joth

GB sol RIS, so no tray as such just an aluminium frame. These are only ever used together so presumably the fire test was done years ago and isn't much of a thought now.

Blimey you must be cracking on! Last I saw you had just done the ground slab pour? by contrast we started renovating in Jan, yet we still seem to be 2+ months away from the panels being installed. btw interesting question about the fire cert. I've not heard mention of this at all -- ask me in a few months if we actually get the cert.

>Cleaning dreams? Avoid the need for cleaning by designing-out sources of dirt. e.g. design an airtight house with MVHR that filters incoming air, to remove a lot of dust issues. The more urban the house the more the benefit. No open fireplace, or any combustion source in the house. Clear and easy to use storage place for shoes and outside coats, and comfortable inviting place to remove them. If you have pets, a pet-designated area without them needing to roam the whole house. Ideally in an MVHR 'extract' zone so their smells and fur doesn't travel around the rest of the house. What other sources of dirt can be designed out? then removing dirt that does get in: design floor areas to support a robotic vacuum cleaner. Carpets are sub-optimal, as are uneven thresholds between rooms. Reduce number of stepped levels. Look to industrial catering and hospitals. Stainless steel kitchen and pantry, "wet room" toilets etc designed to allow periodic deep steam cleaning. There's probably clear design guidance/standards for these, but I can't find it. Then, if you're like us and can't abide cleaning, what about design elements that simplify hiring a professional cleaner? no ideas come to mind other than clear storage for cleaning equipment and a big sink for them to use. maybe a door lock and security system (inc. a safe?) that makes it comfortable letting them in even when not at home (a distant memory, but it may yet happen again).

This maybe an overzealous interpretation of Part L https://www.intergasheating.co.uk/app/uploads/2018/06/Guidance-on-Boiler-Plus-BEIS.pdf That states every house must have 2 independent temp controlled zones, and the guidance is these are often "living area" (downstairs) and "sleeping areas" (i.e. upstairs) FWIW we had a lot of conflicting advice on if we needed upstairs heating or not (and we are going PH certified, all be it EnerPHit). So we comprimsed on putting fused spurs into each bedroom to allow a possible future infrared panel heater if needed, and plumbing into the loft to allow a possible future fancoil unit if needed

Totally agree - I was just jesting to be honest! So was I, really! Perhaps a bit fasiciously, I was giving the guaranteed to work answer to the "Is there anything I can do?" question, and not the "What would I personally do?"question, which was not what was asked :-)

Ask the neighbour what their price is to remove the objection. Most people will have a £ price that will change their mind.

yes x 3 Everything is bespoke and a lot of laminated birch ply with exposed edges. Not a look we would have chosen originally, but we're renovating a 1960s building and got pulled right into the mid centuary look.

This sink is a separate area, against the wall. That's 6mm steel worktop (a friend's company is laser cutting for us), with a cut out for recessed steel basin, all sat on birch ply carcuses. The island will be Sapienstone Malm Black, with a bora Pure X hob recessed in it but no other cut outs or changes of material so it should just look like one big slab of black. The edge will be polished and Arris edge detail, with the exposed18mm ply edge underneath it set back in slightly. The overall effect will be rather like https://koivu.co.uk/kitchen/woodford-kitchen-grey/ but topped in Sapienstone rather than quartz. http://www.nerostein.co.uk/ will fabricate it (in Estonia) to the kitchen designer's CAD drawing and ship over. Sounds wonderful!? Lets hope it all works out.....! Good luck with your plans.

In addition to those you list, the other slight benefit of the solaredge optimizers is they limit the panel output to 1V until connected to their inverter, reducing the risk of death by 1000V DC in certain situations.

We're installing sapienstone onto birch ply units with a thick ply base running continuously under the porcelain. It'll be interesting how we get on with this! Our floor is porcelain tiles on screen on EPS on concrete, if that matters? Spoke to 3 suppliers / fabricators and none raised any concerns. (None asked about floor build up) This is on the island. On the sink area we're using 6mm stainless steel, which if we weren't open plan I'd have loved to do the whole kitchen in ?

Have you looked into a green grant to cover the upgrade? https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/home-insulation/green-homes-grant-scheme

Walls will reflect off a lot of the solar energy (especially if you paint them white!), I have no idea really but I can't think it makes sense to model that except on windows (and even there, attenuated by the g-value) For the walls, I'd start out by modeling it as a the delta-T between worst-case external air temp (40ºC?) (or wall surface temp), and the indoor temp, passing through the wall U value over the given area. So e.g. 20 * 0.28 * 120 = 672W Again I have no idea really :-) my next step would be reverse engineer how PHPP does this.

