ProDave

I find a 10kW shower woefully inadequate, that is based on showering with an electric instant electric shower, and the 10kW instant gas water heater we had in the static caravan. So I would guess for a proper decent shower you are looking at 25kW or more? I think the 10kW shower was rated at less than 5 litres per minute. I can get almost 15 litres per minute from an UVC fed shower.

Try as an alternative, get your image on the screen of your computer and take a screen shot and save it, then post that here. What does your file manager say about the size of the image you tried posting that came out tiny?

I just used a simple emitter follower to connect an I/O pin of the Arduino to a 5V solid state relay.

Why is it inefficient? The boiler would be working hard to re heat the tank as quick as it can, not short cycling and would shut off as soon as the tank reaches temperature. Yes the more times it does that it has to re heat the water within it and the water in the connecting pipes but that is a small volume. Mut unike room thermostats, a tank thermostat usually has quite a large hysteresis, so it would not be firing up to re heat just because the tank has lost 1 degree of water temperature.

Some random thoughts from how I see it, yes as an "incomer" House prices here are too cheap. That is to say is is almost impossible to buy a plot, build a house and then sell it for what it has cost. e.g what we eventually sold our 5 bedroom house for was not a lot more than it cost to build our new 3 bedroom house, and if we had persisted with selling it 8 years ago when the market was moribund we would probably have needed to drop the price to the point the 5 bedroom house would have sold for less than the build cost of the new 3 bedroom house. While we could sell our 3 bedroom house now for a little over the build cost, we would then not be able to build another 3 bedroom house for that money as material costs have gone up so much. Coming from the south, it is laughable to hear the talk here of "affordable housing" There are plenty of houses at the lower end of the market that a couple on minimum wage should be able to buy comfortably. It is not house prices or affordability that drive youngsters to the city. They simply find rural life too boring. I don't think it will be long before our daughter leaves home and the city is where she wants to be. I am completely the opposite, having been brought up as a child in a city, I could not wait to get out to the countryside and have no desire to go back. I don't know how you solve that one. IF we did go ahead with this holiday let plan, and at the moment it is looking very unlikely, we would be wanting to employ the services of somebody local to look after it. I still don't know if that would be something easy to find or it we would be shunned and nobody would be interested? It is the burden of regulations that is putting me off mostly, and threat (likelyhood) of more like "tourist tax" that worries me. But also the property market is very skewed here, almost compressed. Having just sold a 5 bedroom house we would like to have bought a 2 bedroom house for a lot less, but what I am finding is the one we are considering is only 1 bedroom, and on the market for half what we got for the 5 bedroom house. That to me is just way too much.

Which is why a short pipe from the well head to a close by power station makes sense rather than a massive, distribution network to individual homes.

Normally an UVC will start off full of hot water heated to the set temperature. As it is used, a hot / cold transition moves up the tank. If no more heat was added, you would get almost the same temperature of water coming out of the taps right up to the point where the hot / cold transition reaches the top of the tank and the water would suddenly go very cold. If the cylinder thermostat was say half way up, then at the point the transition reaches the thermostat the boiler would fire up. At that point the heat input to the tank would stir up convection within the tank and continue to do so while it is heating. With the heat source being a big boiler, it can probably re heat the tank as fast as you can empty it.

Please explain why you don't want to leave the hot water on all day letting the thermostat top it up when needed. Not wanting to do that is forcing you to devise a complicated strategy to measure when an unusual amount of heat has been extracted from the cylinder when the tank thermostat will do just that, if the heating were on to allow it.

I think you have to serve notice on City Fibre to remove their equipment from your land as it was put there without a wayleave or other permission to do so. you can't just take it down otherwise you may be liable for criminal damage to their cables. What sineage is on your Heras Fencing? i.e what rules have they broken by entering apart from trespass. Point out to them they will be answering a charge of criminal damage to your fencing and anything else they have damaged but you will not proceed with that charge if they remove their equipment swiftly.

What size pipe? If it is the semi flexible stuff from BPC that is used in a lot of radial systems I have some left over. It is stored outside so will need a bit of a clean. You are welcome to some next time you are heading down this way.

Yes, which is regarded as bad for the environment. So before rushing to burn this new massive reserve of hydrogen, would it not be a good idea to ensure this is not just going to be a different problem going forwards?

