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Although it’s completely bonkers that they didn’t provide drawings for you to sign off on, presumably they were the ones that surveyed the cavities. If so, then they are liable, because the survey was incompetent, and you were paying for a made to measure product, which obviously implies you were paying them to measure and then make. So I still think you have a good chance of getting your money back from your credit card, but that will only work if you create the paper trail now setting out the issues, give company a reasonable time to rectify (I think your credit card company will require you to give the supplier 30 days or something similar) and if not rectified by then, you can then escalate to credit card company. Just one thing though, section 75 only applies to contracts where the value is £100 to £30,000. How much was the overall cost here? If over £30k, you might be able to argue there were separate contracts, e.g. one for the windows and one for the door.

I still can’t believe a company (and you, if I’m honest) didn’t insist on drawings being signed off before manufacture. It’s really basic stuff. Sorry, don’t mean to sound critical, I just can’t believe it.

That's a big red flag I'm afraid. You lucky lucky thing. DEFINITELY RAISE THIS WITH YOUR CREDIT CARD COMPANY. You are entitled to compensation under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. Credit card company is jointly and severally liable for the window supplier's breach of contract. Here, the windows do not comply with all the terms in the contract which are implied by the consumer legistation, e.g. fitness for purpose, of reasonable quality, etc.

@Valentina can you clarify a few things please: How was this admission recorded? Did the defendant company tick the box on the claim form that says they "admit" the claim. Or was the admission down outside of court documents? If the defendant admitted the claim as its formal response to the claim, then you would have the right to a Court judgment against the defendant (see Civil Procedure Rule 14.1(4) https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rules/part14). That is important, because you could then convert the admission into an actual court judgment, and that will speed up the process of enforcing the Court judgment, rather than having to start a new claim. It is helpful that a first payment was made, as it evidences that at least initially the defendant thought the admission was binding. Ultimately, just because a company changes hands, does not change the company's liability to you. The director of a company is just it's agent and the shareholder is just its owner. But the company has separate legal personality, and this is not to be confused with the legal personality of the director or the agent. The liability is with the company, not the director. As the liability is with the company, not the director, it doesn't matter if you have up to date contact details of the director or not. You should communicate directly with the company in any case, by writing to the company's registered address which you can find here: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/

No. I would reject these. Apart from being unsightly, it's possibly a security risk. With gaps so thick, what's to stop a burglar coming along with a large sharp knife or small saw and cutting through the foam and ripping out the window? Surely they provided technical drawings for sign off before you signed off on the windows. What do those drawings show? If you don't want a fuss, and are happy to accept these to avoid delays and litigation, you could always just accept them, but not pay the final invoice. I don't know how much saving that will be, probably not much more than 5% or 10%, but it will be at least something. You can do this completely lawfully. All you do is at the end, once they've done everything they have to do and demand their final payment, you just send them an email saying that the products supplied were not fit for purposes and they were not of the correct dimensions. This has caused you additional costs in terms of building out the reveals/cavities. You therefore have a claim for damages against them and you are setting off what you owe contractually against what they owe you. The only difficulty with this approach is that they may not issue you with the final paperwork and certificates. You may need that to get your building control approval (or whatever the equivalent is in Scotland). But some of the docs you need like documentation showing the technical specification of the glazing units should be available on the order paperwork you already have, so you might be able to get away with it. Check with your BC inspector what exactly they require.

@Post and beam welcome to the part of your build where you discover how quasi public bodies can just shaft you. We paid UKPN and Octopus a small fortune for our supply to be lowered by 50cm and then extended by a couple of metres. Ridiculous how disproportionate the fee was to the work involved. But not as ridiculous as our application to the council for a dropped kerb. Completely shafted by the local council and their so called "approved contractor" for almost £8k.

Thanks @Kelvin, which roomsketcher subscription did you go for?

