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Surely it can be dismantled and cut, reassembled and then refilled with gas?

Unfortunately I experienced this kind of survey error a few times. On the most part, we managed to work around the mistake, but it did cause me to look into the legal position significantly. Unfortunately, unless you contract with someone specifically to survey something, e.g. when you commission a measured survey, I think your legal position is weak. The window company will rely on their Ts and Cs which will say that you are signing off on what they supply and they can only supply what you sign off on. So it's his mistake, but the paper trail will exculpate him. Towards the end of my build, after having had this error twice, I started to check each surveyor's measurements. It was laborious, but did sometimes spot fairly significant mistakes. I would try to put pressure on the supplier to meet you half way on the amelioration costs. Luckily the product they have supplied is too big, not too small, so there shouldn't be any materials wasted really, just a question of cutting the glass down and remaking the unit.

@tw18 I highly recommend you install: 1) a Shelley smart plug (or if you pump is wired directly into the mains with a fused spur) a Shelley Plus1PM on the cable powering the pump); and 2) a Shelley motion sensor in each place you want to trigger the pump - we have three, one above the kitchen sink and downstairs loo sink and one underneath the vanity unit in our website bathroom. You connect them to your WiFi and then you configure them via the web portal to switch the pump on for 60 seconds each time the PIR is triggered. It took a day or so of trying different sensitivity settings on the motion sensors before it was working really well. Saves us energy and heat loss but still gives us instant hot water. In response to @ProDave’s question, all of your HW taps will still work even when the pump isn’t triggered, they will just take longer. So if that bothers you, just add more sensors, but at £75 a pop, three was the right balance for us between practicality and budget.

Indeed. What is particularly odd is that the warranty claim has now been approved (we are still arguing about the timing and delivery costs, given they are expecting me to post the package to Netherlands) and in the paperwork produced by their RMA department the failure is described as a “software failure”. If that’s the case, why can’t they reinstall the software remotely and fix it that way? Or failing that, get me to reinstall it.

I've heard back now from Ubiquiti, and yes that is what they are going to do. Subject to availability. The UK Store is showing it as out of stock at the moment. If they don't have it, query whether I can demand an upgrade? fingers crossed even a luddite like me can do this.

So following @Thorfun's suggestion, i logged a ticket with ubiquiti, which included uploading a very large system log file which I had to download from my UDR or ubiquiti account. About 5 days later, I get this response: The ubiquiti hasn't suffered any knocks or damage, so i cannot for the life of me think what has happened. Normally hardware like this should last years. The only abuse I can think of is that when I've had to reset it, which is pretty much never until this problem started a couple of weeks ago, I would pull the power cord out the back of it, rather than switch it off by flicking a switch. This is quite annoying. Apart from the hassle of processing the return and being without internet in the meantime, I query whether upon installing the new one I will have to go through the whole set up again - I had this more or less professionally done, for free, by a mate of mine who is super geeky with this sort of thing. But he now lives in California!

That’s a very good idea

Ffs. Wind has blown part of the tarp/dpc off. Didn’t want to fix the clamps on too hard, for fear of damaging the membrane. Ffs. @Pocster please post something funny to make me laugh.

Yes, as it happens. That obviously compounds the problem, but the main issue is that there is almost a third of brick the entire length of the parapet wall which is very exposed even from rain falling perfectly straight in no wind.

Yes, except that it only goes across the capping by two thirds. Here’s a photo which my architect took at the time they were building, but never showed me until recently when I did an “audit” of this f@ck up: you can see the roofing membrane goes up the parapet but only two thirds across the brick. A third of the brick is therefore exposed. on top of that, plastic tiles were laid, but these didn’t overlap each other, leaving grout joints which eventually cracked (see previous picture) and also they didn’t extend across the whole brick, leaving the edge of the brick exposed. then on top of that layer of tiles, another layer of roofing membrane went on, but again this didn’t go across the whole tile, just two thirds of it (see previous picture). Really odd that each trade (the tiles were laid by one trade, the roofing membrane by another) didn’t think about this at all, and my architect who was meant to oversee this just photographed the mess, but didn’t think to raise it.

