ProDave

That looks like a kitchen design error. There is a reason most people don't put cupboards above a sink. Even without the tap, you would get steam from a bowl of normal hat washing up water.

Please tell me the electrician did not charge you £800 just to connect the electric boiler?

It's good practice to have an obvious local switch to isolate it for maintenance. This will be on it's own circuit so the rcbo is all the "fusing" in needs. Don't try turning it on until he has fitted the correct switch.

The thing that still staggers me, is the housing market takes almost no account of the quality or performance of a house. By that I mean people pay just as much for an old leaky house with a dreadful EPC as they do for a better more modern house, and then when they move in complain at the heating cost. I have said for a long time, I would not want to own a house with an EPC worse than C. But I have no intention of moving from here. Having built our present house it would be almost impossible to move to anything comparable, apart from of course doing another self build.

IF there are 2 cables one would need to be large for the heaters. Post some pictures when you are home.

Show us a picture of what he has done. Some electric boilers want 2 feeds, a high rating one for the heating elements and a lower one for the controls.

I like natural noises. I love having the bedroom windows open in the summer so I can hear the trickle of the water in the burn, the owls hooting and other wildlife etc. But the very low level hum of the central heating water circulating pump really irritates me as does traffic noise. Yes ASHP's make noise. But the noise is outside your house. Most of the time you need the ASHP to work is in the winter when it is cold, and your windows are shut. But the same people that complain about an ASHP being noisy are usually happy to have an oil boiler roaring away INSIDE your house where you can hear it. Or even a gas boiler. I have a relatives house where the gas boiler is close to the living room and all evening you can hear the thing whining away, varying in speed as it modulated it's output. Give me an outside ASHP inaudible from inside the house any day. At one point early in the build I had considered a GSHP. That was until I installed one for a customer. Why would I want a heat pump sized compressor INSIDE my house where I can hear it? much better outside. Same goes for a split ASHP, monoblock with all the noisy bits outside is much better.

My take is we have to do what we reasonably can. That is somewhere between the environmentalists that think we can all stop burning oil tomorrow and we only carry on doing so because we like doing so, and those that think it is all a load of nonsense. If for no other reason than we can't just go on burning oil because it will run out. so lets be sensible and transition to renewable energy as quickly as we reasonably can. What continues to bug me is WHY such high figures keep coming up for fitting heat pumps? Yes if you have to completely change your heating system then costs can add up, but as a self builder building a new house, whatever system I fitted i wanted under floor heating and a hot water tank. So it was literally choose an oil boiler and an oil tank (no gas here) or an ASHP. There really was no additional cost, in fact I think my ASHP cost less than an oil boiler and tank would have done. With the grants for ASHP's at the moment I see exactly what happened with solar PV and the FIT. Installed prices to customers were inflated to it was largely the installers benefiting from grant not the customer. When the FIT was scrapped, solar PV prices fell, and without the MCS cartel being mandatory, anyone could fit them. There should be no ifs no buts, oil and gas boilers should be banned from new builds now. As i have shown, there really is no price penalty to pay for an ASHP in a new build, so there should be no need for any form of grant. Just write it into building regs, no fossil fuel boilers.

I am sure I raised this before. All we hear are politicians complaining about the 400 job losses if Grangemouth closes as a refinery. I have not heard one raise an energy security issue with it's closure.

Start by finding out what competent person scheme the electrician is registered with. Are the electrics complete or is this ongoing work?

When we built the last house, we wanted a side by side Fridge Freezer. We bought one as a package from the kitchen company. When it arrived and we started fitting the kitchen there was a problem. The FF was too deep. In spite of even saying on the box "fits a standard 600mm deep unit" it did not, it was more like 700mm deep plus the thickness of the doors. The solution was the kitchen company supplied the additional extra wide gable end panels to space a few of the kitchen units further out from the wall.

Even more simple what was the rated power output of the GSHP? that has been working well so an ASHP with the same power output would be a good starting point.

Pictures(s) if the manifolds, pumps, valves and any other controls please.

So when he turned the temperature down you got flow. It sounds to me like a problem with the temperature blending valve then. When it reaches the correct temperature it should stop drawing hot water from the boiler and instead just circulate the water in the loops until it cools down a bit, when it will then let a bit more hot in from the boiler. I would be changing the blending valve as my next step. Surprised none of them has suggested that.

No 1 thing to do is take all the actuator heads off the bottom manifold, keeping a note which one went where so they can all go back in the right order. Do you get any water flow in the gauges? (they measure water flow rate, not pressure) Let us know the result of that. Did any of the plumbers try that?

Re roof pitch. 45 degrees any day. It just makes everything so much easier. Only consider something less if you have a strict planning height restriction.

Our kitchen is about 5 metres by 7 metres, so a little smaller than that. It makes a good kitchen / diner but although it does have a sofa and a tv in there, it is cramped as a living room, and I would not want to be without our separate living room as well.

Play the fireplace video on an old Plasma tv. Radiant heat included.

I remember as a boy my dad doing some work under the floor and installing a black alcathene pipe to "replace the lead pipe" That was about 40 years or more ago and as far as I know the black pipe was never connected and the lead is still in use.

The black could well be imperial. What I was getting at with the brass tee, is can you undo whatever is screwed onto the tee? and then find a fitting that will go from that to the blue mdpe? Best wait until the new year when the merchants are open again, you have managed the leak well enough for now.

Is that tee in the black pipe a brass compression fitting?

It sounds like you have a "plasterboard tent" The name given dot and dab plasterboard installed badly so the edges are often open to cold areas like under floor, lofts etc that let cold air get in between the walls and the plasterboard, largely negating the insulation in the walls. One of the plasterers will advise but as a minimum you need to seal all the edges of the rooms which will probably be quite destructive. The lack of floor insulation to do it properly means lifting the floor room by room to expose the bare joists and insulate properly before replacing the flooring.

That is stretching the imagination a bit isn't it?

Just using surplus wind generation that cannot be otherwise used, makes sense. But that is not what is being proposed here as far as I can see.

This scheme is going through planning near us. https://www.cromartyhydrogenproject.co.uk/ It is an "electrolyser" plant to be build close to one of the wind farms near us. So it will take electricity from the windfarm and electrolyse that to produce "green hydrogen". So dig down and find some more details. The water will be conveyed from a pumping station at a water treatment works about 20 miles away. So that will be potable or near potable water pumped nearly 20 miles and about 400 metres up. The hydrogen produced will be taken by road transport to a number of distilleries to "decarbonose their energy supply" My thoughts: This wind farm does not have "surplus" generation, everything it generates goes to the grid. Anything taken from the wind farm for the electrolyser just means less goes to the grid for general use, which in the real world results in more fossil fuel used to generate the "lost" electricity. The water to electrolyse needs to be pumped there, So that is energy use I bet they have not thoroughly accounted for. I hope the trucks transporting the hydrogen are themselves powered by hydrogen. But the final thought, would it not just be simpler for the distilleries just to use electricity for their production? I refuse to believe electrolysing water to make hydrogen, then transporting that hydrogen by truck to then burn it can produce more power to the end use process than just using electricity from the grid. If ever there was a case of "greenwash" this has to be it? If schemes like this that are at best "creative" with the facts are allowed to proceed then we are all being conned that they are "solving" the problem.