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Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

Just more admin fees and paperwork to build a building, making them more expensive. Make 30cm insulation a requirement so we don't pay £2000 per year for electric heating. I asked my property management company if they would, eghm, _consider_ improving external insulation, they responded they have no such legal requirements, so they won't. We pay 4x more for heating and warm water than in 2018, and have it colder and dumper, meanwhile I have 37mbps connection by choice, it's not like I'm going to use more, even when working from home.

In here we literally get NHS money paying for our electricity bills because that's cheap than hospitalisation. Thanks for 4k Netflix tho.

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Already done.

New building regulations, Part O, which came into effect in June last year, set out rules on overheating. Those regs impact the minimum amount of insulation required in new homes while ensuring they're designed to prevent overheating in summer.

Keep in mind that prior to that, Part L stipulated that loft insulation had to be at least 270mm thick. That's specifically for mineral wool and similar roll style insulation which is the most common option. PIR on the other hand wouldn't have to be as thick to meet the same performance criteria.

This isn't really adding much cost. They were always going to run some sort of communications cable to new houses - the government is just making sure it's a future proofed one. Providing gigabit internet when there's a fiber running to the property already is trivial.

It's not adding much actual cost, but you know they will use it to claim that it is so they can pass it on.

Property prices are based on whatever the local market will support.

Homebuilders may argue that it’ll increase costs that’ll need to be passed on when they’re lobbying against these sorts of measures but once passed, it’s done. It wouldn’t enter into the discussion with a buyer.

“Hey, we’d have sold you this property for £300k but since the government forced us to give you faster internet we’ve had to bump the price a couple of grand”

Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house where I'm paying £600-800 a month for the heating right now.

For the record, I'd rather spend that on heating than live under the absolute racket of London leasehold ever again.

> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer

You want to leave your windows open at night when it's cooler. Close the windows and curtains in the morning before it starts heating up.

Managed to get through the heatwave last year by doing this.

We had Venetian blinds but they're inside the windows so all of the heat was already inside by the time it hits them, it didn't help much. We don't live there now so we have different problems.

£800 per month? That seems a lot for a family home, even during these times. And that’s only for gas, electricity excluded?

How big is the house and is there zero insulation, eg single pane windows?

Electric heating, man. 800£ is still a lot but I think my 2-person 60m^2 flat is doing about 200£/month in electric with only 3/5 heaters turned on (our bedrooms + lounge). With just these three heaters on it's about 40kWh a day mostly in heating (everything else uses almost nothing).

I can imagine a family with kids where you want the house to be heated all over + much more cooking/washing machine use and you could get to the £500-700 range, but 800 is still definitely a lot.

It's such a cool place here. I just wish Brits would fix their political/cultural problems. They like doing things "the good old way" too much hence political parties cater to those people. Gov should have been looking at this energy crisis thing 20 years ago; it was obvious as all hell. They went all in on gas like the scumbags they are, yeah it'll never run out. Sure.

That figure doesn't even include our electricity usage, which is fairly conservative; we average about 12kWh/day when we're not using electric heating and we're working from home.

It's a 4.5 bed detached; solid walls, suspended floor, large bay windows, some of the double glazing is shot, hard wood floor downstairs, high ceilings, some of the radiators are too small or too oldz some of the piping is too small and not insulated and runs under the house where it's extra cold.

Yes this all needs fixing, yes we working on it, but we only moved in a few months ago, it takes time, and money.

The ~£800 is just for gas and just for heating and that's without having it on enough to be warm most of the time.

When the children aren't home we just use an electric heater in two rooms; we both work from home in our own office spaces.

That's crazy having to spend so much on heating alone, hopefully it gets warmer soon.

Maybe try electric blankets - I've seen ones where you can use them like a poncho - keeping you warm while working. Must be cheaper than having to heat an entire room.

We've gotten some electric blankets for the kids and some heated throws for ourselves, also the weather is a bit milder in the positive single digit range so it's easing up a little for now, but who knows what's to come.

> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

If your window is open you will have the same air temperature as outside, potentially higher. I saw a lot of that in my apartment block this summer. People don't have experience dealing with high temperatures, and intuitions they have are wrong.

What you want to do is

1. Open windows at night to create draft and cool down your dwelling.

2. During the day close windows and block sunlight as much as possible. Blocking sunlight on the outside of window is better than blocking it inside. If blocking inside with something like thermal curtains you may need to leave window a crack open. Sunhouse-like conditions may cause temperature next to window increse by a lot (60+) which is not good for glass.

3. (1) and (2) can be supplemented with AirCon, but it's not that popular in UK.

Most new builds are a B on the EPC scale [0]. I guess they could require that all new builds meet A?

0 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-performance-...

In my experience, new builds have very decent insulation, which works well during Winter. But they are an absolute nightmare during Summer.

British Summers are not so cool anymore. New regulations should account for this. My previous neighbor had a heat shock because her bedroom stayed over 33 C for a few nights in a row.

The standard is really low, I bumped by flat from average D to B with £300... It didn't change much, because the building is from a naked, not insulated brick. This aspect isn't part of EPC benchmarks.

I think you're way over-estimating the impact of this regulation on costs. Every house today is going to be hooked up to the internet, so the only change this mandates is slightly more expensive equipment. When you compare this to the massive costs of land, the massive costs associated with getting planning permission, and the artificial constraint of supply through planning laws, I think we're pretty far away from this regulation adding any substantial costs. On top of that, it's pretty well understood that fast internet will boost economic activity, so it's probably a benefit in exactly the same way insulation would be.

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