jack

Thanks for the photos. Is your stone base MOT1 or similar? I've more commonly seen large no-fines stone specced - something like railway ballast.

Fair enough. I rarely change titles, but someone searching for information about inverters ought to be able to find this thread!

I'd at least run the cabling for three phase. It's orders of magnitude more work to go back and add it later.

Welcome!

It might depend on what "making people abundantly aware" involved, but I think it could well be their fault: That said, if I learned anything during our build, it's that virtually no-one ever listened to anything we said. In my experience, unless you were stood there looking over their shoulders, most trades just did things however they fancied, irrespective of what was agreed beforehand.

Unfortunately it won't be that easy:

I didn't say above, but I have a 250 L tank and I think it's too small. If all four of us have a shower in the morning or evening, there's a chance we might run out of water (especially if number two child isn't physically dragged out of the shower in time). We also have waste water heat recovery, which probably helps a bit, so if you don't have that it could be even worse. Also, we have a PV immersion diverter. The larger your tank, the more free heat you can store. On sunny days in summer and some of the shoulder months, with a big tank you can probably store a couple of days' of heat from just one sunny day. I'd probably be looking at 400 L if I were doing this again.

If I were doing it again, I'd consider a larger DHW tank and a decent sized buffer for the UFH to allow more heat to be stored during the cheap overnight period. That would also enable a larger ASHP to be used, as it wouldn't need to modulate down so much.

If you're using an ASHP, I'd go larger than the recommendations suggest. A larger volume allows you to heat more water to a lower temperature, giving you the same useful output but allowing a higher COP.

Speculating, but: As a gas, water is just a bunch of free H2O molecules flying around. If they find a hole big enough, they'll work their way through. In contrast, the molecules in liquid water are attracted to each other due to their polar nature. The negative side of each molecule is attracted to the positive side of adjacent molcules. Surface tension is an example of this - the attraction causes water to form droplets rather than spread out in a molecule-thin sheet over a surface. That attraction causes liquid water to clump together in a way that impedes its ability to traverse pores that are big enough to allow individual water molecules to pass through.

All of the temperature sensors were already installed, and I had spare relays, so there was literally zero hardware cost to implement it in Loxone. Feel free to query the need for home automation, but why would I add the cost of a separate thermostat that's guaranteed to be at most (but almost certainly not) as functional?

I use it in place of a thermostat. It allows me to do things like enabling limited overheating during the cheap Octopus window, forcing heating when upstairs gets too cold. It does add complication, and arguably we could just accept the limitations of a fixed thermostat, but it seems a shame to have the capability and not use it.

There are quite a few of us. Use the search function to find out more if of interest.

Discussed here. Locking this thread so we keep everything in one place.

We're 290 m2 and our 5 kW Panasonic has been fine for 8 years. It does run a lot of the time when it's very cold, but no issues heating DHW as as needed.

Ours are the same. It only happens when the blinds are in the fully closed position, and I've only noticed it on the side of the house that faces the prevailing wind.

We went motorised. A lot of the benefit of these is having them programmed to go up and down (or at least tilt between open and closed) depending on the time of day and the season. For example, some east-facing blinds are programmed to retract completely first thing in the morning during the cooler months, to maximise light, then to close at dusk. Those same blinds stay down and tilted only slightly open during the day in summer, to help keep the heat out. As well as airtightness, you also need to think about having a thermal bridge. If the axle is metal, it's going to be a good conductor of heat. Even a small amount of air getting into whatever space it passed through will cause condensation. Personally I wouldn't do it.

Almost identical size and shape to what we had done with 600 x 300 slabs a few years back. I'm sure it took two of them well under two weeks, including digging out and laying a sub-base.

We have external venetians on several windows, including some large first floor windows that face directly into the prevailing wind. In over eight years, we've never had any issues with very strong winds, other than rattling (which can be a bit annoying if you're a light sleeper). I used to raise them in very bad weather, but once they'd got through a few bad days when I forgot or wasn't around, I stopped worrying about it.

I've done so a couple of times. It takes longer for them to reply than they suggested would be the case, but otherwise no issues. I had exactly the same situation a couple of years back. I was genuinely surprised they let the number get so high. Additional plug: if anyone's thinking of moving to Octopus, you can help fund BuildHub and earn £50 for yourself:

You're probably not far off on the kit cost (especially if you want a lot of centrally controlled dimming), but we didn't have any professional services costs. I did the design with the electrician (who admittedly has an electronics engineering background), he did the installation, and I handled the programming. The programming really isn't difficult if you're of a reasonable technical bent. There's lots of support on Google groups and various forums, too. I'm not sure whether I'd use Loxone again. The upside is that the system is extremely easy to program, and it can be used with a wide range of other protocols. It also virtually self-documents itself as you program it. The downside is that it's very expensive if you want to use their proprietary modules like dimmers. I'd be tempted to just use the miniserver (the Loxone core controller) and have it coordinate everything else via DMX, KNX, and IP based protocols. Also, while it would be a hassle to swap in a different solution if Loxone went bust, it's still just inputs and outputs at the end of the day. I'm sure a lot of what's there could be replaced with equivalents from a different system.

Really nice to see this working. This is almost exactly how I've been considering modifying my system to allow my (Loxone) home automation system to control tank heating.

Hi Dave. When you say you "copy the image in turbocad", what do you mean? Did you try this from my first reply?: In more detail: You're using Windows 10, so use the inbuilt "Snipping Tool": I have it as a shortcut in my task bar. Open it, click the "+" button at the top left, then drag a rectangle around the part of the image you want to post. It's automatically added to the clipboard, so you can just paste it directly into your post at the point where you want to image to appear. Optionally, you can use the inbuilt markup tool to annotate (as I did in orange above), then hit the copy button and paste into your post. Using the Print Screen option is fine, but from memory, it only copies either the full screen or the current window, depending on what key combo you use. You can do that then import into something else and edit/crop it I suppose, but the Snipping Tool is a much quicker way of copying exactly what you want to share.

If the image is on the clipboard, you can just place the cursor where you want the image in your text, then "control-v" to paste. For convenience, I tend to use the Windows clipping tool to grab what I want to upload, then paste it straight in. This is by far the quickest way as it avoids saving and uploading images. If the image is a file, then first upload using this link: A preview of the image appears below the "choose files" section. Please the cursor where you want the image in your post, then hover over the image preview below, and you'll see the word "insert" appear at the bottom left. Click on that and the image will be inserted where your cursor is in the text. Hope that helps.

Welcome to BuildHub! As you say, it's best to post your question into the PV sub-forum. A lot of people don't read the Introduce Yourself sub-forum, but monitor other sub-forums of interest. Good luck.