AliG

Sadly @Hogboon PV panels generate virtually zero electricity, even during the day in the winter. The sun is considerably lower in the sky, the days are shorter and there tends to be more cloud. Thus trying to supply an ASHP from PV is difficult. You will get a small percentage of your usage. It seems like the main issue is that your heating is not on for a long enough period of time. Think of it this way. Say your house needs 100kWh of heat on a cold day. Basically it is losing 4kWh per hour. Thus if you have the heating on all the time it will use 100kWh over the day to stay at 20C. If you have it on for half the day it will still need to put 100kWh into the building to get back to 20C and stay there, but you will be at the limits of what the ASHP can provide over that length of time. So you would not save much on heating, but your house would be much more uncomfortable. There is a chance that your ASHP can't provide enough heat input for when the temperature is very cold, but it sounds more like you are losing so much heat overnight that the ASHP can't put it back into the house in the morning. Because you are not actually getting the house up to temperature then you are not getting as much heat as you would like into the house so it probably will increase your bills to run the heating all the time. This though is due to it being warmer, not due to running it too much. No one has mentioned that a 9kW ASHP is usually the heat output in optimum conditions. Often if you are running the water hotter than ideal or if the outside temperature drops below a certain lever they cannot put out their maximum output. This might be exacerbating things in the current cold snap. I would guess that you need around 100-120kWh a day when the temperature is at zero outside. If you ran the heating all day it could provide this, but trying to do it over 14 hours is pushing it. I would set your thermostat at 20C and leave the heating running and see how much electricity you use in a day. If the house is too warm during the night for you at that temp then I would cut it to 19C during the night, maybe 18C. The problem with cutting the night time temperature 2C below the daytime temperature would be that the heating would stay off most of the night and then struggle to get back to temperature.

The basic design seems very sound. During lockdown my wife and I have discussed if we should have had a basement for a large gym. The main issue seems to be a severe lack of storage. Only one bedroom has a wardrobe and there are no cupboards anywhere (maybe under the back of the stair is a cupboard and not shown?). Depending on whether you will mainly use the front or back door I would want a large cupboard there for coats shoes etc. I am guessing it might be the back door in which case I would steal some space from the utility room. My in laws have a house with no doors on the main floor. When there are a few kids in the house it is horribly loud, I would consider being able to separate more of the ground floor. I too am not a fan of the WC at the back, although it is not so bad off a hall and not the utility room as I sometimes see. If I was making bigger changes I would consider can the utility room go where the rear hall and WC are. Then the snug where the utility room and part of the current snug are and then have an area of storage and WC next to the front door. This would require a beam in the wall and may not work out, but is worth considering for a more conventional layout. A minor point is I would not have the fridge on the other side of the island from the hob and sink. That is going to be very annoying. It looks like I would put it next to where the sink is as this is the only area of wall where it would fit. The door to the utility room could move down a little.

Very clever, but I'm going to try the Ebay £6.99 option I think

Thanks guys. Looks like I can get a 200mm one pretty cheap. No point spending a lot to cut three or four holes. May as well go as big as possible once I’m making a hole anyway. I would hope it fills nicely but it is in a cupboard so not quite so concerning. If it works well in the cupboard I might try in the WC also.

Thanks. Looks like I should maybe try a 152mm saw as that’s the size of the duct hole that I was able to get my arm right up inside.

Working my way slowly through the fixes. A problem area consistently has been the WC and hall cupboard which stick out from the house so have a flat roof above them. The roof is a warm flat roof made from a concrete plank with PIR on top of it. It was the very last piece of the house completed as we were waiting for the stone archway at the front door that is part of it. This area has always been colder than everywhere else in the house, the heating needs to run much much more. I had the builders remove the WC ceiling and check for holes above causing draughts, when they did this I could see a gap between the wall and the concrete plank where I could see the insulation in the cavity and asked them to fill this but there is still an issue. It occurred to me that there is a MVHR vent in the cupboard ceiling and if I removed this I could see a little of what is going on between the plasterboard and the concrete plank. I removed this and stuck my phone up there. I could only see the plank to wall junction on the inside and there was a gap there also. I suspect there might be a gap at the third edge that I have not seen. Also the builders consistently fill gaps by just pushing rock wool into them which simply is not air tight enough, there seemed to be rock wool in various places so I could not see what was behind it. Also there is virtually no wind at the moment so I cannot feel any particular draughts, just general cold and air movement. I am thinking that I bite the bullet and cut a couple of holes near the edges of the ceiling so I can both see if there are gaps and then fill them in. I don’t want to cut holes in the ceiling but this area has been an issue for some time. Simple question. What’s going to be easier to patch. A straight edged hole cut with a multi tool or a 100mm circular hole cut with a hole saw? I was thinking a circular hole is less likely to see the plasterboard breaking up and cracking at the corners. Or am I overthinking it and it doesn’t matter?

