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Hi All. I'd really appreciate your thoughts on wardrobes and their apparent affinity to attract condensation. In my old house I've had a few stand-alone Ikea units against external walls (Mid 1970s cavity walls). Despite the house not having any damp problems to note, I was surprised to find patches of mould behind the wardrobes when removing them. Two corner units leaning against 2 external walls were the worst). In the new house (with damp issues that are yet to be fully diagnosed & resolved) I've got corner built-in wardrobes & I found thin ~2mm sheets of styrofoam glued to the inside of the external walls - potentially suggesting that previous occupants had condensation & mould issues there. Is there a "proper" way to put in a wardrobe against an external wall, either built-in or stand-alone Ikea-type unit? Leave a void and plug PC-style fans into the sides to ensure circulation sounds a bit extreme? 🤔 Thank you.

If the pumps not on then it’s only holding back gravity It’ll be fine. When the pumps running it’s not under huge pressure either. Issues are largely when these are sat with full mains pressure 24/7, and then fail quite quickly (flood o’clock). You should be good until then or longer.

Perfect, I’ll not get it done until Monday can’t get any fittings around here until then. Is it safe to leave the flexi as it is until then? Would you say it’s unlikely to burst. It’s actually less than a year old. thanks Nick your a godsend on here

Never used them before tbh, so may give them a whirl. Seems to make sense to upgrade if these are kosher.

There's a workaround for that (had a long conversation with an ASHP installer on the subject - additional buffer tank I think). It seems a waste not to use the heat pump we are getting anyway for active cooling, but if it costs more, we'll just get an air-to-air one in addition. I suppose that it would provide some redundancy if the A2W one stopped working.

And after another long break, it is finished. I had been too busy doing things and going places to order the roofing until now. I ended up ordering it from Steadmans, part of the SIG group. Their quote was £300 cheaper than Plantex with the bonus they did the facings in long lengths where Plantex only do them in 3 metre lengths which would have meant a join. The roof panels were delivered last Wednesday and today me and a joiner friend fitted them, which took us about 5 hours in total. To lift them up there, we wheeled the mobile scaffold in the pictures out onto the grass, on 2 scaffold boards so stop it sinking into the soft ground, and used that as a staging post, lift them onto that, then both up onto the scaffold for the second lift. It was actually easier than I expected it to be. Tip for anyone doing this sort of job. While the suppliers are happy to make the roofing sheets to any length you want, they only seem to supply them in "1 metre" width. Great I thought, my car port is exactly 6 metres wide, I need 6 sheets. Actually the sheets came 105cm wide. There is a 5cm overlap. So while it is true each sheet adds 1 metre to the width of the roof, with 6 sheets there are only 5 joints, so the finished width of 6 sheets of roofing is 605cm. That is 5cm wider than my car port frame. Quick thinking, by cutting a small piece off the top and bottom corner of the first sheet to clear round the garage roof tile overhang, that end of the roof ended up coming closer to the garage wall than originally planned, leaving the other end finishing mm perfect at the end of the framing. There was also a few sheets of "spare" roof sheets used as packing and protection. I am now scheming what I can use them for. Next phase will be fitting solar panels along the back of the car port.

Thank you! That's very reassuring. I think we'll put tiles over the UFH zone under the living areas in the extension and wood over the zone in the bedrooms located in the original building. Aircon to the bedrooms could top up the heating if it's ever necessary.

Treated floor area - 156m² (73 renovation + 83 extension) Masonry floors and walls. Cavity and under-screed insulation. Extension/renovated roof: 0.14; 0.15 W/m²k. Floors: 0.11; 0.28 W/m²k. Walls: 0.14; 0.3 W/m²k Planned airtightness - 1.6 m³/hr.m² Space heating demand - 49 kWh/(m².a) Heat load - 22 W/m² Heating requirement - 3.5 kW (+ domestic hot water) Thanks

Are corrugated stainless steel flexi connectors a better type, or are there any downsides? https://ridgelinetubes.com/flexis/

More info would definitely help. I have the same orientation and solar gain risk, and I'm also single storey. External Blinds are very effective. With the greater contribution roof insulation gives in a bungalow I'd also suggest high decrement delay insulation. Something like blown cellulose insulation. If you're having UFH then cooling via the ASHP is a no brainer. It's the cost of a controller that can handle cooling as well as heating and is effective at just above dew point temps so no risk of condensation. I would also add either air to air heat pump cooling or fan coils in the main rooms. If you have space for the second heat pump then go air to air, as the fan coils, I assume, would be better with a lower flow temp than your UFH cooling needs.

Hi. We’ll need some more info, eg airtightness target, construction methodology, foundation type, etc etc to give the most robust advice “Input!”

