ProDave

The trouble with a thermal store is you need to store water hotter than your required DHW temperature, otherwise it will only be able to deliver a tiny amount of water before the temperature drops. A heat pump will struggle to get a thermal store hot enough That is why an UVC is better for use with a heat pump as you heat it to the desired water temperature and it will then deliver pretty much that temperature water until it runs out. Which brings us back to the issue that is is very complicated to link a stove to an UVC. Much less so to link a stove to a thermal store. There does not seem to be an easy solution for stove and ASHP heating the same hot water system.

Thanks for the replies Looks like Screweys are cheaper (now I know what I am looking for) https://www.screwfix.com/p/smith-locke-flush-bolt-polished-chrome-150mm/3169j#_=p And cheaper ball bearing hinges. https://www.screwfix.com/p/eclipse-fire-door-ball-bearing-hinges-satin-chrome-102-x-76mm-2-pack/5532j They come in a bit cheaper at Electricfix prices. By buying hinges in packs of 2, not 3, means I get the quantity discount break, that I would not reach if I bought packs of 3. Next silly question question. If I buy those hinges what size screw? Normally I would just buy the hinge and look through all my boxes of screws when they arrive and select what fits. but all my boxes of screws are brass colour. I need to buy some satin chrome screws to match, and they don't tell you what bloody size screw they need? EDIT: scrub that silly question, they come with screws.

So it won't be long before the joiner comes to hang my doors. I need to first source all the ironmongery. Lets start with hinges. I have 11 doors to hang so need 33 hinges. They are good (expensive) doors so demand good ironmongery. The Joiner suggested fire door hinges, but not the expense of ball bearing hinges. He suggested "washer" hinges, ones that have a washer between the adjoining surfaces (in place of the ball race on the ultra posh ones) He suggested I should be paying about £1 per hinge. This is the best I have come up with so far https://www.toolstation.com/grade-7-spun-pin-fire-door-hinge/p33522 Yes they don't have washers, and are £1.50 per hinge. I can't find anything between these and ball bearing hinges. Though these are "fire door hinges" Any ideas where I might find these elusive "washer" hinges? Door catches and handles is pretty straightforward. The other think I have not yet found is the bolts for the top and bottom of a double door set. No doubt I have not found them because like most things I don't know the correct name. These go at the top and the bottom of the first door in each pair to be closed and shoot a bolt up into the top of the frame and down into the floor. The mechanism is cut into the top and bottom of the edge of the door and sits flush. Any idea what they are called please?

The decision has been made to proceed with the "floorboard" door liners. I have enough wood for the upstairs ones, with the joint at the bottom. The compromise is I will try and source a wider door stop so less of the underlying door liner is actually visible. So far 4 of them done, 2 more to go. For cutting them to width, the first one I just planed, but found it hard to get a straight finish. Since then I have been cutting them with the circular saw, as a pair with both good faces together and using my aluminium rail as a guide. The resultant cut edge is clean and square and just needs a little sanding. I still need to source some 2100 by 180mm oak floor planks for the downstairs door frames.

If you want to go all wood, think of the system I mentioned before in a straw bale house that I wired. One of those boiler stoves that puts 10Kw to water and 2Kw to a big thermal store. The difficulty comes in deciding how to do DHW in the summer. You really don't want to be burning the stove and to heat such a massive thermal store any other way would be a waste. It almost cries out for a completely separate smaller HW tank for the summer, which could be heated by an ASHP or excess solar PV. Even today, where it is flitting between a few minutes of brilliant sunshine, then back to a downpour, the solar PV is helping to heat my hot water tank.

I doubt modern machines now would work with an external timer. That was in the days of clockwork programmers, but now you have to choose your program and press "start" something that won''t happen on it's own when the power comes on at night.

You are probably not realising how you will actually use a WBS in a low energy house. There should be no notion of the ASHP struggling to keep the house warm, if it can work for ours here in the Highlands, it will work anywhere in the UK climate. We fitted a WBS, against the advice of most on here. The main reason for having it is the abundance of free wood. I would not entertain having one if I had to buy fuel for it. We don't use the stove often. The 2 things that make us light it are if we want a little more heat downstairs to "indulge" or if we need a bit more heat in the (unheated) bedrooms. Firing up the stove for a few hours heats the whole downstairs to about 25 degrees. I would never personally choose to pay to heat the house that hot, but for an occasional indulgence it is nice, particularly on one of those grey miserable wet days when the ambience feels cold, even if the thermometer says it is not. All that extra heat downstairs soon finds it's way upstairs so gives a boost to the bedroom temperatures some while later. I repeat my caution that we can only use the stove with all the doors open so heat can circulate around the whole house. Any attempt to use it just for one room would very rapidly overheat that room (and I mean hotter than the indulgence 25 degrees). If your house layout does not lend itself to heat circulation you might need to think carefully. We have double doors from both living rooms to the central hall and stairwell so there is an easy circulation and convection path for heat to spread througout the whole house from the stove. The original plans for this house had 2 stoves. We very rapidly realised fitting a second one in the snug living room would be a silly idea.

Does the lane have a public right of way over it? That might be what is enabling the creation of a footpath / cycle route. So at least you can walk or cycle to your house. At the moment the access is the vendors problem. Make sure you don't commit until this is resolved otherwise it may become your problem.

Mine has no make i it, but it does have a Honda engine.