As you're installing an MVHR too, put it near the supply valves (or at least in the room with supply valves) so it naturally spreads from there through all the areas as it percolates towards the extract values.

I think most users are delighted if they achieve 0.5 ACH on a new build. For a refurb, 1 ACH is a typical (e.g. Enerphit) top-tier goal, and more realistically (e.g. AECB) people shoot for 1.5 To get any of these, you need to more than simply expect it, it has to be a very intentional goal. If you're doing everything via a main contractor, you need to make it a requirement of the specification you issue them. If you're handling sub contractors yourself, you need to be on top of every single one ensuring they don't ruin it. A single pipe or electrical cable could wreak havoc to achieving the goal. As an analogy, no one says the expect their roof will be fairly watertight: they damn well require it as an absolute must! And in many ways airtightness is harder than that...

No negotiation! I got prices 2 years ago so things may have changed. The MVHR was 25% deposit for the detailed design but I was fine with that as the sizing had already been done and final price fixed. (as it turned out, they'd used price list for the wrong system and only discovered that at the very end, so prices did go up but only in line with what they're quoting other friends for the same correctly priced system, so I sucked that up) The M&E they possibly realized they'd under charged for, especially when I had to remind them they'd included PHPP inputs in the price (not the full model, just the data for the heating &dhw pages of it). I imagine it takes up a heck of a lot of time their side, as anyone like me that's been on here will be back and forth with 50 questions about ASHP cooling modes, control systems, performance of different coolants, what brand are the circulation pumps and manifold actuators, how to future proof for fan coil cooling, etc etc etc. All of which they were helpful looking into and responding on. (Vs the other company who quoted, where they only deal in Nibe and didn't seem interested in any variations beyond their "standard" design)

Right, that's probably a lot of the issue. Builders will never spend more on anything unless they are very explicitly asked to do so, and this is doubly true for "invisible" items like insulation and airtightness. If that entire area is done with UFH but merely at 2016 building regs insulation, it's going to cost a lot and indeed be extremely slow responding. As an approximation, assuming the UFH flow temperature is 30ºC, you're going to be losing 0.25 * 60 * 9 * 20 = 2.7kW continuously down through the floor just heating up the ground under it. That's perhaps 10,000kWh going through the floor, depending on the heat pump that could be 3,000 kWh of primary energy.

Assuming you're not on a smart meter, get a clamp on current meter like this and put over the tails coming out of the main meter. Then you can turn off all the trips in the fuse board one by one, and see how much the consumption drops by for each, to determine exactly where the biggest consumers are. That will determine the low hanging fruit for making some savings. Some other questions: Does the whole thing overheat in summer? Or do you have aircon too? Or use the Ground heat pump to provide cooling? I'm wondering if the trace heating causes other items to work hard to maintain comfortable temps.

As a "custom builder", sorting out M&E design has been the biggest "surprise" challenge of our project too. We were trying to get a design done for the PHPP "design approval" phase, and to use for project tendering, but most suppliers I spoke to only wanted to do it as part of a complete "design supply and install" package. This is complicated because until you've tendered for main contractor you don't really know how much to lock yourself into a specific supply/install package, and also the size of the "deposit" needed for the design phase was so high you can't help but feel they can then design as costly a system as they want, change whatever they want for install, and you're locked in to take it as you've already paid so much up front. For example, this is what one local company quoted for their design only fee, refundable if proceeding to supply+install: ASHP: £2,187 +VAT MVHR: £1,738 +VAT UFH: £1,355 +VAT PV: £988 +VAT Except for PV, that's more than many people here spend on complete installed systems! In the end we used enhabit for a stand alone M&E design (including all the PHPP input data) for £750 , which we're using as the basis although shopping around for various parts of it, which was far more than I'd have considered spending at the outset, but has had quite a bit of use over the last year+, and given some of the other horror stories I've heard since, I'm fairly happy with this approach. Our architect (newly PH certified) has tried different approaches on 4 subsequent PH certified designs and says it's a pain whichever route they go. No wonder architects start bringing the M&E in house. If I gave up my day job, I'd be half tempted to train up on this and go into partnership with them on it, as I do find it some of the most interesting pieces of the project.

