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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.

The issue is that I want to have floating shelves, and so I need them to be thick enough so that we can drill into them to fit the special bracket (like this: https://www.bespoakinteriors.co.uk/shop/hardware/heavy-duty-floating-shelf-brackets/?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCImzyReyjIF9fMOAo77BcNbZDCijgkCIRMcf10d-FAZTcTYjV9DKAQhoCxvAQAvD_BwE) Although reading the details on that, it says minimum thickness of shelf should be 35mm. I’ve found a supplier that can provide 38mm MDF, but I don’t think they do as long as 2570mm, so I still have an issue.

I thought getting MDF cut to size would be simple. Apparently not. I’m after primed MDF that is 2570 x 330 x 44mm Both the 2570 length and the 44 thickness are proving to be tricky to find from the standard shelf suppliers.

I finally got around to swapping some shower heads which we weren't happy with. When I took them off their supply pipes, I noticed that within the metal gauze filter that sits at the entry point of the shower head, there was a little bit of dirt. This was the case in both shower heads. Not a lot, just a four or five pieces of something; bigger than a grain of sand, but smaller than a grain of rice: maybe 2mm or 3mm in size. Is this normal in a completely new install? We've lived at the property for 10 months, so had plenty of use of the showers in question, so maybe this is not anything significant, but it surprised me as our connection to Thames Water was also completely new. Is this just general crud that will have got into our pipework at some point?