Jeremy Harris

I couldn't agree more. They were (they've now stopped trading) a pretty large company, approved Vaillant installers etc, which is why we used them (I'd already settled on buying an Ecotec, having read up that they were about the best performing and most reliable combi around at the time). They started by changing the pressure sensor, as they said there had been a batch of duff sensors, ones with red housings. However, our boiler was supplied with the newer black sensor, so it should have been obvious this wasn't the problem. The second call out they changed the sensor yet again, thinking they'd had two duff ones. After that they started playing around with the pressures, thinking that was the problem. Of course, every time they left the boiler was working fine, it only failed to fire when the house had cooled down enough for all the TRVs to open fully. By the same token, it never failed in DHW mode in the summer, with the heating off, as the flow resistance with the diverter valve in the DHW position was always enough to give a decent pump kick. Our Ecotec permanently goes to lock-out after three failed fire attempts, BTW, and has to be powered off and on again, or reset from the panel to reset it and get it to try and fire again (it's easier to turn it off and on!). The Vaillant people were brilliant, when I eventually managed to talk to them. At first they told me I had to go through our installer, as they didn't talk to customers directly. In the end I got the plumber I now use to call them from our place and then hand the phone to me so I could talk to their technical chap. He immediately had the answer, and said that it should have been fixed by the installer fitting the F75 kit. I then ran into a problem where Vaillant would only supply a free F75 kit to the original installer, and I refused point blank to let that installer anywhere near the boiler again, so I had to buy the F75 kit, even though the boiler was still under warranty, and get our current plumber to fit it. From that time on the thing has worked absolutely perfectly, with one fault caused by a lightning surge that damaged the main board; not a Vaillant problem and easy to fix by replacing the board and programming it for the right boiler model. When the plumber fitted the F75 kit he partially drained the system to empty the boiler of water and found there was no inhibitor in it, so the numpty installers had left the system like this. I gather that one reason they folded was because some boiler manufacturers stopped supplying them, including Vaillant, almost certainly because they were incompetent. What was clear was that they employed one Corgi fitter, with the rest being relatively unskilled, as all the removal of the old kit, power flush and installation work was done by two guys that didn't impress with their skill level, and then their qualified guy turned up to leak test and commission the boiler. Even he managed to lose the manometer port screw from our meter; I had to make up a new one on the lathe so he could commission the boiler...............

It's an odd one, a direct consequence of the position of the pressure sensor in the Vaillant Ecotec plus the layout of our bungalow. The flow resistance around out heating circuit with all the TRVs open is very low, and there's no head for the pump to work against, either, as the boiler is the highest point in the system. What was happening was that in cold weather the house would cool down overnight and all the TRVs would fully open. When the boiler came to fire up in the morning it wouldn't detect the pump kick, because there was sod all flow resistance after the main water block, where the pressure sensor is normally fitted. It would try to fire three times, then shut down with a pump fault. The only way to get it to fire up was to go around turning a few of the TRVs off, then resetting the boiler, when there would be enough flow resistance for the sensor to see the pump kick. Once it had fired the TRVs could all be reset and the boiler would be fine for the rest of the day, as some TRVs would always be partially closed. We adopted a work-around for the year it took to fix the problem, by turning down a few TRVs last thing at night, so that the boiler would reliably fire the next morning. The fix was a kit Vaillant sell especially for installations like ours, which repositions the pressure sensor from the main water block to the pipe going into the heat exchanger. This adds a bit of flow resistance behind the sensor (from the PHE) and so the pump kick is reliably detected. The fault is the one that indicates F75 on the display and the kit to fix it is called the "F75 kit", and when I eventually spoke to someone at Vaillant they knew all about it and apologised that their installer was unaware of the kit. They also told me they had no record of the installer having contacted them about this, which annoyed me at the time because the installer kept assuring me that they were working with Vaillant to try and find the cause of the problem. It was there right from the day after the boiler was installed; they left around mid-afternoon with everything working, at 5 am the next morning my other half tried to use the new shower for the first time and found the boiler had shut down................. They really were a shambles, as every time they came they kept checking the pressure vessel, and messing around with both the pressure vessel pre-charge and the system fill pressure. They must have fitted at least three new pressure sensors, too. When they were messing around they managed to lose the pre-charge altogether, which then caused the PRV to open, and it never properly sealed again, hence the need to replace it the next time they tried to fix it.

