ProDave

I assume that is a window or door reveal before being boarded up? On the face of it, it looks good with gaps sealed up with expanding foam. One can only speculate but somewhere that didn't happen or not happen properly. A thermal imaging camera is about the only thing that may help you track down where.

Pictures? You probably need to cut the tar back a lot more than 4 inches away from the wall, dig out to well below the damp proof course and till with stones. Did the contractor not notice the DPC? did he say it would be okay? What discussions did you have about this?

I had that in a previous house. A 1930s semi. It did not have much heating when I moved in and still had an open fire in the living room. On a still cold ight I lit the fire. Later I went upstairs, only to find smoke everywhere. Being a windless night, the smoke was not being blown away from the chimney and it turned out the easiest way for the air drawn by the fire to be replaced, was by sucking air down a bedroom chimney down the stairs and under the living room door, and that was drawing smoke with it down the bedroom chimney. There was no proper vent anywhere for the fire, only leaks in the building.

My BCO signed off my self installed stove with ducted direct air intake. They were over it like a rash with a tape measure comparing clearance distances to what it said in the installation manual. Once happy with that they signed it off.

If you read this forum you will find the devil is in the detail. What has probably happened, is you have a "plasterboard tent". That is, lack of detailing means the space behind the plasterboard is open somewhere to a cold space probably the loft, allowing cold air to get behind your plasterboard, bypassing all the insulation. I see this regularly with cold air from switches and sockets. The clue is they need cables and the cables have to go somewhere often into a cold loft, and the hole drilled for them is oversized and never sealed. Do you have any pictures of how the plasterboard was fixed to the walls after the final layer of insulation?

That was a bit more polite than I was about to post. Something along the lines of "Oh no kitchen fitter strikes again"

With a decent plumbing install there is also an internal stopcock somewhere inside the house to turn everything off. Start by looking in cupboards etc just the other side of the wall where the outside stopcock is.

To make it easier I have copied one of your pictures and repeated it here in the thread. If you pull out the drawers or open the doors, get inside and look up and take a picture and see if the forum wisdom can work out the fixings of the top panels.

Thread title edited. The only real way to do this properly is remove the existing seating and storage, properly insulate and seal the wall, then put it back again. Can you at least remove the drawers and all the tops of the units to give better access?

Is the thread title as you intended?

If you really want to add a bedroom, then move the kitchen into the living room, and add a new partition wall to divide what was the kitchen from the now smaller kitchen / diner, with the third bedroom accessed from the hall (reinstating the missing door) Moving the plumbing, particularly waste pipes to do that might be a challenge.

So IF the HP saved them £420 per year and the PV saved them £200 per year, that would be £620 per year saved. That brings the £18K payback time to a mere 29 years then. I know it is not all about payback time but "doing the right thing" but you have to be a pretty dedicated eco warrior to pay that.

£70 per month is £840 per year. So if the HP that cost £18K halved their bill it would save £420 per year. So would take 42 years to recoup the outlay. Do people not do a little basic maths before signing up to these schemes?

@HighlandHopeful do you have a watercourse withing reach? That solves all your problems.

I have been out again today in a lull in the wind and rain, experimenting how to mount the pump. The bit of wood on foam did not make the pump much quieter, so I then started to think what have I got to hand that I can try. Simple solution, I have just laid a standard 4" concrete block in the bottom of the pump chamber and stood the pump on that. It is VERY much quieter like that and with the lid on, hardly any noisier than the ET100 pump was. So I will leave it mounted like that. It was also another test, having been running for 24 hours now i wanted to see how hot the pump runs, and it is barely warm to the touch. And still blowing bubbles nicely in the soup. So now begins the long term test to see if this piston pump lasts any longer than the ET100 diaphragm pump.

I think a lot of "I am happy with my standard house, it is not stuffy" is a case of you are used to it. Now we have mvhr, when I visit other houses I immediately notice the stuffy air and smells. Particularly when visiting relatives in their 300 year old cold damp Welsh farm house. You smell the damp as you enter the front door. But stay there a week and you no longer notice it. They will swear their house does not smell damp.

Don't unscrew it too far or you will get wet. If it won't turn, prise the red ring off then it will.

I self installed mvhr for about £1500 so the payback will look a lot better. But good insulation, good airtightness, 3G windows, ASHP and MVHR were the "must have's" so it was not a question of payback.

Can we see a better picture of outside including more detail of what the ground surface is and how it relates to internal floor level please? Are any other external walls, e.g. at the front of the house showing damp or are they okay?

My cheap pump arrived today. I didn't think I was going to get a chance to try it as it was raining hard and playing with an electric pump in a pit in the rain was not high on my list. But the rain stopped and the sun even came out so I could not resist having a go. Initial thoughts, this pump is VERY noisy when not doing any work, but once connected to a "load" it quietens down a lot. It is now pumping and blowing bubbles through my tank as it should. Still some tweaking to do, it's outlet connector is slightly smaller so the quick bodge with a bit of tape needs improving, and there is still work to do with soundproofing but with the lid on the pump chamber it is not so bad, but still as predicted more noisy than the ET100. I will leave that until a better day as the rain was just coming back as I finished and the wind picking up.

Scrape the paint off and make sure this one does not already have the groove that some decorator has filled in to make it look nicer? Otherwise a convex bead of sealant will do much the same job. Let inside thoroughly dry out before patching up and re painting so that probably won't be until the summer.

We fitted a similar sized 3G slider. You lift out the sliding one so that halves the weight. It was still a 4 man lift with a set of 4 suction grips So whoever you employ it needs to be 4 people with those suction grips and then know how to do it.

Are they all like that or just this one not having a drip bead? As well as re sealing all the joints, I would scrape off the paint underneath and then run a bead of outdoor sealant along the bottom say about 10 to 20mm in from the outer edge.

What would bother me is the size of solar panels does not seem particularly standard, each time I have looked different sizes are being offered. So you build your in roof PV with appropriate trays, say in 10 years time one or more gets broken, can you get replacements of the same size and appearance? If I were doing this I think I would buy a number of spares and store them carefully for that eventuality. And a good argument for doing as I have done and have some of your own scaffold.

Ask Rachael from accounts how her plan is going?