jack

I'd also recommend asking your question in one of the relevant sub forums (Other Heating Systems is probably best). Lots of members don't check the Introduce Yourself forum, plus any useful answers to your question will more easily be found by others with the same problem in the future.

Welcome Kevan. For a house with passive-class insulation and airtightness, it's feasible to do everything with direct electric heating. Have a look at @TerryE's posts on the topic. He uses cheap overnight power to do most of his house and water heating. While he pays more per kWh of delivered heat, he's saved the cost of an ASHP and associated plumbing/electrics.

Welcome! You could try posting your question over in the Ireland sub forum. I get the impression we don't have huge numbers of Irish members, but that's probably the best place to find Ireland-specific advice

Shims are designed to counter the weight of a window or door when it's open and not being supported by the latching system. They shouldn't have been removed. Even with shims, we have three or four large door-window frames that have sagged slightly in the direction that the weight of the open door drags the frame. The bottom seals have rubbed and in a couple of cases completely torn off. This might be due to the frames having been under-shimmed, or the shims shrinking over time (our shitty installers used softwood wedges, not plastic). To fix them now will be an absolute pig of a job. It might be less of an issue on the hinge side, but 100% I'd still put them back.

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.