Nickfromwales

If you carry on, I'll buy another £5 worth of capital letters to tell you to fcuk off We're making progress, stop with the negative waves, baby.

Not the same sorry, so NO! You immersion will fizz away loudly as it superheats the water around it. An ASHP buffer receives heated water silently via the coil. If the pump is next to it you get the minute whir from the pump, maybe a small gurgle or rush of water when it starts up, but nothing like the chaos of an F-gas compressor. If the pump was remote ( away from the buffer at the external monoblock which it may well be ) then the cylinder will be near silent during operation. Where the pump that circulates water from the buffer to the rads will be something for zoot to discuss with his installers to see if they can locate it anywhere other than that bedroom. If it's a guest bedroom then no need to shit the bed afaic

There was a trail of pastry crumbs….. Pasty apparently.

Did you keep in touch, or did he never call?

Indeed, but it will require more and more manipulation and effort to maximise the return. Quote from the CAB webpages.... "Consumers could benefit from lower prices under time of use tariffs, particularly if they can shift their electricity use. But there are risks that the complexity of these tariffs could lead to higher costs for consumers. As the consumer advocate, we wanted to understand these potential benefits and risks. There is a lack of evidence about how willing consumers in the UK would be to adopt these tariffs and whether they actually reduce costs. "

Chats with folk in the industry, plus the constant dealings with DNO's and costs for new connections and costs for fortifications etc. Stinks of the UK public forking out and the energy companies dropping the dragnet to get that money from anywhere but their own coffers.

When ToU tariffs start to decrease in value or disappear, the battery maths will go with them. With big ( or huge ) batteries ( 13.5 or the +10 ( 23.5 ) bolt-on posse ) there will need to be, IMO, a fair bit of babysitting needing doing for those ~3 months of solar discontent eg so they do not charge and discharge off the grid. As soon as those economics thin out, driving the battery full and empty each day with anything other than excess PV will be a very poor equation. Other domestic battery offerings with 'winter mode', which can hibernate for up to 5 months of the year ( warrantied and guaranteed to do so ), will inevitably become the then-prized possessions. The biggest question has to be, what will come of L/S ToU tariffs of course. Anybody here in the process of being given E10 / E7 / Octopus Go! etc and been given / promised a contract to proceed?

Quality! lol. Your secret is safe with me and the other 8,000 members. Mums the word. ?

Errr, with the movement he stated eg gaps opening and closing?!

You'll do £40k and then another £40k going properly off grid. Work your best at whittling the cable price down and bite the bullet. you 100% need to get a 3-phase cable in now, as an all-electric house, +PV, +EV or 2x EV will not bode well off a single phase. Get the quote adjusted and see what they come back with, but I would look LONG and HARD before going truly off-grid. Batteries will last 10 years or less,so factor in their decline and demise / recycling / replacement in a 30 year proposal to get some real figures. Space heating will never run off PV unless you've a huge array, huge battery storage, a genny, and an LPG boiler for backup heat input + DHW. Off grid = multiples of £10k''s and a life enslaved to maintenance and monitoring. No ta. Buy the cable.

Ok if you can gain 3" of height at the ridge, or compress the height of the 1st floor spaces? The 3" has to come from somewhere??

No idea whatsoever lol. But.... I will know when next updated by my PV partners / Solarwatt and I will update here as and when Lower output panel upgrades are from Q2 but not sure when the big boys roll out yet. Watch this space !

A bit of news would be that SolarWatt are upgrading their solar PV panel range, with the best one soon to be available with a whopping 540kWp.

We’ll get there, eventually…..

Would you buy that car again, or would you buy a better one with a better crash test ( NCAP ) rating? VW Golf for example. Cheap as chips, strong as an Ox, great NCAP rating. We digress……… Anyhoo. Where’s Zoot? I cannot move onto the next life without sorting this first. The 21 virgins are starting to get impatient though!!

ABS? Airbags?

