ProDave

they have got "noticed" so people know their name, but I still bet very very few know what they actually want to happen.

If it is "Carbon neutral" then that is manipulating that phrase and kidding yourself you are reducing CO2 emissions. A Boimass boiler still sends CO2 up the flue, it still adds to greenhouse gas problems and has reduced the number of trees absorbing CO2. Just imagine of we all swapped to boimass boilers. Do you really think the CO2 problem would be solved? I don't.

But they are doing a lousy job of getting their message over. They block roads and we know it is "insulate Britain" that is doing it, but ask the general population what are they trying to achieve and I bet most have not got a clue. They are FAILING to get the message across that most of Britain's houses need a lot of work to improve the insulation levels.

Round here all the schools and public buildings like swimming pools and leisure centres switched to biomass boilers about 10 years ago on the mistaken belief that was "green" If your house needs radiators to run at 70 degrees to get enough heat into it, then you are going to be disappointed of you just swap the boiler for a heat pump and do nothing else. A lot of these are piped in radial microbore systems so quite likely won't get enough flow for the radiators, assuming you have actually swapped them for larger ones. A lot of us keep saying, there is nothing wrong with heat pumps, but if you swap half the system without proper design then you ARE going to get disappointed customers and bad press for heat pumps.

I am sorry to say the whole house heating upgrade topic is being completely miss handled by the government. They think (at least this is the impression they give) just swap all the gas boilers for heat pumps and the problem is solved and we have all gone green. WRONG. The most fundamental issue with a very large amount of the UK house stock is the fabric of the houses are lousy, no or poor insulation and poor air tightness meaning they need a massive amount of heat to keep them warm. Easy to throw lots of heat into a house with a large gas boiler running on (what used to be) cheap gas. Not so easy ito do with a heat pump. Yes if you do the heat calculations a very large heat pump might work, but what about the radiator sizes? what about the hot water tank? What it the HP needs to be so large you need 3 phase but can't get it at your house? Offering £5K is just going to feed the cowboy "swap a boiler for an ASHP and do nothing else" brigade, result in a lot of poor installs that don't work, and give heat pumps a bad name (which many think they have already) WHEN are we going to tell the general public the truth? If you want your old poorly insulated house to go green, you are going to have to spend a LOT of money upgrading the fabric of the house first and properly insulating it, which will be costly and very disruptive. THEN it might be a good idea to heat it with a heat pump.

What I am trying to say is the heat curve thing is a means of getting the very best eficciency from an ASHP by reducing the water temperature when it is not very cold. But to set it up you have to have some knowledge of how the system performs. So start with the heat curve disabled so the ASHP just produces a constant temperature of water. Your first goal is wait until the depths of winter when you can turn that water temperature up and down, and by experiment find out just how hot it has to be to get sufficient heat into the house on the very coldest days. Only when you know that, can you turn on the heat curve function and set it to progressively lower the temperature when the weather is less cold. I am not familliar with the Ecodan, so hopefully someone can give you some help to understand how to adjust parameters and what they mean.

The issue is this one and only thermostat turns the whole lot off when that is satisfied which is wrong. By "turn down" I don;t mean adjust a TRV, I mean turn down the lockshield valve on that hall radiator to slow the water flow rate through it which will make it a bit cooler and less heat into the hall.

I havent bothered with a heat curve, I just run at a constant flow temperature. If you do that, it is just a case of finding how hot is has to be on the very coldest day to provide enough heat. Only once I know that would I then consider implementing a heat curve to reduce the temperature when it is less cold. to try a heat curve without knowing even one data point would be just too many unknowns.

The title is "hidden" i missed it glancing through as its "New: Save Money: My beautiful....... Green home"

I was under £10K on 0% credit cards and getting worried about rolling them over as they were near the end of the 0% period, and to roll them over you need to find a current 0% offer with a different card provider. Thankfully the VAT refund arrived in time to clear all the debt.

Thanks set to record (so I can skip the adverts)

Scottish building regs are all numbered, not lettered and I forget which number it comes under. But basically all general purpose switches and sockets must be between 400mm and 1200mm and that includes consumer units. Dedicated sockets can be any height. There are also other things like no socket or switch within 300mm of an internal corner which I have broken many times without being pulled up, and there is a minimum height a socket must be above a worktop.