Thanks Declan, I'll go and try to find it now. Better set the VPN to an IP in RoI first, though!

Not 100% familiar with the Sky Ranger, but It uses pre-sewn Dacron covering and the wing covers are tensioned fore and aft, and the strut behind those studs may well be a fabric tensioning strut, that I think has a nut on the rear of the attachment between the innermost wing ribs. I suspect the nuts on the end are just there to protect the end of the threads. I could ask the UK importer, Paul, for the definitive answer if you like, I've known him for years and have his number around somewhere.

What I What I did was get a bit of plank around 150mm wide and a 600mm or so long and cut deep, smooth semi-circular cut-outs at each end, to allow it to be used to wind the cable up when not in use. I fitted a double gang socket like this: http://www.screwfix.com/p/bg-13a-2g-dp-switched-socket/67928 to it, with a waterproof (IP68) cable gland like this: http://www.screwfix.com/p/tower-male-comp-gland-black-20mm-pack-of-2/80851 . The cable was secured to the plank using a couple of saddle clamps, with rubber inserts, to cope with the inevitable stresses it would be exposed to on site.

It's the way our slab's laid, and works well. We have a layer of reinforcing steel fabric on 50mm chairs, so at the mid-point in the 100mm thick slab. The UFH pipes are on top of this, so are closer to the top than the bottom (the top of the pipes is around 34mm from the surface of the slab), which improves the response time slightly and also reduces the losses slightly. The thermal conductivity of concrete is pretty close to that of water, so pretty high, and the heat capacity of concrete is a lot less than water, so in practice heat travels from the water in the pipes to the surface of the slab quite quickly. There will still be a temperature gradient both ways when the systems running, with the centre of the pipe being the highest temperature and the temperature dropping the further away from that you go in the slab. If the pipes were at the bottom, then the losses would increase slightly, as the hottest part would be further away from where you want the heat delivered, and closer to the place you don't want the heat to go, the ground underneath. No insulation is perfect, there will always be heat lost through it whenever there is a temperature difference from one side to the other, and the key thing here is that the higher the pipes are in the slab the lower the temperature of the slab will be at the bottom, which is a good thing overall.

As I mentioned above, when our pressure vessel lost it's pre-charge the symptoms were just like this, a dribble of water from the PRV because the system had no way of accommodating expansion. In our case, the boiler was newly installed, but had been very troublesome from the day after it was fitted; we had around a dozen warranty call outs all told. In trying to fix the problem the installers had either accidentally released the pre-charge, or had deliberately changed it to try and stop the constant cut-outs we were getting. As soon as the PRV started to leak it never sealed up again, but continued to drip until it was replaced, under warranty. With no pre-charge it doesn't take much water loss to drop the pressure. The boiler fault we had (on a brand new boiler) turned out to be installation related, and one that Vaillant knew about and produced a kit that when fitted fixed it 100%. The installers knew nothing about this at all, it was a combination of me asking questions around a few forums, plus the efforts of the really good plumber up the road, that eventually pinned down the cause. In the few years since the boiler has been 100% reliable.

I just set my VPN to a server that's in Ireland, so has an Irish IP address, and it seems to work OK, but the show that Declan mentioned doesn't seem to be there. No mention of a charge, either, on the "about" section it just says this: The same trick works if you want to watch BBC content when outside the UK, just set a VPN to a UK server and as far as the BBC are concerned you're in the UK Note to mods: If I appear to be somewhere odd in the world if you ever geolocate my IP, it's only because I've forgotten to switch the VPN off!

The Hotun looks exactly like the tundish fitted to the PRV on our boiling water tap. I'll check later, as I'm sure it's the same thing. From what I remember when fitting it it seemed pretty well made and ours hasn't given any trouble at all.

