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An interesting read that .... worth re-reading for me anyway if only for the bibliography Especially this article : Myths about Heat Pumps

Alright in theory, try finding one in practice.

For planners to make such a mountain out of the "where do I put my bins" question is ridiculous. Mine are by the back door, so I can easily put rubbish out into them. Then the night before bin day (because our bin collection is usually very early) I take whichever bin is due to be emptied round to the front and stand it on the edge of the driveway next to the road edge. Somehow I suspect putting that is my bin proposal would upset somebody. So you need to find out what they want and tell them that, then carry on doing what works for you regardless of what nonsense they want.

The boss (SWMBO) has put a stop to the work. She agrees with @Nickfromwales . Arbeit verboten ; zu gefaerlich Some I win, most I lose.

We just showed ours on our site drawing. Ashford BC has loads of info online about where it should be placed to not affect street scape/ be detrimental to the appearance of your own house. ABC advice is to be no more than 15m from collection point - but we have a long muddy farm track up to our bin store by the garage so it’ll be a bit of a trek taking the bins out. We went overboard, added a bike store and clad it in the same corrugated steel so it fits in… On discharging conditions, hope you’ve seen the advice to do as many as possible together if your council charges for each application?

That's a very valid view but it would likely be very easy money for any plumber/spark that had done a bit of skills updating ie understood heat pumps

Just show that on a drawing. I don’t know any specific requirements, maybe they vary between each LA. As long as they are not blocking any access or parking provisions, double they are interested in what they look like considering they keep giving us more of them.

It's because this is a made up term. Your contractor wants an easy life and isn't skilled at floating concrete, and doesn't know that it's difficult and a real skill. You must do what your SE says or otherwise agrees to. The big danger here is that this contactor wants a plasticised mix thinking that will magically settle to dead level and compact itself. My concern is their competence and then they'll add more water to make it even sloppier. The concrete won't be level, will be reduces strength and crack a lot.

Before i ask the Planning department the probably painful question of what their requirement is with regard to our Bin location, does anyone have any insight please? Our 'pre first occupation' condition #13 requires us to submit full details of how and where we will locate our bins & recycling containers. We have already moved in by the way. My response would be, ' over there mate out of the way'. I doubt this is what they want. For those that have been here, what level of detail are they likely to be expecting?

That trax pipe is expensive isnt it. I had a place 40 odd metres from the rd. Standard gas connection is only like 32m max or something round here. I built a dwarf wall at the max length point and split the ducting here thinking was gonna need the trax. The gas guys just took it all the way to the house for me without even asking. There was a comment after about how it was over max length, a drink to all the crew seemed to quiet that!

You're obviously a clever guy but if you seriously think a company are going to send out a plumber and sparks for half a day to switch a heat pump thats insane. Even giving them a full day each I'm not sure its likely. Anyone who does them is going to be that busy creaming money off new installs I can't see them swapping one out on day rate. Anyone who isn't experienced with them and banging them in all the time, then would you really want them swapping it out.

You dont float it they just use a dapple bar all over then spray some sealer on it to stop the water on top evaporating. It certainly takes a lot of labour out of the process. Can also flow quite far with a diy shute, no pump needed in a lot of cases.

Every stroke of the 'pen' has been considered for my current client, a plot on the highest elevation in their locality, which includes mitigation of the noise of water dripping from the window heads on to the metal that forms the window sills below; nothing worse than the 'Chinese torture' of a single drop of water hitting a window ledge like an annoying metronome. I've recommended installing sound-deadening 'killmat' to the underside of each of the sills before installation, to prevent such annoyance. Folk just don't know what their next (albeit preventable) enemy is going to be. That's where I come in lol. One look at the section for the above roof, and I would have said "feck, no!". Simpler to solve when it's on paper or a screen, where the drill and hammer are the left and right clicks of a mouse.

Had a look at installing a 6M Wilo Yonos Pico as a booster pump. It should, IMO, provide a modest boost in flow from 20.9LPM to 25LPM or slightly higher, might not seem a lot. but if your problem is getting a higher flow to a few cooler rads then it may be beneficial because the residual pump head now available to the rads should rise from 3.98M (398mb) to 5.7M (570mb), a 1.72M (43%) increase.

That may be a temporary situation with lots of people getting them, then changing their minds due to poor experience. Things will bed down and at some point there won't be many second hand ones without a lot of use.

You've also got the option of just buying a second hand unit too, which you don't usually get with a gas boiler. Or at least I wouldn't install a second gas boiler for any of my customers.

It's a mix that has added plasticiser, usually with a 10mm and below aggregate, it flows more freely than a standard mix into mesh etc and doesnt leave air pockets. It doesn't require vibrating or power floating as compacts itself to a fairly level finish. May need a bull float to get the final finish but nothing more.

Not really. Theoretically it should be easier than swapping out a gas boiler. Even connecting the flushing equipment is easier as you can do it off the isolators outside.

