MJNewton

Sounds reasonable, particularly the reality check as to whether a joint *really* is likely to ever need to come apart and, even if it might, whether chopping out a permanently attached fitting will suffice. I suppose compression fittings are pretty bulky too which might have relevance in some situations.

Have you found this with multiple heaters or just the one? I am sure our backup heater would effectively remain permanently on if cranked all the way round to max. Note that the thermostat is usually under the heat source and so is measuring the incoming air flow - at ground level - which will be significantly cooler than the air elsewhere in the vicinity (certainly that at sitting/standing height).

Are compression fittings (decent ones from, say, McAlpine) a good happy medium? I am thinking in terms of being both watertight but still dismantleable(sp?) ...

I heard someone say it reminded them of a festival urinal... 😂

Just watched the following video showing a recent retrofit of an ASHP, and whilst the owner seems pleased as punch I was left flabbergasted. A thought even briefly crossed my mind that maybe it was a prank video! I don't know where to focus with my dissatisfaction, but in a nutshell: - Massive grey washing machine plonked so conspicuously in the garden - Pipes and cables run all over the outside of the property, and 'all over' really isn't much of an exaggeration - Shoddy workmanship involving unfilled holes, pushfit plumbing on show etc - Considerably greater system complexity than what was there before. 8 hours of troubleshooting on first use tells me everything I need to know. - Probably other things too that I've missed as I felt the need to vent somewhere before I'd even finished watching! The owner, who I must say seemed like a lovely bloke and an intelligent one at that, seemed mostly bothered about the empty kitchen cupboard that'll need a bit of tarting up than anything else! Is this what the future holds? Surely we can do better than this.

Yeah, I was always concerned about Honeywell's TPI control algorithm which, whilst excellent at minimising (effectively eliminating) overshoot/undershoot does so at the expense of upto 6 demand cycles per hour (actually, writing that down I think it can be lowered to 3). I've been expecting having to deal with the consequences of additional wear this will have on the system for 14 years now but so far, touch wood, no failures to report.

That joint is under pressure from both sides so even if you were to close down either/both radiator valves it'd still be subject to water being pushed up from below. The nut might just need ever so slightly nipping up. And I do mean slight - being overtightened is just as likely to cause a leak as being undertightened (and can be a more difficult situation to reverse back from).

Ooh nice. Will be interesting to see what I've got, and whether a 2kg tub of Fernox DS3 will dissolve it!

I'd like to see that. I am considering descaling ours in the spring/summer and would like to know what I might be up against!

Ours is in a cold loft and we've never had any issues as far as I am aware. The unit is insulated internally and only the control boards sit outside of this and likely warm themselves up enough not to be a problem.

Are you sure that terminal has something in it to prevent backdraft? To me it look like the type fitted to many a log burner, and just serves to let smoke out and prevent rainwater getting in.

We spent ages - months in fact(!) - debating what option to go for for our 600mm larder unit and there was something about the wire frame pullouts that seemed less than ideal. Whether it was the amount of space it took up, having to pull out far more than what you actually need, reaching over things to get stuff out from the back, I don't know. We then stumbled across the much simpler approach of using full-width and fully-opening deep drawers for the section below eye level and open shelves above. There's also a shallow drawer for tins (a lot of tins - must be over 50). We've lived with it for a few years now and wouldn't change a thing about it. The drawers obviously work much better than the shelves, but we just make sure the rarely-needed items are located at the back on the latter. With drawers it doesn't matter as everything is equally accessible. (Forgive the rather messy shelves - I've just taken these photos following a whole bunch of shopping being thrown in today... I'm sure it could be dressed better!)

Hi Karl! There's always potential for ambiguity and different people's interpretations of tolerance, however notwithstanding this in my view if the tolerance is '3mm within 3m' then I'd take that to mean that over any 3m length the difference between the highest and lowest points should be less than 3mm. Thus your units could ripple like a (square) wave but if you were to locate the lowest unit then all the others must be no more than 3mm higher than that and you'd be fine. It might not sound a lot but 3mm is a fair amount for something that is infinitely adjustable. Do you want to elaborate on your situation? Did you cancel the templating or did the surveyor say it was far out? If the latter I'd expect them to be advising what improvements were needed and where etc. Gosh, this thread is a blast from the past. Funny reading back how concerned we were at the time... A few years on and we love the worktops and wouldn't change them for anything else!

