Jeremy Harris

The snag with that is the bandwidth the thing will use when you aren't listening to the audio from it. If you have enough broadband capacity for this not to be a concern, then this is fine, but I prefer being able to shut the stream off when I'm not listening to it, as our broadband isn't that great and there are times when we need all the bandwidth we can get. The other thing with leaving the stream on is that there's a reasonable chance that it will just stop. One thing that bugs me with internet radio in general (and as well as the Pi Zero we have a Roberts internet radio) is that the stream can just glitch from time to time. The Roberts recovers from stream glitches within 30 seconds or so, the Pi Zero needs rebooting to recover (takes around 30 seconds too). This doesn't happen that often, but often enough that if I had to fire up a PC and log in to the thing to get it running again it would annoy the living daylights out of me. Turning it off and on again is the lesser of two evils, and something I may well fix sometime by detecting the stream going down and making it automatically restart.

Some people really couldn't care less about the EPC, as long as the house gets signed off as complying with building regs. That may well have been the case for this house, and perhaps neither the architect or client thought that a decent EPC was worth aiming for. IIRC, the architect was the same chap that did the GD bungalow conversion on the IoW. That wasn't particularly energy efficient either, as I recall. The IoW is a bit of an unusual place, IMHO. We spent a week there looking at plots, simply because there seemed to be quite a few affordable plots on the island. The prices there seemed to bear no comparison with those just a few miles away on the mainland. It's a bit like a time warp, though, and we gained the impression that the island was like living ten or twenty years in the past.

Depends how you want to control it, or whether you need to control it at all, really. I just wanted a simple device that had no controls and needed no form of interface to work. All mine does is start playing Radio 4 (could be any stream you like) shortly after it's powered up. I didn't need a built-in interface (which would cost far more than all the other components put together), and definitely didn't want to have to power up a PC, tablet or whatever just to listen to the radio, so I opted not to go for something like Pi Musicbox, just to keep things really simple. It doesn't get much simpler than just having something come on when you turn the power on.

Not sure what Pi that is, TBH, but here's the parts needed to build a pretty cheap internet radio with hifi quality audio (you'll need a 5 V power supply) Pi Zero, £4.66: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero Micro USB to Ethernet adapter, £3.30: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5-Pin-micro-usb-2-0-to-RJ45-LAN-ethernet-network-adapter-100mbps-for-tablet-AL/264224644254?hash=item3d85041c9e%3Ag%3Ad5sAAOSw2gNb6UVs&LH_BIN=1 Phat DAC, £13.25: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/phat-dac Header, £1.00: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/male-40-pin-2x20-hat-header?variant=10476117383 You'd also need a micro SD card, 2Gb is plenty big enough to take Stretch Lite.

The audio out on the bigger Pi is pretty rubbish, IIRC it's not got a DAC, but just uses PWM to generate audio. The cheap Pi Zero doesn't have even the crude audio that the bigger Pi has, but the Pi Zero W only costs £9.30 and the Phat DAC £13.25, so even with the cost of the header it's still cheaper than buying a Pi Model 3 at £34.00. I wrote up the stuff I used to get a single channel internet radio running, it seems (getting old, forgot I'd documented it!): Note that if using Windows you need to use a text editor that can create Unix-like text files. Notepad++ works well and is free. PS: Note also that Unix-like text files don't format properly in the quote function of this forum. Here it is as a code insert (note that the SSID and password needs the inverted commas around them): ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev update_config=1 country=GB network={ ssid="your network SSID" psk="your network PSK password" key_mgmt=WPA-PSK } PPS: If you have wired Ethernet, then you can use a USB to Ethernet adapter plugged in to the µUSB port on the cheaper Pi Zero (rather than the Pi Zero W). The Pi Zero is a fiver, IIRC.

Just done this, built a single-channel, line out audio, internet radio, using a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a Phat DAC audio board. When powered up it just connects to BBC Radio 4 via wifi and starts playing the stream, which feeds into the audio system. The quality is pretty good, the only slight snag is that it takes around 30 seconds or so for the Zero W to boot up and connect to the stream. I've probably scribbled down the details of the script I used somewhere, but if I didn't I can always SSH into the thing and copy it off.

I would guess that the builder/architect/project manager just didn't bother to make sure that the data provided to the assessor was accurate. The absence of an air test figure for a house that should definitely have had one, I believe, seems every bit as odd as the high energy consumption figure. I made sure that the data I provided was as accurate as it could be, just to make sure that the EPC was also accurate. Given that assessors don't visit completed houses, but rely on being sent the right data, there seems to be plenty of scope for things to go awry if the person sending the assessor the data doesn't understand the significance of some aspects of it, and the need for accuracy.

Seems to be the full as-built EPC, as it states that it's a new dwelling.

The result does look really odd to me. The design seems to have pretty reasonable U values for the wall, roof and floor (0.15 W/m.K², 0.12 W/m.K² and 0.11 W/m.K² respectively), reasonably good glazing from the look of it, yet wasn't air tested, so we have no idea how airtight it is.

Looking at the as-built EPC it seems that the GSHP was included in the SAP worksheet, but as there was no air test (seems odd to me, I wonder why it wasn't air tested?) it looks like the default air leakage rate was used.

Both MVHR and a heat pump will make a difference, by reducing the primary energy use, in the case of the heat pump, and by decreasing the heating requirement in the case of the MVHR.

