Bramco

Maybe we're just more tolerant than you 😉 We have both overhangs and external blinds on the south facing sliding doors. Which means little solar gain in the summer. But plenty if we need it in the spring and autumn and plenty in the winter when it's not cloudy. Probably the worst thing for most people is that they haven't any experience of what to design in - in our case that was certainly the case! So it's serendipity that the blinds were a great choice, as were the rooflights and sliding doors for managing things. We did do a lot of reading around heat loss and the need/or not for heating on the 1st floor and as I said made provision for supplementary heating but haven't needed to install it.

Not sure I agree @Nickfromwales. Although all of this is about personal preferences. Ours is an MBC build, you've worked on a lot, so you know what we have. 0.14 walls and vaulted ceilings and a passiv slab 0.1. We are fully triple glazed but only 1.2 for the glazing (a lot of aluminum framed sliding doors). We also have triple glazed roof lights. Each bathroom has electrical UFH and heated towel rails (although we never use these). Two bathrooms on the 1st floor. And the ground floor is probably 2/3 of the total floor m2. MVHR of course and low ac/hr. We put in enough suitably positioned electrical points to be able to add supplementary heaters in the 1st floor bedrooms but have never had to fit these. Our heat loss calcs came to 6kW. We only heat during cheap rate, so a maximum of 6 hours into the UFH in the slab from a (max) 9kW ASHP but this is enough to heat the house for the rest of the day. Bedrooms are about 18C which for us is fine. Living space is 20.5 to 21.5. And when it's really hot, we use the ASHP to cool but that's only a few days a year. Having the sliding doors/rooflights open seems to keep things OK. So we're a big vote for not needing heat/cooling on the 1st floor. As for AC, it would have been a pain to fit and they aren't great to live with - draughts, noise etc. @Post and beam is your UFH in a screed, or in a passive slab like the MBC slabs?

Don't think it's a warranty issue tbh - but they really aren't needed - unless @Alan Ambrose would love to buy our surplus one from us 😉 Alan ? And probably my memory is failing me on the cable size - but glad to hear someone else finds the room round the back of the switches a pain....

Don't let your electrician slap in any old wire. I think ours made some assumption about the motors needing heavy duty cable, either that or he had an old reel in the back of the van to use up. Hallmark can give you the spec but from memory it's 1.5mm from memory. Fat cables at the back of the Somfy switches are a pain - there's not much room round the back of the switch in the box. Also, if you intend to use the Somfy switches, I have a Somfy weather station going spare - it was specced before we found a much smaller, neater anemometer. Although, even this could come out, as we've disabled the automatic lifting of the blinds in high winds. It only happened once in the middle of the night which could have startled anyone on the lane. We've been through much worse wind conditions since then and the blinds have been fine.

A while ago, on application, you could either connect a charger or and EV(by make and model). Now the interface asks for the make/model of the vehicle and doesn't allow for linking a charger even though you may not know the make/model of any vehicles that would use the charger, e.g. visitors, carers, children etc. You can still ask for them to link with a charger however, here's a page where you can do this (not sure if it still works of course) -> https://octopus.typeform.com/to/rK8at31n#account_number=xxxxx&email=xxxxx There was some discussion on the MyEnergi forum about which models of vehicle Octopus can connect with and someone on there suggested that if you wanted to go down the linking to a vehicle route, you simply chose a make/model that they couldn't connect with. I'll bet an AI can tell you which ones...

The suggestion was for after you've got the short grass you said you wanted somewhere up above. 😉

@Alan Ambrose We had ours installed over 3 years ago, so probably not worth comparing costs. We did look around for other suppliers but they either didn't do what we were looking for or were much more expensive. We didn't plan for maintenance.... But they've been in for a while now with no problems. I say no problems.... someone.... left one of the chairs on the patio under one of them and it wouldn't straighten by itself, so we got Hallmark out to fix it. They did explain how to rejig the tapes that do the up and downing by pushing buttons on the motors - although of course we've no idea now how to do that!! You can see the motors when the blinds are down by looking up into the housing. We didn't use cassettes but I did find some interesting lintels with cassettes built into them. Could probably still find these if you are interested. Ours are built into a slot above behind the timberwork for the cladding. You can see this from the photos on our architects web page -> https://lhc.net/projects/ashcroft-creating-a-low-energy-family-home/ If you zoom in to the photo with the chairs outside, you can see that the side channels were attached to stands that were screwed into the frame of the sliding doors. So they are proud of the sides of the opening. We are very pleased with them - they're great in the summer for reducing solar gain and from autumn to spring good at letting the solar gain in. Hallmark are only a small outfit but apart from a few niggles we were pleased with them. PS We used wired switches but in hindsight it might have been better to have a wireless system.

