jack

I'm sure you're aware of this, but for the avoidance of any doubt (and for anyone coming along later who doesn't know), the insulation is put onto the surfaces of the walls around the fridge, not on the fridge itself. A decent gap is needed between the insulation and the fridge to allow airflow to take the heat away.

That's an almost identical size and layout to the kitchen of a friend of ours. It won't be too big when you have a couple of people moving around in it! I appreciate that you've said this before, but I don't know how loud your fridge must be for this to be an issue. We have a separate (admittedly inbuilt) fridge and freezer in our open plan kitchen. I'm extremely sensitive to noise, but I have no idea whether they're on or not. In contrast, I can hear the built-in bar fridge in our pantry clearly when it kicks in, despite it being about three metres further away than the main fridge and freezer. I keep meaning to check the noise ratings of these units to compare them, but frankly there's not a great deal of point given I'm not going to replace the pantry fridge just because it's slightly noisy. However, anyone looking at fridges would do well to factor noise ratings into their analysis, especially if they aren't planning to build them in and/or are sensitive to noise. That said, I think your main point is that you wouldn't want a single open-plan kitchen and family room as your only living space, and I completely agree with that. At the very least, I think a separate TV room or snug is very useful. This is particularly the case if you have kids, who especially in their teenage years will want their own space (and/or you'll want space away from them!) We have a separate living room and a TV room, and even then we sometimes wish there was an additional space for us to get away from each other without going upstairs!

No worries. To be clear, it's more the fact that there were two posts on the same topic than where you posted. If you'd just posted in Boffin's Corner, it wouldn't have been moved.

@ollie, I've merged the two threads you started on this topic into one. I think this is the more appropriate forum than Boffin's Corner where the other one was.

7 or 8 years is a long time to leave something like this without action. It may be that your right to get them to do something about it themselves has expired, or may be perhaps more difficult to enforce. I'd just write to them to confirm that the driveway is causing drainage problems and risks damaging your wall, and that you will therefore be removing the section of the the driveway on your property 14 days after the letter has been delivered. If he wants a different outcome or approach, he needs to let you know during that period.

My understanding about Miele is that they're great for things that involve pumping stuff around: dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners, in particular. In other areas, they may not even manufacture what they sell under the brand. For example, I believe their freezers are rebadged (or at least made by) Liebherr. My in-laws have Miele ovens and rate them highly (they'd want to, for the price!) I've read some horror stories about Miele's technical support when things go wrong. Take a look at the negative reviews on, eg, Trustpilot. That said, they seem to have improved a bit since when I last looked a few years back. At the time, I seem to recall there being far more bad reviews, but I could be misremembering. I believe that only some divisions were sold (and the story is as you say: quality has significantly suffered since). We bought an AEG dryer a few years ago that came with an extended 5 year warranty and cashback. It's been flawless. I believe dryers are within one of the product divisions that wasn't sold off.

I have an up/down spring-loaded toggle switch for every set of blinds in each room, so they're simple to control manually if I decide to do something different to their programming. That said, I use the switches very rarely, because the blinds have been automated. Remember, it's home automation, not home make-everything-electric-and-fiddly.

This is something Loxone really pushed and I couldn't agree more. Other than hitting TV mode, I rarely open the Loxone app more than a couple of times a month (usually to manually adjust some light levels up). All light and blinds switches are just simple retractive switches, with no touch screens or anything complex.

I largely chose Loxone based on flexibility and price. I think it's more user-friendly for interested amateurs than KNX. I seem to recall that KNX was generally more expensive as well. Due to the way it distributes intelligence, for example, you end up with quite expensive light switches. I actually use KNX dimmers in one part of my installation - the older version of the Loxone hardware included basic KNX functionality.

I have a Loxone system that mainly controls lighting, blinds and heating. Things I like: Programming the same switch to do different things depending on the time of day or night, and/or the day of the week. For example, after dusk, hitting the light switch in our bedroom turns on the bedside lights rather than the downlights. Hitting the light switch in the living room after dusk turns on a different scene than during the day. The system knows when dusk is, so adjusts all of this automatically over the year. Automatic blind control: all blinds come down at dusk. Some open automatically in the morning (different behaviour in some cases depending on whether it's a weekday or weekend). Some open in tilt mode rather than all the way. I have an "all blinds up" and "all blinds down" button on the app (I rarely use the app, incidentally). You can program automatic blind tilting to adjust for the sun angle and based on individual room temperatures, but I don't need that. Flexible button programming: There's an "all downstairs lights off" button in the middle of the upstairs landing, an "all upstairs lights off" button by the bottom of the stairs, and if you double-click the light switch by either bedside in our bedroom, all lights in the house are turned off. This feature alone is utterly amazing. I also have a "living room dark mode", which is the only app-based function I use on a daily basis. It turns off all the lights in the house, brings down the blinds in the living room, and adjusts the living room lighting for TV watching (pendant and wall-lights off, downlights on very low). There are garage sensors that give me a status of the garage door on the app. Nice for when you're lying in bed wondering whether you closed the garage, which I do often! I can also close the garage door from the app rather than getting out of bed and schlepping downstairs to do it. Clicking a "holiday mode" button on the app and knowing it will take care of everything from heating to turning lights on and off based on our historical evening habits. Things I like less: It was expensive, and required the use of more expensive dimmers for the lights than I might have gone for. It did avoid the need for proprietary blind controllers though. I like mucking about with it but my wife doesn't have a clue. If you aren't interesting in learning how it all works, you'll end up paying a consultant to make any significant changes (some you can do easily enough via the app). I don't know how much getting a consultant involved will cost you. I haven't done half of what you can do with a system like this, and certainly if I were doing it again I'd make some different choices (on light drivers and dimming in particular). But overall, I think it's been a clear net benefit to my life despite the costs.

