Leaderboard

Yesterday extra PV and SE battery were added. SE battery not commissioned yet but apparently charging from solar ( I can't see this yet as commissioning needs to be done ). SE Battery quite a chunky monkey. Apparently the top 20% of it is an automatic fire extinguisher ( so I was told by installer ). Because I have a PW2 as well when Tesla app shows Kw from solar it's potentially fibbing as it could be nicking lecky from SE. None the less some strange behaviour today!. As no PV generation yesterday as panels off the PW2 charged off peak as expected. But look at just after 6am today!. Something emptied it!. Not possible for SE to draw from PW!. No idea what would sup all that juice - never seen that happen before.... Will update this exciting thread once I have more info.

Think Thorfun is responding to my comment that ubiquiti has a lot of advanced options that you don't get in consumer wifi networking products. Totally agree there's no expectation to use those features, but if you know for a fact you're not going to there's a bunch of much cheaper and easier to use products that will probably work just as well (and, probably have lower background energy draw, the ubiquiti stuff seems to be quite a power hog in my experience) Note: as a tinkerer I love my ubiquiti setup and wouldn't choose anything else right now. Just saying, it's not necessarily a must-have for every household.

well worth having his book on the shelf - it's good...

While this is seriously irritating you now, I'd take the advice above and live with it for a while before deciding to fix. You will likely have some other issue take over your mind soon and in a few months will wonder why it annoyed you so much. That was my experience anyway with several mistakes on my build. If it's still an irritation, then you can still fix it.

I get that ubiquiti is very well rated on this forum. I’m not entirely sure for what it is rated well, as it seems to do a lot of things that I really don’t understand. I went into their website to try to learn about what they sell and what it could do for me and I got even more confused. I have a three story house, cross section below. I want good wifi coverage everywhere, and I also don’t want to have to use any aspects of the Virgin Media “superhub” router that I can avoid. I hate that thing. Whenever there is an issue with the network it can only ever be resolved by a reboot and then it literally can take anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes (and sometimes another reboot) to get the thing working again. My electrician put a couple of extra Ethernet cables into the house when he was re-wiring in case I wanted to have some wifi access points. I didn’t ask him to do this, but it was a pleasant surprise when I found out. I told him I was just going to install a mesh system but he said he thinks wireless access points are better and that he has a ubiquiti system at home that he is really happy with and offered to install one for me. But I’m confused as to what exactly I need to achieve my goals. The ubiquiti website is just written in a language I don’t understand. R shows the location of my Router (or the location it will be once installed next week). E shows the points where I have Ethernet. I can only give up the one on the first floor and one of the ones on the ground floor for access points. Well this be enough? What hardware do I actually need and what the hell is a ubiquiti dream machine? And can the access points go in cupboards, or will their ability to spread the magic suffer? Any help would be much appreciated.

I visited Installer '22 at the NEC on Wednesday (told everyone who asked that I was a renewables retrofit specifier in the domestic sector, I'm not...)... My take-aways from the day: 1. Cool Energy had a demonstration trailer setup with their newer R32 based unit driving a very nicely made, Italian sourced, fan coil unit in cooling mode. They have a nice product and they're very technical and open. Units will ship with the newer Carel pGDX display in the future (https://www.carel.com/pgdx) and this is a nice display/interface. My visit and chat has cemented them as my chosen supplier for my domestic renovation project. 2. Unitherm heating (Exeter) had a good display of heat pumps from various suppliers on their booth, but nothing plugged in and working. They were one of the few companies there with LG units to see. 3. Grant, who supply Chofu units (Japanese origin) had a nice booth, but the real take-away from them was their nicely produced brochures and handover guide which do a good job of explaining to the homeowner how setback and weather compensation work. Nice to see them trying to educate the user in how to get the best from their system. 4. Midsummer wholesale have launched heatpunk (heatpunk.co.uk) a web based tool for graphical heat loss calcs. It's similar to the freedom toolkit except it is web based and runs in the browser. You draw your house, specify the building contruction and it does heat loss and rad sizing in a graphical manner. Free to use (for now). I asked about importing DXF plans and that's something they are considering. 5. Sunamp are listening and are working on a making their PCM43 more reliable in long cycles (that's why it isn't available yet), and are also thinking that PCM50 would be a good fit for heat pump applications. 6 (Leaving the best till last). Homely, by Evergreen energy - wow, this is a game changer. A modbus enabled, IoT based, smart thermostat and heat pump controller that takes control of a wide range of modbus controllable heat pumps and will optimise the flow temp and operating times depending on occupancy, weather, solar gain, predicted weather for the coming 24hrs, TOU tarrif data from the tarriff provider, storage battery %SOC, etc etc. It can automatically commision Midea and Samsung units over modbus and provides a full app for the end user to setup their schedules and temperatures. It has an indoor light/temp/humidity sensor that allows the unit to automatically setup the weather comp curves for a property, no installer callbacks, no fiddling by the user. I was very impressed with this and can see it being of real benefit to end users. They are going to enter a line of communication with Cool Energy to add support for their units. All in all, very glad I visited. I'll go again next year for sure.

