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- Today
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I'm not sure about Scotland but in England I think your right to maintain a discharge pipe should be in the neighbours title. So I'd be looking at that and possibly even speaking to the neighbour. If its mentioned in his title and he's all happy explain you might need to repair the pipe/install a new pipe and see if you can negotiate the cost of that and a sewerage treatment plant off the asking price. Check what permits are needed if any to do the upgrade. I guess it depends how much you like the house if you want the hassle.
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Hi all, This slate roof is 150 yeas old. The structure appears to be sound and well built, the rafters are wet when it is stormy weather, tiles seem to get wet at corners of tiles as in picture. Is this porous slate or condensation, or something else ? Any advice on next steps is a reroof inevitable? Thanks all D
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That's an interesting question. Just went hunting and came up with this chart, showing public approval & disapproval of Government between 1957 & 1991. The only periods when more people approved of the Government than disapproved, were 1957 to 1962 (Harold Macmillan, Conservative, Keynesian economics, prosperity, "You’ve never had it so good" - until the Profumo scandal), and 1964 to 1966 (Harold Wilson, Labour, low unemployment, economic prosperity, major social reforms, "white heat of technology" - until defeated at the polls). Source: Social and Political Change in Britain (1945-1991) | ROPER CENTER
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Somewhat, it's down the the interaction between the boiler and how it meets the opentherm setpoint (which is set by Wiser and changed constantly). When Wisers 'Heating Demand' measure started oscillating so did the boiler. I changed the set point then to force a long continuous burn and after I dropped the set point again we are now back to no oscillation and less cycling. Now I imagine there could easily be a feedback loop where the boiler cutting out due to insufficient modulation for my CH system triggers the oscillation. My comment earlier was that wiser doesn't offer a way to rate limit or filter this setting which makes cycling more likely. Opentherm also offers a way of turning the flame on and off remotely without using the relay. I don't know if wiser is using that ability or not. This is all somewhat off-topic for this thread though. I want to optimise what I have to the best extent possible physically, then explore wiser more. My plan is: 1. Complete tweaking balance, etc 2. See how wiser works if asked to just manage the temp in the warm part of the home. (it should be able to satisfy that with lower temps and the colder unregulated rooms will act as a bigger heatsink to prevent cycling). 3. See what difference these fan kits I've ordered make (GPT suggests they could double the heat output of the radiators at high flow temps but don't help that much at low flow temps). 4. By the time I've done this I will have had more time to think about radiators. Looks like I can replace the two vastly undersized ones for ones with 2.5x the output for about £150 if I don't mind sacrificing matching the existing. I can't justify the cost of matching existing but moving to the cheap ones might get payback (and if I keep the old ones I can always swap them back in if the new ones cause issues with buyers/valuation). 5. If I do upgrade radiators then I go through the above again 6. If still having problems talk to wiser Good news so far is that if I've done my sums right my gas usage is only about 50% more than normal heating the whole place vs what I was doing before. Given the heating is on for >14 hours a day vs maybe 6 before this doesn't seem to bad (more than I'd like long term though). This means I'm not in a huge rush to finalise this process and can take the time to try things out
- Yesterday
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Hang on here before you chuck in the towel. It's quite usual to find no membrane or bituminous felt under an old slate / clay tiled roof. Can you post some photos so we can have a look at what you have from the inside and the outside. In a new build yes, but when we are considering old buildings and upgrading it can actually be an advantage. The old traditional roofer ( 100 years ago) did not have access to felts and membranes so they gave their slates / tiles more head lap. We can use this to our advantage at times as the roof is really drafty, every cloud has a silver lining!
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Agree a bit of air can cause havoc. One way to purge this is to shut off the other loops and open the air vent. You'll need a bucket and a few towels to catch the water. Give it a good go and don't forget to top up the inhibitor once you have finished.
