Bramco

Would auto balancing actuators work with an insulated slab? Or conversely, do they only work with radiators and UFH in screed, both of which lose heat quickly. With our system with an insulated slab, the feed and return temperatures from the manifold are only about 3deg apart. The slab stays warm, which is the whole idea and gets topped up at scheduled times during the day. The thermostats are turned up higher than the real target, so that they call for heat all the time and don't cycle which means the ASHP runs continuously and doesn't cycle. At the moment while it's cold outside, the schedule is twice a day for 4 hours each time. When it's warmer, it's only once a day. Simon

Do the PVGIS calculations for several angles of incidence. For us in the midlands, the annual production doesn't vary very much between say 30deg and 45deg but the winter output is far higher the more upright the panels are. We're expecting to export a lot of our summer output (no battery yet) but want to maximise output in the winter when we won't be exporting - so for us the more vertical the better within the window of roughly similar annual output. Ours will be a 12 panel array, in line, so no worries about shading between arrays. Simon

We had Nationwide, the coolenergy MCS installers do ours. We already had the cylinders in place for DHW and UFH buffer, so the costs were just for the ASHP and install. Came out a tad over the £5k grant that Nationwide applied for, for us. So net net a no cost addition to the build. Prices have gone up since then and I still haven't seen the MCS documentation a few months after the install. Roughly speaking, and from memory, this was about £3k for the pump, therefore about £2k for the install, which would include the materials. Our pump is the smaller one, the iVT9. We had to provide the mains supply to the pump and an additional cable and cat5 cable to the controller (there were a few issues there but that's another story). The install took a day, the plumber flat out, the sparky spent a lot of time in the van... From memory, the plumber from the main contractor took about a day to plumb the DHW tank and UFH buffer tank in. And for UFH, you'd need a sparky for the wiring centre, immersions etc. So nowhere near the daft 'double glazing salesman' style quotes that 'renewable energy' companies quote. The tag 'renewable energy' on a suppliers web site should be a red flag to anyone concerned about not being ripped off. Simon

That one went back - it was on hire. A new one arrived when the main contractor took over from the TF Co. I say new, it had seen better days!! But yes, the other trades all used it. Simon

We had to provide birdcage scaffolding for our TF Co for the vaulted rooms. Our scaffolder brought a movable tower which they used both on the ground floor and on the 1st floor. Towers are easier for them to move around as the need arises. But I'd check that that is OK with the TF Co 1st. Simon PS Should add that we had a full spec for the scaffolding from the TF Co.

We've just installed an IKEA kitchen with one of their induction hobs - it's our first induction hob but can't fault it, on boost it boils water incredibly quickly. The only down side was that we had to pass on our Spring saucepans that we'd had for 40 years to our son as they wouldn't work - not enough steel in the base, they were a steel/copper sandwich construction. Finding new pans turned out to be a pain. I think IKEA do 2 widths of hobs, one standard sized and the other 200mm wider. When we bought ours, the only option was the wider one and I think we would have gone for this one if there had been the choice. Simon

Renewable energy companies are the new double glazing salesmen...... Lot's of sucking of teeth etc. If it's new build make sure that you get the Boiler Upgrade Scheme £5k - sounds crazy but it does apply to self builds as well as replacing existing boilers. We had our main contractors do the insulated slab and the DHW tank and UFH buffer tank - both with double immersions. Only after that did we install the ASHP and that was basically because it cost us £200 with the BUS grant. So do all the heat loss analysis etc. and only put in what is absolutely necessary. MVHR is, as Conor said completely separate - you should be able to find an MVHR expert in the area and I'll bet they'll be a lot cheaper than your chaps that can do it all. Simon

Worse they were in their own time zone - anything up to an hour out - totally unpredictable. The lovely lady in South Africa on the help desk suggested to be on the safe side setting the time in the scheduler an hour after we really wanted the heating to start. She agreed it was a pretty unworkable solution as we'd miss out on up to an hour of really cheap electricity. Smartness gone mad - it's not confined to things like thermostats either - we tried to buy a replacement iron recently but the model we have is now 'smart' so you can't actually set anything yourself in terms of steam etc. Someone should set up a new brand 'NoSmart' - 'get full control like your gran used to have'. Simon

Be careful what you wish for in replacements. We installed some in our new build but had to replace them as the smartness couldn't be outsmarted. We wanted to make sure that all our heating (it's a big insulated slab with UFH) was done in the really cheap 4 hour Octopus Go window. The thermostats we first installed seemed accurate enough but would insist on starting up to an hour early - bless them. They wanted to make sure the rooms were up to temperature at the start time we'd set. They got the boot - too intelligent for their own good and it was a function that couldn't be turned off. Another annoying thing about them was the temperature display was very bright and couldn't be turned down, so annoying in a bedroom. We've replaced them with Tado. You can at least turn off the 'early start' function on these. They are battery powered, so couldn't suffer from the problem you've encountered. They connect to the internet through a dongle which needs to be plugged into an internet switch or your router - very low power comms protocol. These seem to be functioning OK - except of course like all the thermostats we've looked at, they work in a very narrow temperature band ~0.2degs which means if you are controlling an ASHP the only way to get them to turn on and stay on, is to set up a schedule and put in target temperatures that would be hard to reach. ASHPs are very efficient if they aren't turning on and off. Simon

