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Especially where a PH has a high time constant (ie, takes a long time to change from whatever temperature it's reached), there's rarely a need to deliver heat quickly. The house tends to stay at around the same temperate with only small amounts of heat. As an example of how thinking needs to change with a PH, our plumber was concerned that the long time it would take our "undersized" (5kW) ASHP to heat up our DHW cylinder would result in the house temperature falling uncomfortably in very cold weather. In reality, it takes a full day without heating to notice much of a change. Certainly nothing noticeable happens in the couple of hours it might take to heat the cylinder.

FYI, the amount of hot water ( volume vs temp ) is a mere ‘spike’ in the terms of the ‘capability to discharge under duress’ for most modern plastics. The real problem starts when you’ve got 2-300L of roasting hot water to potentially be discharged. That’s when plastics can melt, seals become compromised. In reality, a piddly little boiling water tap is of near zero consequence in that equation.

I have the same problem. My solution was to design my own PV diverter, with a radio link from the meter box back to the house. This has worked fine for the past five years, but in my drive to remove custom built stuff I've just bought an Apollo Gem diverter, as that comes with the option of a radio link from the power sensing part.

Clips every metre....

Simple, in the UK we could easily release 2% of our total land area to housing. That would double what we currently have. With careful design, just half a percent could house 20 million people. The problem is political will and nothing more.

I have to ask this .... Why are you worrying about this now..?? If you agreed a price you found acceptable for solar panels, they have now been installed and are working satisfactory, and you’ve now been presented with the bill - that matches the price you agreed - why are you not prepared to pay it ..?? The supplier has done what they said they would, and it sounds like in moving from estimate to estimate that something got left in or missed, and you’re trying to query the whole thing ..? Turn it round - if the estimate had 21 panels on it, and you looked at the roof and counted 22, how quick would you be trying to pay the suppler for the extra panel ...???

My gripe with metal consumer units, is they tackled the "problem" from the wrong end. They did NOTHING to improve reliability of consumer units or find out WHY they caught fire (e.g looking at terminations, quality of switchgear etc) instead they put them in a tin box to try and contain the fire WHEN it happens.

They heat the air not the fabric, and would be using peak energy at a 1:1 CoP. An ASHP heated slab can use off peak energy and a CoP of 3:1, so essentially can create a heat store at 1/6th of the energy requirements of panel heaters. Cooling is more of an issue these days, and a cooled slab is very effective for the purpose of controlling overheating.

Good news is I think the contractor felt ashamed enough to apologise and rectify the work on one roof today. Turns out being a reference for half the other self builders in the development has some sway when they realise it! Taken today and tomorrow off from work to supervise onsite directly and ensure the rest gets fixed too. Thankfully I had spare material for the car port which can be cannibalised for this, and they'll be paying for replacements directly out of their fees.

If I was in the market for one I'd consider these guys, been using their nails in my old paslode and they have been decent. About 30 quid a box. https://supafixings.com/

Building regs will always bow to manufacturers instructions. If you fit it as per the MI’s you’re good to go ( as they’ve already sought approval prior to releasing the product ).

@CpdTheir website is https://webuildit-ltd.co.uk/

It's amazing what goes on on the planning portal sometimes. A few years ago an application for a wind farm went in a few miles from us. Many people wrote to object but we were surprised to see that one of the land owners that had and would benefit financially by having turbines on his land had written to object. His letter was online for a week or so before the energy co spotted it an wrote to him to remind him that he had been given an initial sweetner of £50-£60k and signed a contract to say he wouldn't object to the application on his land. He then had to try and get his objection removed which he did by writing to the planners and those letters also got posted online for awhile. Eventually his letter and the follow ups somehow got removed but not before the "action group" had made copies.

