SimonD

It's not really about having the volume to satisfy flow requirements. The volume is to take the heat input from the heat pump and deliver it where it's needed. That's the beginning of working out your volume requirements. From a design perspective this is the start. Glad to hear chat gpt agrees on your design. The addition of a pipe temp sensor and valve with a pcb isn't really complicated at all because you've got to run all the cabling back to the Panasonic unit you've selected. By the time you've wired up another stat, zone valve, and a wiring centre, you might as well have just integrated it into the heat pump unit itself. This gives you more flexibility should you experience a control problem once it's up and running. Once you separate controls away from the heat pump, you're actually adding complexity plus additional control demands on you. You're potentially causing an additional rod for your own back. If the system design has been done correctly. I'm assuming someone sensible has done this and actually designed to ufh loops to room heat loads as opposed to provide a standard geometric exercise trying to fit pipes into the space to 150mm spacing, then simply running the whole system open on weather comp should be all you need. TBH, my alarm bells are ringing as you wouldn't believe the rubbish I see that's a result of a customer getting their builder and plumber to put in the UFH and then ask another person to install the heat pump. Usually they haven't got a clue on the UFH design or they farm it out to a UFH company that apply no sense to matching the design to the room demand. This is where you need to go back to before trying to figure out your control strategy. Are you having to put this in due to poor system sizing design in the first place? If so, then go with the manufacturer options because then you can move away from relay control to electronic mixers with separate curves to balance the heat across the manifolds if you need to, ideally controlled from the heat pump.

There's hardly any price difference between the two and often I find in bulk I get a better price with the MLCP pipe. The 'overkill' on something so basic when it's a totally unnecessary comment is weird. Personally I'd be going the route of MLCP at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, I'm clearly a bit naive and wet behind the ears on this 😁 Problem is trying to find one, just like trying to find any decent trades.

Agreed. I had an EPC done for my house and the assessor wouldn't include floor insulation and a few other things in his assessment. I got some amendments after sending photos of the work to prove the insulation was in there. But in the end we ended up 1 point below a B in energy efficiency, which is a complete joke. One of my customer got an EPC for the BUS Grant eligibility and also got a C, only a few points below us and half their house isn't even insulated but has solid wall. A big problem is that the price of an EPC is less than £100 - and that's to cover a full house survey, measurement and then a report? There's no way you can get this accurate with a quick 1 hour visit.

Honestly, I haven't been brave enough to give it access and control of my system and docs. If I set up a dedicated machine, I might do that. But yeah, it's amazing. This morning I was working through a problem and within 25 minutes I've got a working app that does exactly what I need it to do and I've haven't touched a single piece of code, job done. But I'm still surprise you haven't had to touch anything. I've still got to roll up my sleeves every now and again but maybe that's because I'm restricting access?

The promise is to use a different cold bridging methodology, probably using FEA tools, so yes a lot of work required, but better than blanket defaults as per SAP currently? If used correctly..... But this is interesting, because there is no mention of using BS EN 12831-1:2017 which is the UK standard for designing the space heating load. And this standard has only just been implemented. I wonder if this is going to lead to different standards being used for new builds using HEM that aren't necessarily going to be consistent with BS EN 12831-1. Or is there going to be another poorly considered change to the industry.

Sadly, the implementation probably will be.

The Future is HEM - https://home-energy-model.co.uk/

Is this timber frame wall a load bearing wall or is it just internal framing? If it's load bearing then you really want to follow standard timber framing methods. I would almost always use the 3rd option from left, but sometimes use option 1 if short of cls.

YouTube Channel now up and running with a few instruction videos already published with more to come: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenHeatLoss

Thanks! It's good someone is looking into it and making good content about it. In case it was missed, my comment was sarcastic as my second sentence was a nod to its origin, but like all these things the term has a messy history. It isn't just that it's been hijacked for certain political ends, but even in the origins of social justice, it's been hijacked by some schools to frame others as less worthy etc. etc. so in many ways it has ended up as a word that is so much more meaningless than it started.

I'm sitting back waiting for the explanation. I was tempted to ask what "being 'awake' which turned into slang 'woke' to social justice, more specifically racism and discrimination" has got to do with policy decisions regarding renewables and fossil fuel extraction by the UK government, but you beat me to it.

Local grown timber and getting hold of it is a big problem. I managed to get local cedar for all our cladding and remember when I got the phone call from someone at the mill with a deep Welsh accent telling me my boards were all ready and they were putting them on the back of a truck for me. Since then I've struggled to find the things I need. I've been trying to find somewhere locally that'll provide me with the timber to make my staircase. What frustrates me even more is I get regular email updates from various suppliers, and regularly receive some from Buckland Timber where I've sourced Glulams, both bespoke curved and straight off the shelf. They'll manufacture glulams to your spec including providing locally grown options and their newsletters talk about using local growers and mills - but the frustrating thing is that when I then go out and try to source it myself for other needs, I hit a brick wall! Some time ago I also read some interesting articles about the UK forestry industry where I came to the conclusion that it's a bit different to those of countries who produce so much timber, because the way in which land ownership works here, timber is seen as an investment asset rather than a commodity so owners can just put a hold on felling and selling instead waiting for prices to rise. So this creates an unreliable supply chain. I don't know how that plays out right now as I haven't really engaged in it much recently, but it certainly used to be a problem at the distribution and merchant levels.

Yep, no rubber feet or flex hoses rerquired. The new m series has a separated compressor a bit like a washing machine drum so you have to remove the transport bolts when you install it. I'm soon fitting one directly onto a flat garage roof very much because of the lack of vibration.

Claude does package the stuff very nicely, but it's still not without its problems. As a result I have a specific instruction to take me through what it's doing and why, and then on fairly major decisions, I go and do a but more research and go back to question the proposals to make sure it's right. On a few occasions this has resulted in big changes in direction, sometimes not. Instructions include not writing any new code until I have provided and confirmed the latest deployed versions The other risk I found was that the packages can contain out of date files that don't contain recent code changes so crashes the app. But tbh, nothing beyond what I've seen and experienced in human coding teams. I'm actually constantly finding myself surprised by how it's always helpful and amendable to changes and completely changing my mind about something we've just deployed. That response in me tells me everything I need to know about my experience and history dealing with human programmers!