Facetious answer is buy a plot in a warm country... But basically, it's no use having an airtight barrier on the inside if as others have noted, you don't have an insulating envelope around the barrier. So SIPS, timber frame with insulation, there's many ways to make sure that the cold stays on the outer surface of the building. So check the U values of the walls, floors and roofs. Another point about airtightness is to make sure that the windows you specify don't have trickle vents. They can be opening, you might want that in the summer but they can't have trickle vents. We actually made a mistake in our design. Bathrooms upstairs have rooflights that we can open. The downstairs en-suite windows don't open. Wish we'd made one of them open, so that when showering the window could be opened a crack. MVHR should do this but if you think about it, the MVHR is aggregating the extract from all over the house, so that one bathroom aggregated with the rest never gets above the humidity protection threshold, in our case 75%. We'll end up fitting a wireless humidity control in the en-suite to force a boost based on that room. Simon

Check out the IKEA wardrobe systems. They do the same thing for their cabinets that are only about 400 deep. Simon

They are but using PVGIS it looks as though there's a window between about 30deg and 45deg where the annual total doesn't change much but the winter output is a lot more, the higher the angle. At the moment, there's no battery, so we'll be exporting a lot of our summer output, so I think we'll aim for the higher winter output and not worry about changing the angle in the summer. The soil survey shows made ground down to about a meter and then turning to clay - we had to go down a meter for the house foundations. Probably just more faff, and definitely expense, although on one iteration of the plan I had thought of using postcrete.

Petrol post driver could be fun...

Pods are a pretty low angle, so don't give the output. We're looking at 45deg which will give us about the same as the optimum for our location (35deg) but increases the winter output by about 20%. You can play around with the angles etc. on the EEC PVGIS website. Simon

890mm according to the diagram....... So very little, if any, movement front to back or side to side..... Simon

The structure in the kit is rated at 55km/hr - so not sure where the arbitrary 4m/s comes from? Simon

Hi, Been putting off making decisions about how to build a ground mount system for our solar PV system. There's a system 'Tm Type' which uses key clamp fittings and galvanized pipe - looks pretty simple to implement as a DIY project. One set of documentation says that the clamps and pipe are size 2 which is only 34mm OD which seems a bit small. It's not that much more expensive to use size 4 (48mm OD) which would be more sturdy. Here's a side view of the structure Has anyone built a ground mount with key clamp fittings and pipe? And if so, what size did you use? Also, if you've done a similar system, how did you drive the poles into the ground to support the structure? Thanks for any advice or thoughts on this. Simon

When we moved to the new build, I bought payg SIMs from EE and 3 ~£10 each. We were on Virgin and knew the signal was crap, so no point checking that one. Then with an old phone with each of the payg SIMs in I walked round the site and through the rooms with the Mastdata app running, so I could see what the signal looked like. As it happens EE and 3 were about the same but in different places. As we couldn't get Virgin to supply broadband and were planning on using a 4G router we opted for EE as the data throughput is better (it's more expensive of course). But the phone signal is fine and the 4G modem works well. This is in a timber frame with 2 layers of foil (inside and outside) and corrugated metal cladding and roof - so essentially a faraday cage! Simon

We're on Octopus Go, so have the ASHP on for 4 hours at the cheap rate and then a few hours late afternoon. If we used the ASHP to heat the hot water, it would be at the more expensive rate, about 32p if I remember correctly. But the cheap rate is only 7p, so we have the hot water heated on a timer at the cheap rate - that's until we install the solar PV - although that wouldn't have been much use here for most of the last 10 days, way too dull. So if you can heat your hot water via the immersion, you will free up time that the ASHP can be doing just heating, rather than switching between the heating and hot water. Simon

Last winter, for the same reason, I pumped out all of ours - 12 loops - about 100m each... I used a stand up paddle board pump with an adapter shoved down one end of each loop. Worked a treat, especially once you'd got the flow going. Getting it started on some of the longer ones was hard though. We only got soaked a couple of times!! Simon

Straightforward, except it asks who your installer is.... (so my friend tells me) Simon

We just applied. Can't remember any questions about what EV. Although my memory aint what it used to be. Ours was a new connection. Simon

Asking for a friend.... 😉 How would they know? Let's imagine that someone has 6kW PV installed and no limiting on export how would this be visible to the DNO?

Try a different supplier? We went for the triple glazed ones from Roof maker. Great thing about them is they don't have that ridiculous bump along the top edge that Velux have. When we bought, prices were similar. Simon

You need worry.... When we lived in Holland, our plumber had to don a wetsuit to do some connections under the floor for a new kitchen. A few feet of crawl space with quite a lot of water. He said it was far worse further to the west of us - for example in Leiden, where they sometimes had to use blow up boats to get around under the floors...... Simon