marshian

I'm quite happy that you chose that direction Every m3 I purchase costs me £2.10 The water cost isn't bad but it's the 90% sewerage charge that kicks £2.14 for every m3 So the saving is £4.24 for every 1000 litres of rainwater harvested for watering the garden (I also steal a bit for rinsing the cars after washing them because I hate the water marks you get with hard water - but don't tell Mrs Alien 😉 )

As @Nickfromwales has said it's not unacceptable but it does come with some risk if water is able to get behind the tiles then the plasterboard can quickly become a saturated soggy mess and tiles then detach from the soggy mess - I have a false wall at the back of both showers (Hides pumps, controls and plumbing but I do have a process for access - back in 90's I did the false wall in marine ply, on a refurb 20 years later I used cement board as I found some deterioration of the ply as I gutted the bathroom In the other bathroom recently refurbished I used the jackoboard for the false wall - rest of the walls are all brick/plaster so no concerns there I don't think there is an easy/cheap way to rectify so live with it just bear in mind the concerns

Agree with you there - I'm getting all the potential major expenditure done now before I retire because I'm damn sure it'll be a squeeze to do any of that on my pension

I viewed it slightly differently - I'm damn sure that insulating under a concrete floor is a very good thing to do from an energy loss perspective but think about it - if you have an existing house and to dig out the floors means massive work - you certainly aren't going to be living in it - if you can get 500 % efficiency with leaving the floors alone just a UFH layout above and a screed over the pipes why would you bother about getting a higher efficiency which isn't going to pass any cost benefit analysis

What sort of question is this? It's lacking context - per m3 - per m2

Do you need people who have done self build or will people that are thinking about it help you reach the target?

On the reliability of a drop in submersible pump - parents previous three houses have been septic tank - "marshian senior" who is now 86 has watered the garden of all three houses for many years with the same submersible pump - mains powered - hanging on a rope - drop it into the water and amazing green grass all summer. Current house is connected to main sewers and he's too tight to water the lawn with mains water and in the summer it's a shit show and it certainly isn't green.

I'm not actually saying that............. It's what I have sure but if I had my time again it's not what I'd do Brand new 1000 litre caged IBC £270 (+vat) https://itppackaging.com/product/1000-litre-ibc-new?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAq-u9BhCjARIsANLj-s0zrUXn4IWfVXPObi3tiDAikpXTf-O-aLbMp_R8XvQKxOnCwDcmc_oaArjBEALw_wcB You can get second hand ones for way cheaper than that but be careful what it was used to store there are a lot of really nasty chemicals that are shipped in IBC's - buying new means that's not an issue My 400 Litre above ground rainwater tank cost nearly as much and they are a lot more money now!!!! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/352521164934 Because it's above ground it goes green as hell and needs washing out every year I need to 1. empty it before winter (all that rain wasted) 2. make sure I don't start filling it before March because of the risk of a cold snap - April showers don't always get me to capacity 3. transfer from butts that fill quickly to butts that don't to maximise storage capacity when it rains in summer (the biggest butt is on the smallest roof but Mrs Alien doesn't want a 400 L butt on the outdoor entertaining area so the largest roof area has just 200 Litres and I was lucky to get away with that. None of those issues are a problem for below ground storage using cheap IBC's - you can't see it and if it's away from the house so no risk why spend a lot of money on fancy tanks and rainwater harvesting systems I live in what is statistically the driest region of the UK - I have 800 litres of above ground rain water storage and it is not enough in summer for me to not end up using mains water (Mrs Alien likes her veg patch and fruit trees well watered)

You are still trying to overcomplicate it - Stand alone submersible pump dropped down a hatch above the tank - transfer to above ground water butt - fill the butt when you need too

Good to hear that you can already tell the difference - with a CWT in the loft it took a little longer to notice the change Now one piece of advice @AdamD if the house has been running with hard water for a long time keep an eye out for leaks for the next few months - usual places toilet cisterns underneath taps under sinks all those sort of areas - if everywhere is mains pressure it will probably be fine but it's worth keeping an eye out. The reason is simple "Softened" water will take back into solution any limescale deposits that have built up over the years - I found two places where this resulted in a leak - one was the outlet on my CWT in the loft - the other a gravity fed toilet cistern where the flexi union started leaking.

correct me if I’m wrong but @Weebles was talking about harvesting water for the garden - he wants to do what I should have done when I finished the extension at the rear of my house. I was going to stick a couple of IBC’s under the ground and pipe them up - overflow goes to the soak-away but Mrs Alien wanted the garden back asap - so the soak-away got filled with rubble and covered up with brickweave We now have 800 litres of water in water butts - we always run out of water in the summer so have to resort to mains water between them getting refilled with rain - no room for any more It would avoid having to drain them down in the winter (water butts split when the contents freeze - unlikely to happen with underground storage

if it feels like a lot it probably is but is house specific my daily for feb so far (4 bed detached heating 24/7 with room temps from 18 to 22) the minus overnight temps are the peak days (70 kWh ish)

I don’t think I’d be entertaining using direct electric to heat rooms when I had a gas boiler and rads - the running costs are 3 x that of gas maybe for a bathroom floor thats intermittently heated for comfort factor I’d consider it but in that case it would be a luxury not a necessity

I'm with @JohnMo Heat loss is Heat Loss - doesn't really matter that much if you provide the heat with a radiator or underfloor The advantage of underfloor over a radiator is a large surface area to emit the heat so a lower temperature can be used to transfer the heat. However if your boiler cannot go down to that temperature then you need mixer manifold to drop the temp down to whatever the heat loss of the room requires If you have other floors with radiators that need higher temps you are very likely to be running the boiler at a higher temp anyway.