Clothes airer is a wonderful thing, position it just below an mvhr extract vent and it dries your clothes very quickly. All looking very good and in spite of being a tight fit, it all looks to be servicable.

I would at least start by making your present timed periods much longer, so you are sure the cylinder has reached set temperature. Personally I would leave the HW on all the time people are in the house. If you really really don't want to do that, then whenever someone takes a shower get into the habit og pressing the +1hour boost button on your programmer. Your recirculating water pipes will be losing far far more heat than the tank, and that is where your attention should be, e.g make the circulating pump only come on when hot water usage is likely, e.g by motion detectors in the bathrooms.

@Adsibob can you post a picture of your cylinder please. It SHOULD already have a thermostat, that is a safety requirement and part of G3 for an unvented cylinder to ensure it cannot overheat, so I don't see why you are only timing the boiler to come on for set periods. Have you actually tried leaving the hot water on all day and just letting the thermostat do it's job?

You missed my point. Ignore the fact I have an ASHP, that distracted you. Your boiler should be "on" all day in DHW mode and a cylinder thermostat will fire the boiler whenever the tank needs more heat.

While the burner of an oil boiler is only on or off, it is controlled by a thermostat that is setting the temperature of the water leaving the boiler. So if all UFH zones are open, the flow temperature will cool down quickly once the burner stops so it won't be long before the burner starts again. But if just one zone is open, the flow temperature declines slowly so it will be much longer before the burner comes on for it's next burts. Hence power delivered and oil usage is directly proportional to the heat delivered. In our old house we used to turn the heating on 2 hours before we normally got up so it was warm by the time we were up, and in the evening it turned off at least an hour before we went to bed. That worked well for us.

I hope one of the English members who are part P can come and comment. Unless things have changed, it is only new circuits or work in special locations. So if you have a power circuit feeding a sun amp, then altering that circuit to feed a different how water tank in a different location is not notifiable. Please someone correct me if that is not the case?

I am not the best person to comment on part P as it does not exist in Scotland. But my understanding is it only applies to new circuits, and work in special locations like bathrooms. So if you have an existing circuit feeding say an ASHP and you want to modify that by changing the fixed wiring, that is outwith the scope of Part P so just get on with it. My choice for power switching from a microcontroller (Arduino in my case) was a solid state relay. That has been hapilly pulsing mu thermostat for years.

The rest of us have a cylinder thermostat, and when that senses the water going cold the boiler ASHP fires up and re heats the cylinder. No need to put the boiler on for a timed period. The thermostat in in a pocket half way up the cylinder in our case. So when that senses the cylinder is "cold" you still have the best part of half a cylinder of hot water left.

A lot depends on the quality of the corner. Nice smooth crisp plastering with a perfectly smooth, straight transition = easy. Old knackered ceiling with lots of patched up cracks and a corner that if far from smooth and straight = very hard to get it looking right.

That looks at escape of hydrogen into the atmosphere. I was considering the burning of a long time captured reserve of hydrogen would result in removal of oxygen from the atmosphere as well as release of water vapour into the atmosphere. This is different to producing hydrogen as a means of "energy transportation" and then burning it. Both ends of the process pretty much cancel out. A bit like the burning of recently grown wood = good, burning very old stored wood (coal) = bad.

If the planners refused a porch saying it is too big and you say it needs to be that big to be accessible, then that would be good grounds for appeal. Perhaps just telling your planners that is what you will do if they refuse it, might make them reconsider?

It is definitely a requirement here. Outside underground pipes were tested when BC inspected them before filling the trenches. For the final test of the house pipes you plug it at the closest IC to the house, surely that won't be 8ft down? and you cap off any vent pipes. In the case ot a file vent you would uncouple the flexi connection and plug the top of the rigid pipe. I assume you have access to that in the loft. Then you should be able to pressurise it up to the depth of the lowest trap, in our case that was 80mm. Your "fun" starts if it won't pressurise as you would have absolutely no idea where the leak(s) is. If BC ask for this test pass their request to your builder / plumber who both should have known it would be required

I read the extra post if >3M as suggesting if you don't then the balustrade rail might snap if you apply a .36kN/m load at mid point without the extra post.

So total energy demand 25,265kWh per year, which currently at about 28.5p per kWh is an astonishing £7200 per year. What were you paying previously? I bet it is nothing like that. I would have ran a mile from that. How much are you actually using per month? And remember this will be in addition to your normal usage.