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Would it be possible to run a soil stack up the side of the house? We did this to avoid having a penetration through the roof. All internal soil locations have air vents. The external one runs vertically parallel to a downpipe, so isn't too out of place. It connects to the sump where all the internal ones come together.

We are lucky, we have a lower ambient in summer than down south, but our big windows drive solar gain and a need to cool. So when cooling we do get a great CoP, in winter a reverse situation can be true. That's a gshp. But sand 150mm down below surface and loads of trees preclude that, tried but gave up.

@Super_Paulie Any reason not just go for a quadrant shower? The curve doesn’t take a lot more out of the room.

Sorry guys, been a manic few weeks 😅 I dunno if an indemnity would cover a WBS or not. Our last house we got 1 for the windows, but a potential fire hazard is a different matter altogether We had a fireplace fitter around & he thinks we won't need HETAS (as the outbuilding is exempt of BR). However, we'd likely ask for 1 anyway, to be safe with insurance or if we ever sell The stove we're after has built in heat shields, allowing 100mm rear & 200mm side clearances to combustibles, with a 12mm hearth. So I think we will hopefully be ok Thanks again for the advice guys Shadow

Our timber frame is nearly up and we have a roofer and builder lined up for external work. I don’t think our roofer is familiar with airtight, timber frame or our builder 😬 We have been advised to use ProClima Roflex gasket and Tescon Vana tape to seal soil stack. Apologies if this is a silly question (mine usually are) but is this for penetration through the roof tiles or lower or both? Should we also be using a special flashing? Our roofing will be Danum TLE system. We are going to have to explain this clearly to roofer and builder this morning!

That's fantastic!

Explain please why it is wet? I can think of pressure relief valve on a hot tank, but would tundish that if necessary. We have not designed ours plant room at all, so this is timely.

If only we could store that for next winter. Actually it us the one thing that is useful about slinky ground source. Warm the earth for later. Where you live, above 22C is getting too hot for most people. I was travelling in 32C yesterday and ok with it. We get used to it.

And AI might not find that crucial information. I guess the likeliest problem would be that trawling could as equally find outdated or false information, as factual. Yesterday planning a complex journey, AI told me to change trains to platform 1, (stairs and a bridge) instead of platform 3 which was 5m away. But fortunately we asked a person. A useful lesson. Somewhere there was a totally wrong bit of info it found. Now to find what material and colour of carpet she wants, given the reduced choice when considering open textures. AI response: "Your wife will ' know it when she sees it', and this may involve visits and repeat visits, to many retailers". Well yes, but thick carpet over underlay will reduce the effect dramatically.

Why would you need that? This is my 3rd year of cooling, no dehumidification needed. None if you don't try too hard to go to low flow temperature. Almost all heat pumps do that. But your CoP is governed by lowest cooling flow demand temp for cooling and highest for heating. Higher cooling flow temperature give excellent running CoP. Over my 7 running hours yesterday I had an average CoP 7.8, using a massive 3kWh of energy, while removing 22kWh of heat from the house.

Don't take anything as gospel, you need to ask the right question several different ways to get a correct answer sometimes. First it's your house, choose floor coverings based on how you want the house to look and feel first, not because an algorithm says that's what you need. We chose large format ceramic tiles for looks, and being bullet proof, the oak floor, if required we can sand it back to restore the finish. Carpets in bedrooms because that's what my wife wanted.

Quite possibly. Still a little way of installation. But our planned Panasonic aquarea heat pump natively supports two circuits running at different flow temperatures, so it shouldn't be too much of a DIY hack. Admittedly cooling using a loop above dew point and then running a dehumidifier would be easier. I also don't know how much of a real world problem the humidity will actually be when cooling.

Aren't you going down a rabbit hole of complexity for complex sake. Heat pumps like simple open flow systems, if you involve UFH you are limited to 14 to 16 Deg flow temp (depends on location), no dew point management specifically needed. Size any fan coils to operate at that flow temp. Otherwise your into electronic mixers etc.

The alternative to this if you're not going grant route, is to design the UFH to provide almost the whole house heat load, then have electric panel heaters in bedrooms, which only get switched on once in a while on very cold days if you feel you need to. Plenty on here have zero heat in bedrooms. Open bedroom door for an hour you bedrooms will be the same temperature as everywhere else. And make sure your heat pump does cooling, quite a few don't. Then you get the option to cool the floor. Simple wins for ASHP efficiency, cost of install reduces, direct DHW cylinder around £5-600 cheaper than a heat pump one, which buys loads of energy, especially on a time of use tariff.

Yes, I'm thinking this would should not be on the same loop as UFH. But maybe using pre-insulated MLCP pipe runs, so they effectively have a continuous vapour barrier around?

Interesting stuff Gus, The challenge is the pipework, we have 25mm insulation around nearly all our pipework - not sure how much condensation is forming on the pipework beneath that but our Underfloor Heating (UFH) manifold is not insulated and that is my tell tale. Humidity is hovering around 46%.

You can use anything over ufh. We've a range of carpet, lvt, tiles, and thick laminate. They all work, once flow rates set correctly.

It's all related to local temp and humidity, that's why I say a bit of trial and error. We ran ours at 14.5 target yesterday, it ran for around 7 hours, completely dry. Internal humidity stayed around 49% all day.

This would be an argument for cooling at below the dew point surely? With fan coils + condensation drainage. If you can control flow temperature and fan speed you could balance cooling and dehumidification as needed.

I just can't make a regular rectangle work in the room without it looking stupid, the lost corner of the pentagon helps me out massively but it's not something I ever thought I'd get or need. For the best part of £2k it seems mental pricey. This other one is a whole world cheaper and probably just the same. Sick of it all to be honest, no fun this.

I posted some stuff a few years back about how you get, call it " reverse condensation". My post was driven as I live in Scotland. Here we get days, particularly on the west coast where the house is cooler on the inside and the Atlantic Ocean moist winds blows in. Most BH folk wrote me off as a mad Jock! It totally reverses the dew point calculation and yes you do get condensation forming on the cooler house surfaces. Now in the south of the UK you are not accustomed to this.. but if you introduce air con into a very well insulated house then this kind of reverse dew point and internal condensation is worth a thought. In structural terms the odd bit of water gas condensation is ok.. but too much and you have a problem.

I'll take you word for it that they turned up with some lose rebar and made it all good. That requires diagonal bars to transfer the shrinkage loads around the service penetrations and supplementary bars to compensate for the cut ones. My experience tells me other wise. I doubt this happened, forgive my old school sceptesism, rafts and so on are not my first "rodeo!"

MBC guys tidied all that up the following morning, and inspected before the pour . My bollocks are both accounted for

Nope, sorry. Looks a decent enough unit from the pics, but that price is just taking the absolute piss. 8mm glass is one up from a 6mm eBay jobby; for that money I’d expected to see that as a minimum but I’d also want to go and see it in a showroom before buying. You soon get a feel for quality, but hard to justify that price from a grainy pic (you also don’t know if the image is exactly the unit you’ll get. Why the pain of the pentagon? Just the heart wants one I guess.

But the photo shows you have happily cut the rebar without reinforcing not least diagonally to prevent cracking. You've dropped a bollock there!