Nickfromwales

Has your wife caught you looking at @ducthub in the evenings?

Tres bien, Rodney. Yup, as above, the foiled stuff. Or neoprene sheet stuff and use carpet spray glue (contact adhesive) to bond. Penises.

Have they installed silencers / attenuators?

Probably wants the pre charge set at around 2.0 then with a pressure reducing valve set to 3.5. The water has to stretch the bladder and compress the pre charge gas / air, needs a bit of headroom to do so. https://pumpexpress.co.uk/explaining-cold-water-accumulators/#:~:text=The air pressure inside an,bar below the mains pressure. Scroll through that for a bit more info

What’s the static cold mains pressure? 👀. lol.

Do it! I’ve never installed one that doesn’t have a fudge on the ‘pressure reduced’ side. Even if the mains pressure is low, you never know if network pressure will go higher or peak at over 5/6 bar overnight or midday.

Was it commissioned properly? Has it been checked / inspected annually / bi-annually? I don’t abuse my underpants so they last a long time. Expansion vessels get fitted and forgotten about, until they die….

Hire of the kit is less than £100, but some decent plumbers will own one. Just get several quotes for duration and costs etc and choose the ‘best’ one. 🤷‍♂️. A 1.5-2hp pump will shift a lot more shite than just the heating pump bumbling around

I have used both Furnox and Sentinel, as said “Tried and tested”… This is added into the power flush machine, and will do the job if the people doing the power flush are there for the full day leaving the stuff in long enough to do its job. A pour in / rinse out affair is near pointless and would be quite ineffective. Ask the person flushing to go around and vent the rads etc whilst the machine is in ‘flow’ (the flush machine goes in both directions to stir the shite up most effectively).

It's down to the manufacturers recommendations tbh, and I have slept MANY times since having to use this stuff last (I only work on brand new installs these days for self-build clientele etc) so if in doubt just read the literature for these products and choose the one that best suits the mix of components and metals etc in your particular system. Just remember to flush it well, a couple of times, and to add in a sacrificial inhibitor each time, even though it's going 'down the drain'. Every time you fill the system back up it is with fresh oxygenated water from the mains and this will instantly start corrosive reactions which is going backwards! Use a cheap inhibitor for sacrificing, and then, when you're happy with the results, drain out for a last time, fit the new AAV, and double-dose with a quality chemical to suit.

You just need to know the chemicals won’t attack any system components, so check with the manufacturer’s literature before dosing. Any decent plumber can do the job, but you need a plan of attack. The sludge remover needs to go into the system ahead of any other works, and for it to be run up to temp for a good few cycles of ‘chemical flush’, before the system is mechanically flushed. This chemical is supposed to break down the crud and get it into a solution. Then it can be drained down and rinsed out during the mechanical flush. Then fit a new AAV and look back on these happy times and laugh.

The last 2 UFH installs I did in near / at Passivhaus standards of insulation had 100mm centres, but that was to drop the flow temps as low as possible, and to have as much water volume in the slab as possible. This was mostly to aid cooling via the slab in both instances, but one was an insulated (aka Passiv) raft with the UFH pipes inserted, and the other was a poorly detailed foundation where the pipes were clipped to the pre-cast constructional slab and then we screeded over. If there is any doubt over performance then UFH should be very seriously considered / reconsidered, as it may well function but may very well be adversely uneconomical to run / operate cost wise. Kitchens / any other rooms with reduced floor space will suffer most, further impacted if theres large glazed areas, so again you may need auxiliary heating from say a vertical ‘decorative’ radiator in there to achieve desired room temps during the worst days of winter. Vertical rads prob not going to do much with a heat pump though so this all needs proper thought and for you to sew some headroom into the final choice / solution. Max floor surface temps will be capped at 27°C, flow temp will be decided by insulation / screed / floor covering type & thickness etc, so at that limit the heat output needs to be more than suffice, so you’re not ‘just there’, and are able to overshoot the stat set temp (eg the room should be able to get north of 22°C without seriously struggling).

