Nickfromwales

My dear Watson. It won’t do anything of the sort! “Fire away”. Blocks will absorb and dissipate the impact.

Use a gas nailer. My Spit gun earned its £500 price tag on one job in 3 days. When are you doing this job? If you cover P&P you can borrow mine? Fixings aren’t cheap, but the time saving/ease of use is insane.

Willis will work inline, but you’ll need to exceed the target kW heat demand to get it to respond well. Prob need 2x 3kW heaters in parallel to give a 22mm feed if more than 3 or 4 rads. Willis have 15mm connections, so when I install 2 units or more I tee them into compression tees which are 15x15x22mm so I can use 22mm flow and return pipe work to the pump and primary pipe work. If you do this, you can get rid of the TS. TBH, if it’s just a tiny bit of heat needed in a couple of places, eg one or two radiators then I’d rip the wet system out and fit electrical radiators in their place and get near to 100% efficient vs the convoluted setup you’re currently proposing/adapting. Link This is just becoming a very odd way to skin a cat as firing up a full wet system for a bit of heat to a couple of rads, heated on demand by direct electricity, is just ‘no beueno’ afaic.

Flue can't be permanently boxed in either, as it all (every single joint) needs to be inspected annually.

Yup, the second boiler is just madness. A flush, chemical treatment, and mag filter is all that's needed here. Jeeeeeeeeeeeesus. Why have they used a plate heat exchanger if the Vaillant is only servicing rads?!

That solution is fine, and as long as the joints are glued or taped you’ll not have any issues there. I removed your duplicate post btw

You’re god-damned right there should be!!! Theres zero stopping the frames from moving. Open the window and push it to see for yourself.

I can see a concrete screw, but no packers

Quite normal for a window company to underside, but what have they done for fixings? Also, often the head of the opening used the window millions and frames for structural support, so I wonder if the opening is suitable to take this simple swap. Worth checking, particularly with curved bays. One way these are otherwise supported is if the floor joists from upstairs project outboard to take the weight of the above elevation/bay. Can you take a pic showing the front and head of the opening? To seal up, if they’ve fixed them robustly, you would want a continuous bead of Illbruck 330 foam Link (NOT regular builders foam) which will reduce noise and draft to an acceptable level, and then uPVC ‘makeup’ usually gets set in place to make things pretty.

Yup, agreed, but the isolations are probably moot as there is just so little system volume above the manifold rails to not have to worry about 'draining the whole system down'.

The combi should have an integral bypass, but that should be a failsafe only. WRT losing the UFH manifold pump and blending valve, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea as then you are at the mercy of the flow temp from the boiler. How long has the heating been on for, and do the floors feel warm/hot with flow going in at 70°C?? The hottest I’ve set these to in adverse conditions is about 45°C to get a floor surface temp of 24/25°C, and a room temp of 21°C. At 70° it should be like Barbados in there. How is this performing currently?

That's the flow out of the pump.

Hi. For one, the flow gauges iirc will only register flow if the water is going into that rail, as the water pushes into the pipe loops there is a slider that gets drawn into the current and that pulls down the flow register in the gauge. As per your pic, the pump is running but the gauges aren't appearing to be doing anything? The other thing, is that pumps are suppose to be mounted vertically, but that's just old school mentality from 30+ years of plumbing (I don't mount pumps any other way) so air can rise upwards with flow vs against it. Also, as the boiler is only servicing UFH via a mixing valve, there should be a bypass, other than the one ion the boiler, so when there is pump overrun (the boiler pump is pumping faster than the UFH is consuming that flow/pressure) it can cycle back on itself. That promotes longevity of the boiler, and shouldn't be dismissed as 'unnecessary'. Finally, does that gauge show 70oC flow temp?!? Who commissioned this and what is the target/design flow temp that's supposed to be going into the floors?

Does the flue exit on that wall or at 90o to it? If the same wall, is it sealed up properly so no rainwater can penetrate and get into the mortar joints? Is this evident when it rains/immediately after, or 24/7?

Yup, they would have known about the paternity stuff roughly 9 months in advance...?

+1. Maybe get a rudimentary bill of quantities done, to show the lender that you have your side in check eg that you know the actual costs required to get to a completion certificate. All you need here is the BCO’s sign off, architects are being dicks.

SBR won’t really adhere to the duct tape, maybe use some 4” scrim (plasterers) tape to give it some help?

They’ve used JG Speedfit, and as always there are no circlips installed behind the collars….. This is why I only use Hep2O (Wavin Hepworth) push fit in every permanent installation I do, and have done so for the last decade. JG has the ingenious flaw of slowly undoing itself over time, and this will be 20X more of a concern with heating as it’s going hot-cool-hot-cool so will expand and contract for the rest of its serviceable life. Get the circlips (collets) LINK fitted before the boards go back down and sleep soundly. Copper is king, always will be, but modern push fit is perfectly acceptable when installed CORRECTLY.

Yikes. I’ve dot & dabbed tiles more times than I can remember, but always with cementitious adhesive and never without having completely buttered both the reverse of the tile and the wall. I’ve tiled for over 3 decades, never a callback / other issue, not with grout and not in wet rooms or wet / splash areas, so the principal is fine I assure you, just this guy is too comfortable riding the luck train. Is that ready mixed adhesive from a tub? If you’ve heard sounds then that sounds like excess adhesive having the moisture sucked out of it from the porosity of the tile and the bone dry plasterboard. That usually results in the adhesive shrinking back and tiles drying in place differently than where they were ‘laid’, often resulting in kickers and uneven finish. Here the walls simply don’t look bad enough to have any reason not to have done bed & butter, plus there’s no sign of him ‘squishing’ the adhesive into the tile and board by moving them around as they’re set into place.

Some stopcocks have a washer that falls to the closed position in the absence of ‘flow’, but that’s a random addition to the possibles for the process of elimination here tbh. The problem with noises in a plumbing system is they can be produced somewhere away from where you think you hear them. Swap that back to a gate valve, as that’s a cheap possible win. Then try again!

Yup. Nice isn’t good enough, needs to have quality or what’s the point. Make sure you have spares of the batch of tiles above, then ask your new tiler to cherry pick the few bad ones and re-set new tiles in to reduce the issue. Does just seem a bit of complacency had set in from the pics, as just the odd one vs a whole shite lay….. shame as you say but needs doing properly, simples.

Where is the F&E teed in? Possibly look at relocating that.

Heat pump yes, but the demand will have to be known, and the temps won't be much or any better unless it's a high-temp split which will give a decent CoP at 60+oC. That leaves you heavily reliant on burning wood to keep the whole house 'warm' if the rest just adds background heat, but in bedrooms and other spaces away from the WBS I expect the rads are actually doing much more than you may first realise. Turn them off over winter and test this theory afaic, and then maybe readdress this in the new year when the UK warms back up a little.

Just the worst possible one, in honesty. Not unless it's massive. The losses will outweigh the gains I'm afraid, as, for one, the storage type and useful energy capture to then run these high temp emitters will be of negligible practical benefit in actuality, plus the accumulative losses and poor responsiveness will further add to the negative maths. The last TS I installed for space heating to rads was 2600L, and took up a 1/3 of a garage (for comparison). That stored at 85oC btw. Driving this into a slab with UFH would work, but for rads I'm afraid it's a battle on a good day to suggest this is a 'good idea', sorry!

Just a 'not great' solution to be honest, the immersions into a TS, so these are my thoughts.