ProDave

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?

Can we have some context here. Type of house? Detached, terraced, age, type of build? WHAT is the other side of the wall where the noise appears to be coming from? (next doors house even?) Does it occur at particular times of day? What type of heating? How long have you been there? Has it happened all the time or just started happening?

I would fit thermostats, remember to get ones designed for a bathroom.

I have only worked on one straw bale house. I seem to recall part of the issue sourcing bales, apart from the size issue, was moisture content which seemed a lot more important for something that will be stacked up and kept for many 10s of years than normal bales that will usually be used within a year. It was a case of needing perfect weather conditions leading up to harvest and then between harvest and baling.

It's also a useful giant wind indicator for sailors in the Moray Firth.

You can probably see the Norboard factory or pass it every time you go to Inverness, you would think it would be cheaper here. I wouldn't want to do more than 2.4M wide sections or it will be hard to lift. Beware, OSB is available in metric or imperial sheet sizes. You really want metric or your stud spacings at 2ft won't match the plasterboard. God knows why they still make it imperial sizes.

I generally see 13mm OSB used as sheathing. Use double headers and footers. the way it normally works is you fix a single footer the the wall plate or whatever is sits one. You then build the stud walls in sections with single header and footer to each wall section. Then you fix a second header across the top with the joints staggered to tie it all together.

I only heat our DHW to 48 degrees. That temperature found by experiment to be the absolute hottest I can hold my hands under without being painful. I can see no need for DHW being hotter than that. The use of the immersion heater is probably because it is working hard to do the DHW heating and the worst ambient temperature for an ASHP is a few degrees above 0 when it is most likely to ice up and need defrosting. It probably senses the icing issue and switches to the immersion instead. Just lowering your target DHW temperature will reduce that, but you will probably be able to disable the use of the immersion in some settings if you really wanted to. The buzzing box is a contactor. they shouldn't make that much noise, you have a bad one. It's unlikely to be dangerous, just annoying. You could complain to the supplier and get them to swap it and hope the next one is less noisy. Many of us concluded that if you have mains treated water and an unvented water cylinder there is no need to a legionairs cycle so we have turned that function off. Once it gets well below 0 icing ceases to be a problem as there is little moisture left in the air.