Conor

That's crazy. With ashp, car charger, PV and induction hob, ours comes in at less than 20kW. And that's before you apply diversity. Give your engineer a boot up the hole. Go back and ask NIE what they can provide from the existing transformer and work from there. Otherwise, you will (rightly) have to stump for the upgrade.

That looks like a party wall. Have you spoken to your neighbour about this? I'd assume the existing wall height would be included in the 1.8m max height limitation. If it's for privacy, I'd bring it out just as far as the second step in the wall, so you are not compromising any visibility to the road. And I'd keep it at the one height (e.g 1.6m high at the house and 1.8m high at the step down). Double sided, boards on both sides. But otherwise, what you are planning on doing is perfectly reasonable and won't need planning permission.

Our entire master bedroom part of the house flexes in the wind. Steel, comcrete, glass are more flexible than you realise.

I made some edits. I was interrupted by a puking child on my first attempt. Keep the big island. Just make it the focus of the design, not an afterthought. Ours is 3.2m long and 1m deep and it's fantastic. I've the hob at one end, all pots and pans under it, oven directly behind, bins, chopping boards, knives etc just a step away. Sink almost directly behind as well. Keep the sink at the window for sure. Try to picture using the kitchen day to day. What happens when somebody is cooking at the hob and transferring food to the oven while somebody else is making a cup of tea? Do they ever occupy the same space? The answer should be no. That's how we designed ours, designated zones by activity type. A rendering of ours. The door on the LHS past the fridge is in to our boot room / pantry.

Your room shape is quite similar to ours but design very different. Why is the hob (or sink) not on the island? Your oven is too far from the hob. You want to keep the main working areas (sink, hob, oven) close together in a triangle shape. The tall corner unit on its own looks wrong in that option. A lovely 3m island with no functionality is just getting in the way. It's too big if it's just for prep. I'd move the hob to the island, replace that entire run where the hob was with full height units and put the oven there, bringing it in closer to the action. You just then need 600-800mm workspace either side of the sink. I'm also not a fan of overhead units in working areas. Only put them in if you really need the storage space.

Likely the same but you'd need to dig a small trial hole at one side to expose the footings. No other way of knowing. What are you planning on doing?

Are these external stud walls, and therefore is this your main insulation layer? Or, are these internal partition walls? If the former, then you'll need to batten out using 22 or 25mm battens. If you compress the insulation, you reduce it's performance. If these are internal partition walls, use 50mm acoustic insulation instead. How are you running services?

Realistically, you've two options if you want a warm house. 100mm EWI directly on to the existing walls. Don't worry about the 'dash. Second, is the knock and rebuild. Any talk about widening cavities etc is crazy. We were in a very similar position, but with even less work than you are describing. Rebuilding on the same footprint worked out more cost effective once you calculate long term running costs and resale.

Once you have a trap full of water, it's weight will be greater than the negative pressure from the unit. Was there not one supplied with the unit? It can even be a loop of pipe to form a trap. I've still not got mine plumbed in and it's just flowing in to a tub. Only need to empty it every couple of weeks or so. Is this a newly completed build, then your house will be soaking and the unit will want to be boosting. Override the humidity settings and set the fan to something like 33%

You've probably figured this out by now, as posts above have explained, but a heatpump normally works to a set delta of flow temperature. Let's say 5c. So if your slab is 10c, the initially the water coming out will be close to 10c. So your heatpump will only deliver 15c. It will slowly ramp up to the set flow temp, e.g 30c. You can change the settings to deliver the required flow temp regardless of the return flow temperature. This just costs more. You'll get a COP of 1.5, rather than 5.

Option 6. Demolish the lot and start again. What you are planning to do will cost more and perform worse than a new build.

Day you get the completion certificate is the day you should change to a normal home insurance policy. Our self policy was voided upon completion.

Faulty seals, new units needed. Go back to your installer.

Leave that up to your renderer. All of our walls were rasped.

1. Don't trust the drawing. It could be anywhere / not exist. I've worked in the utility sector, and specifically mapping side of things and they are rarely reliable. At our last property, the drawings showed a main sewer running right through all of the gardens, and if I'd trusted it, we would not have bought the house. In reality it was a further 8m back in an alleyway. You need to get somebody out to lift a few lids and tell you what is what. 2. It will likely be a small pipe serving just a couple of houses. Shallow, but easy to deal with. 3. Build over agreements are possible, you won't know until you have all the info and speak to the water company.

Had this issue on my salda, I taped the contact shut so the error would go away. It's the Internal bypass so it's never needed as we never get temps low enough for it to activate.

All of our first floor ceilings are vaulted. Love it. Zero issues. Just avoid angled windows as they are a pain to dress.

A for the win. It all has to be the same direction, minimise or eliminate joins. We have 75m² of herringbone laminate , all centred and continuous from the front door.

I went for two 400m³ units for our 350m² (gross, 275m² net). Largely driven by shape of house and needing one unit on each side of the building. Other than duct run savings, other advantage is both units are only running at 25% capacity, so dead silent. You really want to oversize you mvhr so it's running on low rpm. Don't get a unit that scrapes the flow rates for your floor area

Your meter box will also have an non return valve.

When I had a power cut, It glitched the controller and I had to do a factory reset to get it working again. Cant remember the specific issue but sounds similar to your, unit would say "on" but nothing happened. Only issue I've had.

Render (Sto, Webber, k-rend etc) on to your ICF is by far the best option.

Our plant room is still bare screed nearly three years in. Can't see it changing.

I would not be installing a door frame on EPS. Use compactfoam or similar and set directly under the frame to act as a door block.

We've 12mm laminate on top of 5mm wood fibre underlay on top of our screen floors. Love it. Esp in working areas and with kids running about the place. Something like 70m². So, so glad we didn't go for wood.