ProDave

Yes that's the one. When we first moved here, before the new treatment plant was built, when there was a strong SW wind it wold stir up the silt near the outtake and the water came out of the taps with a slight brown tint. That has gone with the new works, but the water still tastes pure. I really notice when I go south now how much chlorine is in a lot of the water.

Ours went the other way on the last house. We had the NHBC solo for self build. At completion, I got the NHBC inspector out for the completion inspection. He signed the completion stage in the log book. I asked what other paperwork we would get and he said that is it. 6 months later the 10 year warranty certificate arrived, dated for 10 years from that day. so we got an extra 6 months.

Thanks for that reply @JSHarris Yes it's a sealed unvented tank, mains water supply. The water comes from Loch Glass about 6 miles away and treated by Scottish Water in a relatively new treatment plant. I don't know what treatment it gets there, but unlike some other parts of the country, it arrives to us a pure water with no taste, smell or even hint of chlorine. But we are to assume it arrives as tested potable water, so you are saying there is no risk and I should not bother? I still need to sort out the thermostat so solar PV has the ability to store more unwanted power in the tank.

Thermowatt RTS-3 thermostat. No numbers on the dial, just marked + and -. Hard round all the way as far as it will go in the + direction, hard against the stop.

300L Telford unvented with heat pump input coil. The immersion is a Thermowatt type, the ones where the thermostat plugs onto the element terminals with 2 spade terminals. I have sent an email to Trevor, but it surely must be an "out of calibration" thermostat? Surely it should be capable of 70 degrees?

Oh dear. I have hit a "problem" The immersion heater thermostat that came with my Telford UVC cuts off at 54 degrees even on it's hottest setting. That's neither hot enough for a pasturisation cycle or to give a decent amount of solar PV storage. Clearly the thermostat needs to be changed, that can't be right.

We set out our shower to be 1200 by 900. but didn't get around to sorting out the glass panel to enclose it. Result is we have a shower area of 1200 by 1200 open to the rest of the bathroom. We like the complete openness so much it is now unlikely we will ever fit the glass panel to enclose it.

I can just stick with the controls the heat pump has (when I get around to actually connecting the immersion heater to it) or later on I can implement my own controls when I install the solar PV and the excess energy dump controller that will also have control of the immersion heater. I guess I am trying to minimise cost of using resistance heating. Currently what I am noticing (when doing a manual pasturisation) is from turning on the immersion heater, it probably takes half an hour before I actually see the temperature start to rise. That is probably stratification, and the immersion is lower down in the tank than the heat pump input coil reaches. I guess that's a good thing as the immersion will be heating that pool of cool water sitting at the bottom of the tank. Using the heat pump controls I can't go beyond weekly as it only knows "days of the week" and has no mechanism to say every other week, but I can set the target temperature and how long it wants to stay there. That latter point is academic as having heated the tank it will stay at that temperature for many hours unless you are drawing a lot of hot water off. I am likely when I install the PV to do the pasturisation from that, as it can be more intelligent, i.e. the controller can monitor the temperature and know for instance it already reached 70 degrees a couple of days ago when it was partucularly sunny, and reset the count down to the next cycle, something the heat pump controller cannot do.

I have a 300 litre unvented water tank. Heated primarily from an air source heat pump but later we intend to install solar PV with excess power heating the tank via the immersion heater. The reason for the large tank is to enable hot water to routinely be stored at the lowest usable temperature as heat pumps are not good at heating water very hot. The sweet spot I have arrived at is a target water temperature of 48 degrees. The heat pump has a built in hysteresis so does not start to re heat until the temperature drops 5 degrees, so in my case, it turns on again at 43 degrees. At that temperature, the water is just hot enough for the hottest task of dishwashing, if you run hot water only with no cold added, so I cannot reduce the hot water temperature any lower. So this is all working well, should not give the heat pump a problem, minimises standing losses, and still allows plenty of capacity later on for excess solar PV to heat the water a lot more. So onto the question. Legionella and what do I really need to do to be safe? By default, the heat pump wants to heat the water once per week using the immersion heater to 70 degrees. Does it really need to be that hot? Wickepedia suggests 60 degrees is enough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionnaires'_disease and does in need to be weekly or is a longer time still safe? What do other heat pump users do?

I can't picture what is happening above the ceiling, but the Durgo should be above where the water enters the pipe runs, so usually instead of an elbow at the shower trap, have a tee, and continue the pipe a bit further and fit the durgo to that.

The Durgo is supposed to go on the top if the pipe the water flows down so the slug of water creates a vacuum and the Durgo allows air to enter to replace that. Having the Durgo off on a separate branch is not going to help that at all. You need to continue the shower waste pipe past the shower trap then up somehwere and that is where the Durgo goes.

The clearance under the line will be enough for normal road traffic, you can probably look it up but that will be a minimum of about 5 metres. It would not surprise me if the standard height of the poles is 6 metres, hence the "no build" distance being 6 metres so if the pole fell over the line would not hit the building. In the unlikely event of a pole failing in this case, the line could come into contact with the building. Ouch. Rules change over time. In the past houses were build under pylons (talking 205KV or more) I am sure that is no longer allowed. I used to regularly drive past a nice neat row of bungalows but one of them was stepped back from the rest because it had a 132KV pylon in the front garden.

