ProDave

No problem at all. Particularly up here in the north, they can work very well taking more advantage of the low winter sun. You only need MCS if you intend to export and get paid for it.

I will be the odd one out then. I have Glycol in my system. I do NOT want the heating on 24/7 I prefer it off most of the night and prefer it to do most of the work in the day when the PV is likely co be contributing. I do NOT want an anti freeze valve that will dump my water if it gets too cold. Glycol added at the ratio that will protect the system down to -10C Never been a problem.

Is the house 20 years old or more? Trying to guess insulation levels. Indoor system oil boiler will be simplest swap. Does the old one work at all, if so that gives you an idea of the noise, a new one likely being less noisy. I am not a fan of combi boilers myself but others seem happy.

That suggests it is already laid as a wet room, but the fact it is leaking and the tiles are moving suggests somehow it has failed. I doubt there is a fix other than remove the tiles assess what is under them and repair and replace as necessary.

You still have the tundish, followed by a waterless trap.

If the heat loss calculation gives an answer of 3kW then put simply that means you want a 3kW heater turned on all the time to maintain the temperature. If you put less than 3kW into the house it will slowly cool down. If the house is cold and you want to warm in up, you will need to put in more than 3kW The point about water heating mentioned is as follows. Most heat pumps will only heat the building or the hot water, usually done because then you can have different water temperatures for the 2 functions. So in the perhaps 2 hours a day your heat pump is heating the water tank, it won't be putting any heat at all into the house. So for the remainder of the day it would need to put more than 3kW of heat into the house just to get the average over the whole day up to 3kW.

Have you actually requested a new connection from Scottish water yet? It is not your job to tell them where you expect the pipe to run. Get a quote first and then if they propose a distant expensive connection, then start questioning it.

The official flood risk map shows a very high risk of surface flooding immediately to the south of our plot. Correct. In very heavy prolonged rain, the water table rises to the point the field floods. But it is no risk to us as the flooded part of the field runs off into the burn, and the ground level on our side of the burn is higher. It's things like the local topology that matter, so if your house is even slightly higher than the surrounding land, any flooding will just run off somewhere else. I guess your biggest risk is if the pumping station failed and the industrial scale water extraction stopped.

I am happy with our static caravan now serving as a shed / storage space / additional work space. Nobody is ever going to accuse a static 'van of being "well insulated" but condensation or stored stuff going mouldy or getting damp is not an issue. They are probably easier to buy and install than a container.

Can you show a picture of a pair of joists fixed together with these brackets? I am struggling to understand exactly what they do?

Yes move that to the pump terminals. It's as if the installer did not have, or could not read the very clear wiring instructions. Or simply did not understand them. Sadly I have found several UFH installs where the installer did not have a clue how to connect them properly.

Yes. A screen grab of the important bit The red and blue wires shown here going to the boiler are a volt free normally open contact that does exactly what your relay is doing, closes when the UFH pump is on. Ditch your relay and connect the Red and Blue shown here to the EVU

Quite apart from the probable drain problems you will encounter, is this extension really worthwhile? At 1.7 metre wide externally that will be about 1.4 metres internal width. Not a lot at all. So it will be an expensive extension for not a lot of space, and in building it you block access to the garage and lose a parking space. I suspect that will devalue your house, it would certainly put me off buying it.

Looking at your diagram, the wiring centre IS providing Switched L and N to the pump. and A1 and A2 on the relay is the relay coil. So the relay turns on when the pump is running. 3 and 4 are a normally open contact on the relay. So the relay is NOT switching the pump, it is providing a volt free open / close contact to the EVU This relay should not be necessary as most UFH controllers will already provide a volt free contact of some sort often labelled as boiler or call for heat, which will provide this volt free contact without needing the relay. Can you post a manual or a close up picture of the connections available for your UFH controller?

Most people don't have any form of relay in their fuse box to turn the heating on or off. So can we get to the bottom of why you have one, and what generates the trigger signal to turn it on or off? And how often does it turn on and off? A SSR probably could technically be used but the question remains why? Not something most heating systems need.

Our first build we did that, completed the house before the garage. No issue with planning, but building control required us to do the building warrant for just the house so they could issue completion on that and we could do the VAT claim, and then a separate building control for the garage. Of course it meant the materials for the garage you could not reclaim the VAT.

You MUST keep moving. You cannot store fitness. It will go away very quickly of you stop doing things. In the "off season" we try and go for a good long walk a few times a week to keep things moving.

Tell the council you expect the end wall of the replacement balcony to be opaque to prevent overlooking of your garden.

It's a 1 page preview of the start of an article. the last paragraphs fades out to nothing, it clearly continues but you can't read it. Usually there then pops up a message how to subscribe or whatever? But not this one.

Why do I only see the start of that article? Is it behind a paywall? but nothing to tell me why I can't read it all?

That's not a trivial job, for each joist that needs replacing, you need to remove most of not all the planks that it supports, and if the rotten joists are spread out, you might as well rebuild it completely, otherwise any fix will be short term. If some joists are rotten the rest won't be far behind.

"Energy state" is not a term I have seen used anywhere with mine. It does have timer functions built into the controller so you can time DHW heating only in certain times for instance.

Mine is an early version but the thermostat input only works for turning heating on and off. There is no official way on mine to turn DHW on and off via an external switch or thermostat.

Kind of ironic that as we discuss this we hear of the new Runways for Gatwick and Heathrow approved and a near doubling of flight numbers. So while we are all being encouraged to go green with our vehicles and houses "the message" is it's okay still to fly long distances and we are enabling more and more flights to take place. Again, I have little confidence anyone has a proper plan other than try and tick a few boxes.

What is that small room below the bath being used for? We have a similar (but oval shape) bath and the install instructions are to connect the waste with a supplied flexi coupling and lower the bath into it's casing making it a top install. But I HATE that sort of flexi. Since the room below our bath is the utility, I fitted the bath from above and made the waste connection from below before the plasterboard was fitted, knowing if it ever needs attention I will cut a trap in the utility room ceiling where it would not matter for access.