ProDave

It is normal to have a top and bottom bar to a service void. Drill or leave a notch where you know services will pass thtough

I really think you do not want to be helped and do not think it is possible to be helped. You are set into the mindset of your house is too cold and to rubbish to be heated in any way and won't listen to or try any suggestions. If that really is your mindset then I hope you are happy in your cheap to run but freezing cold house and I don't see how any of us can help you any more? If you have not given up reading this, I can definitely say I know plenty of people in these old stone houses living in warmth and comfort (but obviously not ultra low bills) We are suggesting ways to help and things to try and to try but rather than try them, you just tell us why they won't work and they are ridiculous suggestions. Some people can't be helped. My sister in law lives in a 1960's house with her heating on twice a day for 1 hour at a time with the radiators scalding hot, the rest of the time the house cools down and she often snuggles up in bed in the day to keep warm. She just won't listen when you suggest not having the radiators anything like as hot, but on for much more of the day. She just says it will cost too much without even trying it. Some people you just can't help. Sorry.

Most people use more energy in winter because they are heating their house, and less in summer when they are not. Your electricity meter gives reading all the time of how much it has used. Most suppliers, like Octopus prefer you to pay the same amount each month. So in the summer months you are paying for more than actual use so your balance with the company builds up. In the winter you are probably using more than the £70 per month you are paying and your balance comes down. If you still have an account balance of £300 at near the end of winter then you are paying more than you need to. That makes your £70 per month even more astonishing. I can't get my summer monthly usage that low, I would have to stop using the washing machine and dishwasher and watch a lot less television to achieve that. So all it shows is just how little you are using on heating which is why your house is always cold. Octopus will change your monthly payments to actual usage each month if you prefer rather than the same average all year round. Or you can ask for surplus balance to be returned to you if you want to. In that respect they are a lot better and easier to deal with than most other suppliers.

Yes, I mean ON as in running and radiators hot ALL DAY AND NIGHT until the house reaches the temperature set by the thermostat. You need to get the installer to show you how to change the settings between off, on, controlled by a timer and on all the time. Only when you actually try it on all the time, will you really know if the house is capable of being heated by the heat pump. Try it for a week. It might annoy you with some noise at night, it might cost you more, but that is the only way to know if it is actually capable of heating your house and if so how much it might cost to do so (remember costs will go down after the initial heat up and dry out period) Get the installer to show you how to change the settings, take notes so you remember, and if you don't understand ask him to explain it again. As an aside, one thing I dislike about heat pumps is to the average user, they are so different to a gas boiler. Almost everyone is familiar with a normal central heating programmer on the wall from where you can set on off times or easily turn it on all the time. But every heat pump I have seen the timer functions are way more complicated but more important are nothing like operating the sort of programmer that everyone is used to. When I installed mine, I made it a non standard install by ignoring all the timer functions built into the controller that came with the heat pump, and instead connected a standard central heating programmer so anyone could understand how to change it from on all the time to on a timer etc.

What if planning conditions removed permitted development? Your simple definition would appear to ignore that?

If you are only paying £70 per month for electricity then there is no way you can be putting enough energy into that house. At this time of year I am paying that much for heating a very well insulated and air tight house. If I put that level of heating into an old cold stone building it would be cold. The only way you are going to solve this impass, is to turn your heating on 24/7 for at least a week to try it. Once you have been shown how to do this, please give it a try. For the first week or 2 the bills WILL be high as it will be heating the mass of the building and drying it. Bills will go down once the building has warmed up and dried out as you will then only be replacing lost heat. Until you get over your conviction that it is not going to work and actually try it, you will never know.

But a motorhome could well be, and car towing any form of trailer. You don't want to be stuck with the a**e end of your vehicle stuck out on the road while waiting for your gates to open.

As above, pumping stations are a last resort. I am sure you can design the parking area with a suitably reinforced construction to not harm the pipe. Raise the height of the parking area would be a good start to give enough cover to reinforce it.

The "tent" thing is where a structure has been built inside the stone walls of the building, in this case plasterboard supported on a probably thin timber frame. If this is not detailed well, then this cavity between the actual stone wall and the plasterboard might be open all the way up to the loft. So it allows cold air from the loft to get in between the actual building structure and the room. So if the walls were perfectly insulated, the rooms can still be bold and lose heat quickly because of this constant supply of cold air from the loft into the gap keeping the plasterboard walls cold. The same can apply on a modern brick / block build where dot and dab plasterboard is poorly detailed. The detail it properly, the entire perimiter of each and every wall needs to be sealed to the actual stone work all the way around top bottom and sides so there is no air path for the cold air to get from the loft to the gap.

