MikeGrahamT21

Cheers, good to know, don’t think we’ll be installed the heat recovery component, unless they aren’t too much extra, I know the vaillant addon is near £700!

I guess the thing which is niggling me is, do we actually use that much hot water, and I think the answer is no. Our gas bill for entire year, for heating, HW and gas hob was only £320 last year, well the hob has gone now, so even less next, but the majority will be Heating costs. if we say HW is £100 out of that £320, thats £2000 over 20 years, if we never had to pay for HW again, which won't happen. Can stand up in the loft with my arms up straight, so its fairly high, but it won't take 250kg of load for sure, ceiling joists are only 4x2. I'm really racking my brains for something to use my spare kwh's on, i still think solar battery storage is the way for us when its a bit cheaper. This latest chap has raved about Atag boilers, i'd never heard of them before, going to look into them tomorrow, what do people think of them?

I remember that install, a thing of beauty! Latest fella just been, he also didn't think the tank would save any money any time soon

Do you know of any other solar diverters? They are on MK4 of this one now, so you would hope the 4th attempt be good...

Yeah the engineer who came this morning spoke about the circulating system, he did also say the pipe work to the taps would all need re-doing, which i'm not such a fan of, just for the mess factor at this point in time. At present we have to wait around 15-20sec for hot water, i even installed a combi-save, which brought it down from 30sec, so anything less than that will be fine.

We know Solar battery is too much at present, and having a cylinder is going to be a good £1k more than standard combi as far as I know. Its a shame where we can put it is the other side of the house to both the heat generator and the point of use, but not the end of the world, we just need to super insulate the pipes. We've 2 others coming tonight to discuss all options, see what they think about it.

Gas engineers. We've already got 4kw of PV, but we don't currently have a water cylinder.

Got people telling me its not worth getting the extra cylinder, labour etc??

and I guess the killer question, because we dont have a cylinder, is the extra spend going to be worthwhile overall?

Also, is this any good? https://solarimmersion.co.uk/features-of-solarimmersion/ One i'd heard of before was immersun, more expensive than this, but the company seem to have gone bust. This one allows primary as water cylinder, and if we still have excess, we can add a secondary load, even a battery, though not sure how that would work totally in practice, as it doesn't seem like a Solar Battery inverter, so not sure what type battery they have in mind.

Looking at water cylinders, some appear to come as standard with a 3kw immersion heater, do these things accept variable power input? Can't imagine its going to be very often we have a spare 3kw of generation. Or would it be necessary to add our own heater with a lower wattage? Looking on ebay there are much smaller wattage ones, 500, 750 etc, however it would be nice if the 3kw one could be used in a variable manner. EDIT: Think i've found my answer, and thats a yes it does do that: http://vi.vipr.ebaydesc.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemDescV4&item=263692558672&t=1499859105000&tid=310&category=20715&seller=solarimmersion&excSoj=1&excTrk=1&lsite=3&ittenable=false&domain=ebay.co.uk&descgauge=1&cspheader=1&oneClk=1&secureDesc=0

And I think I should also not discount converting to a system boiler with a water tank and solar diverter, instead of going down the battery route. we’d look at an unvented tank, what sort of size for a 2person household, who use a little more than average hot water? We have 2 concrete posts sticking out of the wall in the loft, which is where the old tank used to be, but they are as far away from boiler and point of use as you can get, I’m guessing the ceiling joists wouldn’t take that kind of loading? Would it matter too much if tank want approx 15m away from the bits that need it?

Yeah it’s definitely a new thing for sure, this boiler has been on the market for a couple of years, keep seeing it advertised in my free building mags, started with 3yr warranty and has slowly worked to 8yrs. I’ve read somewhere the flue heat recovery has been put into building regs requirements from April this year, not looked into that yet but will have a read tomorrow. ill not forget this one, but what mainstream boiler would you recommend? Must have opentherm as we can make full use of that, and be combi, other than that I’m open to options. really not sure how much to spend on this 10yr old ideal boiler, no one rates it well even tho we’ve had virtually no issues with it, so gotta have a plan in place for every eventuality. Annoyingly had insurance last year but didn’t carry it on as they wanted near £30 a month!!

