Jeremy Harris

I've never been a fan of laminate. I laid some really expensive, water resistant stuff in our old kitchen, and it's frankly rubbish. On the other hand, I bonded down (cheaper) solid bamboo in the new house and it's absolutely brilliant, very hard and tough, solid-feeling to walk on and most people assume it's hardwood, until they are told it's bamboo. It's harder than the best hardwood, and very resistant to dents from hard stuff dropping on it (guess how I know that.............).

Our internal cills were deep, around 290mm, and I bought some laminated Radiata Pine (knot free) worktops, around 30mm thick, and 600mm wide, then ripped them down to get two 290mm finished width boards from each. Radiata Pine is easily finished with oil or varnish, I used satin varnish. It's fairly tough and doesn't absorb varnish or suffer from raised grain after the first coat, so you get a very good finish with three coats, just de-nibbed with a Scotchbrite pad between coats. You can't see the laminated joints at all, either, as it's very straight grained.

Brendan led the team on our build, and similarly they were pulling 12 hour days. They broke our planning conditions on working hours, but luckily no one complained about it.

It's very useful, as we found that one supplier, Internorm, didn't include any of the necessary "extras" in their quote. When we added in installation, cills etc their quote rose by a whopping £4k, and they were already the highest quote we had. In contrast, Munster included everything in their quote, but I asked them to leave out sealing, as I wanted to do it, just to be absolutely certain that the low expansion foam was right through the full depth of the pretty thick frames. It took me a fair while, using a specially made 2mm nozzle, to inject foam from both inside and outside around every frame, but I wanted to ensure that there was as little chance as possible of there being any cold air bridges around the edges.

FWIW, our roofers were the same, copper over aluminium for the reasons given above.

Harlequin Bathrooms, Salisbury: http://harlequinbathrooms.co.uk/

I have a feeling that it's probably worth going to a bathroom company to get stuff like this, even if it is a bit more expensive. We had no choice, as not many people stock 2000 x 900 shower trays, and ours ended up having to be ordered specially anyway, but I can't fault the service and support from the small local bathroom specialist we used. They took a lot of time making sure that I knew how to store and install the tray, and rang me up a couple of weeks later to make sure everything was OK. They weren't the cheapest, but their advice was invaluable, as was their help with loading the damned thing into the back of my car................ (yes, a 2000 x 900 shower tray does fit in the back of Toyota Prius, quite easily).

Yes, it remembers it permanently. There are (IIRC) four set points, that match up to the ends and the two corners in that plot. I remember sketching it out on a blank page in the manual, in order to get my head around what each of the four settings really did, as the description for setting custom curves in the manual I had wasn't very clear.

That looks the same as the one I have, but is drawn the other way around. The problem I found was that when the outside temperature drops below about 3 to 4 deg C with the default curve, the heat pump would start doing defrost cycles, where it reverses and sucks heat out of the house to melt the ice. These last around 10 minutes or so, and really hit the COP badly. The worst case outside temperature seems to be in the 0 deg C to 4 deg C range, when the outside humidity may well be high enough to cause a lot of condensation and potential ice build up. Below about -2 deg C the efficiency starts to improve, as the air will be drier and so there's less need to defrost. By the time the temperature is down to about -5 deg C (rare here) I don't think it would need to defrost even if run at a flow temperature that's a fair bit higher. As mentioned in other threads, defrosting is the performance killer, so ensuring that the heat pump doesn't have to work too hard in cold weather has a big benefit.

I just fitted a energy/power meter to the electrical input and as a part of the house data logging I have temperature sensors on the flow and return pipes that are logged every 6 minutes. The flow rate is constant when the system is running, so it's fairly easy to calculate the power output at any time. The COP never drops below 3.2 and most of the time it's around 3.8, peaking at a bit over 4 occasionally. The energy/power meter I used is a standard DIN rail mounting one, that measures power, energy, frequency, power factor, voltage and current, and was pretty cheap, around £20 I think.

