Jeremy Harris

Our planning condition discharge form is worded in exactly the same way, in that it says: I paid a single fee for the first request, which was to discharge several pre-commencement planning conditions, and then paid a second single fee to discharge the remaining planning conditions once we had finished the house. So I am certain that it should be as the form says, that the fee is for the request, not the number of conditions in that request.

I've copied your email and will do. I've also redacted it here, to stop the spam bots getting hold of it!

The Command Unit is worth having, without a doubt, as it not only allows access to a lot of settings but it also replaces the programmer/timer and room thermostat, if located in the right place. The diagnostics and different operating parameters are displayed on it too, so you can see exactly what the heat pump is doing at a glance. This is a photo of ours (ignore the Glow worm label, it's a Carrier unit and the Kingspan one is identical but with their name on instead): When the heat pump is on (it's off in that photo) then there are lots of other symbols that appear, letting you know what it's doing, like this: If the alarm indicator in the lower left comes on, you can press buttons on the Command Unit to get a code for the cause of the alarm, very easily.

Definitely a gold star (well, the closest we can get here!). I can understand the bin smell, the problem is the green bin, the one for composting stuff. That tends to get ripe pretty quickly, especially if not emptied every day. The unit we have is identical to this one, except the bins themselves are coloured and ours is on a left hand hinged door. The lid system works pretty well; as you open the door the lid lifts first then the bins swing out from under it. This does mean that the bins are covered pretty well, but the green bin still tends to be problem:

I'm not entirely sure all the manual information available is 100% accurate, to be honest. At best some of it is confusing, at worst some of it is just wrong. I ended up drawing my own diagram for the control and relay connections, and this almost certainly is the same as your unit: I never managed to find out what terminal 16 did, but note that it is used in your system. I have a stack of different wiring configurations for this control board, but they are all intended for use with specific control system products, so aren't of much use except that they confirm some of the connections above, like this drawing:

I used 40mm waste pipe, Nick, which works very well. The internal overflow in the cistern to the pan, which is how the suction gets to the pan is only about 20 to 25mm, so that's the main restriction. In practice, because the person sitting on the seat practically blocks the thing off, air gets drawn (gently!) from the small gap between the seat and the pan and sucked out via the rim flush slot. For best effectiveness you need to close the lid and flush promptly when finished, as the lid works much the same as sitting on the seat to block the pan off. For a waste bin, then I'd have thought either 32 or 40mm would be OK. Seems a good idea, especially if you have a set of separate bins for recycling, composting etc in a unit (we have one with three bins, one for plastics and cardboard, one for composting and one for general waste, a German unit, a country that's been separating out waste for a lot longer than we have).

Me too!

I thought I had too, but I can't seem to find it in my attachments here. I've found the copy on my machine, though, so here it is: Ventilation calcs.txt Download it and rename it, replacing the .txt suffix with .xls (the forum doesn't like Excel files!)

You can get standard DIN contactors that have DC coils. I have a few that use 230 VAC coils, but the data sheet shows that these are available with 12 V or 24 V coils. Doesn't meet your 5 V control requirement, but they do fit in a stepped DIN consumer unit style housing and almost replace an MCB, but are a bit wider. I'm using them in my garage CU for the emergency stop buttons. The two 20 A protected socket radials are each DP switched by a single 4 pole 25 A contactor and that contactor is powered through a low current circuit that contains the normally closed emergency stop buttons in series. If any of the buttons is pressed it opens the contactor and kills the power to the workshop sockets, leaving the lighting circuit and the door circuit still powered via separate MCBs.

If it were a compressor problem then the diagnostic LED inside would be flashing a code, as would the red LED on the board. The manuals are confusing, probably because the heat pump is made by Carrier and the manual has been produced by Kingspan, and if Kingspan are like Glowworm, who use the same Carrier heat pumps with their name on, then back when this was installed there wasn't much technical expertise around. Things may be better now, but I found it hard to get firm data. This is a snapshot from the manual I have for the Kingspan Aeromax series: That gives the error as being the one where the flow pressure is too high, and that fits with having radiators with TRVs perfectly, and it matches my experience of having this same error many times originally on our unit, until I fitted the pressure bypass.

I have a few SSRs controlling things, and they will happily work with a 5V signal direct from a microcontroller pin. My home made excess PV diverter uses a 25 A SSR driven like this and has been working faultlessly for a couple of years or so. The only slight snag with the DIN rail SSRs is that the high current ones have a pretty big heat sink as a part of the mount. I have a spare DIN rail dimmer that accepts an isolated DC control voltage, too. They are quite expensive, though. The one I have here is a Carlo Gavazzi, rated at around 20 A, IIRC, that accepts an analogue control voltage and has selectable operating modes, semi-random burst control, phase control etc. I was originally going to use it as the control for my excess PV diverter, but then decided to use the "energy bucket" method, which only needs a standard SSR and TTL level control.

