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I installed two units in our house, self installed, well under £2k all in. Ebay can be your friend - if you accept warranty is unlikely. But in the UK you don't need pre heat or enthalpy heat exchangers, you don't need CO2 sensors and really once setup, and running, you don't even need boost very often - we last had boost on (manually) over a year ago, auto boost just isn't activated. Manual boost outside bathrooms and in kitchen, or manual boost in kitchen and humidity activated elsewhere.

Looks fab. Well done. Just make sure you coat the timber with something that is UV resistant. Otherwise, in the same way as Mapel turns a bit orange in the sun. Your Walnut will "Fade to Grey" as the song said.

This is certainly a contender for how to manage it as there are already jobs where installing a volumiser, for example, might be priced but in the end it's unecessary so reduce the final invoice. The thing about single supply is that it depends on perspective. So if a customer considers all of the job as a reasonable single supply, then that is permitted at least in theory, even if there are several invoices.

Thanks, that's why I posted. Agree on HP controls. Have one at the minute and it's unzoned. If I can get that install at less than £5k I'm happy. MHVR seems like it's 4k components, 2k ducting, 4k install, but am working on prices around that. Seems a big racket on it by installers at present.

I know the name, but I have never met him. For the last 18,19, or 20 years or whatever it is now, I've been firmly embedded in the Chen-style lineage of Chen Xiaowang.

That’s interesting, and very nice, you must be pleased and proud of that? It’s nice you’ve incorporated something you chopped down too.

I like the walnut and that it came from your tree. It is also very different colour from nearly all the other stairs you see now.

I've seen that way of doing things mentioned several times and the real world a lot of building could get away without much in the way of radiator changes. VAT, include a contingency (deposit) to return assess and make x pre priced changes - fully refundable, less second visit service charge? Explain you could remove that charge, but full VAT, plus any grant funding, that was too have been included, would be payable for the second visit.

Keep it all simple and functions separate First ventilation is ventilation, it isn't heating/cooling. Separate the ventilation keep it a stand alone item. Cooling via MVHR is an expensive folly and in the round doesn't work as flow rates are too low. Why oversize the heat pump - bad for SCoP due to cycling. Plus Vaillant don't do cooling out the box and cost way too much So is that 3kW or less? if so heating bey direct electric isn't going to be cheap - 3 x 24 hrs is 72kWh. Direct cylinder are fine, not sure I would pay the premium for an OSO A rated one. Slightly oversize for house and heat to 50 degs. Low tariff charge not from battery, use battery for other stuff, not worth the round trip losses when you can charge direct, without going via battery. I would do Decent no frills MVHR, if you want a Passivhaus certified one, fine, but leave all the optional extras on the shelf Stand alone small heat pump - A Haier 4kW is £2100 from Wolseley incl VAT (you can reclaim) Telford Tempest 250L direct cylinder £610 UFH to ground floor, £1k - fully open system, no room stats or actuators, flow direct from ASHP circulation pump Or direct cylinder and a good quality A2A heat pump for heating and cooling Option 1 - no Option 2 - no, almost but not quite - £10k for MVHR are you mad? Options 3 - no

That's fair.

Those who don't make mistakes never made anything.

All, PHPP calcs are in and we are firmly in between Passivhaus Plus and Passivhaus Premium by design, less than 0.6ACH, with overheating risk at 1%. Amazing of course, but the one slight downside of all of this is the multitude of options for heating and ventilation. The solar installation will be 9-13kw of solar (pending DNO approval), a 15kw battery, with no gas installed on site. May consider a V2X Sigenstor as my car has that feature and I have access to free charging. The basic issue is that we can almost heat the house with a toaster, therefore a heat pump system is for the most part going to provide HW in an unvented cylinder for a family of 5, with only periodic use via a wet U/F loop downstairs on the insulated raft. The MHVR solution is likely to be a Zehnder Q450. I am trying to weigh up all the permutations we can try in order to minimise capital cost and simplify controls. So far my considerations are: 1. MHVR Heating/Partial Cooling with Direct Hot Water Cylinder - £16k Zehnder Q450 and Comfoclime add on HP, which gives about 2kw of heating and cooling capacity. It comes in at £13k and has the benefit that it likely has all the heating capacity we would ever need, can temper hot conditions (clearly not a full blown AC, but 2kw of cooling would help a lot). OSO 300L DHW cylinder. Can heat overnight on an agile tariff, economy 7, and recharge daytime from battery, V2X if needed. £2k installed. Contingency install U/F loop in case the above is less liveable than we hope. £1k 2. MHVR with 5KW HP HP Cylinder - £18k Zehnder Q450 £10k Vaillant Arotherm 5KW with 300l Vaillant HP Cylinder. £7k out of pocket. U/F loop in case the above is less liveable than we hope. £1k 3. MHVR with Direct Hot Water Cylinder and IR/Electric Heating - £14.5k Zehnder Q450 £10k OSO 300L DHW cylinder. £2k installed Strategic Electric Heating - IR or a few towel rails in the extract locations of the MHVR loop - £1.5k. Contingency install U/F loop in case the above is less liveable than we hope. £1k Any other options I am missing here? I am inclined to go with option 1 as it is a bit cheaper, harmonises the controls, and in practice I can't imagine it will cost any more or less in practice to run, plus has some cooling capability. I was also considering the NIBE S735C, but am struggling to lock in pricing on that. I think it may come in at 20k and is an entirely integrated solution from which I could heat via air, u/f, ventilate, cool and manage HW with 300l of storage. But, the issue is the overlap of heating and cooling adds complexity to ownership of an installation between the MHVR designer and heating engineer. Thanks for any input and experience!

