It's rather ironic given today's events in Balcombe that, as far as the Withington Co-operative Eco-house is concerned, roadblocks are bad news, and burning gas is good (well, less bad, at least).

Unitied Utilities have enlarged their fenced off area and moved about half their equipment into the new part; it remains to be seen whether they'll hit their latest self-imposed deadline of clearing the part in front of the house by the end of this week. I intend to get a clearer picture of this by the end of tomorrow. Back To Earth, the EWI supplier, are concerned about being able to gain access at the pre-agreed time, so to be on the safe side I have pushed back the EWI to September. As things stand though, the window delivery and fitting is still timetabled in for next week (and given the difficulties I've had with the window company, I really don't want to change this).

I've been to-ing and fro-ing with my contact at Baxi, regarding our proposed Ecogen installation. It seems that it is do-able, so I now need to get the company that will be doing the Ecogen install to agree to the specification from myself and Baxi - but my contact there is on holiday until next week.

It might seem paradoxical that burning gas is the most appropriate choice for an eco-house. I'll be writing a full article on this once the details are finalised, but in the meantime suffice to say that we did look into the issue, and gas-fired plant is very much the lesser of evils for a house of this type and location. What's actually more important than the choice of fuel is to minimise the amount of fuel burnt - hence the superinsulation. And according to our calculations, the size of boiler we need to heat our 6-person eco-house is smaller than what is typically installed into a one bed flat.

Speaking of which, the roof insulation is almost complete now, with Andrew on-site today and returning tomorrow to work with the builders to address a few detailing issues with the air-tightness tapes and sealing.