ProDave

Insulate the pipes between well, so the distant manifold stands a chance of getting the same temperature water as the first.

Put inlet and exhaust vents on the same wall, and on the downwind wall for your prevailing wind. In my case they are both on the east facing wall. Make the house as air tight as you can, you are obviously intending to if fitting mvhr. Then i don't think you will have a problem. Practical experience says on a windy day in an air tight house you can open 1 window or 1 door and you won't feel a draught entering or leaving. Not as exposed as you as not on top of a hill, but I am in a windy part of the country and no problems encountered.

If you are considering solar thermal (a one trick pony) you obviously are happy with something on the roof. So fit solar PV. It will power anything that is using electricity in the house and if there is more generation than use, it is easy to dump the surplus to water heating. Most of us that do that have very low water heating costs in the summer, and lower electricity bills. An ASHP then makes better sense as it is yet another easy way to use some of that self generated solar PV. My ASHP was an ebay purchase for under £1K but you can get new for about £3K upwards. No harder to fit, in fact I would say easier to fit that an oil boiler, no storage tank, no servicing and no volatile cost fuel. While I agree oil may be cheaper now, it is a very volatile price, so may not always be so.

You succeeded in one sentence to say why it is a good idea to change, where that entire page linked to failed to make the case other than "it's made in the EU"

It's a sales pitch to sell EU made heat pumps with EU sourced gasses. I see nothing technical in there to say WHY we should change. Heat pumps only let their F gas out if there is a leak. How often does that happen? any statistics? If they need a repair that requires degassing that is supposed to be done by an F gas engineer who will recover the gas, not vent it. I suspect most of the F gas emissions to atmosphere are illegal improper disposal of end of life refrigerators? Another whopping "fail" is car air conditioning. I was somewhat horrified when a previous car went for a timing belt change, something it needed every 5 years. When I got it back "oh your aircon will need re gassing". To get to the front of the engine to do the timing belt the water radiator and the aircon heat exchanger needed to come out so they just vented the gas.

Like others this is counter intuitive. 4 is a poor air test, I would be very disappointed and wanting to improve it. but if you want a cold draughty inefficient house that is your call. Get the air tester back, and instruct him NOT to tape up the vents, or peel off just enough of the tape he has put on to get the air test just over 5 and job done. If I was the BCO I would not accept you making the air test worse. I would expect you to be making the property better. I think all it needs is the fans swapping for the sort that have a low speed constant trickle running. Replacing those is likely going to cost less than another air test, so just do it.

Safe zones would work if people knew about them. Just about the only people I have ever met that know about them are electricians. Most other trades I meet including plumbers and joiners don't know about them. And because the general public don't know about them, you get the home owner who wants to hang a picture on the wall, but it is above a socket, so he gets the tape measure out to ensure the nail he puts in the wall lines up exactly with the middle of the socket lower down............

Then it is going to be a much bigger job to even find somewhere to connect the new socket, or some rewiring of what is there.

I used to work not far from Didcot next to the railway, and the coal waggons were a regular sight.

Thanks. Lets us know which solution you go with. And pictures of course.

A bathroom is not an apartment, it is an inner room. If the bathroom links to an apartment with a means of escape window (e.g. an en-suite), or directly to e.g the stairs then out, no escape window needed.

I thought sound insulation was a building regs requirement.

If it is one cable it will be a spur. How many cables connecting to the existing wall socket? What other sockets are nearby?

I think the thing "they" miss from this "good carbon because it has only just been captured" thing is we are NOT ever going to meet true zero. We will only ever, at a push, meet net zero if we can capture and long term store some CO2 from the atmosphere. So carbon capture is essential. So our waste vegetable oil that has been used for cooking, it has served it's purpose. So rather than waste a lot of energy processing it so we can burn it to release that CO2 again. Why not accept it is already a good source of captured carbon and pump it, untreated, into a disused worked out oil well? That is a damned good underground storage option where the carbon can be stored for a very very very long time. Instead we have this hair brained idea to burn it in the mistake belief it is carbon neutral, which then leaves someone else the problem of how can we capture and store some carbon so we can achieve net zero? The same goes for wood. Felling it, moving it halfway around the world and burning it on an industrial scale claiming it is neutral is bonkers. Fell it as it is needed to make something long lasting, like houses and the insulation for them. That would be another good and easy carbon capture means. Someone needs to challenge nonsense if we are going to stand a chance.

