ProDave

Putting two different size cables in parallel may not work as expected. My question to the battery manufacturer (it might be in the specifications somewhere) is what does the maximum current carrying capacity of the cable need to be? Depending how the 4mm cable is installed, i.e is it in contact with insulation, encased by insulation in free air etc, could be anything between 22A and 37A

I would want to be taking a section of the slab up and replacing the lot in new plastic pipe. Including the run under the foundations. Then you can get it as you want in the place you want.

I did mine in 22mm but had issues with water flow rate which I solved by fitting a second circulating pump. I do have all my dad's old plumbing tools including his Hilmor pipe bender that has 15, 22 and 28mm formers, and (it is old) I still have the imperial formers for it. You could have just done straight runs and soldered elbows to avoid bending?

Can you clarify, are you talking about a split unit? If so who did the Fgas connections and charging? If a monoblock, what is this big indoor unit you talk about? A hot water tank? I did my own with a LG 5kW monoblock and found it easy from a plumbing point of view, with a Telford stainless heat pump hot water tank. The wiring a little harder as the unit lacked a few fundamental control inputs that I had to work around. Complicated - yes. the supplied control panel which is supposed to do all you want in terms of controling it and setting on / off times is WAY too complicated for the average person. I regard that as just a means to enter parameters and check for faults etc. For the "user" controls I grafted in a perfectly standard central heating programmer so you can set heating and hot water on off times using a standard interface just like if you were using a gas boiler. One of the BIG problems holding back installers, and in particular deterring present installers of boilers, is the electrical controls are way more complicated and so different from one manufacturer to another. What is needed is a simple standard like with a gas system boiler, "call for hot water" and "call for heat" are all that is needed and presented in a standard form like gas boilers. The Grant heat pumps are the only ones I have seen so far that achieve this. From a plumbing point of view, a heat pump is just like a system boiler. It heats water, just flow and return connections. That bit is easy.

Re caravans. Find your local dealer, there is a steady supply of second hand ones coming off holiday sites when they get too old. The advantage of buying from a dealer is they usually have several to look at and choose from and they have the transport to move them, usually included in the sale price. We paid £4K for ours, it was actually still on the holiday park when we viewed it, and we chose it for it's unusual layout with the living room in the centre and a bedroom at each end which suited our site well. So it came on their wagon straight from the holiday park to our site. You can buy privately but you have more work and travelling if you want to look at several, and you may find transport harder to arrange, our local dealer will only move 'vans they are selling or buying, they won't just move one privately sold. On our first build when we sold the 'van at the end, I think the closest transport company the buyer could find that would move it was somewhere around Elgin.

When you say stays on, you mean glows VERY dim and can only be seen when it is dark? If so capacitive coupling between adjacent L cores in a 3 core 2 way switching cable can cause this. This can sometimes be cured by reconfiguring the usage of the 2 way switching cables to put the switched L cores either side of the earth. Or fit a snubber in parallel with the light. Or just try different types of light bulb. If it is staying on at full brightness then you have a different fault.

Wet UFH downstairs here. Upstairs has wet UFH in the bathrooms just to stop the tiles feeling cold. I installed cable and back boxes to power a panel heater in each bedroom. Never got used, cable not connected either end, cost perhaps £20? I was only ever going to buy the heaters if we found they were needed, and they were not.

More pictures please of any other plumbing stuff near the UFH manifold. There is no sign of a pump or blending valve, so chances are it is circulating water far too hot through the UFH pipes. And there should be a motorised valve or 2 to switch between hot water and heating. As many pictures of all the plumbing bits please. And there should be an electrical box near the manifold follow the wires from the actuators on the top and post a picture of that. Initial assesment, the original installer didn't have a clue. You are going to probably have a steep learning curve or find someone that does understand such things to sort it out.

Good point, there is mention about starting current an mention the compressor may not start if too much cable resistance, suggesting it is not an inverter drive. More reason to reject it.

As long as you apply for the self build exemption before you put a spade in the ground. That bit is important.

I take it this plot of land does have some form of planning permissions? You probably want to resubmit planning for the house you want, and include on that temporary planning for a static caravan as accommodation while you build. You can buy a second hand static for not a lot of money. Many on here have been temporary caravan dwellers, including me (twice)

I tend to agree. The manual talks about tank temperature sensor and control of valves etc but then the wiring diagram does not show where they connect to. I would go ahead with your plan to return for a refund as "not as described" I would be tempted to connect power to it and power it up. It won't run for a whole host of reasons but I would be interested if the controller display matches what is shown in the manual.