Maybe all cylinders - we've got a Newark that is pretty noisy..... I've always put it down to the coil being corrugated and trapping air - and we haven't got round to putting in anything to get rid of the air yet - next summers job.

Part ex that for a husqvarna robot mower and sit back of an evening with a cold drink and think of the poor bastards going up and down with the racket of a 2 stroke, having to stop every few rows to dump the grass out of the hopper thinking every time - that piles getting bigger, what the hell are w3 going to do with that....

+1 for that - there are quite a few of these dotted round Germany. We visited a couple on trips to Germany while we were still in the planning stage. We also visited a couple of turnkey companies that were doing business in the UK at the time (pre-Brexit). Schworer Haus in southern Germany was amazing. A tiny, very well off village with a massive factory - wood comes from within a few kilometres distance - they xray the raw planks and sell on any not quite to the right quality. There is a massive showroom for all the various finishes, internal and external as well as bathrooms kitchens etc. They also run the whole factory on biomass and export as much energy as they use. Wonder how many of the German turn-key cos are still in the UK market after Brexit?

If you do this, then through the autumn into spring on cloudy days, you'll never run the house on PV alone, so will be importing from the grid at peak rates, i.e. 30+p. We have 6.5kWp and on some days, only generate a couple of kWh - and our panels are at 45degrees to maximise solar gain in the winter.. If they were on a roof, we'd generate less.

Our Sunsynk inverter also allows you to set up charge, discharge and export times. I'm sure many of them do.

Electricity is like water, so flows around any system, so you'd have to somehow separate the house from the PV. I'm sure someone will be along soon with an answer to that. But why don't you simply wire things up normally, so the house will use whatever is available from the batteries or the PV, or the grid. Then set things up, so that you dump what's left in the batteries at the end of the day before the cheap rate - this gets you the 15p export and if you've had any excess PV during the day, over and above house use, then you'll have had 15p for that. Then in the cheap rate simply fill you boots (batteries) before you start the cycle again. This is what we do and it's sort of self regulating. Your only issue is working out when to start dumping (exporting) the excess from the batteries to the grid if you start too early then you'll be using the grid before the cheap rate for the house and if you start too late then you'll be missing out on your 15ps worth of export. We worked out roughly how much time it took to dump 1% of the batteries to the grid. IIRC it was about 2.5 minutes. So we have an algorithm that starts checking the SoC of the batteries at 8:30 and checks every 2.5 minutes. When the SoC is larger than the amount of time left to discharge it, we start discharging and keep checking every 2.5 minutes until the start of the cheap rate. We very rarely use any standard rate units and export the maximum we can. Also, it would it be worth getting on to the Intelligent OG which is 7.5p?

No. Except delete the words 'most likely in the 1st sentence of the 2nd para.

I'm pretty sure this was how ours were done - the join then site behind any cladding. Do make sure that you get them 'permanently' fixed. We had one bit that wasn't that well fastened up and in time started to vibrate in high winds (albeit from a very specific direction) but it took a while to work out what the heck was going on.

Pretty sure it's not that. If I look at the graphs on the TADO app, you can see periods where there is a lost connection - and these can be from a few minutes to a few hours. And it's only one thermostat that's lost the connection, the others are fine. So it's almost certainly the individual thermostat connection to the RF hub. Not the hub connection to the interweb.

@SteamyTea - I've realised that it's actually an RF system to the TADO hub - so my original post should have said that. Apologies for anyone thrown off track by that. So any wifi fix wouldn't really help - the TADO hub has to be wired into an internet switch, or physically into a router. We can't move our TADO hub, so hopefully the Speedfit solution will work.

Agree - keep it as simple as possible.