Mine are 3W ones, so 8 of them

My apologies 🙄. Yes, olive eating into pipe, and the fact that the whole functionality of the olive is to compress onto something rigid, which reinforces by design how it is lunacy to turn / tighten it into soft plastic. The plastic cannot offer any opposing force so just gets displaced. The nut gets tightened until ‘someone’ decides it’s “tight enough” and the resultant joint is a compromise even before you’ve put water in the pipe. The issue of the insert being used ( or not ) is of zero relevance, as nobody here can compensate or advise against idiots not following instructions. However, when the instruction is to do something poorly, and it comes from the manufacturer, go figure. I’ll not defend that any further, just a plumber on the tools for 3 decades stating what’s shite, and why. That’s impartial and free advise, given on a take it or leave it basis.

If around 200/250KG they will but easier to put it on a dolly and roll it into position or use a telehandler externally. That’s “if” access inside is straight forward and or outside. Not only that, the amount of installers that have knackered backs as a result is immense. Safety first, even if they’re lifting things manually.

Oh yes - I forgot to say - your sparks sounds like a keeper (installed RJ45 WITHOUT being told to). Don't know the latest UBIQUITI kit, but mine has a female RJ45 port. Your bloke/lady probably terminated to female RJ45 ports on the walls. You CAN connect the AP to that with a patch cable, but I would have him remove the Box on the wall, terminate the cable in the wall with a MALE RJ45 plug, and then stick that into the back of the AP, which then sits flush. You can do it yourself, but without the correct crimping tool it's a pain (and even with the crimper I am terrible at it)

Zero rated the lot

FWIW - not a gamer (which has very specific latency demands) but am a software dev who often spends all day online and has a house full of kit. Oh yes, and if my wife can't wander from room to room chatting to her sister on Facethingy she goes ballistic .... I have tried multiple solutions, including various consumer routers/ APs , a network of routers wired, and then a network of consumer routers flashed to Open Source firmware (so they would all be the same). What I learned is ... Now we have mobile devices, for most of what you want to do the biggest issue is not bandwidth - apart from UHDTV(maybe). I am assuming, of course, that you are not running an OnlyFans competitor or similar application from your house ...... The biggest issue is MOBILITY i.e. switching between zones. 2 years ago, I ended up with - a Virgin Router (in "Modem") ie. dumb mode. This means that I can switch from Virgin without having to change a single other thing. - a draytek vigor 2862 router - most consumer routers would work fine for my needs, and I suspect yours (I ended up with this relatively expensive kit to connect to a client's VPN i.e. it was a work requirement) - a Tenda 9 port POE unmanaged switch to power the APs - UBIQUITI 2 wall mounted APs (with 2 RJ45 ports each) and a ceiling mount The BIG benefit of the UBIQUITI APs (apart from the fact they look OK on the ceiling) is the switching. My wife still shouts at me, but not because she can't wander around with her ipad. The wifi service is as good as an office/commercial environment with a professionally designed network and WAY more expensive pro kit. So - if I were wring your house I would .... Stick a dumb POE switch in front of your router Put a Ubiquiti wall mount AP on the end of at two of your existing Ethernet connections (you don't lose the ability to plug in direct - the wall mount ones have ports). If you CAN - plug your TV and any gaming machine direct into one of those RJ45 ports . You can install the UBIQUITI app on your phone to control and set up the kit. You shouldn't NEED a Ubiquiti router. I don't have one and it works fine. WOW - I just looked at the price of these - they are up 30% since I bought mine - but I have to say, I WOULD buy them again. Put in a couple and see how you go would be my advice. NB - there is a DISADVANTAGE to having too many wifi APs - you clutter up the channels in your house, and you end up with lots of collisions, which is also a bandwidth killer. Oh yes - and mesh is a bandwidth killer, but more importantly - a LATENCY HOG. I avoid it if I possibly can.

