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Its a system condensing boiler and heats the whole house which are radiators. Plumbed so all have their own thermostats and timers. Mostly we live in the garden room so usually house heating is off or turned down. Bathroom radiators come on whenever boiler is on. So 70 deg is for water heating. All showers use hot water tank water so no electric showers. House is quite large and built late 80's hence 32kW. There is a third option. UFH has its own boiler? Thanks for the comments.

But would life be worth living afterwards, "I would of or I wouldn't of" being mentioned many times, comes to mind

Fundamental question: Is this a boiler just for the garden room, or is the garden room close enough to the house to be fed from the boiler in the house? WHY run the boiler at 70C, First thing turn that down to 55 or lower. You will probably have to run the heating longer but it will work out cheaper.

I'm sure 99.9% of builds would be easier without the spousal input!

Top post. Why can't talking heads on television explain it clearly like that? Regarding old UK houses, rentals and EPC's. I am certainly glad to no longer be a landlord myself. It astounds me that buyers still seem to mostly ignore an EPC. You would have thought old houses with a poor EPC, clearly in needs of upgrading and lots of money spent, would be valued less than a modern well built house. but pretty "period features" seems to override common sense in most buyers eyes. (the exception being I bet no landlord now will consider a house worse than EPC C unless it is very cheap) There have been discussions here before about EPC's and assumptions, with one particular person having vastly improved his house. When he sold it, he explained all the extra insulation and air tightness and showed photographs of the work to the assessor, who promptly ignored it all and made the standard assumptions. Talk about banging your head against a (insulated) brick wall.

Solution is simple - get rid of the blockage. Either remove down pipe and unblock or leave in place and blow out debris with a hose pipe from the top. Maybe while your up there clean the gutters if that's what feeds the down pipe. Most window cleaners now do a gutter cleaning service, get them cleared every year, or if plenty of trees around more often. Fix the problem, don't cure the symptoms.

Better plumber!

What in the rest of the heating system, as I assume you are not using 32kW just to heat a garden room?

Hi - I have a 12mx5m garden room with water based underfloor heating. It works well but I am always wondering if there is a better way to control this. At a guess I think there is about 400m of pipe as 4 loops in this area. My installation has a wall thermostat (no floor sensor) and I the normal mixer valve/manifold/pump arrangement and when stat calls for heat it opens a valve (water from boiler to underfloor manifold/mixer valve/pump) which in turn activates UFH pump and turns on boiler. Obviously when stat reaches temperature everything turns off. Now I'm wondering about 2 things: 1. Better control of boiler as a 32kW boiler running at 70 deg C will soon meet mixer valve requirement but the stat is still calling for heat until the room reaches temperature. So I wonder if I use a thermocouple/programmable thermostat to measure return water temperature on the UFH manifold and set this to 45 deg c (?) and if above this turn off the boiler. 2. To install a buffer tank, use thermocouples/programmers to turn on boiler if buffer tank temperature is below 45 deg C and turn off boiler when temperture is above 60 Deg C. Might have to play around with max temperature to achieve a workable value. There will be some plumbing to do between boiler/buffer tank/manifold and extra valves possibly and likely some wiring changes to suit. There might be a better way than what I am thinking so any comments or advice is appreciated.

Hello Nick and Dave, thank you for your answers. The boiler came back to work normally this morning. I believe it just dried overnight. Yes, the connection between the pipes is blocked. Last time was the rain water and this time, should be the pipe connection part blocked. I don't want this to come back every year; maybe it is time to look at the pipe and find a solution.

