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No they are not. They have a motor running inside them 24/7 driving a gearbox and I think a chain to move the big rotating paddle wheel. They are anything but silent. An air blower type treatment plant just has a standard air blower pump running. There can be a bit of hum in some designs because the manufacturers don't seem to bother with sound proofing and just sit them on a flat surface that can act like a drum. But with a bit of care it is easy to make them very quiet, and some designs let you mount the air blower away from the plant, some have build a brick enclosure for the blower for instance to make it totally silent.

Not at all. I plumb all these with 2-port and don’t really like 3-ports tbh. The 3-port when used is a diverter valve, not a mid-position a-la a standard 3-port in a regular heating install where overrun is required after a ‘burn’. No reason whatsoever why any competent plumber (or very good electrician) couldn’t sort this in a day (including investigative time). Is this problem new or do you not know if it has done this from day 1? My guess is it is an error from the installer which you’ve not been aware of, ergo not a fault, more an mis-configuration.

You can get a water cylinder with a heat pump built in, that may be the cheapest to run, though the most expensive to buy (the Ecocent is just a branded Chinesium model at 4 times the price). While an E7 DHW system is cheap to run and install, it does mean that your daytime electricity is expensive, that will negate much of the savings if the A2A heating. Instantaneous water heaters are good, but need to be high power i.e. 10 kW or more. This may mean updating the consumer unit. You may need a water softener as well. So really just a case of booting up Excel and working it all out.

If there is unsupported masonry - pins (cut reinforcement bars) or a new throating piece should be installed. I see it all the time. Don’t forget to install a flexible flue liner, a raised hearth and a CO alarm/detector.

Not heard that before? What kind of pins? If this is to support the grey blocks either side I would have put angle iron into the back wall and over your new lintel, might be difficult now tho.

Inside there'll be a vent covering a fan. Possibly held on by cross head screws. The fan can get iced up. Unplug, take the fan cover off and see if iced up.

there's likely a motorised flap to open the path to the fridge; defrost and retry, but I'd be asking why it hasn't auto-defrosted itself. Have the doors been left open at any time?

Google translate says 3 " MICRO-ONDULEURS THALEOS TRANSFORMER 2 "are micro inverters. If the app shows the panels generating then youre up and running. Anything you generate will be used to power your house and if there's anything you don't use it'll likely go the grid to power your neighbours

Though I designed my house without an architect, and saved quite a bit of money, I do feel if I’d had input from a good architect my house would have been better and I may have avoided some mistakes. I think their knowledge of light, space, materials etc can be very valuable. I think you’re right that a good architect is more likely to push design boundaries and if you want to build something a bit more special a good architect would do that. Key is getting the right architect.

It only rattled in very high winds (it was very wide at 16ft) it did keep the weather out. Yes they require 300mm head height for the roller, if you don’t have this 300mm consider a sectional door that slides above the garage. Yes I would buy from them again, a part failed and a new part was sent straight away.

At worst this would just require a £20 relay and base to allow the live feed to ‘flip-flop” between the 2 demands. An hour or 2 for an electrician if he knows what needs to be done. Very likely this can be done by just wiring it correctly to the OEM control board tbf.

Unusual choice. While Air to air is good, to fit that without thinking about how water is strange. An ASHP with hot water tank would have been a better choice. So probably best choice now is a direct hot water cylinder heated bu immersion heater, using off peak tarrifs if available.

It's a great offer @ETC - well done. We've pretty much decided to bite the bullet and use one of two local architects, pay their costs which will be high. Reasons are: we want some design input, we feel that we aren't necessarily going to come up with the best solution for our plot ourselves. It's a risk though: we could spend £1000s and not be happy with the resulting concept(s) our chosen architects come up with. One thing I am clear in my own mind about though: if we tried to design it ourselves we would end up with something a bit 'ordinary' at best and deeply flawed at worst.

Watch out for CIL liability if you start before planning is obtained. Edit: Existing property there so no CIL - too early on a Sunday morning, need to wake up before I post anything!

