AliG

I am also trying to wire up a Hive system, although the existing system was working fine. Have been renovating my brother's flat and he asked for a new app controlled heating system. The old controls had turned yellow with age. I have connected up the Hive Receiver and it is working. I can use it to turn the hot water on and it was working to turn on the heating when the original Potterton PRT2 thermostat was in place. I then tried to bridge the old thermostat by connecting the red and yellow cables together here and isolating the blue one. That isn't working. I did think it might not work as the Neutral was previously connected to thermostat also. Can anyone tell me the right way to bridge the thermostat please.

We tried to get Openreach to install fibre at my parents' house. We had installed ducting to the pavement, but they said this just had copper lines in it. They wanted to take the fibre from a pole behind the house across next door's garden and attach it to the outside of my parents' house. It would have been pretty low over their garden by the time it hit the house. We just said no thanks we will stick with Virgin.

Maybe setting it to 48C is the answer. I think that is the temperature quite a few people use. TBH that should be warm enough, a shower is usually at around 40C. The tank is not that large, however and will cool down quickly as you have a shower, so if the temperature is set at 48C I would set the temperature drop when the ASHP kicks in to 8C, you will have to play around with it. It depends on how much hot water is used. Running at 6kW it will take almost an hour to recover back to 48C from a 100l use for a shower. I am afraid I cannot help on the thermistors, I have never seen a hot tank set up like that, I don't know if that is normal for an Ecodan.

The little grey box is where the normal thermostat on the cylinder would be. Can you point to where the thermostat is please as I can’t figure it out. If it is near the top of the cylinder then it likely won’t get hot enough to hit the target temperature as the heating coil is near the bottom. If the temperature of the tank is not showing as in the second picture then it suggests to me that the controller still is not correctly connected to the tank thermostat. I don’t have direct Ecodan experience so someone might chip in. That is an extremely untidy looking install if you ask me and there are a surprising number of loose cables. Also on your pic of the ASHP are those drops condensation or ice? My parent’s ASHP was bone dry this morning, it’s not that cold. It suggests to me that the ASHP is running very hard. It might be too small.

There could be something funny in your hot water settings. This video explains all the hot water settings. It is pretty simple, could you tell us what the settings are. I assume that you are changing the DHW Max temperature and not the flow temperature. If some of the other settings are incorrect they might be causing this. It would also be useful to know the size of your hot water tank and the capacity of your heatpump.

Exactly right, basically land is overpriced at the moment relative to rising build costs. The problem is many self builders just want to build and often aren't that fussed about the financial returns. If there were lots of plots available then these people wouldn't be enough to sustain the market, but in most places there are very few plots so of the moment prices remain high.

If you turn it down a little bit that should stop the immersion kicking in. 55c is at the limit of how hot it can get the water. In fact that’s as high as the flow can go so if the tank temp is set at 55 it will need the immersion to get there. The description of the temp sensor wiring did sound very dubious although I didn’t think that wasn’t the main issue.

Since turning the boiler up it is still groaning although maybe less than before. I could put Star Wars on as it sounds quite like Chewbacca! @John Carroll you have me there. Is the shuttle the trv?

I like the idea of making the craft room open to the kitchen below. A lot depends on how noisy things are and who is doing what at different times, but it would open up the space nicely. In the existing plan it could just be the space above the larder. However, it looks like there may not be enough space as you hit 1.5m head height well before the rear wall. Depends on how much room it needs. If not back to that being a good space for a bathroom.

If the upstairs radiators have TRVs these should modulate the temperature to some extent. If you set them to around 2 then the heating in the different rooms will only come on once it is cooler. You might have to play around to get the right setting. If you want to set it more accurately you can get wireless TRVs that actually have a set temp on them. You shouldn't have to set the stat as high as 23-24 in the en suite. As I always tell my dad, the heating doesn't;t warm up faster when you turn it up, it just stays on longer. If you set it to 22 then it should modulate fine once up to temperature whilst not getting as warm elsewhere. Again it may need a bit of playing around with. I have thermostats set between 20.5 and 22 depending on the room.