No problem if you look on eBay at Bio-pure The top search is identical to ours 1-7

But you were charged for a package. The total price won't be the sum of the parts - they'll internally obviously start with their cost of the parts and add their markup and subtract a bit of a discount for the amount you're buying then think about the amount of labour to install it all and so on and come to a price. If you'd decided to take one of the earlier options with the batteries and inverter/charger it might have been, say, £4000 more expensive. But if you go back to them now and say, “oh, I've changed my mind, I'd like the batteries, etc, after all” it'll be more than £4000 to retrofit it because of the extra travel, paperwork, and general messing around. So, it really doesn't make sense to say whether or not you were charged for the inverter/charger. It's an obvious mistake in the quote and I'd expect them to apologise for it but if they say, as they seem to be, nope, sorry, our overall package price wasn't worked out on the basis of supplying one of those then I think you really have to take that at face value.

Not a bad overall decision to make, it depends very much on just how much drinking ion exchange softened water changes your daily sodium intake, and how that effects the balance between sodium and calcium ion intake overall. There isn't a lot of sodium in softened water from moderately hard water areas, and it was something I looked at closely, as I've been on a low sodium diet for over 30 years now. I added up my average daily sodium intake, allowing for 3 or 4 mugs of tea made from softened water (at the water hardness level we have here) and found that the additional sodium from the softened water about the same as that from the milk I put in my tea. Overall, four mugs of tea made with softened water added up to about 4% to 5% of the NHS recommended daily sodium intake. I'd caveat this by saying that our water isn't super hard, so our softener doesn't exchange lots of calcium ions for sodium ions, and for those who have very hard water it may be that the sodium ion concentration could be a bit higher. To put this into perspective, 1 packet of crisps contains around 140 to 150mg of salt. For our water, that is equivalent to about 1.2 litres of softened water.

The real problem is that the government is inept at dealing with commercial stuff like this, and seemingly always has been. Many years ago I went out with a young lady that worked in the land and property management bit of MOD, at Chessington. They were our supposed "experts" on land management, sales etc, but frankly my impression was that they were pretty hopeless, and regularly got well and truly shafted by the big commercial players in that market. The same seemed to be the case when we privatised and rationalised defence research. In that case we managed to employ a character who turned out to be extremely adept at lining his own (and his wife's) pockets at our expense. He did nothing wrong (except morally, IMHO), he was just astute enough to see how he could exploit the lack of expertise within government. As a former colleague, Les Salmon, said to me more than 20 years ago, he was a man "unencumbered by self-doubt". Pretty much the opposite of most of the senior civil servants I ever worked with.

We live not far from Norwich. If @joe90 gets a sensible reply then we could go look at them.

Doesn’t work like that from memory - diverter just needs to sense there is more being generated than consumed and switches on. As @dpmiller says - need one with a wireless or remote current sensor

no reason why not, as long as you go for one with a wireless current sender.

I have asked those question @JSHarris and will post the reply, if any one is interested keep an eye on this thread. Norwich is 350 miles from me ?.

Pity there's not more information in that listing. Might be worth asking the seller what make they are, what their history is, and whether he'd accept an offer for a batch of panels. Might even be worth asking if he'd do a deal for a big batch of them, and then organise a group buy on here, perhaps. Need to get them from Norwich, though, which may add a fair bit to the cost.

Scaffold planks make good rustic decking and you can buy new “seconds”.

Not in England and Wales ... ? no minimum width requirement south of the border ...

i think you will find that alot of tropical fish will happily live with low 20,s if accustomed to it --leave the bag they come in in tank for 24 hrs before letting them out --but leave top undone or they will not get air

You're right ScottishJohn. When we ordered the panels, I had very little idea about what comprised a system - as a first time buyer you are in the hands of installers. Most of you have had solar systems before, so you know the drill. This is a first for us, and solar PVs are quite complex with a lot of tech involved. I genuinely had no idea whether we needed one, two, three or 10 inverters. No clue what optimisers were and how many we were supposed to get. So we signed off on a proposal. It's only after a solution has been installed that you begin to understand the full picture. And that's where I am today; I can see that we didn't need the Victron inverter, yet it appears we have been charged for it, despite the installer being adamant that we haven't. The lesson here for people new to solar PV is to get fully itemised lists with breakdowns because it avoids confusion, ambiguity and uncertainly. We had no issues with the ASHP installation team and suppliers - they clearly stipulated what we were getting - six months down the line, I see that we paid for and what we got was spot on. This has not been the case in this solar PV scenario.

If you tell anyone about that Dave, I'll have to kill ya.....?

