ProDave

It was tongue in cheek. But I have often said it is a shame flourescents are so lamented as "old" and what a shame nobody has managed to make one that looks modern. Well that fitting you have shown would work equally with two flourescnet tubes and look modern.

Kick them both back with 2 45 degree bends as close to the concrete slab as you can get and hope they will both be hidden in the floor makeup. You might want to buy a couple of bends and try it first before you commit to it.

Oh, flourescent lights are coming back into fashion....

Back to simple ideas. If you are in the slightest into DIY mechanics, then an inspection pit in the garage. Even if you just use it to make a simple oil change a lot easier it is well worth it. Mine is made just deep enough to sit in on a duck board, not full standing height.

Except if under certain circumstances it can only actually store 50% of it's capacity, and you run out of hot water as a result while SWMBO is in the shower with her hair full of shampoo, the "useless POS" might not last much longer in that house.

My SWMBO has a set of fine words to describe something like that. She would be telling me what a POS it was and how it was unfit for purpose and wanted it replaced with something "that works"

Someone correct me if I am wrong but this is the impression I have got from the discussion. The original Sun Amp PV had it's immersion heater in water and a pump to take the heated water in to heat the pcm. The new Uniq has the immersion heater directly in the pcm material. I presume that is to make it more efficient, but by doing so it seems to have placed this rather restrictive limit on when and how much charge the immersion heater can accept. It would seem an "improvement" is not always so.

It's a logarithmic scale. 3db is twice as loud, 10db is 10 times as loud

We have the Lamona one that Howdens were giving away free with very kitchen at the time we bought ours. It does seem a lot quieter than the Hotpoint we had in the last house.

But if installed in a new house before completion, whatever you pay should be reclaimable?

We use satellite for radio as well. I fitted a second low power old sky mini box dedicated to feeding audio to the hifi. Did you not manage to get a basic 2g signal with your repeater that would do to receive a text message? I agree something needs to be done about the poor rural mobile situation. The ongoing frustration is the shiny new EE mobile mast here that should give us a fantastic signal, is for the emergency services network service only. One has to ask why? Would it really cost them any more to let paying customers use it?

We put the DW on when it is full, which means not every day. Once we have fitted solar PV that will be modified to only in daylight hours. Back to simple ideas. A comment on another thread made me think of something I wish I had installed, an "essential power" circuit. In a discussion about battery storage there was mention of low power off grid generation being available during a power cut, so a dedicated circuit for things like fridge, a few of the lights, and perhaps 1 television etc that could be powered up independant of the mains would be handy. Too late for us now. Our other simple ideas are hiding all the hifi stuff in the under stairs cupboard all remote controlled to de clutter the house. The printer and router are in there as well. Also recessing some items into the wall thickness, e,g our filing cabinet (which is essential but damned ugly) is recessed 6" into one of the walls such that the bit that sticks out will be hidden behind the sliding doors of what is essentially the shoe and coat cupboard in the hall. I have done similar to make a pocket in the wall so the surround sound amp won't stick out further than the wall hung tv. My other usual wiring thing is I have the hall lights 2 way switched from up and down as well as the landing lights, something I always advise to my customers.

I lived the first 23 years of my life in the familly 1930's house. I recall that being very cold, even with central heating blasting away. Condensation on the bedroom wall was normal. Later I bought my own 1930's house and that was another ice box. It was heated with storage heaters when I bought it, woefully inadequate for the amount f heat it needed. I used to come home from work to a cold house and sit in my armchair with a 1KW fan heater blowing at me to warm my space. Living now in such a well insulated low energy house, really brings home just how utterly rubbish a huge amount of the UK housing stock really is, and I am not convinced that you can really do that much to improve them significantly. I am convinced a lot of people if they experienced this would never again buy an old leaky house. The EPC's were presumably introduced to inform choice and make people improve houses. Most peoplem would never buy a fridge unless it has a A+++ energy rating, yet seem happy tobuy an old house with an EPC G or even F rating, then perhaps complain about the heating bill. Logic would surely say that the older poor houses should be worth less to reflect their high running costs, but nobody seems bothered, except landlords will not now buy the very poorest as they have to reach a certain standard for rental.