The link in my sig below goes to our build blog, which has lots of photos of the build. The link directly to the frame erection entry is: http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/10/part-eighteen-a-house-in-4-12-days/

We built a 1 1/2 storey timber frame, and the really big advantage for us, building in winter, was that it took 4 1/2 days from the moment the frame truck arrived to the moment that the house was erected and waterproof. The truck arrived at 08:00 on Tuesday morning, and the house was watertight by midday on Saturday of the same week. Had we been building in summer this may not have been so useful, but having the house watertight quickly in winter was a big bonus, and allowed us to crack on with the build through some pretty foul weather.

Doesn't really matter if it's food grade or not, but yes, sodium nitrite is a powder, that's dissolved in the ethylene glycol/water mix.

Depends how hot they need to get I suspect. Our UFH rarely ever gets the floor more than 1°C above room temperature, so we can't actually feel that the floor is warm at all. If we had skirting rads instead they would need to run a bit warmer, but I'd guess they'd not need to run at more than around 30°C or so.

I've found (by accident) that bonding bamboo flooring down with a fairly thick layer of Sikabond has made a significant reduction in impact noise. Very little noise is transmitted through from the bedrooms and landing, whereas the bathrooms (which have 9mm marine ply glued and screwed to the OSB flooring, with 12mm travertine on top of that), transmit far more noise. I suspect that the Sikabond MSP acts as a decoupling layer, as it's quite rubbery.

We have both, a Grundfos on the UFH manifold and a Wilo on the DHW preheat heat exchanger. Both are reasonably quiet, but the Wilo is a fair bit quieter than the Grundfos.

Yes and no. I found that it takes too long to grab, so used a combination of mitre bond and the setting pen stuff on the architrave to lining joint, and on the architrave mitres, with solvent grab adhesive around the edges that overlapped the plastered walls. This worked really well with our solid oak architrave and linings, with no nail holes and neat mitres at the head. The technique I used was to apply mitre bond around the edge of the lining, and on the mitres, then quickly run a bead of grab adhesive around the plastered area, followed by quick wipe around the architrave with the setting pen, before putting the architrave in place. The big advantage of the mitre bond was the fast curing time, as holding the architrave in place for a few seconds was enough to secure it, handy when working n your own.

If it had been down to me, then I'd have laid cork flooring. I laid it in the bathrooms of two houses I lived in before I met my current wife and it was very nice underfoot. Unfortunately, SWMBO was set on having travertine on the bathroom floors... I tend to agree with you about using skirting radiators. They do seem to work well (a friend has them) and they offer the best of both worlds, being as unobtrusive as UFH and as efficient and responsive as radiators. I suspect that they might work with a cooling system, too. We've certainly found that using the UFH in cooling mode works pretty well, as does just running the circulating pump to even heat out around the house, but this might well work just as well with conventional radiators or skirting radiators, as long as the temperature isn't dropped too low. I run our floor cooling with a flow temperature of 12°C, which never seems to drop the floor surface below about 18°C, and that isn't low enough to cause any condensation problems.

That, seems like an idea very well worth trying to me! Unconventional, but it has to be worth a try.

I set mine at 5mm from the edge of the lining, which someone said (after I'd finished...) was about the standard normally used. I did it simply because it looked about right, to my eye.

First off, filters can look dirty when they are still working OK, they tend to quickly get a thin layer of dark muck over them, long before they become clogged. Our filter alarm time is settable in the control unit for the MVHR, and I have it set for 6 months, which seems fine. Might be worth looking to see if the filter change alarm frequency can be changed on your unit, as 8 weeks seems to be a very short time to me. The extract side filter on our system rarely gets very dirty, but the finer intake one does. I can usually vacuum clean the intake filter once, then replace it at the second filter change of the year, which seems to work OK (it won't tolerate being vacuum cleaned more than once). The extract filter lasts longer, and can be lightly vacuum cleaned three or four times before needing replacement. Our filters look very similar to yours, I'd go so far as to say I think your intake filter uses exactly the same filter material. I found that the price of the filters from Genvex in the UK was very high, and also found that they weren't a common size, so I couldn't buy cheaper replacements. Luckily I found Jasun Envirocare, who can make batches of custom made filters to exactly the same specification as the OEM ones, but for a fraction of the price. I just gave them the exact dimensions of the filters, and the filtration standard, and they quickly made a batch of new filters, that look to me to be indistinguishable from the genuine Genvex ones, other than having a different label.

Good points, as I think one reason we get good heat transfer from the ground to first floor may well be because we have a central hall that extends right up to the internal ridge of the house, so a fair bit of heat rises up that. I have noticed that the temperature on the landing will often be a bit too warm (not uncommon for it to be around 24°C at times), so we keep the bedroom doors closed so they don't get too warm. We don't like the bedrooms to be over about 22°C, and prefer them to be cooler than this if possible.

Given the cost of running pipework and controls for the towel rails, compared to the cost of just sticking a low power element in a towel rail, I'd say it's probably not worth the hassle. Our towel rails are both fitted with 70 W heating elements, and are on a time switched circuit, so they come on for a total of two hours per day. With both on they cost less than 5p a day to run. We usually only have one of them on, so the cost is less than half that.

I wouldn't bother with first floor heating at all, as I doubt you'll need it; enough heat will rise from below. We don't have any heating on the first floor, bar low power heated towel rails in the bathrooms, that only come on for an hour or so morning and evening. The bedrooms are plenty warm enough, although I did fit fused connection units in both so we could add small electric panel heaters if needed (they won't ever be needed, as it happens). The only thing I'd do differently would be to fit low power electric mats under the tiles in the bathrooms, to just take the chill off when standing on them in bare feet. The bathroom floors aren't cold (typically ~21°C) but a few degrees warmer would feel nicer when in bare feet. If doing this, then the only thing to watch would be to keep the power right down, as our bathrooms get quite warm as it is, so any floor heating would have to be limited to only times that the bathrooms are in use.