If you look back at the previous page, there is a photo, but here it is again:

Yes, going to do that in due course, but I can’t get those installed for a while and this will at least confirm that the problem is indeed the top of the parapet wall.

After a fairly dry January, with no leaks for most of the month, I saw that it is forecast to rain almost an inch of water on Thursday, followed by an almost as wet Friday. Could procrastinate any longer, so got onto the roof of my rear extension, temporarily removed a strip of seedum (which I imagine will need to come out to install the copings in due course) and clamped on the DPC: let’s hope this stops the leaks (which only occur after heavy and persistent rainfall) otherwise I’m pretty clueless on how the water is getting in.

Nice. Particularly the bit when he says: “don’t know if it will work”!

What is batch charging?

Well this was my thinking entirely. And I thought I could do this: But I was obviously rubbish at it. The system I have works well, but the lack of compatibility between Tado and Viessman and my ignorance of the 4 pipe system being needed to get low temperature heating and my apparently viessmman approved engineer’s failure to point this out to me really f&cked me up.

Cheers, I will PM you.

This is all fecking complicated. I'm starting to think I should have swallowed the £2000 design fee I was quoted in 2021. Looking back at my emails, the chap I was speaking to said: one zone per floor, Weather Compensation, low temperature heating. I'm not sure what his solution would have been to the two towel rads though. Times like this I wish I was Marty McFly.

So how much is an esbe valve and pump? And how many of these would I need? Is it one per manifold? Or one per loop?

That makes a lot of sense. Of our 6 rooms with extraction, 4 are adjacent or very close to the MVHR machine, so pretty short runs. Whereas most of the other rooms of the house which all contain supplies, are further away.

Because we specified a slight positive pressure in the main room of the house, so as to be able to open the wood burning stove without sucking the smoke out of it. But that is quite a large difference, so i'm not sure that is right. Are they usually configured to be equal?

So the supply temp is the same as the inlet temp. On my phone's web portal they call it "supply temp" and on the machine display it's called inlet. Currently that is 21.2C. The extract temp from the rooms will be the weighted average of the temperatures in the parts of the house where we have extraction, which according to Tado is: kitch 22.3 bath1 21.6 bath2 20.3 bath3 20.6 WC (i'm going to ignore this as it's very small and I'm too lazy to go and take a temp reading - no tado there). Utility 21.6 I get about 21.4C. So that means i'm losing 0.2C against the supply temp of 21.2C. Does that sound right?

So what is my efficiency based on these numbers: I’m losing 1.3C (13C-11.7C) out of 21.4C so at the current outdoor temp of 11.7C it’s 94% efficient?

@SimonD thanks again for all the time you are putting into this thread. And thanks to everyone really, all contributions are helping me learn. Just to clarify one thing further: we much prefer ufh to radiators. So I think that even if a survey by a properly qualified engineer had concluded in this: I wouldn’t have accepted it. But your idea has got me thinking. let’s say I install weather compensation, is there a way to vary the flow rates in different zones depending on usage, or would that be incompatible with WC? So rather than on/off controls to open and close zones, are there ways of having electronically controlled flow rates on the manifolds to deliver more or less heat? This of course could get expensive, as I guess I would have to replace my manifolds, but they are pretty budget ones (I don’t think you can get cheaper than the ones I have) so might be something I would consider.

This is also my gut feel, and indeed why I have so many zones in the first place. The building regs encourage zoning, so I thought this was a good thing: only heat what you are using. But when I mentioned my zoning to the heating engineer you recommended, he explained (or rather his junior associate explained because the main guy is on holiday) that keeping rooms switched off is a false economy because you get heat loss from the rooms which are on into the rooms that are off. This Heatgeek article explains the maths, but using the example of a radiator setup. Not sure it’s still such a problem in a UFH setup, but the engineer thought it would be.