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Old boiler couldn't support Open Therm - so yes I was managing room temps via TRV's however I had one room that needed much longer than all the others to hit target temp - so when other rooms reach temp and the Wiser Hub stopped the boiler it buggered up any chance of getting the one room to actually reach the temp required
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Thank you for the replies, much appreciated and looking like they shall have to remove the slates. kind regards, kevan
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By the CH light do you mean the flame icon? I don't tend to look at the thermostat but rather the app, but it has a representation of the same. It doesn't appear to be directly connected to the opentherm requests. I've seen plenty of times when the boiler is active (and cycling) when the flame icon is off. I initially thought it was a bug (and my boiler was ignoring opentherm requests) but after a decent amount of observation I think the flame icon represents not matching the setpoint. ie, in a traditional on/off system, when the thermostat calls for heat. But with Opentherm it's trying to modulate the flow to maintain the set point to a much more precise degree (within 0.1C) and as long as it considers itself as successfully regulating that then the flame is off. The relay signal to the boiler has stayed on all day barring once around dinner time when cooking pushed the temp a fair bit above set point at which point the relay switched off. What I think is happening in my case is that Wiser adjusts the setpoint it wants from the boiler constantly based on the heating demand % supplied by the thermostat. Wiser wants the boiler on all the time to maintain the set point. The boiler is willing to exceed the set point by a certain amount but if it goes over that then it shuts off. I think there's more to it than this but feels like the main issue. I assume you mean since you moved to weather comp and not using opentherm at all. That's not really something I want to do (given the amount of disruption running the cable would involve) and I'm not sure weather compensation would help when the CH system can't dump out the heat from the boiler at minimum modulation.
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Looks like the party is over....
Gus Potter replied to Beelbeebub's topic in Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)
Ok that is settled. First paragraph. The UK oil and gas energy resource is not "fininite" in terms of the next 50 years. There is plenty! It's just that the UK tax system makes it less attractive to extract. If we use our own resource that satisfies and mitigates your point of despot regimes, blatent abuse of human rights. Cut off their money! That is why we need to be relying on the West of Scotland oil and gas fields and fracking. Schiehallion, Loyal, and Foinaven fields. This gives us national energy security in the short to medium term and delivers well paying jobs and income taxes etc from that. . The money we get from this can then be used to drive towards zero carbon emissions. If we just import oil and gas we are paying the Arabs instead, for no benefit to ourselves. You have to remember that us Brits are great innovators, we can't do that if we have no cash! Unfortunatly we have the Greens in Scotland who don't know what a woman is, so we have much doubt about their ability to make evidenced based decisions on the oil and gas industry which impact on all of the UK. You see they can control this through the planning system not least! One of my pals is an SE who is working on this, the actual design of the rigs and how you extract oil and gas in deep water and then get it to shore. It's also to do with the quality of the oil. Much of the oil from the Middle east is a bit crap to say the least and really churns out some nasty stuff during the refining process. Ok, fair enough. But this is a typical response from lefties, mention Reform and you are far right. I mention them as an Engineer. Tice and Farage have said in their speaches that they recognise that they don't have the strength and depth within their party to run the country. But they have said that they will second people from indusrty, Engineers, Doctors to support them where they are weak. Take some time and listen to some of their speaches before you come back for a second time and ask me for evidence. In the round though I think we are of the same mind. Here you make a good pragmatic conclusion. Lastly is ok to disagree! -
Take the actuators off on the not working loops, does the flow meter move down (the red lines). Removing actuator opens loop, regardless of call for heat. If this resolves issue you have an issue with electrics. If nothing changes you have an issue with air in the system, get the plumber back to bleed the loops. Takes all the junk off the UFH loop pipes. Look to box in, so they don't get damaged.
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Assuming here you have Wiser Hub and One room stat (no smart TRV's) Watch the hub - if the CH light goes out it's killing the boiler because it's trying to stop temperature overshoot I agree this is an annoying characteristic If the CH light is not going out then it's not interveening My solution to the issue was to set the room stat or a smart TRV to a higher target temp that cannot be achieved - that way the Wiser Hub doesn't get to screw around making the boiler cycle or stopping it mid burn (which is what it did with my old boiler when I had it set up with a really long anticycle timer to give the rads chance to dump the heat)
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Hi, hoping for a little advice. After switching on my ufh I’ve discovered that two rooms in our bungalow aren’t warming. The system was installed before we moved here (just over 10 years ago) but we haven't altered anything in that time. Upon closer inspection I found that the two actuators, linked to the thermostats in those rooms had stayed closed. I removed them, tested the pins (which all tested similarly to the others, firm but they do move) and re-attached. Voila! (I thought) as they slowly rose up. However, after several hours, no heat came to the rooms… I’ve tried testing each non-working thermostat in isolation by turning them to max but no joy. I can’t feel heat coming from the supply pipes leading to those rooms either but the actuator tops do get warm. I’m wondering, is if this all sounds familiar to anyone? And is it something can resolve myself? Or am I in, call out a professional territory? We did have a new boiler fitted around March this year. Though we haven’t had any problems with it. We also had a small leak coming from the return area of the manifold. This was repaired shortly after boiler was fitted by the same person. I have no idea how long we had the leak but when I did find it, it was a single drip every 30 seconds or so. Attached photos of the set up. And one (where i'm pointing) from when I noticed the leak. From left to right on the manifold, the seven connected rooms are performing as follows: O - NW - W - W - NW - NW - W (O = Off, W = Working, NW = Not working) I do have Bosch AdvancedTemp Infrared Thermometer. Incase it help with fault finding. Thank you for any help in advance.
