joth

The OP will be controlling it from Loxone so easy to use a PID controller to avoid any overshoot. However as I mentioned a few pages ago the PID works MUCH better with zero crossing SSR than a mechanical relay.

But only 4 of them. My house has nearly 20 temperature probes, and this is not counting instrumentation built into light switches, MVHR and ASHP. Additional AIs are 30+VAT per channel and then you have to deal with some being voltage sensing, some current sensing. The 1-wire are plug and play in comparison (if you keep the wiring clean) Fortunately I only have 2 UFH mats with thermistors so was easy enough to wire these direct to the miniserver (biased with appropriate ladder resistor to keep the thermistor to 0-10V despite me driving it from 24V.). That plus figuring out a calibration curve was much more hassle than 1-wire sensors.

I'd suggest asking the service company directly what the impact is. The info you posted here isn't enough to comment on, and as you paid them you might as well get support directly from them rather than play a game of telephone here. It could be a DHW secondary return pipe, a primary or secondary zone circulation return pipe, or something else they're on about, and the impact is very different depending what it is that's missing.

They do for installation under permitted development, but I don't see the OP is at risk of violating that So long as it's not a listed building, conservation area or world heritage site, there's no restriction on placing it in front of the house / towards a highway under PD. There's a general PD rule that siting should minimise impact on external appearance and amenity so far as practicable, have fun interpreting that.

Yup that's what I did, as mentioned up thread. Probably would use 1-wire if planning it from scratch, but I was taking over control of UFH mat by removing the Schluter proprietary controller so had to work with what was already installed by the tiler.

Sounds good. We have automated shading, but the problem bedrooms all overheat due to human bodies giving off heat, not much that can be done about that passively (we keep windows closed because busy train line, and doors closed because cats as mentioned). Retrofitting an a2a with head unit in the room should be easier than retrofitting ducted fan coils. Only thing is to plan the condensate drain. You can use a pump for that if needed, but seems much more elegant to have it gravity drained if you can manage it

Do you have a number for peak heating load (in kW) and annual demand (in kWh)? If these are low enough, then electric resistive heating is just fine. Certainly £60k can massively reduce your heating demand but increasing insulation depths everywhere, and going for a hard airtightness target. And then you might only need a single 2kW radiator working on the coldest days. Are you installing MVHR? This also reduces heating demand significantly (and is mandatory if you're going for a sensible airtightness goal and no trickle vents on windows)

Personally I'd not bother, but we have cats and prefer to keep bedroom doors closed so need to actively circulate air around rooms. We have a large skylight over the hallway/landing that I've set to automatically open when needed for overnight purge ventilation, this cools the house down as a whole marvelously, but useless for occupied bedrooms. Ironically despite being on the second floor (vaulted ceiling) it cools the ground floor better than the first floor. Convection vs closed doors for you.

Originally used cooling through UFH only (2021). A few problems for us: 1. We don't have UFH upstairs, just down. This is perfect for heating, but useless for cooling upstairs 2. All our overheating occurs upstairs 3. Even downstairs, we find it makes the tiles chilly and a layer of cold air about a foot high off the floor, bit need something else to agitate it about to actually achieve cooling. In a passive house (assuming you don't go au natural without any active heating/cooling) I think it's hard to go wrong with heating via UFH at the bottom of the house, and cooling via FCUs (preferably a2a) at the top of the house, and in any room critical to not overheat (e.g. office space) or that has variable target temperatures and you need fast response time in

Putting them on the bulkhead above the bathroom door is popular, depending on door heights that's either right in view or well out of it 😅 Regarding UFH electric mats I had each wired in 2.5mm2 direct to the Loxone cabinet, where I control them from a cheap zero crossing SSR driven by a dmx decoder. Originally I had the Schluter OEM controller (their most basic manual one) installed in the isolator switch locations, with the underfloor thermistors handled there, but these have a very annoying click every time the power up. So I removed them completely and manage it all in Loxone: I extended the thermistor wires back to the Loxone cabinet (had put spare CAT6A in there just in case this was needed). It was fairly easy to determine the temperature curve for the thermistor and hook the up to analogue inputs on the miniserver. So I now have a software PID controller block that manages getting the floor up to target temperature. Using SSR rather than mechanical relay is crucial for this, as it modulates the mat on/off every second or so which would be hell done mechanically. The isolator locations are supposed to be "obvious" for someone working on the equipment. I'd hesitate to put them in the loft, my Loxone cabinet itself is on the same floor so much more obvious place to go than hunt around one floor up for it.

