diarmidR

Thanks @Jolo. When I emailed Sentinel they did mention the possibility that the air would be warming in the ducts as you say. I find it surprising that there is no apparent bypass effect at the vent though. I guess I can test this further by increasing the air flow. Once you open yours, what sort of temperature drop do you see at the inlet vents? I'm currently taking it on faith that the bypass is open when it says it is (it's an auto setting similar to the one you describe - I don't think the unit has an "open" setting). I might test this further by taking the temps at the manifold.

Hi all, the summer bypass on our Sentinel kinetic appears to be giving the same inlet temperature as the normal heat-exchange operation. House at 22C, external at 14C and in-flow at vent at 21C in both modes. Has anyone else observed this lack of any temperature drop upon opening the bypass? Ta, D

Thank you both, will cancel this one. Thinking about it more, it might even make icing of the ASHP worse too. Diarmid

Hi all, Does the forum think there would be any benefit to locating the exhaust vent from an MVHR system on the wall just behind an ASHP? In theory it should allow some of the heat to be recycled, and might be particularly useful on days where icing of the ASHP coils might occur. Only downside I can see would be the extra ~£30 for extract 150mm ducting to reach further down the wall... Cheers, Diarmid

Ah, I had the orientation set to North facing. What a plonker.

PVGIS is giving me an optimum panel tilt angle of 0 degrees. Is this because I live somewhere that is tragically cloudy? (Scottish Highlands) Even in January the output is higher at 15 degrees than 35 degrees.

Alan, although the manufacturers say that, if the watercourse is not on the OS 25000:1 map then SEPA want the water to go into an additional treatment step: reed bed, partial soakaway or field drain (buried slotted pipe).

The Klargester product seems to have similar dimensions to guidelines I've seen elsewhere - 1m2 per person equivalent, and 600m deep gravel. Reed Bed Design Factors - Meniscus Reed Beds effluent and waste water treatment - Do reed-beds take up a lot of space? This is for tertiary water treatment of course

Hi Olka, worth shopping around for SIP kits in Scotland, we had quite a big difference between budgetary quotes from different SIP suppliers.

Thanks Dave, that makes a lot of sense.

I'm confused about this. For PP, our draughtsman specified a septic tank + Puraflo discharging to a small stream. He doubted the effeciveness of a soakaway and he was right as the percolation was very slow. As the Puraflo is fairly expensive I emailed SEPA to check if an aeration treatment plant could be used instead of the above. The person I spoke to advised me that I should have the PuraFlo plus a partial soakaway of 10m2 with overflow. I'm not sure if this is because they also thought the watercourse I would be discharging to would have too small a flow. I can't find any documentation of this sort of thing online - can anyone help? I feel like the partial soakaway will add nothing but cost and bogginess. Ta, D

I am tempted by your approach John, would rather put a bit of DIY into an interesting job like this than something dull like taping and filling!

Thanks for the comments folks, we've decided to go for ASHP+UFH. Now we can start the battle to get one installed that isn't massively oversized!

Cheers JohnMo, how would I go about getting a system for £4k? I take your point about the off-peak heating, I hadn't thought about that.

JohnMo, that's a good point about the dew point. I'm guessing there must be a water collection pot somewhere in the mini HP unit though? Will check this! And again, I'm not saying I wouldn't have heating, just that I estimate the std. ASHP+UFH would cost me at least £4k more (not including the £9k from the generous taxpayer) and that would take a long time to recover via lower running costs compared to electric rads. Might still go for the UFH though, and it's exactly because it's the well-trodden path.