AliG

I think it is partly important to design a house that will be cheaper to build. As mentioned on the windows, we are about to star a 195 sq metre place for my parents. There are 75 sq metres of windows, so straight off we are going to be almost £200 a square metre for 3g alu clad windows. If I had thought about it, I might have asked the architect to do less glass.

I have some even rough Porcelanosa tiles and they are a real pain to clean as they rip apart most cloths and you need to use a scrubbing brush.These don't look quite as bad. The real thing to watch is that all the grout is cleaned off them when they are installed as it is a nightmare to get it off these rough surfaces one it has fully hardened, I had to use a wirel brush on the rough ones, nothing else would shift it.

It is not, looking at a few of them, I think they have maybe set them back a bit so that the strike plate is not too near the edge of the frame.

I have Ubiquiti hardwired access points. I am not the only person I think. Wireless boosters use some of your bandwidth and slow down your internet, so it is better to have access points wired back to the man router. The most efficient solution is to run ethernet cables to a few places and then have wireless access points there. Ultimately we put in ethernet to everywhere there is a TV as then you can connect up a Sky Q box or the TV itself and then in most rooms a second ethernet cable for an access point. Other than TVs most devices that accesss the internet do not get plugged into it anymore. Only two or three of them actually connect to a backplate, the access points are mounted on the ceiling as that gives the best signal, so the cable just comes through the plasterboard into the back of them. In a house with concrete upper floors and block walls we needed a lot more access points than you would need in a timber frame house. Two or three should do most people.

Is there another way to go other than diywardrobes.co.uk and similar. I used diyhomefit and bought units which we then made up and installed, but they cost hundreds per unit. In a lot of developer showhomes I see something like this - Do they just buy furniture board and cut to size then build it on site, especially if you didn't need the drawers?

2-3C is decent drop overnight. In that case it might be better to set the thermostat back one degree during the night which will have the heating coming off and on all night but not running so hard to get back up to temperature in the morning. Ultimately I think all you can do is try different permutations and see which is most efficient in real use. this does require a lot of trial and error. One thing I found was that in rooms with wooden floors 40C wasn't getting the floor warm enough to heat up the room. The floor might only come up to 22C and then the heating might be on for four or five hours to warm the room up. I turned up the flow to 44ish so that the floor temp was 24-25C and the room heated up in an hour or two. Now it might be in this situation you could run a lower floor temperature constantly versus a higher floor temperature for an hour or two. My feeling is that there is a point where the heating ends up being on considerably longer at only a slightly lower temperature so it may not be more efficient.

I have experimented with this and continue to do so. On the one hand, previously I set my heating back 2-3C during the night and it was running for a long time in the mornings to get back to temperature. Having changed the night time set back to 1C, which basically means the heating comes on occasionally during the night if it is very cold it seemed to get more efficient. So running a more constant temperature seems more efficient. But during the day I was running lower flow temperatures for longer periods. Rooms heated up at quite different rates and the boiler would be running off and on for short periods for 3 or 4 hours. I have raised the flow temperatures so that the house heats up faster in the morning, trying to run al the zones at once. This reduces short cycling of the boiler. As the floor gets warmer, the house then stays a nice temperature most of the day and the heating only comes back on if it is quite cold. This seems to save on gas usage. So some ways running a constant temperature helps and some weight running a higher flow temperature and shorter runs on the boiler helps. I suspect that a gas boiler that is oversized for heating requirements may work better with a high flow temperature for short periods than an ASHP, but that is a guess. Maybe as an experiment I should try not setting the temperature back during the night and just leaving the heating on 24 hours a day, that is the one thing I have not tried yet. The trouble is there are a lot of settings to change to try these things and then you need similar weather to compare heating usage. I have been monitoring gas usage the last few days after making a few changes. I will try turning up the nighttime temp tonight and see what happens.

In option C it would be difficult to have the toilet there as there is nowhere to put the stack downstairs. You would have to put a shower in that space and the WC where the bath is. I would go option 1 with a small change - As the master bedroom has a large dressing room it doesn't need a wardrobe as well. I would move the door to bedroom 3 up a bit to make the landing larger and then use some of the wardrobe space to have a cupboard off the landing. I would also put a skylight over the landing.

I was worried about that, but you use so little heat in a small flat it wasn't much of an issue. I think the electricity bill went up about £20 a month when the boiler was changed, but it was a few years now. I was only in the flat 4 nights a week. When the bill is low saving one standing charge makes a decent difference. My electricity fix is almost up, the best deal I found today was 2.19 for gas and 14.29 for electricity, a 6.5x ratio is the worst I have seen. You will get a bit back in efficiency in the electric boiler. It won't be easy to move people off gas boilers with those figures.

I'd replace it with an electric combo then. My landlord did it in my flat in London. Went pretty smoothly. Electric combi had a small tank inside it, I found that it was fine for a shower, but if you wanted to run a bath the hot water would start to run out just before the bath was full. Fine for a 1 or 2 bed flat

@ProDaveI think he means that it is a combi gas boiler and he wants to replace it with a small hot water tank and different kind of boiler. I guess I would ask the question of why? It is going to be quite involved to replace the combi with a tank and boiler and expensive. You are going to need a minimum tank size of 100l which is not going to fit in a kitchen cupboard easily. It might fit into a larger cupboard, but that is a lot of space in a small flat. If the issue is not wanting gas in the flat I would replace it with an electric combi. That will be a bit more expensive to run.

The uninsulated DHW pipework will be acting like mini radiators around the house. I think under Scottish building regs hot water pipework all has to be insulated, but I may be wrong. It is all insulated in my place and I can still use an IR camera to see where all the pipework in the ceilings is. Luckily it will be relatively easy to fit, other than for the stuff behind plasterboard. I think what we are trying to figure out is does the system pump hot water around the bathroom loop when the other loops are off or is it only when the other loops call for heat that the water is hot? In the pic you posted earlier the bathroom loop had flow, it would seem unlikely that it has flow when the ASHP is not switched on, but maybe it does. The temperature gauge will tell you if the flow is hot and there is probably a light somewhere that shows if heat is called for from the boiler. The other easy tell of course is the bathroom would be way warmer than everywhere else.

Weird that it is so neatly fitted yet no insulation. There will be a lot of heat coming off the cupboard which in itself will be boosting temperatures in the house. Not sure what the reason for having a loop without an actuator is. Is the system calling for heat to this loop even though all the thermostats are off?

If your wife is anything like mine this information will be irrelevant

I had that, one room got to 27C before we figured out what the problem was.