ProDave

On the subject of hysteresis. I still say a good mechanical thermostat, providing it is wired properly (3 wires) so the "accelerator heater" works as designed, has very little hysteresis and does a good job of maintaining our house at a constant temperature.

Hi and welcome. Another one here who dislikes the term "eco" and much prefer "low energy" when it is used to describe a house that needs little in the way of heating input. We are all timber, and insulated with earthwool and wood fibre. But like most, concrete used in the foundations. We look forward to finding out more about your project and sharing your journey.

Glyphosate is absorbed into the plant via the leaves, so spray a living plant. Don't strimmer it first and don't dig it up.

What did you treat it with originally? I used Glyphosate weed killer in the form of Gallup360 from a back pack sprayer.

As far as I know the "plug" (in the water meter hole) is in fact 2 concentric plugs. I have never seen one that allows you to connect another pipe to it, though I guess you might be able to engineer something. I think this is the plug https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5x-aplas-Talbot-Full-Flow-Cap-with-O-Ring-Seal-Blank-Water-Meter-Box/303279996731?hash=item469ce57f3b:g:i2IAAOSwcQpb4I6g

There are spare ports because this house has been built in stages. That was taken some tine last year, when we had only got one room complete downstairs, the kitchen / diner, or what people like to call these days the "family room". So those two UFH circuits go off to the "family room" That was how the house was when we first decamped from the caravan. Next to be added was the left two circuits which head off under the gap craftily left under that stud wall, through into the living room. And then, only a few weeks ago the UFH circuit for the utility room was added, that is the room the manifold is in and connects to the middle port of the manifold. Clearly an up to date photo needs to be taken. Edit. As J points out, this is UFH manifolds. My Hot and cold water "manifolds" are a bit less grand and look like this Again that was a work in progress, the en-suite and utility were not connected then. Those are full bore isolators on the showers and bath, and ordinary ones on basins and sinks. All 15mm.

On the subject of manifold systems. Yes very handy. But finding the right location that does not use up lots of pipe or make the runs longer than they need to can be a challenge. I solved that by putting the manifolds above the ceiling of the utility room. There will be a mini loft hatch arrangement to access it. Acceptable in a utility room but probably not in any other room though.

Yes. But mainly because I want the solar PV to be free to top it up, rather than have some time clock deciding when to top it up which probably does not coincide with surplus solar PV being available. And I doubt it's software has the built in logic to say "oh it heated to 65 degrees yesterday by some unknown means so I don't need to do it manually"

From a personal point of view it it a basin that most irritates me. If I want to wash my hands, I want hot water now. If I am having a shower, I know how long it takes for the water to get to the shower head, so I know at what part of my undressing routine to turn the shower on, knowing that as I remove the last garment, the hot water is arriving ready to step under. No irritation, no wait. Likewise in the kitchen. If I want to fill the sink. I just put the plug in and turn the tap on. The cold slug to get the hot there, is about the right dilution ratio to give hot but bearable water. It is rinsing things at the kitchen sink that irritates me which is why I rinse with cold most of the time because I can't be bothered to mess about.

Mine has that feature but I have turned it off.

Local instant water heaters start to make sense when the point of use is a long way from the main house source of hot water. If it gets to the point you have to run off twice as much cold water, just to get the hot to the tap, as you actually use once it gets there, then I would say that is a candidate for a local small heater. One of the design inputs to the house layout was to keep bathrooms etc reasonably close so we don't have that problem and water reaches all the taps with little waste. Contrary to popular practice, I piped all my hot water from tank to tap in 15mm to minimise the dead volume in all runs. For a small wash hand basin I would probably go down to 10mm even for the hot feed to that to keep the volume down.

That is what I do with mine. One of the user parameters is "water leaving temperature" which has two settings, one for DHW and one for space heating. I still have the blending valve in circuit, set to it's lowest setting. That protects the UFH when the HP switches from DHW mode to heating mode, from a slug of 55 degree water still in the pipes that would otherwise go straight into the UFH loops if the blending valve was not there.

My last experience of a "limited" shower was when in the static caravan. That was heated with a 10KW instant propane heater and produced a poor shower flow. You had to compromise and have it a bit too cold just to get barely enough water.

I have no deliberate anti bacterial cycle. (mostly) in the summer surplus solar PV heats the HW tank via the immersion heater and on a good day it approaches 70 degrees before the immersion heater thermostat opens. But that is not going to happen in the winter. We discussed this at the time, and the conclusion was our mains water originates from a cold mountain loch where the chance of any bacteria surviving in the first place is low. It then goes through a treatment plant that included a microfilter. So we can be pretty sure there is no bacteria in the water when it arrives. The hot water tank is unvented, so there is no route for contamination to enter. So the consensus on the forum at the time is any bacterial risk from the stored hot water in incredably small.

Ah, so this will only work on some manifolds. Here is mine (before being piped and wired) The blending valve does not have a removable head, so I could not replace it with the Salus unit.

Nope totally confused. Diagram needed. Every blender I have seen has 4 ports and does not have a removable actuator with an M30 thread. So I am now at a complete loss to know where you would put one of these Salus proportional actuators.

No problem with an ASHP doing hot water if you think about it carefully. You need an unvented cylinder (NOT a thermal store) and choose one with the high capacity heat pump input coil. We store hot water at 48 degrees. that was found by experiment to be as hot as I could possibly hold my hand under without undue pain. I see no point having hot water any hotter than that and the lower temperature you heat it, the easier it is for the heat pump. Because the hot water is less hot than it would be from say a gas boiler, you will dilute it with less cold to get your final temperature, so you will need a bigger tank. We have a 300L tank and that is just about okay for 3 of us. Our heat pump is only 5KW so the hot water will take a lot longer to re heat after using some than it would from your average gas boiler.

Ah so is this connected to a spare port with a direct short link from flow manifold to return manifold?

Sorry I am struggling to understand that. It is an on / off valve (probably proportional) As such it can allow water to flow or not flow or flow slowly. I cannot see how it can do any blending, it can just adjust the flow rate to get the desired difference between flow and return. But that might be at a high or low temperature depending on the feed temperature.

You have lost me now. I thought you had your entrance level. Up half a flight to the left hand "bungalow" section, then up half another flight to the upstairs of the right hand bit. I have obviously been misunderstanding it up until now?

The 433MHz transmitter and receiver I just bought from China for an add on to my solar PV dump controller cost just under £3 for the pair and would do that function.

So if you try sucking water above 10 metres, you create a vacuum above the water, and have just created a barometer. But water boils in a vacuum. So that won't be a vacuum at the top, but steam?

There are fish in the English canals. I would not drink from them.

When you were talking of a borehole I thought you meant to an aquifer in the normal way, not to draw water out of the quarry pool. Is that wise?

Physics lesson