I didn't realise it took so many killer whales to run these things.

I didn't see a copyright anywhere, so "play ball"

Use the 22mm up on the cold runs first, hot runs last, but preferably use 15mm for the hot feeds wherever possible (10mm where it's a basin and close (less than 10m) to the cylinder). Decide if you want / need to be able to isolate every single run, and if not you can go with the plastic dumb manifolds to save a lot of £'s.

The only water you are shifting is what comes out of the jet. Could be fed from the north sea, the same amount of water will come out of the jet. Resistance etc will skew the numbers a little, but most of us will have snuffed it before this matters, in reality.

More is more, and doesn't just have to work for the weight of the water it has to be able to deal with heave of the clay. It'll need to be thicker than 100mm and defo very well reinforced. SE on the aforementioned project has this wrecked slab to add to his website pics...... 100mm is for walking on.

@Russell griffiths ? He bloody loves excavators.

Any issues with freezing / defrosting over the winter?

900mm (or less than 1400mm) means broken necks and dead kids. That’s a massive NO. Have a proper pool that you can jump into without ending up in a wheelchair or don’t have one. Dig the hole, make a proper slab with 50% more concrete and 100% more reinforcing steel mesh, and enjoy the fruits of your labour (as you’ll be a lot “less rich” at the end either way, so why go half-cocked?!?). ”Do it”

If I put my foot down, my V8 AMG returns less than 8mpg. "Smiles per gallon" my friend. You are dead for a VERY long time, fill your boots and do NOT listen too much to bean counters. Most get buried with their money and are boring as feck. Most won't buy a round either.

SE input is the first stop, and there's your 'sanity check', simples. Crazy or not is decided by that person, as your ground conditions will dictate the majority of the lunacy aka cost but at that point it's only on paper so cheaper to bin the idea there (if the feedback says don't do it) before you spend big. The main issue is the clay, and heave, as one slab set into a clients build (for a swim-spa about the size you state) featured a 100mm steel reinforced slab via the SE's "original idea"......this snapped clean in half over the first winter, literally. The SE was a cock, and very comfortable spending his clients cash like water. The clients were very lucky to have a great builder on board, and he went all-out on the second attempt; which worked out well, but only at twice (or three times) the price and about 4 months of delays....ffs 😳 I would recommend doing this in ICF in a heartbeat, and my ICF guy is someone who's done more pools than there are UK governments who have failed their constituents. For a single-storey jobby, the pump arrangement should be a fail-safe at best, and the majority of migratory water influx should be near zero or mitigated against / dealt with by natural discharge (unless you live near @Russell griffiths where you poke a hole in the ground and get a swimming pool for free 8 seconds later). Clever choices for the groundworks and robust french drains 'and what-not' should be your best friend here, but it just needs someone to look at it who has previous experience, and isn't just giving opinions. FWIW the last home we spec'd a pool for was indoors in a £7.2m home. Would be good if a design proposal for that scale of project didn't come back to bite me in the arse so I trust my team and my ideas, unless they all tell me they're bad ones lol. At that point it's back to the office (pub) for more intensive talks

If you need a really big pump running 24/7 you have made some seriously bad decisions. So "no" to that, and "yes" to some 'proper' thought/input from someone both a) sane and b) who's been there and done that and got the T-shirt

You'll need a second job to be able to afford a Sunamp (aka Thermino) nowadays..... Prices have gone into orbit, and when compared to an UVC you can get 3 or 4 for the price of 1 S.A. unit You'd be much better off with an UVC, especially with the PV, and I'd defo double the size of your current capacity to maximise on solar storage/revenue and to get you to a higher % of self-consumption. Also, with a modern UVC you'll be very well insulated and have minimum losses compared to an older/less efficient one. You can have deeper baths and longer showers then too

Ouch.... This will need to be fully chemically flushed to get all the crud out, using something like Sentinel X400 LINK and then a cleaner, and then an inhibitor which I would double-dose with.