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Or thickness? Cheap addon options for conventional radiators exist on Amazon (or other) and do work to a degree, but they won't perform miracles. Another option to think about is if you could replace the radiator with a proper fan coil unit with thermostat control. You could likely greatly increase the output from the space your existing radiator uses assuming there is a similar sized fan-coil available. Not cheap though.

Given money is tight I just wanted to check that the quotes you are getting are coming out at zero cost to you? ie, the heat pump, hot water tank and install are all covered by the £7500 BUS grant. Given that you already have the UFH installed the BUS grant should cover the rest.

As a last resort there are some pull down TV wall mounts that allow you to mount the TV above a fireplace but pull it forward and down for when you want to use it. Not personally keen on the option but wanted to make sure you know it exists. I was thinking that (with a small sofa). If you put a single rotatable chair to the fire side of that and then other chairs (or another sofa) in the other parts of the room you could effectively divide the room into a smaller TV snug and a somewhat larger social space, though the dimensions are a little tight for this. He wants this room as mainly for TV or he wants this room as a living space and to use another room as a dedicated TV space? How much TV do you watch?

So do you notice the mismatched colour? Would you mind sharing a photo or two? You are clearly happy with things, but I've never got on with mixed colour temps in the same space though because I've always been careful I've never lived with it, just noticed in other places so I'm really curious to see if it can be made to work with careful application.

This surprised me. I assume you are thinking you want to avoid the need to get steps/ladder to silence the alarm after accidentally setting it off? Can't say I've ever set off my fire alarms since I've been living here >10 years and that involves some occasionally smokey cooking. If it's been a problem for you, maybe consider if your alarms are set right (heat alarms in cooking areas, etc)?

Amen! There is Loxone and KNX at the 'low-end' and moving up there are companies like Lutron and Control4 that do stuff (been a while since I looked so might be out of date). Nothing really accessible unless you want to spend fortune on it along with specialist installers and maintenance contracts. I'm seeing a lot more commercial building solutions so maybe these filter down at some point but not getting my hopes up. The market will be dominated by Matter/Thread I've seen people plaster in mm-Wave sensors to the ceiling though can't find it right now. Some smart light switches have presence sensors behind the switch (again dont have a link). Saw this most recently whose features seem attractive, but it's not hidden (ceiling mountable though and the visible PIR sensor is removable). https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/everything-presence-pro I wouldn't trust these sort of things to HA anyway. Best bet in my book is add monitoring to the alarm signal wire in traditional wired alarms. That way your HA system can get notification of an issue (to send alerts if you are out of the house or whatever). Not currently building but I certainly plan to have water leak detection and automatic shut off would be good.

Welcome!

Keeping my fingers crossed this makes life easier for those of us still looking for somewhere suitable. Also, credit where credit is due, @Daniel H saw this first:

So do you ever have mixed colour temps? I'd guess from your description you don't have tasklighting switched on at the same time as non-matched CCT output from the strips. I can see how that works in many cases I care about (dawn simulation, dark day light boost) but I'm a little hesitant how well it would work as day extension. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear about how you use the varying CCTs in practice? 🙏

It feels of another place. Not common British style but we should have more variety in this country. So long as it suits its immediate surroundings. Lovely.

What are the LEDs? Bulbs or strips? I've not found much that is externally controlled CCT in bulb form.

I thought I'd read that 18mm was the standard for accessible (or convertable) bathrooms (attached to wall at 400mm centres IIRC).

Can't you buy a data SIM like: https://www.three.co.uk/broadband/data-sim-payg Edit: see you mention preference for O2 / EE. Look for mobile broadband or packages for tablets. EE have a whole line of Mobile Broadband offers, not sure they are sim only but if you are looking for a router too then worth a look.

The dynamic adjustment of temperature via opentherm is one of the reasons I went this route and Wiser is fully dynamic in this. If I set my system to regulate temperature in my cold room (starting from cold) it will set the water temp to maximum until the room temp is within about 0.5C of setpoint and will then moderate it down to whatever it needs for steady state. @gaz_moose I don't know how techie you are but if feel able to I thoroughly recommend setting up HomeAssistant and installing the Wiser plugin. It lets you see what's going on and understand your system better including how often your boiler cycles. I'm not sure that Wiser is great at handling cycling when using opentherm. I suspect if your heating system is well designed then it should work ok but with mine (which is badly designed) it doesn't handle things great. I'm still working through how I want to manage this but you really want to avoid frequent cycling so if that's happening in your case then you may want to take extra steps. (If Home Assistant is a step too far, then standing in front of the boiler and watching it for 20 mins while the temp is steady state will show you how much it cycles). An easy one that seems to work is to have the scheduler regularly adjust the set point up/down by 0.5C as the cycling seems to happen when very close to set point.

