ProDave

Post a picture of the meter and how it is connected. It would not be the first time the installer has connected a generation meter backwards.

If your deepest trench is 750mm I would first be digging 2 trial pits in the lane next to the 2 garages to determine their foundation depth. If >750mm then happy days, just notify them you are not digging deeper than their foundation and PW act does not apply. I think this is going to be a difficult connection, you want to get all the services in in one go, and you need to start by digging a trial trench at both ends to find all the services. If they are not in the same place at both ends then assume they are not in a straight line. The lane is going to be out of action while you do this, so you need the cooperation of the other owner or you need a lot of road plates to keep it in use during works.

Don't put it under the stairs or any built in kitchen unit. In a well insulated house it is arguable if it is needed at all in the hall, we have none in our hall. BUT the one BIG fault with that layout, is it puts one manifold at the back of a kitchen corner unit. that will have to be a butchered kitchen unit and even then will be very awkward to get at. Move it so both manifolds are under the stairs and can be boxed in easily and easy access. Manifold 2 would be right down at the low end of the stairs and also be pretty inaccessible. So put both manifolds nearer the high end of the under stairs space.

Immediate thoughts. He didn't raise the PW issue until you ere about to start work, because up to then it did not matter. The concern is the service trenches could be as deep if not deeper than the garage foundations and very close to them. You really need to find the locations of the services. 3 lots of water, gas electricity and possibly telecoms in a 2.5 metre road is probably going to be cosy. You don't want to put a digger bucket through a gas pipe. What have the individual utilities actually said about connection points? A drawing would make it all a lot clearer.

Some of us managed to jump onto a fixed rate that is no worse unit rate than the post April cap, but at the pre April cap standing charge. And fixed for 12 months so will protect from a further cap increase in October. I never ever thought I would think electricity at 27p per kWh was a "good rate"

My heating requirement is about 2.5kW when it's +20 inside and -10 outside. I fitted a 5kW ASHP so it can do 200% of my heating. That's mainly because there are very few ASHP's less than 5kW but any smaller and it would be too slow at heating DHW. In practice it means the heat pump has an easy time and could cope with a lot colder.

Simple answer is they will work fine, as long as they are sized correctly to meet the heating needs on the coldest winter day. No problem with our ASHP here in the Highlands. We do have a wood burning stove as secondary heating, but that is more to do with the abundance of free wood.

I pity the sparky tasked with fitting the fan.......

If you are aiming for air tight, get the ducted air kit, and make sure your chosen stove supports both primaryand secondary from the duct. The stove manufacturer will specify if it needs a full constructional hearth or just a 12mm stone of glass hearth. My best advice is position the stove where it can heat the whole house, e.g in a room that opens to a central hall / stairwell so you can open the door and let the heat to other parts of the house. In a well insulated house, if it's not possible to distribute the heat to other rooms it might well overheat a single room very quickly.

That, in one picture, shows the lack of joined up thinking and cooperation between trades. Someone drilled the hole in the wall and put the pipe there. The boarder boarded the outside wall. The joiner came and put up the stud wall, oh the wall clashes with the pipe. Not my problem, I will put the wall where the pans show, I won't discuss it with anyone. Then the boarder comes back and does the same. If that were my build, I would be livid and getting all the trades together and asking why not one of you raised the issue and thought about doing something about it.

There was a case mentioned where the planning officer visited and standing on the edge of the public footpath, if he could touch it, it was "adjacent" if he could not, it was not adjacent.

There were problems in the past with copper developing pin holes for no reason. Buried in a wall it should be sleeved. Was this just passing through the wall or literally going up or across inside the wall at some depth?

Appeal?

Who designed that? It just looks wrong to me, you are effectively putting a timber cassette down into a trench below ground level, relying entirely on that red board to keep water out, and no way for it to drain if any does get in?

All expenses paid of course. It must be a joy to build with nobody checking what you do. And no need to spend a fortune on heating or insulation. And i don't think we will be discussing air tightness or mvhr on this project either.

Hi and welcome. Nice project but don't expect us to know your local building regulations. So with so much of the main house open / no windows, are they a really honest lot there so no risk of burglary?

go on, you can't keep us all guessing, you have to tell us exactly what instruction he misinterpreted, or we will have to start speculating?

Can you not DIY install as many of us have? It was certainly NOT €5000 of work needed. Or are you forced to have some stupid sign off by some registered scheme like our MCS?

WOW and I thought our £2K council tax was plenty (that is a shock after paying £1K for several years for the static caravan) I coined the phrase "Council Tax Poverty" some time ago, where you are in "Council tax poverty" if you spend more than 10% of your income on council tax. "Fuel poverty" is a well used term, but I am willing to bet most people spend more on their council tax than they do on fuel, we certainly always have done, and unlike fuel, you can't "use less" to reduce your bills. You have to be seriously poor to get any reduction in your council tax bill. And with our house now being band E, we won't even get the £150 off to ease our fuel bills as they must think having such a high banded house, we are rich.

I bought all my UFH kit from ebay, pipe, manifolds, actuators, and a cheap generic UFH controller box.

What is this 100% mark up you talk of? My own 150m2 house used 1400 kWh of electricty heating it in the last 12 months which is 9.3 kWh per square metre, but that is energy into the ASHP so assuming a COP of say 2.5 average that would actually be 23kWh of actual heat per square metre. But we are not passive house. The only way to be sure of your heating usage is to meter that separately. I bought an old school dual rate electricity meter, the sort that has a pilot wire input and would have been used with an external timer. That meters my ASHP usage, one dial meters the usage in heating mode and the other dial meters usage in DHW mode. the pilot wire is driven from one of the signals to the motorised valves.

but they are good at spin.

Can't see your video. Too big? Try a photograph instead?

Re stoves. You WON'T need two. Stoves only work in a well insulated house if you design and treat a single stove as whole house heating. Fit just ONE stove, in the kitchen diner. NOT in a fireplace, but a free standing stove in front of that short bit of wall in the middle of the south wall. Then change the single door to the hall / stairwell to a pair of double doors. When you light the stove open the double doors and the door to the living room and the stove will heat the whole house including upstairs. Shut the kitchen / diner door and the stove will overheat that room. A stove in the smaller living room will definitely overheat it. This is pretty much what we have and the one stove, with all the doors open heats the whole house without overheating one room. Most people will tell you not to fit a stove in a well insulated house because it will overheat the room and you will never light it again, that is because it has not been thought about as whole house heating.

Okay another little twist to this. SWMBO and I had almost resigned ourselves that this was going to happen. SWMBO was less against it than me providing the compensation was a "useful" sum of money. At the moment we have no idea what it might be. I have now spoken to all the neighbours in the street and we are the only ones that have been contacted so far. But the last one I spoke to this morning is our direct neighbour who already has the cable from another wind farm under his garden. Surprisingly he said, without being prompted, for me to give the comany his details and he would be happy to have it under his garden alongside the other one. So now I am torn between just going down that route and suggesting they contact him, or hold out a bit longer to see just what they are going to offer and if not a "useful" amount then suggest they try next door?