Other day our boiler started leaking, it’s the notoriously bad ideal isar he24, but it has lasted 10 years, bar a PCB change I did last year £50 off eBay, this time the manifold valve has gone, £100 for parts and it’s tricky to replace so labour is going to be high, we’ll see what the quote is anyway... ive already done some research for this point in time and have come across the Johnson and Starley HR24C but can’t find any pricing for it anywhere, it’s labelled as the worlds most efficient boiler without requiring additional components due to it having the flue heat recovery system built in, in a standard size case. has anyone come across this particular model before, or any Johnson and starley boiler? Anyone know a buy price? any info would be great, likely going to have to move fast on this, all I know is it does everything we need, opentherm etc, but if it’s extortionate then will have to rethink. found info on a site about green deal, if it still exists, this boiler qualifies for £1000 back, as it classed as two energy saving measures, only issue is we already have a condensing boiler, so may only get the flue heat recovery component, going to ring the firm up tomorrow and ask Mike

We do 10Gb OM3 between Core switch and the edge cabs these days to provide A 10Gb backbone, but then it’s copper to the desktop

Dont bother with fiber, its extremely expensive to terminate, and if not done properly it won't work. Theres nothing in a home which requires that kind of bandwidth, so just stick with CAT6 (the low smoke version). I install HPE Aruba Modular switching in my day job, and often do 10GbE installs, but they are only useful if you are pushing a huge amount of data, i.e. multiple stations streaming full HD, and even then it doesn't get saturated, in fact the most useful thing for 10GbE is iSCSI SAN installs, where you can really use the bandwidth in a Hyper-V environment. In a house, i just don't see a use for this.

I would be very keen on something so important, to be buying in a certified product, rather than crossing my fingers with poured concrete, I mean what if a few air bubbles get stuck in it?!?

That is a beautiful house! Well done for all the hard work on it. And the area looks stunning too, very lucky people! ?

Wow, glad you noticed all that and got it sorted, id say a near miss?!?! Are you sure whoever is putting your house up is up to the job?

Came across these on ebay last night, still the same LiFePO but these support 100% DoD, same batteries used on the London Buses apparantly: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BYD-B-Plus-2-56kWh-Solar-Battery-storage-100-DOD/322754585457?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649 Still a bit top heavy on price, but not too bad considering the 100% DoD?

Thats an aircrete trench block, will be 7N at most. Definitely wrong as a pier for the house to sit on

Not a problem. I used Marmox many years ago as a tile backerboard, and I had no idea they could be used as a drylining board, until i stumbled across instructions on their website. Its a revelation! They are super lightweight, brilliant for a 1 man installation such as mine, and even better you can create curves with very little cost + effort. Sd value is 3.2m, not quite as high as some VCLs, but this will be more than enough to stop vapour moving in to the wrong places ? I too am using Marmox for the inside of an extension with external wall insulation applied, as the internal VCL and drylining in one.

Have you considered something like a Marmox Multiboard/Wedi Building Board? These are used in the same way as plasterboard, but have integral XPS which forms a VCL (as long as the joints are sealed with marmox multibond), and can be plastered direct, the same as a plasterboard. Come in a variety of thicknesses too, dependant on how much insulation you want.

For me, ban wood burners completely, even existing ones (maybe im biased though because it means we can't even have MVHR since smoke is all around us in the winter)! They are far too dirty for the modern era, people only use them because they are cheap to run!

This is probably not the case with them being brand new, but I often find when the bottom of our bath gets a tiny covering of limescale on it, it gets rather slippy, quick go with the cillit bang, and its grippy again, worth a shot even if its just on one of them to try.