jack

Please note the comment I've added to my post above. It appears TKC Kitchens might be a different company to TKC (TK Concepts Ltd), which is also a kitchen supplier.

Please note that this poster is associated with TKC Kitchens. Note: Please be aware that TKC Kitchens repeatedly linked to in posts by Tony687 seems to to be a separate company to TKC, which is also a kitchen supplier. It's not immediately apparent whether there's any connection between these two companies, so please be sure to check which one you're looking at before making any decisions. Do with that information (and other members' comments in the Howdens Trade Account thread I've linked above) what you will.

Turns out it wasn't a coincidence at all - well spotted! Sorry we missed it at the time. If anything smells off in the future, hit the "Report" button and we'll take a closer look. Your email address (which forum staff can see) has a LOT in common with the user name in the link above, so you plainly uploaded that article to Medium. The article itself is a thinly-veiled ad for TKC Kitchens. All of your posts on BuildHub have involved pushing this company. Overall, it's clear you work for them (we're 99% we know exactly who you are, but it doesn't really matter). Since you've breached BuildHub's Terms and Conditions, we've locked your account from further posting. Please note that TKC Kitchens repeatedly linked to in posts by Tony687 seems to to be a separate company to TKC, which is also a kitchen supplier. It's not immediately apparent whether there's any connection between these two companies, so please be sure to check which one you're looking at before making any decisions.

Welcome to BuildHub. A couple of points (I'm sure there are others): ASHPs don't heat water as hot as gas boilers do, so you'll want a larger tank to deliver the same amount of water to things like showers. Make sure you get a tank with a heat pump coil, which is longer than a standard coil for use with, e.g., a gas boiler. A longer coil allows for better transfer of heat into the water.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLolteQt7Vz/

From ~10 years of reading BuildHub threads, one general principle pops up again and again when it comes to building problems: the junction where one trade's work meets another. The timber frame company's work isn't square? Foundation guy's fault. Plasterboarding guy having trouble? Timber frame guy's fault. Windows a problem? Supplier says it's the installer's fault, installer says it's the supplier's fault. Roof issues? Roofer says the blockwork isn't level and it's the best they can do, take it up with the brickie. Costs aside, for my money there's huge value in being able to point at a potential problem and identify the one person who is responsible. I suspect that in some cases there are fewer chances of problems if it's all the responsibility of one entity, because there's less temptation to cut corners at each stage. If I wanted a shell built, I'd get someone in to do it. That's what we did. And of course, the two biggest subsequent problems were windows and roofing. The window installers blamed the framing company for some of their difficulties, even though they'd approved all measurements and external battening before arriving. The roofers blamed the timber frame company for ongoing leaks before the house was completely watertight. The leaks turned out to be 100% the fault of the roofers.

Our house can get very hot upstairs during long runs of hot days. I've not got around to setting it up yet, but I have plans to boost the MVHR during the cheap overnight period when conditions are such that the summer bypass function is enabled.

No wonder you haven't finished the build yet.

At a guess, some combination of incompetence, malice, disengagement, and self-interest on behalf of the council and its employees. Whatever the cause, the outcome has in many cases been deeply unfair. I can't see any reasonable basis for the requirement that every CIL box be ticked before you can even trim a hedge or lay some hardcore, for example. If the law is meant to be that self-builders don't pay, then the law's intention shouldn't be subvertable by councils requiring that a set of narrow formal requirements must all be met before an early, arbitrary, and unextendible deadline. It reminds me a lot of how the VAT self-build refund was operating for a while. The clear intention of the law is for self-builders to be able to recover VAT, but HMRC did everything in its power to subvert that intention by using a definition of "complete" that was completely at odds with any reasonable meaning of the word, and was certainly contrary to how it was used in the legislation.

Sounds like clients in every industry!

The last two or three issues of Private Eye have briefly addressed local council abuses of the CIL system, and this person's plight with Waverley council in particular. I don't know much about CIL (it didn't apply when I built), but I'm aware that there are huge potential financial traps for the unwary. Perhaps we should add a sticky post with a warning in the relevant sub-forum.

On my (Brink) unit (and I imagine most other modern units), bypass mode mode is automatically entered based on (among other things) the difference between internal and external temps. Assuming an automatic system, what prompts clients to ask you about it? Do they tend to get concerned that it isn't coming on during hot days in summer? Yes, but if it's automatic, summer bypass mode won't come on unless it's cooler outside than inside. Are there many/any current units that only have a manually-operable summer bypass mode? For us, summer bypass tends to kick in during the evening on hot days when the outside temperature drops below a threshold. It turns off the following morning if/when the outside temperature rises sufficiently. Perhaps less of an issue in Scotland, where overheating is presumably less common? That said, is your unit configured to operate automatically based on the difference between inside and outside temps? If so, why wouldn't you just leave it operating so you get the benefit of cooler air bypassing the heat exchanger overnight if your house is too warm?

They look okay to me. The only issue I have is the lack of edging/boundary between the edges and the adjacent grass. The edges will quickly become untidy unless regularly maintained.

Very interesting. You're the first person I can recall who's done this. I've said before that if were doing another build, we'd have some sort of screed on the first floor, with tiles on top. In summer, the floors would be cooled as needed. For winter, they'd be warmed just enough to keep the rooms at a comfortable sleeping temperature, with temporary rugs around beds and along halls. Depends on how tall the windows are. We have 400 mm overhangs on all south-facing windows. Some of the windows are very wide but only maybe 500 mm tall, so they're completely shaded when the sun is high and to the south in mid-summer. This is very effective. The south-facing sliding doors don't get much benefit from the same overhang. I can give a concrete example of how important external shading can be. Our bedroom is at the east end of the house. For cost reasons, we idiotically decided not to include external blinds on the large east-facing window/door that looks out onto our balcony. The balcony isn't very deep, but it's covered, so there's a 1000+ mm overhang over the east-facing window/door. One of the other bedrooms is west-facing. It only has a 600 mm overhang. It has a big window too, but has external venetians that are only ever partly open during summer. There's a permanent temperature difference between these two rooms throughout summer. In very hot periods, the difference can be several degrees. The difference in comfort between 22 and 27 degrees is marked, especially when you're trying to sleep! I wish we'd provided for these, as they're not really practical to retrofit! If there's doubt about whether they'll be needed/wanted, it wouldn't cost too much to add the required (insulated) runs at first fix, but only install the fancoil units if needed. I think you also need to consider condensation drainage, depending on the temperature you plan to run them at. I've heard this can be effective, but it seems like an expensive and complicated option with a high risk of failure over a long enough period of time. External shutters or blinds feel like they'd be as effective. More generally, I'd also consider careful selection of plants. For example, a deciduous tree in the right place can provide a lot of useful shade in the summer. Same with deciduous vines on a trellis or pergola.

I took the opposite from @-rick-'s comment: "without [the Germans] the rest of us would be stuck with [worse] privacy laws much more in line with the US than we have."