ProDave

Typical rubbish design (don't be fooled by a posh make) A screw self tapping into a hole in a bit of wood that has worn and the screw now falls out. Post a very close up / macro shot of where the 2 bits meet and someone might suggest an alternative way of securing them. I would be looking personally at trilling a hole right through and a nut and bolt, or simply a larger screw but would need to see the details of what is there first.

That means it is losing heat like having a 25w heating element under your sink. So it will consume (thanks to that heat loss) 25wh in an hour and 600wh or 0.6kWh in a 24 hour period, just to make up the heat that it has lost. so at present electricity prices it will be costing about 15p per day just to keep the water inside it hot and ready for use.

How are you planning to use the worktops? "butchers block" suggests you will be using it as a chopping surface?

Use standard handrail newel posts and spindles sold in treated wood for decking.

Which makes me ask the unanswered question again. Is this raw sewage leading to a communal treatment plant? Or treated effluent from multiple individual treatment units going toa communal soakaway or into a watercourse?

It's a shame you did that, that gives them ammunition to blame you. If you had just left it all untouched and undisturbed and it leaked, it would be much more clear cut. WHY did you replace it? Because it was leaking?

I take it you have notified the issue to the neighbours that own / use the pipe? What have they said they will do? If you want to get nasty, report a pollution incident to SEPA

So is this field drain a solid pipe, perforated pipe? Have you dug down to find it. I can see SEPA's issue, you are asking to discharge to a pipe that you don't presently know where it ends up. Do you even know which way it flows?

I take it this field drain is an open mostly dry ditch? My experience was SEPA don't like that. We got permission to discharge to the burn but only after measuring the flow rate at a dry time of year to work out the likely dilution rate, if it's dry a lot of the time there won't be any dilution. Is there a proper flowing watercourse within reach?

You need to work out if this is actually raw sewage on it's way to a treatment system or the mains sewer, or the outflow from a treatment system to a soakaway. If this but of ground that is flooding is the lowest point of the land in the vicinity, it might just be the soakaway, if that is what it is, is overwhelmed and simply flooding as it is incapable of handling the volume of liquid put into it (and they knew that hence why you were not allowed to add to it)

You should not need to if the air tight layer behind the plasterboard has been done properly.

I wired a straw bale house some years ago. That was heated with a WBS that claimed to put 10kW to water but only 2kW to the room, and that heated a massive thermal store (1000litres iirc) and the thermal store ran under floor heating for when the stove was not burning. Unfortunately I don't know the make or model of stove.

Whatever you do, talk to the stone supplier / fitter first. Ours were adamant that they would only fit a sink hung from under the worktop, not mounted in the sink unit first.

Why do you want them in every bedroom? Building regs does not ask for that. You can get AICO a LOT cheaper on ebay, just check the "replace by" dates to make sure you are not buying old stock. Aico also do a switch unit that will silence them, test them, or identify which one has set them all off.

Assuming the garage has it's own consumer unit you connect the inverter to that. You need a generation meter, AC isolator and DC isolator to connect it all up. A picture of the meter box and consumer unit would be handy. You don't need an MCS installer unless you want to claim the pittance of the SEG payment, you are better off aiming to self use as much as you can and forget that. a picture of the roof would be good as well.

If in doubt, turn the whole house off then back on. How do you adjust that? or is it a "dumbed down" (safe) shower that won't let you turn it up too hot?

It means when it's -10 outside and +20 inside the house will need a continuous heat input of 3.4kW or averaged over 24 hours 81.6kWh Sizing the heat pump, you have to allow for it also heating hot water (when it won't be heating the house. So a 5kW ASHP for instance, assume it will be heating hot water for 2 hours per day, and lets guess that it might only manage 4kW output at the low temperature, it could deliver 88kWh so should be adequate. But would need to run almost 24/7 to manage when it is that cold. So if you wanted the heating off over night for instance you might consider something a little larger. I don't imagine it gets that cold for very long in Norwich so you might not need that much heat very often.

Another one at 48 degrees here. Found by trial and error to be the hottest I can just about hold my hands under if I draw if sink of washing up water just from the hot top. I don't see any point in having it hotter. Treated mains water into an unvented cylinder has no opportunity to get bugs in so a weekly cycle to heat it hotter is pointless. You only need that if it's not mains water or it's a vented tank.

If you know the calculated U values of all the walls roof, floor and windows you can calculate the heat loss pretty well. I used Jeremy's heat loss spreadsheed and the result was very accurate. I confirmed the building performance almost as soon as it was complete, long before the UFH was down and the internal fit done, just by running a single low power electric convector heater for a few days and plotting internal vs external temperature and calculating the heat loss from that and it agreed with the heat loss spread sheet. So I then knew I could trust those figures to design the UFH system.

Have you tried notifying through that awful e building standards online portal? It seemed in the latter part of my build you had to instruct everything through that. https://www.ebuildingstandards.scot/eBuildingStandardsClient/

Yes even in the south and on a perfect roof you won't get much over 3000kWh per year, which at the present 27p per kWh is about £800 so at least 2 years payback. I don't get as much generation due to shading but am self using about 1800kWh per year so just shy of £500 per year. That would be a 3 year payback for me now.

Care to explain what that is? I don't want to do any engineering work as such. the burn as you see it now is it's docile summer flow. It can get quite excited in winter spate and don't want any obstructions. Any water wheel or other generator will have a means to retract it out of the way when in spate.

I think what this has done is show how much water you need and how much head to get a useful amount of power. My initial thought was just an undershot water wheel at pretty much that constriction in picture 1 above where the red pipe presently starts from. Although the flow is fast there, the same equations apply and the power you get out is proportional to the flow in litres and the head it falls. An undershot water wheel at that point would deliver in minute amount of power because the head is only what it self creates to turn it.. But yes you could put a whole load of them along the burn. I won't just leave the pipe like that, it will be buried somehow. I have one low power candidate motor so I might just rig up a "Blue Peter" water wheel and try flow I have from that pipe and see what I actually get. It seems odd that 2L per second at 1.3m head only generates about 30W. Why do I feel if I was asking the question, what power of pump do I need to pump water uphill by 1.3m at a flow rate of 2L per second, the answer would probably be a lot more than 30W?

So I have done some more. I remembered where there was a spare coil of black electrical ducting, not ideal but good for my test work. So we have: Spare length of mvhr ducting collecting the water at a bit of a natural header pond right where the burn enters my land. that goes round the S bend in the burn. Where that runs out, it joins to the black electrical duct, a bit smaller and a tight fit inside the mvhr duct That black duct then runs as far as it reaches which is only a couple of metres short of where the burn departs our land At the end of that we still get most of the flow I had before, perhaps 6.5 seconds to fill the 12L bucket so say 1.8 litres per second. The head is now 1.4 metres So putting that into the page linked before gives a grand total of 24 watts I bet you would be lucky to actually get 15 watts of electricity from that. The only way to do this I think is is to treat is as a fun project and make a large water wheel for the water to run over as a garden feature and any power you get from it is purely a bonus. Or find a cheap / free very much larger length of pipe to increase the flow rate.

It matters not one jot what the pipe sits on, you just need to seal it with fire cement. Cutting a bit off the bottom will mean it sits on the top of the fitting so will sit more level while the fire cement sets. I would hold the pipe up slightly so you can fill all around with fire cement filling the gap then let it drop down so the tapered bit sits on the top of the stove fitting then leave it for the fire cement to set. But before you set it, you want to sit the pipe there, check it's upright, project up and mark and cut the hole in the roof for the twin wall section.