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This thread is about trust, not plumbing. @Dee, Forgive the change of focus to my experience: I write this to illustrate the point about trust. I paid my way round my first degree by cleaning the windows of the Great And the Good in Oxfordshire. Often, I (stupidly) gave a year's credit impressed as I was -then- by customers' status - many of them landed gentry. Think of the largest estate in Oxfordshire - it's an offical palace linked to Wellington. Well I cleaned there, and the Lord Lieutenants, a very famous bankers house(s), and a good few Peers of the Realm, not far from where Clarkson lives now. I had been working there for two or three years. At the end of one year, I asked for payment. The non-resident owner (he lived in Charlbury nearby) asked me how much it was. I've forgotten how much now..... He grunted, took a large roll of £20 notes out of his back pocket and peeled off £100 LESS than he owed me. "I'll owe you the rest" he said looking at the floor. I looked at him and his wife who was standing nearby. Her face flushed red, and glared at him . "Your Grace," I replied, "Gestures like that are designed to remind me that I'm down here, and that you are up there - and we knew that before I stated cleaning your windows: could you pay me the rest please" He hadn't heard because he had disappeared down the corridor. His wife silently took out her checkbook and wrote a cheque for double the difference. Next job, that day was the The Lord Lieutenants place - as it happens right at the end of the estate private drive. I was still angry when I got there. He sensed it and asked what was wrong. I told the story. "Hmm , he grinned " he just wants to make sure you come back: had he paid you in full, you might never go back. And he knows half the Board at St Cross (my college)- if you put one foot out of line, you'll never work in Oxfordshire again - you're not just cleaning windows - youre selling TRUST AND clean windows. Now, pop down to the wine cellar and choose yoruself a good claret" Top bloke. Sir Ashley Ponsonby that was. When I got my degree, he put on a silver service tea for my whole family at his private residence. Taught me an unforgettable lesson. Unless you have come to know and trust a tradesman, initially retain an appropriate amount. For the first time someone works for us, I usually ask for the trades day rate, and pay promptly for the labour. And pay for the materials after 30 days if all is well.

You need ~15mm cover over the pipes, so about 16mm for a pipe, a couple mm sticking up here or there meaning you need a min depth of 35mm. They say min 50mm on basis you'll have high spots and it'll be thinner. There's not much you can do about it anyway. Move on to the next job.

Measure twice or 3 times, cut once! if your walls etc are not square then you are looking at scribing, which is effectively using a block or stick of some kind run down the uneven surface to trace (scribe) a corresponding line onto the piece you need to cut .. take a look on YouTube etc. because it’s easier to see than describe.

I am sorry that you are involved in such a tiresome, miserable and expensive issue. Please try not to let it take over your life and I hope it is resolved soon.

Yes it was - a PITA to get at as Terry says, which is why I haven't looked at it until now.

1/2 Inch Elbow Backplate Pipe Fitting Back Plate Wall Mount (plumbing4home.com) Bit pricey, Think I paid that for the warmer shower wall plate. or G 1/2'' Brass Wall mounted 2-way Air Junction 16 Bar | Tameson.co.uk

Basically what ever they say as a throw away statement about pipe sizes, will only be true for a certain set of circumstances. You/designer still have design the piping system to manage total pressure drop, so you do not exceed the allowable system back pressure, and to ensure the circulation pump can meet the minimum flow rate requirement. Talking about exact pipe sizes, without a full design, is rubbish in, rubbish out and pretty meaningless.

A quick update :- The Y-Strainer was completely full of crud. It looks like stone flakes of some kind. At a guess I would suspect this was kicked up by the local water company doing repairs a few months ago but may have been building over the last 6 years. I'll closely monitor the thermal trip status for the next week or so before declaring success.

