ProDave

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.

I think the Grant Aerona that I wired just over a year ago has the right balance. Basically it has 2 call for heat inputs, one for DHW and one for heating, so each can be supplied at a different temperature. My own LG is at the other end of the complicated spectrum, it really makes itself hard to control by anything other than it's own very complicated and not intuitive control panel * and then requires a LOT of connections from the ASHP into the house to control things like individual motorised valves. And that is the problem, you need to read and understand the manual to work out how each particular system works. * I wanted my heating controlled by a standard central heating type time clock that everyone understands, so anyone can change the heating or hot water times, I had to get a little inventive, particularly with the hot water to achieve that with the LG. I guess companies like Octopus breaking into this market will only install 1 or perhaps 2 makes of heat pump and their installers will be familliar with them.

It was paused and then re allowed with just a few safeguards. I don't like the idea of anyone having their house forceably entered and a pre payment meter fitted any more than anyone else. All you can do is ENSURE you pay your bills on time and don't run up debt, so they have no reason to sniff about looking for an excuse to do anything like that. Of course not everyone has enough "float" in the bank to ensure all bills are paid on time.

In recent years I have concluded the whole "heating industry" in the UK is in pretty poor shape. I have given up counting how many heating systems I have worked on that have never been working properly since installation, the usual faults are original plumbing or wiring simply done wrong so the system is not shutting off when reaching desired temperature. I find heating controls pretty simple and logical, having spent my life working on "control systems" mostly for industrial machinery, the usual domestic heating controls are really down at the simple end of the spectrum. But it astounds me how many plumbers and even more so how many electricians have no basic understanding of the principles. They just wire them in a "painting by numbers" fashion, connect the cables from the valves and thermostats into the terminals marked for them in a standard wiring centre, job done. I think many of them never actually test that the controls are actually working properly, and if they did would not have a clue how to fault find and correct the problem. If so many installers cannot get the controls for a standard boiler install correct, then what hope of getting an ASHP install correct? The mass adoption of ASHP's does require a lot more installers who understand how the controls work, and how to test that they are working properly. Of course this is not helped by the fact that each make of ASHP has a completely different set of electrical controls and operating philosophy to the next one. Perhaps trying to get the manufacturers to standardise the electrical interface and make it more like a standard boiler controls input would help?

Octopus seem to be trying to break that mould by offering simple cheap ASHP installs. I await hearing from anyone who has had one fitted to see how successful that is. Hopefully this is the start of cheaper, simpler installs.

You can switch to them with an ordinary meter and they can't force you to upgrade change to a smart meter. Though of course without a smart meter you can only have the standard 1 rate tariff. Like any other supplier you have to ignore the pestering to fit a smart meter.

Looking good. I hope you don't mean plastered, but really mean rendered?

There is clearly a lack of joined up thinking. We have to get to net zero. Somehow. The current approach really only skims around the edges of the problem. Lets fit heat pumps in place of all fossil fuel boilers. That will do it. No matter that for a good many people that will mean more expensive heating. Oh they don't seem to be queuing up in sufficient numbers to pay £000's just so they can have more expensive heating. I wonder why that is? Assuming they all do choose to get an ASHP, just like electric cars, where is the green energy coming from to power them? We still burn a lot of fossil fuel to produce electricity. We need to make sure we add to the electricity demand less fast than it is being turned green. No point adding extra demand faster than we can build and commission wind turbines or nuclear power stations, otherwise each additional heat pump gets powered by additional probably gas fired power stations. Now which produces less CO2, a gas boiler burning in a house to heat it, or an ASHP powered by a gas fired power station? And we appear to be completely ignoring the elephant in the room, or rather in the walls, lack of insulation and air tightness. I don't have the solution and it seems nobody does, but unless there is a proper plan to upgrade the old housing stock, then we are not solving the problem, just kidding ourselves that we are. Having built and now living in a near passive standard house, heated by a small ASHP with low heating bills, this is what we should be aiming for already for every single new build, not just a few geeks that choose to do so, but still we are not demanding that of the mass market house builders. If we can't even get all new houses built NOW built properly m what hope is there ever to get all the old poor houses upgraded? It is a problem that needs to be solved in a way that everyone can manage, and like it would seem everyone else, I don't have a clue how we are going to manage it. I am just glad for once to be ahead of the curve with my own house.

Well as others say Octopus are a good supplier, PM me for a code if you want £50 credit when you switch. Octopus are listed as a FIT provider so try them for that as well? I am not switching as the FIT in question is on our old house which I hope we won't own for much longer.

Yes if you miss the "reading window" by 1 day you won't get anything that quarter. But you will get it in the next quarter as the reading won't go down again. I wonder what your energy supplier would say if you told them "I will get around to paying your bill some time within the next quarter"?

Driven in like piles? I would say no, by comparison that will be a better earth than any little rod would be.

My FIT has been switched from SSE to OVO and they are even slower at paying each quarters FIT than SSE were, and they were slow.

There is also a difference in OAT depending on how near the coast you are. Yes in Oxfordshire cold frosty nights were common when the wind was not blowing, and again in still conditions in summer it just got hotter and hotter. It was the summer heatwaves that I hated the most.

This last week when it has been sunny but the air not very warm (cold east wind off the cold North Sea) our sun room warms up nicely and we just open the doors to let the warmer air into the house. I did think about ducts and fans to automate this, but the sun room is outside the "air tight" envelope of the house and hence outside the scope of the MVHR system. So any such duct would kill the air tightness of the house.

Why is the dormer face only 100mm thick? Surely that won't contain enough insulation by modern standards. I would be asking your builder why is the wall plate so small?

This would really annoy me. I would be writing to the CEO of your old supplier asking him to explain this final "actual read" when several days later your photographed read is still lower. I would be making the point to him that this should not happen with smart meters as the supplier should get a reading every half hour from the meter so there should be no room for error. I totally detest the whole energy market we have at the moment, it appears despite regulation this sort if thing happens a lot. It just reinforces my view to choose a good supplier like Octopus and just stay with them. Even if I could switch supplier to save a few £ per year I would not consider it worth the risk of this sort of problem.