ProDave

The issue is the usual question is something like "is the house built of brick or block under a tiled or slate roof" Normally timber frame with a masonry outer skin satisfies that. But no outer masonry skin and it becomes "non standard construction" in the eyes of many lenders. I doubt they care which render system is used, it is the fact it is not applied to masonry that troubles them. You could try saying "timber frame, tiled roof, render exterior finish" and see what they say?

My ASHP is heating my DHW to 47 degrees. This was found by experiment over a few days to be the absolute hottest I could hold my hand under without it being painful. Hot enough for washing up. Bathwater will be cooler with cold water added. So an ASHP seems perfectly capable of heating DHW. The caveat being I fitted a larger hot water cylider as you will be diluting with less cold, so will need a greater volume of hot water.

MY LG Therma V air to water heat pump has a cooling function, but I am not planning to use it.

Basically the rules are if it has been your primary residence, then the period it was your primary residence is exempt from CGT and so is the last 18 months of ownership regardless of it's use in that time. After that there is a possibility it may be liable for some CGT but don't forget you have your personal CGT allowance to use up (twice if jointly owned) before you actually pay anything, so very unlikely indeed that you would actually have to pay any CGT. If you then let a property that was formerly your primary residence, you then get letting relief as well, which is a more complicated "lower of 3" sum, but gives a further allowable gain before CGT is payable.

We have a burn flowing through our garden and I toyed with the idea of a water source heat pump. I didn't have anything expensive like that in mind just a loop of pipe down the burn and back up again (about 40 metres of length available) fed into a ground source heat pump. The paperwork of getting permission from SEPA and more likely having to prove to BC that we had permission put me off and I went for a cheap ASHP instead. I might still experiment in the future though. I don't suppose you own both sides of that bywash do you? An undershot water wheel looks like it might work there, another thing I am thinking of playing with later on.

It is surprising where you can muster up funds from, make savings etc. We started out with barely enough funds to get a watertight shell without the sale of our old house, yet somehow, by scrimping and saving, doing a LOT of work myself to save labour costs, and a couple of injections of capital, we are on course to just about complete the new house without the sale of the old one. Your £200K should get you a long way, certainly I would have thought to habitable, if not complete.

The FIT ends to new entrants from April but if you can get in before that you will be good for the duration. The issue is needing an EPC to claim it which is what stopped me and has caused me much bitterness because nobody will lodge an EPC on an incomplete house. You can still install solar PV without the FIT. If you just buy the kit you can probably get a 4KW system for about £2K way cheaper than paying for an MCS installer to fit it. Just mount the panels yourself and get your electrician to fit it. You will benefit from the self usage of what you generate even without ant FIT payments, so make sure you e.g have a hot water tank to divert excess generation to. Check also how much you are paying an MCS installer to fit your ASHP. and what your RHI payments will be. You might find it is cheaper to just buy a cheap ASHP and install yourself and it still works out cheaper. P.S where in Scotland are you building?

I don't know what to suggest. We had the same problem with the cheap Chinese stove that I put in the static caravan, but that only had a short (2.5 metre) flue. It was alright when up to temperature, so we just learned how to stack it up to get it hot quick without needing refueling before it got hot. But most of last winter it didn't ever go out so this was not an issue.

How is the pipe connected to what I think is a brick chimney? If not well sealed with a closure plate, the draw from the chimney may not be sucking up the bit of connecting flue pipe. Most stoves are designed for a "warm flue" If it is an old brick or stone chimney I will bet it has no insulation around it and is anything but a warm flue.

It will be interesting how this is policed. Will all owners of such systems be advised they have a year to upgrade? Or will it only be enforced if a polution incident is reported and investigated? My immediate neighbour immediately upstream of me has such a tank and it can smell i bit at times so I won't be sorry to see him forced to upgrade. Like us he has little option to discharge anywhere else so a treatment plant discharging to the burn is what he needs.

Interesting that Rationel were one of the best and the cheapest, that was my finding. In fact the only ones that quoted me better Uw values than Rationel, were Internorm, but at twice the price. Before you get too bogged down in you "must" have a certain Uw or Ug value, do a heat loss calculation. Compare how much extra heat will be lost through what Rationel are offering, compared to the best you can find, then work out the extra heating cost of that extra heat loss and work out the pay back times. I think you may find you will never recoup the extra you have to spend to get better windows. I am certainly pleased with the look and quality of my Rationel Aura plus triple glazed aluminium clad doors and windows and it does seem strange to hear talk of rejecting them because they are not good enough. If you want to try a couple more, add Katzbeck and Russel Timbertech to your list.

I got called to our old house, still a B&B. They had a foreign guest in an EV and wanted to plug in his charger. It claimed to be rated at 7KW but had a moulded on Schuko plug on it. But given a Schuko plug is rated at 16A, I am intrigued to know how it can deliver 7WK I cobbled together an adaptor and it charged his car overnight from a 13A plug without melting the plug or blowing it's fuse.

