MikeSharp01

onshape is very good, free - as long as you don't mind your drawings being public. and although a bit more complex than sketchup it is full featured.

We have just bitten the bullet and put an ensuite wet room off the snug area, which also serves as an accessible WC.

Will do, when they finally tie down the spec, as things stand it keeps coming and going from their web site, something to do with MCS certification.

The one we are looking at has a Panasonic DC Inverter Compressor - which is the real heart of the machine I guess.

The ASHP we are looking at says the COPs up to 5.56 is that the limit should I be looking for one that get up to 8 or is the quote from the manufacturer based on some output value?

here are the basic logo's ! Not dimmable: Dimmable:

Some of them yes. Look out for the logo on the box.

Not if you use the right approach (Trailing edge / phase-cut) suitably choked surely!

Look at the Whitewing driver units for either LV LED or 240V LED, we have one, not yet commissioned, controls 16 channels of 240 LED lights DMX controlled and fully dimmable, all in a single DIN rail mounting unit about 200mm x 120mm. Here is one we have: https://whitewing.co.uk/acdim.html I think others on here have these as well.

Its a long story, we have 1600mm x 600mm x 600 and this is directly below the MVHR unit. At this point the house is single story and it is close to the outer wall so everything is tight. The original plan was a Sunamp unit where we are now thinking we will put the UVC the Sunamp being much lower. However given the tribulations with the Sunamp units we have chosen to go for a UVC instead run from the heat pump but also chargeable via cheap electricity (Octopus agile / solar PV). So the space is limited by the original plan. We can get a Telford tempest (200l) in there, just but only if we can turn directly out of the top of the unit. Their 170 & 150 units fit with plenty of head room. There is only two of us and the house is just two bedrooms, two bathrooms, albeit spread of 153m2.

Is that not a G3 / MCS requirement - 100mm clear run of pipe straight out of the top! (I was told this was a requirement by one of the possible suppliers we investigated for our system.)

Had a look at the Telford Tempest, 200l we are only a two bedroom home so that should be OK and I am confident we cannot fit 300l into the space we have. Although if I could do away with 100mm of straight pipe from the outlet we could go 100mm higher but max Diameter I 600mm.

I have been looking for a 200l cylinder, we only need about 150l, and I have not found on that has a coil that big, I have found one with 1.9m2 if you connect both the main and secondary coils in series.

The Latham's door does have a passive house certificate, but it isn't clear to me that includes the lock: https://www.lathamtimber.co.uk/contentfiles/files/z_moralt_moralt-passiv-klima-klimasoft-firesafe-akustik_en_2015.pdf Interesting link, the certificate says is valid only until 2015 but it looks like a current product on their website, it must come with a lock and if it is a certified product then that's you sorted. Judging by the video on the web site about the Moralt system it look like you specify what you want and they build it.

Couple of things. 1. The company selling the door should offer a U value for the door and frame including the lock and the package will be certified so no need to worry about that. 2. When we had our air test the leak through the mortise locks were vey noticeable so we will need to fit covers on then eventually. We still managed 0.2 on the Passive house scale but every little helps.

Time we started a bit of gentle lobbying perhaps. Here is a note I have just sent to the BBC Today programme to ask them to ask an appropriate minister. "Here is a question you might like ask of an appropriate minister if they continue to say that the only route to cheaper electricity is to increase renewable generation. While I agree we should be increasing renewable generation there is a problem lurking at the core of this statement from government. The chart above is from this document (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675c0ca798302e574b915336/eep-report-2023-2050.pdf) published in December 2024 by Ed Miliband's department. It clearly shows that we will be using as much gas in 2050 as we are using now to generate electricity despite a massive increase in renewables. This means that unless the link between the gas price and the electricity price is broken the price for electricity will still be set by Gas. How does the minister square this circle? If we are going to delink why don't we do it now - perhaps it is because the renewable generators are getting a great price for their electricity. If we are not delinking how will the electricity prices not be tied back to a fossil fuel with all that entails. " Let's see if anything comes of it.

the menu will probably have a setting to fix the speed of the RS485 connection and get its address, if not use 9600 Bps and 1 and see what gives. You will need something like this (https://thepihut.com/products/rs232-rs485-to-rj45-ethernet-serial-server-poe-port) to talk to it and an ethernet connection to plug it into the RS485 wire can be as long as you need - even Buckingham palace does not extend so far that RS485 won't reach.

It looks like something has got to give as things are unsustainable. That report from Mr Milibands department in December clearly shows that we will still be burning as much gas as we are today although as a smaller proportion of overall generation. So it follows that gas will still set the price unless it is delinked from doing so. Given we assume that the department knows what it is doing the calculation must be that at some point the link will need to be broken by some means as yet unknown. This brings us back to what @SteamyTea says might be a tactic in the minds of the windfarm builders to push this date back so they can make hay while the wind blows.

No Apparently you don't need any more up there. According to your man from Octopus the marginal cost of production up there is something silly like 7p kWh but the companies get paid something like 12p kWh just to keep them turned off. Its all madder than a mad things mad thing!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce848g8l8vro Looks like we won't get this wind farm after all. While I heard again today that the only way to get cheaper electricity is to get away from fossil fuels and I recall that graph referred to last week, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675c0ca798302e574b915336/eep-report-2023-2050.pdf, that says we will still be using gas in 2050! How can we square this circle.

Ah I forgot to say that it is a separate filtered tap. Cold only which we will use for kettle, food water etc. Otherwise two PRVs is not a problem?

It must be pain points.

Am trying to follow this for our G3 central plumbing install. In the recent thread on precharge for a uvc you have a few PRVs around the place so not sure quite why there are so many and how, if there is one, any water softener gets into the circuit. I was thinking: 1. Stop cock (25 to 22) 2. NON return valve 3. Drain cock 4. T to external tap 4. Prv to step down from 7 bar to 4. 5. Isolating valve. 6. T off to A. Water Softener B. To kitchen potable tap. A.1 Isolating valve. A.2 Softener A.3 Isolating valve. A.4 Multi Block set at 3 bar adjacent to UVC Then out to all cold feeds and on to UVC. Is that the right place for the Softener,? Will the the two PRVs fight each other - can't see how?

No they didn't - just good jobbing architects who had done three houses on our hill and we liked one of them very much so we included them in the list to be 'interviewed' as I mention there were places where they did not get the self build ideal but Buildhub has worked its magic on most of those questions already.

We used an architect for our design upto building control (BC). We were very happy with the work they did and we had told them we would not be going past BC. This said they were not that aware of self building of our sort, as @nod has described, so some aspects got a bit lost. The main one being describing the details as they assumed a competent builder would just do it so leaving gaps which took us a long time to work out and still appear on occasions. So I get the impression there is a gap there. Also in our case the architects had not done a passive house (PH) beforehand so although they got the contract I did the PH courses so I could feed in the expertise so they did not design a house that could not be built to PH standards. So that is another gap worth looking at.