ProDave

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.

Boy that is busy in that back box. If the wall depth had allowed I would have used a 47mm back box there.

Yes this was a lesson in how to waste money on a completely unecessary design feature (the cantilever) when a couple of pillars would achieve the same thing so much easier and cheaper. But I felt sorry for the bloke, start a project expecting another house sale to fund it, then find that house does not sell and the only way to shift it is drop the price drastically. A bit close to home that one. And i also saw a broken, bitter and twisted lonely man putting on a brave face with the situation he found himself.

Rationel at least, leave a gap between the timber window and the aluminium cladding. So the wooden window can breath and the aluminium keeps the rain and the UV off it. That I feel confident will last. I did wire a house a few years ago that had "aluminium clad timber windows" and that had a thin strip of painted aluminium tight up touching the timber window frame. That did not strike me as a very good arrangement as indeed water would at least wick by capillary action and the small gap between wood and aluminium might end up permanently wet. I the subject of weight, there is no disputing my 3G Rationel slider is a big lump of window but once you get it moving it slides smoothly, but agreed someone weak and frail might struggle to get it moving.

Personally I would go 2.45 downstairs and 2.4 upstairs. Our house is a little unusual that we have 2.4 downstairs and the two main upstairs bedrooms have vaulted ceilings going up to the ridge, and I like it. The small, spare bedroom has a 2.3M ceiling to give more height on the mezanine but it is only a small room. I think it would be oppressive in a larger room.

Don't worry about the boiler flow temperature, the UFH manifold should have a blending valve to mix the temperature down to a low temperature just for the UFH. Upstairs rads and HW tank will operate at boiler temperature though of course the tank will have a thermostat to turn it off once it reaches it's set temperature.

I used royal mail special delivery. My concern was if the package went missing, there was a potential loss of many thousands of pounds. It was impossible to insure the package for that much. So I mitigated that risk by scanning and storing a copy of all the receipts, so if it did get lost I could re print them and re submit.

What I would have done is lay a sheet of air tight membrane over the wall plate before the joists went on and applied the Tony Tray principle.