diarmidR

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.

Thanks both. My issue with the exhaust air heat pump is that I've read elsewhere on this forum that the optimal air flow for the MVHR heat exchanger is too low to provide a good flow of heat, and alsowe wouldn't get to use the excess heat in the summer. Also, ProDave you commented on October 2nd on a different thread that you don't like the all-eggs-in-one-basket aspect of an EAHP. ProDave, I don't know if the comment about heating was directed to me or Gone West, but I'm not expecting to do without heating, just that it will be a small enough amount for resistance heating to make sense. We're in the highlands like you!

Hi all, We are planning a new-build that will approach passivhaus standards, and I feel that going for the typical ASHP+cylinder+UFH is engineering and financial overkill, especially since we like to have the house around 18-19C and cooler at night. Instead I would like to have minimal electric radiators (or even just electric blankets) and something like the Mixergy iHP* to provide hot water at COP > 1. I would like to set it up so that it has two inlet/outlet paths according to external weather: If solar gain > heat loss: extract from top of vaulted glazed area and return to bottom to provide cooling If solar gain < heat loss: extract and return from/to external environment The second case is to avoid having to run the radiators to provide hot water on days with no sun, which tend to be wet and not sub-zero where we are building. Does this sound feasible? We will be getting an MVHR, but I was hoping that by having only internal/internal or external/external config we would avoid interfering with it's operation. Are there any products out there that would allow a compact solution for changing the flow path? It doesn't have to be automatic or anything, but I want to avoid a mess of flexible tubing. Cheers, Diarmid * other products are available, I just like the look of the warranty and modularity of this one.