Yeah, and of the four air sections I'd expect it to be the only one where water would appear. (Okay, perhaps the occasional stray raindrop might get sucked in through the outside air intake too.) There's still the issue of why this water wasn't draining away though. Or have you solved that?

Are you accusing my doorbell of being racist? 😉

Remember the 'extract from dwelling' air will have some heat extracted from it thus raising its relative humidity which, at the saturation point, will cause condensation to form.

It has night vision too!

I'm not sure I should admit this but that is pretty much what I've got! Specifically, a Reolink Doorbell with AI person detection that triggers a Shelly smart relay to turn the porch light on. It was born out of an overreaction of being annoyed by the PIR sensor triggering in the wind! Overkill, yes, but it works ridiculously well.

Yeah, we've had a couple of Shelly Flood devices and found them really good. Whilst we've never had a real leak/flood to deal with I do periodically test them. Battery life has been great too - predicted to last 12-18mths but I've just replaced one that lasted just over 3 years!

Yeah I thought it was a bit steep, but I was assuming it was just to cut holes in the frames and whack some form of louvres/shutters over the top but it turns out to have been for a separate fabricated section that would be fixed to the top of the frame.

Is it definitely a scratch and not a mark? If the latter I'd certainly recommend giving a Magic Erase a go - it never seizes to amaze me how effective they are. Here's a link to a generic one which whilst not the exact ones I've used I am sure they are all pretty much the same.

Hi Mark, welcome to the forum. We retrofitted MVHR (also a Titon HRV1.25 as it happens) and have been really pleased with it. In our case it was a 125m² 2007-built property and whilst we didn't have any condensation/mould issues to treat the initial motivation was the creation of an open plan kitchen which, primarily for aesthetics, we didn't want much on the walls (high level cupboards and, more relevant to this discussion, a hob extractor) and so started exploring the use of MVHR. Retrofitting was difficult, particularly given we're spread over three floors, although saying that we've ended up with a pretty much 'invisible' installation and so looking back it was really just a lot of planning, problem solving and head scratching but we got there in the end. We were helped massively by the flooring structure being long engineered I-joists which, surprisingly given my usual luck, nearly all happen to run in the ideal direction for us! Furthermore, given we had the ceilings down on most of the ground floor that also helped. To keep costs down we actually bought the MVHR unit off eBay for £350 as a second-hand unit albeit one that had only been installed and not used as it was one of many fitted to a small estate of houses that turned out to not be to specification so were pulled out and replaced. It still ended up costing us £1400 in total once every last component is factored in. It's been in around five years now. Electrical running costs have been ~£26/yr (based on today's rates of 22p/kWh and ~125kWh/yr consumption) and I change the filters every 6 months at around £1 a time as the frames are reusable so I just buy a square meter of filter medium to chop up. Performance in terms of humidity control and perceived air quality has been excellent. We also saved £400 in not having to have trickle vents in the lift-and-slide doors too which was a nice bonus. Based on our experience I would definitely recommend it, but it would certainly be worth exploring the alternative options raised for consideration by others above.

Just to follow up on this, spoke with Octopus and they were happy to fit an isolator at no charge. Due to scheduling issues it ended up being done in advance of having the smart meters fitted a couple of weeks later but now it's all done.

Was this the video? The installation has put me right off. Going from a boiler hidden neatly inside a kitchen cupboard to a grey washing machine sitting on your drive with all that pipework and black trunking going to it really doesn't feel like progress to me.

When our neighbour installed a wood burner I went in to full-on damage limitation mode, admittedly prior to even knowing whether there was any damage to limit! Instead of additional filters though what I did was install an air quality sensor in the intake duct and if/when it detects smoke particles (actually, it is not that discriminatory but smoke is within scope of what it can pick up) it triggers the MVHR to stop pumping in air for a while. There's some info of the approach here: Incidentally, it turns out that in practice my wife's cooking appears to be arguably more of a threat than the neighbour's wood burner! So, I now have *two* sensors - one that turns the MVHR down if the neighbour's wood burner goes wild and another that boosts it when dinner's nearly ready. 😂