Can you post pictures of ALL the PCB's inside the unit and all the connectors on them please to see if we can shed any more light on it. If you have an electronic copy of the manual can you post that as well please?

If you have bottled LPG you will find a very similar set of restrictions on where you are allowed to site the bottles in relation to drains, air bricks, or other openings, opening windows and doors etc. For all the same reasons, to prevent escaping gas entering the building.

That looks to be a capacitor in the output circuit of a switching power supply. By the time it gets that bad, it has usually blown something else, but if you have a soldering iron and feel lucky you could try replacing the light blue one with the top split open. That £35 one is a "refurbished" used one. It has a 12 month warranty, but if I bought that I would look at the soldering of the electrolytic capacitors and any that had not been replaced already I would replace with good quality replacements.

It does seem to me a little odd to actually have the ASHP control a hot water recirculation pump. Most people wire that independent of the heating system with timers, sensors, etc which is a whole other topic how you want it to run. It might just be simpler to do that?

No, I am not aware of any domestic accessories that need ferules. That is mainly for terminating stranded cable.

Are you sure those options don't refer to a split system (unit and outdoor unit) where I think you have a monoblock? Check the obvious first, is power to the pump being turned on? any errors showing on the controller? And the vital question, is this a newly installed system and the pump has never worked, or did the pump previously work and has stopped working?

Fit MORE insulation under the ground floor slab, a lot more. 300mm is probably a good target to aim for. And wider cavity with more insulation in them. You build a house once and get one chance to do it right. You will never get the chance to improve it later and will probably regret not doing it right. You are aiming to get the heat input down as low as possible. UFH should then work fine. If you do it really well like many of us have the house ends up so well insulated you don't need any heating at all upstairs, but fit upstairs UFH unless you are really certain of that and really determined to detail it properly. Do it properly and many of us are heating a house that size with a 5kW ASHP. If you are doing this properly, you get a Design SAP done which will tell you all that. It is a requirement for building regs in Scotland, but so few people seem to get it done down south that I suspect it is optional? It is not so much the design on paper that lets a building down, but unless you are detailing everything yourself, or have a really trusted contractor who actually understands low energy houses, then a typical house gets let down by poor details, e.g badly fitted insulation so cold air can bypass some of the insulation, and poor details at junctions. If you are having a cold loft then the details of how to insulate and air tight seal the upstairs ceiling is one of the major details that is often done poorly. And I know you are only asking about heating, but don't block your downstairs hallway. You WILL get fed up having to go through the kitchem / diner to get to the back. Scrap those cupboards and have a hall you can walk through front to back.

Don't waste money on 1.5mm, totally unnecessary. Use 1mm 3 core & earth and the terminals are large enough for three of those.

Tell them you meet their space requirements. Then the guy on the ground that comes to do it won't care and will fit it into the space you have available.

I see. R290 is a posh name for Propane gas. Propane is heavier than air so they don't want a leak filling up drains, getting into buildings etc. Is is possible to swap to an ASHP using something other than R290?

And then the councils and the government wonder why landlords are quitting that business and there is a shortage of rental properties and rents are rising. Just the latest in a long line of "changes" chipping away at the viability and desirability of being a landlord. Milk the cash cow too hard and the cow goes away.

But if you rotate it 90 degrees from how it is shown with the front in line with the house I bet it will meet the 1 metre from the door opening. They draw ambient air in the back and cooled air gets expelled from the front, so site the front facing the road and the cold air will blow that way not towards your door. Alternatively, if they insist on that orientation, then surely the 1M would be measured in a straight line from the corner of the door opening, to the nearest corner of the ASHP. So how much further out from the building would it need to be for the front edge to be in line with the front of the wall and the 1M distance achieved. Cut a large piece of cardboard or plywood or whatever you have around to the size of the ASHP and go and try it on the ground.

Yes it is a mystery where all the water that is clearly there has been going all the years it has been blocked. Raising the water table in the field I would imagine to the point is appears as surface flooding then drains into the burn. As we have a dry day today, and it is still flowing nicely I decided to follow it with my divining rods. It does seem to go in a roughly straight line across the field for as far as I bothered to try following it roughly following a low point in the field, so it would make sense if it was originally installed as a land drain to dry that dip in the field. If so with a bit of luck that field will be less prone to flooding and less likely to flood into our garden again. Should i send the farmer a bill for restoring his land drain to operation?