Agreed, it does, but it illustrates the sort of reluctance to change that seems to dominate parts of the building industry.

Thanks, Declan, I'll go and see if I can find it on the RTÉ Player.

We added a big waterproof caravan connector, which has 4 DP RCBOs in it, one for the site supply Commando and the others for three additional external circuits. The Commando socket is now redundant, but was very useful during the build, as I made up a long, 2.5mm² extension lead, with a waterproof double gang socket on the end, using HO7RN-F cable, with a decent strain relief and a mounting board that doubled up as a cable reel. That proved invaluable during the early stages of the build.

It looks like the PRV is letting by, as already suggested. Ours did this once, when the system went over-pressure slightly (the damned useless installers trying to fix their own problem - badly), and it seemed to never seal again afterwards. The only fix was to get the PRV replaced with a new one. In our case, part of the problem was that when the installers were mucking around trying to fix the persistent fault the thing had from day one, they "accidentally" released the pre-charge in the pressure vessel, so there was no where for the water to expand to when the boiler fired up. Worth getting the pressure vessel pre-charge checked when the system is de-pressurised to fit the PRV. Nick's the boiler expert here, though, so I'd wait for his opinion before doing anything.

It's really largely about getting the detailing right, and a bit of research before work starts can reap a useful benefit at little or no additional cost, or may even give you a cost saving.

It's great to see retrofits doing so well, given that our biggest challenge is trying to improve existing housing stock, even though it's rubbish new builds that get most of the headlines. What's the programme called, Declan, as I'm trying to see if I can watch it on RTÉ Player.

I saw this earlier (email shot from The Pi Hut) and it looks good, but I wish they'd found room on the board for an IPX connector. I fear the WiFi range won't be that great with the pretty small on-board antenna. I've just modded a standard Pi Zero by fitting a small WiFi board with an IPX connector, and this in turn is connected via an IPX to SMA pigtail to a decent patch antenna. The Pi Zero is working as a hi def IP camera, and seems to have a pretty good range. The idea is to see if I can maintain a good link from the other end of the garden, from the garage, back through our fairly radio-opaque walls to the WiFi access point in the middle of the house. I reckon that with around 12dB of gain from the antenna it may do it, with luck.

As always, your regs may be different, but here it's in Part H3 of the building regs: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/442889/BR_PDF_AD_H_2015.pdf page 40.

The failure to understand income taxation, direct and indirect, and the impact it has in terms of who pays the most for the same services as everyone else, is something that came home to me when I retired. My gross pension is about 52% of my old salary, but my actual income after tax is around 75% of my old income! The difference is not paying ERNIC and paying a lot less income tax. If I take into account commuting costs, I'm almost earning the same retired as I was working, plus my pension is index linked, so has kept place with inflation, whereas my pay would have been frozen for the four years immediately after I retired. I get a bigger pension from this November, too, as then I'll get the lower rate basic state pension as well. At a guess that will nudge me up towards 80% or more of my pre-retirement income, perhaps a bit more allowing for indexation and the free benefits I get, like free prescriptions and eye tests, and a bus pass and railcard come November! Dave T's blog is worth a read. He's a few years older than me, yet seems to have ten times the energy when it comes to battling within local politics: https://dtremellen.com/ (some here will remember him as "joiner" on Ebuild, one of the moderators).

It wouldn't surprise me to find that the RoI decide to adopt the Passivhaus standard as their new Part L, as there's a lot more interest in building passive houses there than there is here, despite the dire economic situation (or perhaps because of it). Passive House magazine is an RoI magazine, or was originally, and has only in the past year or so switched to publishing a UK edition, but even that is mainly full of RoI builds. I don't think it's an accident that companies like Munster Joinery and MBC are doing pretty well over here in the UK, either, as there aren't many UK suppliers offering passive house performance at prices that aren't much greater than conventional builds over here (given that build prices down in the South of England tend to be higher, anyway). I've had some feedback from the radio bit this morning already, including a couple of builders that reckon our house would be "impossible to build"..................

