Jeremy Harris

MVHR does not deliver dry, heated, air normally. Unless there is some form of post-heating in the supply ducting then MVHR delivers air that is always cooler than the room air in cool weather. Definitely an extremely bad idea. Apart from kitchens being an extract room, with a specified extract rate in the regs, there is a very serious fire issue with supplying fresh air to a room (or garage) that may well be the initial seat of a fire.

I doubt it makes much difference, but the most common MVHR terminals are the mushroom type, that draw air in from their edges mainly, with a fair bit of the flow being close to horizontal all the way around their periphery. Ideally there needs to be a clear area all around to allow the terminal to draw air more or less evenly around the peripheral opening, but given that the air flow needs to be throttled down a bit in almost all MVHR ducts, it probably doesn't make too much difference if flow is a bit restricted on one side.

A Harvey, or similar, will fit in a kitchen cabinet OK. I can measure ours tomorrow, but I'm sure it will fit OK.

I have a spare one somewhere that I'll try and dig out tomorrow and take some photos. It may be that not all of them are adjustable.

I bought a brand new brand name monobloc inverter controlled ASHP and control interface, a 6 to 7 kW model, for £1,700 delivered. Cost another ~£300 in installation parts, plumbing, etc and took me less than a day to install.

It may have a screwdriver slot in the hole in the grey cover, and turning that should adjust the set pressure. Both of the pressure reducing valves I've fitted had grey plastic covers that look a bit like that, and both have an adjustment screw on the top.

I'm simply not going to argue with you, as there's no merit to the forum community to do so. You have made your view clear, hopefully I've made my view clear. Others can decide which view, if either, to believe.

Firstly, the very last thing I would do on this forum is pick a fight with anyone, that seems to be your own forte, amply demonstrated in several threads here. I would certainly not pretend to be an expert in planning, but I have spent years dealing with planning applications of all sorts, and anyway how you can judge my level of knowledge, or otherwise, about planning, when I rarely comment on it here (for obvious reasons) I'm not sure. I'll assume you're just reverting to an ad hominem tactic as deflection. I've seen the planning system work reasonably well at times, and equally I've seen it fall over a fair few times. I've seen people gaming the system, too, often as a consequence of a local authority just failing to do their job properly (the classic case here being the long delay in updating local plans and policies). More recently a lack of funds has created the slightly bizarre situation (which some planning consultants seem keen to exploit) where the LA are keen to avoid any application going to appeal, because of the high cost implications of losing. This is making planning here risk averse, and consent is being granted when, if there was a strict interpretation of policy, it probably shouldn't. I would like to see the planning system work equably for all, with no single individual or group being more likely to gain consent than any other. I fear that is getting ever more unlikely as an aspiration, unless there is a fundamental change, ideally one that provides enough resources to local authority planning departments so they can both bring local plan and policies up to date with national policies, and are able to deal with all planning matters faster than the maximum timescales laid down.

That's simply untrue. We have very clear planning policies, in many cases backed by statute law, and so there are many, many cases where policy and legislation override the merits, or otherwise, of many planning issues. I dealt with one when commenting on an application a few weeks ago, where some of my colleagues wanted to argue against an application and I pointed out that there were no legally justifiable grounds to oppose it (and no, I'm not a Planning Enforcement Officer, just a Councillor).

I believe we have a former Planning Enforcement Officer here, so we could probably get a definitive view on this. Mind you, it's possible that some might choose not to believe such an authority...

The one in the photo for that listing is a pretty standard Chinese non-inverter ASHP. The give away that it's a non-inverter model is the big motor capacitor over on the right hand side in the photo. In general, Chinese non-inverter ASHPs may be OK, but are unlikely to be either quiet or as reliable as a well-known brand, plus spares may well be unobtanium, as often the same, or a similar, design will be manufactured by several different companies (it seems fairly common in China for companies to just copy each others products, even to the extent of using the same component suppliers).

I've found that our built-in cisterns are surprisingly quiet, so quiet that when you're in the bathroom it's hard to hear when the thing has stopped filling (slight nuisance when cleaning the thing as you have to listen carefully to hear when it's ready to flush again). I've no idea of the make; they came with the Vitra WCs as a kit. TBH I had half a mind to change them for something else, as, although the WCs and basins were really quite good, I wasn't 100% convinced that Turkish-made cisterns etc would be that well made. It was a pleasant surprise to find that they were so quiet and we've had no problems with any of them so far.

