ProDave

Are you / they saying their product will stitch a crack in the brickwork back together in such a way that underpinning will not be required? Surely if the foundations have subsided and there is further movement, all that will happen is the brickwork will crack again at the next weakest point, probably the next brick along? I can see this being a structural cure for historic settlement where the cause of settlement has been fixed and it has been confirmed there has been no further movement, but you don't know that now do you?

Where does the Brown and Blue of the UFH valve go to? Orange and grey seem correct.

I have never been convinced about "electric boilers" I am still waiting for someone to tell me what an electric boiler brings to the party compared to individual electric panel heaters in each room? Apart from looking like proper central heating with wet radiators.

If it really is a passive house then 3kW heating for whole house will be plenty. My house is not a passive house but max heating demand when it is +20 inside and -10 outside is just over 2kW On first heating at such low levels of heat input it will take a long time to heat up the structure of the house, so stick with it, leave it on for 24 hours or until the house warms up. Thereafter is will not need much heat input to maintain the temperature.

You just need one service riser area, which usually can be in the back of a cupboard or wardrobe.

The first unknown is do either of the existing bathroom walls help support the roof? That needs to be known before you can take one of them down. Then what is the floor? A solid floor with the drain pipes buried in the floor will need to be dug up, pipes re routed and floor re laid. A suspended timber floor is is usually much easier to re route pipes. Although it may suit your needs better, reducing the bedroom count by 1 will probably devalue the property.

Game boy's box connects via wifi presently to the Air Cube which is router and wifi in one box. I do have an old BT home hub connected, presently serving as a network switch and giving access to my network drive. all router and wifi functions are turned off. I did think of enabling the wifi in that but I find that does not have the ability to limit speed either, so would not achieve anything. I will see how the "passive filter" works out.

So when I was looking at the wiring centre just now, was the "heating motorised valve" connected to that, the UFH one or the radiator one? The UFH zone valve should be the one that is connected to that currently unused pair of terminals in the UFH control box. I would expect it to be the radiator UFH valve connected to the wiring centre. Then there will need to be a link somewhere to connect the feedback contacts from all 3 motorised valves together so any one fires up the boiler,

This is the trouble trying to work it out remotely. So are there THREE motorised valves, one for DHW, one for UFH and one for radiators? It's how the UFH and radiator motorised valves are linked (or not) that is the issue. confirm there are three before I go further?

Potentially yes. I would modify that to leave the existing wires in terminals 2 and 3, and connect your new bit of flex into 2 and 3 with them, and the other end still into the unused pair on the manifold control box. then the boiler will fire up if either the radiator thermostat click in or either of the UFH zones.

I think I see what he has done. One of the thermostats goes via this box (there is no reason for them to) and he has connected that to the "room thermostat" input. I take it that is the grey wires into a separate terminal block wrapped in white tape? If you want to try correcting it (turn the power off first!!!!!!!) Disconnect the 2 wires from terminals 2 and 3 and park them individually in 2 spare terminal blocks. connect a new bit of 2 core flex to terminals 2 and 3, (brown to 3 and blue to 2) and connect the other end of that bit of 2 core flex to those currently unused terminal blocks bottom right of the manifold control box, brown to the left hand one, blue to the right hand one. Let us know if that works. This is typical of heating engineers / plumbers / electricians who just don't understand under floor heating. they are used to a gas boiler where typically you have just one room thermostat. With under floor heating it is common to have a thermostat per room and these all go to the manifold control box, and the manifold control box created it's own "call for heat" when any zone is wanting heat, and it is that which goes to the "room thermostat" connection on conventional boiler wiring. He probably scratched his head how to do it before coming up with this bodge and making the excuse that is how it should be.

In a previous house I owned, the gap was sealed with linseed oil putty. In just a few weeks after it was fitted, the local birds had removed all the putty from the upstairs windows. I assume they felt downstairs was just too exposed to danger for them to do the same. Could yours be the same, it was sealed originally but has been removed by local wildlife?

This is the normal wiring configuration for that junction box I would expect terminals 2 and 3 (shown here as "room thermostat" should connect to those 2 call for heat terminals in the manifold control box. That would then energise the motorised valve when anything calls for heat. It would be interesting to carefully follow the the wires coming out of terminals 2 and 3 and tell us where they go.

Hi and welcome. They say by the third self build, you get it almost right.

