joth

I loved Jeremy's posts and learnt as much from reading his thoughts here than I did from anyone anywhere, but yes he did struggle to let any disagreement lie and I'm sure randall munroe must know him personally...

I haven't heard of this before. Rooms need door gaps, but cupboards? Do you have supply or extract vents inside the cupboard? One other thought: PIR work on infrared and some amount of this will be visible through the door itself, depending on material. Seems unlikely but you could try bulking it up or temporarily sticking a sheet of aluminium foil over it as an experiment to figure out what is the pathway that needs blocking

I saw that email but the attachment didn't come through in digest mode, and I couldn't see it listed on the company's website so gave up looking. Now I see the pdf it looks really good, and good value. If I get reliability issues it'd be trivial to swap one of these in in place of 8 or the s1-dr dimmers I currently have (and would save on a fair bit of cabinet space and vampire load in the process)

Part of my process was about convincing myself I wanted to go with loxone at all, or any automation system for that matter. So initially I was making low risk dabbling and then looking for the best value (cheapest) system I was comfortable with. But by the time we'd spent lockdown / my covid recovery building up the cabinet I felt I needed a lighting design that would do it justice and got cold feet about my own "grid of downlighters" which is where I got a professional designer involved at the 11th hour. She was truly amazing, put much into helping us and I learnt a lot.... But now I was really fully invested and the additional cost of DALI suddenly looks much less. So my real advice would be to get familiar with both and then get the lighting design nailed down (and even, all fixtures bought as lead times on some of it are terrible right now) and only then commit to exactly how many channels of which sort of dimming. Aside from Dali Vs dmx, in the end a lot of the fancy lighting placement means I needed a lot more "remote drivers" than anticipated which actually means I could use centralised constant current drivers a lot more than I have. E.g. https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4001200401126.html

Where is the airtightness layer in that roof build up? The MVHR room ducting is best kept entirely within that

Yeah the 302 seem quite terrible reliability and they dim the neutral rather than live which causes a lot of disgruntlement on that forum too. For better or worse I'm using s1-dr. These seem a bit better, although the 1W vampire load per unit is not very nice and they have soldered on 5amp protection fuse so if you manage to make a snafu wiring it up there's a puff of smoke and the soldering iron has to come out to replace the fuse - not so cute. If doing it again I'd probably have kept with plan A of using DALI everywhere, but used the Loxone DALI extension rather than mess around with KNX-DALI bridge. Which would have kept the cabinet much simpler too. I gave up on that because I didn't want to use expensive "specification grade" DALI fixtures, but in the end I got a lighting designer's help and she spent a lot of my money on nice fixtures from Phos and Lucent Lighting that would only have been a fraction more to drive from DALI anyway. Live and learn ... So now I know for next time.... I'm using 1 CAT6A per 2-3 switches. This allows a fairly free mix of Tree and retractive switch per cable run.

Cheers! I'm using Tree touch switches in important rooms and cheap retractive switches (and cheap 24v motion sensors) everywhere else I'm using CAT6A for all this (in green ?) and for all the networking runs. This is 23AWG so plenty of power delivery and 8 cores makes it more useful than tree cable. The convention I settled on is each control run I've got power and Tree protocol on the orange and green pairs, and the blue pair can support 2 motion sensors and brown a pair of retractive switches.

Yup we're just onto tiling and mist coating this week. I had our electrician pull most the cables, started off ok but they're a bit old school so pulling Cat6 cable one drop at a time became kinda rediculous with joist notching etc in the end they got the hang of identifying the main cabling "highways"" and pulling through a decent bundle of cable at once. I suggested daisy chaining a maximum of three switches/motion sensors per Tree drop, but left them to devise there own plan for the order of looping them which became rather crazy grouping things up by device type rather than room for unknown reasons, which massively increased the quantity of Cat6 used. I had a lot of other things on my plate during it all so was trying not to micro manage... In the end I had to anyway as they kinda lost the will to keep track of what was still needing doing each day. Now making final adjustments to the cabinet to meet the final lighting design needs. I have a 3+ week break over Christmas which... Given the state of things this year... Will be almost entirely spent on terminating switches and programming.

We're allowing 1500x700mm but using the 300L Geocoil UVC which is narrower than most. Probably could squeeze into slightly less space if really planning it out. (there's also showersave pipe and the immersion and ASHP controllers etc in that space)

Dig through the categories here https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/

One other thing to keep in mind is 400L of (occasionally) 60°C water in a small space will create a very warm loft. I'm assuming it's a well insulated space anyway if you're planning to put the MVHR unit there too, but it may impact some other choices. Getting in to change the MVHR filter maybe a sweaty task! ( We put the cylinder and UFH manifold into our laundry room specifically so any escaped heat is useful for clothes drying, after reading that tip on here )

Honestly don't be sad. Insulate well, control heat losses through ventilation. Reduce heat demand and it becomes much less critical what the source is. For a rental flat using something with minimum capital outlay and easy for any random tenant to understand and operate is of great value. Heating technology is always advancing and much easier to change a boiler at some point in future than improve critical errors in the design/build of the fabric

