jack

It depends on how loud the unit is. Our Brink Excellent 400 is in our pantry, which is off the kitchen and doesn't have a door. It's boxed in with simple kitchen-type doors without any attempt at sealing or otherwise soundproofing them against noise. You can't hear the unit at all when it's on low (about 25% power). You can hear it on boost, but since I only manually use that now and again, it's actually helpful being able to hear that it's still on so I remember to turn it off! It isn't an offensive or intrusive noise - just a low level background roar.

What pipe and where? And to which building regulation is he referring?

From the installation instruction manual for my 5kW Aquarea model (WH-MDC05F3E5): I interpret this as suggesting a buffer tank is not required. I believe there's a small internal buffer in the unit, hence the use of "additional" here. And the troubleshooting section says this: I assume "is used" is a typo for "if used", which again suggests that a buffer tank is not compulsory. As an aside, the (Panasonic-authorised) engineer who fixed mine suggested that a buffer tank was desirable irrespective of what the manual said.

Does the installation manual say that a buffer tank must be installed? Or just that it should be? If you can find something in the same manual saying that it's only needed if less than 50L system capacity, I don't see how they have a leg to stand on. Even if it's an installation fault, isn't that the whole point of them requiring that you use an approved installer? What does the warranty say about the installation, if anything?

That's exactly the situation.

I just checked and the cheapest we were able to find it was £380. No idea why it's so expensive. I spent some time trying to find a generic substitute at the time, but from memory, it's a proprietary part.

Interesting. We had a water pump problem with our 2015 Panasonic Aquarea ASHP about 3 years after installation, and it needed replacing. No extended warranty as it wasn't installed by an approved installer. The part cost was a ridiculously high proportion of the unit. I want to say it was something like £400 for the pump, when you could buy the entire ASHP unit new for around £2k. Who was supposed to back the warranty? Generally I'd have said that was the manufacturer. Also, if it's anything like ours, the requirement for a buffer tank is set out in the installation manual. For ours (5kW), I believe it was needed if the system volume was less than 50L. If you meet the system volume requirement, I'd have thought Panasonic doesn't have a leg to stand on. Even if you didn't, I don't think they can hide behind the installer. What does the paperwork say - was the warranty in writing?

I have the same build system as @Bitpipe. When the contractor who we engaged to put up backing boards (and install brick slips onto them) turned up for their first morning onsite, they realised that the studs behind the panelvent weren't spaced at convenient 400 centres. No idea how they'd missed that when pricing the job, since it was pretty clear. One possibility was to cut the boards so that they fit the spacing that was there, but that was going to be a mammoth task. Probably more than 80% of the boards would have needed some form of cutting. In the end, we decided to go with counterbattens. Vertical battens were installed along the stud lines, then horizontal battens were installed on top of those. Fixings for the horizontal battens go through both battens and into the stud behind the panelvent. I do have some concerns about the potential longevity of this approach. There's the odd bit of fine cracking along the mortar lines of the brick slips, but other than that it's mostly held up for over five years. I think with some care it could potentially be an approach that would work with renderboard.

I couldn't disagree more.

The post you quoted referred to the UK/England, which are political bodies, not people. It also didn't use derogatory language.

Bit late to this, but I believe building regs requires you to have an unsoftened outlet (and maybe even requires that to be in the kitchen). I drink softened water all the time (bathroom tap) and it tastes fine to me.

For sure, but I don't have any way of measuring that!

Mine's hard to work out due to the 8.5kW of PV on the roof, but looking at the two meters, covering almost exactly 5 years: Electricity: 35598 kWh (= around 7100 kWh/a) PV: 37583 kWh (= around 7500 kWh/a) House is 289m2 If I assume we used all generated energy locally, that's 14,600 kWh/a, or about 50 kWh/m2/a If I assume we used none of the generated energy locally, it's roughly 25 kWh/m2/a The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. We don't try that hard to time our usage of electricity, and my wife's a massive user/abuser of the dryer (which at least is a decent condensing model), so on balance I don't think the numbers look too bad. I did look into this a while ago and I seem to recall that our feed-in tariff payments just covered our electricity bill. One day I'll get around to measuring how much of our generated PV we self-consume.

