Thorfun

ASHP is a buzzword at the moment. So unscrupulous people are cashing in on the fomo. but there are good installers out there who won’t take the piss.

thanks. i think this is what i'll ask the sparky to do. local thermostats and controllers are expensive and we shouldn't need them. but, just so i fully understand, when you say radial do you mean a single wire from cabinet to each towel rail and ufh mat? so for 3 x en-suites each with a towel rail and ufh that would be 6 cables in total? i sometimes get radial and ring mixed up as i'm a simple fella sometimes.

rather than guesstimating use the heat loss spreadsheet that @Jeremy Harris wrote. you should find it here that should give you a much more accurate heating demand. it will also give an indication as to how adding extra insulation/airtightness detailing will change the heat requirements.

i think you're crazy to try and install a 30kWp PV system especially as you're not off-grid! i would size more sensibly to allow you to run the house in the summer and charge up your batteries to run overnight and in the winter charge the batteries overnight on off-peak tariff for heating demands during the day. you'd be much better off using the money you were going to spend on the PV array to insulate and airtight to the n'th degree so you simply don't need that much heating! at the moment our 10.5kWp array is generating between 50 - 70kWh per day. Also, i fail to see what's wrong with an ASHP and ufh as has been said above, you get 3-4x the energy out that you put in

I was also thinking about putting them in the loft tbh. definitely one to consider as well

that's actually quite tricky for us! we don't really have any cupboards that close tbh. we have the ufh and towel rails to spur. It will be a conversation I have with the sparky.

foam, membrane and tape are your friends! looks like you've got room to put some insulation between the wall and frame too.

further to the above i guess i could ask the sparkies to run a 1.5mm cable to each locally isolated switch outside each bathroom. should be pretty trivial for them at the moment.

afaik Loxone can do anything! (i've not started building my Loxone cabinet yet and so my knowledge/research is from quite a while ago) the way i see it Loxone doesn't send the 230V per-se there is a relay in the cabinet that is wired to the mains cable via jumper blocks and so when heat is required the Loxone miniserver sends the signal to the relay in the cabinet (probably on the same DIN rail tbh) and that then turns on the power. that way it's easily configurable to allow that cabinet relay to be rewired to trigger something else in the future. @joth, @Dan F, @Rob99, @jack and others are very much more experts on Loxone than me! but i'm hoping my knowledge will rise dramatically as i get closer to wiring up my cabinet. 😉

resurrecting this thread as i'm currently looking at this. our tiler is installing the electric ufh mats in our FF bathrooms. i'm installing a Loxone system and have run cat6a to our AC units and GF UFH temp sensors for 1-wire control so could easily extend that loop to include the electric ufh temp probes on the first floor. my question is would the power for the electric ufh have to run all the way back to the loxone cabinet? with a standalone thermostat/controller we could run it as a spur of the ring main. or is it possible to put some form of independent relay in the wall that the 1-wire can switch and that the spur is wired in to to keep the power local to the ufh rather than running all the way back to the cabinet?

the only alternative is to sell up and pay the mortgage off and try and find something else. not something we want to do but we have quite a bit of equity in the property so is always a possibility if things do go very wrong.

maybe one cable now....until the next one.....and then the next one. 😉 definitely not rocket science! but, if it is truly a one-off then probably no point. but i always seem to be needing a new length of network cable so having the crimpers has been useful.

if BoE put up the rates by up to .5% as the reports are saying my self-build mortgage will go up to 8.5%! and it's not a small mortgage either. and @Nickfromwales chastises me for not wanting to spend £15 on electrical fittings. 🤣

so i've done a little bit of quick research and i can't justify the cost of these profiles when i could just glue these https://www.ultraleds.co.uk/standard-aluminium-channel-178-in-white-3-metre-length.html to the top of the plasterboard, right? even with the extra £0.44 per meter for the 38mm battens i make that a total of about an extra £18 per room on battens. doesn't even touch the cost of the specialist profiles. i'm not just being tight here, what would the justification be to use those specialist profiles? maybe in an area like they show in their video where you can actually see the edge of the dropped ceiling, e.g. above a kitchen island, but in my scenario where the dropped ceiling will be against a wall no one is ever going to see up there.

thanks for this. it is a nice solution albeit expensive but it does mean that the battens can be reduced to 25mm saving cost and ceiling height reduction and also plasterboard overhang which is something i was concerned about. i will investigate this solution!

Actually these rooms are upstairs so the battens will be attached to attic trusses rather than posis. Sorry for any confusion!! I’ll still run the perpendicular to the trusses though. That just make sense.

loft is not habitable so no issues with fire rating. I like your drawing and was thinking of using 38mm x 50mm battens but was going to use 12.5mm plasterboard at 600mm centres. my only concern was the bit of plasterboard 'overhanging' at the end of the run by the wall. seems a bit flimsy to just have it like that without any support. like someone could just put their hand up and yank it down.

I have a Unify WAP outside under the eaves of the existing bungalow that connects to one in the new house setup temporarily to get wifi in there so my Inverter and batteries can communicate with the world and I can monitor them. I have run cheap cat5a cable slung across a conservatory roof like @Big Jimbo says and has been out there all the last winter and it still works! you can get outdoor rated cable if you want to though. can even get armoured in case you want to reduce the risk of someone cutting it. also, don't buy pre-terminated cable. just buy the connectors and terminate it yourself. 😉

well, we've not finished the house yet but the cladding is done and we love how it looks. it is pretty fragile though so unless your chippie is extremely careful with moving boards etc some of the blackness comes off. that's on the really charred stuff btw. here's a blog I wrote on the subject

sounds like a plan to me! will run it passed the mrs to see what she says but i'm sold on this one.

also, i wouldn't need to board the entire ceiling above the dropped ceiling, right? just the bits around the edge

actually, that's not a bad idea you know as I guess there's nothing stopping me (apart from potential load on the trusses) to just fixing 38mm or 50mm battens to the bottom of the trusses and plaster boarding to those, right?

probably something that also includes a double entendre

afternoon all. I'm now thinking about a different dropped ceiling requirement. in the kids rooms we want to have the LED strips in a dropped ceiling look. e.g. I'm guessing this would be built something like this above the bedrooms is the loft space so there are 600mm centre attic trusses. I'm going to make the assumption that to get the light reflected I would need to board the trusses and then drop the ceiling, right? I'm also thinking that only a 50mm drop would be required? ceiling height is currently 2.4m so don't want to drop it too far really. so a 50mm MF bracket drop, then 9.5mm PB? I guess the other cheaper way to do this is to purchase LED coving profiles? something like this https://www.ultraleds.co.uk/u-shape-polymer-wall-coving.html and attach it 50mm/100mm down from the single skin of 12.5mm plasterboard? anyone have any suggestions/experience on how the best way to do this is? or have used the LED Coving profiles and what the effect is like compared to the dropped ceiling method?

yep. tiler is going to use the Impey water guard system on the floor and lipped up the wall (I believe) and then we talked about him painting the liquid tanking on the walls. he said liquid on the walls is belt and braces and I'm all for that so we're happy.