Congrats on the planning permission. That's a nice looking house and the downstairs design is a good start. As a starting point for the rooms I would suggest you consider what you want to do with each room and what furniture you want in there. Larders seem to me to be the big in thing at the moment. All the food in our house fits in the fridge, the freezer and one 2m tall 600x600 cupboard., maybe a few things spill into another cupboard. You have allocated around 10sq metres to a larder. That is almost another entire room. You describe this as your forever house. If that is the case have you not considered having a downstairs bedroom and shower room in case there is a scenario where someone cannot easily get up the stairs. There is ample room to do this between the rear of the garage, boiler room and larder. However it depends on if this is something you want before making specific suggestions. As noted I would have the boiler room accessed direct from the house. I seem to be in ours a surprising amount of time. BC issues with kitchen open to stairs also have to be looked at. Upstairs is another matter. Why go to all the effort to have a lovely open sunny hall downstairs and then walk up the stairs to a totally enclosed and small landing. I always advocate for a window on the upstairs landing if possible. In this case I would incorporate the "powder room" as a small sitting area on the landing. You probably don't need another store room upstairs with all that room in the integral garage downstairs. I would make that a bathroom and the current bathroom an en suite giving a much nicer bedroom for visitors. Our dressing room is smaller than our ensuite. One thing to consider with this and the larder is that the larger you make these rooms th more they cost in fitted furniture. Fitted furniture for our dressing room cost around 7k if I remember correctly and that wasn't going to somewhere crazy like Sharp's. As mentioned I might look to take some space from the dressing room for a laundry room. The en suite seems OK to me, it could be a little larger. The master bedroom itself makes very poor use of space (TBF ours does too). Do you want a sitting area in there, or could you rejig it so more of the eaves space is storage as it will be wasted as part of the room. The RHS of the master next to the "powder room" would make a good storage cupboard if as I suggested you make the storage room a bathroom. Unless these areas are storage or sitting areas, no one wants to walk into an area with 1.5m ceiling height so it just becomes water space. You might also consider putting the headboard end of the bed under one of these areas as it is a better use of the lower space. There seems to be a small vaulted area and extra velux above part of the larder. That seems a waste of money and it would look odd in the kitchen.

Yes. but not at the same time. You need to shut off the valve when the electric element is on. Normally this would be done to run just the towel rail in the summer. It looks like you have a downstairs thermostat controlling the UFH and an upstairs one controlling the radiators. So to get just the en suite radiator on you turn up the upstairs thermostat and turn the TRVs down/off on the radiators. It will be cheaper to heat this one radiator from the ASHP than from a direct heating element. The ASHP has the CoP effect so if you put 100W in you will be getting 300W out. You won't get that benefit on a heating element although it could be offset by losses in the pipework and these could be quite large running the whole system for one radiator, but if it is winter they will still be helping to keep the house warm, so they aren't really lost. A 300W heating element will probably not put out as much heat as running 50C hot water through the radiator from the ASHP. A pretty small towel rail puts out around 2000-2500BTUs with 70C water in it. 2000BTUs is almost 600W. At 50C, it probably puts out the equivalent of around 400W. Again though you would get this heat cheaper from the ASHP than a heating element. I think what you have been doing is the best way to run it. It might be more efficient if you connected everything to the downstairs thermostat so the en suite radiator only ran when the UFH was on (assuming the other TRVs are switched off), but this runs the risk of overheating the en suite if it has no thermostat or TRV.

These two companies offer multiple carcass colours. We used DIYHomefit for our dressing room with walnut effect carcasses to match our doors and flooring. https://www.larkandlarks.co.uk https://www.diyhomefit.co.uk DIY Kitchens offers 7 cabinet colours which can match door colours.

The richest people make most of their wealth from the increasing value of Investments, not income. This is only taxed if you sell the investments but it’s pretty much impossible to spend billions so they just sit on them. Looking at a lot of the data the 1% haven’t been getting much wealthier it is the 0.1% or even the 0.01%. These are mainly business owners. As @SteamyTea says many things have helped them get richer recently. However inflation, wage rises and poor stock market returns will probably erode a bit of this over the next few years. The amount of money someone can accumulate today from a few good ideas such as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg has become quite absurd. It’s not clear to me what can be done about it. These people will claim to be smart and hard working, which they usually are. But lots of people are smart and hard working and aren’t billionaires. What they almost always are is smarter and harder working than politicians. If only we could somehow harness this ingenuity to run the country. The US dats here on increasing wealth of the wealthiest is more extreme than the UK. The US has very generous treatment of capital gains and inheritance tax as well as many of the most valuable new businesses.