I know different ASHP's work in different ways, but ours is configured to heat the DHW in half hour bursts, with a half hour gap before the next DHW burst *. So it will stop feeding the under floor heating during those periods. Trust me you will not notice that it has stopped feeding the UFH for that time. Yes buy an UVC with the high capacity "heat pump" input coil. * The default setting was heat DHW for half an hour, then wait 90 minutes before doing the next burst of DHW heating, but as it typically takes 3 half hour bursts to heat the tank, that would have taken 6 hours to get the tank up to temperature which I thought was way too long, so I reduced the wait time to 30 minutes.

The issue is normal ones are shaped for an olive, so present a very thin edge for the washer to seat on. They maybe perfectly okay, or they may not last before the washer gives up. I sometimes think the quick solution is put it in the lathe and turn a bit off the end to make it flat and wider.

I just bought a second hand one from someone on ebay for £100, I will easily get that back should I wish to sell it.

www,passageweather.com is another one to give a good visual forecast of what you might experience.

Our static is set up on piles of concrete blocks. But there are also 4 steel stakes driven into the ground and it it wired down to the stakes to ensure it does not go for a wander. Remove anything and everything from scaffold and make sure that is secure. Add some temporary straps if in doubt. Remove and store all loose sheet material. Have a look on WeatherHQ They have live and historical weather data data from loads of weather station, your local airport will be the most likely to tell you what is happening. Here is the link for Inverness airport. https://www.weatherhq.co.uk/weather-station/inverness-%2F-dalcross that I use for sailing weather as it is only 3 miles from the harbour.

We opted for the "keep it simple" idea. We have a timed boost available from a button on the wall in the kitchen that you press when you are going to be cooking. You could link it to the cooker hood, but you might not always use that so that is not foolproof.

Yes could be. The blockage is certainly the reason for the recent pump failure. It has the Itallian pump in now, identical to the one originally fitted so I hope this will give a good service life as now everything seems in order. I must say though I am very glad we ended up with a system that needs no pumping in the new house (the original plan had been a pumped outlet to a filter mound) Although we never got to dig the big hole and inspect it, the soakaway does now appear to be draining freely.

The bugger here is it was never described in the documentation with the pump chamber that it WAS a non return valve, although the instructions said you must fit a non return valve. That led me to buy a larger one and fit it on the outlet from the pump a short time later. And this one has never worked as a non return valve so the flap may have been detached all this time.

Okay all sorted this morning. Today, being the one good say in the weeks weather forecast, we set off with the intention of digging a hole in the field, But SWMBO talked me out of it. It was that fountain, or lack of fountain, at the upper test hole. WHY were we not seeing a fountain at that upper test hole. Se convinced me digging a massive hole by hand was going to be a waste of time. So we looked again at what was down at the bottom. We decided to scrutinise all the pipes and fittings within the pump chamber. There was this innocent looking fitting. It came as part of the pump chamber plumbing. It went between the 50mm mdpe elbow fitting, and the quick release pump hose fitting. There was never any mention of it being anything special. To me it just looked like they needed a female to female coupling and used a tee with a blank plug. It didn't look like it was any form of strainer. Once I had unscrewed it from the pump chamber it was obvious there was a problem, you could not see through it. . When I cleared it out, there was this what looks like a flap, wedged tight at the top of the fitting with various bits of debris packed in behind it. So it looks like this was a non return flap valve. There was never anmy mention with the pump chamber that it had one supplied, and it never worked as a non return valve as I fitted one attached to the pump at the bottom of the hose because it needed one and the one they didn't tell me they had supplied never worked. I made no attempt to put the flap back, I just cleared it out and put it back together as a dumb straight coupler. It is all now working, and now we did get a fountain out of the top test hole, albeit not very high. But the pump now clears the contents away up the hill into the soakaway at about the rate I always remember it working at. A big relief that the soakaway appears to be functioning correctly and no need to dig up the field. The digger man has been stood down.

Don't get your hopes too high about being able to use that socket. It is very likely that is just a spur from an existing ring final. To do the job properly your electrician will need to work out the total demand and size a suitable cable for that load taking into account the distance. That might very well (very likely) exceed the capacity of that socket and require a whole new cable to be routed back to your consumer unit. If the total load of the heating is under 13 Amps then you could plug it into that for testing, but don't rely on that being the permanent feed.

I am surprised that with U values of 0.1 your heating demannd is as high as 7KW Our U values are only 0.14 any while our house is smaller than yours at 150 square metres, the peak heating demand when it is -10 outside and +20 inside is only a little over 2Kw Even if you doubles the size of our house that would only be 4Kw so with your lower U values I certainly would not expect it to reach 7Kw

So what am I doing differently that we maintain a much higher internal humidity? If the incoming air, and cooling it results in such a low humidity why do I not see that? There will be humidity added by 3 of us and 1 cat breathing, and showering and cooking will add some. And at this time of year the washing is dried inside so that will add some. But the infernal tumble dryer is a condensing one so that should not add much. My guess is we are under ventilating the house? I have not ballanced the flow rates or even measured them, but the air always feels fresh and free from odours so from a practical point of view it is "correct"

I am just surprised that tower system can actually withstand those heights.

Don't watch if you suffer from vertigo

I am struggling to understand how an mvhr unit can reduce the humifity inside the house so much unless it has some form of cooling / dehumidifying function. Looking at data from the nearest weather station, outside air humidity here hovers around 70-80%. In the couple of very cold weeks we had at the end of January when it was -14 at night and not above 0 in the day, it only got down to 50%. So I am struggling to see how you were getting values of 38% unless the old mvhr was doing some dehumidifying function? As I type this inside humidity is 58% inside almost perfectly mirroring the weather station values that dipped to 56 overnight and is now creeping back above 60. If you were "feeling" the airflow from it, it was running way too fast anyway.

Tell me more please?