Well yes, with an open slate, not doing a retrofit in the middle of a town would alter a lot of parameters

Very interesting. I have my mitsubishi ecodan set to cooling, it was extremely inefficient but this was mismatched emitters (1kW FCU on a 8.5kW heatpump) not specifically from the mode changes. (the heatpump was sized for the UFH and the FCU was an afterthought). I've now added a 100L buffer tank, and a shed load of logic in Loxone to correctly manage the hysteresis needed for the FCUs only, and cooling is running very well now. I currently have the DHW charge up twice a day (4am Octopus cheap rate, and 1pm top up to maximize solar PV/battery use). Perhaps I'll click it back to once a day and rely on the PV diverter for daytime top up, if the mode change is indeed an issue. Over all if I had my time again, I'd just use the a2w for DHW and UFH (space heating only) and add a multi-split a2a upstairs for cooling (and backup heating)

Afaik outdoor rated cable comes in any colour you like so long as it is black. You can either paint it, put it in some white conduit (and which point being outdoor rated is less of a big deal anyway) or just use indoor rated white patch lead. If it's 5m it should be easy enough to replace once every 20years or whatever MTBF is if abused like this. The only cable I have externally is in conduit, or to CCTV. Both are black outdoor cable and not visible except one tiny bit to a camera which I painted over white.

Yes that's what I have. Controlled via Loxone in my case, but with the engineer code I could have the texecom panel directly set/clear an output relay on arm.

The model doesn't support it, or their technical support doesn't support setups using it? I expect it's the latter, but their technical support doesn't support me whatever, I can't even buy a buffer tank thermistor from them as I'm not a registered installer. I have the same model as you (I think) and got cooling working very well now. Mostly via fan coil units, but the slab cooling does assist a little too. There's plenty of threads on here discussing how to do it. Tldr there's a dip switch in the FTC6 to enable it.

We put down new lawn in April and our guy said it's basically not possible to water it too much. We have a bunch of hozelock flipflopping sprinklers and it perks up everytime. Becoming a nightmare to deal with all the cuttings tho.

We have an electronic ball valve stopcock that automatically shuts off when the house alarm is armed. This is mostly to reduce damage if there's a leak when we're out, but also very effectively shuts off all the outdoor taps. I'd never even considered that benefit. (Albeit drawback if we ever have a gardener or automated irrigation, beyond what waterbutts can supply)

I was taking this from section "2.6 The 60% test" of that doc, and my attempt to decipher section 2.2. But reading it again I think section 2.1 says since April 22 (or May 23 in NI) the 60% test no longer applies. And from March 27 it will also no longer apply. Right? What a convoluted document.

To zero-rate the VAT the installation must be at least 40% of the total bill. So yes, on a zero rated supply & install, instead of +20% VAT you'll pay minimum of 166% of the price of all the materials.

This is the current thread on the topic. @S2D2 installed his using vacuum pump, I did mine without. Post questions over there 🙂

Of course this site is only for fibre installation. If they say no, you can only have copper, I don't know what happens but presumably you get sent back out and through the supplier-talks-to-openreach run around

No you can do it direct with OR now. https://www.openreach.com/building-developers-and-projects/fibre-for-developers/registering-your-site Because of the BR change (Jan 23) they have opened it up to all new builds, not just large developers. Nice little money spinner I'm sure.

Point is, even if you "know" it is cost prohibitive, you still need to get quotes from suppliers anyway to prove that and pass BR. So you may as well crack on and do that, while installing LTE as the short (and possibly long) term solution

But this will fail Building regs part R RA2 requirements. (I made a typo and said G2 up thread, which is utterly unrelated but something else I was dealing with this week 😅)

You have to do this as part of building regs G2 now anyway so you may as well follow that process as do it all twice 1/ put in Gigabit-ready Physical Infrastructure™️ (I.e. a duct) that new cable can be pulled through from the street if needed 2/ ask OR (and any other provider) for a quote to install gigabit internet. Doing #2 does not eliminate the benefit of also doing #1. Register with OR here https://www.openreach.com/building-developers-and-projects/fibre-for-developers/registering-your-site Building regs put a cap of £2000 on the amount you must spend to get it installed so you can guess how much OR typically charge.