Okay, pretty sure the thermostat wiring is okay. He has used (in controller speak) zone 1 and zone 2 on the controller for what you refer to as zone 1, and zone 3 on the controller for what you call zone 2. He did not need to do that but nothing wrong with it. Where he has gone wrong, is he has not used the boiler call for heat terminals. They are the 2 empty terminals bottom right, just to the left of the manifold pump terminals. These currently unused terminals are what should energise the motorised valve, and then the feedback contact in the motorised valve calls for heat from the boiler. I suspect he has connected the motorised valve somehow directly to one of the thermostats. To complete the picture can we have a photo of the inside of the other thermostat, and the inside of the other junction box you mention please?

No you should not need to have zone 2 on to get zone 1 to work. the zone 1 wiring looks odd, it has a brown wire to the "call for heat" input (right facing arrow) but it does not have a connection to the L terminal above it which is live out to feed the thermostat. Can you take the cover off the zone 1 thermostat (be careful, some designs of thermostat have poorly shrouded terminals so a shock hazard may exist with the cover off) and post a picture of the connections inside the thermostat please. EDIT: looking again, that brown wire I am seeing into zone 1 call for heat, looks to be just a link to a L supply inside the box. Is there in fact a thermostat for zone 1?

My search for a way to limit the download speed of one connected device seems to show only a few routers will do that, and the air cube is not one. So a bit of lateral thinking. We all know wifi speed diminishes as you get further from the router and the signal gets weaker, you can test that by walking around with your phone and doing a speed test. This XBOX is very close to the router, so the potential speed of the wifi link exceeds the total download speed of the broadband service, so for that device the wifi is as good as a wired connection. Now if only it were further away and had a weaker, slower connection? Well I can't change that, but what I have done is stick some sheets of copper clad PCB board to the "ceiling" above the router placed to try and block the signal from the router in the direction of this XBOX. It has certainly reduced the signal strength it is getting and appeared to slow down it's download speed just a little. I will have to wait until it is next downloading to see if it has slowed it enough that the other stuff can still work while it hogs as much as it can.

The two 8 by 2's were chosen because....... I had two lengths left over that were long enough. The front one is supported mid point by the newel posts that go down to the floor so that will reduce deflection, and the back one, well that could have been anything, it is fixed to every single timber frame upright at 600mm centres.

The VOIP phone service is organised by my wireless provider, so I don't know who they buy it from. It seemed far simpler to buy it as a package.

Mine is a bit hybrid. I have an 8 by 2 spanning side to side one at the front and one attached to the back wall. I then span between those (between the top of the stair and the wall with the window) with 4 by 2's. I did this to give maximum headroom inside the cupboard.

That sounds like it is MORE than just a simple MVHR unit. Can you post pictures and / or a model number? How is the house heated? Ir is the heating element built into this the only heating for the whole house? Usually the mvhr system takes care of ventilation (without wasting heat) and the house is heated by some other means.

So, our new broadband supplier has been going for over a month, and so far so good. But just one little problem (that I had sort of anticipated) When daughters boyfriend is downloading games to his XBOX (which he does very frequently) I see this infernal XBOX zapps all the download bandwidth starving everything else. I know this, because the Pi Music box that is usually streaming radio, starts stuttering on and off. If I go and view the statistics on the router, you see the XBOX sitting there at a constant 50MBPS download The Router is a Ubiquiti Air Cube ISP I belive some users here are familliar with these? I am wondering if there is a way to throttle one (or more) devices to a lower speed so there is some bandwidth always left for other users? I tried enabling a guest wifi thinking that might give me some options to adjust settings, but I can't find any. So is there a way to limit the download speed of this one device so the rest of us don't get starved when it hogs the lot?

I don't know for sure these days, but when I had my 2011 FIT system installed the paperwork package from th eMCS installer included various certificates to confirm the equipment was new, was owned by you, had been correctly installed and various drawings about the instalation. These needed submitting then to the FIT provider. I assume it is much the same. the key thing it must be signed off my an MCS installer.

You have ruled out storage heaters so I don't know what else you expect to store the cheaper night time rate? Remember ALL the electricity used in your property gets the cheap rate at night, so the 7 night hours that fan heater is running it will be metered at the cheap rate. Look again at the Air to air heat pumps, especially if you are still going to use the fan heater for some specific need as you won't be expecting the A2A unit to do all the heating. I think you were unlucky with your previous experience with a system that did not perform well.

Please find a way to post photos. If you use a phone to take pictures, you can access this forum on a browser on your phone so it should be easy to upload them. It sounds like you don't really know how it is wired. It may or may not be wired in the optimum way. Who advised you to fit 8.5kW? that is a lot to hope to self use, so for that much, you meed either batteries to increase self usage, or justify it on export payment. And if your chosen method of payback was export payment, then you must have the install done by an MCS contractor who would certify it so you can claim the export payments. Were they MCS and have you got the paperwork from them?