ProDave

Get a set of screw extractors, drill an appropriate small hole in the screw for the screw extractor to engage into. Drill a pilot hole in the MDF for the rest of them so the screw goes in without too much effort. Throw away the rubbish screws supplied with the hinges and buy better ones.

Lots of glazing says risk of over heating, so choose ASHP and you can have cooling as well. AND fit solar PV which is an ASHP's best friend. It will do more good for you with an ASHP than it would for a gas boiler. You might be limited by your DNO how much you can have, 7KkW is good, you you are not guaranteed to be allowed that. Heat pumps are not new technology. They might be new to the rather backward UK population. Have a serious look at just getting your electrician and plumber to fir the ASHP rather than paying £££ for a "specialist" company. Lots here with appropriate skills have self installed them with good results.

Seen something equally uninviting at a customers house, where upon I decided I did not really need a pee and I would finish the job quicker and scarper.

Can you start by posting a picture of your supply and meter where they are at the moment, and then some plans showing where is is now and where you want it to end up.

Always a satisfying moment to get that bit of paper. well done. Now you can "finish" (if you get my drift)

NO You only have to look at Harled (rendered) Scottish houses in exposed locations. When you get driving rain, it is clear to see the render colour on the wall darkening as it absorbs rain, and then takes days or even weeks to dry out again. This problem shows itself clearly on rendered garden walls where they get cold, freeze and crack and the render and it falls off in lumps. A rendered wall here is lucky to last 2 winters. This does not happen on rendered houses, because there is always just enough heat escaping through the wall to prevent the wet render from freezing. (though my findings with my new house are that may become a problem when walls are really well insulated)

Can you explain the short walls more? Are these essentially the top of the outside walls of the house with the roof sitting on top of them? Or does the roof slope right down to floor level and these are partition walls with a triangle corner of loft space behind them? Could it be the blown in celulous has slumped, or was never filled completely so there are voids at the top. Overall I don't think it looks bad.

Reading that datasheet in the link above, it shows a graph showing how much heat pump and how much gas it uses vc outdoor temperature. Below 0 it uses all gas. If you fudged it and tried to use it without the gas boiler, I expect your first issue is with an outdoor temperature less than 0, it would refuse to work as a heat pump. I would buy the right thing, a proper monoblock heat pump described as that with no mention of hybrid.

Do you have a link to the ebay item?

Having the water flowing too fast won't make the floor heat any less well. You need an automatic bypass valve at the far end of the flow / return loop to ensure water always flows even with one or more of the loops shut down.

Ouch. 750W of "wasted" (not contributing to the heating) power all the time the heating is on. Many on here say run a heat pump at a low temperature 24/7. That would be 18kWh "wasted" so I would not suggest that. This is a hidden "cost" when people say a GSHP is more eficcient than an ASHP. So a start to solving this high usage might be to increase the radiator temperature and run the heating for shorter periods? Also forget zoning, all on or all off. Zoning may keep the system running just to get a last bit of heat into the cold room. So better run it all on or all off and balance the system to even out temperatures.

I believe it is just to distribute the liquid. Our problem was lack of area for an infiltration field, and high water table. The high water table could be dealt with by a raised filter mound or something like the Puraflo system above ground, but whatever you did we still needed that area of ground. Our resolution was SEPA agreed to discharge into the burn, something they don't do automatically but seem to need convincing there is no alternative. The silly part about that was we could have had enough land for an infiltration field except for the fact that can;t be closer than 10 metres into the burn. So instead of having an infiltration field that went very close to the burn, not allowed, it all goes directly into the burn. I never could understand that logic.

Which village are you in? that looks very familliar but I can't quite place it. A previous house was in a low lying river valley and suffered like that, though out house was on a local hump so never got wet.

That is an awful lot of money to avoid running a low power air blower pump. The "no percolation area" claim is probably misleading. That is why we tried for the Puraflow system and exactly the reason building control rejected it, insufficient percolation area.

Can you post a link? Google just comes up with portable solar panels for me. I tried getting a Puraflow filtration system as a solution for our plot but building control rejected it. We ended up with a perfectly normal air blower type treatment plant discharging to the burn.

Walls first. Leave a gap at the bottom a bit wider than the flooring you expect to lay. Skirting board was invented to cover the gap between the bottom of the wall and the floor.

Look at other threads, Most "installed" prices seem to be inflated to harvest the grant for the benefit of the installer. If you just buy an ASHP and then pay an ordinary plumber and electrician to install it you will get it fitted for under £5K

Just put salt down. Any idea of using electricity to melt the ice when we are trying to reduce our fuel usage is just completely bonkers.

We often criticise the large builders for building cheap shoddy houses (I am not at all saying this happened with this builder) but even with the economy of scale is shows it is hard for a large builder to be profitable.

What is wrong with a convector heater with a simple heating element, a timer and thermostat built in. I took a major dislike to "posh" electric heaters when the wonderful EU introduced "LOT20" intending to make electric heaters more efficient by enforcing electronic controls. The first one I installed, I removed a week later, as the customer just could not understand the controls, and it kept shutting down with a message "window open detected" What a load of rubbish.

Daytime high of -2 today, forecast -8 tonight. Stove burning nicely. I collected a load of firewood in the Landrover last weekend and going back for more this weekend. This will be for next year or more likely the year after. Chainsaw was busy Saturday afternoon.

Are you sure it was not YOU that took a year to get used to the building? I have relatives in an old stone farmhouse and when you first go there you notice the damp smell as you enter and the general damp feeling. After a week or 2 there, you stop noticing both of those things.

But what if it is in a rental property and every time the tenant switches it off the program settings are lost? When there is no need to turn it off because it is remote controlled by some smart device?

Another thought. How many properties does that serve and who owns it? It might be better to do any works needed right at the top and share the costs?

It is my opinion that the market should value houses with a poor EPC lower than those with a good EPC to reflect the higher running costs or the future upgrade costs. Which is why at the moment I don't wish to own such a property as I don't want to be the one suffering the drop in value when the market wakes up to reality.