Makes sense. Thanks @Lofty718 for the explanations, wish I’d got you to commission the system in the first place! It’s incredible how there isn’t more education in the industry. My plumber showed me his recently obtained Viessmann certifications, and so I didn’t probe much further. But maybe it was poor communication: it’s possible that because I told him I wanted various zones, each with their own thermostat, he just ignored his training and did what I asked. Back to my original question, would it make sense to time my hot water heating to coincide with when the heating of the UFH is on. At least in winter, we can pretty reliably predict those times. In that way, the boiler would come on and off less frequently.

Is your windows copy the sketchup pro version? Appears you have to pay a subscription for that: https://www.sketchup.com/plans-and-pricing#commercial

That’s interesting. But would you still get remote control of the flow balancing so that you could amend it as and when you see fit. I will give you an example: most nights a week, my kids sleep in their own rooms. But since we got my daughter bunk beds, she’s been quite excited about the prospect of having her brother come over for a sleepover. We normally decide whether the sleepover is happening at dinner, which gives me enough time to pull my phone out and turn off the heating in the unused room. Similarly, they can both stay over at my parents unexpectedly, I can work from home in my home office (bedroom 5) unexpectedly and we can have guests in our guest bedroom unexpectedly. So the zone control needs to be quite dynamic.

I remain satisfied that the setup we have, with 12 zones, gives us many useful advantages. The house has three exposed walls (being a semi detached). The front faces East, the back faces West, and the side faces South but is mostly in the shade. Accordingly, different rooms have different solar gains. We also like having pretty different temperatures in different areas of the house, and also have a wood burner that we run a couple of nights a week in winter. So it is quite usual for the heating schedule in each of the five bedrooms to be pretty different to each other (one bedroom being empty, another being my office, the two kids’ bedrooms being on opposite sides of the East/West divide and wanting our master bedroom to be cooler than the kids’). Similarly, each of the three bathrooms also has its own requirements. So maybe the reason I’m only spending £90 a month on gas is that I have each room set up to come on only when I absolute need it. I don’t think I could achieve that with no zoning and WC, since this would not account for the microclimate in each area of the house.

And we fixed prices well after the Russian war. On octopus, so great service but not cheap. we have about 12 different zones, 12 thermostats, 4 manifolds and 4 wiring centres. A lot of kit, but I doubt we would get as much control as we do with just everything controlled by Viessmann kit. I’m curious to understand how and why.

Scratch that, I've figured out how to stretch furniture in sketchup! Still interested in views from people as to whether it's worth paying for a subscription to use roomsketcher if you can just about get by with sketchup.

I've been using sketchup to do some basic drawings and 3D room layouts. I find it a bit clunky to use and often find that I have to google how to do something, rather than being able to discover it more intuitively. I don't mind that too much, it's a free bit of software after all. However, today I tried to import a sofa from their "3D warehouse". I found the selection of sofas available very small and when I finally did import one, it was very oddly proportioned. When I scaled it up to make the length meet my 210cm requirement, it looked very wrong compared to the height of my in room "dummy.manequin". I measured it using the tape measure function and shore enough, although the length was 210cm as required, the height of the sofa was only 54cm and the depth only 70cm, which just seems very small for a a three seater sofa. The whole point of my sketching session was to see how differently sized sofas would look in different positions; it won't work if it's incorrectly proportioned. Are there ways around this in sketchup? Alternatively, is it worth paying one of the cheaper subscriptions in roomsketcher and trying that? Does it have more appropriately sized objects such as furthniture, and bookcases. Only thing that's putting me off is the need to commit to a yearly subscription with room sketcher.

I've purchased some plastic thingies which are 50cm long and flexible, smooth when pushed inwards but jagged when pulled back. Should hopefully catch some hairballs.

I'm not at home now, but this is the product we installed. If you scroll across the diagrams at the bottom, you'll see this: So it seems that it should be possible to access some of the bits by unscrewing the top parts. Not sure how i'll get much purchase on it, the pieces are small and fiddly for my fat fingers.

As mentioned above, I can’t access the trap without cutting into the ceiling from underneath. Rather not do that.

