joth

17 shown there. 7 GF, 7 FF, and 3 external. I'm extending Loxone Link to an exterior cabinet with relays (and could add DI in future) to minimise airtight penetrations for all the exterior and landscape lighting

Ok so yes, I completed second fix of my 2nd install today, and I'm much happier with how the CAT6A termination into the cabinet is looking, if still not perfection. Top left corner: To recap, my approach here is I'm still not using external 110 pushdown but instead use 8 way din terminal blocks to fully terminate every incoming CAT6 core (hopefully once and for all), and then any changes (of which we've had a couple already) are made on the internal cabinet lacing side of the terminal block rather than rewiring the external facing CAT6 side.

Yeah other than the buffer tank (and a lot of unrelated loose WIP wiring) this is all the preplumbed cylinder you're looking at here. It is a messy job even if you do want the 2 zones of space heating, but for a DHW only system it is crazy.

I stand corrected, the FTC6 does indeed have a output for controlling primary pump speed, and it is hooked up on the preplumbed cylinder. Marked CNPWM / WH on the motherboard. The MIs have it on the drawings but don't mention its purpose in the text at all, which is why I've never noticed it or tried to hook it up in my own install.

The rectangular one is almost same size as ours, we only have manifold, uvc, water softener, plus utility (sink and washing mc) and cat litter tray there and to me it feels really cramped to actually use the utility space. Adding a battery, electric distro, and MVHR definitely pushes it past being a useful utility space IMHO I think you need to allow more floor space for the uvc and all the misc plumbing (2 expansion tanks, pumps, filter, etc) and also our manifold inc pump ended up needing much more space than anticipated. If you have high ceilings getting some vertical stacking of items may help a little. (Our ceilings are not so high) Battery, depending on the system, can be much larger than you have shown there too

I'm working next to one of this mitsu cylinders today. I'll take a look at see if it's speed controlled, but 99% sure it isn't as the FTC6 does not have any connection for variable speed output. (It's also a kinda mad system design as it's being used for DHW only (passivehaus, no space heating) yet had a preplumbed cylinder with a couple redundant pumps and diverter valve in circuit. And then the primary side is so tiny (in part because of the PHE) that they've had to add a 50L buffer (volumizer) in series just to meet the manufacturer minimum system volume. Seems a lot of faff for a DHW only system.)

If you have a wiring centre it will still work after removing the actuators, but it's totally redundant; you can just pass the room stay call for heat straight through to the boiler relay input. (Modulo if there's a zone valve that needs to open you might want the delay start feature of a wiring centre, or to use the microswitch output of the zone valve to call for heat)

Fwiw just for variety I'll share what we did. My build team didn't use ducts at all. Each cable had it's own hope drilled right through (our retrofit is a mix of masonry and TF) and then individually grommeted and taped to the OSB on the inside. A couple places one grommet serves multiple cables. Some 30+ cables done this way. We achieved 0.5 ACH on a retrofit, so I'm happy with the result (although in a couple places having the option to pull more cables without drilling more hopes would be good)

I think the MCS song sheet says you have to use the MCS room-by-room calculation method. The SAP report likely has the necessary input data to plug into that other calculator, so maybe the easiest way for and ASHP supplier to bootstrap their work Beware MCS method assumes 5 ach and no MVHR, and it's hard to get installers to override that. Obviously going for a non-MCS install is one option!

Power cycling if as you describe should be safe, as it's like what happens in a power cut. It may help. But don't trust me I'm just some guy on the internet 😂 I had to remove mine from the inverter and re-pair it to fix when it went wrong. SE warned against doing that as it may make things worse though.

Got it. So there's three different Qs here, and there's very little interdependency between them. 1/ MCS vs self-install. You can choose this regardless of installing under PP or PD (or in breach thereof). The fact it's conservation area has little bearing on going MCS or not. 2/ Install under PP or PD. As JohnMo says, you can't use PD until completion. So the choices are doing it under PP or just close your eyes and claim it was done under PD post-completion. 3/ Conservation area. This is only relevant if doing it under PD, and the impact is minimal (slightly more restrictions on placement). As JohnMo says you can't do it under PD until after completion anyway. Another undiscussed issue is if you are claiming the £5k BUS grant. Then is must be an MCS install, and you need to declare the date of install which will probably be pre-completion which means it really needs to be covered by the PP. Which again as JohnMo says, if it's on the plans its covered.

Gosh. Well if someone wants to block the install on this basis, just unplug the external unit and shift it into a store room until they're gone the certificate issued, then bring it back out. 🙄 Do you have a reference for that? I can't find anything saying it must be at the rear (and indeed, ours isn't). Planning portal says "On land within a Conservation Area or World Heritage Site the air source heat pump must not be installed on a wall or roof which fronts a highway or be nearer to any highway which bounds the property than any part of the building" which is what a paraphrased as "not visible from the main road". (btw did you mean to say "irrelevant"? I think it's semi-relevant even if going through PP, as the PD rights will be the reasonable baseline the LPA will start with)

You can install an ASHP under permitted development even in a conversation area, so long as it's not visible from the main road and a few related location restrictions. Plus all the usual constraints (1m from boundary, comply with MCS section 20 noise design limits, be the first/only heat pump on the premises, not be used for cooling, etc) Is your concern related to your comment about PP being for it "on the south side" ? We don't have the context to interpret the relevance of that. In my experience (also in a conservation area, and we forgot to put the ASHP on the PP application at all), the LPA won't care about MCS, and the MCS installer won't care about PP/PD process. The only value in the paperwork is to cover your backside if anyone comes at you making complaints, or when you come to sell. Doing an MCS install it the easiest (in terms of effort, if not money) way to get an official looking piece of paper that says you followed the MCS noise guidelines. And that's only important if someone complains about the noise.

