Nickfromwales

E7 and E10, along with other LToU and SToU tariffs will soon disappear for new customers / those wanting to switch. The banging of the industry drum(s) is not a pleasant sound atm.

If this is an MCS registered installation and you have a FiT agreement, you are NOT allowed to touch the existing panels, inverter or meter, other than to replace like for like in the event of a failure. Technically you can swing past the FiT generation / export meter and do as you say by feeding into the garage CU, but it is the greyest of grey areas. If you break the agreement, expect some severe consequences. FYI if your solar panels are 300w each, you are ONLY allowed to replace a failed unit(s) with 300w or less. 305w replacement is illegal. Basically delete this thread and do as your first suggestion.

The only way is up in this instance.

Already clearly stated in my previous boss!!!

Thanks for the fresh replies here, all very current and relevant to folk favouring ditching gas or building an ‘all electric’ house…….

NOPE. It is night and day different. A question; @zoothorn......nobody else......... "Do you understand, for once and for all, that the new system is a monoblock and not a split, ergo the noise from the internal compressor that has offended you to date, will then live OUTSIDE in the monoblock itself?" Do you understand and accept that? Please only reply with a one word answer.....stating either the word "yes" or the word "no". One word, not a single other vowel.

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OK. The buffer tank is a hot water vessel, simply full of water, zero mechanical or moving parts NONE, ZILCH, NIL, NADA. Get the old noisy unit out of your head, keep it off this thread, WE HAVE MOVED ON!!! The most you will have where this buffer is, is a circulation pump and possibly a motorised 2 port zone valve, one near silent, one totally silent. Noise is NO LONGER an issue. Even if there is a defrost cycle, it will only involve the ASHP sucking warm water back out of the buffer, which will be no more audible than when it is in normal ( quiet ) heating mode. The new equipment is completely different to the original, the original being a split ASHP with a remote ( internal ) compressor unit ( which was your nemesis ), but the new unit is a monoblock with the compressor outside with it. EVERYTHING that makes noise IS OUTSIDE. This is the most amount of capital letters I have used in a single post since helping to start this forum, so.......read, digest, understand, move forwards. We herby set sail form new ( quieter ) waters. You can request, of the new installers, that the secondary ( buffer ) pump ( if there is to be one at the buffer ) is located elsewhere in your dwelling, eg away from the bedroom. IF you mention the old system and it's associated noises etc again, I am going to send the boys 'round to duff you up, ok We're moving forwards, away from the old shite. The management.

The buffer is just a water tank. No noise, no moving parts other than possibly a circulation pump. Do you seriously have literally nowhere for this to go?

I reckon 2 pints of medium strength ale on Friday and you’ll be on the roof yanking the slates off on the Saturday morning. Mark my words, there’s a shit-storm-a-coming with electricity costs. Going to throw all this into a spin. PV price ( for supply ) will inevitably follow.

Solarcrest seemed to do a very good job on the last install I saw them do, with a spray on internal airtight layer to take a stone cottage to AT. No experience of them doing a cavity wall tbh. GreenEnergy was down to which team came out. 1st team with them was a disaster, and the very good second team ( sent out to rectify the train wreck the 1st team created ) struggled to retrospectively pull it out of the shit. Now an expensive compromise, since made better by clients own patching and cutting, and diligent trades on site further reinforcing those works by filling gaps as they go with gun grade ( illbruck 330 ) closed-cell foam by hand.

At the least, put redundant D/C 4mm or 6mm singles in now and run them from the roof to the plant room in anticipation.

Bite the bullet now. You will kick yourself afterwards, even more so if the outbuilding isn't an 'immaculate' elevation eg to max out the 4kWp. Scaffold costs alone will piss you off if you don't. Just install the panels and the trays now, 2-3kWp on the house if it helps, and install the rest 1-2kWp on the outbuilding roof later, when you've completed and you know if you can stretch to it. FYI, you CANOT temporarily connect the PV up to a CU which has not been signed off anyways, if you're going MCS installer ( highest cost route but export payments can be had that way ) so you'll not miss not having the inverter etc in right now as they'll not connect it up immediately anyways. We've done 2 installs recently which have panels on the outbuildings as well as the house and we've simply ducted the D/C cable(s) back to the single inverter in the house ( to reduce costs and complexity ). Working very well.

