ProDave

11KV overhead lines right over the building. I am not sure you are allowed to build under them now so that might scupper the extension plans.

@ToughButterCup Will give you the low down on this.

That does sound like you have helped create your own problem. This is just like our previous house, planners dictated both plots take access from the same service layby. As both plots were under the same ownership when outline planning was granted, when they were sold, the area forming the shared layby was sold as jointly owned by the 2 plots. It never presented any problem.

So did you buy the lay by space from someone else to achieve that requirement?

That is a very unusual boundary line for you to own the layby space? What is your concern as long as the addition to the layby us properly surfaced?

Build a PD shed with PV on the roof. When I did my planning for the house, it was a last minute addition. Just a square outline on the site layout plan "Ground mounted solar PV" NO details at all. Nobody ever checked or asked for any details.

Generally unfenced green verges withing 3 metres of the road are classed as the highway.

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.