ProDave

Do you not know their names? If the company has folded, they would likely be happy co finish off privately for you?

I bought the £150 offer Makita, just one drill but two 5AH batteries. My gripe with previous tools is running out of battery charge and time to recharge so 2 5AH batteries was more important to me than the impact driver. That offer is only £135 if you buy it before midnight tonight.

I would love to see the details of just HOW they are going to make the huge proportion of old buildings up to an EPC C and WHO is going to pay for it? A heat pump is ONLY "carbon neutral" if 100% of the electricity grid is carbon neutral. We are a long way from that. But if the greens want to pretend a HP is carbon neutral just like they claim burning wood is, then that is fine to make it easier to "tick boxes" Just WHEN are the house buying public (and more importantly they surveyors) going to wake up to the fact a house with a poor EPC SHOULD be valued lower than a house with a good EPC, to reflect the money it is going to cost someone sooner or later to upgrade it. Like we continually get, a lot of bluster about well meaning intentions, with no idea of just HOW to achieve any of this. It does make me glad the 2 houses we own are EPC C and A and the poorer one should be sold within a few years anyway. But even my new build is not quite carbon neutral. to truly achieve that would require a house even better than the one we have just built, and I just cannot see the mass house builders ever achieving that. Has anyone calculated just how many boilers need to be replaced by heat pumps each year to achieve these targets? Then care to guess what percentage of these "upgrades" will fail as being inadequate or too expensive to use?

I used to program Siemens S7 which is a bit different to LOGO. Have you done any PLC programming? it is quite a different beast to most HA systems. Lots of help, tutorials and a forum on PLCS.NET

A heat pump is more like a system boiler than a combi. You need a hot water tank with a heat pump. Most of them will only run heating or hot water at any one time and switch between them, and most allow you to set different temperatures for each. Mine is set to run hot water heating for 30 minutes at a time when the HW tank says it needs some heat, but you can adjust the parameters to either give priority to hot water or to heating. And most of us run the hot water at about 50 degrees or slightly less which plays much better with the way heat pumps work.

There are places where you would really really really rather the bolt stayed in thanks to gravity and at least the 2 parts were still held together in some form.

In my book the washer goes under whichever one you intend to turn with the spanner to tighten it. Or whichever side has an oversized hole that the bolt or nut might pull through without.

The BG stuff from SF is probably as good as any other ordinary brand. The one I avoid at all costs is MK, and they are on my blacklist because they have history of changing the exact sizing of their mcb's so a current MK mcb will be a very poor fit in an old MK board. My favourite and what I have in my house is Hager, because it does not matter how new or how old your Hager board is, the mcbs are exactly the same size and a perfect fit. but you won't get Hager from screweys.

Not so, I believe ASHP's are a good choice for well insulated low energy houses and particularly when used with UFH. But I think they can be a very bad choice for an old leaky draughty house with a high heat requirement and even more so when you try and deliver the heat through radiators and run them at a higher temperature than the heat pump can properly deliver. With the proposed banning of fossil fuel boilers we are going to see a LOT of very poorly performing ASHP's installed as "boiler replacements" and they are going to get a very bad press. That is not the fault of an ASHP but rather whoever "designed" and installed such bad installations.

Last weeks one was just an example of the ludicrous planning system we have. A valley in Cumbria with the ruins of some old mill. They got PP to conserve and add a building to it, but then the building was declared beyond hope by the heritage guy, so they knocked it all down, built the new building and then rebuild something a bit similar to the derelect stone work around it to look as though they had kept the old ruins. Am I the only one that thinks it would have been better just to build a completely new building and face it in the old stone, once it was apparent the old building was completely beyond saving?

It might be better just to pay the extra for a flooring type that already has a coating on it that can withstand a certain exposure to the weather. I would not just be using standard P5 in that situation. Does the floor have to go in now? I have never worked on a TF house that has the floor deck put in at that stage but I know some specify it as the floor forms part of the racking structure of the building. In our case just a few sheets of OSB were loosely fitted just to make a working platform, but not part of the final floor so it did not matter if they got a but wet.

And often, just removing them, rotating them 180 degrees and putting them back will make enough contact to get it running again,. at least for a short time, thus proving it is just new brushes needed.