Do you mean Wh.

Whilst your suggestion has a great deal of appeal to it I really honestly do not want to cost the guy more than I have to... I know he started it, I know he is being unpleasant and obstructive and he may consider me as an "enemy" but I don't have the energy to do the same to him, he isn't worth it... However I certainly am not going to spend my own money on it for now

Keen to hear what you think of this battery over time as I have it lined up to be installed in the next few months.

I don’t think 4 guys can lift a 467kg window. Plus it is about 500mm above ground level at the moment. They did the other windows manually.

If this will be on your side of the boundary take a look at the Paving Expert website (especially check the index). Looks of details in how to build everything related to paving and driveways. Apart from the base the next most important is lateral restraint for edges and corners. If it's in the public highway side you will need to find council/highways guidance. Same dept as for dropped kerb applications probably.

I personal thought everyone was overthinking this. 4 lads just picked mine up on suckers and walked them in, extremely heavy but nothing that they don’t do every day.

All the windows are in and they have started to plasterboard. It is going so fast I am struggling to keep up with ordering lights etc.

Seems like they don’t have a leg to stand on reading the deeds. You can’t use machinery but that wasn’t planned anyway. There may be some argument over whether wheelbarrows etc constitute foot traffic. My view is they do as they are pushed by someone on foot. To not be foot traffic the vehicle would have to be carrying the person. No doubt there is some legal precedent on this matter.

Looks like Peter was correct. The bottom of the float chamber was full of similar crud to that I cleaned out of the petrol tap. Every other jet I inspected looked clean and free of blockages. Back together again and it still flooded. I then had to adjust the float height, don't ask me why I should have to, but it was simply not shutting off in time even though the valve was clear and working. First try at that resulted in too little fuel in the float chamber to pick up. So somewhere between the two and no petrol pouring out and she purrs like a kitten with no choke, running nicely. Just got to clean things up and put it all back together and then change the engine oil.

Think it says what you always knew. I think motorised vehicles and sack barrows/pallet trucks are different. Gets a bit grey when you think about a push bike (almost certainly allowed) and a motorbike (almost certainly not allowed), so an electric bicycle or scooter is on the cusp of being allowed, as long as it is manually moved. So this brings in a mini digger. Some are tiny and can be pushed though standard doorways, so they should be allowed, while others can only realistically be driven, so not allowed. Just make sure all your contractors know which house to park in front off. 37 years ago, my neighbour got fed up with a local company van always parked outside her house, so called the company. There response was; "Strange that as we built him a garage to park the van in" Two days later, after a visit to the garage, which was full of company goods, the guy was signing on and waiting to be prosecuted for theft.

