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Just make sure all the joints are compression ones. I think those stainless, corrugated, pipes are to allow for expansion and movement. Make the system a drain back one and those problems go away, but gives you other problems.

EV charging can take place via a 3-pin plug if the outlet socket is correctly rated. If you do it through a regular one it can melt them over time. Is this just a regular 3-pin 230V house socket that is marked so that you know it's safe for EV use? Otherwise you don't need a special EV charger for each brand of car. An untethered 6kw wall charger with a type 2 socket on will be fine for all vehicles. There's a few around that still have Type 1 charging (mostly Nissans) but they just use a Type1 to Type2 cable to get around this.

Exactly my thoughts - there is a company doing brick-weave drives locally but I'm not impressed with their prep work - I reckon those drives will soon suffer with tram-lining where cars are repeatedly parked in the same place

I can only talk about my personal experience, but we cool our downstairs slab with an ASHP during hot periods and it's remarkably effective. Coming in from outside on a hot day is like walking into a cool cave. We run a flow temp of about 16 °C and that's enough to keep the slab under about 20 °C, even in a multi-day heat wave. We do have concrete floors, which I'm sure helps a lot. I don't imagine the effect would be as powerful with, e.g., wooden floors. I'd be careful about overstating the effects of convection in a well-insulated house using low flow temperatures. Sure downstairs gets warm, but as you walk up the stairs there's a clear temperature gradient as you move towards the downstairs ceiling. In the middle of winter, it's typically 2-3 °C cooler in the hallway upstairs (no heating upstairs) than it is downstairs, even in the central landing with open stairs and a large double height area. I suspect that hotter floors in a more poorly insulated house would increase convection.

Not really a shifting argument, different solutions to the same issue. The larger fan coils at a flow temp of 17 are not quite as good as Aircon, but in nearly every case more than adequate. Way less faff to install than flowing at 7 degs, better CoP also. Give them two options, all singing all dancing, plus a few of grand in install costs covering, additional insulation, condensation drains, electronic mixing valves etc, worse CoP, and more complex commissioning or a comfortable night's sleep in hot weather and a super simple install. 95% of installs would never ask for cooling anyway.

I would have assumed there would be proper case studies by manufacturers or academics but I've not come across any. For me that's enough to suggest that it isn't an efficient process.... and many installers are just that, installers, and don't understand the heating principles let alone cooling.

If you use copper, use 10mm, it means there is less heated water in the hot pipe, so the heat gets to the coil in the tank quicker. we did this in a previous house and afaik, it's still running after 15 years... 😄

I may tile the garage toilet/utility in a mix of old tiles for fun and mean-ness, I mean economy.

Would these corrugated stainless pipes do as the interconnects at the top of the panel between panels 1 and 2 then panel 2 and 3? https://ebay.us/m/hHy3Fm Various sizes. I presume I just equally space my panels on the rail and pick the right length /end fitting pipe? Then the pipes through the roof at each end of the array, same stuff or copper? A lad I'm talking to on another forum reckons he's used copper throughout, his system has been up and running 12 years with no issues.

Can you buy dummy ones?

Well done - one of those jobs you could have brought someone in and they would have bodged it again.

You start by setting the finished height in a number of areas then barrow in 20-30 barrow fulls and tip into these marked areas, walk up and down on it and push it into all the corners, keep walking on it, it needs to be fully compacted, not open a fluffy. make a flat pad 400mm square level with your finished height mark go to another mark 2-3 m away and make another pad Fill in between these pads and compact use a straight edge, aluminium is best to scrape the in fill down to the top of your pads, fill in low spots and drag again until no air is under the straight edge. complete two strips opposite each other then fill in the big area between these strips and again drag the straight edge over it filling in voids and compacting as you go. after you have completed a 1m wide strip the width of the room you can use a plastic float in a figure of 8 motion to even out the straight edge marks. don’t worry about loose product sitting on top, these will sweep of when dry. continue back for another metre. don’t have too many breaks keep the screed always moist on the last edge you don’t want cold joints. I hope your fit it will kill you if you have not done it before. if it’s ready mixed it will take you half a day.

