HughF

Yeah, the regs/advice is a bit weird concerning r290 in air conditioning units inside the house...

100% worth the risk. I was just commenting that it was brave of the manufacturers to put that sort of product onto the market. The sooner we move away from f-gas the better. I might even buy one to make a DIY heat pump water heater out of.

An R290 split? That's brave..... Most of them are still on R32 because of the risks involved with R290 leaking inside the home. Your fridge freezer has a limited volume of R600 (Butane) for this very reason.

As an aside, I’ve been leaning on the developers of Homely ( a smart temperature controller for heat pumps) to try and get them to add support for the modbus registers in the Cool Energy/SPRSUN units. Then you could have automatic weather comp tuning and load compensation. They haven’t got back to me yet so I might knock something up myself.

Ideally you’d ditch the buffer and allow the heat pump to run direct into the ufh circuit, gaining considerable efficiency there. The industry is moving away from the buffer/llh/plate installation scheme and moving towards direct installations, as a drive to increase efficiency. Plenty of articles from Brendon Uys on LinkedIn about this (and the renewable heating forum) You then wouldn’t have a disconnect between the heat generator and the heat consumer. The issue now present is that unfortunately the Cool Energy unit doesn’t have any idea of room temperature and thus cannot do load compensation. You could however use the room stats to drive the call-for-heat input on the heat pump, and use them as hi-limit stats. Once the weather comp is set correctly then the internal Temperature should stay consistent. The high limit stats would take care of any solar gain. Remember, not many heat pumps actually have load compensation, for some reason. LG and Mitsubishi are the only two that I remember. tl;dr - your weather comp is set too high.

I helped my neighbours pressure test prior to a pour, used air. No risk of freezing during the cold snap. Made up some fittings to connect to my compressor and blew it up to 6 bar.

Dig it up, do it properly…

F**k me your builder is a messy one isn't he....

It is, zooming in I can see the ridges. Although the brass nut and yellow amalgamating tape gave it away.

That's tracpipe....

I’ve never had an issue with compression onto plastic, using the correct inserts. I’ve also never had an issue with compression onto mlcp using euro ones. Nick has had lots of issues with them coming undone or blowing off, hence his recommendation to not use this method. YMMV….

I’m a 16mm mlcp kinda guy and am tooled up to press this and copper. Any benefit of using an mlcp radiator tail (pre bent, single joint under the floor) instead of a bent length of 15mm and a straight coupler under the floor? The only benefit I can see is there’s one less press joint. But the 16mm rad tails are close to £10 each, vs £2.50 for an M to U female/female press adapter. The benefit of using a straight adapter is I can make the 15mm hockey stick long enough to do TBOE to bring the TRV up to a more accessible height. Can’t do that with a pre-bent 16mm tail.

65 deg will be fine, but you’d be a lot better to remove the pump, hook the flow and return up to the manifolds, then throw the rads on the end of the pipe loops. That way your boiler weather/load compensation has control over the flow temp. you can use the existing 16mm pipe, just transition to copper before going into the rad valve.

Given that a dropped kerb is £1500 in Somerset, and that doesn’t even need much digging up of the road, £23k for the whole package of a new sewer connection doesn’t seem so bad.

You should use an insuduct mdpe hockey stick for this.

Could you not provide the required secondary treatment in a much smaller package by building a percolating filter? That’s what we’ve got as a second stage after our septic. Ours is 4ft cubed, blockwork, with and in at the top and and out at the bottom. Ours uses a coke bed but I understand that nowadays injection moulded plastic biofilm carriers are abailable.

Yep, sensible. Given that we have to replace the manhole/inspection chamber at one end of the run anyway… it would be a lot easier to work that manhole in new 110mm pvc.

It will be at least 1000 below the finished floor level. It’s probably at 600 below ground now and I’ve got 400 to come up, at least. My main concern was, given the age, is it better to disturb it, replace with new then have one flexible connection buried at our boundary. Or is it better to leave it well alone, don’t disturb the joints between the salt glazed and worry about replacement if it collapses in the future?

Footings will be 1m deep, probably and we’ll be building over them in two places. Everyone else on this terrace has built over theirs and bridged them in line with the Wessex/Bristol water requirements, even though we’re on a private (Aster) treatment plant. They’ll be hand dug around those areas. My builders (who used to live next door and did a rear extension 2-3yrs ago) usually hand dig their footings on extensions although I’ll be doing the bulk of the excavation with my small machine on this one, mainly to save a bit on their day rate, and to save their backs. A mixture of stone and clay.

Having spent an entire day unclogging a blocked soil stack that was boxed in, inside my brother-in-laws house, I’d definitely want that sort of thing outside of my house. We were 10 mins away from ripping out the kitchen cupboards to expose the stack when I managed to get it clear.

I guess we’ll stick with things as they are then…

Sand/cement and paint every time… the modern renders look terrible after a few years.

Would it be wise to replace the sewer that we are about to build over given it’s age and the fact we’re the start of the run? Some background, we’re an end of terrace, with the poo stack at the front corner of the house. It travels down the side of the house where the toilet and surface gulley trap from the outhouse join, then turns a 90 and runs along the back of the terrace. We’re planning a single storey rear extension this year, and are planning to knock down the existing outhouse (single skin, cast it situ roof) and replace with a 2 storey side extension in the future. As such we’ll end up bridging the rear run with out footings in two place and then pouring our concrete floor slab directly over the top of the run which is about 3ft out from the back wall of the house. The existing sewer is salt glazed and dates from ‘46. It’s working fine but the manholes need rebuilding and the pipe is D sectioned due to buildup. Is this a prime case of ‘if you have to ask the question then you already know the answer’?

Change out of £5.5k for me, and that includes a full slab of new rads. Most stuff came from eBay of marketplace though

Paging @Marvin who has a cool energy 9kW unit on his flat roof.