Nickfromwales

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.

Indeed. Last MBC project, where space was tight, I took the 110mm and converted it to 2x 50mm where it was guaranteed to be dry / just a vent only, and then took the 2x 50’s to the attic space and fitted 2x 50mm AAV’s up there (so they could be accessible). Done this a load of times and it works a treat, including going to 4x 32mm and back to 110mm with an “elephant foot” fitting upside down in the attic / service space, so I could use a 110mm AAV. Also have used 225x25mm ducting to take a vent up within a service batten void (another MBC build) with only 35mm to plant with.

Now I’m the complete opposite. Yes to putting something on the threads, but I always clean the mating faces and that allows the rubber to have friction. This otherwise, in the hands of someone not doing this day in day out, can lead to the rubber just being displaced and ending up in the centre of the fitting doing feck all. Threads yes, mating faces clean and dry for me.

1000%

Take that with a big pinch of salt. Consider what that document is actually telling you, which is that if you stay inside for “a few” days a year, you’ll be clinging to life (not just a little uncomfortable). I had the same argument (robust discussion) with a PH certified architectural practice, and beat the lead architect by 1%. PHPP just focuses on the building, and nigh-on ignores the poor buggers locked inside. This particular client then abandoned the £1k they’d invested in the architects recommended M&E designer and went with me, with said architects blessing. When I finished picking apart their proposal, the chap simply said “if all else fails, then you can just fit 2x AC units and that’ll fix any issues” ffs. The list of faux pas was long. They’re no longer the clients architect…as they politely disengaged soon after, with a boatload of the clients money gone forever. Unfortunately, most folk simply don’t know what lays ahead, but it is very difficult to convey this to someone such as myself, who’s coming from fossil fuel heating in a poor performing current residence, as to the new and different way in which they will find themselves then living. Oh, what a difference there is! Like night and day different. Consider how horrible a summer is in your (and my) current home, and then multiply it x3.

The spade is for me to dig my own hole, if the house floods when he pulls the pump out