Thorfun

We have a poured lintel in our basement designed by the SE. it came out a bit rough but we weren’t going for aesthetics! i’m sure if you tried with decent formwork and the right concrete you could make it look nice.

the OP mentioned TRVs early on in the thread so i would presume it's radiators.

This is a top tip that I followed. And not only for the reason you say, it also saves a lot of cable by not going up and down to the ceiling every time!

I don’t think it’s as black and white as this. For a well insulated airtight house there’s no need for high flow temps and using underlay suitable for ufh in areas with engineered timber flooring will work. Even if it did reduce the temperature a bit the whole house would have the same temperature and so other areas would compensate. we have underlay with our engineered flooring in some rooms and tiles elsewhere and our house is not cold. we also have decoupling membrane under our porcelain tiles and can feel the tiles are warm when the heating is on and the flow temperature is high enough. Our current flow temperature is 26 deg C and the house is maintaining 22 deg C but the tiles aren’t warm. They’re just not cold. It’s very easy to overthink things! I’m an expert at it.

None of the touch buttons depress. You can literally just put your palm over the central area and it will activate the switch. Double and triple taps are a doddle too

No complaints about the retro touch switches. But then I rarely use them! Light come on automatically when I enter those rooms. I’ve mostly Loxone Touch Tree switches around the place for the 5 touch points as we have external blinds in most rooms and will eventually get the audio server going so they will do that. Also I use the temperature measurements the touch switches give as well. anywhere we don’t need a touch we have single retro touches. Just for manual turning on and off if ever required. I couldn’t justify the cost of the Touch Pures as much as I’d have liked them.

We have some retrotouch switches and I don’t recall seeing the led light up. tbh I also can’t remember how I wired them up! they’re nice though albeit a bit clicky but I’ve yet to find a quiet retractive switch.

i agree. i just use them for the underlying broadband. i have individual subscriptions for the streaming services i want.

hang in there! make a complaint to your provider and ask them to escalate it in Openreach. then ask them about the compensation (i think it's about £6/day of delay). it will get sorted eventually i'm sure and it'll all be worthwhile. Starlink is expensive when i looked in to it and the 4G signal by us was just about usable but not for a permanent solution so we stuck it out and am happy now, plus i have about 2yrs free broadband from the compensation payment.

we had issues as well but persevered and eventually got it all sorted for free and got about £700 in compensation as it took so long! not going to lie though it was a very frustrating process

you can get underlay suitable for ufh and wooden flooring. as above to drying times....is it cemfloor or anhydrate liquid screed? i think 1mm per day is excessive for liquid screed. i know that's the value for dry screeding but i thought liquid was quicker? luckily for us we're really slow at everything and our screed was down for a long time before we covered with tiles and wood! 🤣

I didn’t know about this cable. It’s still expensive though! I have some leftover 14AWG purple speaker cable and green Cat6a cable so thinking I can run the 2 cables as it’s no big deal for me.

we just put electric towel radiators and ufh in our upstairs bathrooms. i thought it a massive faff to mess about with multiple circuits off the ASHP and to run all the pipework upstairs just to run the towel rads for an hour a day and the ufh for a few hours a day.

i'd be concerned about how having so much EWI will affect the condensation risk and any sort of airtight membrane internally? unfortunately i'm not clever enough to know the answers to that! 🤣

yeah, maybe with a sloping basement like yours the best route would be all internal insulation providing you can maintain the thermal bridge as @JohnMo said.