MikeGrahamT21

Go with concrete every time i'd say. I have timber joists in ground floor, and though i'm very thankful with it being 1960's, that i don't have to dig up old concrete to insulate it, you always have thermal bridging with timber, which you wouldn't with concrete, plus the thermal store as you've said. With timber there is also the element of ventilation to consider, which you wouldn't with concrete, and depending on what timber they use for it, the chance of insect attack, woodworm is horrible!

Pop the control panel off of the wall, should be a screw or two underneath, and it'll just lift off, couple of seconds then put it back, that should do the trick.

If I remember right MVHR units use old fashioned COM style communications, these generally require that one end is powered on and operational before the other end is switched on. I would guess that the MVHR unit needs to be on and fully booted (give it a couple of mins to do this), before the control panel is turned on, essentially so it has something to connect to, it may only try once and then fail if it can't connect.

Have you checked seconds and co for the insulation? You may be able to get phenolic insulation at a much cheaper price than PIR, and it tends to come in pretty much perfect condition, could save you a small fortune. I recently bought 21 100mm boards for a little over £400, retail these would have been astronomical.

I’d say just some plastic sheeting to stop the water getting in will be the best thing, it’s the combo of wet and freeze thaw which has potential to damage them

Since presumably you are installing Solar PV for environmental reasons, then go with less panels which are better, as they will have less embodied carbon, and all of the other chemicals and rubbish which get created during their production. And if nothing else, its less bits to go wrong!

Thats a real shame it requires planning permission, i can understand it for a proper bay, as it will have foundations, but didn't think this would need it

I'm going to keep an eye on how this turns out, very interesting. I currently also have a bow window, but would like to replace it with a normal flat window, which is hung further out of the brickwork, partly to keep it a little more in line with external wall insulation, and partly to keep the deeper cill. I'm curious though, would this type of thing have to go through planning permission? I know for a proper bay window conversion you have to have planning, but I wonder if this would be covered under PD?

I did the utility with 20mm plastic conduit, and then got an electrician in who used singles, he said it would have been a lot easier to use 25mm conduit, and thats what he would have installed. Even so, the conduit houses sockets cabling 2.5mm and a lighting circuit 1.5mm, but it took them a while to thread so i'm guessing it was tight. I'm not sure if this helps, more of an observation, i put another run of conduit in for ethernet cables, and managed to just fit 4 of those down, so you don't have a lot of room to play with

Yeah good idea, I’ve got smart TRVs in each room to do the same job

Yeah I think I’ve one Blu-ray which has got it, a Harry Potter if I remember right, there is a lot of simulation stuff as well though like DTS Virtual X which is meant to be really good. I think for £99 it’s a sound investment. Glad to hear it works well in a real life situation too so thanks for that

So the IC600's were a bit bigger than anticipated!! Think I shall be returning them for some IC400's tomorrow.

What rate do they pay the export tariff at for new installs these days? I just got £27 export for the last 3 months on my 4kwp system

I can't comment on the underfloor heating product, as I don't have it, but I did recently change the Wall Hung Radiator pipework at my house to a manifold system, and MLCP pipe, and its so much better, easier to control, balance and portion of radiators if I need to remove them for whatever reason. We fed the pipes complete with insulation tie wrapped onto them throughout the entire house, with only a small 20cm2 hole in each room, and one access panel to give additional control, was a few hours work, and a lot of sweat and toil, but I'm really pleased with how it performs. In answer to your question, you can use any manifold, they're all the same, this was an underfloor heating manifold, with MLCP 16mm cones

I can't justify buying 4 ceiling speakers, I've gone for 2, Yamaha IC600's. Whilst I await an Atmos receiver (pending on when the TV gives up, so I can get a relevant one in terms of 4k/8k whatever is around at the time), I plan to connect these extra two up to an existing output on my Denon. Both sets of speakers are 8ohm, and receiver can handle up to 16ohms, so should be able to connect either parallel or series, depending on what is easiest. Power is my only concern, each channel is 75W, minimum power for the Yamaha's is 40W, so may be best (and more practical from an install perspective) going for parallel and sticking to 8ohms.