ProDave

You mean this one https://www.stovesonline.co.uk/wood_burning_stoves/Woodfire-CX12-boiler-stove.html Oddly no mention of being able to drive an UVC , you would think they would want you to know? I am pretty sure that was the one fitted to the straw bale house I wired a number of years ago. It was linked to a massive thermal store to provide DDHW and UFH, the theory being you only light the stove once every few days to heat up the thermal store. But that was the only heating. I never did figure what they would do for DHW in summer.

Care to link to an example of such a stove?

For anyone wanting to switch to Octopus use this link https://share.octopus.energy/light-eland-196 You will get £50 for signing up with that link and I will get £50 as well. They may not be the cheapest but certainly get good customer service reviews.

You got it fair and square this time. I am just "making it known" so I get the next one.

Bugger, I could have recommended you and got the £50. Anyone else considering switching to Octopus?

We faced the same decisions. We decided for the sheer simplicity the WBS is space heating only. We have a well insulated house (and as a new build I would hope you do as well) so the space heating requirements are low. We only light the stove in very cold weather and then it only works with all the doors open so it is able to heat the whole house. With the doors shut it would very quickly overheat the room it is in. So with the stove only burning for a few hours once in a while it would not make a significant contribution to water heating, and the extra not inconsiderable challenges heating water with an "uncontrolled" heat source adds, we decided it was simply not worth it. If you are going to use the ASHP for hot water, you need to be using an invented cylinder not a thermal store and I don't believe you are allowed to connect a WBS to an UVC.

Been round that loop many times. All that happens is the PO phone the council who say "he hasn't paid to register the address" and they collectively refuse to do anything. I have lost the will to fight any more and it will just remain unregistered.

Are you going to deliberately install it wobbly?

This is a very grey area and depends where you are. Here we don't have house numbers, just names, the road does not even have a name, so we are "house name, village mane, county, postcode." I have so far refused to pay the £100 to register the address. The result of that, is the house name is on the councils address database but they refuse to notify the post office unless I pay the £100 fee. So we are not on the Postcode Address File. That does not stop post arriving here, and does not stop the council charging us council tax. It might be different if you are in a numbered street with a name and need someone to allocate a house number to you, it might not be so optional then. As to "when" for council tax, that seems very fluid as well. We have been paying band A council tax for the caravan since we moved in, but the valuer does not seem in a hurry to list the actual house. He was here last week and had a quick look in and decided it was not ready so he will come back in about June for another look. Until then we carry on with band A for the caravan.

It staggered me that my plumber friend paid £11K to have a Mitsubishi ASHP and cylinder installed so he could claim the RHI. You could have bought the kit for under £5K and he is a plumber FFS. So unless he got more than £6K in RHI payments, he is worse off.

No the pump chamber has a very loose fitting lid and for a lot of the testing the lid has been off anyway.

I doubt it, but digging will tell us that. It's not had significant input for a couple of weeks so even if it had been overloaded it should have gone down by now.

The drainage field was made with fist size rocks not gravel so I doubt that is clogged, And there was a pretty good fall making it deeper the more it goes into the field so I dobt it has sagged and pooled. I have left a message with the farm manager to discuss it and have the local digger man coming to see me soon to work out a plan of action.

The normal thing if doing tarmac as we are, is just lay the sub base and the coarse base layer of tar now, and finish off the top layer once complete. If you are crossing a ditch you will need to culvert that.

I am exasperated by this now. All I can think is the drainage field is clogged so the pump flow stalls and as you say then the centricugal pump stalls. The next logical step has to be excavate in the field to find the end of the mdpe as it enters the drainage field to test flow (with it uncoupled) and examine the state of the drainage pipes;.

Stupid question, but why not do the proper dropped kerb now?

I have cut through the 50mm mdpe at the bottom of the hill where I now have a slip coupling. If I loosen that coupling and slide it along, water fair gushes out of the exposed pipe, so I can't see it is a problem at the bottom end.

Okay another day another disappointment, a BIG disappointment. So unrolled my coil of PEX pipe from the top down to the bottom and marked it with tape where I expected it to "end" I then sent the PEX pipe up from the bottom. It met no particular obstruction. I kept on feeding it in and it just kept going, way past my mark by many many metres before it did eventually come to a hard stop. I am pretty certain it had come to the end of the mdpe pipe and down one of the perforated drain pipes of the soakaway. At that point I cut the coil of pipe and attached the hose to the end and turned on the mans water. Water was flowing up the hose but none came down the mdpe pipe. As I would have expected it was flowing into the soakaway. Keeping the water running I drew the house out and back a couple of times. Some black water did come down, but not a lot. So the pipe is clear to the top and into the soakaway. I re connected the pump and tried it. It is pumping away, but oh so very slowly, way slower than it used to. Something is still not right. The odd thing is there is still not much coming out of my "test" hole at the top of the mdpe pipe run. More than before but still not a fountain. I think it is time to talk to the farmer and get a digger in and see what is going on down there. Worst case that I am dreading is needing to re lay the whole drainage field.

Isn't this what the Code For Sustainable Homes was supposed to do, even counting how far and how the workers travelled to work each day, but it was intensely paperwork heavy and unpopular. If you don't like concrete, then don't use it. What is wrong with timber frame and timber cladding? And for the record I hate the term "eco" and don't use it for my house. I prefer the term "low energy house" which describes it more accurately with no hint of a tree hugger in sight. There is a house at the top of our road that was originally marketed as an "Eco house". As far as I can tell the only "eco" thing about it was triple glazed windows (not particularly good ones) and solar thermal panels. It only got an EPC rating of D, the 2 owners I have known that have lived in it complain about the high heating costs, and it is alway the first house in the road that the snow melts from the roof.

This sounds like a retro fit UFH system. I assume this is a new building, so should you not be designing in sufficient floor insulation and incorporating the UFH as you build it, not looking for a cheap retro fit system?

Just about all the modern ones have an inverter driven compressor and vary the compressor load to suit the load and maintain the flow temperature that has been set. Most of the time when just doing the under floor heating ours runs at a very slow speed. About the only time it gets to full speed is heating the HW tank,

I am interested in a real life example. What size heat pump? and how much was the total installed cost?

I am puzzled by this as we are on "Sandy Clay" and the structural engineer that did the soil sampling declared strip foundations were fine. The only stipulation being we dig through the black organic top soil into the sandy clay, and put rebar in the foundations strips. All done at 600mm wide.

Yes I have that shower (and a second one ready to fit when we do the en-suite. But last time I checked when someone else was asking recently, the price from BBC had risen substantially.

The ones I use as "outriggers" are some leftovers that only have an intact peg on one end, so can't be used as a proper brace. I kept them when I sold most of the scaffold and use them like that with the "dud" end in the ground.