PeterW

He’s hilarious ..!! He’s the one that starts talking about chipboard floors and glued down carpets from memory being a reason not to fit bigger radiators... This is the WB Heat Pump page btw - they are spending millions investing in the technology. https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/products/heat-pumps Just to save you looking, they quote the following : I though you said they were expensive and would fall apart ..?? And are expensive to run...?? Seems WB disagree with you too - as to 99.9997% of the population ...

So I can run 3 bar at point of use and get hot water to 3 taps at 8 litres / minute from a heat pump based system. Find me a gas combi boiler that can provide 3 bar pressure and 24 litres / minute...? (BTW you won’t find a domestic boiler that can do this, the maximum flow from WB largest combi (8000 Life 50kW) is 20.3l/min at delta 35°C so around 43°C delivered to save you looking and the PRV reduces it to 2.1 bar max so you won’t get close. ) So if we are comparing apples and apples, your combi (which is around £4K installed now for the WB 50kW) has a lower overall pressure capability and lower flow rate to what I am describing so it’s not “zero problem” it’s “you can’t get close” No such thing as free electricity... and you can’t power a heat infrastructure with a variable power source. The U.K. has the ability to store very little of its natural gas supply so is beholden to the European pipeline interconnectors for supply. Unless you convert the whole of the European network to hydrogen, you’re needing TWh of gas storage to provide supply sureity and at the time you don’t need gas ..!! To use the hydrogen created in the summer due to excess solar (your scenario) on a November evening you wound need several million cubic metres of storage as an inter seasonal store. Localised combustion of any fuel as a reliable and environmentally friendly heat source for domestic properties is a rapidly diminishing option, and you’re hanging on to this hydrogen powered combi argument based on outdated opinion and conjecture despite being presented with facts time and time again.

So this isn’t like for like, you need to add the cost of a typical gas boiler, the installation of a gas supply and then the annualised servicing etc of both. That gives you the Total Cost of Ownership. Comparing the two as you have doesn’t work unless you do this as you have compared Capex to Opex. Average life of a heat pump is far in excess of 10-12 years as there is very little to go wrong inside. As they don’t create anything corrosive or products of combustion they also don’t need anything like the servicing of a gas boiler. You can also do it yourself if necessary unlike gas. We’ve done this before .. a heat pump will support as much hot water as you need. Sizing the system is the issue, it’s when installers don’t survey the property and assume the 180 litre hot water tank is “enough” for a 4 bed house. What isn’t understood is that the tank is acting as a buffer for usage in a gas fired house, and the boiler will be kicking in pretty quickly once 2 showers are running. If you don’t believe me, turn a standard boiler set up off (Usual 25kW boiler/210 litre tank) once the tank is at temperature and get 2 showers running. You’ll be out of hot water in about 8-9 minutes. The boiler kicks in and is essentially acting as a 25kW instant hot water heater into the tank. The downside with ASHP (unless you go very big) is they can’t provide the speed of recovery as it’s 25kW vs 12kW, so will need twice as long to recover. That is why you oversize the tank. 400 litre tank is £2-300 at most more than a 210 litre tank so in the scheme of things is negligible. Back to Capex - you’ve paid for it as part of the build so what’s the issue ..? If they U.K. standard for new housing was the same as Southern Ireland and the zero carbon targets then we wouldn’t have this issue moving forward. I guess this was a retrofit under one of the “schemes”..?? A lot of these were done by people who used to fit solar panels, cavity wall insulation before that .... and they are neither heating engineers or specialists. I’d hazard a guess it was poor design that was the issue here not the heat pump. Bit like complaining your Ford Focus can’t beat a Ferrari off the lights ... In the lab yes, on test rigs yes, they have less than 3 years real world data of actual usage and the biggest change is changing the jet on the boiler. Been doing this for 40 years with LPG so it’s a no brainer but .... it’s not as clean as you think it is...!! Burning anything in pure oxygen is fine, it’s 2H + O = H2O plus some nice heat. Then add all the other stuff in air, the nitrogen compounds are still there, just ask TfL about this with their hydrogen buses. Your other issue is the problem of transportation and detection. You add mercaptan to natural gas to make it smell, and the reason is so you can find leaks. Our natural gas network is leaky ... but the volatility of natural gas (the nice methane mix) is much lower than hydrogen. So we will need to work out how to stop that lovely hydrogen leaking out as it’s a tiny molecule not the massive long chain hydrocarbon - welcome to the situation where you “could” use hydrogen in a standard boiler with a new jet and a pressure change, but 80% of the infrastructure to get it there would need updating. Assertion.. Assumption..? Or a blind guess ..?? If you size the heat pump and the radiators to the heat load and heat loss of the building, then any building can be heated with a heat pump. If you don’t believe me then you may want to check what an aircon unit is and how they heat places such as exhibition centres with them and not gas boilers (hint, they are heat pumps) Are they ..? 9kW heat pump with all the bits is change of £4k, cheaper if you buy non-inverter. The £10k you’re usually quoting .? That’s the “MCS Premium” for installation to get RHI and it’s not rocket science to install a heat pump. As a balance, I’ve seen quotes of £3,500 to install a gas boiler into an attic plus £1500 for a new hot water tank so they are comparable in price when you consider any plumber can fit a heat pump, to work on gas you are required to be GSR. On what basis are they “bad for the environment”..?? Burning of fossil fuels is bad for the environment, and you’ve completely missed the “how to create hydrogen” issue as you need energy to split the water in the first place to fuel your hydrogen generation. So you are going to take clean energy I take it (ie no fossil fuel based generation) and then use it to inefficiently split water (which you will have to purify first, possibly even use reverse osmosis) then inefficiently compress the hydrogen (using energy generated from..??) then add the smells etc, and finally transport through an upgraded network to a property where you will inefficiently burn it to produce heat and create combustion products ..? That is environmental impact of a massive scale in terms of creation, storage and transmission of a volatile gas that still hasn’t got a fully proven long term benefit. Just so you can use that lovely box on the wall you have always been told is the only way to heat water...?? Or alternatively I can use a transmission network that currently exists to move electricity from existing generation plants that could be produced from any source, to power a heat pump that creates no emissions without having to change anything in the grid infrastructure. And you call my heat pump bad for the environment ..??

