ProDave

Great stuff. I love reading this sort of topic. I guess the next thing is try it on your real boiler. If it works you just have to set the Pi to send the required temperature each time you change from heating to hot water. Storage temperature might be some combi boilers keep a small store of hot water internally for faster response to a hot tap being turned on.

I bought my ASHP from a business seller on ebay. It sat in my part built house for 11 months until I finally installed it, only to find it did not work. I got it replaced, but it took a fight. What a damned good job it was only 11 months after the purchase before I installed it not 12+ months.

Heating "engineers" that UNDERSTAND any form of heating are in short supply. Most will wire a standard S plan or Y plan heating system with a standard boiler by connecting the wires according to their colour in a standard wiring centre from the standard drawings. If it then does not work, they are stumped. If there is just one thing a little out of the ordinary they are stumped. I have lost count of how many wrongly wired / not working heating systems I have found and had to correct. And none of them understand a 3 port mid position valve and know the symptoms if it has failed and the heating or hot water has stopped working.

The real "fault" is the bath design. A completely flat top. In a previous house we had a more styled bath, there was a slight raised edge right on the outside with the rest sloping down very slightly to the bath. Never had any problems because water naturally drained away from the edge and the shower screen seal therefore did not need to do much work.

Yes fit a Fused Connection Unit for the towel rail with a 3A fuse in it. And a switch outside the shower room to turn the towel rail on and off, then just a flex outlet plate inside the room to connect the towel rail heater. Re sealed system, you are supposed to leave an air gap at the top i.e. don't fill it to the brim with water.

Yes. Worst I saw was an old kitchen wall cabinet on a post with a bit of roofing felt tacked on the top and the DNO were happy.

Self use is king. Since i installed my PV, I have exported 334kWh. If I had been paid for that at 5p I would have been paid £16.70 Even some of the more realistic rates like 15p would only have earned me £50.1 I will let someone else calculate how long it would take to repay the "MCS premium" to enable me to claim that pittance.

Eaves level

But for those that didn't want to pay for an MCS install, and / or do not for various reasons want a smart meter, there is no SEG payment available.

It looks like at least part of your upper floor is above the garage? While heat going down from upstairs into a room below would not be "wasted" any such heat going downwards into the garage would be. Also with that portion of the upper floor above a garage, it is likely there will be air paths due to leaks etc allowing the cold air from the garage to the inter floor space. I suspect the solution lies with taking it all up again and doing it properly, making sure the entire ceiling above the garage is properly air tight sealed and properly insulated, then re fit the UFH. With carpet is is likely you will need the UFH pipes closer together than the downstairs UFH. Probably not what you want to hear.

What is the context? New build? Retro fit in old house? Insulation levels etc? And your approximate location so we get an idea how cold it is?

Most of us have a "to do after completion" list.........

The best thing we did with our static was install a multi fuel stove, it burned wood in the day and coal over night. We lit it in November and it hardly went out until March. We survived the winter with the "Beast From the East" in that. Only had 1 frozen pipe, where the mice had eaten about 12" of pipe insulation leaving a bare pipe. Crawling under the 'van with a hairdryer and extension lead during a blizzard.

Do you have a close up picture of a "plinthe" I take it is is more than just a row of contrasting coloured tiles? does it stick out? perhaps thicker tiles etc?

So what is the grey strip at the moment? I would expect floor tiles down first right to the very edge of the room, then wall tiles down to the floor tiles and grouted. If the grey we are seeing is the tanking membrane, then you should still be able to fit the bottom row of the same tiles, but they all may need cutting unless they anticipated that and left exactly the right gap.

My LG heat pump controller seems to take all summer to consume 1kWh doing nothing.

Earth leakage faults are funny things, particularly if they create a path between neutral and earth. The imbalance is not enough to trip the RCD until you draw a substantial current, which is why turning on a different circuit may have been the one that caused the RCD to trip, but not the circuit that actually has the fault.

Our kitchen / diner is 7M by 5M. I would divide that 10M by 10M space in 2, for a kitchen diner and separate lounge. We lived in the house as we built it and first to be finished was that kitchen diner which we briefly used as a living room. I HATED a living room with the noise of the fridge starting and running from time to time, and noise of the dishwasher disturbed the peace. I was glad to get our separate living room completed.

In our case (Scotland) it was 5 metres from a boundary or 10 metres from a road or watercourse. The watercourse one was bonkers, in the case of a treatment plant where the output was clean enough to go directly into the watercourse. So that is exactly what happened. Instead of being allowed to build a soakaway right up to the burn, no that was not allowed, but we were allowed to discharge into the burn instead.

ALWAYS look at the recent alterations first. That is always one of my questions "have you had ANY work done recently" It's a shame not everyone answers that properly, it could save them a lot of time.

This highlights the importance of sealing every single penetration through the air tight envelope of the building as you make them. So much easier to fix then than near the end.

Could very well be condensation. Give us some context, type and age of house etc. Switches and sockets on outside walls of cold uninsulated brick or stone walls can be prone to condensation in very cold weather.

Firstly, read any of the reviews, that sort of shower screen and seal are absolutely rubbish. You need to establish if the leak is actually water passing under the seal, OR water passing under the chrome bit between the hinge point and the wall. Effective but naff looking solution, a shower curtain on the inside, it need not be a full size one, perhaps a cut down one to just cover that corner section to keep that dry, so not too clingy in use?

Why not a planning application to replace the old garage with a new one? That would put it beyond doubt.

There are two completely separate issues, you need to separate them. 1) does the system used need a drainage field to provide secondary treatment? I would not personally install such a system now. 2) whatever system you install it produces water. that has to go somewhere. Assuming it is a treatment plant that has no requirement for secondary treatment, then that could go to any of the different forms of land drainage, or it could go to a watercourse. Local bodies like the Environment Agency or SEPA in Scotland often need to licence a discharge to a watercourse.