As long as it is 900mm high all the way (which that one may not be) Personally, I would have that as an "after sign off" project. You would need to make the stairs wider so they are still a compliant width with the tank in place. KM would approve, and you would instantly be on Grand Designs. I think your idea we discussed yesterday is less controversial

Looking at the quote: There are clearly two inverters listed in the price. The Solaredge inverter, that will be the 6 kW one you have, plus a Victron Battery Charger/Inverter, which allows a battery pack to be connected and charged during times when there is excess PV, and discharged when there's little or no PV generation, so cutting down on imported electricity. The slight issue with this is that word "None," above the Victron Battery Charger/Inverter entry. The comma makes me wonder if those two lines should be one, and read "None, Victron Battery Charger/Inverter". The key point may be the timing of the receipt of this quote. If you initially considered having the battery option, but decided against it before this quote was received, then it may be that they have badly amended the initial quote they had drafted, and the Victron line entry is effectively a typo.

One screw and glue them on. CT1 would bond it too, or Stixall.

I think the design is an effective division of the space available and hits the sweat spot for modern family living. What prompts the angled the rear glazing of the day/dining room?

Can also run spurs to rooms for future electric heating and leave them in wall if not needed.

i think he is really asking the question so he can save money on build costs . If it were me --i would at least fit UFH piping in the floor as its very cheap at build stage to do -, maybe you can balance cost of heat pump etc with more expensive running cost of simple panel heaters? fiiting pipes in floor at build stage leaves you options later

Thats good... Its a sideways half round the world elevation.. Cant seem to turn it 90' Its a front elevation of the back of the house.

I can see 9 rectangles in that puzzle ? .

+1 to the above. The vast majority of our heating (which isn't much) is overnight, during the E7 off-peak rate, and uses the ASHP (which seems to run at a COP of around 3.5 or so) to charge the slab up from the UFH. The running cost is about 2.328p/kWh. If we used electric panel heaters, then the cost would be over 6 times higher, at 15.729p/kWh. There's also an environmental benefit with an ASHP, in that, because it uses less than 1/3rd of the electricity, there will be less than 1/3rd of the emissions etc from the power generation.

these guys are worth a chat, they re-sell the L&C unit and have an optional paid extended warranty package https://www.peakenergyproducts.co.uk/monobloc-ashp-s Andrew is the contact.

Looks like the cost of these has dropped since I first looked at them. Not used Qubino before but I'd be tempted if I was doing it again. In the end I used normal Fibaro dimmers + a 3D printed DIN rail holder which actually now costs the same as the DIN Qubino! Just had a quick flick through the manuals - the only thing I could see is that it looks like the Fibaro can be switched to leading edge dimming rather than trailing edge which *may* make it more compatible however dimmable LEDs have moved on leaps and bounds so I don't expect you'll have any issues. The only change I had to make was to raise the lower dimming limit as when it was down <10% I got flicker from my LEDs

This is what I'll do as hiring a chimp is expensive now @ £150/ day.. 3 weeks.. £450.

Haven't been called that since primary school .

Fully agree.

No acceptable invoice = no payment. This is how the world of business works. Once you've paid, you have zero leverage.

Completely true from a regs point of view. And certainly some regs change somewhat "for the sake of it" and really not worth thinking about on an older installation. However worth noting the regs on plastic consumer units changed because of their role in a number of domestic fires, ISTR including some with fatalities as the consumer unit was under the stairs and blocked exit from the building. In those cases the root cause was loose connections but the plastic contributed to the rapid early development of the fire. So it is worth at least understanding why the new regs are what they are, and making an informed decision of the risk/reward of leaving it as-is (which you're perfectly entitled to do). This will also depend on circumstances : e.g. if the only thing above it is an old dry timber staircase that's the only means of exit it's a higher risk, if the cupboard has a plasterboard ceiling and you have other ways out you may be less worried. Similarly if it's near anything that vibrates there's more chance of something coming loose over time, if not and the connections have been tight for decades they probably aren't going to magically undo themselves in a hurry. If it was me and I knew I was planning work in the area in the short to medium term I would probably leave it till then. But in the meantime I'd think about other potential control measures e.g. perhaps putting a smoke/heat alarm directly in the consumer unit cupboard for early warning and getting semi-regular inspections of the connections (perhaps every couple of years, between full EICRs) to check they're all in good condition with no sign of loosening or arcing. That said loads of houses with plastic consumer units haven't burnt down, only a few have, so you may think it's not that big a deal. Just depends on your risk appetite / whether there are other things in your life more worth worrying about. I wouldn't worry at all about RCDs on lighting circuits and missing drawings : just be aware of it if changing screw-in lamps / drilling walls / changing fittings and make sure things are off before you work on them (which they should be even if you had an RCD). Though the cost can bump up if during the CU change they find other things that need to be done (e.g. a cable with a lower-than-acceptable insulation reading that can't be connected to the new board till that's fixed). Advantage here is you have a generally-satisfactory EICR so that's less likely to happen, but still worth bearing in mind.