Thank you @Adsibob and @AliG (and the others who also mentioned it) - You and other people in this topic have rightfully suggested that I check the deeds and I have taken that good advice. I don't want to get in trouble with the Land registry by posting the full document here and I certainly don't want to post anything which could be used to identify anybody so I will remove all distinguishing information and also reference to the plans. The following is from the title deeds for the property of the person who has raised the complaint (bits underlined are my edits) "Together with the right in common with the owners and occupiers for the time being of (The houses between the person complaining's property and the end of the row) and all other persons authorised to use the same to go pass and repass on foot only over and along the passage way four feet wide situate at the rear of (the houses between the person complaining property and the end of the row) aforesaid and on the South West side of (The first property in the row where the passage joins the street) Except and Reserving unto the Vendor and his successors in title and the owners and occupiers of (The rest of the houses including mine) aforesaid and all other persons authorised by him or them the right at all times to go pass and repass over and along the passage way Four feet wide at the rear of the premises hereby conveyed and (reference to the plan)." Now... I read that as I have a right to foot access along the row. But ALSO that anyone I can authorise my workers to do the same. -There is nothing in here about the right to enjoy property -There is nothing in here about not being able to move materials -It specifically allows me to pass at ALL times If I may reiterate a previous posting... I don't believe that I am a monster and I am hopefully not an idiot (although my partner may suggestion otherwise on occasion). I was never going to give the contractor permission to drive motorised vehicles down the easement (it's MAX 4 feet wide and the surface isn't great). I suppose that his only remaining complaint would be if he considers that wheel barrows, sack truck, and potentially pallet trucks don't constitute foot traffic. However I could then use the evidence that he himself has used barrows, sack trucks, and in one case a custom made dolly truck for moving concrete beams for beam and block flooring to suggest that this is a normal use.

No idea - don't have time to follow the market and I'm still very happy with my Ubiquiti set up so not looking to change. If I were starting from scratch now I'd be doing a whole heap of research, as I do for most things so that I get the best solution for the price I'm prepared to pay.

The law already says that. All goods must be fit for purpose. So as long as the supplier of the ASHP knows that the purpose you will use it for is to heat your home, there is an implied term in the contract that it is fit for that purpose. Ergo, always get the supplier to survey the house the ASHP is going to be fitted in. See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/10/enacted

Comes down to sizing an ASHP correctly, just as you would with any heating system. Then it is down to installation costs and running costs. The first part has to be done first, then the other parts can be established. Limecrete is not really breathable like an airbrick, it is more a case of letting moisture wick though to the outside, where it evaporates. Depending on the mix, it is not inherently different from concrete mixes. Getting the kg.s-1.m2.kPa-1 numbers is challenging though, why there is so much 'mystic' around lime. It is a short hop from the above units to kg⋅m2⋅s−2 which is a unit of energy, and as we know, if you increase energy levels in a solid, the temperature rises. A pascal is kg⋅m−1⋅s−2

I’m having a go at doing it myself it’s hard work in this heat so only doing half days

Hallmarks of a sticking float valve and one of the jets full of crud.

Spot on. 👍

Yes but unfortunately that's not evidence that you/previous owners and your/their tradesmen have actually used the route for 20 years. At best it suggests those other house owners might be able to establish their own rights but that doesn't directly give you any. You really need something more substantial like letters from the previous owner of your house saying they and their builder, gardner, window cleaner, painter etc all used the route to bring a wide variety of materials and equipment to your house for at least 20 years and nobody ever raised any objection or blocked the route. For the whole of that period.

Some of it will depend on what you want your food to look, and taste, like after heating. A microwave is very good for heating/reheating, not so good for the Maillard reaction, which is what can cause complex flavours to emerge. Try doing cheese on toast to see what can go wrong. As an aside, microwaves do not cook from the inside, that is just a myth.

My suggested response: Dear Sirs I refer to your email of [date]. In your email you suggest that “Any use my clients have made of their own property or the passageway is entirely without relevance” as “It would not set any legal precedent on which [I] can rely". You appear to have misunderstood the point. My argument is that all residents on that side of [name of road] have a right of way over that passageway. Therefore, the fact that your client has made use of that passageway to cross other neighbour's land is entirely relevant since it supports my assertion that a right of way exists over the entire passageway, including your client's land, for all residents on that side of the road. I would therefore be relying on your client's use of that land as a matter of fact to support my legal argument, not as a legal precedent. Indeed, the fact that you yourself are referring to the “passageway” as such is telling. It is a passage that shows the way across your clients land for others to make use of to access their own properties. Your client’s position has no legal merit and your correspondence on this point is misconceived. It is patently obvious that your client's purported objection on the grounds that no right of way exists is a thinly veiled objection to my development proposals, as evidenced by his prior objection to my planning application, in a new guise. I urge your client to reconsider his position, failing which I will have to escalate matters to protect my rights, all of which remain expressly reserved. Obviously litigation is a costly endeavour, but I will resort to it if necessary and seek my costs of doing so from your client. Yours [@woz]

