ProDave

The heat plate does not need to go behind the stove, that is rated to be only 100mm from combustibles. It is the plain single wall flue. This tells me I must have a non combustible shield but crucially with a 12mm air gap so can't use tiles.

The last few days has seen me installing the flue for the wood burning stove. First put up some scaffold and remove a few roof tiles Cut a hole and put the flue through the roof, shown here after the first row of tiles was put back. It is worth noting some detail. I wanted to retain as much air tightness as possible, but flamable materials (the wood fibe sarking board) must remain 6cm from the flue pipe. Solution: An insulated sleeve. Obviously this is made of non flamable material, and is >6cm thick so this can be made a snug fit through the wood fibre, and any gap sealed with foam. Here is the flashing on and tiles put back The flue then runs down through the bedroom, down through the kitchen into the stove. The cover plates cover up the holes that are at least 6cm larger than the flue in all directions. And the test firing And now a few questions: I am going to need a heat shield plate up behind that flue downstairs. Does anyone know where I can buy one that does not cost an arm and a leg? (seen prices of about £250 so far)? And I expect the bedroom with the flue pipe is going to need a CO alarm. Are there any regs saying how close to the flue it needs to be? In particular with the flue going so high up the room does the CO alarm need to be that high? (Is CO lighter or heavier than air?)

The issue with the hot water is the length of tome it takes for hot water to reach the tap when you turn it on. Unless you have a pumped recirculating hot water loop.

Careful with your hot water tank positioning. imho that does not normally belong in a "plant room" unless your plant room is in the middle of the house. It needs to be central to all the rooms that use hot water. Mine has ended up in what will be an airing cupboard from the small bedroom as that was the most central location. My telecoms / network / AV stuff is in the cupboard under the stairs. Wifi hub under there gives a workable signal in all rooms, but again the stairwell is central to the house. UFH manifolds need to be central to the rooms they are serving to minimise pipe runs.

The point was to use the wifi calling option so your phone contract minutes can be used without a mobile signal if you have wifi available, and you can send and rciv texts by wifi as well. Definitely works out cheaper for calls than the landline.

Our previous house was done using a netting made for the job, I believe it was called Netlon or something similar.

You want to look into that a bit more. I was given a 2 year old Samsung Smart phone. It is now on a £5 per month contract with O2. Not unlimited but enough minutes for all my call needs. I don't ever use the landline now unless it is for an 0800 number (which peversely you have to pay for on a mobile). The £5 per month for the mobile is way cheaper than BT can offer a "call package" for and in any case we were paying about that per month for metered landline calls with them. I don't generally use the phone for anything other than phone calls, the exception being I have Open CPN chart plotter on it for when out on the boat.

Re which bank. It's very different for me as a self employed tradesman, a lot of people pay me by cash or cheque, so I need a bank I can visit without a huge detour to pay money in. Everything else I do on line. At the moment RBS is filling that need, but I fear the end is near. Earlier this year they closed a lot of branches, but thankfully ours was spared, but I feel that is only a matter of time before the axe falls on that. There is a Bank of Scotland in town, otherwise it's a 20 mile drive. There is no longer any bank branch left on the Black Isle. They now have to go into Inverness if then need something physical. @JSHarris at least RBS (or Natwest where you are) don't need a mobile phone to verify payments, that is done by putting your card into a card reader that they supply that generates a number for you to type in.

Well done on exchanging contracts. That should be the worry over and it should all complete now. The conveyancing process seems stuck in the dark ages. I often feel after a few weeks what is needed is for all partied to have a face to face meeting where all the issues could be trashed out in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks and weeks of slow communication and slow answers.

Hi and welcome to the forum. I used to live in Oxfordshire, and I was unable to fulfil my self build ambitions there as self build plots are rare and very expensive. It was not until we moved to the Highlands that we wer able to aford a plot and self build, now on No 2. There is always Graven Hill at Bicester if that is within your area? Best of luck and welcome to the forum.

LED security lights seem to be evolving. They for a long time did have captive short flexes, but lately, the last few I have wired had a connector on the back that you terminated your own flex into then screwed on the supplied waterproof cover.

Looks nice, very Grand Designs. Front door dos not look wide enough, apart from being out of style.

