PeterW

That’s a thermal store .....

Aluminum doesn’t corrode as much as any of the others as what happens is it oxides and the oxide layer forms a protective coating. This protects the aluminium from further degradation. However.... there is one big but to that whole statement ..!!! Where there are two metals together, and aluminum is one of them, then you get galvanic corrosion instead and the aluminum appears to disintegrate. Any land rover owner can tell you what this looks like ..! Anything with a secondary coating is only as good as the coating itself - Tata coated products are guaranteed on the life of the coating and it not being damaged exposing the steel below for example. This will rust whereas an aluminium based product will “heal” around the damage with an oxide layer.

Flap valves are used on the continent for water flow - quite neat but do need a pump to make them work. You're about on the edge of the performance an IVT can give asking for 55c water from it. Is the DHW tank new or is it quite small as you could drop the temperature on that however you do really need a high power / surface area coil to get the most out of the heat pump into the tank. Alternate option would be to use a buffer but put the coil in line with the cold supply into the DHW tank and use as a pre heater. Adds a bit more complexity but no moving parts

B2 & B3 are a logic gate - you are correct that they give 24v but they need to be taken to ground to get a signal. The outputs are as follows : So if you have LEDs then you will need to ensure the pair have some sort of key to what the combination means.

It will be a reasonable start - you may need to flex it a little based on the external walls etc but if you oversize the rads you can turn them down

None do - they are a long way behind the times. What you need to do is work out your total load, check the room volumes and then size based on this. @JSHarris spreadsheet is a good start for this.

Just be aware that they will let you defer delivery once you’ve ordered and the customer service is top notch.

DIY Kitchens winter sale has started til 3rd Jan with 10% off some of the kitchen lines DIY Kitchens offers

Thats cheap ..!! Does that include trenching the cable ..?

Yes, it’s on @JSHarris blog ....!

One of the issues is they are now receiving and storing pre mixed dry material for mortar in silos and these have inherent problems with granular material of different sizes. What may be happening is that whilst from a volumetric perspective the dry mix products meet the spec, when they are blown into the silo and subsequently pulled out, the mix will be variable as the cement has settled out meaning some are probably getting a stronger mix and some are getting weaker mix. Cost will then play into this when the mixes are seen to be less than the spec as you would need to add cement and the developers will not want to do this.

@PTUK you may struggle with a switch due to the combination of the contacts - it’s a binary tree from 0-7 so to go up or down you would potentially have to disconnect certain pairs of wires....!

Nope - air flow is huge so it would suck the air through every gap possible.

That’s a bit of polytheism wrapped around a wire coil ... will last about 2 minutes with water and solids.

A lot of the schedule pipe in the US is ABS and not PE / HDPE / uPVC so forming sockets etc on pipes is a lot more difficult. Glued pipes are more susceptible to ground damage as the joints tend to shear. - you get some flexibility with the UK and EU methods and it’s a lot easier to demount and remake joints than with ABS.

Through footings is different ..! There are standard details for this sort of stuff and you can get specialist movement joints. I’d much prefer a seamless joint and a tiny risk of movement over the other option any day..!

I would be worried about pipes moving that much that a joint or an inspection chamber moved 10mm..!! I wouldn’t want a 10mm gap as crap/crud etc will build up on that edge and slow things up.

Doing a 320 degree turn will slow things a lot - isn’t there a better route ..? 320 degrees seems to infer you’ve just got to do a 45 into the main sewer..?? You can’t use flexible 110mm pipe as it will crush/block/split as the only ones I can think of are pan connectors. Other option is to use one of the multi flex elbows that rotate to give anywhere from 0 to 90 but can give you a drop too

Mitre box and a good sharp hand saw. Don’t forget to chamfer the edges on it or you will tear the seal. I wouldn’t be pulling any joints back as they won’t move that much - shouldn’t need it if everything is properly bedded.

The IVT box runs 100% or nothing, it bridges the A1-A2-A3 connections. You’re going to need to break that up as 100% will cook the floor. You need to balance all the loops hence why I suggested the Wunda actuators - they balance flow and return to delta 7c which is ideal - set the pipe stat to 7c lower than rhe flow you need and it will control the floor temperature. Those valves you have circled are ball/butterfly valves - use them to isolate the manifold. And you can bridge the 4th port but you have to put a valve in there somewhere as otherwise the resistance will be nothing and you’ll get no flow through the floor.

So .... I would bin off the blender, connect the flow from the ASHP through a butterfly valve direct to the manifold. You will somehow need to add an 8 litre expansion vessel in here via a tee but nothing else as it’s just a closed system. You’ll need a fill point too but you could be clever and use the drain valve on one end of the manifold as these don’t have one way valves on them. From the return, run through a mag / particle filter and then use a length of copper pipe as the sensor section for the pipe stat which could be where your pump goes. Those canister filters make it easy to add inhibitor or antifreeze and you’ll need about 10 litres. Only add it after you’ve filled the whole of the loops with water though as you’ll just end up with lots of air otherwise. I’d consider using the Wunda self setting heads to regulate the flow - not expensive either. It will regulate the flow to 7c but you will need the bypass as it could shut the lot down and the ASHP may go into overheat mode. You could link port 4 flow and return through a pipe and shut it down so that there is a bit of restriction with a valve or you can do this by taking the manifold apart and removing the drain valves from the ends. These should be standard 3/4 thread so put one on the bottom manifold as a drain off, take the other and remove its vent plug and put that in the top rail in place of the flow valve. You need to run the ASHP on setting 4 which means from memory that the positive from the 24v goes to A5, and the negative goes to A2. Should give you 45/50% output from the heat pump. Run the circ pump on setting 2 to start with. Where are you in the UK out of interest ..??

Looks like a Ridex (?) kit off EBay..?? Is it fitted ..? with a bit of re work, you can make that be auto blending and also re-use the pump for the heat pump. Is the extension one big zone ..??

Hi what is the spec for the walls etc and heat load / loss ..? The IVT needs a minimum flow rather than a minimum capacity - running it on a Wilo I’ve got it set to about 2.6m head which works fine on about 26m of 22mm pipework (flow and return) If it’s an open manifold with very little blending then you may want to set the power to 3 or 4 at most on the IVT and set the stat on the return flow to about 28c (assuming flow of 35c)

It’s to do with the design of the retaining cones, Philmac ones have a different method of gripping the pipe and can cope with varying wall thicknesses.

I used to have a rare earth magnet glued on the end of a pencil - poke into bag to pick up a nail and easy to move out when I’d hit it once.