I would love to know the convoluted thinking that came up with that. They are obviously not suggesting that the actual burning of the fuel actually creates 1/10 the CO2 that burning the same quantity of fossil fuel diesel or kerosene does. So they must somehow be counting it as a boifuel and falling into the same old "The CO2 was only just removed from the atmosphere so it's carbon neutral to let it back" nonsense. If that is the logic then sorry but we are doomed. I just can't understand how people fall for that, other than if they don't actually care about the outcome, they just view it as an easy way to comply and claim to have reduces CO2.

I agree waste used cooking oil needs something to be done with it. If turning it into heating or transport fuel is an option, I don't disagree with that, it cuts down the disposal costs and we should always try and maximise the use of everything we use. My gripe is purely with the claim that using it thus produces less CO2 than if a fossil fuel had been burned.

My point is, whatever the fuel, it shoves CO2 up the chimney. Exactly what we are trying to stop doing. It's no good saying it's "good" CO2, the atmosphere cannot tell the difference. As long as "they" tell us this it good (must be the same they as behind DRAX) then you cannot blame people for taking up this sort of scheme, and they will be misguided into thinking they have "gone green" and don't need to bother insulating their homes of finding another heating source that does not emit CO2 (whether good or bad) To me it just shows that "they" either don't understand the issue, or they recognise we have a CO2 reduction target to achieve and this is indeed a way to bend the rules to say "we" have achieved the target. It does not inspire me with much confidence that anyone in charge actually has a clue about the problem.

Just seen an article on the BBC news, claiming a village in Cornwall has all converted to HVO, in other words recycled used cooking oil, instead of Kerosene, and claiming 80 to 90% reduction in CO2. Is this true? A damned lie? Or something else. HVO is still an oil, it would still burn much like Kerosene, so will it really reduce CO2 emissions? OR is it greenwash?

In the present climate sell the house and live on site, it may not be what you want to do, but you don't want to be stuck like we were with a part build house (basic shell) all money spent, and the old house would not sell in a dead housing market, not unless I gave away a 5 bedroom house for less money than the construction cost of the new 3 bedroom house (i.e pay to downsize)

Ask your BCO what height he wants is.

You don't give us a clue how old the house is and construction method. We can at least work out this wall is timber frame. If you have access to lift floorboards in the room above, then drop a new cable for the socket straight down from above. Otherwise down from the existing socket, out onto the surface of the wall below the worktop, along behind the units, back into the wall and up to the new socket. This is allowed as safe zones only relate to buried cables. The horizontal cable would indeed not be in a safe zone, but it would be on the surface of the wall. There may be many obstacles in the way which make that far from simple, you don't know until you try it. Some kitchen cabinets the back stops short of the worktop so you might be able to do it without removing the worktop. Always assuming the existing socket is part of a ring. If that is already a spur from somewhere then you can't join onto that for the new socket.

But at night, the islanded PV inverter would suddenly get connected to the grid for 7 hours. Would that upset it, even if it is not actually generating at that time? If you are going to do that, I would want a proper changeover relay to switch the storage heater CU between grid and inverter.

Neither wall looks to be a party wall. If yours (the right in the photo) was meant to be a party wall it would have aligned with the fence? And if it was a party wall they would be joining to it. But some hedgehog moss protector in the gutter to make the moss bounce off rather than go down the pipe.

Cross Laminated Timber.

Speaking from an electricians point of view, CLT was a right pain in the proverbial. I suspect the same was true for the plumber. But it may depend on what you are trying to achieve. The one I did, they used CLT for the structure and the finished wall surface inside. So that meant the structure was built, services were fitted so all socket positions set in stone wood, the wiring then went on the outside of the CLT which then got clad in insulation (routed out for the cables) and some form of exterior rain shield. It was more awkward to do, but above all what I did not like was the complete inflexibility to make ANY changes to the wiring. you have to get it right first time. Of course if your CLT is not remaining on show as the finished interior wall, and you have a normal service void none of that applies, but then I ask what does CLT give you that any other timber frame does not in that case?