Nickfromwales

Fingers crossed for the third!!

Actually kudos to @Jeremy Harris as I quite liked a lot of his ideas for his first setup, much as you have there, so I built on that as a ‘game changer’ in how I thought things through. He had the exact same combination cylinder as you’ve installed, but then ditched it due to the significant latent heat loss, using a SA instead. I’m very much still learning / improving myself btw…. Such a great forum, just for the diversity of the members and their knowledge and comprehensive feedback, which is simply gold dust.

Removing the back of the sink unit is normal play for me, so I can properly clip all the pipework to the sold wall vs the crappy bit of 4mm hardboard. If removing that gets you what you need, get the machete out and get it gone. Soon be too full of Ajax and MrSheen and 4 candles for the back to be seen anyways

Jesus Christ! Get them all taken out. Ticking time bombs. Stinks of a lazy plumber who’s used those to save draining down properly. Seriously, they all need coming out.

Turn the Allen head grub screw. DON’T touch the nut! The seal wears out after a few years due to the ferrous particulate in the water eroding it. 30 years of fitting them

The ballofix valve shouldn’t be of CH pipework though. I hate seeing them used. Should be ( if absolutely necessary ) full bore valves, not a ballofix, as they are very narrow bore and are usually used for isolating hot / cold feeds ( mains pressure ).

Ah, OK The plumber has fitted the balancing valve, and you’re staring at it Grab the circular chrome cap of the valve that side and unscrew it. Bingo

Read the MI’s…. If it doesn’t state that removing the shart euro plug will invalidate the warranty then doing so cannot be enforceable.

Do you have a pic of the isolation valve please? Do you mean they fitted a ballofix valve? One of these?

I’ve just got off the phone to them……… Answer: Because they are a bunch of cocks

The actual number of clean cut ends I’ve de-burred in my career is close to zilch. Detrimental effects to date? Zilch. Invite a dozen plumbers in to your home and allow each of them to install a section of copper, and see what they do……….. As long as your pipe slice ( rotary cutting tool ) has a nice sharp blade you’ll be fine. I do, of course, expect you to ignore absolutely all of the above and meticulously de-burr each and every copper section you install, and I will salute you for doing so .

It “can” be sealed up. Just would you want to do that? I’ve not yet had to delete an overflow in over 25 years of plumbing / bathroom / kitchen fitting, so I’d say find a way to keep it tbh.

Yup. Was probably for adventitious airflow / ventilation for an open flue gas appliance of yesteryear. Getting rid should have no adverse effects afaik.

As was I. Knee-jerk was to dump the wasteful open vented combination store and just go to an UVC for collecting excess PV for summer DHW ( keeping the dual TMV DHW arrangement which I like a lot and will use at mine when the UVC goes in prior to my gas combi ). BUT……. Seeing that the combination store is also the buffer for space heating, and that the space heating demand will be waaaaaay lower than what’s needed at mine, I now get it. Hats off, results speak for themselves Tres Bien.

Why not just do this properly????? Plastic is NOT meant to have a metal olive chew into it, and I’ve said this a number of times here. Put the zone valve on to a short piece of copper, so the compression setup is 100% concrete solid, and then simply use a pushfit coupler or elbow to convert from copper to pushfit. Bombproof. Compression and plastic should not appear in the same sentence, EVER. 👎

I always use Hep2O ( Hepworth by Wavin ) and use zero hidden joints. This is achieved by running multiple dedicated runs aka radial plumbing. A manifold for hot / cold resides at the hot water device with all of the isolation valves in one place vs at each outlet. Series plumbing uses a lot of joints so you can tee off the main pair of hot and cold pipes as they make their way from the hot water device, but this typically loses a lot of dynamic pressure / flow unless the start of the run is in a much bigger diameter. Causes a huge delay for getting hot water from basins etc at the end of the run, and is also very wasteful due to the amount of cold water that needs to be discharged before getting hot water there. I use copper and brass at the source, and Hep2O form distribution.

You’ll thank yourself later. Cost of a months re t to find another contractor would soon pale into insignificance when retrospective repairs either stopped you moving in anyways, or cost several thousands to correct whilst you were living in it. Bite the bullet, not great news I know, but these guys are just crap.

Easifill is a finisher. The bulk of the work, including bedding in the tapes, needs the joint filler Get that as flat and smooth as possible and use Easifill to complete, sanding and adding more as required. Easifill goes off much quicker, so only mix up what you can use, making bigger mixes as you get used to using it / workable “open” time.