Scribe a strip of ply or hardboard to get the profile and use this to get your first panel

@Pocster … automated drones with guns 🤫

It’s funny all BM’s recommend hardi board . I went with this ditra type board . Light weight and easy to cut . Of course you’ll need noggins for bathroom fixings . Tile adhesive sticks to this board like sh*t . In the shower used their ‘tape’ , glue and paint on joints . p.s obviously not my shower cubicle ! The boards dead useful for other things

Mostly the heaters are less than 400W. You need a switched spur which you can normally take from a ring main. Locate the spur outside the bathroom feeding a flex outlet in the bathroom. Ask your sparky to confirm it is OK before you do the floor / plasterboard.

Called the structural engineer for confirmation and as per his calculations, it should only have 2 flitch beams. Thanks everyone. 😊

Without knowing the rating of the heater and the condition of the existing circuit, it’s impossible to say unfortunately

@TerryE Many thanks for the detailed response(s). My water here is extremely soft, with no furring in the kettle after 5 years of use. My assumption is that whatever is causing the thermal hat to trigger it is unlikely to be due to furring. Unfortunately I have intimate knowledge of the Sunamp PV internals. Over the last two years I have replaced :- - The thermal cutout (2021) - The control board (2021) - The immersion heater (2023) Like you this is after approximately 6 years use. The thermo trip fired again last night so I now have a completely cold unit after this mornings showers. @Nickfromwales mentioned the Y-Strainer which I have not yet looked at. That's probably my next thing to try.

The principal difference between the Chofu and Grant install. Chufu have a fully functional controller with built in thermostat and scheduler. Grant basically by-pass the design intent of this. Grant have modified the install to match a gas boiler, with two port valves, which have to be timed separately so DHW water cannot get into the heating system. There are several versions if the Chofu manual kicking about. This one has quite a few different schemes Chofu-Operating-Installation-Manual-R32.pdf

Surely the person who did the drawings should sort this out ? Sounds like a typo to me but needs confirming.

We had the land, and had started the build and had a large mortgage on our previous house, and used Loughborough Building Society for their self build mortgage. Having the land is a distinct advantage, you won't need a deposit. You will need an estimate to complete [we just did a spread sheet, based on estimators online with firmer estimates. We suggested our stage payments, and they did not mind that the first stage payment was the completion [passed off] foundations which we had already done. We dealt with Loughborough direct without going through an agent, Their rates at the moment look about 0.7% higher than ecology.

Yes it sounds like 3 flitch beams, each with 2 timbers and a steel plate. How many are shown on the layout plan?

One at the back and then a steel strap along the front, fixed to the unit sides, not the worktop. But the adhesive they use seems rock hard.

tbh you should be able to get a decent price for it on facebook marketplace. i just sold a few sheets of 100mm celotex for £2 less than what i paid for them new.

Given you can’t do anything about it now I’d forget about it. Certainly don’t go drilling holes in your screed. As long as you have enough cover over the UFH which is 16mm if its stapled to the insulation. I had the same mild panic with my screed depth albeit we were nominally at 55mm. What kind of screed is it?

It daft that cylinders don't have a series of temperature probes up the cylinder (say 4 equally spaced), so you can see how much hot water you have.

All we did was leave the sink in the box in the kitchen and the guys from the worktop company did all the figuring out when they came out to template. Can't fault them. Ours was then glued on by the worktop fitters. I didn't trust it so fitted a a timber batten across the back. Not fallen off yet.

I have the same heat pump. I see this sort of loss when it starts to do a tank heating cycle. The 28mm pipework holds a lot of water that has after some time dropped to a low temperature. When a tank heating cycle is called for, the first thing that happens is the tank temp drops a lot as this cold water circulates through the tank, stealing its heat. Is it this? It looks like a few minutes later the flow temps jump and the tank is reheating.

I think I did mine more or less 50/50 with the tap positioned central but so both windows would open. The sink was fixed with G Clips. https://www.gclip.co.uk/Undermount_sink_installation.html

Yeah, I think you’re right - can you call her to check?

It’s better to be under than over with screed, last thing you want is to be grinding off. What finish are you putting down? Have you checked for humps, bumps and high spots?

