ProDave

MVHR is about providing fresh air into a building without wasting the heat from extracted stale air. It is not on it's own a heating system, though some mvhr units are available with a heating function. I think that is what you are talking about? So your house won't heat itself. MVHR is one ingredient to making a low energy house. Having said that. we have UFH downstairs, but upstairs only in the 2 bathrooms. We find we don't need heating upstairs because that does okay with what creeps up from downstairs. Most of that will be via the centrally positioned stairwell. As part of your design process you should get a SAP assesment done that will tell you the heating requirements of the house.

That's not very helpful. It's not goinf to show your export. I think that arrow pointing to export might be saying, that at the instant you took the picture you were exporting power, but it does not seem to want to show you how much you have exported.

f you have an EV and are either retired or work from home, then that makes the case even less compelling for battery storage, because by charging the car in the daytime you will pretty much guarantee 100% self usage of your solar PV generation. If you are out at work all day then the battery storage may enable you to charge the car a bit in the evening from your free solar PV power.

No, smart meters don't seem very intuitive at all. Tedious I know but can you scroll through all the different display modes on your smart meter and photograph each one?

But the savings Vs cost is important. I have never doubted it will save you money. My question is simply will it save enough money to justify the capital cost and and over what time. If you are going to remove that from the discussion then it will just be a thread about how wonderful battery storage is.

First image is "imported power" Second image is "exported power" Third image is net power, Imported - exported To understand what "imported" and "exported" means, I need to know what this meter is doing? Is it your main electricity meter? I think not, that's in the piggery isn't it? So is this your "generation meter"? dedicated to the inverter? If so then "export" in this case is how much your inverter has produced, and "import" is the tiny amount it consumes over night in standby when the panels are not producing anything. So NET will be how much you have generated. That's all very interesting, but it won't tell you how much you have self consumed, for that you need to look at your supply meter. Do you have a smart meter? If so that should be able to show you your export figure. That export figure will be what has "escaped" to the grid without you using it. If you don't have a smart meter, you will probably have to fit your own export meter like I have done, I can take a picture and post it later.

And if you have one on that basis, you would not be able to let it as a holiday unit.

Up here, the planners normally grant temporary PP for a static caravan with the standard clause, the caravan is removed once the house is complete. I wanted to retain mine as a studio, workshop and store room so I asked for permission to keep it. They granted permission for it to stay with a clause "residential use of the caravan shall cease upon occupation of the house" Are you sure you really have PP to keep it to let as a holiday rental?

Are they Noisy? That depends on your definition of noisy. I would say they make about the same level of noise as the roar of an oil fired boiler, the difference is most of the noise is outside unlike most oil boilers that are inside. You will need to take care with the install that noise does not get transmitted into the house via the pipes, by using a flexible section of pipe on the flow and return pipes. Normally they stand on the ground, but can be wall mounted. Most can do cooling as well as heating but you may need extra stuff inside like a fan coil unit for use when in cooling mode. Yes they heat somestic hot water. But they don't work so well at high temperatures so several of us on here just heat the DHW to 48 degrees and use a larger hot water cylinder as it will get less dilution in use than it would if it was stored at a hotter temperature.

Contrary to what you think, I am not against reneweable energy and trying to do the right thing for the planet. Why else have I spent the last 5 years building this low energy house heated by an air source heat pump and partly powered by solar PV. But I only do what makes sense. Unlike perhaps some, I don't have bottom less pockets (very empty pockets in fact) so all spending has to be justified. I have 4kWp of solar PV. that is all I can have "for free" the DNO have made it pretty clear there will be a network upgrade charge if I want to install more, in spite of the fact very little of what i generate actually gets exported. One day I might enquire what that upgrade cost will be if I want to install some more, but I believe I have to actually pay them some money just to give me a quote. As things stand by using the big domestic appliances in the daytime and diverting surplus solar PV to water heating, I am self using 95% of what my panels generate. That does not leave much to store in batteries, though arguably storing in batteries to later power the ASHP to heat DHW might be better use that just dumping it to a resistance water heater. So I keep on doing the sums. I work out how much I could save off my electricity bill ig I could use the surplus "free" solar PV that might otherwise go to waste. Then I look at the cost of the equipment to do that, and the best I have found would be a payback time of 10 years, by which time the batteries are probably at end of life and need replacing, so I then replace them and the payback time starts re counting. One day I hope batteries will have evolved to have longer lives and be cheaper, and it might be worth it, but we are not there yet. As to variable tariffs like Agile. I would not personally choose one. I don't want to be stuck paying 30p per kWh just to cook dinner if I have the audacity to want to eat in the early evening. That's where the batteries help of course, but it is a self created problem by choosing such a variable tariff.

