jack

Ours is presently at 1.5 bar. Water pressure isn't the issue.

I've asked my wife to do this every few weeks for years. She's never once done it in all that time. Also, stainless steel that's periodically scrubbed isn't going to be a breeding ground for anything. Same can't be said for a scratched-up plastic bowl that can't be properly cleaned. Even worse - putting plates in the sink that still have food on them. Drives me mental.

We're close enough to sign-off that we can taste it. Just need to order glass for balconies and install it, and we're done. However, we need a lot of glass - two balconies (respectively 7m and 4m wide) and over 20m to go around three sides of the flat roof terrace over our attached double garage. I haven't got formal quotes yet, but it's going to be many thousands of quid. We've been doing a lot of thinking about the terrace recently. It never gets used, and I can't really see a situation where it will be used in the future. We're therefore thinking that we could save several thousand quid (which would come in very handy right now) by not installing the glass balustrade around this area. Instead, we'll just cap the low parapet wall with powder coated aluminium coping. The only access is via a door from our bedroom. My understanding of building regs is that we need a balustrade around the terrace if there's a usable door to this area. The question, then, is what would need to be done to change this door to something more like an "access for maintenance" door. For example, would locking it with some sort of lock that needed a tool (rather than a key) to open it be enough? Obviously we'll need to discuss this change with the building regs guy, but I'd like to go in forearmed with some basic knowledge if possible. For the avoidance of any doubt, this door is not needed for fire escape purposes, so no issues there. Many thanks.

If only she were like me and had no annoying foibles.

My wife does this. Literally turns the hot water tap on full and stands there for ten minutes washing things up without ever turning it off, even if she wanders across the kitchen to get something else to wash. She also saturates the entire kitchen floor whenever she washes up. I've asked many times over the years how she manages to get so much water on the floor, but still haven't had an explanation.

Yes, and I can't bloody stand them. What is it about the English and plastic bowls in their sinks? I'm sure it's to do with the historical use of gravity hot water systems that would take forever to fill even a moderately sized sink. My wife never empties ours properly, so it's always full of standing water and a wet dishcloth. Eurgh.

Pretty sure he was talking about taped plasterboard rather than Fermacell.

We have two stainless sinks - one full size and the other massive. If I were doing it again, I'd still go for a massive one. It's really handy for cleaning large trays and hardware from the oven. However, I'd consider replacing the full size one with something smaller so it can be used for washing up with less water than the current one. Both are under-slung, which I think works well and is less work to keep clean than one that drops in. However, the narrow worktop bridge between them does tend to get scratched up (it's white corian - literally the worst worktop I've ever had). The ideal for me would be a pair of underslung sinks with no worktop bridge. Something like this but with a much larger second sink (not sure if such a thing even exists!)

We're just up the road from you (south side of Farnborough). The scenery along the A31 is pleasant all the way from Guildford, but it really gets stunning once you get to Bentley and beyond...

There are a few other vids on their Youtube channel, but this isn't a bad start:

We had severe problems with our insulated slab pour, which was done on a very cold day. The top layer never really went off properly, powerfloating didn't work properly for the most part, and we eventually had spalling over most of the surface. There may have been other factors at work (eg, the concrete mix), but I'd personally be very careful about pouring if freezing conditions are expected.

Should have said: it's 99p until the end of today.

My architect recently posted about the following book which has just been released by someone he knows: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Right-First-Time-Architects-Successful/dp/178133420X/ I can't comment on whether it's any good, and I'm a bit late in the process to be reading such a book, but it might be worth a look if it sounds of interest.

Correct. I was concerned about energy wastage and overheating rather than cost, but have since learned that these probably aren't large issues. The two main problem areas are our kitchen sink and one of the bathroom sinks. It takes about 45 seconds for the water in the kitchen to start getting warm. If I'm in a hurry and can't wait I sometimes end up using the hot water tap. The bathroom sink is an oddity. The shower in the same room takes less than 5 seconds to start running warm. The sink takes nearly a minute. They're both very close to the plant room underneath, so I have no idea what odd route the sink plumbing must take! The other place I'd have included this is the downstairs toilet, which takes over 30 seconds to start warming up. No-one will wait that long, so it's cold water for hand-washing there.