I don't quite understand this. A recirculating hood isn't ventilation, it's merely filtering the air. It only applies to the hob, steam and airborne fats will also be present from the oven, microwave etc and these can only be ventilated via the MVHR system. So it has to be acceptable to regs? We've already had 3 run ins with building regs not understanding elements of modern efficient building design (clearly it's not a popular option over there in impoverished St Albans ?) so I'm eagerly awaiting this next conversation. (We have Bora Pure to be installed, and MVHR extract over the kitchen sink. We bought the hob a bit early to avoid the price increase @BartW mentioned)

Assuming airtightness boundary is on the inside face of external walls, then inward opening makes it easier to get a good connection from the airtight boundary in the walls and floor into the face of the threshold that connects to the door leaf. (Depends on the exact design of door, but majority of Passivhaus doors work this way)

Oh their website is a disaster. I spent three days putting the exact same items in my basket and randomly getting different errors for: some out of stock for delivery, out of stock for collection, simple "we can't deliver this order", random error "can't add item to bag" when trying to delete items, yes we can deliver it but oh no there's no slots available. So I almost gave up and ordered a commercial sink stand (for utility room) and then suddenly yesterday morning is spurted to life and let me order it. "We'll send two trucks, one Friday (today) and one Monday" This morning arrives with 2x SMS and an email saying today's delivery has been rescheduled for Monday. But 30 mins ago I got a call from the driver saying he'll be there within the hour. To the building site I'm now not at today. sigh. I guess some subset of stuff may arrive in some unexpected state on day. Almost as bad as the Bora hob Tuesday, arriving a month early with no notice of being dispatched. Guy at the door of our (temporary) home "I've got a pallet with 150kg on it for you!" me: WTF? "Wrong address!" (thinking it's flooring) us: argument eventually him: "I have no idea what it is, let me see. From Germany. Kitchen appliance? Yeah see, 27kg" me: WTF again. me: (eying the massive hole in the box). "It's been dropped" him: "no it hasn't". "That's how we received it". "It's fine, we're always delivering Boras and I'm a world expert in them" Sigh.

Welcome! Pretty sure you mean LED not LCD light :-)

Thank you! That makes much more sense now, GHG is just "business as usual" for the RHI system so doesn't need special GHG wording to explain it. The remain benefits of GHG are: 1/ if you were predicted less RHI than GHG (e.g. used in well insulated homes) 2/ avoids the need to mess around getting EPCs and topping up loft/cavity insulation etc 3/ Avoids need for metering for usage/payment (e.g. if the home is not full time occupied, or if using the HP for cooling as well as heating) 4/ avoids the need for quarterly claims and payments over multiple years

"Everyone" says that if you get GHG for an ASHP the RHI will be reduced. Some say it's nets out to the same as doing RHI alone, other's (including my installer) say it's not a direct substitution so there's still benefit in applying for both. Like most of the details of GHG, I can't find jack written down about it. If it was purely additive, I'd be looking at £5k GHG and £7k RHI grants towards my £8.5k+VAT install (for ASHP + cylinder) leaving me a very tidy 4k increase in capital vs having no heating or hot water system at all, so (a) I don't believe that will ever happen and (b) if I do, it certainly would blow raspberries at what most people are finding (especially down here in the rip-off home counties)

ah yes, sorry I wasn't very clear but the links I linked upthread were exactly to make this point. Thanks

I'm also no expert, but we're using wood fiber insulation (retrofit + extension with 50% external walls are now timber frame) and this has a continuous layer of pavatherm EWI wrapping all the B+B and TF walls https://www.pavatex.com/en/application/wall/external-wall-insulation-in-timber-construction/ https://www.pavatex.com/en/application/application/

That's clearly someone that just doesn't want the job

That's what our tester did. (We got 0.4 ACH on a retrofit, pre-1st fix - so happy! And this thread about faked results makes me sad)

Yes, see my previous response ? Yes we did, from Lathams

I read this as all on the same rcbo. Otherwise if there's any 230v control signal fed from one unit going to the neutral supply of another it would constantly trip the rcbo

Please please let's not turn this into yet another RHI pros/cons debate, but yes I'm getting mine professionally installed under MCS, foremost because we're installing under PD in a conservation area that had a lot of other contentious issues with our "green" improvements, so I want to ensure I have full documentation of MCS noise requirements. But also for the reasons you mention about documentation, support, warranty, and frankly I have a day job that pays me far better than the cost savings I'd make learning every single detail of successful ASHP installations just for a one-off install (and plumbing terrifies me for some reason). Our order is in with mitsubishi before they closed accepting new ones, so it'll arrive when it arrives! I have a mix of loxone and esphome devices for controlling the smart grid function. I'm a software developer by profession so no concerns about that aspect, plus it's of really minor importance vs the core function of the unit so can wait for months or years for me to play around with optimizing that specific aspect. Other's situation maybe very different!!