Should be a standard large bore 22mm x 3/4” flexi: Link

Any idea what type of hose I need? The nut says it’s 21mm on it thanks Nick

We have started on a bungalow project in southern England. It will have south-east facing living areas and additional glazing on the south-western side - all posing an overheating risk without external shading, which will be added. The building will have: MVHR ASHP for UFH and DHW. No radiators. Solar array and battery. I'm considering cooling options and quotes. Underfloor cooling with appropriate sensors - is it worth the condensation risk and additional cost? Excluding plumbed rooms, we may have wooden flooring throughout. Adding fan coils vs a separate air-to-air heat pump and split system? The latter is coming out cheaper so far, which seems counterintuitive. We have space for a heat pump of each type.

Yea. Leave the nut and olive on. Just add some jointing compound and she’ll be mint.

@JohnMo, out of interest do you know the time constant for your house? We have an MBC cellulosic-filled twin-wall with an outer stone leaf, so ours is pretty long: the house loses about 1°C / day in a typical winter day when the heating is off all day. I also use an Octopus Agile tariff rather than Cosy. I can just treat the day-ahead as a time shiftable window for heating purposes. OK we still use resistive heating, and like you I do a 24hr-ahead heating calculation aligned to the daily Agile roll-over; this shifts all heating to the cheapest hour-hour price slots. The CH+DHW app is a standalone Node-RED implementation running with its own IoT stack (MariaDB, mosquito broker, Zigbee2MQTT) in a Proxmox Container. This is loosely couple into Home Assistant (running in a Proxmox VM) via MQTT. I do use HA for the UI and other house automation, but heating control itself is autonomous from HA. (This design choice dates back almost 10 years when HA was a lot less stable, but if I were starting now with a clean slate I don't use any 3rd-party cloud services for active control. At some point in the next few years before I get too old, I will add an ASHP for UFH, plus a battery which is Agile tariff aware, and retire my custom App. One thing that I will pass on is using the ASHP for DHW heating. I'd rather just fix the ASHP output flow temp at 35°C, say, with long heating window and take the 5 - 6 CoP. At the moment our large OSO UVC is really low loss and uses the cheapest Agile slots. so it rarely costs more that 40p / day and the average is less than that. The immersion thermostats are set at 60°C, but the heating control stops at a target 55°C unless the Agile price is negative, in which case it goes all the way to 60°C to a do an anti-Legionella cycle. PS. Since you reference me, I though that this summary is a point of comparison for other readers. You already know most of this. PPS If you use the <> code tag for YAML etc., this demarcates code and preserves spacing, etc.

It’s full bore yes. can I reuse the olive on this brass section coming from press fit? Also I’m struggling to find the right hose

For anyone interested. Freshly dug 2.2m hole this morning. it is very dry throughout, with a touch of dampness in the bottom layers. That is ground unaffected by trees but it will have shrunk throughout. In the winter this surface was sopping wet and any wheel ruts sat full of water. You can see horizontal banding which is different eras of clay and thin bands of weak sandstone.

Sounds a familiar story. Must the the microclimate that is unique https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/search/?q=zoothorn&quick=1

We get quite a few abandoned boats down here. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-57232394

Maybe that query should be directed to the shower manufacturers, I measured my Mira Sport TCO at 48C and my present (non thermostatic) Triton T80Z Fast Fit TCO at 50C. I find it very surprising that the thermostatic temperature range isn't given. I think thermostatic power showers have a normal max outlet temperature of 38C/41C but an override button allows 43C/45C.

It won’t burst today or tomorrow, but change it asap. Leave this at your peril. Is it a full bore flexi?

Has he actually measured that temperature. It a stupidly high temperature, as it strips all the oils from you skin. So are trying to set up something to deliberately scold people? Why would you want a shower at 50 degs output?

Or find a barn. I've fallen down the rabbit hole of watching people build boats on Youtube recently and while you can build a boat in little more than a makeshift tent, it would be a much easier experience if you have a inside space to do it in. Better still if you can maintain a level of environmental control (especially if working with resins). Having said all that, building a boat, even a smallish one, is a very long term commitment in both time and money and you'd likely be a lot better off if you just bought a second hand boat that suites your needs (I'm sure you know this but worth saying anyway).

My sister in law is the same. Complains heating is too expensive to use. It comes on 1 hour each morning and one hour in the evening. Radiators too hot to touch. The rooms heat up quickly, and then cool down again quickly when it goes off and most of the day the house is cold. I tried suggesting we turn down the boiler flow temperature to something much lower and run the heating for longer. She could check on her in in home display and see how much gas was used and see if it used more or less gas than the present scheme. But she would not even let us try it. "That is the way the plumber set it, so it must be right"