Yeah - I went for Raid 10 across 4 drives mostly because my NAS is on Linux and I'm using btrfs which I love, but I don't fully trust its RAID 5 support (and probably never will as it looks like the winds are blowing towards zfs these days). Also I had some bad experience with Raid 5 on my old Infrant ReadyNAS that got slower over time but was a real pickle to convert back from. With the 1019+ my inclination would be same -- even start out with 4 or even three drives in Raid 5, put the NVR on it too, see how that goes and consider how to use the remaining 2 bays as space and speed demands evolve. I'll watch how you get on with interest! I'm sure 8GB RAM is plenty, but having seen the table above the lack of future expansion on this is the only hesitation I'd now have on it. (Full disclosure, I installed Home assistant on a Virtual Box VM (on ubuntu) yesterday , as they're deprecating the docker install I was using, and while it runs absolutely fine the act of carving out 2GB dedicated to the VM did make me twinge rather). Well... roll on a couple months (and a few surprise tangents in the conversation here : ) and I'm thinking about this topic again. Bizarrely because I decided to sell all my current AV and Sonos stuff and start over in the new house, and LMS (nee Squeezeserver) seems to be the winner, which is hilarious as this is what I used 15 years ago for multi room audio and it looks like I've gone full circle! It was a joy to unpack my old gen2 SqueezeBox and setup again, I bought it in 2006 and still supports every useful file format, and and now even Spotify streams to it great. (Alongside Sonos, it's the only system to let you mix and match local and spotify media. Even use local playlists as input to have spotify suggest variations) Anyway point here is I had to go through the motions on reinstalling software stacks few time, and tried out proxmox.com for managing VMs which I found really nice, along with portainer.io to manage docker containers. So I think this is the path for me rather than a proprietary NAS solution. But the i7 machine I put it on keeps burning out SSD drives so it will soon be time to get a proper server to host it all on. I'm looking at these 16-core Atom machines, may even enough to host my BlueIris Win10 VM too, TBC https://www.broadberry.co.uk/intel-atom-rackmount-servers/cyberserve-atom-104s Nice thing with that vs Xeon is it's very low energy draw when idle, and can spin up more cores as needed. (And it's several k£ cheaper)

A chunk of reasoning is over here: To specifics, we wanted Gaulhofer but couldn't get the U-values to meet what we needed in PHPP (partly due to some of the very human issues craig outlines in that thread). So we went to other manufacturers with similar looking (but PH certified) product. GBS was too limited in the Alu clad options, plus didn't quite feel right for us. Weru were ridiculous price. Internorm were about same price as GBS, but had option of integrated blinds, so we settled with them (Studio / Home Pure mix). The price was close to GBS. We tried to use Aspect in Exeter, but they don't do install in our area and really weren't interested in supply only, so ended up with another one of their other suppliers. This story it To Be continued. (I can also share a spreadsheet with more specific window-by-window comparisons)

I only just realized, these were only announced the smaller CW6 ComfoPost last month. (It's mentioned in this month's Self Build mag). Do you already have a price for it at all? Apparently last year I exclaimed about how expensive the much larger CW12 was, but even that link is dead now. Just debating this approach (and insulating supply ducts) vs stand alone fan coil...

I suggest researching windows now with the benefit of hindsight I spent 10+ weeks waiting for planning permission to come though having fun with research on home automation and the best sort of microwave oven to buy, but you know what? When the PP was granted the architect's first question was not about those things but just "what windows are you having?". I then discovered they are a multidimensional nightmare trade-off in price, aesthetic, performance, function, lead time, helpfulness of supplier, availability of high quality installers approved by the manufacturer, discounts available via "haggling" etc. Making a decision took 5 weeks (and a lot of pre-Covid driving around the south of England to various showrooms) all the while our architect was blocked on progress on the rest of the technical design as apparently windows are pretty fundamental. (We were doing a PHPP-led design mind, may be very different for a conventional build ) FMMV

Don't beat yourself up over this, self-building doesn't have to be a hair-shirt wearing competition. Your reasoning makes perfect sense and there's a lot to be said for getting on and getting it done with the funds available. And sounds like the core fabric of the build is good so you'll need less heating whatever source it's from. I mean, we had to pay best part of £1000 to have the mains gas disconnected from our passive house renovation. Considering factors immediately in your control , your decision is far more logical than ours!

Depends how off-piste you want to go with this, but if it's only a few days per year you need the higher capacity you could put a Willis heater inline with the output of the ASHP and use to boost up the temperature a bit. For £50 it could give you 8kW on cold days.

This is the supplier I'm looking at: https://www.shopclima.it/en/panasonic-paw-fc-d15-r-aquarea-compact-fan-coil-with-right-side-connection-1-5-kw.html €214.00 Plus €75 shipping (it does reduce if I order multiple, so a bulk buy maybe an option although the UK wide onward shipping might wipe out the benefit) @ProDave also interested in this topic