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Here’s to more inflation, strikes and prime ministers. All the best, Scrooge

Is this a good deal: 64 x 22L nets of kiln dried “superior”, whatever that means, ash and oak for £485 Inc vat and delivery. https://www.londonfirewood.co/kiln-dried-logs/64-nets-kiln-dried-logs/ difficult to compare like for like as there does not appear to be a standardised way to quantify kiln dried wood. Some sellers describe the nets by their weight, others by their maximum volume. Volume is only a guide as some of the volume is taken up by air.

Not much impact from the extractor on and the window cracked open. But my measurements are not that accurate because my kitchen thermostat (which tracks the data) is actually not in a great location. Much closer to the oven than to the cracked open window. I should probably use a separate thermometer to take measurements nearer the window. I think that as long as you only use the extractor once or twice a day and only for 30 minutes at a time, the impact is largely going to be minimal and partly offset by the heat generated from cooking. But the purist in me wishes we had gone for a Bora hob with integrated recirculating extraction, as this would send the extract to grills by the floor, where they would not be as noticeable as our original recirculating configuration, which is what caused us to change to non-re-circulating.

Following with interest, in case it helps me with this:

Well they complied with this, but I still lost it! Why doesn’t the legislation say something like “No person shall install any installation pipe work in a wall, without photographic records showing the exact position of the pipe in the wall”.

Thanks. There is one socket on the wall, but it is nowhere near the pipe. The plasterboard is mostly unplastered so pretty easy to cut into it to explore, problem is that i think the pipe is behind the Tyvek foil and I don’t want to compromise that. I guess the thermal imaging camera could work, but would prefer a metal detection solution.

Wall has been bordered up and partially plastered. Lost the photo showing location of copper gas pipe. Need to know fairly precise location as wall is to be covered with wall mounted cabinets. I know roughly where the pipe comes into the house from the outside. I also recall it then travels upwards in a vertical line, before making a right angle and travelling horizontally across the wall. But I don’t know the point on the wall where that right angle is. The relevant wall construction is i think the copper pipe is in the ventilated cavity, rather than in the service void. So from the inside of the house, it is behind the aluminium. Potentially complicating matters, we used metal (I presume steel) studwork, directly behind the 12.5mm plasterboard, so a metal detector might not be able to distinguish between the studs and the vertical pipe. I say “potentially” because I’m hoping there are metal detectors which can detect non-ferrous metals such as copper, whilst ignoring ferrous ones such as steel. Are there such metal detectors? Any other tricks of the trade to locate a hidden pipe?

So do we. Laid as herringbone in two rooms and planks in three rooms and a hallway. Manufacturer and supplier insisted we couldn't exceed 27C. We have, by at least 6C and no disasters yet. But I agree with you that if you are seeing stuff in your flow meters, you need to get that fixed first.

How about putting your hot water tank under the stairs, going for one that doesn’t have the highest insulation level and accepting you will lose some heat from it.

I think he's being unreasonable. By way of comparison, i haven't heard from my contractor in a couple of months. Over the weekend, out of the blue, he calls me up and says: "are you in, I need to come over and show you how to drain your external taps". So he did. The cynic in me thought "lucky I happened to be in, he really left it to the last minute", but on balance it shows he thinks ahead (just not a lot ahead)!

This is a good point. My own view is that manufacturers err on the side of caution and so a manufacturer's recommendation that the floor be limited to 27C is just an ideal case scenario. 29.5C or even 31C should be fine. I would start by making sure there are no draughts in that room and seeing if there are any other ways to boost the insulation of the walls, ceilings etc. Then, if still no improvement, try increasing the limit to 29C and seeing if that makes a difference. If not, increase to 30C. Keep increasing until about 32C. After 32C I think the risk of floor failure become more realistic.

Wow @Moonshine, I really feel for you. I think you should get your plumber to fix it for free. He’s really (expletive deleted)ed up here.

Look at aerogel. Your architect is mistaken if he/she thinks it only works in a NASA lab.

The heating for that room was off at the time I took that photo. I agree that to approach something scientific, I should only make one adjustment at a time. But I'm just interested to understand what is the difference between the pump speed and the flow. How would you describe their different roles in the UFH system?

Are you sure you don’t have air in the pipes?

Ah, ok, that makes sense. Well I guess that if you are feeling warmth underneath the ufh system, then the insulation is likely insufficient. Could you temporarily affix some PIR to an area of the floor/ceiling void and see if it makes any difference, before doing the whole thing?

If you insulated that door, I think all that will happen is that stairwell will be a degree or two colder than the rest of the house. If everything else is well insulated, then overall you will be okay. If you are really worried, see if another manufacturer makes an 8kw heat pump. If the window in that stairwell is 2G, could you upgrade it to 3G?

The floor plans suggest you are in France or Canada. If the former, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You are unlikely to have long hard winters, and this is a corner of your house that doesn’t appear to contain any living space, just staircase. If you are in Canada, that’s a different story, but even then not terrible.

I don’t see what the problem is. Why would you want a bedroom warmer than this?

I think @Dean Mc is more concerned about how to conceal the ducts given he has few void spaces.

How about adding EWI? You mention part of the outside is covered by an adjoining building, but what about the other part? Can you annotate the pan to show which part of the wall is attached to the neighbouring building and which part is detached?

Ok, have checked. See picture below. From what I can tell (but grateful if someone could confirm) there are unfortunately only two loops. In picture to the left, under the orange pump are a pair of pipes, one with a blue sheath and one with a red sheath - I assume this is the hot water coming in to this manifold from my boiler and the cold water going back to get reheated by the boiler. To the right, there are two pairs of pipes, representing the two loops. One supplying my front room and one supplying the hallway and WC. Real shame the installer didn’t think this through better. Am I right in thinking that I can only adjust pump speed and temperature? or is there a third adjustment available on each loop? @ProDave you mentioned something about balancing and flow, hire does that work? I noticed that the water temperature was set to 45C which seemed high (the terrazzo in the hallway and WC gets pretty hot, not quite burning hot, but too hot really. And the wood parquet in the front room shouldn’t be exposed to that kind of temp, so I’ve turned down the water temp to 40C. Anything else I can do?

That’s a good point. I had assumed it will all be the same, but actually if the plumber has any sense he hopefully put it on its own loop. Particularly as the manifold which serves it only serves that zone and one other, both medium sized areas. I am not home now, but will check.

I thought my UFH design was pretty good. But now that I've lived through a couple of cold weeks, I've spotted an incorrigible flaw which I thought I'd write about here so others can avoid making it. Our ground floor consists of the following zones: Fairly wide entrance hallway with a WC under the stairs Front room kitchen and utility room open plan lounge area off kitchen I thought that was plenty of zones. Turns out I was wrong. The WC is in the middle of the ground floor, with the hallway and utility room to one side of it, the front room on the other side and the lounge behind it. Accordingly, although it's just made out of stud walls, being in the centre of the floorplan, it has no external walls and so probably doesn't lose much heat. The WC gets significantly warmer than the rest of the floor. Setting the thermostat on the zone (which is located in the porch on an external (brand new cavity wall) to 20C, gets the general area to about 20.5C but the WC to 22.7C. I think it's mainly because of the lack of external walls/windows, but there's possibly other factors I'm not aware of. So I guess the lesson is if you have a space which has the unique characteristics that my WC room has, consider putting it on its own zone.

I had wood in mind, but it looks like I might be mistaken. We have thermally broken aluminium 2G windows and a thermally broken stell 2G door. The aluminium windows perform better than the steel door, which is to be expected as the aluminium windows had a higher energy performance rating than the steel door.