When we bought our current house in 91 it had no coving in any room - before we moved in we had the whole house done. When we added the extension in 2009 we didn’t add coving but pretty soon did because the rooms even when finished didn’t look it. We like it - we liked it in the 90’s and we still like it now. However as stated it’s relatively easy to add but not as easy to remove all traces if you don’t like it so if it’s being built to sell I wouldn’t add it (and save the cost)

Sounds about right to me, scales nicely with the install portion of our supply and fit cost.

The key here is to talk to the surveyor.. tell them what you want to do.. take their advice and offer to pay a bit more and ask them if it is worth paying a bit extra for a bit more service! For a bit of context.. when you get round to tendering.. one experienced operative on site can cost 1.0k plus a week... an extra £300.00 to the topo expense can really save you a lot of bucks. I've been on BH for a bit and totally appreciate how hard it is to nail down build costs. Everyone want to break things down into work packages.. like you are shopping in Asda. Self build does not work this way any longer. The people aspect is key to driving down cost these days. That takes time and effort... like serious effort and it is a massive learning curve to even get a grasp of the basics. BC, planning delays are costing us a fortune, I factor in now a dealing with "twat time" in terms of planning and BC interaction. TF companies etc are having to watch their costs.. and are delivering less on the design input.. eventually they will start to realise that service is the key. I see this as an SE. I totally get the excitement.. wife and I were away for my 60th this weekend.. passed by a distressed plot and she said.. let's buy that.. I'm like.. ok but let's make sure we don't loose our shirt!. Now what happens is I do an absolute pile of research and dilligence that I do as a day job anyway. But folk on BH often don't want to pay for that or expend the time learning about this.. and then find themselves in trouble. Years ago when I first started unless you were a complete idiot it was hard to lose money on self builds / flats / renovations / developments as property prices were increasing rapidly. There is much less room for error now and if you want to make a go of it you need to put in more work. It's shite but the rewards are worth the effort. Getting prices from kit companies, ground workers, sparks etc is no longer good enough as they are getting pelted by market forces.. they are putting too many caveats on what they are doing and it does not work as well now for the novice self builder. I'm still thinking about how I can explain in a better way of executing the mechanics of this in the current market. Post for another time.

That comment, while quite probably true, is scary. Do we really conclude that your local plumber can't cope with diagnosing a fault in a couple of standard valves? This is very, very simple plumbing, not rocket science and nothing really to do with heat pumps (same principles apply to any boiler with variable flow temperature/weather compensation); plumbers use these valves all the time. Are they really incapable of making the leap? Sadly possibly we do reach that conclusion.

Not agreeing with much of the above. Since September I've generated close too 2,500kWh, nothing much exported. I'm in NE Scotland, so plenty more solar would be generated further south. My summer bills will consist of mostly standing changes. Electric suppliers cap what can be exported to what the local system can handle. Using the correct crimping tool to make up connections is a must, other than that is all very straightforward.

No, I think you'll have to sort out the detail yourself. If I remember rightly, for that kind of detail, an Oakwrights frame I saw had the glazing unites mounted on the outside of the frame and then some full width oak 'trim' pieces mounted over that. Unless you looked very carefully, the effect was as though the glass was mounted in the 'frame'. I think the trim was held by counter-bored A4 SS screws but with little oak dowels over, so the whole thing looked through-dowelled. Having said that, I'm not sure why you couldn't mount the glazing units within the frame, allowing plenty of room for the frame to move, and then mount trim pieces inside and out over the units. Maybe you can mount one big triangle somehow in the apex to avoid dealing with the curved braces. Actually it's not clear which parts you're planning to glaze and which parts not.

I’ve just been having this conversation today The sites I work on don’t even bother with hardcore Quick weed kill Done As I stated in my previous post Quite a while back I thought it was way over the top to put 6 cube of concrete under the BB and a drain But once it was on my foundation design I had little choice Probably the most miserable day of the job 6 cube in pouring rain Now After done the freak storms we’ve had I’m not so sure Our tank is only 10 metres away from the house We could easily end up with the contents under the house our next one is on clay also I will at least stone up under the BB Or May concrete and drain like the last one It was a days work and about 500 quid so not a lot in the grand scheme of things