Wasting your breath. Continuing with these clowns is a suicide mission. If you’re happy with these idiots then on your head be it sorry. You’re being given sound advice here, what you do with it is up to you. Pretty much why I instructed my clients in Leicester to sack their ‘builder’…… complete buffoons of an order of magnitude. Causing more harm than good, and covering it over hoping it wouldn’t get seen / discovered. Even staged ‘photo shoots’ for BCO then didn’t carry on with the same standards. Far from it.

That’s a bag of 💩. Stop them now and part ways immediately. This will NOT get better, only worse.

Weren’t you curious as to whether any improvements were made ( or the opposite ) since the primary test? I’m rectifying every defect / not great bit of taping / improving the AT detailing on my current clients PH build and I’m going to look meagrely to getting the final “as built” test done tbh, eg to see how we’ve improved things. 0.59 ACH when provisionally tested, but since then I’ve gone to the enth to rectify / improve this. That’s included having 2 pairs of large french doors taken out and re-fitted by a much better window company ( Simon Chadwick of SMC, great guys if anyone needs a nationwide window supplier / fitter ) so, now I can no longer see daylight through them!! Should be a good place to start, lol 1st general builder, since discharged, had not helped things at all. I’ve hopefully found and rectified all the damage his crack team of AT membrane assassins caused 🤞( through ignorance as well as what they KNEW they’d damaged, but then immediately tried to cover over and hide vs repair, ffs ), so am hoping to get this project down to 0.3 or thereabouts when done. Sub 0.3 I think would not be impossible. The challenge will be to retrospectively seal the house when the installed systems are in and the bathrooms and kitchens ( fouls and wastes etc ) and MVHR are fitted and functional. I expect I’ll use some drain ‘test balloons’ to seal the outgoing FW connections immediately after they leave the insulated raft foundation and appear at the first chambers, and just make some EPS bungs for the 200mm MVHR fresh / exhaust exit the exterior walls. Add to this; the whole frame has since been blown full of densely packed cellulose Warmcell, entire ground floor has been tiled and the adhesive now holds the wall to slab AT tapes firmly down ( there is a huge amount of linear meterage of that, and then add my 20+ penetrations for external lighting / sound / WAP / power etc, and curiosity is, as usual, eating me alive! Ergo, the second test is 100% happening……..even if it was NOT required My plan is to use the sticky clear membrane ( the one the AT crews use over the keyholes / duct ends etc ) to seal the windows / doors / keyholes etc ( from both the inside AND the outside so they cope with both the negative and positive blower cycles without coming detached ) for one specific ‘build fabric only’ test, and then quickly remove those for another ‘final / actual’ as built test. I’ll leave the wastes and MVHR plugged for that test as I really want to know I removed the obvious major issues from the poor initial window and door installations.

The airtightness test? Always done quite early on so you can find / get to / rectify leaks. Only then do you board and skim in every new passive build I’ve been coordinating.

If this is a lifetime solution then I’d keep the 400L CWS, add a 100L ( 50L useful capacity ) cold mains accumulator, pumped off that as required only, and fit a Steibel Eltron 3 phase 27kW instantaneous water heater. The Steibel is about the size of a shoe-box, just a bit longer, and is one of the most impressive bits of kit I’ve seen for a long time. I installed one for a client, in their annex / residence during their main build, and it is working very well indeed. Changes water temperature for duty too, so shower gets full wallop, basin tap gets a 1/3 and so on. You may be able to clear out that airing cupboard space and just fit a 300L accumulator and go passive off the mains, but we’d need the statistical info from the data logging first to be brave enough to discount bulk storage. You’d be at the mercy of electricity prices on demand, but the Steibel is nearly 100% efficient and you’d only ever heat the exact amount of water you used. The same single phase unit from the same supplier, I can piss faster than the hot water comes out of that btw.

My mates Vivaro got emptied the other day. 3mm hole made around the sliding door handle. Surgical precision, near zero damage, not even noticed until the penny dropped. Luckily not his whole collection in the van that time……..

https://wrcpartgcalculator.co.uk/Calculator.aspx I just grab figures from these types of examples. Few ‘inspectors’ ever cross examine or even check tbh. Just a box-ticking exorcise. Posts on here show typical l/per person/day. Google will point you to most common information, plus feedback from others here should fill the gaps.