Ours came with no installation kit, but it's not needed. All you need are a couple of long flexible hoses, plus a Y strainer to fit inside the house on the return pipe. I made an error by not using long flexible hoses, in a loop, as shown in the installation instructions, and had a noise problem, from vibration transmitted through the hoses. Swapping the short (and too stiff) ones out for long ones fixed the problem completely. The hoses I used were standard large bore ones, that I think came from Pipestock.

Sorry, but I'm not sure this adds up. The maximum flow temperature of our UFH is around 25 to 26 deg C, in really cold weather. The heat pump can't modulate down below about 1.5kW output, and even that is close to the maximum heating demand for the whole house in very cold weather. It also has short cycle protection, so it shuts off for around 20 minutes when that kicks in. This means that a buffer is needed, just to give the heat pump a decent load to work into when it's on, and to store heat energy when the heat pump is off. Running the heat pump at a constant low flow temperature (in our case 40 deg C) is the point where it's most efficient. Turn it down to the lowest (about 30 deg C) results in short cycling, even with a 70 litre buffer, and that tends to reduce the real-world COP. The COP is maximised when the heat pump runs for fairly long periods, with no defrost cycles. I ran loads of experiments with ours (same as this model, a re-badged Carrier) and determined where the best efficiency point was. It turns out that, with a constant 40 deg C heat pump flow temperature the COP is near-constant over a pretty wide outside air temperature range, when heating the house. I did try several custom weather compensation curves before doing this, and what we've ended up with is what works best, by a fair margin. The weather compensation in these units is crude, it just increases the flow temperature in a linear relationship to the outside temperature - all you can change are the fixed points on that straight line. It does not control differential flow and return temperature directly at all, there's not enough headroom to do that.

They were usually around the £2500 to £3000 mark I think. Installed price was a lot higher, and I have a feeling that Kingspan only sold them as an installed package. I paid £1700 (delivered, inc VAT) for a brand new unit, including the Command Unit, from a dealer that was closing down, and he told me that was the wholesale price (not sure how true that is!).

The 6kW is the approximate peak output, the max electrical input is 2kW. In practice the input will rarely exceed 1kW I've found, ours tends to run at around 400 to 600W electrical input power when on.

We were warned, a couple of times, by the supplier of our 2000 x 900 shower tray that we had to make sure that it was stored carefully before I installed it. It was pretty heavy, around 60 to 70kg IIRC, and there were pictures all over the packaging warning against stacking it in ways that could result in in getting distorted. As it happened, I installed it the day after collecting it, so there was no problem, but I did notice that they had what looked like custom made racks to store shower trays on. My guess is that BMs may well not take as much care as they should over storing them, and that may be the cause of some problems.

We had a 100ft jib crane on site for a day and half, and that got all the wall panels up, plus the joists etc lifted up to the first floor level. We were lucky, in that the weather wasn't too bad, just one wet day, and we're sheltered in a valley, so there was no wind to speak of. Our frame arrived at 08:30 on the Tuesday morning, and MBC were off site at Saturday lunchtime, leaving us with a weathertight house.

Thanks, @PeterW, this is the plan I sketched up last night, showing the sight lines as red hatched areas: The stone slabs that form the path alongside the upper post and rail fence, next to the drive, are a mix of 900 x 600 and 600 x 600, to give an idea of scale (the sketch is to scale, I just converted it to a jpg to upload here). There is a fairly steep bank between the two post and rail fences. There are some native hedging plants right behind the lower fence, but they are pretty small, as they were half metre bare roots and have only really started to grow well this year, plus there are a few gaps where some have died. The soil isn't good, it's mainly clay and blue gault, so whatever we plant will need bigger holes dug and some decent compost/soil I think. I've sketched where I think ee could put trees, with the tallest and widest being needed in the centre.

Interestingly, Munster asked for all apertures to be 10mm bigger all around than the window sizes, and came around as soon as the frame was stood up to check that the as-built apertures were the same as the schedule sheet with the order. A week after they checked the aperture dimensions the team arrived with the windows to fit them.