Turn down the radiator in the hall or turn up the thermostat in the hall. Is this a new system for this winter? If so it hasn't been balanced yet. Balancing means adjusting the flow rate of water through each radiator so all the rooms heat up at about the same rate, and at the moment the hall heats up way quicker then the other rooms and the thermostat in the hall turns the whole lot off. You want the hall to heat up slower than all the other rooms so its radiator wants a very low flow rate. Once that is sorted out, you will have to experiment with the flow temperature. Only when it gets colder, if you find it struggles to heat the house, increase the flow temperature a bit.

Radiators or under floor heating? How well insulated is the house? Old or new etc?

When we owned a flat in Scotland where the access was over a bit of "communal" land, our flat in common with the others owned a 1/8 share of that land. I would have expected in this case rather than plot 1 owning the access, that it would jointly be owned by the the plots.

I am talking of marking the timber frame before the plasterboard even goes on, so no risk of the marker pen showing through.

Yes I have found that is the Cylinder Head, sold as a complete unit. The price on ebay (not even convinced it is the exact one) is about half the cost of the whole machine. Bitterly dissapointed and wish I had spent half the cost on a "no name" pressure washer then It would not be so bad I certainly could not recommend Karcher to anyone looking for one.

But you know reducing water from 4C to 2C does not take out "half its energy"

I rarely wire a building to a plan. Instead I go around with the client, and a big black marker pen, and work out where they really want switches and sockets now thay can see the building, rather than some architects best guess at where to put them.

It was a vaulted roof design supported on ridge beams anyway, deliberately so designed to give maximum usable space in a room in roof design using 3 additional gable ends to further add to the usable space. So the choice came down to vaulted ceilings, or put a ceiling in at any height you wanted to give a bit of loft storage space.

You are allowed "dedicated" sockets at any height, e.g. the high up socket for a wall mounted tv. It is only general purpose sockets that have to comply with these rules. If it really bothers you in a new build, install a horizontal cable at your desired socket height in the service void and connect the absolute minimum sockets at regulation height. then after completion add your low down sockets where you like.

I really doubt you will get the temperature down that low, even UFH in a house that needs a lot of heat might need more than that. Probably more like 50 degrees is considered a low radiator temperature.

My Karcher pressure washer leaks. First sign of trouble was the motor did not stop when you stopped spraying. Shortly after water starts leaking from the bottom of the casing, even when turned off and the motor not running. But apart from the leak it still sort of works. Time to take it apart for a look and this is the "works" when stripped back to basics. The leak is coming out of a small hole where the arrow points My guess is that is the pressure switch. The wight "pip" coming out of the top presses on the electrical switch (removed for this photo) so I am guessing there is piston or a diaphragm and a spring in there that is leaking. The whole black plastic lump does not seem to dismantle, the only thing resembling a joint appears to be welded with what looks like solvent weld. It does not look like the black plastic lump is servicable. Internet and you tube searches only seem to deal with easy leaks on the inlet our outlet fittings which are about the only bit you can remove and replace (outlet fitting removed for this photo) and "advice" on the internet is "throw it away" Has anyone else had luck with a similar thing? I have to say I thought I was buying a quality make and am very underwhelmed with what I find inside.

Having previously lived in a 1930-s house I know they leak heat like it is going out of fashion. Ours was 9" solid walls, if you really have a cavity that is an improvement. Storage heaters were abysmal in ours, it was what was there when we moved in, and in the depths of winter the living room would not keep anything like a comfortable temperature with the storage heaters on full. We fitted LPG gas central heating and the cost to run it (talking 20 years ago) was high, I would shudder to think what it is now. In all honesty I would probably fit oil fired central heating to that. But if you cant stomach that then I suspect you are going to want a pretty big ASHP and you are going to still be shocked at the running cost.

My last order for the sun room earlier in the year were about 12 weeks and arrived on exactly the day they quoted when placing the order. Considering they were now coming from a "third country" I thought that was not too bad.