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Well my “ Discount offer of the week” has been my best score yet, as some of you will know I am doing my build on a rock bottom, empty barrel budget, it’s just the way things are and I’m ok with it, but it has made me develop lots of contacts for getting materials as cheap as possible and recycling / up-cycling wherever I can. One of my local builders merchants has undergone a radical management and staff changeover and cutting a long story short after introducing myself and showing them photos of my project the new management have offered me a substantial amount of materials for my project for free.... today I have started the long job of collecting pallets of paving bricks, they have just gifted me a minimum of 15 full pallets of brand new but old stock pavers in a variety of colours. It’s an unbelievably generous offer and I am over the moon, though I am not ready just yet to go crazy with my paving it will in the future make my property look totally amazing. Really overjoyed that there are still some incredibly friendly and generous people out there who are happy to help out a stranger doing a budget build. Living in my remote location with a small ferry ride and two miles of steep dirt track and restricted to only being able to carry 2.5 tons means I am going to be very busy next week hauling all my plunder back !

The only caveat on mixing whiteware is that white isn’t always white ..! Worth choosing a brand and sticking to it for WC and basin if they are going to be side by side.

Twas time to renew our line rental and broadband contract. Last time it was a battle and they ended up price matching the cheapest alternative I could find. This time, no messing, just offered to renew at the same price, but upgrade us to "broadband plus" which is just a better level of service. The SIM for my daughters mobile now has twice as much data. And as a parting gesture they are sending a prepaid mastercard pre loaded with £50. Makes a change not to have a battle.

Yup. Deffo get the bog seat from the same supplier as the pan. Shapes n colours a plenty otherwise !! Good shout, Woody

Mix them up on nearly every job. There’s only “so good” ( expensive ) you can make a chunk of porcelain .

So.....6 weeks later and the new phone line has finally been installed. I've had numerous visits and met the full gamut of Openreach engineers and their mates from Kelly Communications. I reckon that we've had 5-6 engineer visits (that we've seen) plus another 1-2 who've just worked at the cabinet. Can't be much money in it, as the total cost from BT for the new connection was £70! Happily for me, as it's taken 6 weeks they've had to stump up £210 in compensation.

That is just sizing the storage correctly, but I do understand that problem.

We've been using an optical pressure switch on our system since I first got it going, so around 5 years ago now. I wasn't sure about it, so bought a spare, and wired it up using garden extension lead connectors, so I could swap it out for the spare quickly if need be (I pre-wired the spare with the same connectors). So far it's been very reliable, and seems to have a decent quality relay inside it: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151020-Automatic-Water-Pump-Pressure-Controller-Electronic-Adjustable-Switch/272751286212?epid=703592864&hash=item3f813e57c4%3Ag%3A4AwAAOSwaNlawMXN&LH_BIN=1

We had to drop rationel as they couldn’t supply our large windows in one piece, they started to split them into 3 separate components which was not what I wanted.

It has a class one air break in it, quite clever as it essentially flows from either the left port to the tank, or if the tank somehow overflows then it flows from the right as an overflow. Still a a lot of money for a couple of bits of plastic and a valve ...

Vitra porcelain on a Geberit frame - will be fine. Geberit frames are the best - sigma flush plates can be had for list less 65% if you search.

The programmer I used is just a standard single channel Drayton LP111, the thermostats are Computherm Q7RF wireless units (there are two, one controls heating, one controls cooling). The programmer doesn't select heating or cooling, the thermostats do that. The programmer just sets when the system is on or off. This also gives an easy way to just turn the thing off when on holiday. Our house is a passive house, with a very long thermal time constant, so room zoning would have been pretty pointless, as it takes well over a day to drop by 1°C, and trying to change individual room temperatures on the fly just wouldn't work. We have no heating upstairs, just towel rails in the bathrooms that come on for a couple of hours, morning and evening, and that ensures that the bedrooms stay slightly cooler than the living rooms.

Sounds like a lazy installer. One that was fitted to a house I wired 2 years ago (HP installed by local renewables company) they were too lazy to bother connecting the "call for heat" contact from the UFH manifold. You would have to read the manual, but there are a pair of call for heat input terminals to connect to, and you probably have to change a software setting to make it look at that input.

you can always pre drill but yes i understand that why good quality screws and driver with torque setting is important -also using in old beams where wood is dried out will increase the load --so if old beams maybe pre -- drill which is why i suggested the 8mm not 6mm type

Just to be clear, my main point from my first post in this thread was this: There's no doubt at all that for us, using the current rates for RHI, it still wouldn't be worth paying the premium for an MCS approved installation, as we'd still only receive about £100 per year for 7 years. Those who have a higher heating and hot water requirement will get more, as it's an incentive that encourages people to use more energy...

Quick question... Is it usual on these systems to have the heat pump keeping the flow temp to our set temperature, 24/7, even when all the heating zones aren't calling for heat? Seems the room stats link to the zone valve/pump for that zone, but don't interface with the Ecodan in any way. So if our rooms are all at 20c, with the stats set to 18c, even if no heat is called for all day, the ecodan is still spinning up to keep the flow temp to 40c for instance. Understandably this water shouldn't change much with no heating load, but seems a waste to be continually circulating the water from the heat pump to the buffer tank when no demand?