Yes, there is a temperature and humidity sensor on the rear of the unit. It's used to control the defrost cycle, as well as the weather compensation curves. I'm pretty sure that weather compensation is just a hang over from energy saving controls for high heating demand homes, and it is a waste of time for a low energy home with UFH.

The main problem is that the default weather compensation curve results in a fairly high flow temperature, certainly mine was too high on the default setting and that resulted in severe defrost cycling. I ended up removing the weather compensation altogether, and programming in a constant flow temperature, as that makes a great deal more sense for a low energy house with UFH, where you're mixing the flow down to around 25 deg C at the most. Mine is set to run at 40 deg C maximum flow, no matter what the outside temperature, and that gives no defrosting at all in our installation, which improves the real-world COP by a lot.

That's functionally the same as the Glowworm unit we have, the only difference is the label on the front. Be interesting to see what it goes for. There's no mention in the description about whether the Command Unit is included. The fact that he says there are no manuals and that it's still wrapped and on a pallet, suggests that it may be, as the Command Unit is wrapped in the installation manual and packed inside the unit, under the cover. If there is no Command Unit, then there's one for sale here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KINGSPAN-AEROMAX-AIR-SOURCE-HEAT-PUMP-USER-INTERFACE-CONTROLLER/172724880638?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIM.MBE%26ao%3D2%26asc%3D43782%26meid%3Dce8de494bdb94eeab535d68ab7651a33%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D152582165540

@Calvinmiddle, @PeterW, Thanks both. I sketched out some sight lines last night, and there are three main lines to block, and surprisingly, none are very wide. They are all high, though, and the largest problem, the sight line from our central glazed gable to the kitchen and bedroom window of the house opposite needs a tree that's at least 3.5m high, preferably a bit taller, as it will have to be planted down the bank a bit to be clear of the fence. The width of the canopy needed for that tree isn't massive, around 1.5m diameter would be just about OK. This is the most critical bit of screening, so I think it will need an evergreen, or at least a tree with a dense canopy, perhaps one that retains some leaves through winter. The other two sight lines can be blocked with slightly smaller trees, and I think we could get away with deciduous species with a fairly dense canopy. I'm reluctant to have all evergreens, as I think we need a variety of colour and shape. As @Ferdinand mentioned, we already have a fair bit of hard landscaping, and it could do with being softened by some natural looking planting. Nice to know that hand digging the holes is possible, as although we can get a minidigger up there, it does make a mess, even with boards down, and any soil that finds its way on to the permeable paving encourages weeds to grow, we found (they only started being a problem after we had a digger going up and down the drive when we were putting all the topsoil in where the lawn is).

I did a proper report for BC, only because the regs seemed to require a commissioning report. I don't think it was even glanced at by BC.............

I'll have a dig around, but I'm sure someone on here had some made up, and it wasn't monstrously expensive, IIRC. I've found one example, here, that gives an idea of what this stuff looks like in section: https://www.guttercrest.co.uk/aluminium-combined-soffit-fascia-soffits-fascias-eaves-cladding-systems.html I have a feeling that people like North West Aluminium, the people that make the Kytun aluminium dry verge system (which we used - it's very neat) may do made to measure sections. With luck whoever it was on here that fitted aluminium fascias might pop in with some contacts. Edited to add: Just found another possibility: http://www.marleyalutec.co.uk/products/evoke-fascia-soffit-and-copings/

In his defence, I'd guess that he was thinking about cool air in ducts, where there is a very real risk of condensation when it's cooled down to 7 or 8 deg C. The difference with a slab is that although there may be water at 12 deg C circulating around the pipes, the surface of the slab will always be a fair bit warmer, and it's only the slab surface where condensation could form. Slab cooling is very unusual, I've not heard of many who have done it, and when I first installed our slab cooling system I couldn't find any information at all about it. I have to say that when I asked a few questions on various HVAC related forums I did get lots of condemnation for the idea - because of the sort of person I am I took that as encouragement to give it a go.............