This is exactly the shifting argument I've come to expect from you. In one statement you say just run fan coils at 6C and get as cold as you want and then when it's pointed out the measure you have to take to get this working, in the next you say something is dead simple and no problem at all, but use reference temps that are wildly different at 17C. Once you then run at 17C the cooling effect is dramatically different and goes back to what I originally said was marginal cooling that may bring uncomfortable temps back to okay and not like aircon at all. The other issue is that your doing this in your own home, you're not running a company providing design and installation in other peoples' houses that may have vastly different expectations and understanding of the system, or none at all and then completely undermine the original strategy. What customers often understand as cooling is very difficult to quantify and can easily lead to big misunderstandings, because they often assume it's like aircon.

This is my plan: avoids condensation faff / risk.

Great job, looks much better 👍

It really isn't that difficult - UFH flow at around 17 degs, job done. It's above dew point for the piping, and therefore the floor, no matter what the build up. It even works at 300mm centres. Fan coils just over size them, run at the same flow temperature as the UFH for heating and cooling. No additional pipe lagging needed for cooling and no condensation drains. A good compromise.

For the lol's or alternatively why I DIY rather than pay people to do things I had the drive brick-weaved about many years ago - but in the last few years the manhole cover seems to be rising out of the drive Of course that's pretty unusual and I suspected that it was actually the area around it was getting lower but wondered how that was happening So I removed a load of blocks and then the manhole cover and found my issue - the frame was sitting on what remained of the original mortar a very uneven mess - bedded down on 4 blobs of silicone!!! FFS So there was my smoking gun - the sand was being washed into the manhole when we had a downpour and there wasn't a car on top of it. So I got the concrete grinder out and leveled the top off Bedded it down on some mortar and threw the sand back in - a few sting lines to get the level and the pile of blocks can go back in All done

They're OK. I actually bought directly rather than through eBay which saved some money. They need the panel to be a minimum of 35mm thick but mine are 30mm so I put some plastic spacers between the mounting pole and the back of the frame which worked well. The clamps on the end tend to sit at a bit of an angle [as they seem to be a bit better with a panel on either side] which isn't the best but the mid-clamps work well.

In real life, copper pipes under the floor might spring a leak (pinholes in bad copper that had been down for 20+ years and eventually corroded through) and you might need to dig stuff up to find the leak and effect a repair...

I've got to tile a utility and kitchen floor - actual m2 is 14.5 - I'll order 16.5 - In the past I've found 10% just too tight - running before the job is finished and then having to get more is a PITA

In the same way houses lose heat - "Hot always moves to cold" - like cold rooms steal heat from warm rooms, the outside steals heat from a heated house - it might not be as effective as say AC but the rule is just the same - warm room - cool floor the hot is going to go to cold.

For radiation you need to ignore the air (as that can actually hinder radiative heating and cooling). It's the radiation of heat between different bodies. For UFH the warm floor radiates heat to our bodies and the surrounding walls/floors which then radiate the heat back into the space. A similar thing happens with cooling. When the floor temperature is reduced, the walls and ceilings, and our bodies radiate heat toward the colder surface. Hence we feel cooler (even if the air isn't necessarily any cooler). It's the same reason intermittent heat isn't very good for comfort because it heats the air not solid bodies so when the heating is turned off, it feels cold very quickly because the surfaces draw heat away from the body through radiation. Passive cooling using radiation can be very effective but it has to be carefully designed for cooling. If you happen to have the infrastructure, like UFH and your heat pump has the necessary controls/sensors for relative humidity and dew point calculation, then of course you can use it. I've had conversations with the tech people at a couple of large and well known heat pump manufacturers who, whilst they confirm the heat pumps do cooling, it's not like aircon, it will temper the room temperature. In many circumstances this is okay. And the other side is finding the design resources to do the cooling side properly - if heating using heat pumps is difficult, just imagine trying to find the knowledge and skill for cooling. And I'd argue that if there is any risk of condensation forming on pipes, then detailing the system is even more painstaking than insulating for heating.