Do you know Willie Lim?

id probably go with the strip type ones.

Oh, yeah. Gets me all the time. I'm so glad this thread is here to expose the shared experiences 😄 Here' my two pennies worth which is influenced by my working with people psychologically and teaching my Tai Chi classes, but also from how I'm at ease with my mistakes building (well, apart from one - see below) - I actually appreciate them because of what they represent. 1. Don't try to make it die. The first step here is to embrace the f**k up, and do it in a compassionate way. 2. look at the self-build process as a learning process not at the outcomes. I get this every week in my Tai Chi classes when students tell me they're afraid to practise at home in case they get it wrong and build bad habits. So I first ask them if they intend to build bad habits and they answer 'no.' Great start. Second is that I then explain that there is absolutely no way you can get something right first time if you've never done it before and to get it right you have to do it wrong many times, sometimes 1000s of times, if not more. I never tell my students they got it wrong, I just guide them towards improving. Learning is about getting it wrong. You need to remind yourself about this over and over. I see stuff in my house and then just ask myself if I did my best at the time and have I learned from it. If the answer is yes to both, that's a great help. It sits much nicer for me and is comforting. The only time I can't get over it is when I see some stuff from a disastrous period when I got a couple of people in to help me - paid trades - and they cocked up. I still look at those bits and wish I'd done that myself, because even if I cocked up I did it with my best intentions! But with time they're dissappearing into the unseen background The important thing here is not to be narrow in your consideration of what you learned. This isn't just about learning a technique or build method, it's about whether you learned to make better decisions, learned to ask for help when you needed it, learned to be more self-sufficient, learned to be more self-confident. It can be learning about anything related to your experience. 3. Learn to think about whether what you've done is good enough, not perfect. For me there are some Asian cultures that produce very high quality goods and appear to be perfect in many ways in what they produce. Now we all know they're not. But one thing that they all have inherent in their culture is to never seek perfection, or in some countries seek perfection fully in the knowledge you'll never achieve it. And also they purposefully leave something unfinished (a minor unfinished bit that most people won't see, but the make will!) The reasons they take this approach is because nature is never perfect and it is still unfinished, and why go against nature. Instead look at creating overall harmony. 4. Time is a great healer. Get on with what's next in life and eventually those mistakes will fall away in importance 5. If you're questioning decisions you made that turned out wrong, stop to remind yourself that you were, literally a different person with different information to hand when you made the decision. You're now someone completely different with new knowledge and experience so you have no place to be going back to give the earlier you a hard time for those decisions. Again, go back to reflecting on what you learned and what you got out of the experience. And if you've got some interest, wonder how it will support you going forwards. Maybe some of this helps...

Yes, absolutely, it could be a game changer in that context. From discussions one of the ideas behind it is that it's about taking the guesswork out of the system design so instead you put in the Adia with the heat pump to get a proper understanding of how the system works and then propose essential changes based on real world measurements. The only issue and question I've got about this approach in retrofits is the application of VAT because the VAT examption on installs is defined as single supply. Technically you could probably get away with it but I do wonder how the conversation with the HMRC might go if they questioned you.

I think it does. To a certain person "Net zero" provokes rants a but "Greta" and "ULEZ" etc. Almost inevitably a (parroted from some blue tinged or red hatted politician) rant about "Net zero is stopping us using the vast reserves of fossil fuels in the north Sea to achive energy independence" follows. Which sort of was my reasoning behind this thread - energy independence via domestic fossil fuel production is not possible for the UK.

This is correct. It isn't quite as simple as saying "let's ditch the marginal pricing model" However it is undeniable that the current model does still link the day to day energy price to gas prices. Moving away from this to some other method (which absolutely would need to price in the "standby" costs of any low utilisation generators) would help lower the enrgy cost. It is arguable that the current model does generate healthy profits for renwable generators and so encourages the build out.

Backups not unneeded extra systems. Back then it was about the effective management and distribution of resources that nurture the healthy function of a system - so that it's harmonious and balanced - across cycles of excess and deficiency. So water, for example requires appropriate storage as well as managed consumption to maintain consistent supplies across both individual and several seasons - what's appropriate is obviously governed by the wider context and environment. It's been refined and still remains one of the central models used to simultaneously guide both diagnosis and treatment in Chinese medicine. It's even been used over the centuries in the structure and function of government and society.

Get manufacturer and industry (BBA/BRE) test certs and see what it is approved for.

🎉👏🎉👏🎉 😁 Thank you! 😁 This is 100% my point (aside from net zero being "a con") You and I may disagree about the need to address climate change but that is irrelevant. The core tasks of diversifying energy sources, improving air quality and trying to lower/stabilise energy prices are all things we need to be doing regardless of any individual options on carbon emissions!

It is (part K). It'll get done sometime before completion signoff 🙂

So far we've dealt with part of the thread title: Low points, and suggested ways of moving on. But there's more to it. Forgiving yourself. @Onoff hints at the issue earlier. We've all got fookoops , - hidden from view from others or not - which still get to us : sometimes years after the deed is fookedoop. You've all heard "Nobody knows, nobody knows" And a little voice in our heads say "I bloody well do" Get out of that without squirming. Any suggestions as to how - when some bloody annoyingness on your build stares you in the face years after the fact - how to let it go. Make it die. ?

Cromer Vent 3 Air is BBA certified for unventilated cold roofs and is good value so should tick the box. Do we need to re-think the use of intello on our upstairs ceilings?

Not that I trust Kingspan certificates.