ProDave

I use about £50 of non heating electricity in a month and at this time of year about £100 for heating. So lets just say £700 of your electricity is for heating. That seems an awful lot for an ICF house about the same size as mine I would start by taking a reading every day at the same time and tabulating it. If there is no inbuilt metering to say how much the ASHP is using, get an electrician to install it's own electricity meter so you have an independent measure of how much the ASHP is actually using on it's own. Then you can work out what is happening.

Thermal Store is what you need, not UVC, that might make your search easier. You can get those very large.

You are nearly there, look on the bright side. Just the thermostat to fix now you have finally got the radiators properly hot. It sounds to me like it has probably never worked, until the rooms got properly heated they never got hot enough to bother the room thermostat. So that's an easy tangible fault to put to the installers "the room thermostat does not work, come and fix it"

I would put it on the back wall of your house.

In our previous house, all the kitchen sockets were temporarily surface mounted, and I only cut the back boxes in to flush mount them as I tiled the room so all the sockets lined up perfectly with the tiling.

Why don't the recessed shelves line up with the tiles?

What is the other side of the 1M walkway? If it is your boundary with a neighbour then I think he would be very displeased with you mounting it up high above head height blowing cold air over his fence and subjecting him to the noise from it. The only other issue is if you walk under it just as it is defrosting you might get dripped on.

Put 25mm insulation e.g kingspan / Celotex etc. Long PB screws through the insulation into the timber. If that is not exactly the right thickness then pack with plywood etc or whatever makes it up to being a square fit. Don't forget to detail your membrane up to the window with all joints taped and all bits filled and taped to the windows before you fit the insulation and plasterboard.

This is progress but not a solution. So they got you to change some settings which got the radiators properly hot but then the room thermostat didn't work. Why was that. The operation of the room thermostat should be independant of water temperature settings and heat curves. And why could the various engineers that have visited so many times before not have changed those same settings and got it all working properly? At least you have some more amunition to go back to the installers again and get them to finally sort it out properly.

None. They are all double insulated cables so can be in the same trunking if you want.

So my cooker hood has arrived but not without a twist. I was given a provisional delivery date when I ordered and was told the courier would contact me. On Monday I received a phone call from the courier telling me it would be delivered on Friday and the driver would phone me an hour before delivery. I was just putting my boots and coat on this morning to go out to do a job, and the door bell rang, there was the van with my cooker hood 2 days early and no phone call. What was the point of booking a delivery for a particular date to be sure you are in and then delivering it early where 5 minutes later I would have been out?

Yes plot orientation, i.e. which way is north, where are the views? I would turn the stairs round so they start by the front door and come up into the centre of the landing not right at the front. That would allow you to have an open void above the front door making a double height space if you wanted to.

It needs to be more sophisticated. Purge the line upon detecting occupancy, but stop as soon as hot water is detected with a pipe temperature sensor, so it won't purge the pipe if you come back in and it is still warm. A perfect boffins job using an Arduino or the new micro pi (forget it's correct name)

When I remember seeing this discussed, you would not feed the WC with raw hot water, rather you would feed it from a thermal mixing valve with that set to the lowest temperature it can go. so the first flush will draw hot water through the pipe but when the hot arrives, the mixing valve would then reduce that to a lot less hot water so the next flush is not wasting much hot. I would be looking for a thermal mixing valve that can be adjusted down to say 20 degrees? Is such a thing made? Is there a legionairs or other risk filling an open vented cistern with luke warm water and leaving it to stand?

A second storey may be possible on the single storey bit, but i would not be moving the end walls and making them follow the boundary line at an angle. That would be a huge expense for not very much extra space. To be frank, it is the wrong plot for a large extension, I would put the money towards moving to a larger house, or a similar sized house on a better plot that has real potential to extend.

@zoothorn What have you got to lose by doing the 1 radiator test? Why are you so dead against it? it is as if you don't want to understand why it is under performing. You can lead a horse to water...........

Yes the expensive fix is a larger ASHP. The alternative is some additional heating to supliment the ASHP in very cold weather.

FFS Try at least turning the workshop radiator OFF to stop wasting precious heat in a non habitable room and see it that allows the rest of the house to get even a tiny bit hotter.

Is this one of your qwality HMO's?

I will just drop this in here. Someone else having trouble getting his heating up to proper temperature (in this case UFH) found if he turned half the rooms off lo and behold the remaining rooms all heated up properly, suggesting the ASHP is under powered.

That does indeed seem to suggest in this cold spell you ASHP can't keep up with demand. Not a lot you can do, at least not a lot that is cheap.

It may not be as simple now as fit a gas boiler. It has to meet things like SAP, DER etc. What to the calcs say for your house with a gas boiler (i.e. no renewables)? Some of us found buying a cheap ASHP and self instaling it was a better route than pay for an MCS install and claim the RHI. Hasn't the RHI been extended another year? in which case you may stil qualify.

Some do flash regarldless of the direction of flow, but if it is not counting up it must be wired backwards.

+1 for concrete. Otherwise when it needs emptying you will be worrying and wondering if you should wait for a long dry spell before you dare empty it.

Is it different in Scotland? I recall our last house we had a 5kW stove, and being "5kW or greater" it needed an air supply and it was BC that told us the area of the air supply should be >= the area of the stove flue pipe.