ProDave

Ah, boiler not firing. That's another missing bit of info.

That does annoy me. you have the wiring and the heater points, a really good electric heater will be under £200 and an hour to fit. No way on earth should it be £1500, that's £300 labour per heater. But before you do anything more, leave your plug in heaters on for a whole day, so they are keeping the bedrooms warm (I assume they have thermostats) Then with the bedrooms warm, and not sucking heat from the rest of the house, see if downstairs is now warm and cosy or not. This will prove or disprove it the cold upstairs theory is true or just an excuse.

I suspect the problem with "turning it around" to try and make a private south facing garden, is it would in reality be a front garden and I doubt anything other than a low fence would be allowed. Sticking with more or less the existing layout you can achieve a west facing private garden, and if you are out at work all day, a west facing garden is just what you need for the evenings, If they won't allow a tall fence to give privacy then a hedge is your friend. I suspect planning won't allow more than 2 bedrooms because you can't reasonably park more cars. But a later loft conversion might be possible under permitted development. Alternatively you could try for a 2 bedroom house instead of a bungalow, that would reduce the footprint of the building and give more garden, and since the adjacent houses are 2 storey I can't see any justified reason to refuse that,

I would take the head off, turn the spindle fully one way, try it. Then turn the spindle fully the other way and try it. If neither results in hot radiators the problem is something else like a blockage.

Are they houses or bungalows next door?

What you are describing is what I see regularly on Scottish stone houses. Usually done VERY badly. The inside face of the stone wall is way too irregular to just fix insulation to and hope for it to be flat. Usually a 50mm frame is installed, as already noted with the thin studs being supported at intervals with fixings and packers from the stone wall. If you are lucky a bit of insulation might be poorly fitted between the studs before the plasterboard. Usually though nothing. And the last poor detail that makes it so rubbish is the top and bottom of the gap so created is usually open so cold air enters from the loft creating the ubiquitous "plasterboard tent" To do this properly, you need to make your frame fixed to the walls. Then line the entire wall with well detailed and well sealed sheets of insulation paying particular attention to seal the top bottom and all edges (expanding foam?) so no air can enter behind from outside. Then on the inside of your now well sealed insulating box you need to fix battens to create a service void so pipes and cables can all run inside without penetrating the insulation and letting cold in. It all comes down to getting the detail right.

The plot is what it is. I would change the layout Have living room and Kitchen / diner at the front as two separate rooms one either side of the hall. That way the main living rooms get the sun. If the one to the left (west) is the living room you could have a window or even patio doors onto the side garden to get afternoon sun. Then have the bedrooms at the back either side of the bathroom with the north facing windows. I did some work in a bungalow with that layout last week and the layout seemed to work well. A variation would be double doors from both the living room and kitchen diner into the hall, then by opening both doors to each room you can pretty much open those up as one big space when you want to. I would also build the roof with attic trusses to allow for a future room upstairs. Think how you might add a staircase to serve that later on and build it so that is easy to convert later.

Sounds like air in the system to me. Is this manifold higher than the others? So flow is okay when not calling for heat, it just circulates the (cold) water around the loops but as soon as the mixer opens up demand from the hot feed, it just gets air. Check the system pressure (assuming a sealed system) and try opening the manifold air bleed valves.

Yes it is definitely outside of safe zones for fixed electrical wiring. I guess you could use it for AV , Network, Telephone, tv aerial cables etc where the consequences of sticking a nail through a cable are not so severe.

Or just wait until mid week when the forecast says it will have warmed up.

Blowlamp. Carefful not to turn it into glass though.

Back the trailer into your garage and put a heater on in there. Should have put it there to start with, even in this cold spell, my unheated garage has not gone lower than 3 degrees.

Yes but check it is free to move not stiff. If it is stiff some oil and exercise it with pliers will often free it off. I think these ones only go a quarter turn.

Start by removing the existing actuator and checking the mechanical part of the valve is free to rotate.

And I have the same shower mixer and choice of 2 outlets. They were very cheap when I bought my 2, but someone looked recently and they had become a lot less cheap. My design goal was you should not get a wet (cold) arm when you reach in to turn the shower on, but it must still be reachable when you are in. So it's towards one end of a 1200mm wide shower.

Of course it is on a well built house with an air tight membrane then a service void, as many of us have built. It is this simple, and not expensive step that the main stream builders choose not to implement.

Since you have PP now for one large house, could you not appeal the refusal for 2 smaller ones using the PP obtained for the large house as your justification?

I bought a new house in 1986, moving into that from the 1930's familly home, expecting it to be warm. It was anything but. I now know the dot and dab plasterboard was probably the main reason why. Up here you will find a building technique that's like "dot and dab on steroids" Old stone cottages (croft houses) are rarely left as bare stone. They are almost always lined with a thin timber frame (often just 2 by 2) and boarded over. Originally this would have been lath and plaster, now more commonly you find plasterboard. But it is rare to find any insulation behind this. Instead you have a large irregular sized gap open to the loft space. As an electrician, if I have to remove a switch or a socket, I can almost guarantee I will be met with an icy howling gale coming out of the hole.

If you are going to do brick outer and lots of insulation on the inside, then you might as well do timber frame. At least you have a nice timber structure to support the insulation and fix the plasterboard to.

The usual way to combiner multiple heat sources is with a neutraliser, a friend has 3 heat sources into one tank with such a device and it seems to work okay.

You don't need a really thick slab to keep a house warm for a long time. Our UFH is on a suspended timber floor, and the UFH pipes are set in a 25mm thick dry "biscuit mix" screed, so not a lot of "thermal mass" there. Yet when the heating goes off it takes a very long time for the house to cool down. That is all down to the long decrement delay of the insulation and the ammount of insulation in the house.

No. It's like suddenly having frosted glass to all the windows on the north elevation. If someone stops outside we can't see who they are.

Definitely right for the treatment plant. The current measurement might even suggest it uses more but it has a lousy power factor. When I first installed it I ran it for a few days with absolutely nothing else on, and the electricity meter clicked up 2KWh per day. The mvhr is probably less, I have current measurements (somewhere) for all the different fan speeds but have never done that metered KHh test on that alone.

Our 3G windows have had frost on the outside for well over a week now.

I used Frametherm, 2 layers of 100mm in a 195mm frame. Of all the wool type roll insulation it is the least nasty one to handle. The best price I could get for it was from SIG buying the whole lot in bulk.