MikeSharp01

Just doing the first fix plumbing run's and wondered where we will need to run potable water, as in direct from the mains, as the house will have a water softener - Southern water is very hard! I was thinking of running it to all the bathroom taps, not the WCs, cisterns, showers or baths or indeed anywhere there is need to have balanced pressures on hot & cold, so you can safely drink the cold water there and to a filter tap beside the kitchen sink. We have great pressure and flow so I may have to condition the pressure before we split off to the softener and on to the UVC, I appreciate that the water softener will drop the pressure itself (looks like between 0.5 and 1 bar - which seems a lot but is what is quoted). I wondered if there is anything else I should use the hard water for!

We are not at the stage for the final stairs but to avoid the ladders we put in a cheap stair from Howdens to make it more comfortable getting around the building.

We need a spreadsheet for this lot, anyone up for experimenting?

That is then very weird. So the problem is here: Can you put a spirit level on the bath edge and see if it sloping towards or away from the wall - because to get behind the tiles it MUST be getting through them either directly - some tiles can be porous, or the grout - more likely. So I suspect the bath edge is slightly sloped towards the wall causing the water to flow under the hinge and behind that there is a hole in the grout that is letting the water through and behind the tiles where it runs down and out as you have indicated. Has the plumber take the hinge off to look?

How much water is there? Does it run even when not showering? Where does the vertical copper pipe run to? It's all a bit odd because to get behind the tiles there must be path in through the grout somewhere and that may be further up the wall than the base.

In the UK you can, if able to access the grant, get the job done for less than you can DIY it - so that's an incentive. True it is marginal, on ours the lowest quotes are coming in at a couple of grand over the grant - so cost to us being a couple of grand and I cannot get the core components, ASHP and cylinder, for that let alone the G3 certificate and the extended guarantees on the ASHP for that. So despite knowing that my fellow country men and women are paying for the grant, and perhaps therefore some over pricing, although given the MCS overheads these firms carry it is hard to work out how much this might be, we will probably go for this route and ours is passive class and in the SE.

Is that you with 44 (forty four) bricks - that's a lift if ever I saw one. the HSE would have something to say adding all that weight to a wooden ladder's rungs!!!!

Yes @Nic that's a great link - gets a heap of professional advice from @Carrerahill who has a degree in lighting design.

Willis heaters are like immersion heaters for flowing water so you just put them in the UFH circuit and away you go.

No they are roughly in line with those, when you include fitting and well below Internorm. We went with Norrsken - very happy we are.

I was getting the wholesale prices for the exact same kit as the quotes, they came in between £3.8K and £4.3K. I can get a cheaper heat pump and if I loose the buffer it comes down a bit more. Had a really good conversation with one of the companies technical guys today which went well on my side as I got a good impression for my control options and some of the limitations of the heat pump (Modulation depth). I expect they thought I was some rather odd customer asking questions about everything.

You could do without the grant for that or less. Full price ASHP £2.5k, cylinder £1k, bits and bobs £500. Not quite I don't think. I did some estimates of the equipment wholesale costs, my brother-in-law has an account at one of the suppliers, and its around £4k and we won't get MCS certificate. I do need to negotiate hard and see what I can get.

Yes I think the best so far is £11K plus (so minus grant we will pay £4K.)

I would love a quote of £10K.

Does that mean you need loxone to access ebus or are the ebus electrical and protocol standards published somewhere.

I think I want to somewhat follow in the Homely footsteps and use dynamic trading - such @TerryE and others have been looking at through Octopus to control the ASHP / UFH / DHW use and SOLAR generation in association with APIs like openweathermap for more than direct weather compensation and then some basic AI's at the outset to to optimize it while improving this heuristic functionality through data gathering.

I thought that 12mm of pink fire rated stuff was 30 minutes on its own with the grey being 30 minutes when skimmed. Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes somewhere or maybe I have wrong.

Just poking this thread as it looks like there is now an API and a home assistant integration but no Homely integration. We are being offered a vailliant heatpump for our DHW / UFH and I would like to make sure that I can get control of it. Anybody got any experience of the vaillant API development groups work?

It's a mine field, we have the same problem although our tracks will run above the beams in the vaulted ceiling and are really for lighting pictures rather than the space more generally. I have found no standard although I have to say its not been a long look as yet. I did find this https://www.thelightbulb.co.uk/resources/everything-you-need-to-know-about-track-lighting/ which gives a hint about different track styles and is generally very informative. I think the solution must lie in looking at commercial shop fitting lighting tracks as they seem to have all manner of things on them. Either way it will be interesting to see if anyone can identify a standard track which can accommodate lights of many different manufactures.

Yes what quantities are you looking for - roughly, including lengths of steels & sizes will help members get a better handle on the prices you have given.

Hi and welcome to THE forum. I have no experience of CiL, our LA does not have it, so I cannot help but there have been loads of members that have been through it so you should get some advice when the world wakes up

I just made some temporary frames from 50x25 batten and covered them in clear polythene.

We did it that way. I was taking so long to line up a window company that I decided to go ahead without them and seal up the holes as best I could. The way our air tightness is done is basically to have the whole house sealed internally with Intello+ and I ran this over the roof lights as they were in because the roof was on. I left the window holes though so I had to make temp covers for them. We then pumped the cellulose fibre into the walls through the intello+. The windows are now in so all I am doing is taping round them and fitting the sub structure for the internal window boxes. I still have to seal the intello+ to the slab which is my next job. The first air tightness test should be by the end of the month but for that I will leave the roof lights covered so I don't have to worry about them.

O It is somewhat about volume / surface area because you could have a 156m on the ground floor with 50m ceiling height and 100m 1st floor - extreme I know but I guess you see the point. Pretty sure it won't make difference though will it.

Have you used / tried the JSHarris spreadsheet? You can find it here along with some details for using it.