joth

Ah good old Revk, one of the founders or AA internet and he must have a record for most FOI requests or something. The conclusion seemed about right in most cases, but if you've already been told by the council you need PP prior to installing, it'd be brave to go ahead and install it without it.

Sorry if this was already asked but Is there anyway to disconnect the control panel from the unit? Seems the controller should be optional and without it connected it should fallback to just moving air around at a default rate. Also interested what brand that is? The controller looks rather elaborate, the fact the main unit doesn't fail gracefully if there is a comms problem talking to it is a bit of a design shortfall

I enjoyed reading that, not least because half way through it I realized I knew the author. He has some great exposés of DIY home alarm systems on that blog too. (hmm now there's a thought - we should get him onto all this keyless car theft)

@Ed Davies I re-found the article suggesting a structured approach to it I was thinking to start from: https://www.loxone.com/enen/how-to-lay-out-your-smart-home-distribution-board/ The price of those Future Automation enclosures though. Oh my. EDIT: For that matter, the price of the loxone Terminal Blocks to go in it are also fairly shocking. Looks like something AliExpress could serve up at a order of magnitude lower cost.

Sorry I offer no help (looks like you've solved it already), but do you have any example pictures of what you're planning to do with these tracks @AnonymousBosch? When I think of track LED lighting I think of things like this and this. It's clear from Adrian's link above we're talking something different (and less... overbearingly commercial), just keen to see what the final effect sought is? Thanks

Most air to air A/C units are air source heat pumps... The permitted development doesn't mandate it has to be air to water, but the problem is it DOES mandate the unit is installed to provide "heating" only. https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects/27/heat_pumps/2 Leads to the question, does "heating purposes" include DHW? Either way, clearly A/C for cooling wouldn't qualify.

Probably those Wago DIN rail mounted connectors (I think that would count as a bit more structured?) lighting will be driven from DMX dimmers and loxone relays, all on DIN rail; while it would be feasible to terminate the runs directly into them, it seems a lot neater to do via some kind of wiring block and I can see numerous benefits (not least in context of this thread, to allow easy future upgrades/changes)

It's not a bad idea, most the runs from switches to the central electrical closet are very short so not that wasteful. What is this beast you speak of? KNX cable looks like it is rated to 300V but I don't think it would meet any kind of regs to use it to 240V live switching. LOL! OK I under-anticipated the cultural hatred of ring mains here. What I really meant to say was for the sockets, I personally don't care that much what layout is used, and especially not in the context of home automation future proofing. Basically I'm asking the contractor to put sockets in <long list of places> and leave them to it, as far as I can. My own thought process here is I want 4 double sockets in every room (more in kitchen) so running every socket on its own circuit seems totally overkill. Grouping them by room seems arbitrary to me and may create artificial restrictions on already tricky cable routing. Double guessing this doesn't seem a good use of my time given I actually don't care, I'll just let the contractor do their job and figure this out themselves. If it was a new build maybe I'd get more excited over this, but for a retrofit the sparky is going to have quite enough chasing out of walls to do as it is without my making arbitrary dictats over this. Only exception is some circuits (freezer, A/V comms gear, CCTV/alarm, suggestions on an envelope?) will be on standalone circuits, and perhaps with a nod to future proofing to add offgrid battery backup failover (not that I'm really very excited for that). Losing a whole floor of sockets (except critical circuits) when a phone charge goes Foobar? Yeah, I'm actually fine with that. If it means I notice and decommission said busted device sooner, so much the better. But my key point is whatever wiring layout is used for sockets, home automation needs are lowest on the priority list. (Vs lighting where it dominates). (And to be clear, I'm saying all of this in the spirit of explaining how I made my own trade-offs and decisions, not trying to tell others how they should make their own choices)

I'm using a mix: wiring every light circuit back individually (radial layout) but putting the sockets on a traditional ring main. I don't care much for automating sockets and the odd one where it makes sense isn't going to be a critical component so a sonoff type plug in WiFi switch will be fine. Lighting on the other hand I want to be rock solid and future proof for upgrading (as I don't trust any of the existing tech to still be available in decade or 3) so radial fits the bill there. The one major compromise is putting SELV cable (cat 6) to each light switch rather than mains voltage T&E. This removes the option to revert the system to anything like normal configuration, it'd need central relays or new wire pulling. (I'm going to try and duct as much of that cable as I can but being a retrofit some places it may not be possible)

