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I'm looking for a company to come and fit some external shading to some of my rooflights. Most of these are velux, so should be standard/mass-market enough for there to be some price competition. Yet I'm finding the prices are a bit high. I have been quoted a price to supply an external velux heat shutter £522 plus VAT and installation of £600 plus VAT. Seems a lot for what cannot be more than a day's work. It can be installed from the inside of the room, so no scaffolding needed and isn't really "dangerous" work. I can get the blind for £450 inc VAT if I purchase it on amazon, but then I don't get the benefit of having the same company supply and install (which I value, as it minimises the risk of different companies blaming each other). The one thing going for this company though, it seems, is that they do have very good trust pilot reviews. Of the 60 or so reviews, there are only two bad ones, with all others being 5 stars. One of the bad ones was about a complaint that arose 5 years after installation, which the company wanted to charge for because it fell outside the 3 year warranty period. So that seemed like an unreasonable complaint to me. I'm due to get another quote but so far this is the second cheapest, the cheapest not having the benefit of many online reviews. So the question is, are trustpilot reviews trustworthy?

Here is a photo of my gutter off my first floor roof, that is directly above a large skylight in my ground floor roof: when it rains, there is a fairly constant drip from the gutter onto the rooflight below, making a fairly noticeable sound in the living room under the skylight. One possibility is that it’s leaking, but I don’t think that’s the case. It appears that water hitting the sides of the gutter (which is of the rectangular, not curved, type) or the top edge, drips down the external side of the gutter and then onto the rooflight beneath. Is there anything I can do about this? Would adding a diagonal profile to the top of the gutter, for example, help to funnel water that would otherwise hit the side into the gutter?

Can somebody please explain what perceived benefit there is of using MVHR to keep a house cool? I have MVHR but I don't find it does anything to cool the house down in summer (even with summer bypass activated). The flow rates just aren't big enough for it to cool effectively.

What makes you think this?

That makes sense. My house isn't sufficiently well insulated for that though, and there are some rooms, like the guest room and the study which get used very infrequently (guest room a couple of days a month at most; study a couple of days a week) such that it wouldn't make sense to heat them above their natural "resting point" in winter of about 17C much of the time.

We have about 12 zones in our UFH heating system and I find the zones to be very useful. The front of the house is East facing whereas the rear is West facing, so quite different solar gain patterns. We also have quite variable usage, plus one zone has a wood burning stove in it, so not sure how I'd survive with just one zone per floor.

No pressure loss since the installer tightened a few joins on 1st March, but today I observed the modulation shoot up to 98% again when we ran the heating and hot water for the first time in 48h as we had been away. Just wondering how the boiler knows this is the case: I had assumed the boiler is just given binary inputs from each of the thermostats controlling our various zones and HW demand valve. But if @Nickfromwales is right, the system is more intelligent than that, and knows how much colder each zone is from target temp, and not just that a zone is colder. But how?

I saw Bereco at a trade show. Was quite impressed at the time, but didn’t go with them as quite a bit above my budget.

If your walls are straight, you should be able to fit 5 x 600 (or 6 x 500 or any other combo that adds up to 3000), but you might need to plane a few mm off the edges of the outer units. DIY kitchens also do 300mm wide, 400 wide, 800 wide and 900, and for some of their more basic units you can call them up and all if they will do a special width. Something like a cupboard with no drawers will certainly be bespokable to 580, for example. If you do that, it becomes much easier. DIY kitchens is also very well regarded. I’ve had three kitchens from them, good service every time.

the overarching point is that this is nothing to worry about. Wait till the house has gone through a bit more weather changes, then poly filla and repaint.

Looks like normal settlement after building works. When did the cracks first appear?

I can’t remember the size I needed, but the heat loss requirements of my house are about 18kw or 19kw. It’s a large 1930s house that has had insulation added as part of an extensive refurb and extension, but nowhere near passiv standards. And only 2G windows.

Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I think I’m going to install that, but only if installing the external blind on the Velux first doesn’t make a big difference.

I won't be installing a heat pump, having investigated these options at length at the time of design and concluded that the market was crazy. It was much cheaper, and less hassle, to get a highly efficient gas boiler, than go through the process of: getting planning permission to install a more expensive air source heat pump, work out where to put the external unit so that it wouldn't bother us or the neighbours borrowing money to pay for an even more expensive one of these: https://www.ochsner.com/en/ochsner-products/air-source-heat-pump/ (quoted to me at the time as costing something like £15k). There are space constraints in my property that just make it non-feasible. I hope that prices come down in 15 years time which is when I expect to replace my gas boiler. I know this is environmentally the completely wrong approach, but the government just hasn't incentivised this technology properly and until they do I'm not keen on it.

I have an alcove that I want to close off with some wardrobe doors. I want to hang the doors from posts. Looking at my existing ikea wardrobes, I like that the hinges function in such a way that the carcass is completely covered once the door is closed. These ikea carcasses are made from 18mm thick boards, so i thought that if I erected 36mm wide posts they would be plenty strong enough and also neatly accommodate ikea hinges either side and be fully concealed by the closed door. But standard size posts tend to be 38mm wide. Is there sufficient adjustability in an ikea hinge that the 2mm difference won't make a difference?

What would I need to do that? The lowest tempera setting on my UFH manifolds is 35C.

I have MVHR but no heat pump. I understand that chilling by MVHR alone doesn’t work very well.

Had a chat with an installer today. Definitely lots of pros. Two issues that came up, which I hadn’t thought of: installing one of my windows, and annoyingly probably the most important one for me, as is where my office is, will require a complex scaffolding to get up there. Very expensive. Other issue is I’m not convinced at how easy it is to clean the windows once this stuff is on. Installer said it’s easy, you just power wash them with the jet wash. But I’m not sure how they would dry without lacking water marks on the glass.

@Thorfun did you get any smartlouvre fitted. It does look good and I'm very curious about it (and have ordered a sample). My main concern is whether it might make rooms a bit dark. My main issue in my study is the almost 1m2 of velux skylight which faces East and the 2.4m2 of west facing window. My plan is to install an external shutter for the velux and have that closed in summer until about 1pm, when the sun is on the other side of the roof. But smartlouvre appears to be a permanent solution so you cannot open and close it. I just query whether the room (which is about 17m2 in floor space) will get dark in the morning when I have the velux shutter closed and smart louvre is (permanently) covering the 2.4m2 of west facing glazing.

Did you install that velux shutter in the end, or are you waiting to see how Summer 2023 goes?

It's made by DAB Pumps S.p.a. Will be something quite cheap and basic as I didn't specify it. I bought these: The Shelly Plus 1PM goes inside the button and the button intercepts the power cable of the pump. So the pump is plugged into the mains, but via the button. Then I set up the three motion sensors pointing towards the three taps which I wanted to activate the pump. Managed to hide them all quite well so you don't see them.

That's very kind @joe90. Ideally i need to get this done by the end of April, as we are getting the room painted in May. But I wouldn't want you to go to any trouble!

Yep, this is very true. I’m happy to cover all costs, and bung you some moonshine.

This was a good recommendation, save for one issue, the thickness. I can find 3000mm by 300mm MDF window boards, but only 25mm thick. The good thing about this is that they are really cheap. Only about £48 each, which is much cheaper than the quotes I was getting for thicker floating shelves (which weren't long enough).

I don't need them to be MDF or to be thick. I was just advised that to make them out of MDF with the concealed brackets linked above, they would need to be quite thick. They just need to be: easy to buy in more or less ready made form - I can make cuts/trims, but I rather not have to make anything complex supplied already primed for easy painting - MDF seemed to meet that requirement; be 257cm long and about 33cm deep - the length is not variable, but i could settle for something slightly less deep, maybe 30cm or 31cm.