That won't be an issue with us as the garage door faces north, so I don't expect it to bake in the summer. But I don't expect much from a thin bit of insulation in such a door.

I will let you know how I get on. I have just had a look at his ebay feedback, 100%. BUT only 1 garage door in the last 6 months, and all other feedback is over a year ago and totally different stuff. I will probably take a punt knowing I will get my money back from Paypal if it never arrives but it looks like he has only just started up selling garage doors, and possibly just changed his user name to reflect that.

Roller Doors UK on ebay have come back with a price of £565 including delivery to the Highlands, 2 keyfobs etc. So I will ptobably go with that.

First thing. there must be a circulating pump somewhere else as well as the one on the manifold. Find this. Then find out if it is running when the central heating programmer is on, but ALL UFH room stats are turned down. If that is the case then the radiators can run without any UFH zone calling for heat. If so and there is no room stat upstairs, it will only be the radiator themal valves controlling the temperature in those rooms.

I would add caution as well. If I had known 100% what our situation would be, I might have just stayed in the old house and improved it instead. BUT when the dust settles, we will be in a much better house, only slightly smaller than the old one (downsizing was the original aim) and we will be a little better financially than we started, but not a lot.

If you are doing a raft anyway, then the logical extension to that is a passive insulated slab foundation instead. Similar in many ways but very much better.

If our old house had sold quicker, I would have had more money, so paid more people to work on the new house, so the total cost of the new house would probably have been £250K making the plot value only 20% of the total. And it would then be very questionable whether the new house would actually be worth what it cost. The main result of the delayed sale is me doing very much more of the work than I ever expected so the overall cost reducing a lot, plus I probably strive more to get a good deal on everything we buy to eek out a stupidly small budget to go further.

If you are wanting to mainly DIY I question is standing seam is really what you want? How about box profile steel instead, that can (mine does) span between battens, and is all 100% DIY if you want to.

Just found this on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123282794794?ViewItem=&item=123282794794 I await a delivery quite from them.

Oh dear. That has highlighted something I had forgotten about. Insulation. If I went with the roller door from the local supplier that would be "insulated" now I don't expect it to be very well insulated as the ones I have seen appear to be plastic slats making up the roll, with presumably some token level of insulation between the 2 skins.

I want to get a door on our garage that has been sitting doorless for nearly 3 years now, so I can get it set up properly as a workshop. Originally we were planning an electric roller door which (I haven't actually had a quote) I understand would be in the order of £1K But as ever in a quest so save money. SWMBO points out the garage is not for a car, they will live under the car port but we will need to get cars in to get them over the pit for servicing (and my Landrover might end up living in there) So we don't need electric, manual will do. Because the plan was a roller door, we didn't make it to any particular standard size and it has ended up with an opening size of 2370mm wide and 2310mm high. Of course now I am looking for a cheaper option, I find none of the off the shelf standard doors will fit. Any ideas? A manual roller door might be the simplest, they fit behind the opening on the inside not in the opening, so the size does not have to be so precice. So anyone know a supplier of cheap manual roller doors? Another alternative might be a pair of hinged timber doors, but again not found a standard set that will fit.

What is unusual about that? My plot cost £50K, well down at the bottom end of open market plot values here, and the total cost will be about £220K

Your overhead cable worries me, and may be more of an issue than you thought. It looks like 11KV, the standard for local distribution, and your supply will come from a transformer from that quite often pole mounted. We have 11KV overhead lines just the other side of the road from us. The "issue" they cause is restrictions on how close you can build to them. I found this out when a neighbour wanted to build almost right up to the road edge, putting his building 4 metres from the OH lines. He was told NO. As it happens, there was some network alterations going on, and he was able to piggyback onto that, and get the section past his plot undergrounded for a much reduced cost as they were making alterations anyway, so he was able to build. When I looked into out own build, I was concerned it might cause us a problem. So I enquired of SSE the DNO here and was told no work within 9 metres of the OH line. Then when you drill down into the details, it is actually no building within 6 metres of the line, and any work (scaffold, cranes, diggers) between 6 and 9 metres from the line you have to be particularly careful. So we have built 6 metres from the OH line and had scaffold up 5 metres from it, and used a digger (carefully) right under it. The fact it has ended up right above your building is a concern. Has your DNO agreed to that? I would want that in writing. What is the clearance from your roof to the line at the closest point? IF it's less than about 3 metres I suspect you are going to need a line shutdown just for the roofer to work on the roof. And taking the actual build, that could be a long shutdown, and who else would be off during that shutdown. This may not be what you want to hear, but a diversion or undergrounding of a section of the line is what you really want but that is going to cost well into 4 digits. It might be cheaper to move the garage. There will be some wasted money on foundations that will have to be moved but that is likely less cost than moving the line. You might have to re submit planning but should be able to continue building the house while that goes through. Perhaps start a thread in the forum to discuss this rather then clog up your blog?