ProDave

Yes definitely, not enough airflow now so the heat pump's evaporator is getting too cold.

Read this before you do anything https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7817277/Hundreds-furious-customers-left-no-internet-days-Virgin-Media-goes-down.htmlhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7817277/Hundreds-furious-customers-left-no-internet-days-Virgin-Media-goes-down.html Sorry DM link.

Charging tools. to plug the kettle in.

Hi and welcome to the forum I can see a lot of potential and problems for both those buildings. They should keep you quiet for a while.

We have not "registered" our address, I refuse to pay the council's fee for doing that. The council do not seem bothered and have told me as such. The result is the address is not on the Postcode Address file. But it IS on just about every other register I have found, the council's own street naming register, the DNO and telecoms registers, the house name appears on the Land Registry maps (we did not inform them of the name) , electoral register etc. And it did not create a problem getting electricity, water, or telephone to the site or paying for any of them, and creates no problems with delivery. The bigger problem with deliveries is google maps have messed up the position of the map pin for our postcode and now puts it down by the river well away from any of the houses in the postcode, and then sends you down a dirt track to leave you on the wrong side of the river. I have to advise people NOT to use satnav to get here.

Well yes you should turn the immersion heater off and give the HP a chance. But as I said before, it should not run all the time. It should run long enough to heat the tank then shut off completely until you have used some hot water. If as you suggest it is running continuously all the time, then it says to me it's either got an impossibly high target temperature set that it can never reach, or it is circulating water around the heating loop even though the heating should be off.

Cue them to say "from this stage you should be able to complete in 8 weeks so that is when we start charging CT" I am glad I have not had this nonsense, I have been building for 5 years. On his last visit the CT inspector got a few feet in from the front door and said "you don't have any doors on yet, I can't possibly value it yet" The alternative stance is to say yes it's "complete" but it is only half the size that was shown on the plans so value it as a bungalow, and then have cheaper CT for as long as you live there.

There is nothing like calling a spade a F shovel is there? Astonishing.

The site supply needs to be far enough away so that it is not in the way for scaffold, diggers and other works so 10m seems a good distance.

All your electrician needs to do is connect a few waterproof sockets. Remember to connect them to a TT earth (local earth rod) If the builders want 110V they will bring their own transformers. A couple of 16A "commando" sockets would be handy as well as standard 13A sockets.

Post some pictures of the controls, piping, hot water cylinder etc. Then do some basic checks and (with reference to the pictures) tell us what pipes are hot and which are not. Also include pipework and controls relating the the heating side of things which at the moment should all be cold. If there are any thermostats or thermometers on the cylinder for instance tell is what they are set to or what they are reading. I fail to see how antifreeze can "clog" a pipe. It is a liquid. Even when poured in neat it will soon mix with the water to give a dilute mixture. I suspect this was a BS excuse for "I have not got a clue, I messed about without knowing what I was doing and I think it is now working"

But I turned off the resistance heating function in my ASHP because I could see the flaw. It did something like heat the water to 45 degrees with the ASHP then heat it further to 55 degrees with the built in willis heater. The "issue" was as the water cooled down, the temperature sensor would say it's gone below 55 degrees by it's hysteresis setting and turn on the willis heater. It rarely went low enough to trigger the ASHP to "pre heat" it, unless you ran off the whole tank of water in one go. I now heat it to 48 degrees just with the ASHP function.

I would go down the lawful development route. Can you prove how long you have been using it? i.e a receipt for when you bought the shed? When you submit a planning application for land you do not own, you have to serve notice on the owner that you are doing so. Can you find the owner from the Land registry? Then serve notice on whoever is listed. If they have gone bust, someone will have "inherited" the land as part of dividing up the assets of the insolvent company.

This is usually the point where your wife says "oh the kitchen is not tiny after all"

My issue is HOW does that work? It would have to rely on the return temperature being very low, so the ASHP could heat it first then the oil boiler top it up. That would imply a very low flow velocity, which is exactly what an ASHP does not like. My concern is the ASHP would only end up working in the initial stages of heating and once up to temperature the oil burner would be doing it all. I would love to hear how these work in practice. Regarding which heat pumps to avoid. Just make sure it is INVERTER driven, so it can modulate it's power to the actual load.

Of course the time to have decided this was before you started. My suggestion would be square off the boundary so you gain a bit and lose a bit and the net transfer of land is nil.

I am willing to bet if you shop around, you will get an ASHP for no more than cost of an oil boiler plus oil tank plus fire valve plus oil pipe etc. Oil boiler needs (or at least should have) annual service. Just choose over sized low temp radiators upstairs or UFH upstairs, Or like many of us you might find with a well insulated house, no heating is needed upstairs.

What has put you off an air source heat pump? The price of oil, while cheap just now is too volatile for my liking. And they are noisy smelly things. I don't think anyone has ever explained how the hybrid combines ASHP / Oil boilers work. how do they handle the transition to ensure you are not just burning oil? It's hard enough finding someone that understands an ASHP, it must be harder finding someone that understands a particular make of hybrid.

Then that sounds a reasonable price to pay. Consider the uplift in value of the land if you can get PP for a house. But I would want an absolute upper cap on his fee, not a completely open ended agreement.

What is your proposed "1.5 storey building"? A new house? Or just a residential outbuilding?

My Telford does not lose enough heat to cause an over heating issue, even in summer. At only 48 degrees water temperature, I suspect the real heat loss is less than 2.3kWh in 24 hours. And remember for half the year, that "heat loss" is just helping to heat the house and we don't have much in the way of actual heating upstairs so is quite probably beneficial. I suspect a lot more heat loss is caused in many cases by poorly lagged pipes connected to the cylinder. Note the pictures of my cylinder in the other thread are before all the pipe insulation got fitted.

So that gives even more possibilities, like he could re draw the boundaries between the 2 properties enabling you to square off the extension.

You will see from that thread, I chose the Telford HP cylinder with the large area input coil. The large area input coil is important for use with a heat pump to get good heat transfer into the tank from the input water that is not much hotter than the target temperature. Standing heat loss is a separate issue, though in an ideal world you would find someone making a cylinder with a high area input coil and A rated insulation (let us know if you do)

The point is, if he wants the extension as wide as possible this should have been agreed with the neighbour first and the fence taken down to facilitate that. If the neighbour chooses not to put the fence back he could gain a few inches of garden for his good will.

It it is your father on the other side of that fence (if I read that right) I would have got his agreement in writing to build ON the boundary and would have taken that fence down to facilitate that. You would also need permission from your father for the eaves to overhang. Or at least with the fence gone you could build close to the boundary so the eaves overhang stops on the boundary.