ProDave

Isn't the stack pipe in the corner of the original 2 storey house so it would emerge through the original roof not the lower roof with the velux windows? I don't see why a rest bend could not go at the bottom, but the opening and lintel in the wall would have to be much higher and the bend would intrude into the floor make up of the extension so that would have to be formed around the bend.

No, fixed heating appliances over (iirc) 2kW should be on a dedicated circuit. Did he discuss this with you first? It might be that due to the house layout or construction it would be a major job to get a new cable through to the consumer unit, or there might not be any spare capacity in the consumer unit or the consumer unit might need upgrading? In other words he might have done this as a quick and cheap solution to save what would otherwise have been a very expensive and disruptive job, but I would have discussed the issues and problems with the customer if it were me. Is this immersion for regular use, or just there as a backup if the boiler breaks down and unlikely to get much use? that may have swayed his thinking. It is unlikely to be "dangerous" but taking that much load from a ring final would restrict what other loads can run from that circuit and could lead to nuisance tripping if the washing machine, dishwasher etc were on at the same time as the immersion heater.

I took the reduction experiment one step further (literally) reducing to a bit of 20mm mdpe which has a bore of about 16mm. That really killed my flow rate to less than half, and put immense back pressure on the fittings that made up the reduction forcing one to blow apart. So I think my sweet spot for reducing the size is 20mm bore. I am currently eyeing up an old radial air fan for equipment cooling (sometimes known as a snail fan) Thinking it would be easy to swap the present ac motor for my little dc servo motor. The challenge would be making a suitable impeller (candidate for 3d printing?) I will do a sketch if @Onoff fancies a challenge?

Thinking about @joe90 suggestion, A quick rummage amongst my various bits,. cobbled together a quick set of different size pipes of reducing size to gauge the effect. Hydro_experiment.mp4 The final bit of "pipe" in that contraption is a bit of flexible conduit with a bore of about 20mm It definitely increases the velocity (measured by how far will the jet of water reach) and I lose about half a second on the time to fill the bucket test. So next experiment is try and cobble together a mini turbine to see if this has any merit.

I think that is certainly true if you are trying to increase the pressure to get a small high pressure jet to drive a turbine or pelton wheel type device. For an overshot wheel that I am experimenting with I don't think it would make any difference.

I need more / larger pipe. The availability of that will determine if this moves forward. To just go out and buy it would cost far too much so I am "searching"

So the technical analysis. The wheel is rotating at 32 rpm, so with the 17:1 gearing my motor / generator is doing 544 rpm. At that speed it is generating a disappointingly low 3 volts. I didn't attempt a proper load to measure what power it would produce as I know it would be tiny. If I short circuit the motor, the wheel does slow down slightly, but not as much as I would have thought. I think (certainly for this speed) the motor I have is a poor candidate as a generator, but it was the only one I had. My flow rate looked poor to me, so I re measured it. I am getting barely 1 litre per second. But it's not a pipe blockage or lack of water, that is all it will deliver at that height. Drop the pipe down to the bed of the burn and it's back to 2 litres per second. Baked bean tins are poor "buckets" for this application. Roughly 50% of the time the delivered water hits the side of the tin rather than go in it, which will add nothing to the rotation of the wheel. conventional square buckets are what's needed with any overspill just dropping down onto the bucket below. I am unsure if I will take this further, it does at the moment seem like it's never going to be a source of useful power. I might look at turbine ideas instead?

Okay, we have eaten enough beans / soup / rice pudding and today was the day to "give it a splash" So I had driven a post into the burn to support the wheel, and rigged up, with bits of wood and G clamps, to hold the delivery pipe and give it a go. I had set this up to rotate "with the flow" that is the bottom of the wheel would be travelling in the same direction as the burn. I had expected to feed it with the water feed pointing downwards making ir a breast fed water wheel. That proved not to work and gave very little rotation of the wheel and a lot of splashing. I found the best results were feeding right at the top, making this on overshot water wheel. Of course it is set up completely wrong for that and the feed pipe is actually delivering it's water upstream in this test. If this goes any further I would re jig the wheel to rotate the other way. The other finding was i needed the water to exit the pipe as a clean stream, the raw end of the pipe made too much of a broad spread of water. A rummage in the "plastic pipe" bits box found part of an old sink trap that made a good reducer and gave a clean water flow. So this is the trial. Water_Wheel_1.mp4 I will post again later with some technical analysis

Work put how the system works re room thermostats etc and check the correct zones turn on and show some flow on the flowmeters. Get a cheap IR thermometer to measure the floor temperature and pipe temperatures. 24 degrees won;t feel "warm" to the touch.

I read the tone of this thread as more of a "which ASHP to avoid buying" or at very least a question to ask of your supplier and demand a reply in writing stating what the standby power consumption is, so if you then encounter such a high standby power consumption you have a valid complaint. I do agree, if you have one of these power gobblers, turn it off in the summer.

STOP RIGHT THERE. A high start up current like that means this is not an inverter driven ASHP. Before you think of upgrading your supply, choose a different, inverter driven ASHP that will have soft start and will modulate it's output to match demand.

Split phase is uncommon now, it is essentially a single phase supply, but derived from a centre tapped 460V transformer. You have a 3 phase supply head with 3 fuses as that is standard equipment, one will be unused. How do you know if the second feed is not live? You would have to break the seal on the fuse to determine that? Or is it connected to something? A picture of what you have might be interesting. As far as your supplier is concerned, get a 3 phase meter. The may or not connect the "3rd phase" but they might? It won't do anything. A 3 phase meter will ensure you only have one MPAN and only pay one standing charge. Because it is so unusual, all I can suggest is you ask your supplier for a 3 phase meter and see what the meter man says when he turns up. Have a second single phase CU raeady to connect it to.

