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When I lived in shropshire doing up a derelict cottage, I was away for the weekend and went straight to work on the Monday morning only to get a phone call from the police saying my site had been broken into and they think they had recovered my tools. It transpired the police were already on the drug gangs radar, and it was because some of my small tools were ex BT who I worked for previously, they traced me through BT and I got all my tools back. Years later in Bristol I was approached by a “tinker” in a car park of a DIY store who offered me power tools cheap, I refused, went into the store and spoke to the manager who called the police. The chap was arrested as all the tools were nicked and so was his van!!! It felt good to know the scrote was nicked.

Whats happening friday then is Noah setting sail at the zoo?!

Sorry to hear that mate, I think you are privileged the old bill turned up,I have heard of areas where they just give you a crime number over the phone. They all need their fingers cutting of with a pair of secateurs, then give them no benefits and let them starve to death on the streets. Utter scum.

No it is not your fault. It is the fault of the scroats that do this sort of thing. We should not have to live in a society where we have to baracade ourselves in like we are in Fort Nox. Lets hope the insurance do the decent thing and stump up for your losses.

I found it really quite simple. I got quotes from 6 suppliers, the ones I can remember were Russel Timbertech, Rationel, Internorm, and Katzbeck. Rationel were the cheapest, and the second best in terms of Uw value. Only Internorm beat Rationel's Uw value, but they were twice the price. They were fitted by the builders that built and erected my frame so I bought them on a "supply and fit" basis (so VAT free) I have the Rationel Aura plus aluminium clad windows and very pleased with them.

Sounds like a plan, I usually just wait until my wife is available and then give her the sharpie.

Christ on a bike, its a 50 minute round trip to the nearest supermarket and you drank the place dry in less than 30

So my installer asked whether I wanted to go with a small 100litre buffer for my UFH. As I think the house will have areas that will be colder (older bungalow areas) I fitted room stats in each room, so now reverting to a one zone approach would not enable us to control room temps individually. Is there anything I should be aware of with having a buffer tank? The buffer vessel will have some heat loss, but will be within the heated envelope rather than attic, so not a big issue. Although I keep coming back to Mitsubishi, the installer is looking to get a CTC Eco Air unit (Swedish) so parts may be a bit more pricey with fewer experts around to service the latter I guess. Any particular buffer tank I should be considering? I came across this unit (only 2yr warranty though) but was thinking that the 3kW element may be useful for limited heat if there's ever any issues with the ASHP. https://www.advanceappliances.co.uk/product/141-buffer-stores/

5min job on Sunday night. Easy peasy. Just need to clean out the rust and debris and lift it down. Luckily only needed to cut it in half to make it small enough to fit through the hatch. But the Makita saw I bought cut through it no bother, would happily cut it again.

So is TorBoard just routed out T&G P5..?? If you were to ignore the issue of structural integrity (!!) then you could rout your own ... D4 the the P5 to the beams, use a 10mm pipe rather than a 16mm, and then get busy with the router ..? Go perpendicular to the joists and it shouldn’t be too bad ...

Hoping that Zoot’s Gaff does not become Zoot’s Gaffe.

How awful. Sorry to hear about this.

Blood hell Dave Say what you mean ?

To be honest, hearing what you say about this neighbour, I would be moving, not extending.

Sad news - were you in the cottage?

Sorry to hear. Atleast you've got the right perspective, put it behind you and crack on. I think i'd struggle to have that perspective the next day so fair play to you!

Obviously I'm talking about 2 different pumps here, dirty water and concrete pumps!

A lot of sparks would frown at it but AFAIK there's nothing specific in 7671 to stop you. The round pin lighting sockets were really more to avoid a nasty surprise when you plugged the iron in and plunged the room into darkness. A socket on a lighting circuit might also have thrown up issues like RCD protection under previous regs, less of a problem now RCDs are more widespread. Off the top of my head there's various general regs that would apply - safety on power failure (the iron example), nuisance tripping, clarity of what circuit actually supplies the socket (to allow for maintenance isolation) etc. Most of those can be dealt with one way or another. But in general so long as any cable is appropriately protected upstream for its current carrying capacity I don't think there's an insurmountable issue. It's ultimately not that different to populating a consumer unit with 200A worth of MCBS on a 60A incomer.

Very disheartening as always to hear this sort of thing, when living in Australia it was a constant job trying to hide / secure all our work equipment on semi remote sites.... worked most of the time but still had half a dozen incidences. Another fairly major reason why I choose to live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by water..... best of luck with the claim.

Go to the fishing tackle shop and buy lots of treble hooks, hang them at face height inside container.

Circled by Diesel wagons no doubt ?