@-rick- thanks for the clarification... I might actually try the speedfit wired controller (I should have said our 3 thermostats are wired) -> https://www.johnguest.com/gb/en/products/jg-underfloor/heating-controls/wired-heating-controls/240v-wired-programmable-room-thermostat This should be a drop in replacement for the TADO thermostats we have. It looks like the 'smarts' can be turned off and each thermostat can be linked with the Speedfit app, i.e. it has wifi (2.4GHz) built in. So no RF to gateways etc. £60 from screwfix in black so worth a punt. PS @SimonD EDF do, do a black RF unit but it looks like you have to pair it with one of their programmable 4 zone controllers, or an RF manifold controller, so quite an outlay to see if it works. And it's still RF which I think is the issue with the TADOs we have.

Thanks John, I'd looked at those but wasn't sure it was all local... I'll check them out again. The ASHP is controlled (on/off) through the Heatmiser UFH controller. The ASHP itself is a Cool Energy unit, so no fancy thermostatic control just an internal interface and web interface to set the settings etc. So the question is really about the zone thermostats... And you're right about Home Assistant - I'm not going there... Oh and I should have mentioned aesthetics - those EPH CP4 thermostats are some of the ugliest I've seen!! 🙂 But I will check the specs... Wiser might work but I think it might be like the first ones we canned - you can't turn off 'smart' things like 'we'll get your house warm before you've programmed the heating to start!' - which for us, batch charging our insulated slab on cheap rate is unworkable as it would start at some 'random' ('clever' in it's mind) time outside the cheap rate window. We have friends who stripped theirs out as well... Thanks everyone for chipping in. I'll continue our searches and report back if I find anything that works.

Hi, We only use ours thermostats (3), so we can run a schedule at night on the cheap rate (ASHP, OIG, insulated slab with UFH, just in case anyone asks). We also want/need to be able to connect remotely. We replaced the original thermostats with some from TADOs which work OK for what we want, i.e. a dumb temperature limiter with the ability to run the schedule and remote access so we can override things if needed, check things are working OK and occasionally when its really cold run the ASHP for a few hours in the day to top the slab up. To cut a long story short, we've been away and while we were away, one of the 3 thermostats occasionally lost wifi contact - that's OK you'd think but with TADO, if it happens just before a scheduled run, then the schedule isn't started. Also, if it fails during a scheduled run, it will stay on until it reconnects with wifi, or you manually override it. So basically the schedule is in the 'cloud'! So the TADOs have to go..... I've searched on-line and obvs there are loads out there that would do the schedule and the remote bit but reading the installation manuals and specs, none of them say anything about what happens if wifi is lost, i.e. whether the schedule is remote or local. So does anyone have experience of/know about a thermostat that will run a schedule even if it's not connected to wifi and can also be accessed remotely. Oh! and it has to be available in black, otherwise I'm going to have to hack the tados with some kind of home brew.. Thanks in advance if you can help.

It looks like the windows don't go up into the pointy bits at the top - so have you thought about setting external venetians into the top cill? These are very effective. A bonus is that in the winter when it's sunny, you get a lot of solar gain but in the summer, the blinds cut out all the solar. We've done this: Note to self, must get some photos done with the drive completed - it's only been 3 years!!! There are a few people who have the same type of external blinds - our supplier was Hallmark Blinds (I think they are actually made in eastern europe)

PM'ed you Tim.

We have timber frame, crinkly tin roof and cladding, as well as timber cladding and render. Also a small flat roof section. We were with Direct Line (and still are for contents) but they wouldn't do the buildings cover. They put us on to Gallaghers who were v good, although the price seems to jump around a bit. Last year the quote was about £500, so I looked around using links from here and couldn't get anywhere near Gallaghers, so we stayed with them. This year the quote was around £400 - so they got the business again.

I went to uni in 1969, was involved in student politics, i.e. the student's union. Apart from some big 'events/demos' I don't think students were particularly involved in Politics, the 'clubs' aligned to the major parties only had a few members. Compare that with the numbers a while back marching for Gaza, climate change etc. And don't forget, back then less than 10% went to university. Thanks to Blair, almost 50% go. And don't get me started about the lack of vocational training as a result.