Nickfromwales

Kudox radiators are B&Q / screwfix rubbish. Avoid the touching of, with a barge-pole.... Paint is wafer thin and they chip / damage easily. There's much better out there for not much more money

I'd be a little concerned that the roof style 'may' let a little rain in on the other side? Did the architect sell you this design as 'open plan'?

I normally bring them up tight to the plasterboard, as you can always find a way to bring the fitting forward, but not so easy to move the pipe set into the floor back...

There are several manufacturers now offering ‘super silent’ units for areas that require it.

Thoughts still are; 1) you don’t need this setup. 2) see point 1. Get a cheap ASHP ( LOW TEMP ) off the ‘net to do space heating / cooling, and link your pv up to dump any excess into DHW.

Trevor at Cylinders2go will give you a good price too, if you want a comparison. He did a group purchase discount a while back for the forum posse

That's one i did a while back. 14kW HT split, feeding 2x eHeat + 1x HW ( all size 9 ), load-shifting off E10 into high temp emitters ( standard convector radiators ) in a poor performance dwelling. For this instance i totally understood the remit and the above system complimented the job perfectly. For a hose with low temp emitters I think it needs to be revisited. Without all of the details I cannot comment absolutely, so any other info would be good.

I admire the guys enthusiasm, but is this not just a re-make of the old 'bath / basin' setup of cylinders in the 70's where if you wanted hand / dish wash through the day you fed into the top loaded immersion, and if you wanted a bath you flicked the switch for the lower mounted immersion and then heated the old tank. I'd be very interested in how much this "new technology" costs vs a standard UVC with an upper and lower immersion + additional stat pocket....

PV based systems should store excess, so I’m a little confused by your question. PV doesn’t lend electricity to DHW, it has to be diverted there. For eg; If PV is generating 4kw of juice and the house is looking for 1kW then you’ll have 3kW going begging ( so it'll fulfil the needs of a typical 3kW immersion heater ) whereas 2kw from the roof would give a 1+1 divide, as the house would not ‘switch off’ to allow the full 2kw to go to DHW. The house ( your base load ) will be a constant and will be the first thing to suckle from the CU, regardless of where the energy is coming from, so managing control / diversion needs to be fully understood “Direct PV heating” would be for eg a DC immersion fed only from the DC PV panels, with the AC side of the house on the grid mains, or DC panels into an AC inverter that is not grid tied ( eg to a dedicated device only ). @AnonymousBosch, you’re going to have to buy something for DHW, so why so worried about the SA? A lot of people have them and they’re working fine. Unvented cylinders aren’t without problems / failures, vented are useless without a pump or a CWS tank up in the clouds, so what gives? Maybe the question should he asked directly to Sunamp; ”Will you carry spares?”, so I’ll ask Simples.

Future proofing is never a bad shout. @TerryE Wait until Monday if you can, and I’ll make some calls. When exactly did you buy the units?

Are the Sunamps to be heated by the ASHP?

Hi and welcome to the forum. The unit can be fitted by a ‘reasonably competent’ individual, and the controllers are pre-assigned to the type of unit ( hot water only / hot water + gas boiler etc ) prior to dispatch. If you’re having difficulties still send me a PM and I’ll see what I can do to help. Do you have your own plumbers / electricians?

A size 9 unit ( ~10.5kW actual ) lends itself to managing your DHW water use and deciding how / when you have to boost it with grid. My proposal to go to a size 12 unit ( ~14kWh actual ) will have much more space to store energy, allow for the drain from the HRC, and guarantee that you’ll be fine to charge once a day from low rate electricity ( allowing you to downscale the size of your intended PV array too ). At 5p/ unit with Octopus, plus the ( iirc ) 5.2p export tariff ( available now ) this would work out the best bang for your buck. PV won’t cut it all year round, but grid is constant ( at least as long as the supplier is in business ) but consumer deals for buying electric should get better with EVs becoming more popular ( or even mandatory ) and suppliers having to lend themselves to more sensible ( dare I say ‘consumer friendly’ tariffs. Having additional headroom in the capacity of the SA also means more energy can be harvested in times of plenty, for use when maybe the PV output the following day is poor. £300 well spent imho, as you’re paying for the smaller unit and installation anyway. When given this option a lot of people are going for it. Cheaper than lithium storage and a much longer lifespan / near zero service & repair, so economics wise, for dumping excess PV or load-shifting, a good option afaic.

