ProDave

I have just about finished my balcony, but the weather is not nice enough to sit out there now. If you want a cantilevered design as shown you have to design that in right from the start, no option to add the cantilevered support beams afterwards. A lot cheaper and simpler if you are prepared to accept 2 support legs.

Move the bath towards the tap end so the there is no gap there. That is where the shower is and most of the water. This will make the gap bigger at the foot end and you will have to fill / bridge the gap somehow, but there will be very much less water there. That's the best you will do without fixing it properly as advised above.

Me too. Perhaps that is a Scottish thing? I had a planning condition that the road access onto the site must be formed before any other work commenced (presumably to avoid vehicles parking on the road) and I had to notify the planners when we started. So I notified them when I had started building the site access and they replied in writing saying the development had commenced. That on it's own would have locked in the planning permission.

Just to be clear, I do think we should be reducing use of fossil fuels and moving to truly green renewable energy. I just don't think the present panic mode adoption is quite the way to do it. Policies implemented in haste in panic are rarely the best policies. I would like to see the panic taken out of the present approach and move in a steady and well planned way towards reducing fossil fuel usage. The dash to outlaw FF cars and FF home heating is the low hanging easy fruit, but they are trying to make it happen faster than the grid infrastructure can be upgraded and faster than we can build the renewable generation so a lot of what people think is "green" when they drive their new EV's and turn on their new ASHP's will still be coming from fossil fuels. People are being hoodwinked. And the switch to electric heating for older houses is probably going to be ignoring the real issue, the abysmal lack of insulation and air tightness.

From that: "The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s, and those of you who have heard of the runaway hothouse Earth scenario may wonder why it didn’t happen then. Major factors were that the Sun was cooler, and the planet’s orbital cycles were different." So we didn't get a thermal runaway last time CO2 levels were way higher because in the intervening time the sun has got hotter and the planets orbital cycle was different. Yet we continue to blame the plants problems on mans activity, not the fact the sun has got hotter and the planets orbit has changed. If that is not selective use of data to probe the MMGW point I don't know what is.

Interesting. When I was going through planning for the house and discussing finer details with the planning officer, it was her that said an ASHP is not PD unless you can meet the 100 metre rule and told me to add it to the planning application. Of course one does not question that a planning officer has got it wrong so I dod not check.

In Scotland the PD planning rules for ASHP's are different, it has to be something like 100 metres from a neighbours boundary to be PD which few would be able to achieve. I was originally planning a GSPH (which are PD) but changed my mind in time to get it added on to the planning application for the house and it was not questioned.

Take a look at this well presented scientific presentation. If you are short on time start at 5 minutes 30 seconds. It shows there are a number of cycles that affect global temperatures all of different periods and when all the cycle peaks coincide we get a warm period and when all the cycle minimums coincide we get an ice age. That data shows all the cycles have just peaked, we are presently at the maximum of a warm period and temperatures are set to decline from now on for 50 years or so. I look forward to well presented arguments why this is not the case. (gets tin hat on for incoming)

Leave it for the professionals, you are building a basement and it is serious engineering.

Simplest way would be on a day you know it is going to be sunny all day, manually turn the boiler off. Or have a summer boiler program, that turns the boiler off during the daytime. This is what I am trialling at the moment, we still need some heating (average about 5 degrees outside today!!!!) so I only have the heating timed to come on for a few hours around mid day when it is likely there might be some good PV generation to power most of the ASHP demand.

Has anyone done a G98 or G99 application recently? The rules were supposed to change about now so most cases the customer does not have to pay for any necessary network upgrades.

Probably not what you want to hear, but before tiling the walls should have been built out so there was NOT that great big gap. I had trouble with "porous" tiles in a previous house (I did not know when I bought them they were porous) that soaked up water around the edges and soaked right through the tile eventually they just fell off and got replaced with something non porous.

Yup I will stop complaining. I was offered a 12KVA single phase supply, expecting a 40A fuse, but I got the same cable size as any other supply and a 100A fuse, so the 12KVA means nothing. If you are worried about earth currents, put a clamp meter on the earth to see if anything is actually flowing that way. At least you have got a circuit breaker, I hear stories from places like Spain where it is a small fuse and you get your diversity wrong and you are off until the supplier comes and replaces it.