Cables are supposed to be supported, not just hanging, using metal cable clips above an exit route to stop cables hanging down in the event of a fire. Plasterer will expect cables and back boxes in the wall if plastering direct to blocks. Some pipe insulation would be good and sound insulation between floors if your BC demands it or you want it.

I notice with a lot of trades I meet on jobs, most of them are very "old school" in their working practice, at 10 O clock they go out and sit in their van for half an hour for a cup of tea, same at lunch time. Me, i just carry on and "graze" on the go. I would rather finish the job and be home sooner, rather than take a break and do nothing in that time.

Interesting observation as you have the same unit as me. Ours has been in use about 4 years now. I dutifully turn the unit off and withdraw the heat exchange modules from time to time and the filters are always in good shape. I take them off, give them a bit of a shake outside, give them a hoover to suck any dust out of them, then put them back. I guess one day they will need replacing, but not yet. We too are rural, there is not much population upwind of us, pretty much all the way down the Great Glen to Fort William.

Careful. you are assuming the openings have actually been made to the size on the drawings. My builders came and measured the actual as built opening sizes before ordering the windows.

I am in the minority here, I am in favour of an hourly or daily rate. If someone asks me to price a job on a fixed price, I have to allow for every difficulty that might get in the way of doing the job and price it on a worst case guess of the hours it will take. That almost always ends up at a higher price than the actual hours the job takes. If you are happy at paying more, then go ahead and keep pushing for a fixed price. I guess the difference is I don't advertise and all my work is through personal recommendations, so if I was a lazy so and so and charged an hourly rate while working slowly or not even working then I would be out of business very soon.

Chexk you are not buying one 100mm diameter. You want the diameter to match the scaffold pole and 100mm is the depth you want to drill it.

I was more thinking the cold water could be contaminated with the hot, it would put hot water into a short section of the cold feed pipe, and if there was a drop in mains pressure could that flow back? I just have a feeling it would break some water bylaw? anyone care to comment? If I just put a tee directly on the cold in tapping and one side of the tee was the cold feed and the other side of the tee was my stratification mix feed that would only be a small risk? The cold feed in to the cylinder I am talking about comes from the pressure reducing set that came with the tank, does that include a non return valve that would stop any possibility of back flow into the house cols water system? I also have an unused hot water return port, quite high up. that would be too high for the destratification system, but I recon I could make an extra thermostat pocket out of that which would give me 3 thermostat pockets.

My point if you want to circulate the water within the cylinder to mix up the stratification, then you need to pump it from the top to the bottom for long enough for it to mix around. To do that, you would need an extra "input" tapping on the cylinder near the bottom. The only way I could do that on my cylinder would be to pump from the hot out tapping down to the cold in tapping, but I am sure that would break some water bylaw as there is a risk of contaminating the cold water with hot water, hence if I had been ordering the cylinder again, i would have specified a second separate input tapping just a little higher than the main one. The hot water circulation loop around the house, some people still do but it wastes heat, even if really well insulated pipework.

I suspect the FF might be a big part of that. About 2kWh per day for treatment plant and MVHR it soon adds up. I am guilty of leaving stuff on standby, e.g. televisions. The satellite box is on a timer so is off over night and part of the day. Yes electric oven used most days. Washing machine and tumble dryer used most days and dishwasher every other day, they are used in the daytime so solar PV should power some of that load depending on the weather. That is likely a major part of why the non heating use goes up in winter.

Our local council sports centre has showers in the changing rooms and our membership would allow me to go every day just for a shower if I wanted to. But the petrol to get there and back would be more than the cost of a shower, so no saving, and if I went on my bike, I would need another shower when I got home. But it means we don't shower at home on swimming day.

For those suffering insomnia and need something to send you to sleep, some of my figures: The readings I take each week go in columns B, C, D, K and M. The rest are calculated from those figures. The odd figures at the bottom in row 200 are the total of each of those columns for the last 12 months. It's that pesky stubborn 75kWh non heating use each week I need to work on, which goes up in winter probably because there's less PV to offset it.

Our shower heads on full tilt I measured about 11 litres per minute. So a 300L shower would take about 27 minutes. When you are only storing DHW at 48 degrees, it will not be mixing much cold water with that. The Ladies in this house seem to delight in long showers, my daughter in particular half an hour is about normal. I am convinced she just stays there until the water goes cold. And she does not understand the concept that you can run the shower at less than full water flow. 10 minutes is a long shower for me, by then I have long run out of places to wash and hair to shampoo.

So 18kWh total per day, less 5kWh other use means the ASHP is using 13kWh per day, so in round figures that is like a continuous load of 0.5kW 24 / 7 Something is not right here. It should be easy to tell when an ASHP is running, you will hear the compressor going, and the big fan on the outside unit. Do you observe the ASHP running nearly all the time? or do you notice it turn on say once an hour for a period? If you don't know that yet, then I would watch it like a hawk on your next day off and find that out. We use roughly 25kWh per WEEK heating DWH for 3, less in the summer because solar PV heats a lot of the hot water needs. Just the simple laws of physics begs the question where is all this energy going? 13kWh into an ASHP each day will be at least 26kWh of heat coming out of it. You can't lose 26kWh of heat without warming something up, so either your cylinder will get very hot, or all that heat will be going into your house into perhaps unlagged pipework?