Alan Ambrose

Hmm, you may have have lost this one. You could have a 3-way call or meeting to understand how it came out that way, but it's possible everyone will be pointing fingers or ass-covering. However, it is possible that the new solution was either the right one to begin with or is a substantially better idea than the original. Not for sure, but quite possible. It would be interesting to try and ascertain the validity of this thought, but you might need to obtain a second opinion from another SE. What you could do now, now that it is built, is try to ensure that if there are failings with the basement, that you have a clear path for redress.

>>> Now apparently if you've had a gloss white kitchen for 28 years you can't have another gloss white kitchen You are not meant to understand, just observe the instruction .

Take a bit off - end cap or bracket etc and see the manufacturer's markings - that's what I did with mine.

>>> if you've got reasonable cold pressure (we do) One very useful bit of data is the actual water pressure you have - you can buy a test gauge to measure this for a few quid. Better yet, wire one in permanently via a ball valve to make it easier to change. Then you'll know whether you can use eternal pressure to power the new build. If the pressure is really good then maybe a quick and dirty unvented install?

In shopping for BC providers, I asked my LPA and they said 'no' (even though I gave them the Cornwall and Kent examples), but a private BC near the plot said 'yes'. The question was 'will you allow PHPP instead of TM59?'. I have yet to do this 'in anger', but I've done the solar gain calcs in PHPP which seem to come out reasonably favourably. I mitigated the gain with external blinds and anti-solar-gain glass. I guess even if your BC insists on TM59, you could do the design work in PHPP and then order a TM59 run to verify and maybe tweak - it should be fairly close by the time you've finished with PHPP.

Well Imperial is a good university, so the product must be good It would be interesting to look at the original research and see the logic for the invention. It says it’s a 0.5bar boost, so maybe that’s enough pressure to go from hampster’s pee to … something else. One solution I know works is a Stuart Turner dual 3 bar pump. Expensive, but we’ve had the same one for 30 years, and apart from swapping out the little pressure vessel a few times, it’s been flawless. This is on a vented tank. You have unvented?

FYI your LPA may have a web system which shows the locations of TPOs, so check there first. Are these big prominent handsome well-established trees or just scrubland trees?

Ah interesting, I think sometimes we go overboard ‘fixing’ things to other things when actually gravity will do the job fine. What kind of gap did you leave at the edges for expansion etc? By ‘hardwood ply’ you mean construction grade rather than actual marine sapele or something?

You could check any of the proprietary external wall insulation (EWI) systems - Sto / Dryvit / etc. You can buy their products or replicate some of their not-very-complicated design detail. So EPS/PIR/mineral wool behind rainscreen of some sort, with a vapour barrier if desirable.

Ah you've hit upon the big problem with current home automation: either cobbled-together home grown systems which probably only you understand (and what will the next owner do) and which probably have reliability and maybe safety problems, or off-the-shelf (Loxone etc) vendor systems complete with lock-in / internet & vendor server dependence / limitations as what feature are covered. I plan to borrow what I can from grown-up office building automation systems (think big office buildings, KNX etc) and custom wired but upgradable industrial control systems (proper automation cabinets etc). All fairly properly documented. I figure the key thing is to get the wiring flexible and well thought out mostly back to central cabinets / then a fairly well built automation cabinet or two / then whatever software you need. The software - preferably you set it up and then leave it alone rather than tinker with it constantly. The software / automation engine can then fairly easily be switched out at a later date if necessary or as and when some new technology appears. I think consumer-grade is largely a waste of time and energy due to short lifetime / missing support / safety / fragility / security - although I do have cheap and cheerful consumer grade in my current place for the odd thing (e.g. switching outside lights based on dawn/dusk timing). Fine for experiment and 'user experience' testing, but there's always the 'will my wife ever learn to run this?' / 'what will I do when I sell the place?' questions. So no great answers atm, but maybe a strategy of 'enabling' a building with wiring and switching along with 'whatever works now' software - until a proper standard and some competitive substitutable offerings come along. The risk is that a technology appears that would really benefit from rewiring - but I figure plenty of network / mains / low voltage cable should take care of that.