Their FAQs are very informative: https://buffalomachines.co.uk/pages/faqs Website says they have 30 years combined industry experience but company only incorporated in 2023: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15271611 Looks like they are just a UK importer of Chinese machines. So whether you actually benefit from going to them IDK. Maybe warranty issues, but adding the middle man might not help much in reality

Ideas to consider: 1. Don't split any loop between areas, put separate loops. 2. For routing the pipes for the loops for the second phase, either use conduit as @Nickfromwales to allow you to install the pipes when you are doing the second phase, or look to see if you can route pipes in walls/ceilings between areas. 3. Maybe it makes sense to have two manifolds, one for phase 1 and one for phase 2. Then you just have to route 2 (bigger) pipes between the two locations.* * Some nuances here that needs careful thought but worth considering if other options difficult.

You'd need a very big PHE. The flow through pool heatpumps is huge compared to CH. If you have to upsize the domestic heatpump you may also lose out financially. Pool heatpumps are super cheap compared with domestic ones. Feels like this is something so outside your normal heat pump installers wheelhouse, that you'll either be paying them a huge amount to learn on the job and develop a bespoke solution for you or you'll scare them all off.

I thought pool heat pumps had fairly different optimisations from domestic ones so trying to mix them would not be advisable. @SBMS wants cooling anyway so I think needs a separate system on that basis.

Make the connections on the roof, run continous cable through some form of protection (trunking, kopex, etc) to the ground. Don't make connections inside the roof. If you are using the PV Ultra cable I guess you'll need a connection box on the roof which is a little more tricky to create space for but doable. Ignoring the detail about how the cable routes from roof to inverter I think you want all the solar panel MC4s to be accessible from the roof side. If a panel gets damaged or needs to be lifted for another reason, you need to be able to access the connections from the roof side to disconnect it.

Reading between the lines it sounds like you don't feel you get enough heat in the loft conversion so to get that room hot you have to turn off the other rads (either because it doesn't get hot otherwise, or by the time it does get hot the rest of the house is boiling). That sounds like something is wrong with your system. If starting from a cold house, turn up all the radiators and turn on the heating. All the radiators should get hot at roughly the same speed. If that doesn't happen then your system isn't balanced and some of the hot water might be short circuiting back to the boiler before it reaches your cold room. If this is the problem then the first step is balancing the radiators and then coming back with more info on your system if this doesn't solve things. I've just been doing similar in my place. Once you have things roughly balanced you should be able to just use normal TRVs to adjust individual rooms. Yes this still means all the rooms heat at the same time, but rooms should warm in approx the same time. If, like me, some of your rooms have woefully undersized radiators then you still might have a problem, but smart heating won't solve that.

Thought that was recommended against these days. In any case, best to keep the active electronics outside of the hot (in summer) loft if you can.

My worry would be it's 2.5mm2 copper coated aluminium. Still probably better than the 1.25mm2 copper ones mentioned earlier, but nowhere near 2.5mm2 copper.

That one makes my spidey senses tingle. As in is it a dodgy Chinesium one? It's also available at close to half the price on polybound.co.uk (the claimed manufacturer - who seem to specialise in resin bound surfaces). https://polybound.co.uk/product/tools-equipment/25m-blue-extension-cable-reel/

I wasn't thinking about CH at all. Now I remember you previously talking about it being unvented. No matter, the HW cylinder/system can be dealt with independently AFAIK so no need to link the two in a single job. So no real reason to change it from a delapidations point of view. As far as maintenance goes, I remember you saying you were aiming to get as much done as possible before retirement so that you kept your costs low in future. Retirement also brings the future potential of not being as able to DIY as much. I tend to think that both of these lean more towards the unvented solution as it's simpler* but maybe not by a lot. But the backup water during outages is a big positive of the vented option. *Yes you have the PRVs and the associated maintenance. But these are all contained in an accessible heated/controlled space, no ladders involved, no float valves or pumps to play up.

🫣 Assume the HW pipes flow through these rooms to the kitchen/bathroom? Changing the HW tank shouldn't affect CH pressure unless I've misunderstood something. That is an advantage. My experience of cold water tanks in lofts is they end up with unpleasant things in them and are located in a diffcult spot for maintenance. Having said that you are not my relatives and are likely taking much more care of the system than the average person.