Actually Internorm you have more flexibility than most of the quality 3G manfs, as you can choose from at least Ecohaus, Aspect Windows, and AT-Eco (that's just the 3 UK supplier/installers I know of). For most manf. you either order direct from the factory of via a single UK importer. I take it you're after a quote from a different manufacturer though, rather than a second quote from a different supplier of the same products? Aside from the ones ProDave mentioned, we also looked at Gaulhofer (would have been preferred choice if our PHPP consultant could have made the numbers work), Green Building store, and Viking Window AS

That ship has sailed, however of the redesigned scheme the architect indicates that as they are only asking for tweaks now, the scheme seems to be supported. Time will tell, and see what consultation brings up!

I've just got 20A switches above the worktop...on show. Unswitched 1 gang sockets below. I'm feeling very isolated on this.

In my experience I wouldn't rely on having one easy point of contact for issues if you use Ecohause Internorm. I had to deal with every man and his dog and chase up the european tech expert from Internorm, who was particularly uninterested in helping out. Most issues I had were to do with installation, but also had a nightmare trying to sort out control of the external blinds, which should have been really easy but ecohause did not know anything about the product they were selling. I had countless revisits from so called experts to fix problems as well as 3 visits from plastic surgeon and magic man. None of the people that came to fix issues from Ecohause had been briefed on what needed doing and a number of them turned up with wrong parts or caused further problems. If I was doing it again I would firstly find a recommended installer and then approach a supplier. Ask around on the forum for good installers in your area who are able to problem solve not cause problems. It seems any idiot can fit a window, but it takes another level of skill and knowledge to sort out on site issues that may arise.

I used the abacus manifolds for the bathroom. There were quite expensive for what they were and you can buy a bracket that hold them flush to a wall. But i just used a steel banding that you screw through. I particular like how each knob has colour face plates and a pre set list of appliances that there connected to (Sink, Toilet, Shower, etc). Its great because when I hand write a description, it looks like a child did it. Annoyingly they need a huge amount of ptfe tape to not drip and the feed in. Hoping the hard water in the area eventually clogs the tiny dip coming off of it.

The question breaks down into 3 parts - choice of manufacturer, supplier, and of installer. While these are related, you do have some flexibility within them. We found it easiest to look at the manufacturers and products first, from a performance and aesthetic point of view, and choices of supplier largely follows from that. We're doing what we can to have our (passive house experienced) main contractor do the install, for the exact concerns NSS mentions.

We have Internorm (3G aluclad in 7016). Imho the product quality is excellent, which is why we chose them, but you'll get mixed reviews on the UK installers. We're very happy with ours and although some people have had a bad experience with Ecohaus Internorm we've found them very responsive and accommodating (ours was not a straightforward install due to the inclusion of SageGlass).

How about... Power enclosure: Into that plug 13A Quinetic receivers: https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/QUA313.html Plug the wall warts for your fairy lights into that?

Isn't' 100L fairly large for a buffer tank? My guy recommended 25L. Sounds a good idea, might do this even if it's not wired in initially.

Common sense says that's a sensible solution but thinking, instead, about regulations: why wouldn't these have to be in a metal enclosure? I.e., what's “similar switchgear” to a consumer unit and what isn't?

Seconds?

Many thanks @Ed Davies, now I get it and, as you suggest, the fixed IP address does indeed sit in the 192.168 set. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what they come up with. Cheers ?

That'll likely not be a globally routeable address but rather one in one of the local address blocks [¹]: 10.nn.nn.nn or, more likely, 192.168.nn.nn, probably 192.168.0.nn if you've got default router settings. Almost everybody's home LANs (Wi-Fi and wired) use addresses in these blocks; there are many millions of routers all with the address 192.168.0.1. There's no way to directly use that address to access the device from outside your LAN. If all the devices in people's home had unique globally routeable IPv4 addresses then we wouldn't be running out of IPv4 addresses now, it'd have happened a decade or more ago. Instead such communication has to be either via a server (run by SG, presumably) which does have a globally routeable IP address or it could be sent to the globally routeable IP address of your router if that was configured to forward packets (with some particular destination port number) to your SG controller. There are two complications with configuring your router to forward packets to your SG controller: firstly the way it's set up varies from router to router and holding user's hands to get it configured properly would be a support nightmare for SG. It's possible that their controller could talk to your router and get the configuration set up automatically (using UPnP [²]) but that's not always going to work. E.g., I've got UPnP disabled on my router - can't remember if that was the default or I turned it off myself but whatever… The second complication with using the router to forward packets to your controller is that the external IP address of your router could change. Some ISPs assign a static IP address to each user, others just assign one from a pool of numbers when a user connects so any time you turn your router off and on again you'll likely get a different IP address. Again, a support nightmare for SG if they tried to rely on that. [¹] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address#Private_addresses [²] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play#NAT_traversal

Easy. Three individual 2 port motorised valves. One for downstairs UFH one for upstairs radiators one for DHW. The 3 channel time switch (plus a room thermostat if you wish for the 2 heating zones) turns on the motorised valves. In the case of the UFH it turns on the downstairs motorised valve and the UFH mainifold pump. Each of the motorised valves has a microswitch, connect all 3 of them in parallel. That gives the logical OR function to send a "call for heat" to the heat source.

