Sho_86

Hello everyone, I have joined to ask for some help/advice. I had a house built which was finished this January. The whole thing was a mess and I am just glad it got done somehow. I am in no means expert in house building but some things I had to do myself which was good for experience however would have been better to know this beforehand. I will make a separate TLDR post detailing what went wrong during the construction. This topic now is to ask for help regarding our underfloor water heating. The contractor who did the heating/ventilation and plumbing did everything but probably he didn't check the things when he was done and didn't do any fine tuning. I am playing this game with him since the middle of September, where he promises to come the next week and never does. We have a heat pump which supplies the hot water for the underfloor heating and the hot water for the building. We moved in this January and the outside unit of the brand new heat pump broke after 4 days of use. Of course we had to wait a month for a new one and when it arrived it was too cold to put into operation so we did the winter with the heating element of the indoor unit of the pump. In itself this already consumes an enormous amount of electricity but we had an ever bigger problem. The heating circuits never closed fully. Even when the thermostats are off there is still water from which I can clearly see in the distributor. This resulted in having 29 degrees inside. I had to keep putting the heating pump into summer mode every other day and leave it until it got cold again. And of course all this with the heating element so we easily racked up a 4500 kWh consumption in 3 months. Now after the outside unit got changed things did improve a little and this winter I turned on the heating a few weeks ago and now the temperature is at a 24-25 degrees, even though all the thermostats are only set to 21. I wanted to do the hydraulic balancing on the flow meters since I know for a fact the guy who built it didn't do it himself. After the calculation and having printed out the tables to use for it I opened the distributor and then I noticed that some of the heating circuits again have water flow even though the the thermostats and actuator are off. So please could anyone tell me why this could be happening? I am including a picture, this is from upstairs, from the 5 heating circuits only 2 are fully closed, the other 3 have water flowing through them constantly. This is just wasteful and literally defeats the purpose of having thermostats if the heating is always on anyway. What I did so far is I unscrewed the actuator and the valve then closes fully, I can also completely push down the valve and it opens fully so there is nothing stuck there. What I also did is I switched one actuator where there is water flowing with one where it is closed just to see what happens and everything stayed the same so its not the actuator that is defective. Also I would highly doubt that 3 would be immediately defective as they were brand new, plus on the ground floor NONE of them circuits are closed fully so that would mean 9 out of 11 brand new actuators are defective. So if the valve itself isn't stuck, the actuator itself isn't broken then what else could it be? Is there way to set the height of the valve, should have this also been done beforehand? I have attached a picture, here it can be seen that from left to right only the second and fourth one have 0 l/h water flow. The other 3 all have considerable flow through them. Thank you in advance

Hello there, I am also a new member here. Congratulations on your project. I just did the same thing and the house was finished this January. However if you can afford it, please do appoint a builder and project manager. I made the mistake of not having one, on the ground of saving like yourself. I had to contract different workers, one for the complete interior who also brought his on electrician and someone for heating and plumbing. This turned out to be a mess, I was supposed to coordinate them myself while doing a full time job as well. It was not fun at all. The guy doing the interior went bankrupt at 80% of completion and I had to find someone else fast, in the months prices easily doubled and because it was urgent it cost even more. What was even worse is that I only found out later that they did a lousy job regarding the electric cabling, they had no consideration for the cables while putting about they dry wall and about 1/3 of the electric cables were ruined. And now of course since he is bankrupt I can't even make warranty claims. The heating and plumbing guy did his job but as I also later found out there was no checking or fine tuning of the heating either, I am still in contact with this guy and since the middle of September we are playing this game where he promises to come the following week and never shows. I actually registered to this forum to try to get some help regarding our heating in a separate post. So if you can afford it please contract someone to organize everything. Best of luck!