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Ours works well as long as you open all the downstairs internal doors to let the heat out to the whole house and as above don't put much wood in at a time. Fill it full and keep the living room door shut and you will be cooking. It helps that we have double doors from the room with the stove to the hall from where heat can go up the stairwell and it nicely heats the whole house. We only have it because we have plentiful wood. I would not have one if I needed to buy wood, and if I did not have one I would be giving away or selling wood for someone else to burn.

My son and I have recessed a wireless charger module into wood. The wood was made of lamination like thick veneer so the coil was only about 3mm below the surface. That worked fine. It's the top of a speaker in which we also put a Bluetooth power amp module and power supply. So it charges the phone while playing music through the speaker.

You need a stove covered in soapstone and a low capacity to slow everything down. After the first year lighting ours twice and melting, we tried the second time the following year. But now only add one small log at a time, turn the air down to lowest setting to still get a clean burn. Now that log lasts maybe 1 to 2 hours, the heat spreads across the whole house, 2 logs on the coldest day is more than enough. NO it leads to depressurisation of the house. You cannot install a WBS in a house with MVHR safety, unless it has primary and secondary air from outside. It is something the OP needs to think about and plan for. Where will they put the air duct, took us an age to find the correct stove

Not sure the price premium is worth it in the short or long term - yes you get a good CoP, but with something like Cosy tariff you can be paying 10p per kWh. A lot of reheats to get your money back. I have been using just the immersion for about a 8 months now. No intentions of going back to heat pump heating. ASHP has a simple life and you size purely for CH. A direct cylinder £450, HG £3000. At 10p kWh and CoP of 5. I average around 3kWh heating DHW - house of 2 people so 30p a day or £109.50 a year. At a CoP of 5 that's £22. So £88 saving £2500 / £88 so 28 years pay back. Add any clipping of solar PV in the summer and water heating becomes free anyway, if you time to coincide with peak solar production. Plus no CH/DWH diverter needed, easier plumbing, less wires. Simple immersion timer.

Thank you again, Nick. I suspect the original problem may be that there is only about 20 mm of cover above the pipes. I've also received advice suggesting that pipes under a slab would ideally have compacted fill around them and significantly more concrete cover above than I appear to have. If, after opening up the floor, I find that the pipes really are only about 20 mm below the existing surface, would you still proceed with the repair using the mortar you recommended, or would you be concerned about the lack of cover? Also, if I discover that the void has been caused by settlement of the original backfill beneath the pipes, would you: remove all loose material and fill the area entirely with the repair compound, or first try to reinstate support beneath the pipes using compacted sand or pea gravel before repairing the concrete above? My concern is whether pouring repair mortar directly onto exposed pipes is the best approach, or whether it's preferable to provide compacted support around and beneath them first. Finally, would you expect a repair with only around 20 mm of cover above the pipes to remain durable in a normal kitchen walkway, or does that depth itself suggest a more substantial repair is needed? I'd really value your opinion given your extensive experience with these types of repairs. Thanks again for your help.

That's another issue than the fire protection, but a chunky beam that is inefficient in normal use can then use that extra stiffness. Next time you're in a big warehouse , reasonably modern, if you look up at the rafters, they are likely to have diagonal struts. They're not for fire but show how stiffness can be provided. Likewise if a floor is built in line with a beam, or a wall into a column it won't distort.

Fixing it in the open position will guarantee to make your house hotter during the day. Bypass should only be used (and should automatically turn on) when the outside temp is below the inside temp. Your MVHR shouldn't ever be delivering 31 deg air. In normal, non-bypass mode, the MVHR will work to maintain any existing temperature difference between inside and outside. In summer that means it will transfer most of the heat from the incoming air to the outgoing air, significantly reducing the temperature of the air delivered to the house. So if it's 30 deg outside, and 20 deg inside, the air delivered into the house will be something like 22 deg, depending on the heat recovery efficiency of your unit. Summer bypass only comes on when it's cooler outside than inside. Depending on the unit, you might be able to adjust the temperature at which it kicks in. To maximise effectiveness: Reduce airflow when it's really hot outside, cooler inside, and you want to minimise incoming heat. Turn it off if you like, but you risk a stuffy, humid house. Personally I'd avoid that. Summer bypass won't operate in these conditions. When the temperature outside drops below the inside temp and summer bypass kicks in, bump up the flow rate to maximise purging.

Unfortunately I followed the advice. I told my so called expert planner that I should probably reduce and he told me in his expert opinion that the design was fine and to resubmit (this is the ex head of planning for a different council). anyhow that turned out to be hogwash, as I suspected so now I’m doing my own thing and reducing the footprint. I’ll see what the preapp comes back with. That seems to take just as long as a full application. the wheels of local government move very slowly…….. thanks again for the continued feedback. Much appreciated.

I'm hoping we have enough headroom in the attic for a conventional cylinder - something like the heatgeek HG230B6 which is 211l and 1560mm high - spec looks very nice but the price less so which means we may look for another option that gets close to that. Yes WBS is fed via an external air feed through foundation!