Drill a hole down to insulation?

And thats about standards of personal behaviour. People who behave like that (couldn't-give-a-tossitis) are developmentally stuck in something like teenage. Think for a moment if that were not to be the case : then there would be no need for published Build Standards, no need for CPD, no need for statements of Best Practice because individuals would think it normal for colleagues to review one anothers practice and learn from the outcomes of progress reviews. Personal and professional development would become normal. Think of that. Normal. For the life of me I can't see how best to work with people like that: I'm not in a therapeutic relationship with people who work for me so it's inappropriate for me to tell grown men to answer-the-damn-phone, behave - clean up - know-how-to-do-their-job-properly. How does anyone build a bridge with people like that? And what's worse is we are desperate to get our damn houses finished. And politicians bang on about Life Long Learning. Doing it the way I've 'solved' it - DIYMAX - is not for everyone.

Ask the electrician? Generally 2.5mm2 twin and earth back to the consumer unit would be a good bet. Electrician might not want to sign off though if he hasn’t seen the run and that it’s installed correctly. Take photos and make sure the run complies with things like safe zones.

@Cooeyswell, do you use something like a Harvey water softener on your potable water supply? If you don't on the HW, then pipe furring can become a real issue over time and cause TMVs etc. to fail as the fur builds up in such devices and pipework. This is why the SunAmp people say that you should using a water softener for all potable water if you have anything but a very soft supply. This is especially the case as heat cycling causes calcium salts to precipitate out on the surfaces inside the SA. Unlike the classic CH pipework which runs that water in a closed cycle and you add scaling inhibitors to it, the SAs use open-cycle potable water so scaling will become a problem. (Think of what happens inside a kettle, and hint: if you need to descale your kettle even once a year then your water is too hard and the Sunamp units will fail over time.) If your circulating pump is getting noisy, then you do have a furring problem. If you are in this situation, then the unit might need a complete strip down and descale. However, note my above high-jinks: the SA unit needs to be cold before you attempt any panel removal for disassembly otherwise the cells will sag and bulge, and you won't be able to reassemble. I suspect that this a 'once every X years' sort of service, where X depends on residual hardness. (In my case I am at 6 years, and X is probably 5. 🤣) This is all a pretty straightforward job, if you have any plumbing experience as the pipework has demountable joints at all the necessary places. Just make sure you know how to demount standard compression, Pegler Tectile and John Guest Push-fit fittings before you begin. (Watch a Youtube tutorial.) Also take a load of photos during each stage of disassembly, so you can reverse it to reassemble. One of my big bugbears with the SunAmp factory assembly is that they didn't use PTFE tape on the standard compression couplings so many of mine have wept over time until being sealed by the weap furring; these will all need clean-up before reassembly. I guess that this is a job that I am going to have to schedule for next spring, if I want my SunAmps to last another 6 years. In my case I have 2 units, so I can do one at a time without loss of hot water. My concern here is that the thermometer on the heat outflow is an analog one that is clipped to the output pipe: any scaling in this pipe section will cause this thermo to start to read low so the SA control algorithm will tend to run hotter over time and eventually the independent safety cut-out (which trips at ~80°C) will start to trip. I have now lagged around these thermometers, so hopefully they don't read low now. In my case, I already have a load of DS18B20 digital thermometers wired into my CH system (which runs using Node-RED on an RPi). So it is relatively straightforward to tape another DS18B20 to the pipe coming out of the heater (next to the analog thermometer that the CS control uses and to gate the SunAmp demand on that, so that the SunAmp never overheats. @Nickfromwales, you are probably the most experienced member with installing and using SA units. Have you any comments or advice?

I lined my shower wall niche with water-resistant HardieBacker tile-backer board which is impervious to water damage and won't rot, swell, or warp even if the tile grout did ever leak. Sealed all the internal corners before tiling with CT1 sealant or similar. As already said slope the tiles a little to avoid water pooling at the back but not so much your shampoo bottles slide off....

