ProDave

If you move panels so your total generation suddenly jumps up, they may start asking questions thinking you have added panels. Your FIT payment would go up and they would want to know why. I'll bet they would not question it if your total generation went down.

My house is about 140 square metres over 1 1/2 storeys. I have never worked out the external wall area. It is clad in 100mm thick wood fibre board and rendered with the Baumit.com thin coat render system. I can't give a cost for the wood fibre board as that was lumped in with the build and erect of the timber frame so I don't have an itemised price. The render material cost £4397 and the labour for the renderer cost £4750 Scaffold (my own) was already in place. This is the wood fibre board we used chosen from the first supplier I could find just now doing a quick search https://www.insulationsuperstore.co.uk/product/diffutherm-external-woodfibre-insulation-for-render-100mm-080m2.html I am absolutely certain our builders paid a lot less than that price for it. The base coat render is mixed from a powder https://www.baumit.co.uk/products/external-insulation/starsystem-nature/multi-contact-mc-55-w.html And this is the top coat render ready mixed https://other.baumit.com/products/exterior-insulation/starsystem/baumit-silikontop.html The whole point of doing it this way, is you are paying for a board to clad the frame with to apply the render, so it might as well be a board that adds a bit more insulation to the building.

I am loving your propped up ladders, and that "interesting" scaffold corner in picture 4 Shows your builders are human.

Some of the commercial once are not that clever either. A near neighbour has one, I forgot the make (but NOT immersun) and I have repaired it twice. Carp design, 2 wires from the PCB to the SSR keep failing where they are soldered to a PCB.

I tried the mist coat thing once and it didn't work. Still needed 2 more coats of neat paint to cover. Now I just do 2 coats of Wickes cheapest mat white contractors emulsion and then it's good for a top coat of your choice. Just wait until the plaster has dried to a light pink all over with no dark patches and you are good to paint. In the summer when out last lot of plaster was done, that was 3 days.

Things have moved on since the days of a bit of plywood, a layer of roofing felt and a lot of hope. I would not even have felt of a shed roof today. Useless stuff.

This is mine. I have been know to fetch firewood in it. That had the rear springs down on the stops.

Okay of you really want a second vehicle, my off the wall suggestion is a >40 year old Series Landrover, probably LWB truck cab. £0 historic road tax, MOT exempt and cheap classic car insurance. And if you don't break it, you should be able to sell it for what you paid, if not more. Take out the mats (if it has any) from the cab. Drive it in your muddy boots, and hose it down inside from time to time (yes seriously)

The trouble with a second vehicle is the extra road tax and insurance. The insurance might be more than you think as you need to earn the NCD independantly for a second car. How about roof bars and a trailer? I carry 8 by 4 sheets or any long planks on the roof. The trailer you will probably find is such a handy thing to have you will keep it forever. Or just get the builders merchant to deliver everything?

Yes. Old house, like this one has a conventional central heating time switch to set the on and off times, and when it's on each room has it's own room stat. The only difference is the new house has upstairs and down UFH on separate channels on the programmer. At the old house I briefly put programmable thermostats in 2 of the bedrooms so I could have them on and off at different times to the rest of the house, but I chose badly and they were rubbish so I swapped them back. A lot of systems that I wire for people have "set back" rather than off. I always believe that is to stop a house getting too cold over night so it does not take too long to warm up in the morning. But given the very long time constant of our house I see that as completely pointless.

Stainless steel is not magnetic. Perhaps there is an issue with ferrous cutlery or utensils "self heating?"

It took SWMBO some time to get used to UFH at our last house. She was used to radiators, where you turned the heating on, and within about 15 minutes you could feel warmth coming off the rads. First time we fired up the UFH at the last house, and hour later, nothing had seemingly happened. It was closer to 2 hours before you could begin to feel the first hint of warmth. Of course in real use you set the timer to come on a bit earlier than you would with radiators and by the same physics you can turn it off earlier. Ours used to go off at 8PM and there was no sign of it cooling down by bed time. Many times in the B&B rooms, we would go in of a morning and the rooms were up to 30 with the thermostat on the end stop. AND the window open.

Check what the UFH controller wants. IF the UFH controller is expecting a switched L then you can use that thermostat, Terminal 4 will be the switched L and just ignore terminal 3. IF the UFH controller is expecting a low voltage or volt free contact, you cannot use that thermostat.

As a Husband, you will learn in due course what a "Hot Flush" is.

Then she will be complaining it is "not working" as the room has not reached the setpoint of 30 degrees. This is the reason I wanted my heating system operating from a "normal" central heating programmer, not the fiendishly complicated thing that came with the heat pump (that is connected but hidden away in the plant room for parameter setting etc only)

Set up a watch list and you will get an email when new items are listed.

I have come into this thread part way through so excuse me if I have missed something. This is wet UFH isn't it? Then that looks the wrong thermostat. That has power into 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 connect to an electric UFH mat. The thermostat for wet UFH just wants a volt free contact for the manifold controller. You normally connect that to the UFH controller with a 3 core cable, it gets it's power from there, not direct from the consumer unit. Apologies if I have got the wrong end of the stick and you are using electric UFH

I had the same with our builders. I dug the foundation trenches by painting what I wanted in the ground. They did not believe it was possible to get it right without first setting up the profiles, but I proved them wrong.

I think @JSHarris coined the phrase "90% finished,only 90% left to do"

That would work. You might be able to pull the lifting strops out, or you may have to sacrifice them and just cut the ends and leave them under the hearth. But would the wheels of an engine hoist get far enough apart?

Your problem is a common return line. Hot return water will flow through that when the HW is on. Even with the valves shut, there is a convection path up through one radiator and back through another to further along the common return pipe. Don't under estimate where hot water will flow by convection. Th cure is completely separate the heating return and the hot water return so they only join much closer to the boiler way beyond where the radiators connect so when only HW is in there is no longer hot water flowing in the radiator return pipe. Common return is the work of the devil, done to save pipe but can cause unexpected problems.

Well done, it is about time you had some good luck.

I love the hand drawn detail of the late 1800 / early 1900 ones.

You are correct, I forgot to make any more updates. It was only the interior, and that is now looking like a shed, full of "stuff" It's standing up very well and no leaks. Far more sturdy than the shop bought shed I wired for a customer recently, made of something not much stronger than cardboard.

@newhome The bell cast is usually fitted level with the DPC. All the white render is above DPC so will be nice and dry. The grey render underneath is below the DPC. So it WILL get damp and often the render will blow. This seems to be a very Scottish thing. When I was down south, nobody rendered below dpc, they did that bit in nicely pointed bricks and left it bare. I had a problem with my 1930's house where it had been rendered bridging the dpc and that was causing damp in the house, solved by hacking off the render below dpc and pointing the brickwork. So when I came to Scotland I was frankly horified that they render below the DPC. I have even seen some houses (one I wired 2 years ago) where the white wet dash just goes straight down to the ground bridging the DPC. In your case I would say the scratch coat has far too much sand, not enough cement. On my new build I have left the block work bare below DPC and to make it look nicer, painted it with masonry paint.