jack

If you like your bedroom that cool, I don't see any way around having active cooling of some sort. Personally, I'd just plan for a small air conditioner for use in summer. Solar shading (ideally external) makes a massive difference to the energy that will be required to keep things cool. Also, if you like the windows open, consider planning for retractable insect screens at the design stage. We can't have windows open overnight at ours because of insects, and retrofittng screens is going to be quite difficult. If you have a central area where you can put an opening roof window, you can get some good stack ventilation going too. We'd planned for that, but the insects have made it difficult. Our solution to the heat is a small pedestal fan. Works fine (basically just directed at me, as my wife doesn't mind sleeping in a warm room).

Not often. I had issues with cheap DMX dimmers for a while so I did need to switch it all off to make changes. I wouldn't bother just for the convenience of having fewer switches to isolate, but I do like the idea of less wiring coming into the Loxone cabinet. As with so many things, there's a lot I'd change if I were doing it all again!

I have to flip several RCBOs in our CU to isolate the Loxone panel. It's been over 8 years since we did our installation, but I vaguely recall having a conversation about this with the electrician, and seem to recall that he was uncomfortable with moving a lot of what would usually be in a CU into the Loxone cabinet. I don't remember whether it was regs or a lack of panel space that led us to the decision in the end!

We're trying, honest! 😄

How thick is your screed (or slab, if the UFH pipes are in that)? Ours are in the slab underneath about 70 mm of polished concrete overlay, and it takes 3 hours for a change of 0.1 °C to be apparent at the floor surface. The floor surface takes about 12 hours to increase by 0.3-0.4 °C once it starts rising. Here's the slab temperature under the kitchen island over the last few days, with the ASHP running 12 hours a day. Lowest temp was 19.8 °C, highest was 20.2 °C: Admittedly this is an extreme case given we run our flows temps quite low (25-28 °C depending on outside temps), but UFH does react very differently to radiators.

It took me too many years to realise this. A 25 pack of DeWalt bits for a tenner last years, and I'm far less reticent to chuck one out when it starts to show wear.

You've been on the forum for a bit so it's fine to share suppliers you've used. That's particularly true given someone else asked for the info!

Not sure if you've considered it already, but what bit are they designed for? Could be an issue if they're a pozi bit and you're using Philips (or vice versa).

Didn't work for us. The most highly recommended guy - recommended by several friends - we had was average at best relative to the others we had onsite. Example: the guy he had in doing the plasterboards noticed that a piece of steel protection we had in place to protect a 240V blinds cable at the top of the window in my study was in the way, so he just unscrewed it and threw it in the middle of the floor. The only good thing is that he was that lazy, as otherwise we'd never have known.

Our window installers were the Irish distributors for the German company that made the windows. They didn't follow the manufacturer's installation drawings - which we gave them - and missed that the frames needed to be packed up by 15 mm. This led to the cills not fitting. I chamfered off an edge of the frame at each window so the cills would fit, then they realised that the blinds (again, supplied by the manufacturer for which they were a distributor) couldn't be attached through the vertical battens in the reveals that I'd confirmed with them were not going to be in the way. I also later learned that they should have lined the aperture with a DPM, but that didn't happen. And on roofing, I complained to the manufacturer about the poor adhesion of the membrane around the outlets through our parapet walls. They confirmed that all was fine and that the installation was to the "usual high standards we expect of our approved installers". Every one of those outlets leaked badly within a month of us moving in, all due to... poor adhesion of the membrane around the outlets. I should stay away from this thread, it's bringing back too many nasty memories! 😁

Not always, in my experience. There were times when we went for what we thought was a higher quality outfit based on the price and professionalism of our interactions with them, but I don't think they did any better on average than the cheaper ones.

I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation in the last few years. We just don't respect tradespeople enough in this country. It's (wrongly imo) seen as something that kids who weren't any good at school end up doing because they aren't good for anything else. Absolute bollocks.

No.

Thanks. I did look into the modbus module when buying the ASHP, but it was several hundred quid + the prospect of me having the figure out how it all interfaced with Loxone. Seemed like too much effort at the time - I may revisit at some stage, but I already have too many projects on the go! Unfortunately (well, unfortunately for this approach), the time constant on our slab is too long for this to work. At the current flow temp settings in mild winter weather, it I turn the heating on, it takes just under three hours to show any change in temperature (+0.1 degrees). The temperature will continue to slowly rise for another three or more hours after the heating is turned off. I think the solution is just to bump of the flow temp across the weather compensation curve and experiment with how the house reacts. Thanks. If I understand you correctly, that's what I was proposing above when I said: There'll be some experimentation involved, but it's an interesting project, plus I can start working on it now even before I'm back on the cheap overnight rate.