We hear sentiments like this a lot and unfortunately they are based on a misunderstanding of the respources we have. This line is promoted by certain sections of the media (who unfortunately no longer have the journalistic integrity to check their sources), and politicians on the make, and is 'encouraged' by the oil companies who source oil outside the UK but know that promoting 'British Oil' will actually lead to more sales of non-British oil in the UK! I'm by no means an expert, but I used to work for a solar company (way back, the first solar installer in the country) that was founded by a man who came from the oil industry and had first hand knowledge to impart. Without going into the weeds (which I'm in no way knowledgeable enough to do - I'm dragging this from the back of my mind from conversation 25 years ago...) you need to understand some basics of the oil industry as it has existed for the last 100 years. And a little Geology. Where to start? Oli is not what you think it is. Most oil in the world (and unfortunately the oil available off our coast) is not the black stuff you see shooting out of the ground in the Beverly Hillbillies. It is a multi coloured sludge made up of a vast array of chemicals that need careful and expensive processing to become useful - and that usefullness may not be as an energy source. Most crude oil - like that available in the UK - is only suitable for chemical productions (fertilisers, medecines, etc), not high grade energy use. Setting up oil refineries is increadibly expensive and to maximise economies of scale, a single type of process tends to be dominant in any region. Essentily, individual countries have specialised in different processes, using particular types of oil that is shipped around the world. I believe we ship 'our' sludge to South America for processing into a usable product, and vice versa). TLDR, The Geology of the North Sea does not produce the type of oil that UK refineries are specialised in, and the cost (and time frame) of converting our refineries to handle UK-sourced oil and the percieved benefits (and profits) are vastly outweighed by and dwindling resources of existing drill sites. In a heating world, WE MUST NOT drill any new fields and even if we did, the product would not power our country. Promoting th use of British Oil is a wheeze by foriegn oil producers (in bed with corrupt politicians and journalists happy to trouser a commission) which keeps the UK dependant upon their products. 'Gas lighting' in the literal sense... Another important lesson regarding 'Energy Security' has been learned from the war in Ukrain. A distributed power production that is not dependant upon a single source of energy is better able to withstand interferance from bad actors. It is very hard to cpmpletely destroy a wind or solar farm in a bombing raid, and even if you succeed, it will only be part small part of overall production. A distributed power generation will keep the lights on. But if you blow up a gas powered station - or the North Sea drilling rigs that supply your gas - it is much harder to get back up and running. To achieve a renewables based distributed grid is going to require huge investment of our aging infrastructure. But the long-term result will be lower bills, which should boost the economy as it will make manufacturing costs cheaper. Espescially if, as weve discussed before, industry is encouraged to move up North to be near the wind generation sources. We were perhaps disadvantaged compared to our European friends in the last 80 years, in that the last 'bad actor' was so very inefficiant at destroying our victorian infrastructure that we didn't have to rebuild earlier. Ironically, we probably gave Germany a boost by levelling the country and forcing a better grid to be built...

I wonder, now we have rent tribunals, if the rent tribunals were to fix a fair rent ignoring the energy performance, then subtract the difference between the EPC running cost and the potential epc running cost if the property made C.

That makes sense. What I was reading from the OP is rainwater was getting in, THAT would have to go up hill.

100% it's the scammers and subsidy harvesters. The core idea of encouraging insulation etc by making it cheaper is sound. It is hard to think how to do this without attracting the cowboys - see the recently unearthed external insulation debacle. My problem, as a LL, is how to upgrade old properties (mostly victorian) whilst navigating planning, conservation areas and finance. For example switching to double glazed windows makes a big difference to tenants. But it's expensive about £1k a window (they are big) and one building alone has 125 windows. Now this isn't an issue, we could just start plugging away at it, but if we swap out all the windows in a property for £5-10k (we've down a few) we get 2-3 points on the EPC, barely moves the needle. We've insulated all the roofs to at leat 200mm, most are 300+. But the majority of EPC inspectors won't actually look through the loft hatch - they just put it down as "as built" ie totally unisulated. Obviously wall insulation. That leaves walls and floors. Which are all solid so expensive and with downsides. My latest plan is to try and fit solar as that seems to have alot of points attached to it. I can get 10+ points for £10k of slap and batteries vs 3 points for £10k of windows.

Common tbh. Water defo backs up and fills the combustion chamber. Loads of British Gas installs suffered from the connection (non return) of the condensate > soil pipes, mostly in cold snaps where the valve internals (massively reduced internal bore) freeze up. @LLL just cut or disconnect the condensate pipe under the boiler and let it drain into a bucket to get you back up and running Are you 100% sure this isn’t frozen? Or hasn’t been frozen and has now thawed out and cleared?

