ProDave

The only thing that struck me was the boot room is a very long way from an entrance door, but no obvious place to relocate it.

That has been a chip on my shoulder for some time. In the "old" days people were happy to use blue (a phase colour) as neutral so why so against black now? Of course my gripe is why is only brown / black / grey available? * particularly when talking of 3 core and earth flat cable, Name me one case where you will actually use 3 core & earth as a 3 phase cable? Brown / Blue / grey would seem a better choice. * Yes I know we are talking about SWA here, where 3 phase e.g to feed a motor is a real possiblility, and where you CAN buy 3 core in brown / blue / green-yellow

With an UVC in the middle, think where you are going to route the D2 discharge pipe. That is to vent possibly boiling hot water being vented in the event of a fault. There are strict rules on how it can be laid. It either has to vent out of the building or under some circumstances into a drain pipe stack. That will almost certainly need something building in for it at foundation time.

Depends where you are and your climate (you price in € as the only clue to your location) Under floor heating from an Air Source Heat Pump will be the cheapest "electric" heating. Roughly 1/3 the cost of direct electric heating. And it can heat your hot water as well.

Very happy with our Rationel 3G aluminium clad. They were the cheapest quote of the quality window suppliers we approached so easy decision. But pricing does seem a lottery and others have reported them as expensive. I looked at 2 houses with Nordan windows and I was not impressed with either.

A lot of work? Why not just replace them all with nice new straight joists?

I wish I could un read that and purge the image from my imagination.

Ditto. Apart from the main big jobs it was bought for, it was a damned handy thing to have, often just used for a short period. You would not hire a machine just to have sitting there to be used every now and then, so without your own machine you would either do without, or wait until you have enough jobs to hire one.

Well ventilation running 24/7 WILL suck heat out of the house. That is the whole point of mvhr, that most of the otherwise lost heat, is recovered.

It is sad that the Sun Amps have ended up this way. Right from the start I liked the concept, but not the price. I also did not like the idea it was pretty much direct electric heating, i.e. no way to heat from an ASHP. Then as time rolled on and some people had problems it became apparent the engineering had some "room for improvement"

I did have one of these Chinese boosters in the last house before wifi calling and whatsapp. It made a bit of a difference but not startling. Can I start by asking what network you both use? I ask because even if your phones will support it, not all networks support wifi calling on all phones. This became a big issue for me just over a year ago when the network I was on (O2) changed something and we lost out signal at home. That was only solved by switching to a different network (EE) that did support wifi calling on my phone, and then later with some network changes we now also get a good native signal from them at home. There have been a lot of changes going on with all networks lately with the switch off of 3G and 2G and some re allocation of what signal bands are used for what service. This may have made things better for some and worse for others.

Having now lived several years in a near passive house with it's low heating bills and constant comfortable internal temperature, my view of old houses like this has changed considerably. To properly upgrade it will cost a LOT of money. You either upgrade it, or pour lots of money into it every year in heating. I firmly believe that the market value of old inefficient properties like this should be much lower than a well performing house, to reflect either the high heating bills or the work needed to upgrade it. I am not saying don't buy it, but buy it with your eyes open, and I hope you are not the one owning it when the market finally wakes up and people realise poor performing houses really are worth less.

What I got from this is the planners say they have to build so many "affordable" homes, which they can only do by subsidising those from the profit made on market value homes? Then the additional costs due to delays, interest and that retaining wall means even selling the market value homes, they could not afford to subsidise the "affordable" homes. And unless they can do that they can't sell the market value homes. Is that somewhere close to what happened? I have never been comfortable with the concept that private developers must subsidise "affordable" homes from the profits made on normal homes.

It's the "system" built up around the BUS grant that forces a cartel to charge as they please. Perhaps the journalists would do better if they looked at an installation in detail, costed the equipment supplied, noted how many people and how long it took then ask "so how can you be charging £4K for 2 man days work"? (for example)

Think again, at least 100mm PIR

In a new build you should just fit hard wired, 3 core & earth between all of them. RF linking is really for retro fit to save taking up loads of floor boards to run interlink cables. Plenty of cheap Aico stuff on ebay but watch "replace by" dates.

No 1 question, how are you going to provide enough insulation under your floor? That might be tricky in a flat. If you don't add lots of insulation and just fit some low profile UFH, you will be paying to heat the flat below you and they will be your best friends.

The motor connections can be seen on my original picture if you enlarge it: RED: YM 310V DC That will be the main power (rectified 220V ac gives about that, it will be a bit over in the UK) Blue: GND I take that as power ground. Brown: VCC 15VDC I take that as power for the control electronics inside the motor. White: FG Functional Ground? Ground for the control electronics? Orange: 0-6.0VDC Probably speed demand input Violet: Reverse logic signal to tell it which way to rotate. When I do get around to opening the motor, I will take pictures.

Before you do that, do a sanity check and replace the flow switch with any manual switch, even a standard light switch will do, and confirm the pump turns on and off and runs properly with no excess voltage drop anywhere.

That's the plan but I would rather wait a few weeks until we are done with heating so there is less pressure in case something goes wrong. From what I know of this motor is the main body is plastic. The front where the spindle emerges is a metal plate held on by I think by 4 screws. I suspect the front bearing might be easy to access, but I suspect the rear bearing is pressed into the plastic housing so may be harder to extract and replace without breaking something. Disappointing that unlike other motors there are no details yet emerging of anyone repairing one.

Yes I am leaning that way. There was only 1 review of the motor on alibaba and that was to say it arrived broken and they were not interested in resolving that. That does not encourage me to buy from there. My thinking is once the heating season is over I should be able to remove it, open it up, identify the bearings and put it back together in a day. IF anyone has replaced this motor and has the old one I would be interested in that to repair it off line so to speak?

The HP was installed in mid 2018, so coming up to 6 years old. Yes it is disappointing but it has not yet "failed" I am hoping someone else who has had one fail might find this thread and let me know where they got a replacement, or did they replace the bearings. I have never used Alibaba so not sure whether to trust them or not, the worry being in some way it may not be the right thing and resolving that may not be easy. I generally only buy really cheap stuff from China on the basis I can afford to lose the money if something goes wrong.

I have been aware of my ASHP getting more noisy than usual all winter. When a passing neighbour enquired today what the noise was, I thought it was time to have a look. It is the fan motor looks to have failing bearings. It's a sort of high pitched whine sound that varies with fan speed. It is not the compressor, that purrs as quiet as a quiet thing. So probably time to start looking for a sollution. Here is the fan motor: Googling the part number FMEC531LGB and the motor is available, most places seem to be charging between £250 and £300 but Alibaba have it for £150 with postage https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005003764026412.html I'm torn between buying a new motor, or trying to replace the bearings in the one I have. Trouble with that is it will take time to dismantle it, find the bearings, order them etc, all the while the ASHP will be out of action so that will have to wait until we have finished with heating. Or I might buy a new motor and then look at fixing the old one as a spare. I have not yet found anyone dismantling this exact motor so have no clue if it is easy or hard and if the bearings are obtainable.

Why so shallow? For our 5M span we have 300mm by 100mm posi joists at 600mm centres Same span downstairs has 300mm I beams at 400mm centres.

What's the steel structure in picture 7 that looks to be framing some form of internal bay window?