You just fit a room sealed WBS that sucks air in from outdoors. 👍. Sad fact is, folk spend thousands fitting one, suffer silently in protest whilst roasting to death, and then it’ll eventually become an ornament. The further irony is the several hundreds of thousands spent making an airtight, well insulated home, that requires next to no heat at 0° OAT, and then fitting the most fierce heat source that you can lay your hands on….. The heart and the head are two very different things

Not helping your question I'm afraid, but I have one of my own for you. We would have liked a wood burner in our Passive std house. I never considered the issue of the flue and combustibles...we canned it on the need for airflow to the fire. Is the MVHR capable of supplying enough air to meet the fire regs? Last time we fitted a woodburner we had to have an enormous air brick put into the lounge wall to get the installation signed off - not really on in PH!

Thanks, now purchasing a CO2 monitor.

waiting for 5 hr limit to reset whilst drinking chilled wine next to the pellet smoker. THAT IS A LIFE! (or perhaps need to get one?) TBF if Claude was a bloke I'd buy him a drink or 2. If she was a woman well....

I feel the same way, it seems weird to bring 26°C air into a 23°C room - except my CO2 meter quickly shows that the air quality quickly worsens if the ventilation is turned off. So I set it to the lowest possible that keeps the living room under 1000ppm CO2. This really isn't a lot of air, so I don't feel it heats the room up that much. As you mention, external window shades have made the most difference for us. We now have some form of external shade on all the windows, I'm sure it would be far hotter in here without those!

All well thanks…..SSDD……

Depends on how much time you spend in there? The kitchen / dining / living, open space lifestyle puts folk in that area for socialising quite a lot, whereas at mine I’m either behind my desk or I’m perfecting my ass-imprint on the settee. I have USB’s everywhere, house with 6,7, or 8 occupants at a time, so just leaving wires everywhere (lightning and USB C) seems to be useful here.

This toilet is worth remembering as it has an exceptionally high outlet at 225mm: Armitage Shanks Contour 21+ Back-to-Wall Rimless Toilet https://www.idealspec.co.uk/catalogue/bluebook/toilets/back-to-wall-toilets/contour-21-back-to-wall-rimless-toilet_p4015.html https://www.aqva.co.uk/Bathrooms/233963

Bit of a ramble, When the summer bypass is activated, the extracted air is diverted around the heat exchanger preventing this heat from being transferred to the fresh air suppling the home. I think the supply air on this unit always goes through the heat exchanger. I cannot find a cutaway diagram The heat exchanger is effective in winter as I did take some measurements with external temperatures 10c lower than the incoming supply air to the rooms. I checked the summer bypass recently and have fixed it in the open position but makes little difference during the warmer days. I will reinstall to factory settings. It might have a minimal cooling effect if the internal temps are lower than external if the bypass is off. For now, this will upset the purists here, I switch off the unit during the day and back on late evening and purge. Why would I want to input 31c all day when the house has recovered overnight to 21c? Also a lot of residual heat in the fabric of a well insulated new build might explain the higher supply temperatures. Shading windows has been the most effective solution for now.

No probs https://www.screwfix.com/p/no-nonsense-d2-pva-adhesive-5ltr/474ek?ref=SFAppShare 👍👍

Thank you very much for the advice and for taking the time to explain the repair process in such detail. I really appreciate it. I'll check what material the pipes are made of and will take some pictures tomorrow. One question: when you say "Prime (saturate) with 50/50 PVA/water", what type or brand of PVA would you recommend? Would a standard building/bonding PVA sealer be suitable, or is there a specific product you would use for this application? Thanks again for your help.

Until the yield point is reached, it is really just differential thermal expansion (in a fire situation) that causes the buckling point to me lower. So what may be fine at 50°C, may have problems at 75°C even though it is well below the critical temperatures of the material, due to the change is sizes (expansion) in 3 dimensions. This can be made worse if 2 of the 3 dimensions are fixed in place. Think of a beam that is rigidly fixed at each end and has a weighty slab on it. When it heats up, there is only two degrees of freedom, one downwards and the other sideways. A bad design would not take those small movements into account, a good design would, and know which way it would ultimately fail. Another way to think of it is removing a few bricks from the base of a tall chimney. Each individual brick does not carry much load, so removing it cannot do any harm!

For a box section of equal dimension, this I assume would be difficult for heat to affect easily, but I beams (UB & UC) with different thickness materials making the one profile, thus reacting differently over time / temp, the focus would be more on those? However, the ‘system’ would just blanket the solution for worst case, methinks, vs giving chapter and verse for each different scenario. Just my uneducated guess…..

Are they heating pipes, or a hot & cold? 20mm doesn’t leave much (any) room to insulate effectively. 15mm pipe with 9mm wall insulation = 33mm diameter, x2. You can buy a thin (3mm) neoprene tape LINK which may suit and give you that little bit of wiggle room.

Thank you for the advice, that's very helpful. One additional question: if the pipes turn out to be bare copper, would it be advisable to cover them with a fairly thick foam pipe insulation sleeve before placing the repair mortar? My thinking is that the insulation would create a small separation around the pipe and allow for thermal expansion and contraction without the copper being tightly bonded to the repair material. Would that be considered good practice in this situation, or would simply wrapping the pipes with duct/gaffa tape be sufficient? Given that there is only around 20 mm of cover above the pipes, I'd be interested to hear how you would normally accommodate pipe movement when carrying out this type of repair.

claude said "lets be clear before I change this for the FOURTH time" GET HER!. Can spend rest of my life trying to improve water - always a really tricky thing to look and react great without killing fps.