The risk here is the DNO's cable (usually concentric these days) is normally installed in place then terminated. There is no cable clamp. So if you pick up a live meter box and start moving it around, you will be putting strain on the connections, and quite probably a rotational strain. Even if the cable does not fall out and short, there is a serious risk of weakening the clamp force on the connections, leading to overheating later on. And don't even think of mitigating that by breaking the seals to re tighten the live connections. Up here is it something like £90 extra for a "building supply" which then covers the cost of relocating the supply into the house when finished. £90 well spent for safety. The reason I chose the option of making the external meter box on the boundary a permanent thing as it feeds from there to the static caravan and a garden shed. Both are permanent items. If I had chosen the "building supply" option and later had the meter moved into the house, I would promptly have been running my own supply back out to the 'van and the shed, so it just saved a whole lot of extra work keeping the meter box where it is.

ASHP, MVHR and Sun Amp definitely on their own circuits. My UFH manifolds are run from the "heating controls" circuit. 6A Sockets in the plant room are one ring final feeding utility, garage and plant room.

My thought if I could not have found the meter I had, was use the current transformer versions of those din rail meters, and switch 1 CT between the 2 meters to achiieve the dual rate switching. I will add a bit of trunking under the meter to protect the single insulated cables, when I can find the handy offcut I know I have somewhere.

I don't know why the travelling folk don't do that, other than they have no respect for the law. 28 * 13 = 364 so they would have to go somewhere else for 1 day to make it legal. Not an issue for the flying club as I doubt they fly every day so easy to keep within the 28 days.

Yes a little Finder relay and plug in base from CPC 240V ac coil and single pole changeover contacts (also available as a 2 pole version) It is a din rail mount, but in this instance it is just screwed to the OSB, though I had to search hard to find a long enough, thin enough wood screw to do that.

Yes that is why I needed a meter that had an external rate switch input. I would love to have had a more modern one, but the only modern dual rate meter I could find was the type with an inbuilt radio time switch that would be useless for this application. The relay gets energised when the motorised valve for DHW is energised which only occurs when the heat pump is on and heating hot water, and so the meter records that usage on the off peak dial. At all other times the meter records on the normal rate dial so that records any usage for space heating. If ever a more modern external rate switch meter pops up on ebay I will probably buy it and swap for the more modern one.

Even in 2003 we put 150mm of floor insulation, and that was possibly not really enough for UFH. In our new house I am setting it up for the heating to run all day (it is on a conventional programmer so easy to change) but off at night. The driving force for that is to try and do the heating only in the daytime so when we eventually get solar PV then self usage is easier. The house does not cool down quickly so that should not be an issue. I have however been instructed to start the upstairs (bathrooms only) UFH early in the morning so one gets warm feet for ones morning ablutions.

Interesting project. but seeing how it sits amongst the other barns I have to question if this was the best one of the barns to convert? Would one of the others not have given a better outlook? At least if the ground floor is staying partly as agricultural use, you can continue keeping the Series 3 under cover.

Well my (almost) museum exhibit spinning disc dual rate electricity meter arrived yesterday, and this afternoon I got it connected. I have confirmed it is working and recording space heating consumption on the "normal" dial and DHW consumption on the "off peak" dial I will be taking weekly readings of both now to really see what our energy use is for heating and hot water.

I would avoid Danfoss. In our last house the microswitches kept failing, some I replaced the switches, others I replaced the whole head if I could not be bothered with the fiddle. Honewell in our new house.

Just watched the Carbonlite impossible build. What can I say other than "welcome to my world" Everything was so familliar. the location, the landscape, the company and people that built it, some of the build process and materials used. Matt is an incredable guy, not only the brains and boss of the company, but a hands on guy present at most site assembly periods. And he lives a mile from me. Interesting that the build company , it's name and location is so prominent in the program. Most of these programs seem to want to hide the name of the builder or arcuitect. I wonder which way money changed hands to facilitate that? In case some of you have not made the connection, we talked to Carbonlite about building our house, but being a more conventional 2 storey house they could not see a way to fit in with their modular build, so they proposed a compromise that they design and detail it and employ some of there techniques (e.g the wood fibre board etc) but it would be built as more of a conventional timber frame kit house by a local firm of builders who have worked with them before (and as it happens I have worked for so I knew them) The other thing that stood out though is what I have said about our build and am working damned hard to avoid. At £65K for the plot, and £350K build cost, they have a house that has cost them way more than the market value of a 2 bedroom house in this part of the world, even with the stunning location and view (the 50 mile trip to get to a shop, lack of broadband etc is not so stunning) And the sad ending. If I read it right at the end, no sooner was his house finished, and the poor bugger fell off his perch.

Tower seem to be a Honewell clone, very similar pattern.

Are you on the route for Runway 3? If so compulsory purchase might be the "solution"?