ProDave

A lot of my earlier career was involved with servo motion control of machines, so you would do that to tune them, put a step change to the position demand and watch the resulting actual motion and tune it to get the characteristics you wanted, be that maximum speed, or no overshoot etc. You could do that quite quickly with the position demand stepping backwards and forwards, and adjust it on the fly and pretty soon get the response you wanted. But a house is much slower time constants, hours not milliseconds, so to do the same with the heating system in a house would take days. More akin to tuning the heating system on a furnace to get to desired temperature as quick as possible without overshooting.

It can go crumbly in old houses, usually due to damp. But the same cable pulling issues applies to whatever you use. If there is no service void or duct, then any wall covering material will need cutting holes to thread new cables through with the patching up afterwards. Just think yourself lucky this is not plastered on the hard brick walls............ For fishing cables, this tool is up there amongst my "I could not do my job without it"

So if the developer does not exercise his option after the 18 months are you free to do what you want with the plots? Do they (did they) have planning permission? Is there room (without knowing the dimensions) to divide the front and put another house alongside the existing? Garage would have to go to make access I suspect.

My take on service voids. For just cables, a service void made of 25mm battens works well with 12mm plasterboard and 35mm back boxes. Safe zones are your friend. As long as you have one socket on a wall, you can run your socket cables horizontally all around the room at socket height in your service void. Then should you want to add an additional socket anywhere, the cable is waiting for you. If you want run a batten horizontally at that height making it easy to fish any new cable along the wall. Adding new cables is all very well but where are they going to / from? In each bedroom I left a strip of floor board at each end with no tongue and groove and screwed down. So it should be possible to lift the carpet, unscrew that strip of board and feed a new cable down into the service void below. What have you against plasterboard? Fermacell is an alternative but a lot more expensive and harder to fit

To get a neat cut I would be looking to rig something up to make a "table saw" out of the grinder with a fence, so you can slowly feed the beam through to get a neat cut. Or if you have a table saw, see if you can get a grinding disc to fit it?

That looks to crying out for a house in the back garden. Is that what the house to the right of yours has done?

Sorry the question should have been addressed to @DevonKim

But why need to blip it? I had calculated the heat loss of our house using Jeremy's spreadsheet. When the house was just a bare shell, I just put a small known power electric convector heater on in the middle of the downstairs for a week, and plotted inside temp vs outside temp over a few days (once it had reached equilibrium) and confirmed delta t between inside and outside was what was predicted for that amount of heat input. I can't see that working with a shot test as a modern well insulated house, the time constants are measured in hours if not days.

The pictures from an earlier post for those that can't open them So you want to notch part of the deeper joists just where the stairs come up?

Who says you cannot live on site?

Don't over think this. The HP will stop and start it's compressor as required to maintain the flow temperature, just as a gas boiler will stop firing the burner.

Is there an easy way to convert? So my 1.4m³/h.m²@50Pa air test result may not be as bad as I thought, so might only be about 0.85 ACH?

Or need to plant a treatment plant.....

I doubt the cost of charging small things like that is significant. Though I would not do it during the silly early evening rip off peak.

Hi and welcome.

That looks very nice. I would be wondering if there was any chance of reinstating the water wheel, even thought the pond has gone, is there still a stream passing by to feed it?

If it is a vented system, then the pressure in the pipes will always be low and should be constant, any expansion due to heat pushes the water back up into the header tank. I would expect a pressure gauge to register very little pressure, so the question now become WHY does it increase when it gets hot? I would just expect the expansion to raise the level in the header tank slightly and the increase in pressure to be almost nothing.

Can you post some pictures of your hot water tank and pipework and other gubbins around it?

Regardless of the source of your water you would expect the heating circuit to be a closed system with an expansion vessel. It is quite likely the expansion vessel has failed. Can you see a largish white or red tank anywhere with a single pipe connecting into the bottom?

Is 64 nets what you see on that pallet? That does not look much for £485 to me? but I am used to free firewood (requires the graft though)

I used to HATE houses that had the stairs rising from the living room. A sure sign the house is too small to support a proper hall. My first house, a 1980's new build shoe box was like that. The very last place to put the sofa was anywhere near that. And my MIL had a similar house. It was toasty warm on the landing and freezing in the living room. She largely solved it with a heavy curtain all around the stairwell but it was not pretty. In a properly insulated hose this become irellevant, no cold air coming down my stairs here.

So you have chosen a tariff with very cheap off peak and very expensive peak to get cheaper heating? but then face the challenge of the extortionate day rate. You plan to solve that by installing a battery system to shift all your day usage to off peak. It is no good calculating your "saving" by basing it on your now very high day rate. You really want to cost your electricity on your old rate, probably about 30p compared to shifting all if it to the 7p off peak rate, so a saving of about 23p per kWh not 47.5

Never noticed a problem.

48 degrees, found by experiment as the hottest task you normally have to perform is kitchen washing up and with no cold added, I can just, and only just put my hands in the water without it being painful. I see no need for any hotter than that, but if such a need arrises, there is the boiling water tap.

I have resisted posting because this is not a typical developer new house, but my self build, built to largely passive house principles but no attempt to have it analysed let alone certified as a passive house. 150 square metres 1.4 air tightness ASHP under floor heating downstairs only triple glazed and MVHR Last 12 months heating the ASHP consumed 1200kWh so that's 8 kWh of electricity per square metre or about 24kWh of heat delivered. In addition the ASHP has consumed 1000kWh heating the DHW (metered separately to heating usage) And this in the east Highlands where the last week of cold weather that brought the UK almost to a halt, is just a normal weeks weather here in the winter.