My wife was far more important to our build than I was. She ran the entire site. Most of the guys we had onsite were pretty good, but a few struggled with taking instructions from a woman.

I run our downstairs underfloor cooling at 15 degrees flow temp, only during the day when the sun is out and the pv is generating power. This keeps the floor at about 19 degrees, which makes for a very comfortable room temperature, even in a run of high 20s days as we occasionally experience. Admittedly we have concrete floors, which do tend to be good at sucking the heat out of the room (and your feet - heavenly when it's really hot outside). I have no idea how well it would work in the sorts of temperatures you're talking about. I suspect air conditioning would be more effective, especially upstairs where it tends to get a lot warmer.

Man, that's horrendous. Not quite as bad, but we had rockwool for sound insulation just thrown up between the joists prior to plasterboarding the ceilings, rather than pushed into place to close all the gaps.

Correct. Loxone calls for heat, and there's some (programmed) flexibility about how that happens, but flow temperature (including weather compensation) is set by the ASHP controller. Ideally I'd have Loxone control the flow temperature too, based on various current and predicted temperatures and the availabilty of cheap power (overnight) or free power (occasional excess PV during winter), but that isn't possible with my current setup. Depending on the rate at which my slab can absorb energy, the solution may be to just increase the flow temperature across the weather compensation curve. That might be enough to get me over the line. The problem I have is modelling all of this. I may just need to try it out when it gets colder. I've thought about using this in the past, mainly for when there's excess PV but the house is already up to temperature. The main issue is the very long time constant of my slab. I'm sure there's a way to program in some guardrails to make it work though.

I'm not against this approach. For a while I did have things set up to use the immersion to boost DHW for the last hour when we were on Go. Unfortunately, my Octopus Go contract ended a few months ago and I'm not able to sign up to the other cheap overnight tariff until I get a compatible car or charger (I didn't want to tie myself into the latest Go tariff, as the numbers are nowhere near as good as the other cheap overnight tariff). I'm due to replace my car soon and will be installing a charger at the same time, so I'll be able to get onto the new tariff. I'll need to do the sums to see what works out best once that happens. I was hoping that four hours at a decent temperature would cover most if not all of our heating needs, but if it doesn't, adding in the immersion to help the DHW heating may be the way forward.

I wish it were so, but here're all the inputs and outputs for my unit: There is an offset function that moves the weather compensation curve up or down by up to 5 degrees, but that's something you set manually via the controller.

Yeah, there are plenty of other cock-ups for me to look at instead! 😁

Sounds like our painters. One of the young guys stood on a pile of cardboard boxes so he could reach something (we didn't expect them to be in that room on that day or we'd have cleared it out). One of the boxes included the blind box and motor to go on our rooflight. He snapped off the solar panel and cracked the housing. Of course, by the time I realised what had happened a few days later it was too late to do anything about it.

The "perfectionist" subbed our cladding to his usual team and they were doing a great job. Then there was a break and the three guys who'd been doing it were replaced with two new guys. They weren't terrible, but an indicator of their attitude was the fact that they started a huge cladding job with a completely blunt blade in their saw. When they cut through at 45 degrees for the corners, it left noticeable splinters sticking out all the way along the sharp edge, which looked ridiculous. I can still see the point in the cladding where the team changed.

I have a home automation system and I haven't bothered using it to do anything other than act as a thermostat for our ASHP. It works fine in our highly insulated house with a single downstairs UFH zone. The only thing I currently wish I could do (without having to hack into the ASHP's external temperature sensor to make it think the weather is colder) is to bump up the UFH supply temperature when energy is cheap. With an Octopus EV tariff, I can get 6 hours of cheap energy overnight. I use two hours of that for DHW heating. It'd be nice to bump up the UFH temperature during the other four hours so I can pump as much energy into the slab as possible. I understand that's possible with more advanced controls, but for my Panasonic Aquarea unit, they were hundreds of quid more than the standard controller.

Our electrician did a great job. Plumbing was okay - not brilliant. The polished concrete floors are good and the painters were pretty good (at painting, at least - they were bulls in a China shop and repeatedly broke stuff by standing on it rather than asking us to move it). Everyone else was passable at best, and absolute dog5hit at worst. I initially thought that maybe we weren't paying enough, or weren't being clear enough about what we wanted, but eventually I concluded that the people we were engaging weren't actually capable of doing excellent work. Even people who'd been described by friends of ours (who'd used them) as "perfectionists" turned out to be pretty poor. The problem is compounded by an order of magnitude if you ask them to do anything different to what they usually do for clients who don't know or care. This is the major reason it took us so long to complete. We had so many bad experiences with trades that I eventually refused to hire anyone else and just did it myself. I certainly didn't always do a great job myself, but I'm certain it was better than a lot of the people I'd have hired to do it.