Is there no other way whatsoever of getting into your garden without going via his. When people try things like this with me, I do my best to find another way or to do something totally unorthodox just out of badness. Could you remove a wall or fence anywhere, even if it meant paying a neighbour and having the wall or fence reinstated. Airlift the materials in? Can you not come through your house? Crane the stuff in from the street... This would allow you to totally cease all communication with your neighbour and their solicitor and simply go and do your own thing which would be highly satisfying. Of course, if you can prove right of way over this bit of ground then that would be highly satisfying too.

Scaffold board laid on top.

I use an ordinary extendable ladder but have to use a u bolt holding the two sections together to stop the lower section sliding away (it’s not made for this type of use) with bolt on hook/wheels at the top. Does fir me 🤷‍♂️

I've used an extendible. D8dnt like the way the top section didnt rest on the tiles so I ended up putting a block of wood under it up near the roof hook so that end was supported. Hate working on roofs. Edit : I see some come with an aluminium stand off for the top end..

depends if your roof is all the same size, i bought mine from screwy. on one roof it just touches the gutter and is easy to get on/off, the other bit of the roof is longer and the ladder stops short making it more difficult getting on/off

I didn't like any I saw (appearance/material/ sturdiness) until I found some abroad, with an 'own-brand' name. Roca were good too but more expensive, and so similar I wonder if they were the same. I tried one and then got loads as they are so good. I came across a Wickes advert and they look the same to me, so worth a look., especially at £19, and 10% off if you can get a trade account. I also bought stainless steel screws, as I have known some supplied fixings to rust, which is not good behind the tiles. Then silicone inside the plugs, and behind the capping....good so far., and very sturdy. Croydex Grab Bar with Anti-Slip Grip - 300mm

@pocster Nah they all live down in the dungeon. The 48V on PoE is useful though as 5V sex toys tend to be a bit meh.