In addition to this, a company is entitled to charge some profit and overhead. They have to design the system, cover office staff, cover support & warranty call outs etc. 8% OH&P on the materials is not atypical Racks up though doesn't it. 6 men for over a week is a lot. Presume that's replacing rads and everything

brief update: I happened to be awake at 1am and took a peak, and the TOU profile still had the battery discharging (to meet baseload) even though this was in cheap rate, so I clicked it back to "Installer defined" profile. A minute later it was happily charging from grid as wanted. So I can't say anything about how tou works (maybe it is supposed "learn" over days/weeks of use, but it already has years of our usage and generation data to analyse so that's a poor excuse). But I can at least say reverting back to installer settings worked fine for me. (I have admin rights on my installers portal so it's easy for me to edit my desired TOU profile there, but I appreciate not everyone has that luxury)

Yep, not difficult to see the Daily Mail have been instructed to go on an anti-green crusade rn, pushing anything to support the current Tory policy change. o/c there's underlying truth in the state of ASHP installation, a lot created by the tory policies that got us here, and which has all been done to death here already. just gotta take a big chill pill before attempting to wade into the green ink drama in the reporting. my ASHP is neither vast nor noisy nor in my garden, but then I also wasn't stupid enough to do it based on a cold call from a grant harvester.

If you have a battery it's very likely a win to use the ashp. If you have cheap rate overnight and paid export (even without the battery), it's very likley better to use ASHP overnight for HW and let the solar go to export. (I buy electricity for 5p overnight and sell PV for 15p in the day, and one night time DHW charge lasts us all day, so it makes zero sense to use the daytime PV on DHW, whether via heat pump or otherwise). If neither, then yeah more complex modelling needed. I actually have both the above, so it's a no-brainer. The PV divert now goes unused.

Yah I've seen many folks ruminate on benefits of 110 blocks but not heard many solid case studies from anyone that actually did it 😅 It seems with 2 enclosures you'll be lacing all the interconnects between them onsite rather than on the bench, so if you have time to do that what not lace it directly from the 110 to the Loxone extension device or whatever and skip the middle terminal block. Maybe a few of the interconnected blocks to act as distribution for power and Tree to keep it all neat. I think it all depends on intended install (and maintenance) workflow, on bench vs in-situ

Just noticed android mySolarEdge has updated, with two noticeable improvements 1/ it now tracks and illustrates consumption and production sources/sinks correctly, even though I charge the battery from grid each night 2/ it has some (rudimentary) settings for the user to define their own storage profile (basically either optimise self use, or some supposedly smart TOU option). I'm trying the TOU but not got high hopes, as while it allows you to configure peak energy times (for octopus Go I did all day except the cheap 4 hours...), You can't set the price or import Vs export timings, so there's not way for it to take into account a varying price spread for TOU shifting. The help text hints it "may" even charge up the battery from grid if needed, but no clue as to when. I'll see and try to remember to report back

Ah yes in that case my advice is perhaps less useful. The approach I've adopted on my latest project was exactly to avoid me having to do that two enclosure trick. I'd be interested what utility you find the wiedmuller terminals offer in your setup, for their cost. In theory the quick onsite install could all be achieved with the punch down blocks alone.

Yes The interconnected ones have the black border around the connected terminals. I could make that more clear if documenting it for someone else, but this was enough for me to follow so far 😄

My cabinet is a mess, as I arranged terminals purely for what was convenient for internal cabinet lacing, which left the cat6 side a complete jungle of wires. The screenshot above is for another I'll be installing in the next few weeks. Learning from my own, I'm arranging it to optimise more for consistent layout on the cat6 side. Even connecting up unused cores, just so they're all accounted for I'll let you know how that goes and post photos if it's something I feel a bit more proud of 😂

Here's an example of a spreadsheet I have mapping cat6 runs through the terminal blocks into cabinet devices. The highlited rows show that the brown core on cat6 cables LX1.1 and LX1.2 plug into Level 1 and 2 of block #6, and connects then to miniserver digital inputs 1 and 2 respectively.

You need to make a doc (spreadsheet) of all the things in the cabinet and what they all need to connect to. Methodically work through all incoming cables, and all devices, to make a mapping Any device that needs connected to many outgoing cores (power lines, Tree, etc) you can use interconnected blocks for, everything else is probably and individual blocks. I find it best to arrange the blocks according to the external wiring, to avoid lots of mess with CAT6 wires all over the place. The internal hookup wires can be routed flexibly according to external needs. In the extreme this means you can do everything with non-inconnected blocks: one per cat6 cable, and do interconnects manually by daisychaining jumps between the terminals as needed. Mine tend to be more of a hybrid, with orange and green pairs going to interconnected blocks, and the browns and blues going to individual terminals. HTH Maybe I can make a photo...

Personally I found the unifi design tool fairly useless, it seems to want one WAP per room, I wonder why 🤔 My standard approach is 2x on ground floor in opposite corners and 1x on the top floor high up centrally. This way viewing it as a 3D object you get less overlap (more total coverage) in the spherical balls of signal out of each WAP. Put the ground floor pair to maximise coverage (minimise distance) to places people will spend most time - so in dining /living room and snug, or kitchen and lounge. Secondarily position them to give best use of outdoor coverage, front door, driveway and back garden. Position then high up both to give better range on the floor they're on, and reduce distance to people lying in bed above. And the disc shaped unifi WAPs should alway be horizontal. So ceiling mount is great, maybe slightly hidden above high kitchen units or fitted furniture. If you find this is insufficient make sure you have plenty of wall ports and any of these can be swapped to a wall mount wap to fill in dead spots or reduce congestion. Putting one in an office for example. HTH