If ever you want to paint that wall behind all the fittings then buy a cheap roll of tin foil. Great for masking difficult to mask things like pipes, holds it's form and is easy to remove. I'm thinking maybe a matt black canvas to show everything off and polish the copper..... ?

+1 The tricky part is generating the Boiler Enable (BE) signal that turns on the boiler. Something needs perform a logical OR function. In your case this would be.. BE = UFH or Rads or DHW. You can't really do this by connecting all the stats together because you get unwanted interactions (for example the Rad stat might turn on the UFH loop pump). You can do it with relays but it's better to use some sort of controller. Edit: Actually it might be possible to do it with just wire if the zone valves have contacts that make when the valve opens.

I'd line a "box" with fire resistant pb. This is rough and temporary, on a loose board but you'll get the idea. Bluetooth (ceiling speakers) psu socket is permanently on. Next socket is switched on and off by the switched receiver

Yep all pretty much standard profiles. Modern Trade in Hinckley do a decent range of uPVC

All my copper (inc the ends into the manifolds) are on munsen rings. I.e. https://www.screwfix.com/p/brass-munsen-ring-22mm-5-pack/3444J?tc=DB1&ds_kid=92700020952479607&gclsrc=aw.ds&ds_rl=1241687&ds_rl=1245250&ds_rl=1249404&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIoPPfvcuN5QIVBrDtCh22cQBwEAQYDyABEgKljvD_BwE definitely the strongest of all fixings and they enable full lagging.

Here we go, more of @Nickfromwales welsh wizardry

here ya go. Picture stolen from nick the welsh wizard.

Oh you might have an exhaust-air heat pump in your MVHR! This one https://www.earthsaveproducts.com/products/mvhr-including-built-in-heat-pump/ecocent-air-mvhr. There is a link to the manual on the web page. Unfortunately, the manual does not seem to mention the word "boost". If that is your model, you might be interested to know that both @Mikey_1980 and @dogman have the same one.

The answer will in part depend on the make/model of your MVHR unit. As an example I have an Airflow Androit unit. The "boost" is controlled by a volt free normally open circuit. Thus a "bell press" type switch will activate the boost. As I mentioned above I linked mine to my lighting system. A second button in my bathrooms is programmed as a bell press and activates a relay which closes the circuit.

Hope this link works for you .... They're on Page 34 https://issuu.com/passivehouseplus/docs/ph__uk_issue_21_digital

Only if you’re using E7 and want to make sure you take your E7 usage to the wire as they use GMT time clocks so you need to be careful with the shoulder hours.

Looks like there's an AAV above the Willis heaters, on the flow side.

Everyone. We can't poll the wider self-build community, so this is by definition a poll for BuildHub members to see what building system they're using. What big builders, non-members and the wider self-build community may or may not do is irrelevant. Please consider that before posting.

You are probably right that it's not a big issue and I could leave it... but I'm too nice for my own good.

I agree with Patrick above. However, i just dont have that gift, and i always end up winding them up. The truth is, i think our planning system is broken. The National and local policies are all written like laws. Open to being interpretated in many different ways. It's quite easy to have one planning officer who is ok with crown roofs, and one who is not, sitting next to each other in the office. I have a local planning officer, not young, who passed a large crown roof, 2 doors away, but told me 2 months later, that he would not allow them on mine. You are at there mercy, and whims, and that is just not right. Once you get a job with the council, you don't get sacked. You can spend your whole career going from department to department being rubbish. Don't feel too sorry for them. My highly educated, very clever daughter, (not my words. She was identified by a government dept at 12 as being so) joined a council. 30 in the department. After 2 months she advised the council that the dept could be run by 10 people with spare capacity. She advised that the 2/3rds of the people who consistantly worked from home, achieved 2 peoples work. She sugested a proformance pay structure, and no more home working. She identified that people working from home, were logged onto the computer system for as little as 12minutes a day. These people were earning in excess of 30k a year. A huge proportion of the money we put into the councils bank accounts is wasted. Sorry.