@SuperPav, Mesh selection is really a choice for your SE or whoever did your slab design and it is driven by that. Using the mesh as a placement framework for the UFH piping is really a secondary bonus and shouldn't impact on mesh selection. As to slab heating, there are broadly two strategies at the extreme: Dump heat into the slab at a steady rate so that the slab remains at a slight Δt above room temp. Here it will radiate ~ 7 ×Δt × A W into the interior. If this matches the net heat loss of the house, then your house will stay at the set temperature. Calculate your total kWh house losses for the coming day, and for a given input heating rate this give a total heating time. Just dump this into the slab in one or more "chunks", and accept that this will result in a slight ripple (say under 1°C) on your internal temperature. We have a passive house and have adopted the latter as this was easier to implement, in terms of kit required, ease of control, and simplicity leading to maintenance risks and reduction. The thermal dynamics here is a different Q entirely and one where I feel more qualified to answer on. I did my slab design back in 2015, and I was one of the first ones on this forum to go with a UFH solution which went against the prevailing wisdom of including a buffer tank. I decided to use a 3 kW Willis heater to heat the slab directly and use it as the thermal store for the heat. I needed to do some modelling of the slab for me to be comfortable with this solution and to ensure that it's thermal performance during the heating cycle was well within sensible limits, before finalising on this implementation. Luckily my professional background give me some experience of doing this type of modelling, but the main challenge was one of producing a model of the correct simplicity yet enough detail for the exercise to be meaningful. I have previously documented this in my blog posts and and specifically in my thread, Modelling the "Chunk" Heating of a Passive Slab written in late 2016. For the modelling, I didn't want to get into the complexities of CUDA compute engines and CFD libraries, so to keep the math and computation simple enough to be computable in Fortran on a single core (which is what I used back in the 1980s when I did this sort modelling for a living), I approximated the slab heated by one UFH loop as a (radially symmetric) concrete pipe some 0.120m in diameter and 100m long with a 15mm heating pipe running down its centre and with water circulating through it and heated by a 1 kW element before return. This allowed me to use a simple radial approximation for the Fourier heat equation and to solve over time for the (r, l, t) coordinates over time and the length of the pipe. (See this post for more details.) OK, it's a model and an approximate one at that because the actual heat flow through the pipe is not radially symmetric as the area around the heating pipe is insulated below, radiating to the air above, and adjacent to another. Even so, this did allow me to investigate the overall varying heating characteristics over time and both along and across the concrete. This was good enough to confirm that a "Willis direct into slab" approach would work fine for me. I subsequently instrumented the actual implementation with lots of DS18B20 digital thermometers which have been continuously logging now for ~5 years, and the slab behaves as predicted. This can be summarised by more simple and intuitive approximation. The slab surrounding a single pipe heating loop can be thought of a (folded) long box of concrete that is insulated below, radiating to the air above and with similar boxes on either side (since these are being heated by a return run at a similar flow temperature). The UFH pipe flow is dumps ~1kW (in my case) heat along the centre of this long box, and so the water cools as it flows along the pipe. The overall Δt is largely dictated by the water flow rate which in turn depends on the pump head, flow resistance, etc. In my case this was the biggest difference between the model and actual implementation, as I went with a slower flow rate than my modelled 1 m/s, in order to keep the circulation noise to a minimum. (The UFH is in a services cupboard off or G/F toilet and I don't like to hear the pump noise when I am taking a dump). So as the long "box" heats you get a standard radial heat flow curve where the circulating water in the middle is maybe 5°C hotter than the surface during heating period, with maybe a 2-3°C drop along the 100m run length. As the heat is dumped into the slab, it slowly but steadily heats up over the heating period, say by 5°C or so over a 7hr heating window. Certainly if you walk over the slab at the end of a heating cycle in bare feet (as we do), you can notice the 1-2 °C variation across the floor between the flow and return legs of the UFH runs and any gaps in UFH coverage. Pretty much as soon as the heating stops, the heat from the warm spots spreads so the feel becomes more uniform (as the heat only needs to flow ~50mm or so through the concrete). We heat our slab overnight, so by midnight the slab might be ½-1 °C below room temperature. In the morning after heating it might be 4°C above room temp, and it is now radiating ~28 W/m2 into the environment. This rate will fall during the day as the slab cools, leading (in our case) to a ~1°C ripple on the overall air temperature. The integrated heat dump from the slab must match the overall house losses, so the colder it is the more we need to heat the slab; and the warmer, the less. I hope this makes sense.

Sort of. It's actually up to the client device's wifi stack to notice there's a stronger AP available and make the change over to it. So it depends what devices you use as to how well it works. Unlikely GSM there's no formal handover protocol (although some versions of ubiquiti tried to fake it by hiding the weaker API from a moving client to force it to reconnect to the stronger one, in practice I think that caused more issues than is solved, especially with the well-known Cupertino fruit products. I find my Android phones and Mac laptops move around the house fine. One tip: make a separate dedicated SSID for "legacy" devices, inc all 2.4GHz only devices, and turn on all the "legacy backward support" performance degrades on that. Those devices tend to be super cheap stuff that never get FW updates, but also rarely move around (e.g. light bulbs, bathroom scales, etc). Then have your main SSID track the very latest stanards and the high data consumers (phones, laptops, chrome cast) can generally keep up to date enough to stay compatible with that what exactly do you mean by WAP? A non-ubiquiti / non-mesh product, or a standard ubiquiti AP but using wireless rather than wired backahual? If the former, depends entirely what product you mean. If the latter, yes it still behaves like a mesh, but not as good. I'd try as hard as you can to get all APs wired. Two less-ideal placed wired APs are probably better than one perfectly placed wireless one. What do you intend plugging into the switch? Do those things need 802.3af PoE? If not I wouldn't bother. A five-port switch is pretty tiny, you really don't have more wired ethernet devices than that? but if it's just for the APs get one that supports the APs now and be prepared to swap out (or add additional to it) in future. FWIW: I find the ubiquiti stuff is good, but bit of a power hog. I'd hoped getting one big switch (I have the 48 port PoE) would give some efficiency in scale vs lots of little, but I'm not convinced. I have about a dozen PoE devices on it (cloud key, APs, CCTV cameras, a couple olimex esp32-poe, and a PoE-USB dongle for my toothbrush)

That's the one - it's a combined heater and pump. Take a look at this out-of-unit photo: Remove the plug connected to the white-shrouded terminals towards the front-right and measure the resistance between the terminals with a multimeter (or measure directly on the element front-left. I'd expect it to read around 10-15 ohms if working. Chances are its fine and its the switching relay that's gone. Don't give up - you've done the hard bit!