That’s quite an odd mix ..!! What animals are you going for and how much land have you got ..?

So an RPZ is only usable if you have it installed and maintained by an accredited installer. But as an RPZ valve is only suitable to category 4, and you want category 5, then you have to use air gaps. Anglian Water do a decent guide - SW should have one too but the principles of WRAS are the same. Is this your first venture into farming ..??

Don't bother - you will be heating the screed and not the tiles. You need some sort of decent insulation under electric mat.

Ok so if you want to have taps in livestock areas you need to ensure category 5 separation. That’s air gap so any tap would either have to be fed from a break tank or you would need to get it to feed troughs with float valves. Fecal residue from animals is the worst type of contamination so you need to ensure you follow the regs carefully.

So if you’re running water to feeder troughs then they already must have an air break built in with the float valve, but you can add standard double check valves - not expensive and you can get them with 3/4” threads so can make your own with MDPE fittings. https://www.bes.co.uk/double-check-valve-non-return-3-4-bsp-dzr-8220/ Pipestock are best for MDPE fittings and if you’re setting up then a big box of joiners, elbows and spares isn’t a bad thing to have about the place along with a spare reel of 25mm Black MDPE https://www.pipestock.com/mdpe/mdpe-pipe-fittings Depending on your land and setup, try and run each field or group from a single line back to the property and fit isolators. This stops your leaks becoming an issue if you have to switch the whole of the water off due to a burst pipe. Not sure if SW do a farm supply but you don’t want to be metered on sewage rated to the water supply rate as you’ll be massively over paying.

Use a Shelly1PM and the temperature sensor then. Change of £30 and you can bury it in a wall box and just have the DS18 sensor “disguised” somewhere. That can be controlled by app, HomeKit, Alexa or a good old push switch. You can also put them onto a timer schedule.

Floor tiles tend to be none slip too. Wall tiles will give you issues. Nothing wrong with that quarry though - near perfect height and would look good. Why do you see a problem @zoothorn..?? How about lay them dry and see if you notice..??

Midsummer can be expensive on odd stuff. Wagner are decent but they are all playing the margin game so it’s what you can get someone to be prepared to go to. If you know what you want and it’s a simple order then cost of sale becomes as much as it costs to stick in it onto a pallet.

Over is a rough as toast and a bodge. Should be under, new board and fillet at the base of the board and then run down over the roof membrane and under the first row of tiles. Re-fixing the ridge could be done with a dry ridge system too. Are they quoting to use felt or rubber ..??

Yep or on their way on a slow boat...

Very keen pricing on that - those all black Trina are not usually less than 30p/W Is that all available ex Stock too ..?? A lot of panels are back order to China currently.

Not to a person as they are battery operated but water would be dangerous (probably fatal...) to the electronics inside. It would probably be worse as the valve on a towel rail sits on its side so you would have the unit at 90° and the casing slots would be exposed. Dripping water into it when grabbing a towel etc would be the biggest risk.

Getting back to the point there are global shortages of certain things now, including labour. Some trades are still not fully back to work and I’ve seen mention of people on furlough til October. Construction Price Index shows a fair amount of fluctuation but rebar, steel and timber are the biggest 3 moving year on year Full report is here https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/982529/21-cs5_-_Construction_Building_Materials_-_Commentary_April_2021.pdf

So Victorian Plumbing is a weird mix of branded and unbranded stuff. I’ve used them for some shower kit and tbh it’s been very good. Tap from the same range was made of recycled toffee wrappers ...

Outside is approved as what..? JFDI...

This appeared in a trade mag sent to me a few weeks ago and it looks brilliant ..! And then I looked at the website .... It is £375 for a single unit, but it is seriously limited. It only works from the app, Alexa or HomeKit and has no way of manually turning it on ..! It needs permanent live wiring and whilst they say there is a matching light coming out, it will be £125.. each... Average bathroom spec is 4-6 LEDs, so this would be £750-900 just for light and a single speaker.. that you would need to talk to to turn on and off or get your phone out to make work ... Nice idea but ..

price yes, service...?? Check the reviews ... Also don’t hold stock - if it says 3-5 days it means they order in from disti.

9...

So I am seeing branches of the same merchants 15 miles apart with vastly different stock levels and different delivery timelines - this is not just regional it is localised too. Wickes and B&Q same with me - Wickes no gravel etc, but B&Q have stacks ..!!

Not at all - welcome to post Covid and HS2. A lot of the supply chain lost raw material supply during Covid and it has not come back to pre Covid supply levels. Timber for example is imported and a lot of the Baltic countries are not exporting as fast so stock is low. Add to that the impact of accelerating construction in Europe and the U.K. to make up for a lost year, and you have supply and demand. And concrete products are being swallowed by HS2 on an epic scale - Cemex at Rugby cannot keep up with demand on cement for example.

There are a few on here with a similar setup - it works well when it’s specced properly. Sound transferance between floors is best dealt with using res bars and sound block along with insulation but increasing that mass will also help.

Prices are not coming down ...