ProDave

Was there a flash and a bang. Who was digging for what?

Yes that is definitely my opinion. I set my tv low on the wall, but at what I regard a comfortable height

I called in at the local TP today, knowing they normally have a wall of various planed timber and came back with a length to experiment with. It's a finished (planed) size of 45mm by 35mm and comes in 4M lengths which will each do 2 spindles with not much waste. Just one cut and fixed to test the idea. Notched at the bottom and screwed into the end of the floor structure. In this picture the top is not fixed yet, but the plan is to drill the end of the post and the ceiling and locate it with a dowel so a hidden fixing. This is probably the smallest timber you would want to use over that length and seems reasonably solid. they will need a bit of sanding and the corners rounding a bit then painting or varnishing. I await our daughter to get home and give her approval before I go and buy some more. We also need to decide what spacing to use. Too close and it will resemble a prison cell.

Best of luck getting highways to do anything. A bit further down our road there is a blocked culvert and for much of the winter the road becomes a ford. The council have been notified several times by each neighbour and 15 years on nothing has been done. They did come and patch up a section of road surface that got washed away but have done nothing to fix the culvert issue. Why have you still got a septic tank in use if you have a connection to a mains sewer?

Widening that opening would leave too little bearing for the lintel. Can your stove do a rear exit flue? If so I would just use that which would make the stove sit out into the room a bit more.

Very little PIR in this build, the only place is under the bathroom UFH. Roof, from outside to in, tiles battens counter battens breathable membrane 100mm wood fibre board 195mm thick rafters full filled with Frametherm 35 13mm OSB Air tight membrane taped 25mm battened service void Plasterboard.

I would avoid linking to the radiator return. HW return anywhere would be fine. I had a house once plumbed with the DHW and radiators sharing a common return and that would on occasions warm up a bedroom radiator by convection. It is a bad idea to share anything else with a radiator return.

Consider what I used, Frametherm 35 on a 1200mm roll, should do your cuts with little waste. Stiff enough to remain in place without slumping, I had one test piece left there for 6 months before getting covered and it did not budge. Mineral wool has the advantage of longer decrement delay, which basically means it takes longer for the building to warm up or cool down in response to a temperature change.

Got that tee shirt as well.

I did that to a barrow. I was filling it with my digger, and it started to fall over, so I tried to stop it falling with the digger bucket. Digger 1, Barrow 0.

Mine (LG therma V) will turn on the circulating pump at about 5 degrees. It does not run the ASHP, it just runs the water circulating pump for a minute or 2 to draw it bit of heat from the house, or at least move the slug of cold water into the house and replace it with some house temperature water. The instructions for the ASHP say to use antfreeze, but it appears to be programmed to assume you have not done that so it tries to keep the fluid temperature above 0. This function is not documented and cannot be turned off.

All ASHP's will have some form of timer controls, either built in via it's own controller or an external controller. In my case I decided the controller that came with it while it could do timer functions it was a complicated thing. So I chose to control mine from an ordinary central heating controller and that ultimately links to the ASHP's "room thermostat" input. So when my heating programmer says off, the ASHP is off. It's as simple as that.

I didn't strap mine. I supported them at frequent intervals with a piece of batten under them for them to rest on, so they won't sag, but are free to expand and contract.

Is that a duct heater /cooler?

You are tackling this from the wrong angle. Rather than work out how to use the "spare heat" i would be looking at how to eliminate or reduce the spare heat creation. 400W projector? do they not yet make LED ones? If not I bet they will soon. 1000W for an IT cupboard. You need to re think from first principles exactly what you are trying to achieve there? Something that consumes 1000W for long periods of time has no place in a modern low energy house (unless it happens to be the heating system)

Yes different window supplier. No problem getting a 900 egress window.

In real life, I dispute that dry lined walls in old stone buildings are better. They might be if detailed properly. But almost without exception my findings are the cavity created with the dry lining is open to the loft space and just allows cold air into that cavity, bypassing most of the insulation properties of the wall. This shows itself in winter when you remove a switch or a socket and an icy blast of cold air comes out of the vacated hole.

Some more work and some up to date photos. Major development is I have installed some stairs to access the mezanine. It is built with a cantilevered overhang to bring the mez. to the centreline of the roof. After much deliberation a staircase solution that did not intrude too much into the room could not be found without cutting a chunk of the overhang away, so that is what we did. For anyone interested the stairs we chose are these. https://www.loftcentre.co.uk/dolle-graz-space-saving-stair-kit-dark-grey We chose these as we could not be certain how they would actually fit and these are so much more versatile than just getting a straight flight from the likes of stairbox or similar. As it was it took quite a few iterations to get the turn at the bottom to work around the flue pipe. The stairs come with a metal handrail system that is yet to be fitted in this photo. So that brings me back to protecting the rest of the mezanine. This photo show the edge that I have to make some banister system for. It's about 3.3M long and the height from the floor to the ceiling ridge is 1.7 metres. My daughter would like spindles that go floor to ceiling along this section so I now need to visit some timber merchants and sawmills to see what they can offer. I am not entirely sold on a timber solution for this. The stair handrails are grey painted steel. If I could find grey painted metal spindles that might work, I am even thinking of round wardrobe rails, if they could be bought in grey or just painted grey.

There will be lots more stories like this and I have already predicted this will be the next miss selling scandal. Heat pumps work fine in the right circumstances and when designed correctly, but what this shows AGAIN is you can't just slap a heat pump in an old leaky house and expect it to work and heat the house cheaply. The government are missing the point by a country mile by just thinking swap all boilers for heat pumps and the problem is solved. They are totally missing the point that some drastic improvement has to be made to much of the UK housing stock to better insulate and make air tight etc to reduce the energy need, Only then can you think of a heat pump as a heating source. Lots more of this to come I am afraid. and I write this as a satisfied heat pump user. If we are going to pick holes in journalism, this is the bit that got me I much prefer to have the noise outside the house, the alternative is have it inside. How would that be better? You don't have windows open when the heating is on and we don't have heating on at night. The noise is NOT constant like any heat source it makes a noise when there is a call for heat, which is not all the time.

If the system is fully wired then with no thermostats there will be no call for heat on any zone = no UFH pump running and no call for heat to the heat source. So at least 1 thermostat will have to be working or linked out to get something to happen.

To sum up. The property is rubbish. Throw 8kW of heat at it from a stove and it barely dents the heating requirement of the house and it is still cold. Throw a similar amount of heat at it from an ASHP and because that does not heat the house, people are quick to blame the heat pump as being rubbish. What is rubbish is whoever thought a small heating system of any heat source was going to be adequate for such a rubbish house. That is the issue that is faced with a lot of houses.

Yes but in order for the house to "make" you £250, in my book that means it generates your entire usage AND exports enough to get you paid £250.

I guess to "make" £250 per year you just need solar PV on an export tariff which pays about 5p per kWh exported. So to earn £250 that would be 5000kWh export, so that would be a big PV system. Or are they counting RHI payments as "earning" money?

The probe is usually a thermistor so there is no problem extending the cable, it does not need to be immediately the other side of the wall.

I missed the bit about HOW you got the worktop lifted up?