ProDave

Unlike Scotland, England has Part P of the building regs that requires a qualified electrician signed up with a competent persons scheme like NICEIC etc to sign it off. In theory in England you can pay BC to do the test and certification, in practice it is almost impossible to get them to actually do that.

More information needed. Best way is SWA glanded into a mini consumer unit and final circuit(s) from there with appropriate rcd / mcb protection. But you don't give us any idea what you are trying to do. Is the SWA already protected by a 32A MCB and you are trying to make a lollipop circuit?

I rate Octopus because their customer service is less bad than many others, and you are actually in control, you can set your DD amount or as others have said just pay actual bills, if you end up too much in credit you can ask for some back etc. So many other suppliers just choose their own random amount, make silly estimates, won't let you change anything and hold onto a large credit, and won't even discuss it. In other words Octopus allow the things you expect and would hope are normal, but so many people with other suppliers have plenty of horror stories.

My built in bin has a standard door with the usual adjustments. You can attach the door to the appliance, then adjust the feet to raise / lower the appliance to get the door right before you screw the appliance in place.

Choose the cable method between CU and outbuilding to not require an RCD you can connect it from a non RCD protected MCB in the CU. It will require a high integrity CU.

Built in appliance doors have almost zero adjustment. Fit that first and then adjust the other doors to line up with it. The fun starts if you have 2 built in appliances.

Let me start by saying an electric boiler is the most useless invention man has ever made. IF you are going to use direct electric resistance heating you are better off just with panel heaters and an immersion heater. Putting a big heater in a box on the wall and using water to move the heat around that will never make it more efficient. However it has given you wet under floor heating so that might be useful. No 1, separate out your space heating and hot water heating, before you can go anywhere you need to know what is using what. If it were me I would be fitting an electricity meter on the feed to the boiler, setting heating and hot water times differently NEVER on at the same time and taking lots of readings to see how much the HW and heating are using separately. How good are you at DIY? With help from this forum would you consider DIY fitting an ASHP? I have no idea what the regs are on Jersey but the parts are likely to cost no more than £5K and DIY might make it viable. You might be better off just with a good plumber and electrician that you can trust, and who are capable of reading an instruction manual, rather than a "specialist" heat pump company which is what I suspect you have been talking to? Do you know anything about the building construction, what levels of insulation for example, particularly under the floor? And what temperature is your UFH running at the moment?

I used dry screed often called pug mix. On top of joists lay OSB or ply, 25mm battens following joists, lay UFH pipes then dry screed, final floor (engineered Oak) on top. Very easy to DIY. Don't forget to include extra dead load when calculating joist sizes.

You used to be able to download the SAP program and input all the details yourself. You could never produce an officially recognised EPC doing that but it is a good way to while away a lot of time. For a good EPC you need good levels of insulation, good probably triple glazed windows, good air tightness that probably means a proper air tight membrane everywhere with well taped joints and good detail at every penetration, An efficient heating system, probably ASHP and UFH, MVHR and possibly some solar PV. and an official air tightness test. When I sent all the final as built figures to my assessor, my instructions to him were that if it failed to get an EPC A, to not lodge the EPC instead come back and discuss what would be needed to achieve an A. It came back with an A94 which I was happy with.

One issue I see is there might be a "warm up time"? If the heater is only a few kW then first time you turn it on, the shower temperature will be low as the waste temperature is low. Once warm waste water starts to reach the unit the flow temperature will warm up, but would there be an issue with a tiled shower where the waste water would initially be cooled by the cold tiles and may be a slow warm up time? Happy to hear how it works in practice. It sounds a good idea but only of interest to new builds or a serious bathroom refit. The biggest market would just be to replace existing electric showers, but the piping for the waste means that is not possible. How do you deal with access for servicing the unit? It seems like it needs to be under a floor with an access hatch to reach it. That might work with a carpeted landing next to a bathroom where you could fold back the carpet to get to a hatch?

