@editor Hardly worth taking up the memory space for a photo; just a line or two informing passers by that the home is kept warm with a heat pump and a generic graphic of a heat pump with a QR code link to the ‘Visit a heat Pump’ website. I then followed this with a mention of RHH and invited anyone with questions to follow the RHH QR code. (Please send the cheque under plain cover as usual Mars😉) Toodles.

As we head into 2026, I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone here a very happy New Year and to say a genuine thank you to this community.

Renewable Heating Hub only works because of the people in it: homeowners asking thoughtful (and sometimes difficult) questions, members sharing real-world experiences and professionals and experienced homeowners giving their time and knowledge freely. The quality of discussion here continues to be something I’m genuinely proud of.

And a special thank you to the moderators. You do a huge amount of unseen work to keep the forums safe, polite and professional... a place where people can ask questions without being shouted down, sold to or made to feel stupid. That balance isn’t easy, and it really shows. Well done guys!

2025 brought plenty of challenges, plenty of learning and unfortunately plenty of examples of why good information and honest discussion still matter so much when it comes to heat pumps and renewables. As we move into 2026, my hope is that we keep doing what this forum does best: cutting through the noise, sharing what actually works (and what doesn’t) and helping homeowners make better decisions.

Thank you all for sticking with us, contributing, questioning and supporting the platform. Onwards!

Here’s to a calmer, better-informed and more competent 2026 🍻

@editor — thank you @editor, and a Happy New Year to you, and all. The forum is the sum and more of all its members, but I am sure others will agree with me when I say that it is you who sets the overall tone and direction, and for that you deserve a lot of praise. As someone once said, the boy done well. Thank you.

@editor Mars, Much kudos to you for all your enthusiasm and hard work here!  It seems we start 2026 with the rug being removed from under us as discounted tariffs come under threat. Does this justify a forum of its own? I see plenty of topics - lobbying for proper Government action to make sustainable heating favourable; practical ways of alleviating costs; news about this and other supplier statements about tariffs (good and bad) and so on. As things stand the issue seems to cut across a lot of the existing forums here. I'd be happy to kick the first two of these topics off and I have already written to the Scottish Minister for Climate Action and Energy.

Posted by: @dr_dongle

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we start 2026 with the rug being removed from under us as discounted tariffs come under threat. Does this justify a forum of its own?

Yes!

Well... maybe not an entire forum dedicated to discounted tariffs, but a topic would certainly be of interest. 😉 
We can make a link to it from the existing (very long) topic on Electricity Price Predictions.

And please start by providing a link or two identifying where the news on discounted tariffs can be found.

@dr_dongle There is no such thing as ‘Too Much Information’ on this subject; a dedicated forum sounds like a good idea to me. Toodles.

@transparent D'Oh - I did look before I posted but I missed that one ...

Just a quick note to say sorry if you tried to access the site earlier this morning and found it down or hit with a “critical error” message.

That one’s on me. It turned out to be a PHP error that triggered a critical failure across the site. It’s now been identified and fixed, and everything should be running normally again.

That said, we’re still doing some work in the background, so if you notice any brief interruptions or odd behaviour again today, apologies in advance.

Thanks for your patience, and as always, shout if you spot anything that doesn’t look right.

A quick operational update.

Over the past few weeks we’ve identified an issue affecting forum notification emails being delivered to Microsoft-managed addresses including Hotmail, Outlook and Live accounts. 

To address this properly, we’ve subscribed to a premium SMTP delivery service today. 

In practical terms, this should improve delivery rates to Microsoft domains (and all other hosts too), reduce the likelihood of messages being filtered or rejected and ensure you don’t miss important thread replies or forum updates

There may be a short bedding-in period while the new service establishes its sending reputation, but this is a long-term fix rather than a workaround.

As always, thank you for your patience while we keep tightening the nuts and bolts behind the scenes.

@editor I haven't been getting notifications for quite some time, except the very occasional one - I've had to be manually checking threads for updates.  Interestingly (coincidentally??), a colleague called me today to say that his emails to me are being bounced because of reputation problems.  When I looked into it, it wasn't my Outlook email address per se, but Microsoft has made changes and it is catching a lot of mail services out.  They seem to have made some changes that are incorrectly blacklisting some IP addresses or at least, limiting the number of mails they will accept from them.  Hopefully, they sort it out as they've probably been over zealous.  Ironically, I often find emails from Microsoft in my Outlook junk folder, e.g. from their support, so their rules are clearly heavy handed if they are even catching their own domain as spam!!

@andrewj, you have a Microsoft account so you should now hopefully be receiving notifications.

@editor 

My notifications started going to spam.. I now stated for my mailbox that it is not spam.

But it raised a question about why your new mailer was being flagged as such.

I think this is the issue, hope that helps:

Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of editor@renewableheatinghub.co.uk does not designate 213.109.76.162 as permitted sender) client-ip=213.109.76.162;