Nickfromwales

My bad! I was thinking of another job. Too many plates spinning atm

Miles off here, sorry! The water in the UVC is fresh potable water, which is hydraulically separated from the heating system ‘brine’, so that can only push water out of taps etc. You can turn the system off, then close the red and blue flow and return valves on the UFH manifold, and then connect a hose to the end of the return rail and run to outside or to a drain. Then you’ll need another hose from an outside tap (or you can uncouple and use the filling loop) connected to the flow rail. You’ll then be using cold mains to blast the loop through. Shut the other working loops off. Leave the one problematic one fully open. Open the drain off and then turn the outside tap on and watch / listen to see if water and air then gets dumped out. Repeat as needed.

100mm? Thickening over ring and intermediate beams.

Modern, domestic AC is none of these. Nobody would ever sell one if they were For 2 current live projects, one MBC ph TF and one (TBC) Nudura ICF I’m specifying AC on the FF, with wall mounted units being suggested (for the first revision for discussion). Also for cost reductions and simplistic installation, integration, and maintenance etc. Cooling is part of each clients remit to me, so my job is then to find the best units, at the best price, with installation methodology that ensures maximum longevity and minimum nuisance to the occupants. Sizes will be considered (over) to get the units to be near zero impact (audibility etc). I recall staying in hotels pre / post Covid, one quite small room, and the AC on the wall doing its thing. An occasional waft (no noise or draughts) as the output was nearly fully modulated, and I slept like a baby in a perfect ambient, with the unit offering surprisingly little sound. It was wonderful, plain and simple. Very apparent that the room had AC, as the unit was gloss black lol (maybe not a good choice for an otherwise lightly decorated room) and it was less than 1m from the bed, but it was an asset for sure. My plan is to set the units as far away from the bed and as high up as I can get them, so the modulated output is of no nuisance whatsoever. The focus will be on cooling the room, not the occupant. One will service the other, indirectly, by design. In reality, us humans will tolerate a fan blowing directly onto us if it makes us cool, think desk or pedestal fans, so a near silent AC unit will simply not offend. This is more of a storm in a teacup than it would actually be in real life.

That’s cold, and it would drive me crazy. At 19° I’m looking at my room stat and asking WTF. Absolutely! This is why, for every new client, I start with a blank bit of paper. I don’t create ‘other people’s homes’, I create homes for the intended occupants and take my lead from them. Heating on the FF is just a thimble-full, when required, but cooling is a very different issue altogether. At 21.5° I know my room is too hot, at 22° I want to kill. Successfully managing this hysteresis and matching the occupants preferred ambient needs control, and the sun has a huge effect on the sums. Solar reflective glazing is a huge asset here, but then folk will quickly moan about needing heating to offset the lost solar gain. The cost and impact of active cooling (by automation or human manipulation) outweighs this many times over.

Post a pic of the manifold, showing above / below / immediately surrounding space. Doesn’t have to be directly connected, but needs to be close ish.

Thanks for the thread though, as this is a great bit of balance to what seemed a very one-sided subject . My rethinking around this, I’ve reassessed heating and cooling quite intensively over the last 6 months, is that AC (for very gentle heat or effective cooling) on the first floor makes more and more sense every time I look at it. Even @Jeremy Harris ended up retrofitting AC to get his home tolerable.

Amen. A handful of folk on here may say they’re ok without FF heating, but a heck of a lot of folk wouldn’t be so fast to agree, now yourself added to that number. @Post and beam, you can easily add a mixing set to the UFH manifold, and then turn the flow temp up to say 45° to see if that perks the rads up a little. The caveat is that they’ll then possibly need to have TRV’s but that’ll be down to trial and error. You can jump the flow temp up in 2° increments until content. The Ivar blender starts at 20°C and goes to 60°C, and is very accurate.

IMHO, those beams and joists look plenty good enough. I worked in a 200yr old cottage in Gloucestershire, and when re plumbing I quickly lifted a floorboard to look into the void below, searching for flow and return. I lifted the board, and the client who was sat in the kitchen downstairs, looked up at me and said “hello”. There was no void “D’oh!”.

The best thing for sharing the loads out is to stick with real wood floorboards with tongue and groove joints, ideally full boards or very long lengths. Nice fat screws, and keep the joints towards the first and last 1/3 of each row. You can get these reclaimed if you look at the rec’m yards online.