It has a 13mm flange that's been recessed to sit flush with the surface of the plasterboard. The tanking system will then run over the flange to make it watertight. In a solid wall you could chip back the plaster to recess it similarly, or you could form the tanking into the recess as long as it's properly lapped all round. In the past I've just created a recess, then rendered / boarded and tiled it. This time it will be sitting below a rain shower getting very wet, so needs to be full water proof and I chose pre-formed for ease. BTW, slope the tiles a little to avoid water pooling at the back.

It's breaking the rule of having increasingly vapour open materials towards the cold surface, hence the condensation at the PIR. Unlike your section, SIP on the roof will have a lot more timber structure and therefore "cold bridging" within the SIP, and more condensation than shown, Why not just go with 300mm or 350mm I-Joists, full of cellulose and a fibreboard external layer. Without any cold bridging, it would perform better in practice.

I’d recommend also speaking to mayflower, they provide lots of advice as well looking at different options and lenders. My only connection was they helped us get a self build mortgage and provided a lot of advice

+1 for ecology.

ag tie properties are acceptable to Ecology. https://www.ecology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Lending-Criteria-Guidelines-Feb-2023.pdf

Have a conversation with Ecology BS. As you own the land already, especially with PP, it has a value so you may find you don’t need a cash deposit. Thats what we did. as such the cash they’re releasing to you is always an amount that’s less than the value of your project at that stage. id imaging a plot in Sussex with PP has a significant value to it. That would be your deposit. search Ecology on this forum you’ll find many have had excellent experiences with them, including me. we’d already bought the plot and demolished the existing house, then applied for the SB mortgage. We used cash reserves to go a few stages before drawing down money as and when required.

This one - this is as far as it's got, but no problems so far.

So a few changes. Mixer valve has been removed. Set heating windows at 6am to 7am (cheap rate), and 12pm to 1 pm (make most of any solar). Heat to 47 degs, and the cylinder heating time is around 45 mins. Had to tweek the shower mixer, flow temp settings down (inside the mixer), but all good. Was too hot for the wife Will monitor usage and possibly reduce set point slightly, over a few days

Comparison photo, showing 210L slimline UVC next to a combi boiler with an Alpha Flowsmart 50L preheat cylinder below it. So if you have a wall hung combi boiler, you can install a decent sized heat pump cylinder in the same space. The white box to the right is the MVHR unit.

Quick run down on what's on the cylinder. A - flow and return from ASHP B - secondary turns pump, has integrated timer C - wiring centre, timer timer, thermostat, 3 port valve and secondary returns pump. D - timer for DHW heating E - check valve on hot water outlet. Expansion vessel is the white bit above cylinder. Tundish is visible to right of C and D. Between D and E is the water outlet mixing valve. G - is a 3 port valve F - air release valve So basically water from ASHP comes in via the top pipe at A, if the 3 way valve allows it passes water upwards to the top of the coil, water passes through the coil and out the bottom of the cylinder towards the 3 way valve out the lower pipe at A. Any air in the coil can be bled out of the air release valve at F. As this is a retrofit, the cold system is not directly balanced to 3 bar, so a check valve is installed on the cylinder outlet at point E. This prevents any reverse flow through the system. I decided to put all the electrical bits on the cylinder so I have just one power cable and the immersion cable coming off the cylinder. Call for heat from the heat pump is via a radio signal.