Anyone could do the water plumbing of a gas CH system then the gas safe engineer comes along connects the gas, signs it off and everyone is happy. A bit like mu UVC The G3 plumber just made the final water connection checked it all and signed it.

Glad to hear that, thanks.

This is nothing new. Electricians are the same. A large company only needs 1 person registered with a competent persons scheme to sign off the work, the people actually doing it could be a trained monkey. Does the same apply to gas safe or does every individual fitter need to be registered?

I wouldn't like to give an accurate answer as I don't know your local regs, but if the supplier provides a TNC-S earth I would use that and perhaps add your own earth rod as well, what we know here and PME Protective Multiple Earthing. And we complain at low power supplies, you have available just 10A per phase. Is that really regulated by 10A fuses? What a lousy offering (sorry)

I would say you need a plumber AND an electrician, and the electrician in particular needs to be familliar with UFH. There are some people with the skills to do both, I know at least one on this forum I would trust to do both but most plumbers would not know how to connect the electrics.

I was recently at a 2 year old "new" build by one of the bigger developers here. The owner was preparing it to sell up and move on. She bought it as a new house expecting it to be well insulated and cheap to run. It managed an EPC of B something. The reality was it was heated with an electric boiler driving radiators running on peak rate electricity, her heating bills far exceeded her expectations (and of course would be 3 times as much as if they had fitted an ASHP). It had 2, yes 2 PV panels and a 1kW inverter, no doubt only fitted to get the few extra SAP points to scrape through.

Make the thermostat on the wall in a guest room a dummy, and a hidden temperature probe for a real remote thermostat.

Our previous house has oil fired heating with UFH upstairs and downstairs, individual room thermostats. On more than one occasion in the morning we found a guest room thermostat turned up to 30 degrees, and the window wide open because the room was too hot. My conclusions: They turned the thermostat up a bit, nothing instantly happened so they turned it up higher. WHY do people think turning the thermostat higher will increase the rate of heat going into the room? Are they really either thick? Or too intelligent and believe the heat input may actually be proportional to the difference between actual and set temperature? Later in the night when they started to get too hot, they had clearly lost all confidence in the thermostat, so rather than turn it down, they opened the window.

The 21st Century slum clearance project. Who is going to fund it? Particularly in many cities there are a lot of old rubbish houses with big gardens, and rebuilding whole areas with slightly smaller gardens would fit more in. All I can say is I would not want to be owning one such old leaky uninsulated house right now and I certainly would not buy one unless it was very cheap.

Which is why fitting an ASHP but keeping the original radiators is going to under perform. Yes reducing the temperature in radiators when possible by WC will improve that, but is a sticking plaster compared to doing the job properly and heating by UFH with sub 40C water all year. That is the issue, we are trying to do half a job here, not properly upgrade the old properties.

To add to that my experiences. We had built our first self build 20 years ago now a 5 bedroom house that we had run as a B&B we wanted to downsize towards retirement. Hoping to release some capital in that process. We were lucky to be able to purchase a plot 100 metres from our old house so it was then a no brainer to self build our new house. this time we wanted much better insulation, air tightness etc and lower heating bills etc. As it happens the new smaller house was 150 square metres compared to 190 for the old house so not that much smaller. We hit financial problems right at the start, with the old house not selling and the prospect of having to drop the price to get a sale, there was the real danger of the new smaller house costing more to build than the sale price of the old bigger house and paying to downsize was intolerable. Plans changed to let the old house, and complete the build almost 100% DIY which turned into a 6 year "build as you earn" financed mostly from the rental income from the old house. Not sure what I am saying here other than for self build you have to really want to do it, and be flexible to adjust to circumstances that WILL change as the build progresses. Very happy with the results, but it took a lot longer and was a lot more work than originally planned. The financial outcome will ultimately be positive, but in our case only because of all the rental income, and the resultant delay in selling the old house to it has increased in value.

The problem with "doing things right" i.e properly balancing UFH loop flow rates so individual room thermostats are not needed, and properly set up weather compensation, is they take time to get right. That's fine for self builders who are prepared to learn now to set up their particular system and take the time to get it to work correctly in practice. But if you are expecting an installer to do all that, get it right first time, or keep coming back to adjust things until it is right, that is just going to add £00's to the cost, and at the same time disappoint the customer "he had to return 5 times to adjust things before he got it working properly" sort of comments. So for the mass market boiler replacement customers individual room thermostats, and no or basic weather compensation is the best you will do.