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Hi Tennentslager! Here are some pictures I took a moment ago. pic1: View of the house from the drive way. The house is side on when you come up the drive. pic2: Taken from the garden showing the building extension done in front of the property. The roof is made into the sundeck shown in pic4. pic3: This is the area we're converting into bedrooms, plus a TV / playroom in the middle as you come down the stairs pic4: Taken from the sundeck. You can see the glass box on top of the sundeck. This is where the stairs will go down to connect the two buildings. The groundworks have already been done building up the retaining walls that the stairs will drop into. Just in the process of getting quotes for the next phase as detailed in my intro. Plus need to make a decision on the UFH. The architect specified Nu Heat Low Pro10. I think initially we're going to link with the boiler upstairs, but eventually we'll go ground source. Cheers, Rod

The reason for this is that there are no smart 3 phase meters available at the moment, I believe. This means that you're probably out of luck for any tariff that needs a smart meter. Not sure what the Bulb Varifair E7 tariff is in your neck of the woods, but we've been on it for a year now and it's still best value for us. If it looks OK for you then you could use my code and we both get £50 out of it. . .

In a passive house you will never want to heat the bathroom floor hot enough to dry it out as it will be like being in a sauna. We put in electric under floor in all the bathrooms in our passive house as we thought there may be a chill on the tiles but in 2 years I have never wanted to turn it on. You will only want to run your wet ufh 23-25 degree surface temp range.

The draft of the 1st amendment to the 18th edition is out for review. Just 15 pages updating the requirements for EV charge points. https://electrical.theiet.org/media/2332/amendment1_read-only_final.pdf I hope the situation matures soon. By the time I buy an EV I expect to be able to plug it into ANY public charge point anywhere, and to be able to charge it at home under a regime that I dictate that will be either time of use or based on solar PV generation. Those don't sound like particularly strange requirements if we are to have better controlled use of available grid power, but I see no sign that it is possible. At the moment there is a 4PM to 7PM shortage of power. How many EV's will be arriving home at say 5PM and plugging in the chargers just when they are not wanted, and with no easy timer function, most won't be bothered to say "oh I'll go out at 9PM and plug it in"

Welcome. Great attitude to have a go at everything. It's about the journey not the destination! Keeps the old grey matter ticking.

I bought a blending valve that is accurate down to about 20 degrees although I have found that running it at around 26/27 works best. The boiler is a worcester bosch greenstar 12i that modulates from about 3.5 up to 12kw. I have never had issues with short cycling and with just a wall mounted temp sensor it controls the temp well. I also use it to run 4 x 600w towel rads which is all the heating we have upstairs. I have these on for an hour in the morning in the winter and overlap them with water heating as their output is even slightly less than the lowest boiler modulation. The UFH comes on a max of twice a week mid winter and often only once for about 4 hours. It was a bit of punt as I sort of designed it myself but it is dead simple and has worked really well. My plumber didnt believe that the boiler would be powerful enough to heat the house. Getting a plumber that understands low energy housing seems to be quite tricky.

Changing electricity supplier is getting to be a bit of a minefield now, especially with some of the more complex ToU tariffs. I keep a spreadsheet of our usage profile and the latest tariffs from suppliers in this area, and in the last six months or so it's becoming clear that the usual price comparison sites are struggling to give accurate recommendations for some tariffs. Our house is all-electric (electric heating, cooling, hot water and charging my car), and we're paying about £48/month for electricity, so a bit under £600/year. We get back about £1,000 a year for the electricity we generate, though, in FiT and export payments, so we have no real energy bill to pay. I accept that the FiT payment we get is a bit of a fiddle, as it was an incentive to get us to fit the solar panels we have built in to our roof, but nevertheless it was on offer and I wasn't going to turn it down. The 25 solar panels (6.25 kWp) provide roughly 60% of our annual hot water, with the rest coming from using off-peak Economy 7 electricity overnight. We find that the electricity generation from the more or less South facing solar panel array drops off a cliff in October and then picks up again about March, so we have four or five months with very little solar power. The data from PVGIS ( https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html ) is pretty accurate, and matches our pattern of generation fairly well:

There is a reason that low voltage[1] PV modules are more expensive and not as efficient as standard ones. [1]Not really low voltage as anything under 1000V is low voltage, Extra Low Voltage is really the right term as that is below 50V.