Hi @Roz Reading through this screamed STOP! with the uber-complex electric inline heaters etc / CU upgrade / faff / more faff / crap flow rate etc, and begs for a hot feed to be taken from the ( already going to be there any way, wink wink ) SA unit in the house. I’d put a hot return circuit in too, timed or switched on with occupancy. A really well insulated pipe run would have negligible heat losses ( some on here say that would be excessive, I say not ) so pursue the hot feed from the house route with both hands. As @PeterW says, run a 110mm pipe and terminate it above DPC level both ends so water cannot get in and fill it. Buy a coil of 15mm Hep2o and a cool of 10mm Hep2o and run those two inside one piece of 25mm wall 22mm internal diameter pipe insulation and tape both along the seam, and around the pipe ( mummify it ). To clarify, the 15 and 10mm pipes sit tight together inside the same single piece of insulation. 72mm total outside diameter, and you’ll still have room for a cat6, a 5-core flex for signal ( switch for the hot return ) and an uninsulated cold 15mm Hep2o pipe too. Trench / duct / pipe pull can be done in a day. Back fill the trench after you’ve tested the plumbing for leaks, but tbh with continuous runs from house to studio you’d have to have done something very wrong to have any issues. Beef the SA unit up to a size 12, you’d need a size 9 minimum anyway, and it only adds £300 to upsize ), go onto Octopus Energy, get 5p / p / kWh from 00:30 to 04:30 and heat the size 12 unit once a day. Cheaper than burning natural gas, no maintenance/ inspection, and will massively reduce fatigue on the boiler. You could actually just go for a heat only / system boiler, and use that to top up, but I’d not do that if it were me. I’d keep both heat exchangers in the SA for DHW to max the flow rate out as you’ll then have a few outlets requiring DHW from the one SA unit. Sorted.

Hi James, welcome to the forum. The first question has to be, “will that UFH system heat my rooms?” A decent UFH supplier will do heat loss calls for you for a small fee and tell you what heat ( watts per square metre ) the UFH would need to provide to keep the temp at 21 degrees when it’s -5 outside. Anything below that and you’d need auxiliary heating to supplement the UFH. Buyer beware!! 100% take all the floors up. Staple some nylon pallet strap to the underside of the joists to make a cradle for loose ( fluffy ) mineral wool insulation to be dropped in between the joists. Full full those voids and enjoy some much better insulation values for not too much money. Draught-proofing the ventilated space is a no no, but sealing the floor / joists to the walls at the top to stop that draught getting into the house is a great way to reduce heat loss, and therefore the above measures may well bring you into the realms of UFH being viable. If you intend to go this path, many in here have installed Wunda products ( I have fitted the same for many clients ) and if you commit to buy from them they will do the full design and calculations for you and compile the materials list to suit. Takes a lot of the unknowns away then, and you can instantly see if UFH will suffice. Even if you can scrape by without the added Insulaton / draught-proofing you’d be mad not to do it ( depending upon how long you wish to stay at the property of course ). The room thermostat for the spaces served by UFH needs to be chosen well, with a hysteresis of .2-.5 degrees C maximum. Do NOT use a standard rotary room stat or you’ll go from hot > cold > hot > cold with the resulting over & under shoots that you’d get from a room stat with even as much as a 1 degree swing. You can just fit spreader plates atop the joists, see Winda’s website for examples, but an Insulaton board system will interrupt cold bridging from the floor joists and improve things further. Forget leaving a draughty cold air blowing around under your UFH as that’ll suck away a lot of heat, and the resulting infiltration could render UFH ineffective. The downstairs bedroom radiator will need to be on the UFH zone valve & controls ( not on the manifold, just fed with heat from the boiler, teed off the pipes that feed the manifold AFTER the UFH zone valve ) and will require a TRV to stop that bedroom from overheating. As for a buffer, you could maybe get away with fitting a monster of a radiator in the hallway ( if the hall / stairs / landing ) are open plan, and run that radiator as a bypass rad, and even better if you can do a bathroom towel radiator as a bypass too. It’s mainly to get some extra primary system volume which should deal with short cycling enough to negate a buffer. Either that or a small buffer tank in the airing cupboard so the waste heat keeps the Y-fronts toasty. Fabric first, heating system design second

Thank you.

@ryder72 is free to respond to that via pm. This will not become a pissing contest on open form on buildhub ok, so please wind things in chaps. Mods.

Cables are cheap, and reliable, with no moving parts If it’s a new install, cables every day of the week. Reto fit / upgrade, then quinetic switches are the mutts nuts. Very reliable.

Always one step ahead....

As in, tired and bedraggled. aka easily confused ?

Ed, I was tired ok Confusion is prevalent when you've had a day grouting in temps over 24 degrees. 2 heads are always better than one, so if you persist, I promise to learn Tired of Wales.

Did somebody call my name........?

JTM have good prices so +1. I still use my local merchant wherever possible as I like to support smaller businesses whenever it isn't daft to do so. I just carry barrier, so I'm not constantly double-checking which type of pipe to fit ( or then fitting the wrong one without realising ), and also less waste / stock to carry.

indeed, far less complex than an UVC.