We've been in five years next month and I still see the flaws and challenges virtually every day I live here, although I worry about them less as time goes by.

Amazing work. You must be overjoyed. And can clearly take a joke.

Yes, I have, and yes, you do. From memory, when I unboxed it there was a separate piece of paper with instructions for unlocking the cooling mode. Somehow that went missing, but I was able to find it by searching online. I didn't save the link or the info, unfortunately, but I'm pretty sure you just need to get into the service settings, and it's a simple on/off setting. As I guess you know, the terminal is just an input to allow a thermostat to call for cooling. You still need to enable it in the settings.

Yes, I think we do, but I've not had anything to do with its tracking unfortunately.

As mentioned earlier, there's a massive difference in usefulness between a steam oven and a steam combi oven. We were talked into the [edited:] former latter by friends and family who use there's all the time, but ours is hardly touched. It does make boiled eggs and steamed puddings very easy, I'll give it that. I also don't doubt that there's a lot more we could be doing if we bothered making an effort and learning what it's capable of.

What a saga - great to hear it paid off in the end, and well done for sticking to your guns.

I run mine at 15 degrees and it works brilliantly. Only wish we'd installed UFH upstairs so we could cool the bedrooms in the same way!

I used a high-build epoxy paint product. Can recommend the guys at Promain - excellent advice. If you're going to spend a lot on epoxy (and it's way more expensive than regular floor paint), you need to make sure you get the prep right. We had really bad spalling in places, so I rented a floor grinder. It was very expensive due to the amount of wear I put on the diamond pads, and that was without taking it all the way back to perfectly smooth. I doubt I'd take that approach if I were doing it again. I really liked the idea of one of the epoxy self-levelling products to build up a thicker coat, but it was expensive, and I was worried about having to mix and lay it while keeping a wet edge (etc). Given how much the grinding cost, however, I think it might actually have been cheaper to go this way, and the result would almost certainly have been better. While the high build product I used did iron out the finer imperfections, it doesn't really do much for deeper marks. You can still clearly see tamp marks in places where I wasn't able to grind them completely off, for example.

I subscribe to Dog & Hat. Every month, I get a box with four different bags of coffee. They can be from artisan roasteries anywhere in the UK - occasionally we even get one from Europe or North America. It's a long way from the cheapest way to buy coffee, but I really enjoy my coffee, and I don't have any other expensive habits.

Building plots simply don't exist in the suburb where I live, so buying what was possibly the worst and maybe the smallest house within a mile was the best we could manage. We bought a tiny - less than 90m2 - 1950s bungalow that was in terrible condition. We lived in it for two years while we got planning, then rented locally for a year while we demolished and rebuilt. The new house is just over three times the floor area of the old one. We bought in 2012. Looking at prices locally now, I'd be far less comfortable doing something like this in the current environment. There have been quite a few knock-downs in the area since we did ours, and I think the market is now factoring that into the prices of small run-down houses on good plots.

I know exactly how you feel. Five years after moving in, there are still things I look at every day - several times a day, most days - that annoy me due to how poorly they've been done. My wife doesn't see them, and to be honest I'd much rather be like her. I think that if I were doing this again, I'd short-circuit this issue by choosing more rustic finishes as far as possible. For example, rather than a smooth skim finish, I'd probably go for a rougher bagged finish. Instead of a sharp modern kitchen, I'd probably go for something quirky and recycled (eg, old teak lab bench instead of Corian), so that it's imperfect from the start.

Sounds similar to what I read when I bought a plunge saw a while ago. I believe you want the depth to be such that the cutting edge of the tooth doesn't leave the lower surface of what you're cutting. For a typical blade, I guess that means you want the tooth tip to extend about 3 or 4 mm below the bottom surface. Have a look at Peter Millard's YouTube videos on plunge saws. He really knows what he's talking about.