Is it because the house is a semi? At first I thought it was a very odd request, but maybe they want to see the whole building in case it impacts the direct neighbour. Could you do it through permitted development as it looks like quite a small change?

Apologies, need to remember that. I am struggling not to order the Virginmedia 1Gbps internet, I am very sensitive to the speed of the internet. A few years ago when staying with the inlaws in the US, I could tell there was something wrong with their internet, it just didn't feel right. Once I investigated I found it only worked for 58seconds every minute. Before I left I had purchased a new cable modem, installed it and called up their provider to get it connected. The Mesh system may well work fine with your speeds, it is worth looking at the speed your modem is connecting at to see if you are losing speed over your wifi connection already. A few years ago when we had Sky WiFi we dropped almost half the speed we were paying for within feet of the router. Seems like a reasonable plan.

This probably explains things. When I had less than 100Mbps then I saw pretty much the same speed everywhere in the house. As it got faster then I saw more slowdown. @canalsiderenovation has not said what his incoming internet speed is and this does make a difference, if it is more modest then the hits you see to the speed are less.

I have no experience with this system and reviews seem very positive. In my experience with other mesh systems they slow down the throughput of the network as a certain portion of bandwidth is used to create the network. However, perhaps if the mesh devices have a much much faster throughput capability than your internet speed then this would not happen. As for the speed being the same everywhere that is just not physically possible, if the nearest access point is on the other side of a wall hen the speed will be slower than in the same room as the access point. It might well be good everywhere, I have good WiFi speed everywhere but I still have places where I get 280Mbps which is my connection speed and other places where I get 180Mbps which is very fast but not as fast because there is not direct line of sight to the access point.

As @Mr Punter said if you want to put the Ubiquiti somewhere else where there isn't a socket then you can use PoE(Power over ethernet). The disc has an ethernet socket on the back and a mounting ring that you place on the wall or ceiling. Where you position them depends very much on your tolerance for the internet slowing down. In my experience every wall that the signal passes through will reduce your speed materially (20%+) and after passing through two and certainly three walls connections become increasingly patchy. So it very much depends on where you want to have the signal available, where the walls are in the house etc. Some devices are much more flaky at connecting than others, TVs in particular often have very poor WiFi connections.

A few of us have Ubiquiti systems, but it sounds like you just need a single extra access point so this may be overkill. What you want is a wireless access point. You will plug this into the ethernet socket in the dressing room and then the socket should be connected to your wifi router at the other end. If you think you will never use more than a 100Mbps internet connection then something like this would suffice, despite having a max wifi speed of 450 Mbps it only has a 100Mbps ethernet connection. https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-WA901N-Wireless-Injector-Ethernet/dp/B087MSF7BR/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=wireless+access+point&qid=1609864374&s=computers&sr=1-3 This one supports gigabit ethernet and AC wifi so will be more future proof for £40 https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-LINK-TL-WA1201-AC1200-MU-MIMO-Wireless/dp/B084BGKJZT/ref=sr_1_16?dchild=1&keywords=wireless+access+point&qid=1609864374&s=computers&sr=1-16 A Ubiquiti access point starts at around £70. I do think their pricing has become a little high recently as it has not fallen as much as other people have fallen. They are however flat and can be wall or ceiling mounted so are less intrusive. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ubiquiti-Networks-UAP-AC-LITE-Access-Point/dp/B016K4GQVG/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=wireless+access+point+ubiquiti&qid=1609864852&s=computers&sr=1-4 If your router does not have enough ports to connect everything you will need an ethernet switch, something like this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07PYSNSDD/ref=sspa_dk_detail_1?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07PYSNSDD&pd_rd_w=dsWVI&pf_rd_p=1055d8b2-c10c-4d7d-b50d-96300553e15d&pd_rd_wg=Iubbn&pf_rd_r=1C6GN7PYKR5MNJY0VSKQ&pd_rd_r=967a89c9-1c5b-4216-bdc6-804545f01f51&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFBTDlURFFDNVlYRUgmZW5jcnlwdGVkSWQ9QTA5NDg1MzQxSVdCUFc0NDNQTVk3JmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTAxNDU0MDk2SlNDRzJMSkc4VEomd2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWwmYWN0aW9uPWNsaWNrUmVkaXJlY3QmZG9Ob3RMb2dDbGljaz10cnVl You can set up the access point with the same SSID (network name) and password as your main router and things should pretty seamlessly move between them.