That’s an interesting idea. yes, this is all brand new plumbing, brand new everything in terms of water waste fittings and channels. What I find odd is that this shower is right up against the external wall that is immediately next to our pipe that connects to the sewer, so of all the wastes, it’s the one that shortest to travel. It must be the trap, as @markocosic says. I presume now that the slot drain has all been tiled into our shower wet room area, it’s far too late to change the trap? I guess I could attack it from underneath, though probably not worth it.

indirect LED strip lighting can be very beautiful and not too expensive if planned for appropriately. Essentially you create a ledge or recess using something like plasterboard, then plaster that and paint it the same as the adjacent wall. The LED strip is concealed in the recess so that you can’t see it directly. Instead you see the glow/reflection of the light as it bounces off the adjacent structures. It’s important you don’t skimp on the LED. Try ilumos, 2700k dimmable. You also need an aluminium profile for it. I will post some build ups later, so you can get more info.

I should also add, to put things into perspective, that we regularly heat our ground floor to 22C or even 22.4C, and we only have 100mm of underfloor insulation so £90 a month during winter seems pretty good. But obviously compared to all the passive build builders, that’s a horrific running cost.

He may be crap, but this was just one of those things that happen in life which is nobody’s fault really. I went to a specialist Viessmann design company and asked for a design, they never got back to me. I also consulted a gas engineer and plumber who only did Viessmann, but he was reluctant to get involved because he was worried about stepping on my contractor’s toes. Inexplicable really. It proved difficult to find anyone else. I was v. busy, and didn’t appreciate the scope for getting things wrong. My builder was in a hurry and his installer was an approved Viessmann installer (albeit he has only recently been certified) and I let him get on with it. For all I know, it’s a competently designed and installed system, though I doubt it has all the bells and whistles. Our expenditure on gas isn’t too bad at £90 a month on average from mid December to mid April (before the government subsidy). Given we consume quite a lot of hot water and it’s an upgraded 1930s 5 bed house, as opposed to anything near passive standards, I think that’s not too bad, so not sure whether it would have been worthwhile spending several £k on a fancy design and extra on more Viessmann kit, which tends to be pricy. Appreciate your concern, but unless it’s cheap and easy to check and improve someone else’s HW and heating design, I really just want to tweak the variables I can.

Well I think the water circulation secondary loop is the weak point in terms of losses. Hence why I was toying with the idea of heading the water more regularly, but to a lower temp.

How can I check this? I do remember asking if he was using a different temperature for the HW heating to the UFH system and towel rads and he said it all had to be the same temperature as we have a low loss header (made by Viessman) as part of the setup and the manifolds will adjust temp for the UFH. If that's the case, I doubt i have that. But else being equal, what's the most efficient timetable?

I have a 300L unvented hot water cylinder which is heated by a system boiler. The main demand on the hot water is: kids' bathtime which is almost daily, almost always at about 545pm (capacity of bath is 123L but we probably only fill it to about 85L); my wife's shower time which is most days at about 10pm (though some days she will shower at another time) (the shower is 10L a min flow rate, so she probably uses 120L) my daily shower which is usually at 7am (I probably use about 120L) random baths, which I may take once or twice a week (probably using about 200L) Now all the numbers above are mixed water estimates, not hot water. Obviously in winter, with cold water supply being colder, hot water usage will go up. But I'm just wondering, what the suggested heating timetable should be for our 300L tank. We currently have it come on from 635am for 25 minutes, then at 5pm for 40 minutes and then at about 930pm for about 30 minutes. This generally works well, but I sometimes wonder if it would be more efficient to: have more regular, shorter bursts of heat. Like 5 minutes of heat once every two hours during the day; or turn the thermostat down from its current temperature of about 50C to 44C and run the boiler a lot more frequently, on the basis that the heat loss from 44C water will be less than from 50C water. We have an added complexity which is that we have a secondary loop going through a few hot water taps in the house and the HW cylinder. The pump is motion activated, but when people are in the house (varies day to day) it will come on for 2 minutes each time it's triggered and I've noticed it does cool the temp of the cylinder a little bit. The secondary loop is insulated, but not sufficiently so unfortunately. I try not to stress too much about that, as it is just leaking heat into the envelope of the insulated building.

Very difficult. Please don’t do this. It’s a terrible idea.