Hi Meabh, For your project, speak to Fakro - they should be able to achieve what you're looking for.

We moved into our new build mid-December 2017 in time to host an extended family Christmas. We are now over 4 years into living in our new home. We have lots of accumulated experience and made a few small tweaks. However, we are delighted about how the house has turned out, and we love living here. There were no material cock-ups, or regrets on design decisions, so we have probably fared a lot better than most new purchasers or self-builders. Maybe a general experiences post should be on the to do list, but what I want to focus on here, and a couple of follow-ups, is a general topic that others on the forum have asked about over the years: that is how our central heating system works in practice, and how I control it. The system as currently implemented is still largely the same as when I first commissioned it, that is a now 5 year-old RPi-based custom control system directly controlling the CH and DHW subsystems. This is a pretty minimal headless system running Node-RED, MySQL and MQTT client for control. The three material changes that I've made since moving in are: I have followed my son and son-in-law in using Home Assistant (HA) for general Home Automation. My server (an RPi4 in an Argon One case) uses an attached Zigbee gateway, and I have a lot of Zigbee devices around the house: switches, relays, light sensors, etc. and I do the typical home automation stuff with these. There are loads of YouTube videos and web articles covering how to implement HA, so please refer to these if you want to learn more. My HA installation includes an MQTT service for use as a connection hub for these IoT devices. I also have another RPi4 acting as an Internet-connected portal / Wireguard gateway/ file-server for caching video snippets from my PoE security cameras. Note that none of my IoT devices directly access the internet, and the only in-bound access into my LAN is via Wireguard tunnelled VPN, and my HTTPS-only blog. All other ports are blocked at the router. Before moving in, we assumed a target internal temperature of 20°C. In practice, we have found this too cold for our (fairly inactive OAP) preference and so we have settled on a minimum control threshold of 22.3°C. As you will see below, because we largely heat during the E7 off-peak window the actual room temperatures have a ~1°C cycle over the day, so the average temperature is about 22.8°C. This hike of 2.8°C increases the number of net heating days since my design heating calcs and the increased delta against external temperatures in turn increases our forecast heating requirement by roughly 18% over our initial 2017 heating estimate. Because our UFH is only in the ground-floor slab, we found that our upper floors were typically 1-2°C cooler than the ground floor in the winter months. We also need more than the 7 off-peak hours of heating in the coldest months, so I have added an electric oil-filled radiator on our 1st-floor landing; HA controls this through a Zigbee smart plug that also reports back on actual energy drawn during the on-time. HA uses MQTT to pass the actual daily energy draw back to the CH control system. This radiator provides enough upper-floor top-up heat, and does so using cheap rate electricity. Note that all servers are directly connected to my Ethernet switch, and the CH/DHW system has all of its critical sensors and output controls directly attached. It can continue to control the CH and DHW subsystems even if the HA system or Internet is offline. There is also no direct user interface to the system, with all logging data is exported to MQTT, and key CH/CHW set-points and configuration are imported likewise. This integration with MQTT, enables user interfacing to be done through the HA Lovelace interface. If there is sufficient interest I can do follow-up posts on some more of the "Boffins Corner" type details on these implementations, or if this turns out to be more of a discussion then it might be better to move this stuff to its own BC topic. However, for the rest of this post I want to focus on the algorithmic and control aspects of the heating system. In terms of inputs and outputs to the control system, these are: There are ~20 DS18B20 1-Wire attached digital thermometers used to instrument pretty much all aspects of the CH / DHW systems. Few are actively used in the control algorithms but were rather added for initial commission, design verification and health checking. Some are also used to monitor and to trip alarms; for example, there is a temperature sensor on the out and return feed for each UFH pipe loop. These were used to do the initial zone balancing. However, the average of the return feeds is used as a good estimate of the aggregate slab temperature. One of the temperature