Starting to plan the next job, developing the mezanine floor. This is the mezanine floor accessed from my daughters bedroom and the floor extends above the adjacent spare bedroom. That's very much an early under construction picture I will take a current one and post it shortly. At the moment there is no fixed access, it has just been used as a storage platform putting a ladder up to it whenever needed. There is currently no handrail. Daughter wants wooden "spindles" that go floor to ceiling. In this case "ceiling" is the apex of the room and is 1.8 metres from the mezanine floor. She wants floor to ceiling spindles rather than ending with a handrail at handrail height. So I wonder do any of the stair parts suppliers sell long spindles like this, or is it a case of trying to buy say 1" square planed timber and making your own (no doubt with a lot of waste)?

I wish this thread had just stayed on the topic of wait and see how the replacement heat pump they are going to fit works and whether is solves the noise problem. But it is just going over the same old ground that was done to death in the old thread, so that's me out of the thread.

Don't under estimate the cost of removing that downstairs corner wall to form the new kitchen and it will need a pillar to support the corner. Bi fold doors are like marmite on here, you love them or hate them. Many will tell you they are draughty and leak heat out like it is going out of fashion. Consider good quality sliders instead.

I am another one that shunned the ASHPs programmer as WAY too complicated. So that is set to 24/7 and just used for setting and reading parameters. I use a bog standard 3 channel central heating programmer, something that just about anybody knows and understands and feels comfortable with. 3 channels heating downstairs, heating upstairs (bathrooms only) and Hot water. Below that is simple room thermostats so 3 downstairs and one in each bathroom.

Well we have both Granite (Italian I think) and Oak, treated with 3 coats of 2 pack varnish. BOTH do not stain (well I have not found anything that has stained them yet, certainly not curry or red wine) and certainly not plain water. The granite I am sure would crack if I dropped a sledge hammer on it, but has not chipped or cracked or scratched in normal use, but drop a plate on it and the plate definitely breaks. The Granite is not bothered by hot pans or boiling water. We take care (use a trivet) not to "test" the oak with a hot pan. The oak won't crack but drop a heavy pointed object and it will dent very slightly.

An external air kit is available for the little 3kW burley stove and I have one on my 5kW Mendip stove.

I assume this is an old house so not in any way built as "air tight" and it doesn't have mvhr or anything like that? So a simple air from room stove would do it but provide an air intake ducted to behind the stove so it does not draw cold air in and across the floor to get to the stove.

170L would be far too small. Bear in mind an ASHP will generally heat the water less hot than a gas or oil boiler. We run our hot water at 48 degrees. So when you draw hot water it will mix less cold with it that you may be used to so will use more out of the hot tank. We have a 300L UVC and find that is adequate for a 3 person 2 bathroom house. and with the water heated to 48 degrees by the ASHP there is plenty of capacity for surplus solar PV to heat it hotter.

There should be an automatic bypass valve for that, but sometimes an ABV can be noisy when passing.

A joiner friend of mine dropped into the conversation last week, he had 2 faulty Makita 18V cordless multitools, do i want to "have a look at them" and if I can fix them one for me one for him. I was astonished at how easy and cheap they were to repair. In both cases it was the front bearing of the motor had failed, the gearbox and everything else seemed fine. Very easy to dismantle the tool. The motors did not appear servicable but replacements were found for just under £20 each. When I took his repaired tool back today, he told me that these were both replaced FOC under warranty by Makita at under 3 years old and they didn't want the faulty ones back which is how he ended up with them. I just thought people might like to know how easy they are to repair, and how cheap and readily available most spares seem to be.

I know this is not what you are asking, but your plot layout does not make sense. You have one HUGE entrance "driveway" that appears to be paved in some form on the south, sunny side of the house, and only a tiny little but of "garden" on the north side of the house. I would be seriously re balancing that. Re the HW tank, how about a mezanine level above the utility room? Agreed with @PeterW master bedroom layout is completely wrong. I would have en-suite where it is, then opening into the bedroom area with the bed taking in the view, and the dressing as a room at the left hand end. I would not want to walk through the dressing to get to the bedroom.

It does seem an odd solution. If there is no valid reason for having a frost protection system in the present setup, then you would think their sollution would be to completely disable any such frost protection. The fact they can't (or won't) must suggest they are not actually in control of the product (i.e. they re badge and sell something made by A N Other and have no access to make engineering changes) that does not bode well if the replacement also has similar issues. The monoblock will have some form of frost protection, but that need be as in my case only the very low level hum from the water circulating pump for a minute or so from time to time.

The point must be to ensure the ventilation is adequate. In the case of a house relying on trickle vents and passive ventilation I can perhaps see the point in that, to make sure the vents are open etc. In the case of mvhr, adequate ventilation is endured when the system is commisioned and balanced to less point perhaps? All I see is jet one more thing for BC to nit pick about and yet another box to tick.