I've asked the question of why, my initial thought is they're worried that the eps profiles might suffer damage from the pressure of a more liquid flow. We can mitigate with shuttering if that is the only reason. I can't find any other real reason why it wouldn't be suitable, seems it has the same inherent strength as standard mix. No fascination just a desirability to do as much of the build as we can and, this allows us to manage the pour etc, instead of needing a full crew to lay it.

Ok lets look at some hard economics first, I'll assume this is your forever home. Ask your glazing manufacturer what their guarantee period is. Now in the past the adverts on tv said 10 years.. but now often in the fine print it's 10 for the frames and 7 - 8 for the glass. So you truck on with all your calcs.. but it could be that in 20 years time or a lot less your glazing is kaputt! So maybe it best to take the view that the least risk / long term value lies in insulating the things that are less likely to go wrong.. like the walls and roof. But what if you high end glass fails in year 9 .. it will be heavy.. lots of thermal stress and so on? You mention that you have some glazing at 0.73 W/m^2K. That is a very big ask.. is this a value for the glass or the window . doors as a whole? If so they are going to be very expensive. But you will be wasting money if you don't insulate the reveals properly. Someone is going to have to detail that and a builder is going to have to follow what is likely to be a detailed drawing. In doing stuff like this you'll also encounter what I call the half day problem. This is where you have to sequence the works to comply with a demanding detail. The operatives may only be required on site for a couple of hours and then have to get back in the van and go to another job.. all that needs to be paid for by you. Start with conceptually, windows an doors with an overall u value of 1.4 if in England and 1.2 if in Scotland. This will then allow a wider variety of suppliers. You are trying to refine the design too much at this stage.. you are leaving yourself no redundancy and this will come back to bite you in the arse cost wise.

I bet you were 😊

U Balkus only takes a static shot of the situation at one temperature. -5 outside (you can change this). Unless you live in Baffin Island this weather is unlightly. If you raise the external temperature to something positive you'll see the condensation risk disappears. As long as you don't have to raise it too high, say much above 7 to 8 deg your wall will be drying for more of the year than wetting and it'll be fine. Remember diffusion is only a tiny part of how water makes it way into the wall. Air leaks through bad airtightness are far more significant. Pay attention to external driven rain on old buildings too. Something like a Auto Brick oil will repel water without compromising the walls ability to dry out.

We started the build as a Passive House but gas fired, we had the gas laid in and ran the track pipe (which is for sale in the market place now.) through a duct from the gas meter. I had looked at ASHP but felt gas was a safer bet, this was at the planning stage in 2017 - we wouldn't need a cylinder so the heat loss into the building, which @Jeremy Harris had shared with us all would not be a problem. I had a very good plumber / gas fitter so fitting the boiler would have been no problem and it should have been a smooth process with a combi boiler. Then I started to get much more concerned about the eco credentials of gas fired heating and decided to look at other options SUNAMP, PV, Willis, and battery but as SUNAMP was getting increasingly bad press and the Willis route would have hit our SAP score they got kicked into touch. So gas came back, but sadly our tame gas fitter was taken ill, and was unable to work, and we would have had to seek someone else so I took a look at ASHP again, plus the grant was now £7500 so we should be able to get it done for that! So in 2021 we started looking at MCS installers and that was like pulling teeth because none of them were very convincing and didn't listen to our design and insulation standards preferring to fall back on some sort of opaque arbitrary process to give us wild quotes for a straight install where a big chunk of the work was already done. The UFH is in and I had installed two 28mm pipes in the insulation from the utility room to the place we might install a heat pump just in case. So again I swithered a bit, and at that point the Umbrella schemes started to take off and it struck me that we might fit the ASHP ourselves if we could find a sound scheme to duck under. In the end after a lot of searching and a bunch of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) like exercises to compare the various offers we went with Cool Energy, although we had to wait almost a year for their smallest Heat Pump to get MCS accreditation. Its installed and commissioned now - still sorting out some teething issues, we have had our grant money and the all up cost with everything including the EMON heat meter system with all the bells and whistles has come in on the money with me doing all the plumbing, electrics and controls and them signing it all off.

Hold up the Zoot. When im squatting in there, you will only be allowed to visit by appointment. Don't get cheeky now.

Ahh thanks BigJ. It's THE most wonderful little space, the ammount of times Ive snoozed off almost as soon as I put a C4 ipad download doco on, with the stream noise outside. It's just running the gauntlet wrapped up for that 1st 1/2 hour freezing until it's just cosy enough.. that's the caveat. Older you get, the bigger a bugbear that is to face. But it takes just 40mins to get from 0 to 19*C. And your mood increaces in harmony, as you recall with your tent as a kid, the campfire etc. It really does have that diddy thrill factor of 'camping out' at the end of the garden. Even as a 55 yr old baldy barst, with terrible breath, athletes foot, bad back, appaling footrot, overpowering BO, piles, squiffy eyes, what else can I throw in the pot.. my limp, frightful flatulence, & my terrible drooling habit. You see I can do all that.. in my fkn cabin. Still wanna come stay? Zoot