Getting back to the original topic of C rated EPCs. As just discussed, we largely have the roadmap for the decarbonisation of transport. As EVs continue to improve and fall in price, the existing fleet of vehicles will become electric. Simultaneously the carbon mix in electricity generation is falling and so emissions from transport will fall. There will continue to be edge cases but solutions for these will be found over time - synthetic fuels for example. This is actually just another way of moving things to being electrical as electricity is used to produce these fuels. With so much having been done to get the ball rolling here, we are now moving onto building energy use. The majority of this is for heating, lighting use has already collapsed with LED lights. As you can see below, we were encouraged to use gas boilers in the UK, but with the decarbonisation of electricity production, ASHPs and even resistive heating are now lower carbon options. I suspect that the reason for the C EPC target is that houses probably have to be at least in this area for to to be possible for them to be heated by ASHPs. Rentals will have been chosen as they turn over faster than owner occupied houses and forcing landlords to make changes is less of a vote loser than forcing owners to make changes. The problem of political expediency in delaying these changes is evident recently. If we are to achievement zero targets these things need to happen. I have noted China being mentioned quite a few times, with the "whataboutery" of we shouldn't bother because of their emissions. This has a lot of problems for me. There is a lot of dishonesty in outsourcing our manufacturing to China then crowing that we have reduced emissions and their's have increased. It would be more correct in many cases to reallocate the emissions to the end consumers. Then of course there is comparing absolute emissions to emissions per capita. China is around 50% of US levels, although it is above UK levels already (again though should we adjust ours up and theirs down for all the goods we import from China). However, this is largely irrelevant now, because China is has also set net zero targets. They have a target for emissions to peak around 2030 and from what I read they are on track to beat this. They have already hit around 25% EV penetration. This year China is adding wind power capacity roughly equal to new thermal capacity and roughly three times as much solar capacity. They like everyone else can see that these are now the cheapest sources of power so it is a pretty easy decision. Electricity demand globally is expected to roughly double or triple by 2050. See this Mckinsey report https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/global-energy-perspective-2022. As almost all new capacity being added is in renewables then by 2050 that alone would get us to 2/3 renewables. Of course almost all decommissioned capacity is also replaced by renewables so the vast majority of electricity production will be carbon free by 2050. Hence why we want to move transport and heating to being electrical as this will make them also carbon free.

The argument has changed now. Of course there is a lot of inequality in the country/world and systems can in particular be abused by the ultra wealthy. The problem with taxing them is they can move around and they have so much money they don’t need to take much income relative to their rising wealth so have neither realised gains nor income to tax. Hence my idea of netting tax paid against inheritance tax. These people haven’t paid the double tax that people complain comes with inheritance tax. They haven’t paid any tax. Not only that but the people inheriting money won’t have paid any tax on it as they never had any income at any point. So this issue could be improved upon, although it’s tough as they can easily move country. The charts on wealth and income inequality show that it has been pretty similar for a long time. Maybe we were less aware of it as there weren’t so many rich people flaunting their wealth on TikTok. They just hid it better previously and tbh that kind of conspicuous consumption is probably getting people’s backs up. However, I don’t like conspiracy theories and the suggestion that working class people got into being landlords so the Tories started to make it worse to be a landlord is nonsense. As is the suggestion that rich people are suddenly hoovering up cheap houses when house prices are barely off their all time high.

That's why I put the chart of wealth distribution in as well, the second chart. I am not saying it is good or fair, just that it has been broadly the same for some time. Despite what people think if you actually earn money from working it is extremely difficult to avoid paying taxes. I certainly am not aware of how to do so, when I was working I earned a large amount of money, every penny was taxed. The top 1% of earners make 13% of income, but pay 29% of income tax in the UK. This does not suggest that they are avoiding taxes. On the other hand I used to sit next to a non dom guy at work who basically paid no tax. It was very annoying. I believe this has been somewhat tightened up. If you inherit a lot of money and make it from investments tax avoidance is much easier. It is also much easier if you are self employed irrespective of your income. I know IT contractors who were using EBTs to avoid tax until the loophole was closed, or you have the likes of Jimmy Carr. People not paying tax are generally at it nowadays. I have come up with a solution for this. They should offset inheritance tax against income tax paid while you were alive. Thus if people manage to suspiciously accumulate lots of assets without paying any income tax then they get caught out in the end, but if it has already been taxed, it doesn't get taxed again.