Nope not on a gas boiler but these days they modulate better than they did

@Peaklander responded to my request for the pump that he replaced at his parents house - it wasn't working properly and had been replaced but it had a working speed selector - mine got broken by a hamfisted gas engineer and was stuck on speed 3 - so I replaced it with a DAB pump Now I know the DAB pump has lots of functionality - tells you water flow in m3 per hour, watts being consumed and the working head in m - all lovely useful stuff but ever since the DAB pump was installed I can't get a happy system on speed 1 - it's not quite enough flow for the boiler to be happy on low flow temps I've had to put it on speed 2 and as a result boiler is happy - radiators have a good DT for the flow temp I'm running around 6 deg for pretty much all the rads. It's declaring 14w consumption, 3.0 m Head and 0.5 m3/hr But I'm not happy......... I'm not happy because the overall system noise is higher and Mrs Alien is a really light sleeper and doesn't sleep well with even the slightest background hum I'm running the CH 24/7 on weather compensated flow temp which means at 0 deg C OAT the flow temp is 30 Deg C. 10 out of 13 rads are set with TRV's as "high limiters" so an elevated temp set point that the flow temp cannot achieve so I don't have system noise because TRV's are shutting down flow and making the system noisy So why do I want to get my original Grundfos pump working on three speeds again because speed one was bloody perfect for best part of 30 years before I changed to DAB and the system was as near as damn it silent. Only time the speed went to speed 2 was with the original 1980 Glow Worm Fuel Saver boiler (non condensing) and it was really damn cold and max flow temp 80 Deg C wasn't cutting the mustard and when it got a little clogged up and I didn't realise that it wasn't flowing as much as it did with the last Glow Worm Flexicom 24hx. (fit a magnaclean before the pump was the lesson learnt) Now it might be rose tinted specs and I swap the DAB out for a restored Grundfos and find for some reason speed 1 isn't enough but now I've hopefully got the original pump issue sorted I want to try it again with the current Viessmann boiler.

Thermostatic mixer showers can really struggle when the HW side is quite low - Both our showers really lose the plot control wise when the HW temp drops below 40 deg - above it it's fine and it will manage to control the shower temp nicely with no changes to the mix

Back in the late 70’s I watched a little known band called Iron Maiden in various london pubs - they were good even then OT I know

Looks better You can potentially avoid bigger rads by heating longer (ie 24/7 or with very minimal set backs outside of scheduled heating periods) I was heating to a schedule and running 50 deg flow temps (at zero OAT) - to get the room up to temp within the schedule Moved to 24/7 heating and I'm running 32 deg flow temps (at zero OAT) Setbacks with recovery didn't seem to save any energy v a 24/7 heating period Only proviso is the boiler needs to be happy at the lower flow temps

I don't think so @John Carroll I think @Peaklander parents system is dirty - the magnetite has built up in the H above the pump and in the pump itself The original issue was probably caused by the blockages in the pump impeller but replacing the pump for a new one (and probably much more powerful in terms of flow rate) resulted in the pump over that wouldn't have happened with the original pump It's not the first time I've seen a pump restricted like this it happened to my own system - I couldn't work out why a system that had run for 15 years on the lowest pump speed and the boiler was happy and then I needed to use speed two to reduce the boiler short cycling because it was unhappy It took me a long time to work out what was happening - probably too long if I'm honest I'm adding to the post just so anyone searching for similar faults can see that a check on the pump might be a good first port of call

That's actually bloody clever................. We've only been burgled once and they smashed the 2G glass in the french door after trying unsucessfully to jemmy the door and then the hinges on all four doors!!!! Seems the French have a more intelligent class of burglar!!! Edit to add - Having read the article culprits were Albanian and Italian so maybe I gave the French too much credit

Gave up trying to clean it out after removing this much detritus pump has a much thinner impeller than my one despite being the same pump???

Well @peaklander sent me his old pump and tonight I had chance to strip it down and transfer the speed controller (to replace the one on my pump which was broken by a hamfisted gas engineer) Easy job but being of an inquisitive mind I couldn’t resist stripping it down completely and I wasn’t surprised at what I found this post is with permission of Tim @Peaklander this is the impeller from above side view other side I could only find a couple of channels that looked like they would pump water

Anyway the bump was to hopefully help get an answer to your question @MikeGrahamT21 - I don't have a clue on what the impacts would be

That's pretty damn impressive on a 15mm mains Love that ^ One of the reasons I still have a CW tank in the loft and vented system - yes unvented would allow me to ditch the pumps I have on the showers but then I'm totally reliant on the mains pressure and it can be a bit patchy here!!!