Stainless / aluminium is not a huge problem, witness how many stainless still things bolt to an aluminium boat mast. But you would normally use something like Duralac when mating dissimilar metals.

Yes I did not see this one coming, don't recall it even being talked about.

Buy an EV and it's a car that gets you from A to B for a lower fuel cost than a petrol or diesel car. It provides a service that you need. Only the buyer can decide if the purchase price and expected depreciation makes it a better purchace than an IC car. I have never disputed that. But home batteries. You need a reason to install them. That might well be to save money on your electricity bills somehow. but every time I have played with the numbers, it is not financially viable. So I am interested in your justification, perhaps I am missing something?

So let me get this right? you are going to charge the Tesla at Agile's cheapest rate (which may be £0 or even negative) and discharge it when Agile would charge you silly money, Can I see your costings please? Estimated average daily "saving" (compared to just having an ordinary tariff and just paying the same for what you use at any time of day) And compare that to the cost of the Tesla so I can wotk out the pay back time.

I paid less than list price, ex display at a local dealer. Room sealed with ducted combustion air from outside.

We have a Mednip stoves Churchill (single sided, they do a double sider but you won't like the price) And I have never needed to clean the glass. It is genuinely the first stove i have known to stay clear all on it's own.

On the few occasions I have had a bad payer, I have always resolved it by sending a "letter prior to action" which basically states if the debt is not paid within 14 days you will hand the debt to a debt collection agency and they will peruse it through court if necessary and add their fees to the eventual amount due. And I was prepared to do just that, I had even discussed it with a debt collection agency.

If the ASHP is rated at 5kW and you need 3864W then it will need to be doing heating 77% of the time just to get enough heat into the house. which means it will need to run 18.5 hours per day heating the house, and probably say 2 heating the DHW so it's not going to get much off time in the winter. And that is calculated at 22 degrees delta T. What if it's -10 outside? What I am saying is you might not have much comfort zone. Is there another source of heat such as a stove?

My own house has a lower heat loss than that. At -10 outside and +20 inside (not uncommon here) the heat load is a little over 2kW and my 5kW ASHP does it comfortably even allowing for it being off over night and doing the DHW as well. Many heat pumps only do heating or DHW oe at a time. Mine is like that. This allows it to put all of it's power into DHW and also to operate at a different temperature for DHW. So in this case a 6kW unit is looking too small, you might have to run it 24/7 in the winter to stand a chance of coping.

My concern is in a pantry, the shelves are likely to be heavily loaded, to the point of bending M12 studding. Floating shelves in that situation would not be my choice.

I have never seen the point of an electric boiler to heat water using peak rate electricity to pipe it around into radiators to heat a room. Capital costs and running costs will be lower just by using electric panel heaters for the space heating. Have you thought about an air source heat pump?

Hi and welcome to the forum. I believe this makes you No 3 Buildhub member from Graven Hill, so you are in good company.

My LG ASHP has separate set temperatures for DHW and heating. I run the ASHP in heating mode at the UFH temperature so there is no "loss" and it heats the water no hotter than the UFH requires. It appears not all ASHP's allow you to set different temperatures.

Where did you get it? There should be some form of baffles, not just a hole in the top going straight up to the flue. Even the ultra cheap Chinese stove we fitted into our static caravan had cast iron baffles and it worked well, though no doubt not the most efficient.

Yes for a roof ladder, you only use one section. It sounds like the ladder you have is too short to sensibly be used as a roof ladder then?