If I had five joists I would just space them equally and cut the celotex to fit as it's not a large area. I would also fit the noggins either side of a centre line so they are easier to fit.

Just a point to make with the installation All the companies I spoke to would make the tank to order Inlet and outlet at what ever height I needed I was having difficulty gauging accurately where the inlet outlet needed to be As I had to fit a tank to our neighbours existing drains So decided to do both before the foundations went in Neighbours easy ours best guess The local tank company said keep it low and they would fabricate a neck extension at a later date £100 Adding a 220 mil neck extension 18 months later made life so much easier

Posted this before: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tiny-homes-become-the-next-big-thing-smnj8ns9t

The LPA have now recatagorised these documents as sensitive, this means they can no longer been seen publicly through my neighbours application. I incorrectly assumed they had been uploaded by my neighbour to assist his appeal when in fact the planners had used the documents to determine the outcome of the application. I'm not certain whether the LPA made an administrative scanning error and that is why they appeared online. Or whether this is usual practice. Either way Im content they have now been removed and I am no longer associated with this application. I doubt any lasting damage has been done to my impeccable reputation!!

Can I ask ‘why bricklaying?’ If it’s because you like the great outdoors,I’d check just how much you like it by standing outside for 8 hours when it’s +4degreesthis winter! Very hard on the body after time too-I’m on my second set of hips & have a John Hurt tribute act for a stomach after numerous hernia repairs,and I’m not 50 for a couple of years yet. As others have said,the trend now is to design out expensive labour elements of the build,and if this continues it will have a major impact on our trade. With that in mind,& the fact that they aren’t weather dependant,have you considered plumbing or electrics?

As I see it, you need either quaifications followed by credible experience, or lots and lots of experience. Then you need to find the jobs, usually starting simply or at the bottom. The impression I get is that training can be through Apprenticeship or a course at an FE College. When I did my "bit of everything" 9 month evening class abck in 2012 ish, at my local college they were teaching it as a skill. That will not help you find a way in, but there seems to be demand at present. I will say that imo being good is the thing to aim for, even if it takes longer. And I expect that the investment needs to be at least as much time as money - and then it will be to your advantage to specialise in a niche or several niches. HTH. Ferdinand

I have recently made some changes after we had a "ran out of hot water" incident (something I thought would not happen with a 300L tank) It was a perfect storm. SWMBO had been doing some cooking, which seemed to mean the hot tap running for some time to rinse stuff. Then she had a shower, not the normal one, but the monthly "put loads of different conditioner in the hair" showers that takes longer. Then daughter ran a bath, or tried to and got half a bath of hot water. So I was in the dog house instructed to "fix it" The problem was simple. I had put the temperature probe in the top thermostat pocket, which is about half way down the tank. Analysing what happened, is half the water had been used up before the probe even knew the hot water was being depleted, and that just did not leave enough for the shower and bath. The fix was simple. Move the probe to the bottom thermostat pocket that is about 1/3 up from the bottom of the tank. It now behaves very differently. Before it would heat the tank and then do nothing for a day. Now it heats the tank much more often, but for shorter periods. So it starts to re heat a depleted tank of water much sooner, making the chance of running out much less. A by product of keeping it topped up more often has been I have reduced the set point temperature another couple of degrees.