ProDave

If you can persuade the zone valve to actually turn, with a spanner on the flat of the actuator and once turning give it plenty of exercise until free, then just change the actuator head if it really is burned out. What makes you think it is burned out? You can't always test the Honeywell heads off the valve base as they have a habit of the gears disengaging and them going twang, which may make you think it is faulty when it is not. So get that valve body turning and try the actuator head on. If the only issue with the "bypass" valve is it is leaking, put a bucket under it.

Why do you want to do anything other than fix it? Why change things? The "bypass valve" is an ordinary service isolator. Easy to just get a new one and replace it. BUT is should be an automatic bypass valve. That only opens when you get a certain water pressure, typically when the pump starts but in the time before the motorised valves actually open. Likewise that's a Honeywell 2 port valve. An air lock would not physically stick the valve, it is broken. So replace it with another. If you want to do cheap, the cheaper Tower ones are pretty much a copy of the Honeywell. And since you will just be changing two things like for like, there is really no plumbing to alter. However you will be re using the olives on the pipes, so give each a few wraps of ptfe tape to increase the chance of them re sealing. Just replacing the broken bits will make the system operate as it should and save you having to bodge the wiring to frig it. Do take care to do a drawing or photograph the wiring of the old zone valve before you remove it and make sure the new one connects exactly the same. Possibly the hardest part of this will be finding enough slack in the pipe work to pull the pipes apart a little to get the old valves out and the new ones in.

Guess which one I would buy if they were both on the market?

Batteries are not interchangable between makes (at least not without making an adaptor of some sort) Batteries are also the weak link, so the thought of having 2 batteries and say 5 power tools is a recipe for never finding a charged battery when you need it, and short battery life as they will be hammered.

That's an interesting project. so do you have the front of the house and the front garden, and your adjoined house has the back of the house and the back garden?

When I had my water connection, SW gave a price initially not including the road crossing. I then asked for an "all works" quote, and the price went up £1000 for the road crossing of a 3M wide single track road, hardly any traffic so no traffic management needed. That was way cheaper than I could get anyone else to do the road crossing for so I chose that option. It was not SW that did it, they instead appointed a local contractor and they guys were great and helped me install a duct for other stuff in the trench before they filled it.

Where has the lintel gone? the brickwork is sagging with only the actual window holding it up. Yes that will be an issue probably blown out of all proportion by a surveyor.

I presume a retaining wall is going in there? I would want it properly tanked with a drain out at the low end.

Could you divert it to the left of the house, around the low side? I would sleep easier with that.

My door to the garage is as above. I have several internal doors on wide load bearing structural walls and I had to make my own door liners, doubly difficult because they are Oak.

A picture would be interesing. I would be worried about a stream higher then the house. Where do you think it will all go when it floods? I am glad our burn is lower than the house with the ground dropping off down the road so it has plenty of places to flood to.

I don't know what the English regs say, but in Scotland you need a "circulation space" of either a 1500mm diameter circle or a 1400mm by 1800mm elipse. Which would mean you need 1.4M between your units and island. I suspect our Island may go for a little walk after completion sign off........

Yes we have a burn running right through our garden. We love it as a feature. Why would you want to line that with concrete? I would not. I assume you are in England? Check with the EA what you are allowed to do. Here in Scotland you need permission from SEPA to culvert part of a watercourse and they will usually only allow part of it to be culverted for a reason, e.g to create access. They won't normally allow it to be culverted just for "land gain"

@Jeremy Harris made a simple device to squirt some powder in from a distance. My own method was wait until disk when activity is low, go and empty a can of RAID into the hole, then RUN. I take no responsibility if you follow that method.

My feeling is that kitchen, in that position, with the pocked dividing doors, is simply too small to support an island. That proposed design would fail Scottish building regs (would not meet the required circulation space) I don't see any way to make it big enough for an island unit.

Yes we are one like that. UFH downstairs and in the bathrooms upstairs. I installed cables for panel heater points in each bedroom and they remain unconnected and not needed.

They WILL want to see all pipework in place and confirm somehow that it is buried to the required depth. For what I had done I showed them photos of the trenches with the pipe in the bottom and a tape measure. And they wanted to see all the double check valves. Just saying that it is less grief is you do the bare minimum, pipe from toby to your stand pipe and no more. Then add the rest later.

To save yourself a lot of grief. Only install a single site stand pipe close to the SW boundary box and get your connection made to that. THEN after you have your connection, install the rest of your pipe work. Sometimes you can buy the same sort of boundary boxes cheap on ebay. I bought 3 of them. One feeds the site stand pipe, one feeds the static caravan and one feeds the house.

I have drawers and drawers of them, just about every value going, and capacitors and transistors etc etc etc.

That will do, shame you have to buy that many, but anywhere else if you buy 1 the postage will cost you that.

1 watt @ 12V is about 80mA Use about a 75 ohm 2 watt resistor in series with the +12V to the bell push.

What is the rating (wattage) of the lamp in the bell push?

I think we discussed IR panels and nobody could find a good reason for them. They seem more aimed at heating the occupants (not the building) of poorly insulated occasionally used buildings. e.g out local church uses IR heaters hung from the ceiling to warm the congregation rather than try and keep a poorly insulated old building warm. In a hear passive house all they would so is warm up the fabric of the house in exactly the same way as any other heat source at exactly the same energy usage. We use an ASHP and it works fine for space and water heating. We don't get all of our DHW from PV. though that nice spell in late April / early May we came very close to 100% PV water heating.

The builders did the ground work (after I had done the excavating with my own digger) and built and erected the frame. I then did: Installed the treatment plant and landscaped the garden, so that was the digger finished with so I sold it. The roof tiling Insulating the frame and the wood fibre cladding The builders came back and fitted the windows and a plasterer came and rendered the house. I then carried on with more insulating Joinery floors and internal walls (oak flooring downstairs) Plasterboarding Wiring Plumbing Under floor heating The plasterer came back and plastered all the rooms I had a tiler to tile 2 floors as he could make a better job than me and I had a joiner hang the doors onto the door frames I had made because he can do a better job than me. I fitted the kitchens, bathrooms and utility rooms, both bathrooms being wet rooms. Mostly SWMBO did all the painting Still more finishing off to do and some of those might not be in the right order.

You need a resistor in series with the 12V power supply. At the moment when you push the button you short out the power supply. Never a good idea. It probably has current limiting otherwise it would have already gone bang. and anything else the power supply is feeding will lose it's power when the button is pressed. And yes reversing youe meter probes will read -12V why do you think it would read 0? What is the maximum voltage input rating of the sensor? Is that happy with 12V? If not then I would be using a resistor and zener diode to limit it to 5V EDIT you posted your last reply while I was typing. Yes that explains my point, when the button is pressed you are shorting out the (in that example common single ) power supply so the sensor could not work.