Ok. The defrost cycle requires heat to be conveyed from one place to the other. So; To heat your house the external heat exchanger ( big box with fans that lives outside ) is utilised to collect low grade heat energy from outside air. That is collected and transported by the F-gas in the gas lines which travel from that external box to the internal compressor unit ( inside the bedroom ) eg the unit where all the current noise and pain emanates from. The F-gas goes into the compressor and it chugs away producing the higher grade heat which is then pumped around your radiators and DHW tank to make them ‘hot’. That is “heating mode”. So, after doing heating mode for a long time in adverse external conditions the external heat exchanger starts to get so cold it starts to freeze up, continuing to do so until the brain box realises this and takes action. This is called “defrost mode”. In defrost mode the whole process is reversed. The water gets circulated around the heating system so the heat energy in that water, even if it’s cold, can be sent to the internal compressor unit to have that heat energy sucked back out. That heat energy gets converted and sent back to outside via the F-gas lines to the external heat exchanger. That elevated gas temp in the external heat exchanger causes it to melt the ice. The brain box waits until the F-gas temps tell it that icing is no longer present and the system resets. If there is still call for heating it will then do the whole process over again……possibly more than once per evening. If it is doing this when heating is turned off then it’s a design or software fcuk up, plain and simple. Nothing external with an F-gas heat exchanger needs antifreeze to prevent ‘freezing’ and there is no need for frost protection as outside air temps won’t make a toss of difference to this system / cause damage in extreme weather ( if as I said the heating demand is off at that time ). Regardless of whether the external unit is at 0oC or lower, the system should not boot up to to ‘defrost’ it, as that is not necessary. If the heating was called for at that time, whilst the external heat exchanger is Baltic cold, the brain box would just check to see if the F-gas temp suggests the external unit is indeed an ice cube and would then initiate a defrost cycle and initiate that reverse of heat energy flow as above ( eg start your radiator pump circuiting water to steal that heat for the purpose of defrosting the external heat exchanger ). To now answer your actual question. The water in your heating circuit MUST circulate in defrost mode. If it didn’t then the internal compressor would just absorb the heat energy in the slug of water that was in that heat exchanger and then have no more access to the heat energy from the heating circuit water. You see it must circulate that water, or when in reverse ( aka defrost mode ) it would have nowhere to get the required heat from to send back outside via the noisy compressor. I have not gone balls deep in scientific facts here, so the rest of you don not nit-pick please!! Ok #2. This unit and all its ugly attributes, characteristics and annoyances will be leaving, ( if you just give the order ), so essentially this was a waste of my time typing out. However; As you felt hard done by with some of the previous comments, ( and I genuinely apologise if any of mine actually offended or upset you in any way, I was just trying to add some joviality in my own ‘quirky’ way ), I have made this final effort to try to help you move on with your life snd to understand how the current sack of shit is functioning. I highly expect you to reply to say that at 02:54 there was no need for this to go into defrost mode, and none of this should be happening, but I honestly don’t care anymore about what your current setup is doing because it needs ripping out and binning. Simples. It’s already dead and buried afaic so PLEASE move forwards and end this madness. I would have used more capital letters but one of my previous replies used up my 2022 quota of capitals……so, to type the above I had to buy a £5 add-on to my capital letter allowance. Hope I don’t need another lot until my allowance refreshes 01 jan 2023….. sorry, not enough left for a capital j in jan. Get the new system fitted. For the love of Christ.

You can check with their tech dept and see if they’ll allow you to introduce a 6mm aggregate to the mix. With A38 you can, and it’s mixed on site with a paddle mixer so you just add as you go. I can ask my screed guy for you if you like? I mentioned using A38 on a previous project ( walk on in 45 mins, and lay ceramic tiles in 4 hours !!! ) and he mentioned another product which he said was better again. Can’t remember the name of it for the life of me, sorry.

You’re decking the floor twice then though? It doesn’t get much simpler than alu plates, tbh, but if you’re DIY’ing then do what you feel most comfortable with. You using that ground and 1st floors? Or just 1st?

Engineering will tell you that the deflection is ‘fine’ which means it’s to the maximum that you will tolerate. That’s not a good standard to strive for in your own dwelling No probably about it. Been in houses that have been built both ways and the difference is massive, not slight. Folk should also remember that if they want to use alu spreader plates for UFH they need 400mm centres.

??.Have you asked for pozi joists @ 400mm centres instead of 600mm? Makes a HUGE difference in the bounce in the floors. If it was my house I’d also ask for extra strong-backs on the longest spans. Pennies in timber, priceless in results.

There will be plenty left to do, trust me. You'll just have started to hate the process by the time you've got to the 'nice bits'. Some like the journey.....others prefer the destination. Horses for each of those courses. Just sometimes the horse is only fit for the glue factory because it's too knackered at the end

If you buy one with an electronic brain vs hydro-mechanical, you can move the regen to 03:00 so it's done when you're fast asleep

This is just such a no-brainer. Watched a TF company put a 300m2 build up, including passive raft foundation, all to passive standards, in 31 days. AT score was 0.27 ACH. If you want the satisfaction of self-building, go for ICF ( just not Velox ffs ), but if you want your sanity and marriage in one piece go turnkey TF. By the time you've buggered off to choose your bathrooms / kitchens and floor coverings, the house will be most of the way up.