Squonk

I had to look at the author to see if I'd written this! I have a 70's bungalow on the west of Scotland, when we bought it last year it was completely uninsulated - not even the loft! We do have double glazing at least, not the latest spec but better than nothing. I now have 300mm of Knaus wool in the attic, and overlay underfloor heating (aka overflow heating) which has stopped some of the draughts from the suspended timber floor. Last year our spare (unheated) bedroom was regularly hitting 7 deg C, now it rarely dips below 13 deg, so I'm making progress. The walls are my next challenge. Behind the plasterboard is an 80mm void, then a bit of block work, and external cosmetic rendering. My thinking is to remove the existing plasterboard, install some Kingspan cavity board and then new plasterboard, either plain or insulated. There seems to be the option of partial cavity fill or full fill, but I'm not sure which way to go. I'm on an island, so options are very limited! Anyway, just wondered if you made any progress?

We have underfloor heating throughout the ground floor of our 1980’s timber framed house. It’s double glazed and reasonably insulated. 10kw ASHP with underfloor heating on a suspended timber floor, with cement board and engineered wood flooring throughout. We only bought the house a few months ago, so this will be our first winter. When I got up this morning the living area was at 18 deg, OAT was about 14. I set the thermostat to 20 but, despite running all day, the room temp never got above 19. This is not even winter yet (even in the north of Scotland) so I’m a bit concerned. Last few days have been the same issue, before that it was warm outside so I didn’t notice. I’ve been keeping an eye on the system all day and the actual pump seems to have done very little heating. The flow temp target is 31, when the pump kicks in the actual temp goes up to about 35, and then seems to drop eventually to 25 once the ASHP shuts down. We did have a power cut recently, so I’m wondering if some settings have got corrupted or reset maybe? Everything seems to work ok individually, and the DHW is as hot as it should be. Alternatively, I’m wondering if the flow temperature needs to be higher? I don’t know what temperature the actual floor gets up to, but it never really feels warm. The system says it’s used 1kwh of electricity today for the heating to yield about 4kW of heat. Any thoughts / suggestions much appreciated.

It’s not just builders, a friend of mine who is a reasonably successful musician told me he goes through the same process with every album - loves it, hates it, loves it again, hates it. At the second ‘hates it’ he knows it’s ready apparently. Seemed odd when he told me this years ago, maybe not so strange after all.