Shower panels I have put in used mastic to stick them to the wooden frame and block. need to make sure you have enough to stick to. Should be instructions on the panel manufacturer

A Sunamp Thermino is working well for me: https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-solar-DHW-for-16WW-UniQ-and-PV-diversion.html Rgds Damon

Welcome, lots to unpack there. Firstly passive standard (not certified) will meet many of your design objectives around low energy and improved air quality as they are inherently highly insulated and airtight so you need to use a MVHR system to deliver filtered fresh air to your home and remove stale air from the interior. You can spec different degrees of filtration for your MVHR system also. Important to say that you don't need to go all out on achieving passive standards but they are not that hard to achieve in practice. A key part of the passive standard will be delivered by the building frame/structure and the rest by doors & windows. You spec a heating system that is matched to your requirements (usually a low temp UFH solution) and then figure out to run that and deliver your domestic hot water - either ASHP or gas boiler. Depends on your existing service connections, budget, preferences but ASHP with in slab UFH gives the option of cooling in summer also. What's important is to understand how the house will behave year round - while we are all obsessed with heating, attention is needed to minimise overheating also - which can occur from spring to autumn. The modelling (PHPP) can be done at the design stage and can influence window placement & sizing, external shading etc. Note this is different from SAP calculation which are required by law but is a bit of a blunter tool. As to one build method over another, again that's a tradeoff in budget. ICF will give you a solid, strong insulated and airtight shell but the roof will need separate consideration as will your internal floor construction (joists etc). SIPs can be used for roofing an all SIP build (or an ICF) and various contractors will erect the shell and provide different degrees of internal fit out (floors, structural walls etc). There is a third way, timber frame, where the bare panels are made off site but once installed, airtightness and insulation are done on site. Some firms (MBC) also offer an insulated passive slab as part of the package. A ICF contractor may be able to do a slab also but SIPs will expect the foundations to be in situ. Once you have your fabric/ shell, the rest is a standard house - follow on trades need to respect the airtightness measures (no random drilling of holes in external walls etc.) but that's about it. So if you decide to use a single main contractor (usually the most expensive option) or arrange follow on trades yourself is up to you. You may find that many general builders are clueless about passive standards or that you pay a significant premium to get one who is experienced but really, once the shell is up and the windows etc are in, the rest is a standard build. For that reason, many of us here contracted to get the passive frame erected directly and then managed the trades (not as hard as it sounds) to complete as that was the best way to control cost and maintain the focus on passive detail. Some may use a project manager to get the same outcome but you will pay them a % of the build cost (10-15). Your frame contractor will offer a standard warranty but that will not cover anything that comes after. Usually these are incorporated into the general building warranty whether that comes from a 3rd party insurance company or your builder or architect. And yes, timber has spiked in price but is coming back down, however SIPs and Timber Frames are always more expensive as you're paying for off site manufacture and a fast erection process that can save you money in the longer run. Hope this all helps! Keep asking the questions.

I was blue and lonely I couldn't sleep a wink And I could only get unconscious If I'd had too much to drink There was somehow, something wrong somewhere And each day seemed grey and dead The seeds of desperation were growing in me head I needed inspiration, a brand new start in life Somewhere to place affection, but I didn't want a wife And then by lucky chance, I saw in a special magazine An ad that was unusual, the like I'd never seen Experience something different with our new imported toy She's loving, warm, inflatable, and a guarantee of joy She came all wrapped in cardboard All pink and shriveled down A breath of air was all she needed To make her lose that frown I took her to the bedroom And pumped her with some life And later, in a moment, that girl became my wife And so I sit her in the corner, and sometimes stroke her hair And when I'm feeling naughty, I blow her up with air She's cuddly and she's bouncy, she's like a rubber ball I bounce her in the kitchen, and I bounce her in the hall And now my life is different since Sally came my way I wake up in the morning and have her on a tray She's everything they said she was and I wear a permanent grin And I only have to worry in case my girl wears thin

The trouble is that houses are not "goods" that are required by the Consumer Act to be "fit for purpose" which is why we've ended up with statutory inspectors, warranties and all the rest of it yet still have houses sold with that level of appalling workmanship.

While true, with a lot of builders they tend to be stuck in the past so apply what they learnt 30 years ago like it applies to new houses. (Hooses need tae breathe Kelvin - sick of being told this so I just smile and nod when it comes up) Fundamentally my biggest gripe is the lack of care and respect they demonstrate given they are working on someone’s home.