For planners to make such a mountain out of the "where do I put my bins" question is ridiculous. Mine are by the back door, so I can easily put rubbish out into them. Then the night before bin day (because our bin collection is usually very early) I take whichever bin is due to be emptied round to the front and stand it on the edge of the driveway next to the road edge. Somehow I suspect putting that is my bin proposal would upset somebody. So you need to find out what they want and tell them that, then carry on doing what works for you regardless of what nonsense they want.

You have just described the classic "plasterboard tent"

I was building a new house that I knew would be well insulated, airtight and low energy. There is no mains gas here, so other realistic choices were oil boiler or lpg gas boiler. I did not want an outside tank taking up space and looking ugly. So i chose ASHP. Entirely self installed with UFH. Cost of parts no more than oil boiler and oil tank and not difficult. ASHP gives electric heating at comperable running cost to fossil fuel boiler, so what is not to like.

Very well done, looks very nice indeed.

They will in Scotland. A near neighbour had provisioned for DMEV only and his air test came in at under 3 and BC insisted on MVHR or no completion certificate. Having provisioned for DMEV that was the extract side of the ducting provisioned for, he just had to provide for inlet ducting, and the only way he could sensibly achieve mvhr so late in the build was 2 separate units one for downstairs and one for upstairs. I would say you need a friendly tester who "won't notice" if the result comes in under 3 and you go and crack a window open a little.........

The thing that gets me about spending countless hours configuring and setting up some custom home brew voice control system, is how do you easily back up all the configured software, so WHEN it goes wrong you can just re install it again in a flash and it will all just work again. It's bad enough with my Pi music box rebuilding that each time it crashes, and there is not much customisation of that.

I have Jeremy's old Stiebel Eltron 10kW instant water heater. It is on the hot feed out from the UVC to the bathroom pipework. It was fitted as a comfort blanket when only heating hot water in the tank to a low temperature, so a given size tank would not deliver as much as most people would be used to as dilution with cold would be a lot less. The theory was if you used up all the hot water part way through a shower you could carry on using it just like a 10kW electric shower. It is still there but I suspect it never turns on.

My first failure was a micro SD card in an adaptor to make it a full size SD card. I suspect the poor quality of the adaptor may have been at least part of the problem. This time around I searched and eventually found a full size SD card to avoid that. That was hard to find so then add in trying to find a particular type would be even more difficult.

Interesting about SD card failures. I have just reinstalled my Pi Music box on a new SD card, second failure in 5 years. That does seem to be a weakness of the Pi that they do not seem to be up to the job of being the boot disk and OS disk.

There was a pot hole here at the edge of a road that every day someone put a traffic cone in it. As soon as the council removed the cone, another one appeared, until they took the hint and filled it.

No, Don't pay them and find someone who actually understands it to do the job instead.

With that level of insulation and such a small space, don't fit a WBS, you will melt the first time you light it.

I have not tried the BG ones you linked to but I have used these https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/FB4235.html

If you have a proper void behind, AND if you have large enough wall lights, you can sink a round (conduit box sized) dry lining box into the plasterboard to accommodate a junction to flex. And check before cutting any holes, if you have said your prayers, you will find the fixing centres of the wall light match the round conduit box screw spacing.

That is pretty standard. I would use 1mm cable in that situation, though some electricians seem stuck in wanting to use 1.5mm and not open to reason. Of course you can strip the cables back to terminate them. But it looks to me like that is a plasterboard wall? If so leave some of the cable and push the spare back into the wall. You will thank me in 10 years when you want different wall lights and you need a bit more cable. Choose your lights carefully some can be a mare to fit more than one cable and keeping things neat and tidy is usually the key to getting everything to fit. If the lights are class 2 / double insulated, often they are the hardest to terminate as they require the connections to be contained inside a usually too small plastic box. Class 1 (those that need an earth) are often very much easier to connect and less demanding.

I would say three of the multiple fixings should be a nut and bolt right through old and new joists (one each end and one in the middle) them multiple screws as well.