I presume that is for supporting an external step? Is it only the main entrances that have this, and perhaps the others are expected to open onto e.g timber decking?

At the risk of insulting you, you are using a crimping tool aren't you? I have seen people try and crimp them just with a pair of pliers, but that won't push the pins in far enough. Before you shorten your cables any more, I suggest you just find a short length of cable and practice making some patch leads until you perfect the art of crimping reliably. I concur what @Onoff says the bag of 100 from screweys are cheap and reliable The 3 things that will make it fail are wrong order at one end or the other, not pushed in far enough before you crimp, and wrong crimping tool not pushing the pins far enough. And yes it is a job I hate and can only tolerate in short bursts.

Okay this is probably "silly question of the day" I may have mentioned before that I had a grumble about the noise of the circulating pumps on my UFH manifolds. They wer both IBO pumps supplied with the manifolds. A few days ago I swapped the pump on the upstairs 0ne (the most troublesome) for a spare Wilo pump and that made that one almost inaudible, So I was considering buying another Wilo pump for the downstairs one. 2 days ago however I laid and connected 2 more UFH loops for the downstairs snug living room. I took the opportunity while filling them to top up the antifreeze / inhibitor that had become somewhat diluted when I partially drained down to swap my original faulty ASHP. Since connecting that second loop and replenishing the antifreeze / inhibitor the downstairs UFH is substantially quieter, and it's not because it's feeding more loops, even if the thermostat for the newly connected room is turned down it runs a lot quieter. So is it really a case that antifreeze / inhibitor mix running through a pump is quieter than plain water? and why?

The issue with dot and dab, is unless you are vert careful, you can end up making a "plasterboard tent" with the gap between the wall and PB open to cold air e,g in a cold loft space. I encounter this frequently in houses where you remove a socket and a blast of cold icy air comes out of the socket box.

The input group is what the cold water into the cylinder passes through. It has a pressure reducing valve, typical pre set to 3 bar, and an over pressure relief valve. This is installed by the plumber usually close to the tank. The tank itself has an over temp /pressure relief valve usually connected directly to the tank by the manufacturer. This one cannot be remote mounted it has to stay on the tank. Both need to be accessible.

Regardless of where the expansion vessel is, they will also need access to the input group and the pressure releif valve.

Katzbeck, Nordan, Russel Timbertech, Munster Joinery are a few others to look at. Like many on here we used Rationel 3G Ali clad timber and are pleased with them.

When I had a fault with my first one, and I was briefly considering getting a refrigeration engineer to re gas i came across much discussion that the refrigerant gasses were limited in supply by quotas. You can't believe all you read on the internet but if that is the case they may not be able to just ramp up manufacture. It would be ironic if an energy saving thing like a heat pump was restricted in number due to concerns about the gases used inside them.

I made my own. This is positioned above the ceiling in the utility room and will be accessed via a small "loft hatch" The overriding objective was to enable individual isolation while piping the hot water runs as short as possible without adding extra length to any circuit. Putting the manifold anywhere else, e.g in a cupboard would have made 1 or more hot pipe runs longer than necessary.

I have done similar when someone bought the wrong boiler programmer. Simply cut a pcb track with a scalpel, and made an alternative soldered llink

Surely the author of the report allowed YOU to use it upon payment of their fee. Now if someone else has used it, that someone else should also pay a fee, and I would expect them to be chasing that someone else for a fee for using their work. Does the author know it has been blatantly stolen? if not I would be telling them. This used to happen with house surveys in Scotland before the Home reports came along. It is usual in Scotland to have a survey before you make an offer to buy, and if several people were interested, a surveyor would do a survey then charge everyone interested for a copy. You could always invite the offenders round for a cup of tea and cake, and have a chat along the lines of why don't you pay me a share of the fee I paid.........

In the case of the ice bucket, it you were heating it with a water loop with the water in the loop at say 2 degrees, once the ice had melted and the water reached 2 degrees, it would stop absorbing any more heat.

Yes indeed, once all the ice has melted the water will heat up. The Sun amp exploits the relatively large amount of heat needed to freeze and thaw a substance which enables so much heat to be stored in such a small space, and released at a near constant temperature.