Check your computers date and time. I have known this when the clock got corrupted and it thought the security certificate had expired.

So is our burn most of the time, but boy it knows all about spate from time to time.

Well my 5KW HP is doing a fine job of keeping the house warm, running at a very low duty cycle. I cannot imagine anyone needing a 17Kw version. In my ideal world, I would not even try heating the DHW until mid day. I am a "shower at night" person, I just can't see the logic in getting into bed dirty and waiting until the morning to get clean, so I just need a bit of warm water in the morning for a face wash. But the girls seem to want a piping hot shower at the crack of dawn which forces a DHW top up early in the morning, when the day has not had chance to warm up, and (thinking of the future) not even any sun for the PV

I am willing to bet it takes you longer to wash your hair than it does me......

It needs more thought. If you just said shut off the HP at 42 degrees and heat to 50 with the immersion, then when you draw water off and the temperature drops, the immersion thermostat would kick in and top it up, and the HP would never get a look in at heating the water unless you drained the tank completely. What is needed is a bit more intelligence. Like the HP needs to detect it needs to defrost, so it aborts heating the HW with the HP and uses it's internal willis heater instead. But at other times when the conditions do not dictate any need for defrosting, carry on using the HP. I might play with this later when I fit solar PV and reprogram my home made Arduino dump controller. e.g fit an outside temperature sensor, and if the outside temp drops below zero, turn off the HP demand for hot water and heat the HW entirely with the immersion heater until the temperature rises above 0 again with the arduino monitoring the tank temperature and turning it off at 50.

That's the point. I heat my water to 48 degrees and if it's just sub zero the HP starts doing defrost cycles that both slows down the heating rate and uses more electricity. It can run all day if needed heating UFH water to 37 degrees and it never needs to defrost.

And how it copes with defrosting when it gets cold. Both Jeremy and I have found our respective heat pumps never need to defrost when running at 40 degrees but above that they do when it gets cold.

You heard the saga of how I came by this one supplied "new" as a replacement for the previous faulty one. Chances are it is an old model and they were glad to offload it as it would not comply with the latest rules.

We planted a Laurel hedge at the last house. Biggest horticultural disappointment ever. After 10 years it has barely reached a metre high. On the plus side it barely ever needs trimming. It must not like our soil or climate.

Many of you know my panels will be ground mounted. I will almost certainly be making the mounts myself. The plan is to place the panels as close as possible together. If you arrange it so the panels are portrait orientation, and the clamps are on the sides, then the top and bottom joints will touch each other. My simple thinking is just tape over the joints with something like aluminium tape. I doubt it would be a perfect seal or last that long. Perhaps some flashband cut into strips might be better? My thinking is by sealing the joints as best as I can, they will form a "roof" over the structure of the ground mount. That can then be used as simple covered storage e.g for logs awaiting processing into firewood, winter storage of garden furniture etc etc. It will no doubt morph into an odd shaped garden shed (I know there is a reason I am collecting pallets again) P.S. @Ed Davies no reply yet re the solar panels so don't bet your shirt on it just yet.

Your site looks similar to mine, except my slope was less, and the trees and the stream a bit further away. I considered a passive slab. The big problem for me, was you have to build up the ground with crushed stone etc and that has to extend a bit beyond the house area. So it would have ended up having raised ground all around the house, then sloping down further out to the lower ground level. In the end I did pretty normal strip foundations and a suspended insulated timber floor. The foundations were specified by the structural engineer and the only things he did a bit different to normal were a reinforcing mesh in the concrete pour of the foundations, and a strong concrete mix specified. A near neighbour to here built his house on a much more challenging small plot close to the burn and on a much steeper slope, he built his on piles. The builders dug down to pour a 1 metre square pad for each pile, then cast concrete piers using plastic drainage pipe as a former. I don't know the cost but I suspect not cheap, largely because they had to remove a lot of soil, store it elsewhere, then bring most of it back (I would have asked the local farmer if we could rent the corner of a field to store it locally instead) This is a picture of his piles before the house went on top:

My LG one does not, unless it is something hidden and not documented in the installer or user manuals. Irrelevant to me as I am not claiming the rhi but you would think many using that heat pump would be,.