I think that every time I walk past my ASHP when it's in cooling mode and I feel all that lovely heat being lost to the atmosphere. Even less feasible is using cold air from heating to make refrigeration more efficient. Slightly more feasible might be to divert some of the cold air in summer to keep a larder outside the heating envelope cool.

Not exactly the same as mine on the inside, but possibly some similarities. I'm heading out for the evening now, but if I have time this weekend I'll try and take some photos of the inside of mine to show where I thought it was leaking and what they did to (allegedly, we'll see!) solve the problem.

I had a very similar problem with my Brink Excellent 400, although I don't recall whether I posted about it. Similar location, and similarly no drain designed for that area (although I think that different versions of this model may actually have their condensate drain on this side, looking at the shape of the mouldings). I have a vague recollection that Renovent and Brink have some sort of relationship - might be badge engineering of some sort going on. [Just re-read your post and noticed you mentioned this yourself!] To me, it appeared that condensation was working its way along joins in the internal insulation mouldings after tracking down the side of the heat exchanger. I eventually contacted Brink (in the Netherlands) about it. To their credit, despite the fact that I'd had the unit for 4 years, they sent out a local guy to take a look. He applied a thin strip along the ridge that the heat exchanger sits on, which has flaps that stick out just enough to direct any condensate over the joins and into the drainage area. I haven't noticed any issues since then, although to be fair we haven't had cold weather since the fix. Do you have photos of the inside of your unit?

Especially where a PH has a high time constant (ie, takes a long time to change from whatever temperature it's reached), there's rarely a need to deliver heat quickly. The house tends to stay at around the same temperate with only small amounts of heat. As an example of how thinking needs to change with a PH, our plumber was concerned that the long time it would take our "undersized" (5kW) ASHP to heat up our DHW cylinder would result in the house temperature falling uncomfortably in very cold weather. In reality, it takes a full day without heating to notice much of a change. Certainly nothing noticeable happens in the couple of hours it might take to heat the cylinder.

That's great news. About the best you can hope for out of the inevitable issues that arise.

Same with the one we saw. I was really surprised, given that when we were looking at MVHR units, Paul was just about the most expensive option. That said, this was around 6 years ago, and I think the unit we saw had been in place for several years before that. I have no idea how well it had been installed or maintained. I know others who've had Paul units installed who are very happy. @HerbJ is one, from memory. Our Brink is extremely quiet when it's on its standard background setting.

I stand corrected!

We have Enphase microinverters (per-panel DC-AC inverters, rather than DC-DC converters like SolarEdge), which offer similar advantages in shaded situations. Another advantage microinverters offer is better generation in low light. In a conventional inverter string, the string as a whole needs to generate a certain amount of voltage before the inverter starts working. With microinverters, each panel needs to generate a minimum voltage. In low light conditions - early morning and late afternoon, for example - a microinverter-based system will start generating earlier and continue generating later than a conventional string inverter. I don't know how much this adds over a year, say, but I seem to recall it was good a few percent. Worth looking into whether optimisers do something similar.

Wow, that's not nice at all. All the best for getting it sorted. I do wonder when trades do work like this how they think people are going to react.

We have an ASHP and are very happy with it. I'd need to check, but I think our electric bill for the last 12 months was around £900 for everything. That's for a 289m2 house in the south of England, U values 0.10 floor, 0.11 roof and 0.12 walls, with 0.6 ACH airtightness, and with us paying very little regard to energy saving behaviour (eg, my wife tumble dries virtually EVERYTHING). We do have 8.5kW of PV, and that will certainly have reduced some of what we take from the grid. During the sunniest months, I suspect we hardly use any energy for water heating during the day. One day I'll get around to measuring some of this stuff!

We have two types of brick slips on our house, both extruded. One is an engineering brick. Unfortunately, the extrusion and firing process has left very slight vertical waves that look odd in certain lights. Also, the corner slips are an entirely different colour to the main slips. Unfortunately, the person installing them didn't notice or didn't care, and by the time we realised it was too late. The other was just the cheapest slip they did, because it was going to be painted white. Unfortunately, several of these were noticeably bent, but again, we didn't find that out until they'd been installed. I'm sure extruded slips can be done properly, I'd just look carefully to make sure that what's delivered is exactly what you're expecting. I agree, and this is what we'd have specified had we known a bit better (or thought more carefully).