That was the primary driver for us.

This is all very familiar. I did this last year to my 5 year old, heavily scabbed garage floor (we had unexpected rains and frost the night after our slab floor, and we ended up with bad spalling). I ground back all the weak concrete over a weekend and laid an epoxy top. It's held up pretty well, although it will scratch if you drag something sharp and/or heavy along it. Very easy to keep clean though. You're right about the epoxy repair stuff being too granular. I had a couple of deep holes to fill, and it was fine for that, but no way would you get it into those smaller stone-holes. I got everything I used from Promain. They have a wide variety of products from lots of different manufacturers, and their technical department was very helpful and responsive by email and phone.

Not a roller door, but we have an insulated Hormann sectional door, which has worked well for nearly 6 years. It's a bit annoying having it above your head if you want to do things with the garage door open (e.g., ours is used as a gym and a workshop, both of which need overhead clearance from time to time). I can't gauge how good the insulation is - the door isn't airtight, and I think that has a big effect especially in winter - but it doesn't get that hot in the garage even when we get the mid-summer sun beating down on the garage door for a couple of hours in the afternoon during summer.

I'd be careful assuming that you'll get much, if any, heat moving upstairs as a result of maybe a square metre of warmer floor at the foot of the stairs. It depends on the floor temperature of course, but UFH isn't like radiators. In particular, the temperature difference with UFH isn't enough to generate convection currents.

Thermal mass? (I'm actually perfectly fine with the term "thermal mass", despite some of the hate it gets on BuildHub. I think the real problem is not the term itself, but the fact that self-builders, designers and architects don't really understand the mechanisms at work, and so the concept is misinterpreted.)

What're your heat input requirements? A number of us here with passive slabs have gone with 200mm spacing (the pipes are tied to the slab reinforcement mesh) and have no issues getting enough heat into our houses at low flow temperatures. At all but the very coldest outside temperatures I run mine at 25°C, which is the lowest temperature setting available with my ASHP. It may also depend a bit on your floor covering. We have ~70mm of polished concrete on top of our 100mm slab, so there's a lot of concrete for the heat to diffuse across before it reaches the surface. I don't notice any "banding" of heat, although there are a couple of warmer patches where pipes are closer together due to routing. Perhaps it's different if the pipes are closer to the surface?

Why not try posting something different for a change?

Nothing's been deleted from this thread as far as I can see. You sure you hit submit? Try posting it again now we're all alert for something that probably needs deleting.

Compared with ASHP, GSHP kit is more expensive to buy, much more expensive to install, is potentially more disruptive in terms of earthworks (less of an issue with vertical boreholes), and costs more in ongoing maintenance due to the need to replace a lot of glycol every few years. Some have mentioned that the pump itself is quite noisy, although I can't see why that can't be located outside in an enclose to keep the noise down. There have also been some horror stories on performance. Things like ground icing up and killing lawns/plants due to the loops not being buried deep enough, and soils with low thermal conductivity with not enough loop area causing the ground to freeze over the heating season to the point where little or no heat can be extracted any more. Most of these are installation issues that shouldn't happen in a properly designed system, but how do you as a lay-person know if a system's been designed and installed properly? For all this, you get a nominal bump in efficiency that will take decades or more to pay back in reduced energy consumption.

*it's self-evident ? What is "low heat transfer" in numerical terms, compared to turbulent flow? 2%? 20%? I mean, if it's just a few percent, can't you just make the larger diameter pipework a little longer to take that into account? The other thing is that surely the pump manufacturer and/or installer should be the ones doing the calculations on this? I appreciate it's a little complex, but if you're in the industry, coarsely modelling a system presumably wouldn't take more than a spreadsheet with a small number of inputs? One other thing: is the larger diameter pipework array typically the same length as the smaller diameter stuff? I ask because I understand that one of the major cost disadvantages with GSHPs is that the glycol needs replacing every few years, and if you have more volume in the pipes, it'll cost more.

Any help? https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/search/?q=viridian

We did this on our build. A few comments: By bringing the cladding in, you lose some of the view, and potentially a bit of the light (the impact is greater for smaller windows). You certainly see more of the cladding than would otherwise be the case. You need to be sure that you can consistently terminate the cladding so that it's flush with the frame. At best, this will be a lot more effort to do well than just cladding around the frames in the more usual way. In our case, a lack of attention to detail by the cladding installers means we have several windows where the cladding (a mix of brick slips and larch) randomly leaves 5-15mm of frame visible. Not the end of the world, but it's certainly more effort to do this correctly than to just clad with the frame visible. When I now look at other houses that have similar windows, I think I often prefer the frames being visible. Especially if they're dark, they provide a clean line that perhaps makes the whole thing look a little sharper. Up to you what look you prefer though. Agree with this.

I'm sure there's another option that relies on a free API at some weather site. I think the only limitation is the number of calls you make to it, and it's at least tens a day for free. Can't remember what it is though - might be mentioned on the Loxone Google group. We have some similarities. Floor to ceiling windows to the east and south corner of the kitchen at the east end of the house, and little to no solar gain anywhere else on the ground floor.

Isn't it though! It's been nearly 6 years since we installed our system (electrician did the wiring, I did the programming), and I still enjoy tinkering with it. I have quite a few ideas at the back of my head that I'll one day get around to implementing.

Presumably you have other windows open in the house to get the stack ventilation working? I've considered this (we have an electric roof window, although it isn't presently wired in), but we get insects in if we leave windows open, and I assume the stack ventilation won't work as well if the roof window is the only thing open. I've considered getting insect screens to windows can be left open all night in summer.