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My videos are largely unscripted and I regularly mis-speak of fluff my words. Even after 400+ videos ‘red light syndrome’ is still a thing and sometimes I don’t notice the mistake until after the video has gone live. In the interests of total transparency here’s a few corrections or clarifications to past videos. If you spot anything I’ve missed please get in touch!
23 Oct 2022 – Fitting an undermount sink
In this video I mentioned there would be 20mm of worktop overhang from the front of the cabinets. I didn’t make it very clear that I meant from the front of the cabinets including the doors. The doors are 22mm. The total overhang from the front of the actual cabinets is therefore 42mm. Always get your worktop installers to sanity check your measurements!
28 Sept 2021 – Why didn’t we install an Air Source Heat Pump?
In this video I had a bit of a rant about Air Source Heat Pumps. It sounds like I’m anti-heat pump but that’s far from the case. I’m more frustrated with the government’s “one size fits all” approach and their relentless push to install them in properties where other key issues, such as insulation, haven’t been addressed.
I’m all for electrification of heat and I’m a huge fan of simplification. Gas boilers are complicated. ASHPs are inherently very simple. They’re the perfect solution for many properties. But not ours (yet!).
The main thing I wanted to get across in this video is that we have a finite pot of cash to renovate this house. Sacrifices have to be made. We need to carefully evaluate where money is best spent while catering for the ceiling price of the street. Obviously we don’t want to end up in negative equity! By installing a cheap (but highly efficient) gas boiler we saved AT LEAST £7,000. Our 36kW combi boiler cost less than £1,300. We spent every penny of this saving (and more!) on insulation. We’ve insulated the s**t out of this place, much of which is covered on other videos.
Having said all that, I was a bit harsh with some of my comments, so to clarify:
- I insinuated heat pumps are noisy. They’re not that bad, especially modern ones.
- I said we’d used 45kWh of gas in 50 days (since moving in). No idea where I got that figure from. Put it down to post-house-move-tiredness. We used 742kWh gas from July to Sept 2021.
- We use around 2-300kWh of gas per month on hot water and in 2021 we used a peak of 2650kWh in December. This is for a family of four and this was before a lot of the insulation work was carried out:
- I generally inferred that heat pumps “can’t handle cold winters” and are inefficient. Obviously that’s not the case. Heat pumps are WAY more efficient than gas boilers in terms of ‘energy in’ vs ‘energy out’. I’m more referring to heat pumps in draughty, badly insulated UK houses. Insulation is key.
- Having said that, I don’t know of a single person running a heat pump who doesn’t also have a secondary heat source, such as a wood burning stove.
- I still have big concerns regarding hot water, especially for a family of four with two teenagers who seem incapable of having short showers!
Anyway, interesting topic and doubtless something we’ll re-visit as the technology evolves.
28 July 2021 – Soundproofing our living room walls
Just a bit of an update on this one, the soundproofing worked quite well but we have the obvious weak point of the giant hole in the wall, i.e. the chimney. We can easily hear next door through this gap and unfortunately, without blocking the chimney up, this is something very difficult to treat.
21 Feb 2020 – Swan DRS-210-30 Compressor Review
In this video I had a bit of a pop at this compressor it was quite expensive and failed after 14 months. To be fair Axminister Tools acknowledged the known fault and repaired it. It’s been problem-free ever since, so all is forgiven.