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Since yesterday, I've opened up various valves, the two most distant radiators fully open, and opened the towel rails a bit. The system manages very long burns if allowed a higher temperature and it's not close to set point, but as it gets close to set point it drops the temperature and cycles more. By staring at the Home Assistant graphs, I'm still seeing some very short cycles but a lot of them I can connect to Wiser demand changing mid flow (which seems like a bad design from them). BTW I do have it set up as Oil boiler, which should limit things to 3 cycles per hour, but obviously getting a lot more than that.
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Looks like the party is over....
JamesPa replied to Beelbeebub's topic in Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)
1) I agree with 2) I cant see how moving as rapidly as reasonably possible away from being almost completely dependent on a finite resource controlled by a small number of largely despot nations is anything other than common sense. Neither can I see that leaving the relatively tiny amount of that resource that we do control in the ground for as long as we can, so we can use it if we get desperate and/or for applications where there is no alternative, is anything other than common sense. Obviously there is room for discussion over the speed of the this transition, but not to make it with a fair degree of urgency, now we have the technology, is grossly irresponsible for our economic security in the unstable world that you quite rightly identify we live in. That has to be combined with defensive measures such as those to which you refer. There is a difficult discussion to be had about where to defend and where to abandon. We cant ultimately stop nature so any investment in defences has a limited lifetime unless the world collectively reduces climate change, and we will need to take this into account. To have any motivation to take the defensive steps you first have to accept the climate science which, it seems, some are trying to avoid doing. That case has to be fought until any influence from the deniers disappears and we can thus focus on what we are going to do rather than discussing whether we need to do anything defensive. 3) All I did was ask for a reference to back up your claim about their policy, without expressing an opinion. Not sure how thats 'getting into a funk' -
A little, or a lot depending on flow rates, if your at 20L/min and below very little, higher rates a bigger and bigger influence - if you have UFH you can do this at the manifold anyway. So wouldn't bother, unless you have a good reason.
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Measuring the pipes before the valves. I started with a thermal probe (admittedly designed for meat). Wasn't convinced I was getting accurate temps (I think I could do but it was frustrating and fiddly). So I bought a IR thermometer. After a bit of learning how to get good results from it (keep distance short, make sure sensor is in line with what you want to measure, black tape over exposed copper, etc) I think I'm getting good readings. They are broadly similar to those with the meat probes (good thing about them is they could measure both at same time). I am also reading the boiler flow/return temps via Opentherm using the Home Assistant Wiser integration, though these temps are not quite the same as those measured with the probes, the deltas are similar. All BBOE
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Looks like the party is over....
Gus Potter replied to Beelbeebub's topic in Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)
There you go, how easy was that! Ok to kick this off what is your opinion on nett zero? Here is roughly what I think in broad scoool terms, call it that for now. 1/ The world is an unfavourable place. We are actually lucky in the UK that we have not had a war that has really threatened out soil since 1945. I'm an SE but was trained primarily as Civil Engineer, we have a duty to the public to secure our infra structure for the next at least 50 years and dams above cities for 100- 200 years. 2/ Nett zero in the UK serves to destabalise our economy and reduces our ability to innovate. 3/ You have got yourself into a funk because I mentioned Reform! -
Looks like the party is over....
JamesPa replied to Beelbeebub's topic in Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)
Unfortunately we probably agree on that also! The British public are, in many ways, their own worst enemies IMHO. Much of the media, and some politicians, know that and exploit it for their own ends. -
Looks like the party is over....
Roger440 replied to Beelbeebub's topic in Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP)
Looks like things will stay as they are then...................... Or get worse.