We're already in talks with Mr Kipling, to manage the expected rise in demand for humble pie.......

Don't forget ducts for cables, if not already in A more modest sized array could just feed into the shed CU. Size the SWA accordingly.

Midnight to midnight eg 24/7/365. 30p? It's most definitely where the consumer market is heading for the purchase price of domestic electricity. Sadly, in 3-5 years we'll likely be north of 35p/unit, or above. Look at fuel prices at the pump.....they push, we smile ( through helpless gritted teeth ), and just pay. Pending huge costs for improvements and fortification of the grid has to come from somewhere, and guess where that cost will be pointed at? Elderly and poorer folk look out. Solar PV.........."Fail to prepare, prepare to fail". We all use electricity in considerable quantities, we all have roofs. Most are suitable for the installation of at least 1kWp of self fit ( via electrician ) PV which will serve us well whilst we are in work paying for the rest of what we use. Calculate the vampire / daytime base-loads that are happening whilst the house is vacated each day, and aim for that as a minimum. Remember that an electrician can assist you in DIY'ing a grid-tied PV system, but without MCS accreditation you CANNOT claim the export payments of ~5.2p/unit . If just installing enough to cover base loads, then no need for MCS as you would be pretty much a self-consumer and theres nothing stopping you diverting any excess into an immersion heater to bolster DHW etc ergo you would not care about not getting the export payments and can then save on any unnecessary elevations to the capital cost of such an installation. DIY all the way then!! Regarding A/C batteries? Deffo. People who already have larger sized ( 7.2kWh and above ) grid-hungry A/C coupled batteries will literally be disconnecting them when they become faced with no cheap rate overnight grid power to make up the winter deficit. Options then would be to manually 'tend to their winter needs' by maintaining the state of charge and cycling simply to preserve the cell life for those generation shy periods of the year. They still make sense inn summer, but winter is about to get extra chilly in the respects of A/C storage ( essentially named so as it is supposed to store excess and not be fed from the grid, due to the then nonsensical economics of cost vs lifespan and losses of throughput ). Solar PV revenue is around 25-30% max over the depths of winter, and we're already not in the sunniest country in the world to start with, so prepare yourselves for this flat rate AFAIC. Assuming batteries will charge from anything other than grid during winter, especially for retiree's / folk who work from home eg savvy users with larger self-consumption figures, there will be zip left to go into them. D/C will be the way forward then, and I am awaiting Solarwatt to return their D/C offering back to the domestic market, new and improved, before I then invest myself ( as they are rated and guaranteed to 'hiberante at their lowest DoD for long periods of time ). PV on mine next year hopefully, batteries to follow as and when. We digress...... anyways......when has that ever stopped us Then go for that after the dust has settled. Install enough to cover the daily base loads, as I describe above, and then at least you remove the daily grind from your electricity usage with minimum capital expenditure. A colleague installed 4x 250w second hand panels on his roof, and I was seriously impressed with what they were chucking out each day. Really put a dent in his daily import.

It means each pair of pipes from / back to the manifold. So, one continuous piece of pipe has a flow connection to one manifold rail, and same for the return. Each pair of connections forms a "loop". 3 loops in your dining room for eg would require a 3 port manifold ( which would have 6 individual connections, 3 flow and 3 return ).

Agreed, but at least we'd all be too pissed to give a feck about warped wooden floors that we laid to early. "Bring your own booze", to coin a phrase recently quoted by the media..........

Budget for midnight to midnight at 30p/kWh. That's the likelihood, and how I'm basing all my current proposals. A/C coupled battery systems will soon be boat anchors all winter long, especially when they bottom out and want some charge from the grid.

