Bramco

Look at geberit rimless. There's one with no indentations. And go soft close. Simon

You see an awful lot of Geberit flush panels in public places, pubs restaurants etc. Does this mean they are more robust or have they just beaten Grohe on discounts. We have Geberit now but Grohe in the last place. The Grohe one used to sometimes stick and continue running, never got to the bottom of that, sold the house and moved on 😄 But that's just one data point. I guess also, it depends on which flush plates you want. For the new build the Geberit black plates where what we wanted, so we went Geberit for everything. On price, we found a parallel import site which was reasonable, as in not so much of a rip off as the UK merchants. Before the B catastrophy, you could order from Reuter Badshop for example and buy at a 30 to 40% discount on the crazy UK pricing. Delivery was on pallets and very quick. If you know anyone in the EU and you're likely to visit them, you could get stuff delivered to them and sling it in the back of the car/van - think you're allowed up to £600 of goods without paying tax. Our son lived in Holland when we were doing our build, so I had all the taps delivered to him and we picked them up when we were across. Saved a lot!! Simon

Yes but they're only as good as their parts. So the factory may be running smoothly but when ours was erected 18 months ago they had a team of cowboys doing the erections. They sacked them off soon after ours was completed, so not sure how they are managing the erections now. They may be young here but afaik, Joe started during the Irish housing boom, then moved here. The good guys doing the erections are all part of his Irish squad - they were amazing when it came to the airtightness and squaring up the mess the erectors had made. Like almost anything, it's like a curate's egg - good in parts. If I were to use them again, I'd employ a PM on site to QC the slab layout and the frame erection - it would be worth paying someone to ensure that the build matches the design. But we would use them again, except, our build was a forever home we built in retirement. Simon

Or a nibbler as @Iceverge mentioned. Our new build has wrinkly tin roof and cladding on the 2 storey part. The professionals who were contracted for the work used nibblers. Lidl actually had both battery and mains nibblers in the middle aisle earlier this year. I bought a mains one which were on offer before the battery ones. It's actually quite hard to go in a straight line, so best to use a guide clamped on, especially across the wrinkles. The corners of our build have right angle profiles but I guess you could bend the tin round. EJOT do a fastener which has a smaller domed head instead of the big hex heads on most fasteners - these would look much better on a smaller project like yours. They will colour code them to any RAL colour. Simon

The manual says that it does that automatically. You maybe need to experiment with the settings. V difficult to work out what's needed from a distance.

Which one? You can leave the setting for the collector where it is. As above, turn on collector cooling (p30 in the manual). This will mean that if the tank has reached it's set point and the collector is getting too hot, the system will run, cooling the collector but warming the tank. Eventually, this will hit the maximum tank temperature of 95C and then the collector temperature will continue to rise. So if you've set up collector cooling, the system will automatically adjust things if too much heat is being generated by the collector. Sounds like the collector array has been sized to give you good output in the spring and summer but maybe a bit too much for the tank in the height of the summer. Simon

From those manual pages, it looks like you can let the tank temperature run up to 95C - collector cooling - but after that it hits the same problem but with everything a bit hotter. Store cooling sounds like a non starter as you'd be cooling the tank off at night in anticipation of another sunny day, so if you didn't get that, the tank wouldn't have enough heat. Maybe what you need is a hot tap you can turn on using a temperature controlled switch. Just run off some of the excess heat when the tank reaches the point you feel safe at. Or you need a bigger tank, or a secondary tank. In the old house ours used to get pretty hot but never that hot. Simon

+1 I could have written that reply myself.