In what way is your heater more efficient than others, how does it heat the water?

No problem at all, standard practice when wiring industrial cabinets.

I am electric only and remained on the variable tariff. The only fix they have offered me for a couple of years would have only been a tiny saving and as we keep hearing the price cap will fall over the summer, it was unlikely the fix would save money.

Voltage drop is going to be your issue. Voltage drop for 10mm is 4.7mV / Amp / Metre So at 16A and 60 metres that's 4.5V drop. That is per core, so total volt drop = 9V That mainifests itself as voltage rise when the inverter is generating. Most inverters will shut down or power limit at 253 volts. So with that much volt rise, if your house voltage exceeds 244V your inverter is likely to either shut down or reduce power. I would first measure your typical mains voltage and see how close you are . With long runs it is better to do a large part of the run in DC cables with the inverter close to the house. Volt drop on the dc side does not usually cause any issues.

What does this "4 pipe" system do to improve efficiency? My ASHP is only 2 pipe (as I think they all are) and it only ever does DHW or Heating (with priority DHW) and runs both at different temperatures. It can be plumbed with a 3 port 2 position valve (not mid position) or as I have, with individual 2 port valves. The only disadvantage of the 2 pipe I can see is when it switched from DHW to heating, there can be a slug of water in the pipe at DHW temperature sent to the UFH (but the mixing valve on the manifold stops that being a problem) I fail to see what magic improvement a 4 pipe system can bring and why a heat only 2 pipe boiler cannot be set up to only do DHW or heating with priority DHW. That is more how you wire the controls than how you plumb it (as long as you avoid using a 3 port mid position valve)

I would at least try to get permission for another gable end window like the one in the master bedroom. Tell them it ia a building regulations requirement. If they say no,take it to appeal on the same grounds.

In an ideal world, you would have those valves (supplied with the manifold) as in the top picture, AND another set of valves, installer supplied under the pump. Then if you need to change the pump you can turn them all off and swap the pump with almost no loss of water and minimal bleeding. Operation should not differ between the 2 options.

The reason we didn't do that is 2 coats of Osmo oil each side a day apart and 2 days to dry before you can turn the door over to do the other side = a week per door. You either need a lot of space and a lot of tressles (which we didn't have) or a lot of time to do them sequentially. Obviously painting them flat means no chance of drips.

Get a 32A commando socket fitted in your temporary power box and plug it into that.

We did ours after hanging. We used Osmo door oil.

That was my original design bodge, when I realised my LG ASHP had no "correct" way to turn HW on and off from an external device.

Yes, definitely fell the trees you want gone ASAP in one go as quick as you can. You don't want someone slapping a TPO on them if they get a hint you want to build, so don't give any warning, just turn up one day with a chainsaw(s) and get felling.

L shaped bracket, screwed to the newel post, handrail sits down onto it and you screw into the bottom of the handrail through the bracket. You will need to rebate the end of the handrail to accommodate the thickness of the bracket. I would do that anyway, I would not want a screw head through the newel post to plug or otherwise hide.

Clearly prices are higher on Skye than here. A couple on min wage would earn £43347 and a mortgage 3 times that gets them £130K then add a 10% deposit gets them to £144K they can spend on a house. Plug that into a search on hspc.co.uk and I counted at least 50 properties they could buy. That is way easier than when I bought my first house down south, where even earning considerably more that a basic wage, I had to borrow a higher salary multiple with a higher deposit and I struggled to find anything and I literally bought the cheapest property for sale in the county, and then struggled to pay for it for the first couple of years. There are not loads more small cheap houses for sale, because it is impossible to build them cheap enough. I don't think planning is an issue, as long as you propose building within an existing settlement, it seems quite easy to get planning here even in the countryside.

I don't know what OS you have, but if you save the file just about any file manager will show you the file size, unless you have everything set to just show you a little icon of the picture rather than proper details.