ProDave

Yes, as p;er what @PeterW has posted, your electrician will make the necessary connections using Henley Blocks

TIP: If making a mat well, you will be going out and buying a good quality thick doormat and making it to fit that. So my tip is, buy a SPARE mat as well and keep it in a safe place for when the first gets old and tatty, and you then find you can't find one the right size.

The THTC consumer unit setup is a complicated and messy thing. You might want to take the opportunity just to get an electrician to swap that for a normal simple off peak consumer unit, but that shiny new off peak CU may make your main one look old and tatty so you might want to swap that as well,,,,,,

I am still finishing my immersion heater dump load controller and I then need to install my own export meter. Then I will have a measure of how much does get exported and how much we are actually managing to self use. I am sure batteries will some later but too expensive just now.

Re solar PV. See my thread about my DIY solar The 4KW limit, is actually a 3.68KW limit, and is not a limit as such but at that power level you have a "right" to install it and then just notify your DNO that you have done so. Anything above 3.68Kw and you have to get permission from your DNO first before you connect it and they may if they think it necessary charge you to upgrade the network. It is quite normal to like me have 4KW pf panels, but an inverter that limits the output to 3.68Kw, though it did cause some "confusion" when I submitted the notification and they intiially rejected it until I provided the paperwork to prove the inverter was limited to 3.68Kw I chose to mount mine E/W as that will make the useful generation per day longer, but at the expense of total generation being lower. To split them 3 ways, E, S and W is harder as most inverters only have 2 inputs, so you would probably end up with 2 inverters, but no reason why you could not do that.

You are probably best just staying with SSE and switching with them to E7 or E10, They will change the meters for one dual rate meter. In the process your off peak loads will be connected to the off peak output, and everything else, including your present "cheap" 24/7 heating stuff, will be connected to the normal feed. Then you can switch suppler to anyone else offering E7 or E10

One of those adverts that likes to tell you everything but facts and what it actually is. As far as I can tell it is a simple evaporative cooler, nothing more nothing less. But being sold as something strange and mysterious.

Oh that reminds me I have a 5 step step ladder and that very handy little 2 step one as well so that now makes 6 or is that 7? I burned the rotten old wooden one when the rungs started to snap.........

While waiting to decide how to move forwards, I briefly thought I had found a solution. I noticed in the new Howdens catalogue they stock Oak veneered door frames. I am sure they were not in the previous catalogue. So I called in for some prices. Bearing in mind some I would need to double up to get the thickness, so the price for 14 door frames was............... £700 plus VAT. Yes dearer to buy an oak veneered door frame than to buy the solid planed oak and make one.

If transport is your issue, get some roof bars. Something no self respecting self builder should be without.

Sorry but I have 4 sets of ladders. One size does not fit all. The really handy combination ladders used mostly for internal work. 2 different sized 2 section ladders, one very light one not so. And a big heavy 3 section set when I need to get up high. Though most of the time the third extension on this set is removed and set up as a roof ladder.

I worked on a loft conversion where the window cill height was slightly too high and BC made them install a 1" high fixed step in front of the window before they would issue a completion certificate. I suspect that step is not there any more.

Someone mentioned adding extra insulation and getting walls an extra 100mm thick through as a Non Material Amendment. So now you have planning, try a NMA stating you are keeping the internal size of the house the same and floor levels the same but for reasons of energy efficiency you are making the roof structure 100mm thicker to add extra insulation so that will make the ridge line 100mm higher. If they pass that then you are sorted.

I think as mentioned it will be hard / impossible to satisfy building regs means of escape, it certainly would be in Scotland. Our house is 1 1/2 storey and I "enlarged" the upstairs space by adding "gable ends" A sort of variation on a dormer that is more common on the West Coast. Here are a couple of pictures It does not add anything to the overall height, but it gives a LOT more usable headroom and ensures all bedrooms have a proper window on an upright wall with only the en-suite having a roof window as it's only window. I have to ask though, as you are clearly working with a restricted ridge height, why waste height by having a 2.5M height downstairs when the standard 2.4 would be fine?

I echo the above. My house is larger than that and working comfortably from a 5Kw ASHP. I would want to see the SAP calculations to see what heat input it really wants before choosing the size of the heat pump.

Are the planners really going to refuse for being 100mm too high? Can you lower the floor level so you are starting from a lower point?

I have 200mm of frametherm and 100mm of wood fibre and it has a decrement delay of something like 13 hours. I don't get any overheating issues.

I have just fitted mine. For me they had to be cheap to install to be worth it. With a LOT of patience and seeking out of bargains, I managed to DIY install a 4KW system for £1500 described here It might be hard, or take more patience to replicate another system for that price. At that price point and assuming I can self use £250 worth of electricity each year, then it will have a payback time of 6 years. So much more to install and it becomes questionable. Later on I want to add battery storage, but the price of those still needs to fall further. That should then enable 100% self usage so making it more viable.

It is the job of the roof insulation to keep heat out as well as in. The amount and choice of type will sort out the details you need. Plain old roof tiles will also get very hot on a hot sunny summers day and will present just the same issue if you have got the roof insulation wrong.

Most of it is easy, I used the Protect Barriair air tight membrane and Tescon Vana tape. However it was thanks to my builders that some of the details were made easy. It was they that suggested installing what has been referred to on here as a "tony Tray" That is basically a length of air tight membrane that goes from the inside of the wall downstairs, around the ends of all the joists, and back to the inside of the wall upstairs. That was easy to install as they put the joists in and made the process or sealing the building easy and effective. If the MBC budget package omits things like that, then you are going to be left with a whole load of joist ends to tape up individually.

I am puzzled why the more basic option has such a very much worse air tightness "specification"? Surely that is down to detailing, and if nothing else YOU can detail that by taping where apropriate, or even adding extra air tightness membrane where necessary. At the moment it sends the message "we don't take so much care" with the more basic product.

Interesting. The plot thickens.

So reading the above posts since @Nickfromwales raised his tin hat above the parapet. The situation can be summarised as follows: For an electrically heated unit, SA recognise the 50% "problem" and have "solved" it by telling the installer to specify a larger unit to stand a chance of delivering the amount of hot water the customer expects. While from the customers point of view, they will get a unit that works, it will be at THEIR expense of paying for a bigger unit that they really ought to need, and the installer may or may not have been too shy to actually tell them they are paying extra to overcome a known problem that SA don't seem willing to properly deal with. So while Mt & Mrs Smith may be happy, I am afraid that is once humongous "sweep it under the carpet" exercise.

I run my UFH direct from the ASHP with the flow temperature from the ASHP set at 39 degrees. This seems to work well. Several others run a buffer / pre heat tank at a similar level, A modulating instant water heater similar to the Steibel Eltron one that I have would lift the HW from say 40 degrees to point of use temperature say 50 degrees. But why bother? I run my HW tank at 48 degrees heated by the ASHP and it does that okay. It won't be as efficient when heating to that temperature and under certain weather conditions will have to stop to defrost from time to time, but it will still be more efficient than resistance heating. But this is all off topic which is about the Sun Amp's.

Find some second hand kerbstones so they don't look shiny and new. Then fit them. If there is ever any query, "no those are the old ones, I decided not to change them"