With a typical 4kwp array consuming around 26-28m2, and an assumed cost of £100p/m2 for supply and fit of slates, you'd have had a hypothetical credit note of north of £2.5k from the roof costs savings with an in-roof array. Shame, as that roof was crying out for PV. £30k of uplift must be a bitter pill though, so spend wisely from here on-in. FWIW, I would go 75mm additional on the under-roof ceilings and 30mm on the walls, if on the walls at all tbh. Heat rises, and your walls are not too shabby now! In absolute honesty, if you have ~£5k sat on the desk wanting spending, and the scaffolding is still up, I'd get the slate ripper out and put a PV system in without a second thought. I would definitely NOT be getting hung up on the heat loss "horrors" that you are mentioning above, just based on seeing some snow melting. Get the steel beam boxed in 50-75mm minimum of PIR, sealed with illbruck air-seal foam, no voids left whatsoever, and EVERY bit of your airtightness detailing done, and THEN reassess. You'll have little to none of the issues you are seeing now if the heat isn't rising and escaping without any real resistance, so you've basically got a chimney there atm until AT works have been done.

Thank you for bringing some sanity to this thread. OK. Firstly it would be, in no way, shape or form, the responsibility of the MVHR supplier to advise you on timelines for you installing floor coverings or any such correlation between that and the amount of humidity that is in the house OR how you manage that!! That would be the responsibility of you, or your M&E consultant, and for them to liaise with your PM to make sure that is strategized BEFORE even choosing or installing such systems. They wouldn't stand by your front door checking if you've got a brolly if it was a rainy day...... Switching on your MVHR before your painting and decorating, second fix woodwork, kitchens and bathrooms are all installed is suicide. HIRE A DEHUMIDIFIER.

Is the slab exposed atm? Are you using an ASHP? Either way, you really do not want to waste the funds and treat with ( expensive ) treatments until the point it’s purged and filled for the last time.

+1.

No issues there at all. “Carry on!”

So that involves installing UFH in a car garage, with significant point loads and movement from shuffling vehicles around, lifting on trolley jacks etc, sooooo, lots of cost putting at least 80-90mm of 10mm concrete mix down with next to no insulation? The recovered heat energy from the ground loops would be so negligible it would fall flat afaic, so your requisite for a "background heat of 10oC" would likely need a supply temp into UFH of north of 20oC after the delta between floor and emitter has been input to the equation. Also you'd need LOTS of the heat energy so LOTS of brine loop in huge trenches all 1000mm deep and 1500mm min apart for each pair of ground collection pipes. I do like the idea, it's just the sheer scale of this that has to provoke a reality check. The real issue would be spending good money on a failed experiment, and to not have any funds for the second attempt. Can you get a winter-long supply of dry enough wood to burn? I'd seriously look at a wood burning stove with back boiler or a second hand log gasification boiler and a TS connected to some massive ( second hand if possible ) radiators, plus the de-Strat fans. Put the WBS into a masonry cave with a bent ( curved ) sheet of stainless behind it, set back a couple of foot, to reflect the emitted heat forward only. Some internal space around it for seasoning would then ensure cheap ( green ) wood can be bought in and dried in-house to further reduce fuel costs. Electricity is soon to flatline at 30+ p/kwh and economy tariffs will fizzle out, so any direct electricity based solution will end up being far too expensive to run during the day. You can get away with quite low temp at high volume, so if you go for fan coil units you can literally just blow the warmed air directly towards yourself, so one big ASHP running at 40oC flow temp could tick the boxes with you strategizing which FCU you used subject to where you were working ( say 2 units on wheels connected to flexis which you could turn and point ). It's cost on cost whichever way you cut this, simply due to the size of the building, so the biggest focus here should be on what will be cost effective long term, so it has to be insulation and draughtproofing, so you keep whatever warmth you create inside the building. Insulation is pointless unless you go for at least 2 big de-Strat fans up high. If seasoned wood can be sourced reliably, initially, then that ( or anything else suitable that could go in a WBS ) would be my choice. Obtaining cheap / unwanted problematic green ( wet ) wood and then seasoning it yourself going forward would help keep costs down in the future.