The VA service manual should be your friend here?

i just connected up my velux blackout blinds (internal) at the weekend. They connect to a pre-installed power plug on the side of the integras and its marked as 24v. The window themselves are 240v but that obviously goes to a transformer in the head of the window which you cant see. I didnt see any options to have these controlled "hard-wired" so to speak, and i did look into it at the time as it made more sense from a reliability standpoint. However the remote button has worked fine but i usually just ask google to open them for me.

Hi All I have a Vent Axia Sentinel MVHR, it is only 2 years old but has a very noisy fan! I have managed to get a replacement fan from Vent Axia (see pic) but as over a year old they wouldn't repair it. The noise is now driving me mad so want to get this replaced ASAP Please see attached picture my install in the loft, do all 4 solid ducting inlet/outlets need to be removed? Could it this repair be done just by taking the side off? I am hoping its pretty obvious which fan it is when i take the covers off etc.. I am electrician by trade, how long would this repair hope to take if all goes well? Would it matter if the house doesnt run for MVHR for a day or 2 if I have to do it in evenings? Any advice/information on this would be very helpful Kind Regards

I've never been a huge fan of subsidies. In fact other than getting cavity wall insulation in my previous house, I've never claimed a grant or subsidy for anything, ever. Which is pretty unusual when you own a croft! Make electricity cheaper, put those costs on to fossil fuels. That's all they have to do. Oh, and get rid of standing charges. Spread those costs so that those using the most electricity pay a bigger share.

Unfortunately the leak has not stopped. Its a difficult situation as I'm in a block of flats, which historically has had a dodgy roof the last couple of years and recently had the external cladding redone (likely source of leak), and so every time it rains the water filters through even more. So trying to get management to move quickly to find and stop the leak is tricky. This has been going on now for maybe 6 weeks. I've had a dehumidifier turned on this whole time, set to 45%

That was my thinking re the lateral movement, if there's nothing to butt up against it won't need a space. For insulation it'll be 100mm PIR between the joists and subfloor. (warm roof with similar construction, and 90mm in the walls) I've not added it to my rough plan yet so I guess it looks like I'll be leaving it uninsulated which isn't the case! Thanks for the reply! I've seen a few reputable tradesmen use groundcrews for similar builds, i.e https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yueMxg8G948 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgcCMlRPkkk , they seem to be quite decent and well recommended. I am toying with the idea of a concrete insulated base but I'll need around 2.5m3 of concrete for the base which will probably need pumping from the front of the house to the end of the garden to stand laying it in time, so a bit unsure of the cost (imagine it's ££££) on that. It will be insulated with 100mm PIR on the base below the subfloor, (warm roof with similar construction, and 90mm in the walls) the ground screws will raise it ~150mm from the ground and I'll probably look at putting some OSB + DPC on the bottom face of the base, but a bit unsure about the best way of doing that.

I am sure governments do accept that however it's almost impossible to design a scheme that is incapable of being scammed without having a parallel set of skilled people to supervise every single installation, which would be horrendously expensive, impossible to staff and still not bomb proof. Scammers are very adept! It might actually help if we, the public, stopped blaming government for crimes committed by others and instead started laying blame at the criminals. Until we do the criminals can continue to get away with the perception that the crime is victimless and that it's ok to rip off "the government" (which of course actually means us). The exception I would make to 'stop blaming government' is when there is cronyism involved. That is simply inexcusable.

They bolted down mine, rawlbolts into a concrete yard area. I was happy to see this as the twin-fan Vaillants are quite tall and machinery can creep about with vibration - my bench grinder is a bugger for this. Actually they had to do it twice! They pulled the unit forward to do the rear connections (rear clearance is only 200mm) but forgot to push it back. I made sure they put epoxy grout in the old holes.

I doubt the water is getting in from the condensate pipe, that would have to run up hill. You won't get anywhere without taking the cover off to see what is going on inside. Try drying everything thoroughly with a hairdryer.

Corrupt people are not going away sadly. Even more sadly the government are incapable, or unwilling to accept that and build their schemes accordingly and so have, for a long time simply hosed cash on ill thought out wheezes. I guess closing a scheme is their only way of solving that.