sensors is also embedded in the central hall stud wall to act as a measure of average internal house temperature. There are two flow sensors on the cold feed to my 2 SunAmp DHW storage units to monitor DHW use and to help automate during-day DHW boost. There are 4 240V/20A SSRs used to switch the power to my (2-off) SunAmps, my (1-off) Willis heater, and my (1-off) circulation pump. These and the rest of my 240V household system were wired up and Part P certified by my electrician. These SSRs are switched by a 5V 50mA digital input, and so can be driven from an RPi or similar. (I used a I²C attached MCP23008A multi-port driver to do this, as this can drive 5V 50mA digital inputs, but its input I²C side is compatible with RPi GPIO specs.) There are many ways to "skin this cat", but whichever you choose for your control implementation your system will need to control some 240V/12A devices and take some input temperature sensors. My preference was to directly attach all such critical sensors and outputs. My heating algorithm calculates a daily heating budget in kWh (each midnight) as a simple linear function of the delta between average local forecast temperature for the next 24 hrs and the average hall temperature for the previous 24 hrs. This budget is then adjusted by the following to give an overall daily target which is converted in minutes of Willis on time. heat input from the heater mentioned above. a simple linear function of the delta average hall temperature and the target set-point (currently 22.3°C). This is a feedback term to compensate for systematic over or under heating. I initially calculated the 4 coefficients of the two functions using my design heating calcs and an estimate of the thermal capacity of the interior house fabric within the warm space. After collecting the first year's actual day, I then did a regression fit based on logged actual data to replace the design estimates by empirical values. This was about a 10% adjustment, but to be quite honest the initial values gave quite stable control because of the feedback compensation. The control system runs in one of three modes: No heating is required. Up to 420 mins of heating is required. The start time is set so that heating ends at 7 AM, and the slab is continuously heated during this window. More than 420 mins of heating is required. 420 mins of heating is carried out in the off-peak window. On each hour from 8 AM to 10 PM, if the hall temperature is below the set-point (22.3°C), then an N-minute heating boost is applied, where N is calculated by dividing the surplus heating into the 1-hour heating slots remaining. Here are two history outputs from HA showing some of the logged results. The LH graph is the slab temperature over the last 7 days. The general saw-tooth is identical from my 3-D heat flow modelling discussed in my earlier topic, Modelling the "Chunk" Heating of a Passive Slab. The 7 hr off-peak heating raises overall slab temperature by ~4-5 °C; well within UFH design tolerances, and no need for any HW buffer tank: the slab is the buffer. The RH graph is the hall temperature. Note the days where on-hour boosts were needed. (Also note that the CH system only updates the MQTT temperature data half-hourly, hence the stepped curves.) So the approach is fairly simple, and the system works robustly. ? And here is a screenshot of my HA summary interface, which gives Jan the ability to control everything she needs from her mobile phone or tablet.

For 2/3rd of that money, I will be lube up wires, pull and jerk will all my might.

@Adsibob If you want simple and robust, and you don’t want to sacrifice any of the installed CAT6 points, the plug n play ubiquity wall mounted AP’s will create local WAP connectivity AND provide you with a LAN connection with data throughput in one device. Some have one port, others are mini routers ( juiced up by you installing a PoE injector upstream ), so mega flexible in one small wall mounted device which gets its power remotely.

A self build constructed to a good standard needs very little heating. Eliminate the need for space heating and you just need hot water. We run our hot water from exhaust air source heat pump, cheap capital cost and cheap running costs. Our total electricity consumption is 10-11 units a day for a family of four. I use a centrally placed wood burning stove to provide a boost in the evening. This winter, I'm burning sticks I collected in the summer, my space heating are £0. A unique set-up for us and probably not for you, but my suggestion is to build your system around the availability of local resources, your skills/experience and budget.

All that solar stuff looks the mutts. However, those wall cappings.........😂 ......Only kidding buddy. Enjoy your beer. Those cappings are way better than your solvent pipe stickings..