As above, you need to challenge this. Mine's like Dave's, but all in one meter box in a similar timber structure. One meter box is not ideal, as space was a bit tight, but neither the DNO (same as Dave's, SSE) or the supplier had any problem with my electrician fitting a DP fused isolator, Henley and a small "two way" CU box tucked over to the far right side of the cabinet. Given the small size of the newer incomer fuse and head and meters, there is really quite a bit of spare space over to the right in a standard meter box now, as the dimensions of the things were standardised to accept bigger bits of kit. I think I was lucky not to have a stroppy meter guy, though...............

@JohnW, your build up looks better, as you're partially mitigating the thermal bridge at the internal wall/floor junction with the Quinnlite blocks, but I'd question the need for the separate, cold, sub-floor. I think you could useful change this detail to the one in the Kore link I gave earlier, leaving your foundation and wall detail as-is. If you have room, then I'd suggest laying the insulation either direct on to a blinded, packed type1 sub-base (cheap!) , or with the blinding covered with the DPM, then the insulation, and making the finished floor the structural layer, with the UFH pipes closer to the top than the bottom, to further reduce losses. If I get time later I'll try and do a sketch to show exactly what I mean, but I'm pleased to see that some effort has been taken to reduce thermal bridging in the internal wall - this is a detail that is often overlooked, it seems.

I suppose we're to blame, really, in that it seems many just don't bother to vote in local elections, and so we shouldn't be surprised if those who represent us, and ratify or create these daft decisions, get elected. I remember Dave T (from Ebuild) being highly motivated by all the gross stupidity (and worse) in his local council, so he put his money where his mouth is and went out and stood for, and became, elected. He's been in a constant running battle ever since, as far as I can gather, probably because he's in the habit of asking direct questions, about things just like this, and not accepting the excuses that are usually rolled out. I've been approached a few times to stand for election to our parish council (both of them!) and may well do so once we've sold the old house, as I'm getting increasingly concerned that I'm too eager to criticise when I could be spending the time trying to change things for the better. Whether or not I could deal with the politics at county level I don't know, reading Dave T's blog makes me think it's a recipe for high(er) blood pressure..............

I wonder how these different charges are calculated, and whether they can be challenged? Local Authorities have fairly consistent salary scales etc across the whole of the UK, I believe, so the processing costs for adding a new house name or number should be roughly the same. My understanding is that public bodies are only allowed to charge the actual cost of doing an essential task; they are not allowed to set a charge that makes them a "profit". I remember going through all this with the public accounts committee, years ago, when questions were asked about the way internal charging operated between government departments, and the rules were very clear, and are the same as apply to the statutory responsibilities of local authorities. The variation shown up in this thread is massive; from £24 to £145, and I simply refuse to accept that there isn't a bit of profiteering going on. I know that our LA has been politically forced into making no Council Tax rises for four years; this year is the first increase for some time. The consequences have been massive cuts in necessary spending, that is, without a shadow of doubt, building up a bow wave of future spending that has been growing year on year as essential services and facilities degrade. One thing they have been doing is looking to extract money from people in as many ways as possible, hence the £115.50 charge for a house name, or the snooping tactics to find half-built houses that they can levy Council Tax on. I'd have rather they'd just put the Council Tax up a bit each year, as I've not been impressed by the political boasts made each year that they've held the increase at zero, when they've just been cutting corners with essential services that will end up costing tax payers far more in the long run.

Our old house was built around 1988. When we moved in it had no cavity wall insulation, just 100mm of rock wool between the ceiling joists in the loft, timber windows and doors with very thin double glazing (and which were very draughty) and no insulation under the concrete floor. What's worse, all the central heating pipes were cast into the slab right around the whole outside perimeter of the floor, causing so much heat loss that whenever it snows the snow melts for a couple of feet all around the house, just from the heat loss out through the surrounding ground. I can't remember when energy reduction measures were added to building regs, but it was probably a decade or so after our house was built.

I paid £115.50......................... Our councils charges are here: http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/street-naming-numbering-fees-15-march.pdf