I just saw their ad on the TV, 50% off, don't all rush. How much of the price goes on commission and advertising I wonder?

The reason for the render beads as shown is to get a neat and strong edge. But as the K-Rend is already on the wall you cannot get a bead behind it, so will just need to cut a groove into it and fill with mastic. Without the bead the edges will be prone to chipping but I wouldn't worry about it over such a short distance.

Normally they are made with a plastic strip, but I don't see why you can't cut the render out and put in a line of mastic. The problem you have is that the crack is not vertical, so you will need to fix some of it also.

TBF that probably needs an expansion joint

I have some hairline cracks in my K-Rend, just on one section on the back of the house. The SE came and looked and his opinion was that it was not caused by movement in the house, as for example the mortar joints in the stonework on the same wall had no cracks, but by the fact that the render had some narrow panels between windows and some much larger areas which expand and contract at different rates (it is the south side of the house) and this has caused cracks. There are no cracks anywhere else on the entire house. K-Rend make a special repair filler, comes in a tube like silicone. The builders used it and at first made a hash of it, it just looked like a whiter area with a crack in the middle. However, when they dug out a crack and then filled it it made a much better repair. We are still considering whether we want to use K-Rend's flexible render fixer over the whole wall(cannot remember the name), but are waiting on them confirming it will fix the problem. Despite the wall being done by an approved installer and to spec they have of course been absolutely useless in getting back to us about it. If the SE is correct and it seems like he is right looking at the wall, then it is a poor show that the render may be prone to cracking on a south facing wall with a combination of narrow and wide panels. The only solution would be to have expansion gaps all over the wall which would look awful.

Siemens show multiple ones here that can work with a hob up to 30cm diameter, one even goes up to 32cm. The street prices seem to be in the £1150 range. https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/cooking-and-baking/hobs/induction-hobs

Hi, Does anyone else get cold calls from this company? I am registered with TPS etc but they call at least once a week. Just got my first call of the year. For a while I had the unknown caller block on on my phone which stopped them, but I have had to switch it off as while you are building a house you get a lot of calls from unexpected numbers. Sometimes they get far enough to give my old address where I also had solar panels. I don't know if they get your info from the installer or the MCS scheme somehow. They are driving me crazy, I find cold calls on my mobile a lot more intrusive than on the old landline. I am getting to the point where I am going to actually go through the whole process and waste their time until I get to talk to someone who might be able to stop the calls.

I did the same. Surprisingly reasonable and a nice finish.

I am very pleased with it. My biggest fear was that I would wrongly order something, I just allowed for the cabinets to be a few mm shorter than the space available. Would be much cheaper without doors. Drawers also add considerably to the cost. Use wider units if possible, a 1200mm wide unit is much less than 2x the price of a 600m wide unit. They are very flexible, the website allows you to adjust sizes. I ordered 680mm deep units as I think the standard 580 is a little skimpy, also 2400mm tall so I had lots of room for double hanging.

There are many different roof build ups, but I am used to seeing sarking boards with gaps to let moisture out of the roof. Is there any ventilation in the roof space? Or a VCL layer below it?

I bought stuff from this place and then had the builder's joiner fit it. https://www.diyhomefit.co.uk It was still crazy expensive compared to Ikea, but about half the price of Sharp's I price up the cabinetry and it was around 2750, we paid around 1500 to fit a couple more units nd they all had doors as well as a pelmet and so on. So you could probably get it all done for £4000ish. If you can make the Ikea units fit they are crazy cheap.

Wish I could help. But with that much insulation in the roof I would think the temperature is going to be very uniform. The camera would probably show the wet area as a little cooler but it wouldn’t show a small hole above 300mm of insulation. As the plasterboard is on a slope, water hitting the top of it will run down it until it finds a hole or a barrier where it gathers so it might well be that the issue is much higher up than where the drip can be seen.

It is indeed. It seems crazy to have such long gardens and then the houses so close to each other at the sides, but it is what it is. I like the idea of that plan, I am not a fan of rooms much longer than they are wide, they are hard to use. A smaller room at the front and wider lounge at the back would work well. You will want to keep within permitted development rules, so no more than 4m back which it looks like you are within. Is that utility area actually a roofed extension as it would affect the ability to do a rear extension under PD, see these pictures. If not under PD you will have issues with the 45 degree rule. As far as I can see a side extension would also be within PD, so it is very much up to you if you think the cost is worth it, you will need a lot of steel. I think moving the garage wall and WC is a lot of work for a very small benefit, the garage will be around 3.2m wide without this. Keeping the front pf the garage stepped in a little as shown would be a good idea. The thing that would make the biggest befit to using the garage is a wider door which you would have room for.