The last dozen years has not actually widened the rich poor divide. The gini coefficient in the UK peaked in 2007/8. Wealth distribution has been broadly the same for the last 25 years. The notion that somehow more working class people became landlords so the government decided to have it in for them is nonsense. Many many people have been complaining about landlords and with typical expediency the government thought there might be votes in being anti landlord. House prices are down roughly 5% from the all time high last year, rich people are not suddenly snapping up houses on the cheap, house prices have barely moved. Even if they are cash buyers they can put cash in the bank and earn interest with no hassle of being a landlord. The average rental yield on property is around 5%, very similar to savings rates. Meanwhile, two years ago it was much higher than savings rates. So again why would people now want to take their savings and use it to buy houses. The government have been quite incompetent on many fronts recently, but this is just a conspiracy theory with no evidence to support it.

Fair @Dave Jones. I probably wasn’t clear enough. The suggestions I was making weren’t based on everything being C rated, the rule should be the same for landlords and sales but the rule also has to be sensible. You would have to set a reasonably achievable level based on the age of the property and maybe other factors. Maybe have a limit on spending of 5% of the value of the house. There are penny of things that would get you a lot of epc benefit for modest cost on a lot of houses. That’s the low hanging fruit you want to be aiming for.

Another solution would be to make the rules the same for landlords and sales, so you cannot avoid improving the rating by selling up. I think this was well intentioned as a better EPC would make a property cheaper for the renter to run. For example my landlord replaced the gas boiler with an electric boiler in London as it was cheaper. Luckily it was a tiny flat, but on a larger property with more people running costs would have been horrible. The rules should take into account what is reasonably possible, so for example listed properties should be exempt(maybe they are) and the rules should probably be tighter for more modern properties. As someone said though, politicians don't understand technicalities so it would be lost on them. The other day a politician suggested that we limit the number of waste of time degrees that are being subsidised by the taxpayer. Someone pointed out that at the same time maybe we should have minimum qualifications to be an MP. I was astonished by the attitude of the Education Minister the other day, she was so off hand and dismissive on camera. In a business that would be commercial suicide.

I think I misread this. I didn't realise it was just the upstairs thermostat. So it's just the upstairs thermostat that goes off then the flow gets to 45C whilst it is still heating the UFH loops. I think it is very clear that simply when the UFH and radiators are both on and it is cold then they can extract more energy from the water than the ASHP can provide at its maximum output so the flow remains below 45. Thus the heat pump is arguably slightly too small, you have no overhead for extremely cold days by the sound of things. Probably not a big problem, though, just put on a jumper if it is very cold and the heat pump doesn't quite cope. I very much would not turn the flow temperature down as this will probably make things worse. I see what you're saying that maybe it would defrost less, but I have to believe that the designers took this into consideration and the heat pump cannot put out more energy in total with the flow temp set lower. That would make no sense at all.

It sounds like what is happening is that the house gets up to temperature and the heat pump switches off before the flow has got back to 45C. This is not an issue. the heat pump is not going to keep heating the water once it is not needed. Even a gas boiler will show a lower flow temp than you might expect whilst heat is being extracted from the flowing water. The heat pump just cannot generate enough instantaneous heat to get the water up to 45C whilst energy is being removed from the water into the house. There is a decent chance doing this that the house will be too cold. It sounds like the flow probably has been running at between 40 and 45C when the temp is below zero. Reducing the maximum flow temp to 40C will just reduce the maximum heat input into the house. If the flow never gets above 40C it might not make a difference.

Two doors should be allowed. You can get composite fire doors which would look like the door you have in there and should provide some level of insulation. Looks like they aren't cheap at around £1000 but would ave two lots of door frame and so on as well as the hassle of two doors. The actual heat loss from a door to an internal garage would be pretty small. I wold be more worried about draughts and it should be possible to make a fire door air tight.

TBH I am just reading on the internet here, so you may have already seen this yourself. The "bolt" is a lightning bolt. This means that it is using the immersion heater instead of the ASHP to heat hot water. The electrician has done what is shown in this video - He has changed the heat source from Standard to Heater. I would change it back. The sound you are hearing is the relay switching on the immersion. P1 error seems to be for reading the flow temperature. It may be that the P1 error is caused by it using the immersion and not the heat pump as there wouldn't be any flow to measure. Or it may be something else. Can you change it back to Standard using the instructions on the video and then see if that resolves the error. If not something else is the issue.

So far it seems quieter since I turned up the boiler, but the heating has only been on for a few minutes. This now has me thinking. At some point I plant to switch over to an ASHP. I would probably have to take out the mixers as they won't be required and likely won't like the low flow temperature. I have 4 manifolds, so won't be in a hurry to do that!