I may chuck it on the Screwfix forum and tell them I’ve fitted this, but the clients won’t pay. lol. I bet 80% of them would bite

I use Paul at underfloor heating trade direct. Used them for over a decade without issue. Give them a call and ask for a price 01925 571999 As above, it’s all pretty much the same stuff with different folks writing / branding on it. @Great_scot_selfbuild I’d lose the fixation of getting so many things from one source, most offerings come in quite underwhelming imho, as the more you add the more diluted the focus and attention to each element there seems to be. The UFH can be laid simply, by yourself if you choose, over a long weekend. Or, get the plumber who’s going to do the rest of the plumbing and engage earlier with them and they can support. On a recent ‘turnkey’ install by certain well known heat pump fitting entity there were a lot of faux pas, client totally unaware, smiling and happy, and a few schoolboy errors when they laid the UFH was the trigger for me to ‘observe a little more closely’ when the HP and UVC was going in. Started laying all the small loops first, so when they got to the large kitchen diner loops they ran short to get one leg back to the manifold, which needed lifting and discarding and replacing with another visit. Caused a delay, with screeders booked in at that point. I was supporting with all ‘other plumbing’ and the electrical arrangement, inc ASHP wiring, so provided a 50mm waste pipe where D2 would connect. The chap just poked a piece of 22mm copper into the 50mm pipe and carried on with the rest of the install. I pointed out that it was connected to the foul sewers so needed to have a waterless trap installed to prevent the stink coming back into the room. He asked if poking rockwool down it would do the same job……? Split this up, and manage each element more effectively is my 2 cents. Panasonic ASHP £3k with controls, cools out of the box and quieter than a mouse sneezing, and a Telford UVC, folk here get good prices from Trevor @ Cylinders2go. Ivar pump / low temp mixer and manifold, if UFH GF + FF, or just a manifold if GF UFH only. Look at the umbrella scheme for the grant, or just keep the costs low so you don’t need to bother jumping through those hoops, with the usually then attracted uplifted costs. Pipe is pretty much pipe. Dont overthink it!

Behind timber you need an uninterrupted airgap, so the fire stop has to be a flat, intumescent strip. It cant be a cheaper rockwool sock in this instance.

18L is a big expansion vessel, so that's just absorbing the expansion and not letting it reflect much in the reading on the pressure gauge. It's all gold mate, as you've done the right thing by over-sizing vs under-sizing, and this will mean you won’t need to top up the pressure as often. My 2 cents is that you can never have too much expansion. Do you know you have to treat the system with inhibitor after these works, to prevent corrosion? Also, do you know you will have to check the system pressure every 3-6 months, or possibly more frequently, as part of switching out from auto-fill from the tanks to regular maintenance of a sealed and pressurised system?

AB give you a price per m2 iirc, so just pick up the phone They don't tax you if you're masonry / leaky etc, they just turn up, do their thing, and vamoose! Really good experience and an amazing result (1.2 test down to high 0.1's)....on a masonry refurb.

A thing of beauty.

I can tell you're unnerved, as you forgot that D comes after C, awwww.....bless. a) Its solid brass, so you need to argue with your wife over something utterly trivial, for a minimum period of 30 mins, then go cut it with a hacksaw with a 32tpi blade. b) use a Hep2o fitting which will allow rotation and be bombproof. Need to see the link to advise further. c1) one isolator is sufficient. 2 is greedy. Put this anywhere where you can get to it. c2) (the rest of us call this a "D" ) as per the video, turn the nut so the belled end goes into the plate, and that then acts like a universal joint so the plate finishes flat and vertical. Remember from a health and safety POV, when you've cut through the thick brass the blade of the hacksaw will be VERY VERY hot, so turn to your missus and say "Can't touch this". Safety first

If you video yourself doing that, step by step, I'll come and fit the (expletive deleted)er myself for free

Apparently, if you move like this, the tap will more or less fit itself.

Shhhhh................. They could be listening.....

Exactly what kit did you buy? Do you have a link to it?

Time to push a bit harder? As long as it still has friction, it'll still function as a marker. It's disposable after that?

You wont have your head up the chimney smelling for #2's It's about the stench from the stench pipe aka SVP wafting into a habitable room.

Fitted a few of these but iirc I had to lengthen them for PH dwellings where the walls were thicker than the tap was long. @Spinny, just put the black bit onto the tap without the bar, to see where it seats. Note the position of the face of the plastic bit. Then put the bar in and put the black bit on the end. Measure the two points, face when planted, and face when out too far, and that's the amount to cut off.

Grinding heads are a consumable of this process. You’d need to explain what you want to do to the hire company, area to grind etc, and ask their advice on the expected mileage of these things, plus the cost.