ProDave

That would not even meet building regs in Scotland. The "activity space" required is bigger than your entire room.

Mostly on line only suppliers. Jewson gave the best price for Multipanel if you are using that. I just picked up bargains when I could like back to wall WC pans for £50 delivered from an under floor heating company of all things.

Why can't they fit the tray, it's hardly rocket science, then they can transfer the marks to the membrane used. Unless you are planning to fully tape the tray to the panels tonight, they will in any event be able to lift the bottom to see any marks on the panel. It strikes me they are just being useless or awkward.

All mine was on line as well and yes you sometimes have the usual battle that the Highlands in not "offshore" but you know that by now.

Can you elaborate (with a picture?) what markings they want to see on the wall? There must be a way to transfer those markings to a Tony Tray as you install it?

Some BC's will accept a wooden ramp on top of the tarmac as long as it is fixed in place. Ask him. Ours in Scotland did, which some say never happens.

At current prices, that would be about 65kWh per day or 2.7kW continuously. It must be a big heat pump in a very poorly insulated house probably trying to drive high temperature radiators. Tell us about this property? New build in progress? Old house being refurbished? have you had any heat loss calculations done etc? At the moment a heat pump is unlikely to deliver cheaper heating than a gas boiler, but in the right situation it will come very close. They are a great benefit to people who don't have mains gas so the only other choices are LPG, Oil or solid fuel. And don't forget you save the gas standing charge and cost of having gas connected if it is not already there.

Near the bottom centre is a white flex that appears to be stripped to it's individual cores outside of any junction box. I don't know if that is part of the pre wired bit or not, but the picture when zoomed in is not that clear.

I would use plasterboard back boxes. If he has screwed that back box through the VCL just what has he screwed into? I am not a fan of fixing the back box by screwing through the sides of the box into the stud, but if that is what he has done it won't puncture the VCL Where does the cable going through the VCL go to? The edges of the VCL don't appear to be taped to anything?

No, you talk to them and lay down the ground rules. The whole purpose of the service void is for services, pipes and cables. The only time they need to penetrate the building is for services entering or leaving the building, like incoming supplies, and things like outside sockets, lights etc. Where such cables do have to exit the building it should be planned and sealed afterwards with air tightness tape etc.

Many on here including me have bought their own digger. Mine was a very old one for not a lot of money and when I had finished with it I easily sold it for exactly what I paid for it. Nothing major broke, just a few relatively minor repairs. The big thing about having your own, is it is there when you want it. It often just got used for a 5 or 10 minute job which if hiring you would have to wait and bunch up all these little jobs into one day of decent work, which would really have annoyed me not being able to do stuff when I wanted to. I sold mine quite early on in the build, and it's final job was to take the piles of excavated soil and spread them around and level them to form the "lawn" For a while we were probably viewed as idiots having a part built house surrounded by a nice lawn that I was regularly mowing. To leave the landscaping until the house was finished as most people do, would have meant keeping the digger longer, or hiring one.

This front door ramp and level access thing. Almost every developer house has one breaching the "must be 150mm below DPC" rule but I have yet to see one with an actual problem as a result. My own, I made the ramp have a 99mm gap between the house and the ramp (except the bit that actually tucked under the door threshold) to try and mitigate the issue. BC did not have an issue with it.

Fred drift, What are you looking for? I have a fair few old coils, formers and slugs and variable caps etc.

The only traditional "keyhole" lock we have is in the fire door between the house and the garage. We rarely lock it. Duct tape covers the keyhole on the garage side to stop the draught.

Getting good air tightness is mostly down to attention to detail in the build, taping and sealing everything, and not leaving anything unsealed, no unwanted holes, design out "leaks" like cat flaps and letter boxes, mvhr so no need for lots of separate individual extract fans and no need for trickle vents. It need not cost a great deal more than normal sloppy building.

I did not use a concrete base, that would have left the hole open for longer while you poured a base and waited for it to set all the time filling up with ground water. So I just set mine on the ground in the excavated hole and started pouring concrete. You must progressively fill it with water as you pour the concrete but without getting the water level at any time significantly higher than the concrete level.

Yes your plumber took the assembly as posted by @Nickfromwales a few posts above and rotated the complete assembly 180 degrees, so you now have the flow meters on the bottom and actuators on the top. That should work okay. What he has done wrong is put the isolating valves in the wrong place, that may make something like a pump change harder as you may get air in the pipe loops making bleeding harder than otherwise necessary.

I thought the 0.6ACH was the requirement to be certified as a passive house? In Scotland, if your air test comes in a 3 or lower, building control insist you install MVHR. Ours tested at 1.4 which initially I was disappointed with, but the tester said it was the best one he had yet tested. That surprised me.

Good point. That was one the "must have" list for my stove that it takes ALL it's air from the one ducted intake.

If that happens in your house, there is something wrong with your stove. It does not happen here. Don't assume all stoves do this.

I heat with an ASHP that can set a low flow temperature I still have the mixing valve. One reason being when the ASHP is heating DHW the water temperature may get up to 55 degrees. When it changes over from DHW to floor heating, that slug of 55 degree water would go straight into the floor were it not for the mixing valves.

Plenty here will advise against a WBS. It is a very marmite subject. In use, our stove draws very well, I don't personally believe there is any risk or particulates getting into the room. The flue draws so well I am sure the pressure inside the stove is less than room pressure.

And for very much of the time an immersion heater heater fed from a PV dump controller is running at a low power input.

My stove (Mendip Stoves Churchill 5) the air intake is about 80mm A vent through the wall might be a bit of a thermal bridge but that will lose a LOT less heat than the only other alternative which is having a similar vent into the room to allow air in which will massively destroy your air tightness. The pipe out, I used plastic, converting to flexible aluminium from the wall to the stove inlet.