Same here - we left a duct over a culvert but didn't bother digging the trenches - eventually dumped the cable and manholes on a neighbour who is just starting building. 4G modems are less than £150 we use a GL-X750 Spitz (excellent) - look it up on Amazon. EE seem to have better download speeds than 3. Why not try this to see if it is enough before starting your trenches. If you want to test the signal from 3 and ee, then buy a £10 payg data sim and check the signal with an app - try Mastdata or Cellmapper. And you need to walk round the site to see where the best spots are. Simon

Is 0.18 still a requirement? We're at 0.22 from the electrical certificate from the build. So quite a bit above 0.18. Simon

Be interested - assume you'll report back. I've got 1 string of ours functional, so under the 4kW limit but will hopefully have the 2nd string working in a week or so - the last panle on the pallet was smashed, so trying to get a replacement.... Simon

Not exposed at all - and there's a couple of big ash trees not too far away to the north. But if we'd balanced the array on a 16m pole, then it would be a little more exposed - but I'd be questioning what to do about stability in a gale... 😄 Simon

Lightning protection. Simon

It's a diy install, hence the question. From the panel spec sheets, the frames need to be earthed. So it's really this aspect and they are connected very firmly to the frame which is mounted on the poles in the ground. They're only a metre long, so no ladders needed but I did slip one of the builders a few quid for him to wield his massive sledgehammer. Think as a pensioner, I'd have managed a couple a day.... He had it done in 15 minutes - he did look knackered towards the end! Simon

Yes. And thanks for the quick response. Simon

Hi, Just about to mount the PV panels on a ground mount which consists of 16 metre long galvanised poles hammered into the ground with the structure attached above. A very similar arrangement to the one @billt showed in @ProDave's post from 2018 The question is, given the amount of steel in the ground, do I need an earth rod? Simon

Our UFH is ground floor only, so we put electric UFH and electric towel rails in the upstairs bathrooms. The electric UFH is set to 19 and has only occasionally come on at night during the really cold spells. The towel rails haven't been on at all - so probably and expensive option - but they do look nice.... Simon

Hi Mike, For this type of application, I reckon if you just used them without calibrating, then you wouldn't know the difference. If you were using them to measure something that needed an exact temperature, then it would be necessary. For a central heating/cooling application, you're deciding on a setpoint according to how the house/room feels. if c above is 0.2 or 0.3 out, then your heating/cooling would kick in a bit higher or lower temperature and you'd adjust the setpoint accordingly. Accuracy is great but maybe a bit of overkill for this application? Simon

I'm no expert, but I think a lot of them are simply a switch, so the switch is closed to indicate a call for heat, i.e. NO. Also, there's normally only 2 wires going from the thermostat to the heating wiring centre, so you wouldn't be able to get both the NO and NC signal to the centre. Wireless thermostats might be a way of doing what you suggest.

18 B20s? if so they don't need calibration but you do need a microcontroller based system to read the them. I was planning to put in some tubes but didn't get round to it - so we'll see if actually need to run the UFH in cooling mode - although I can't see how you can do this with standard thermostats - they want to heat, not cool - so you'd have to have a separate system that could switch off the thermostat control and introduce a cooling control - you won't get your standard ASHP engineer or plumber specc'ing that for you. Simon

Welcome to the club!!! It's worth asking the architect if all of it is really necessary - can it be pared down to the absolute minimum. There's tendency with this stuff as we found out, to massively over-specify it. It's timber frame must go everywhere surely!!!! We got ours down to a reasonably sensible minimum - but the first ideas were crazy. Simon

Surely, they can simply set the ASHP to Heating only? Although, I guess they have trained their teams to do an 'install' which would always include the plumbing to the DHW tank coil. Simon

IKEA do 800, as well as 400 and I think there are units with pull out internals narrower than that. Check out the on-line configuration tool. If you want 600 tall units at either end, with a sink in counter height units with wall units above, then you will need cover panels as you switch from full height to the middle section. From memory, these are 18mm and would need to be accommodated. Simon

I'm guessing you asked a company with the term 'renewables' on their web site. Today's double glazing salesmen. Our coolenergy was £5.2k installed - the UFH buffer tank and DHW tank were installed by our main contractors plumber. With the BUS £5k grant it cost us £200. We had to make sure that the electrical connections were in place - these were done by our main contractors electrician. Simon

Two! 60cm -> https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/foerdelaktig-induction-hob-integrated-extractor-ikea-500-black-50534854/ 80cm -> https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/foerdelaktig-induction-hob-integrated-extractor-ikea-700-black-90534852/ But prices have gone up since we bought ours last year - now a 1/3 of the Elica....