Cozza01

Hi Can just say Nick is great. My son just passed his test! First time! Nick is calm and patient.

Hi Render is not my field of expertise! The thermal render we used is "breathable" so not an issue. You are best speaking to the people who install but to share 1. We used external thermal render where we had existing render (upstairs back of house and upstairs down the side return.) 2. All the other rooms we used internal insulation in the external walls of those rooms only. Hope that makes sense.

Yes. We have an air source heat pump and have had one for the last 4 years. It has never gone wrong and if you wish to see one in action please PM me and I can arrange. The comment that they inefficient and their efficiency drops off significantly as the outside temperature falls whether is air source or ground source. Is not incorrect but incredibly misleading! From a physics case this is correct but the drop off is marginal and does not impact the warmth of the house because air source heat pumps work best in insulated houses. (Heat pumps are used in the Nordic countries which are significantly colder than the UK.) My advice would be...until you have completed the following list of energy improvements....its not going to work that well in a victorian/edwardian house which just leaks heat. (No cavity wall insulation.) 1. Decent double glazed sash windows 2. Wall insulation - either inside or on the outside of the house...depending on if your house is brick or render. Insulation only needs to be on the external walls. 3. Under floor insulation plus and perhaps under floor heating - most houses are floorboards over dirt foundations not exactly robust from a heating perspective. (We have underfloor heating on the ground floor and radiators on the first and second floors.) As to are they noisy, not particularly. There are planning rules on where they can be situated in relation to neighbouring properties but the installer will be able to confirm all of that. Most people wonder about the difference in bills. Our house is around 3000 square feet and semi-detached and our energy bills are under ?80 a month. (For complete disclosure we do have solar panels too.)

So we are all supposed to be using public transport now? so whose bright idea at Southern railways is it to stop ALL the trains from Crystal Palace through Dulwich for the forseeable future?.

The best thing we have discovered this year is that we can run our air source heat pump in reverse in the summer so it?s very cheap house cooling too! No more sweltering nights just run it in reverse!

The green bus deals with very local traffic but really if the problem is cross traffic... Wandsworth/Clapham to Dulwich and vice versa one solution would be to sort the train out. It is possible to go from East Dulwich to Clapham Junction but the wait at West Norwood is actually longer than the journey! It was once proposed by TFL to have a direct train link via the Dulwich stations between Victoria and London Bridge, so the trainline infrastructure must already be in place to send trains this way. Even if you only ran trains in peak hours, this would remove a significant amount of school and other traffic as children could use the Wandsworth stations. It would also allow Dulwich to have far better connections out via Clapham Junction which would make train commuting preferable.

I don?t see why JAGS, Alleyn?s and DC parents should be penalised. There are plenty of teachers and students who drive or get driven to both Charter?s and I have seen plenty of children picked up from Dulwich Village primary schools in the afternoon so I am going to assume they don?t all walk in the morning either. Not sure why we can?t have all the proposed roads on flexible road closure but unsure why the closure has to be for such large time bands. 7.30 to 9.30 and 3.30 to 5.30 would surely solve most issues.

The healthy streets proposal feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. If you look a significant number of the coaches are to transport people on an east west access.... I.e. Clapham Junction Wandsworth Common and Balham to North Dulwich. All of these places have stations, a while ago when an inner loop and outer loop were being decided on one of the proposals was to connect the Dulwich stations via West Norwood to Clapham Junction and beyond. So it must be possible by train...it just needs TFL and Southwark to then push the rail franchise company to include this route. This would help both the school traffic and others who drive east west because they see no other viable alternative.

Actually the thermal render on the outside of the house is actually quite reasonable to put up but you are correct it works best when a house is rendered as its just swapping or adding a white layer for another layer. Most of the time the thermal render can be added on top of the existing render if it is still in good condition. (Our house is a mixture of brick and render and inside the Dulwich Estate so we used a combination of insulation methods!) With a Victorian brick house in a conservation area or the Dulwich Estate this is obviously not possible...so the alternative is inside insulation... on the exterior walls of the house in each room.... this can be done on a room by room basis as you redecorate and or change the windows...it makes the room about 2 inches smaller but in a north facing room in our house it added 2 degrees to the temperature. When we did this the builders removed the picture rails and our non-standard coving from the walls and added them back on the insulation layer. (Invisible.) The obvious area of change is around the window frames and window sills so when we did our changes we were typically changing the windows at the same time so could take into account the extra thickness we were adding to the wall on the inside and adapt the frames accordingly. As to cost in the long run the saving is on your electricity and or gas. We only now use gas for the hob and our electricity bills are significantly below the national average for the size and type of house we live in.

Yes we have one....didn't take very long to install but there are rules on how close to the house, how much space next to it etc....works well with our underfloor heating.... My advice would be...until you have completed the following list of energy improvements....its not going to work that well in a victorian/edwardian house which just leaks heat 1. Decent double glazed sash windows - would throughly recommend Marvin windows....white aluminium on the outside, wood on the inside! Not cheap but fab! 2. Wall insulation - either inside or on the outside of the house...depending on if your house is brick or render 3. Under floor insulation plus under floor heating - most houses are floorboards over dirt foundations not exactly robust from a heating perspective. 4. Solar panels Hope that helps