Yes, that's what I meant, that's the same as our terminal fittings (except ours are blue, and HB+ ones)

Thanks, we try our best!

Just as @PeterW, says, just open all the TRVs, I'm pretty sure that's what caused the shutdown, as there doesn't seem to be a pressure bypass. Yes, you can use 13 instead of 3, as they are both connected electrically on the board to the 12 V ground. Once you have it working with the wire links and the TRVs open, then the next step is to determine why the thermostat doesn't fire it up. My recommendation would be to test it with the TRVs open and your wire links, if that works OK, then remove the wire links and reconnect it so the thermostat is controlling it, but leave the TRVs wide open. If that works, then you can adjust the TRVs, but make sure one of them is always fully open to act as a bypass, ideally one near the thermostat, perhaps.

I've just had a look at the data that's available, and my old caving book and geological maps. The epicentre was too deep to be mine workings, at around 7,500m down. The deepest caves in that area are at most around 300m down, and the old lead mines are shallower, mainly just mining out areas where the galena comes up close to the surface and where it outcrops in some of the caves. There are, as I thought, some pretty large faults in that area. My guess is that one of those slipped and caused the earthquake.

Ye Gods......................

It is hard work, especially if, like me, you decide to do your first ever GRP roof in midsummer, on a hot day, with a friend who assumes that because he's laid up a couple of fishing boat hulls with a chopper gun he's a GRP expert............. To our credit, we laid that roof over 30 years ago, and when I last saw it, around a year ago, it looked just as good as when we laid it.

Personally I'd go for GRP, for a couple of reasons. You can DIY GRP fairly easily, as long as you stick rigidly to the instructions and make sure that the weather and the substrate is absolutely dry. Any moisture can mess up GRP when it's being laid, but other than that is is extremely durable and tough, probably tougher than EPDM. EPDM is very durable, but it's also quite dependent on the skill of the people installing it. It's probably not that easy a DIY job, although possible, and does, in my view, need a higher skill level in order to get a reliable job. I've not heard of someone messing up a GRP roof (although I'm sure some have) but I have heard a few tales of leaking EPDM roofs, all as a consequence of the installation, rather than the material.

I wondered about that too. I had exactly this fault on mine when I first set it up, as the thermally actuated valve, that opens the flow to the manifold, took several minutes to open. The heat pump would fire up, sense the high pressure in the flow and then shut down with an error. It would keep re-trying every minute or two, until the valve had opened and then the error cleared. To fix it I had to drain the system down and fit a bypass, and since then it's been fine, although it took a bit of fiddling to set the bypass pressure to the right setting.

Is it really 9 kW? If so then it would really warm the bathroom up quickly, along with the rest of the house!

It shouldn't do, as it's safe to use in contact with polyethylene DPM, but if you want to be sure then you could test a sample.

Just PM me your address and how long a length you need and I can easily pop it in the post on Monday.

I tried three different types of knee pads, the ones that fit into working trousers (not great, in my view) the hard faced ones, like miner's knee pads, with the straps around the back, which were the best when knelt down, but even with the straps arranged in "miner's fashion" (crossed over at the back) I found they still moved around a lot with all the getting up and down. I ended up using my old caving knee pads, which are very thick commercial divers neoprene ones. They were the most comfortable to walk around in, and stayed in place well, but they weren't as good as hard faced ones when actually kneeling. Mind you, I think a decade or two of crawling around caves most weekends has probably made my knees a bit dodgy, anyway, so I doubt that I'm that typical!

I'm struggling through this, as the LEDs don't seem to match those for the KHP 0040 12kW version. From the manual, if there are LEDs marked above D803, then it looks as if the control board is a KHP0042. According to the Kingspan info, then when LEDs D802 and D804 are illuminated, that indicates "high pressure protective operation" (D805 is the "on" LED). This relates to the flow pressure, I think, as mine does this (but displays the info more meaningfully on the Command Unit) when the flow is restricted. The only way that can happen is if something like a valve has closed which has restricted flow enough to trip the over-pressure sensor. It should try to start again after a few minutes, but if the flow restriction is still there it will shut down again. The flashing red LED is the internal diagnostic code LED, and will flash at 1/2 Hz when everything is OK, but will give a flash sequence that can be counted if something has gone wrong in the heat pump. If it's just flashing regularly then there is no fault. Terminal 3 is the 12 V ground terminal, and is replicated on other terminals on the block. According the the info I have, terminal 3 is also connected internally to terminal 13, both are 12 V ground terminals, so if terminal 3 is broken you could use terminal 13 as a substitute. So, it looks like what has happened is that the unit has fired up, the rads have heated up, but something has shut down the rads and caused the flow pressure to rise and trip the heat pump off. The next bit of sleuthing is to find out what has caused the rads to turn off. Do they have thermostatic valves? If so, then one possibility is that they have closed down as the rooms temperature has increased. If they don't, then we need to have a look to see what else could be causing the flow to shut down.

It didn't get as far as us, either, and we're right on the Wiltshire/Dorset border.