FWIW I run some low-power stuff such as my server (and occasionally my laptop and a small amount of lighting) from a 12V off-grid system with ~500Wp of panels scattered round the front and back of the house at low level. It has some storage, nominally ~2kWh though ageing and in need of replacement. I also have a fairly big (>5kWp) grid-tied solar array and now a smallish AC-coupled battery. All heavy lifting including basically anything to do with heat is done from this part. Rgds Damon

It's really hard to do high power stuff, like warming water and space heating, at 12 V. Might be an idea to take a look at the Navitron forum ( https://www.navitron.org.uk/forum/ ), as there are a few there who are totally off grid, plus some who are partially off grid, and have a fair bit of experience of using low voltage DC. I'm pretty sure that most end up running systems at around 48 V, really to overcome the problems caused by cable power loss as much as anything else, but they may still be good source of expertise on low voltage stuff.

Yea as I said not doign heat source now. We've been in about 3 months, I think we've started off in the right way but obvs not as quick as "she" would like ? I got a good look around, cleared out the loft(s), stripped most of the walls and discovered some things - one was that the hall was really cold so I took the ceiling down and low and behold the water tank above it had had a slow leak for what must have been years. The was a massive black damp patch across the plaster board and some of the support timbers had rotten. No real problem because we had already booked to have the emersion heater taken out. Also discovered a oak beam which supports the ceiling in the bedroom when I knocked out a built in wordrobe. So now I either build another cupboard around it or have a pole stuck 3ft from the corner of the bedroom - might be had to hang a light on ? Things start moving next week - Monday Tree feller arrives to cut down some overground tree - the couple who live here had this love of conifers, with two nicely place eitherside of the patio doors. Nice when they were 4ft, they are now 30ft plus. Day after that the builder comes to create a new front doorway to the kitchen extension. That frees up the old doorway & hall which will become a study thereby gaining a room ? Soon I'll be able to put up the shed I bought and which is in the kitchen having been painted over the winter. Next on the list is repairing the roof then I can start thinking about installing solar panels. I say start, I've already got my hand dirty playing around with a 20w panel and the old battries from a stairlift which was in the property. That will power the shed, but that shed will mainly be storage, I plan to build a workshop for my long term projects. Great to be here, I'll start a TOPIC thread when I have time.

Welcome Lots of quiet fireside reading for you on BH - should last you through the rest of the winter. All the topics you mention have been raised here - often.

Welcome Multi- tasker You should fit in on here perfectly

Welcome @Delicatedave no reason why anyone would delete you...? you haven’t done anything wrong yet?

Thanks. Indeed I am the same @arg as you have encountered elsewhere, but on this forum I fear I'm going to be doing more asking than answering. Having read your trials and tribulations with the PCM54 units I'd concluded they are probably now safe to go with, but was hoping someone had actually had sight of a PCM34. Still, as you say I ought to try talking to Sunamp directly to find out what the official line is. If I learn anything interesting I will report back here.

IIRC it is only a requirement in rented property?

From a quick look, it seems that all Part G3 mentions is the installation requirements. In general there's an over riding requirement to comply with the manufacturer's instructions though, and from what I've managed to dig out earlier this evening, these all seem to mandate an annual service. TBH, I thought that Part G3 mandated annual servicing, too, but if it does then I've not been able to find it.

One thing I now regret is not having more of our windows non-opening. At least 50% of our windows never need to be opened, and so would have been better as fixed ones. It was a detail that I just didn't pick up when getting window quotes. The only issue with non-opening windows is really one of appearance, as if next to an opening pane they can look a bit odd, because of the narrower frame. Having said that, we don't have any air leaks around the windows, so it's not an issue. It just means that cluster flies have somewhere to gather in the tiny gaps around the outside of each casement.

Have you already ordered windows? If not remember to get them without trickle vents. And generally the better the airtightness of the house the better the MVHR will work. We have good airtightness (better than 1 ACH) on our spec so it's a contractual requirement for our renovation contractor

Everyone knows what I’m going to say................concrete Lego ?