Did he cut the flush pipe down to the right size for the height of the loo flush inlet? All the toilets in our house are built in to cabinets that are similar to yours, and I had to trim every single flush pipe a bit to get it to fit neatly. The L shaped pipe can be trimmed on both legs if need be, so it can be adjusted both for height and horizontal distance from the pan to the cistern.

Some friends have an LCD screen installed inside a small wood burning stove that apparently looks very good. Next time I see them I'll try and find out what make it is.

A word of caution if cutting plastic pipe with a chop saw. Don't try and cut freezing cold pipe this way. I nearly lost an eye doing this - the pipe just shattered into loads of sharp fragments when the saw was part way through (yes, I should have been wearing eye protection...).

TBH I don't know. These are about the same size as the thin client boxes we had when I was working, but at a guess would say they are a lot more powerful. I don't know what our thin client boxes contained, but they barely needed to do anything as all the processing was done in the data centre. We only used thin clients for security reasons - no storage on the desktop, encryption on the Ethernet link, and needing a security pass to be inserted in the thing to make it work, made it inherently pretty secure. It also meant that there was no boot up delay, as everyone's VM was always running on one of the data centre servers (the data centre was on-site and physically secured). The small fanless boxes I bought have a VESA mount available so they can just be screwed to the back of a monitor (one of ours is mounted this way):

Worth noting that the heat output of many bioethanol fires is way over-stated, and there are lots around that only deliver about 1 kW. The key is to ignore the hype and look at the fuel consumption rate, as a rate of about 0.17 litre/hour is roughly equivalent to 1 kW. This bioethanol fire, for example: https://www.easyfire.co.uk/bioethanol-fire-burner/bio-ethanol-burner-small.html , states that it will burn for 3 hours on 0.4 litres, which equates to a heat output of about 1.3 kW. There are others around that are similar.

It's why I bought just the barebones box, and fitted reasonably good brand-name RAM and SSD. I've had the Core i7-7550U box running continuously for around 2 years now, without any glitches. The i7-8550U box is only a few months old but seems to be as well made as the other one (the reliability of the first box is what made me buy another one). Because I bought bare boxes I didn't subject myself to the risk of dodgy software, either.

+1 to what @jack says above, an open fire will be significantly worse than a closed wood burner in terms of combustion products and particulate emissions. Another alternative, if you want flames to look at, is an bio ethanol fire. They don't give out much heat, generate no pollution (just a bit of water vapour) and can look pretty nice. The only downside is that the running cost can be a bit high, but for use occasionally just for the look of flames they seem a good idea. No need for a chimney or flue, either, which is another big thing in their favour, as chimneys take up a lot of space and waste a great deal of heat.

This sounds very like our old Humax Freesat HDR box. That used to run really hot all the time, being on standby didn't noticeably reduce the power consumption. Thankfully the new Humax box we bought last year is a heck of a lot better. It uses a fraction of the power of the old unit, runs cool, doesn't need re-booting every now and again and when it goes into standby it genuinely does seem to practically shut down.

Building regs don't take account of the higher floor heat loss when UFH is installed, but perhaps they should, as warming the floor always increases the heat loss, so needs more insulation to counter this.

As stated earlier, increasing the area of glazing will increase the heat loss in cool/cold weather, and increase solar gain in summer. If you want the room to be warmer in summer and cooler in winter, then more glazing would fit the bill. Also, as mentioned earlier, bifolds are almost certainly the worst way of adding additional glazing area, as they will end up being draughty after a while, when the seals stop sealing, as they will. There are better thermal/airtightness options for adding glazing, either lift and slide or maybe fixed glazing panels with French windows. Be prepared for that room feeling cooler in winter, though, as even the very best glazing available provides much less insulation than even a pretty poor wall.

Sorry, I somehow missed this yesterday. Probably just needs tightening, but worth checking that the rubber seal is intact and seating properly.

If you have MVHR then it's nowhere near the noise of an extractor fan. Ours is barely audible in boost mode (i.e. when the shower is on) and completely silent normally. Some have found that there's no need to boost the MVHR, as even without boost the bathroom will dry out pretty quickly.

We get zero smells, steam etc from our en suite, and very little noise (flushing the loo in the middle of the night is barely audible in the bedroom). The key to making this work was as @ragg987 mentions above, having the MVHR boost controlled with a humidity sensor, plus having ventilation directly to the loo itself (as discussed in this thread: https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/11115-loo-odour-extraction-system-update/). It also helps to fit a heavy door between the bedroom and en suite, I think. I'm sure that much of the noise reduction comes from having a fairly hefty door (ours weighs around 40kg).