>>> Normally an UVC will start off full of hot water heated to the set temperature. As it is used, a hot / cold transition moves up the tank. If no more heat was added, you would get almost the same temperature of water coming out of the taps right up to the point where the hot / cold transition reaches the top of the tank and the water would suddenly go very cold. If the cylinder thermostat was say half way up, then at the point the transition reaches the thermostat the boiler would fire up. At that point the heat input to the tank would stir up convection within the tank and continue to do so while it is heating. With the heat source being a big boiler, it can probably re heat the tank as fast as you can empty it. <<< Yeah, the behaviour of DW cylinders is quite a complicated business if you think about it - stratification / mixing / heat loss / statistical usage patterns etc. The simpler way would be no storage tank and use a heat source powerful enough to heat the water to the required temperature instantaneously at the required flow rate. @SteamyTea will be along shortly to tell us what instantaneous heat power is required for a typical shower . That system would be much more efficient because you would only heat the water you need / there would be no 'waste' heat when the cylinder cools while it's waiting for your next shower / there would be no need to heat up more water than you need not knowing how long your shower was going to be. However, the instantaneous power requirement is more than most heat sources can provide - hence the tank. The storage tank lets a lower power heat source heat over a longer period and then the heated water is delivered in a much shorter period. Sort of heat-based impedance matching if you get my drift. Given that the tank thing is all a bit of a fudge anyway, why not just heat a bit longer until you don't run out of hot water ever. Yeah, there's going to be some waste, but using a cylinder in the usual way implies some waste anyway. The other system nobody uses would be to have one or more vented tanks which didn't refill with cold water until the start of a new heating cycle had been determined, say 3 am? The control / safety system might be more complicated though. A bit like a more modern - 'heat the kettle on the stove and fill the bath in the parlour system'

There's a bunch of discussion here on 't 'ub if you look for it.

Before the town & country planning act of 1947?

Gus gave some calculated examples about a month ago. I guess enough there that you would figure you need an SE to checkover a custom design.

Ah

Well you could RTFM and it's only a 10 pages or so. Should work fine remotely btw. Congrats on getting connected up. Auto - runs the time/temperature profile as set/shown below in that screen. Hold - is a temporary change to the profile - e.g. heat the hot water for a couple of hours to take an unscheduled shower. Standby - a sort of off/holiday setting - don't heat unless it gets below the 'frost temperature' (set with the little menu under the 3-sliders icon). I have mine all set to 12C although I guess you could risk lower.

That’s odd, the connect-to-hub step takes just a few secs, no? Then you can configure nearly everything from your phone. I give the app say 8/10 and they don’t update it every 5 mins - which is good.

It's at this point I usually remind people that the point is to use less energy rather than more energy. Maybe add the max power of your car chargers and the heat pump and add 20%. It could be that the DNO doesn't care much anyway and there's no change in cost. Or you could ask for 100A and see what they'll give you. They won't change the size of the cable their planning to use, so it'll just be up to the marketing department. It's a bit like deciding between a 3L engine and a 5L. Yeah, more is better right? All your single phase mates will be on 25kW or less anyway. At 63A per phase you'll have twice that.

You could buy the hub and set them with their phone app - you also get remote control that way.

This web-connected auto-update thing is super-annoying. My CAD set-up exploded on Monday and it's not obvious how I get it back - the error messages are, of course, complete nonsense. Meanwhile our Sony TV is taking longer and longer to start as they add more cruft to it. Roll me back to the nineties when you bought a bit of software and it stayed the same unless you decided to update it.

Wow, very stylish. I would never have guessed that outside Venetians would cope with the wind?

@Bramco - can I ask what kind of blinds you chose? I'm imagining shop awning style as they're tiltable rather than the external vertical roller ones I was considering myself? Or are they tiltable in the venetian sense?

>>> mixing the colour match by yourself can work That's interesting, especially as I am already quite close with a few of the tester pots.

They could look at their smart meter graphs and get an idea what's using all the power.

The DNOs seem to delight in asking these questions in a stupid way ... or maybe they ask the same question whether you have a 3 bed house or are putting in a new blast furnace. The options in the real world (for residential) are likely 63A or 100A fuses (or maybe 80A as ProDave says). Which means 63A x 230V ~= 15 kW or 80A x 230V = 18 kW or 100A x 230V ~= 25 kW per phase. The smaller is probably fine - that's a lot of power. I have 63A 3-phase.