The article is a bit misleadingly worded and doesn't cite any sources but giving it the benefit of the doubt, what it is really saying is IR panel will heat up the people in the room faster than a convection electric heater, as the later has to heat the entire [air in] the room before the occupants get its benefit, whereas IR heaters directly heat the object/person in front of them. This is a reasonable way of thinking if you accept that the whole building must remain uncomfortably cold except the exact place where a human currently happens to be at a given moment. At the other end of the scale a house with high amounts of insulation and high heat capacity (so slow to warm up, very slow to cool back down) it's more efficient to forget about the people and aim to keep every room at a comfortable temperature at all times, and for that all types of electric element heaters will be equally efficient over the long term.

Would it be inappropriate to ask who the 2 suppliers are? I'm shopping around for samples right now, one place seems impossible to get hold of let alone samples from, while another keeps chasing to see how they can help in our project. They're also less than half price of the former place..... which raises all the warning flags (for reasons others mention here)

As I'm using loxone for critical functions like lighting, my own plan is to keep the Loxone config as simple as possible - for heating, it may be very little - just relaying of the room temperature sensors to the basic heating control function (that aims to keep a constant temperature 24/7). Then add interface to Loxone (or the ASHP itself, depending on its controller) to have it expose an "Economy" energy saving mode (i.e. enable it reduces the heating set point). This will free me to use a more friendly development environment (initially Home Assistant, on an NUC or my synology box) to poke around with higher level functions like energy pricing, weather prediction, occupancy/holiday modes etc and have that just flip the "Economy mode" on of off as needed. This way I can tinker at will in the higher level system without distablizing the core automation controller. If the higher level system crashes or throws a wobbly (or, we sell up, or I'm not available to sys-admin it one day) I can very easily turn it off and have a graceful fallback to the basic mode that meets 90% of the needs. (As a general rule of thumb, I want the loxone system to have zero direct connections to internet, and strictly minimize its dependency on internal LAN). Looks like there's an initial HA integration here: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/templates-in-command-line-sensor-octopus-energy-api/96141/48 - that just pulls historical usage data but good starting point. Aside from Home-Assistant, there's more specific projects like https://openenergymonitor.org/ and www.openenergi.com and no doubt others in future... again keeping logic that plays with any of them out of my core building control system (heating and lighting in the loxone) means it will be easier to play around with the options over the years as they come and go, without risking taking the whole house offline.

It claims COP of 3.5 at 55ºC, so is it really so bad at 65ºC? The attraction of the SunAmp is lower heat loss and space saving. Sure, any system heat loss does not go "to waste" in winter, but in summer it does, and even if it is useful for space heating in winter I'd like to see if I can have sourced from ASHP (even at a COP of 2) than from a resistive element.

Slightly strangely formed question, what are the ongoing F-Gas service & maintenance costs and "hassle factor" for a typical split-system ASHP, compared to the G3 service & maintenance costs for an unvented cylinder? Reason I ask is it seems if I want ASHP to provide 100% of DHW and space heating and cooling needs I have two options: - Monobloc LT ASHP (55ºC max) with UVC (=> G3 service) - Split system LT ASHP (65ºC max) with SunAmp PCM58 (=> F-Gas service) I'd been keen to avoid the split system to avoid the added F-Gas overheads, but maybe the G3 savings (both financial and hassle-factor) sufficiently offset it. Notes: The goal here is 100% DHW from the heat pump so I'm also ignoring resistive DHW heating element for this comparison. For the purpose of comparison, I'm ignoring any short cuts around DIY or ignoring the service schedule. I'm ruling out HT monobloc ASHP as none seem to support cooling. I'm assuming the 65ºC from a Daikin Altherma 3 (for example) is sufficient to activate PCM58. If the refrigerant makes a difference, let's assume R-32 (again per the Daikin split units)

Out of interest, do you know 3ph is not possible or have you had a quote for getting 3phase installed? It took me 2 days and zero cost to get a quote, so well worth it. (Tip: when the DNO surveyor comes give the the list of things you maybe considering, and they can give a price estimate for each. They can only go away and formally quote for one job at a time, but this was super useful for comparing cost of moving existing meter vs getting a new 3ph feed (for my case this was £1k vs £3k, purely because new feed involves carriageway closure and roadworks) Having said all that, for a split E/W roof your current plan sounds solid so probably not even worth opening this can of worms.