ProDave

I started to hear about this when I encountered the problem with ASHP #1 that some of the refrigerants were being phased out and were in limited supply, hence expensive. It would be a shame if heat pump technology is restricted by such issues. One wonders what the future will be?

Hi and welcome to the forum. I first wanted to self build when I was in my 20's. A plot came up for a reasonable price and that was when I found the hard reality that plenty of people would lend you money to build a house, but I could not find one that would lend money to buy the land. So that dream had to wait for another 25 years. If you ever find yourself north of Inveness you are welcome to look around by build.

Exactly that. My builders suggested it, and they had never heard it called a "Tony Tray" As with most things attention to detail is important especially at corners. One house I wired 2 years ago now did not do that, and I remember them spending ages taping bits of air tight membrane around every single joist.

I have now fitted a Grundfos pump as my secondary pump, and that, in conjunction with the Wilo pump inside the ASHP gives a slightly higher flow rate. I have now also found a setting on the ABV that gives sufficient water flow rate even with all my motorised valves shut. So hopefully that issue is now resolved and I can concentrate on connecting the controls over the next few days / weeks (this is a background job for me at present)

Did the builders have the foresight to take a "Tony Tray" around the joist ends to ensure continuous air tightness at the ground floor / first floor junction?

An EPC of C is nothing spectacular, our old house achieved that with oil fired heating. If our new house does not get an A I will be very disappointed. I do however generally agree it is important to get the fixed things right, like location plot size etc, everything else you can change so I personally would choose the right location with the wrong heating system in favour of the perfect house in the wrong place.

I wired a house about a year ago that had a number of feature posts and beams a bit like this left exposed. Where the bottoms of the posts ended up buried in the floor screed, somehing caused black staining to wick up the posts about 6"

It never worked to start with, in spite of being sold as new. Then when pushed (and they had to be pushed) they admitted it was an obsolete model and they could not support it, so they replaced it with a different make and model.

Last time I had this problem was in the bay window roof of our 1930's house, a little bit of roof with no access to the void. So wrapped up in motorcycle gear and helmet with all the joints taped up, I took some roof tiles off and emptied a cans of RAID into the roof void. When the buzzing had died down somewhat, I went up again and poked the nest with a stick to puncture it and retreated. Again when the buzzing had died down I emptied the second can of RAID into the roof void, and that finished them off.

Did you mean Rob Roy Homes? Roy Homes, who were based in Inveness (and built out last house) went into administration a few years back.

List price about £2K I believe.

And sell faulty #1 meaning working #2 only cost £305. Plus a lot of wasted time.

And mine only £455 But I am now on No 2 which thankfully appears to work, unlike No 1

I made the mistake at the last house (first gravel drive I had ever done) of getting "20mm gravel" which turned out to be 20mm round pebbles that just rolled over each other as you drove over them. It really did take many years for them to bed down sensibly. What you really want for a solid drive is crushed stone, i.e. each stone is an irregular shape from being crushed, and they bind together with much less movement between them.

This is my initial conclusion and in due course I will be looking to stitch a conventional heating programmer into the system so you can basically ignore the supplied programmer, and control it all from conventional straightforward heating controls. There are one or two challenges for this but I have some ideas. Watch my thread when I get around to doing it.

By "all electric" I assume you mean E7 or E10 and an electric boiler? Even if running entirely at off peak rates, "electric boilers" are not liked by buyers, they fear ££££££ heating bills. But in general buyers are disinterested in "green" things. When trying to sell our old house, not one viewer was remotely interested in the solar PV paying out at the original high rate with another 22 years left to run on the FIT contract.

I just phoned all the haulage firms for a quote. They need to know the weight of the machine and where it's going from and to and should give you a price. Mine was £264 to move a 3t machine 70 miles and it was delivered on an 11t beaver tail truck. When I sold it, the buyer arranged haulage and it was collected on a similar size lorry. I did try the car transporter businesses but they would not touch it.

You can buy repeaters on ebay, of dubious legality but they do work.

I do have a bypass valve but I briefly tried it by shutting the HW motorised valve and even with the bypass valve on it's weakest setting, the thing tripped on low flow, but of course I didn't even have time to run down and see what the flow meter said. More work to do.

That is what I am thinking. However the "correct" way to wire it all is the heat pump controls the motorised valves, presumably so when it switches from room heating to hot water heating on it's own timers, it swaps them over. The question is , is there any intelligence to allow for the time for the motorised valves to operate? This is why I need to think carefully about a scheme to control the whole lot in a sensible way.

That was direct into the HW tank, a 300L Telford UVC with the high capacity heat pump input coil. The motorised valve for the tank held in the manual overide position (controls not yet fully wired) It can only be the length of pipe limiting flow rate. I haven't yet tried driving the UFH, that might re open the flow rate issue. One particular issue I am expecting is the manual says "motorised valves must operate within 90 seconds" yet it appears the unit will trip out of the flow switch does not trigger within 10 seconds. That sounds like a problem, particularly with the time delay of the thermal UFH manifold actuators.

Yes pump was set to max.

And now onto the subject of how to integrate this into a whole house heating system and how to control it. The unit comes with a "Remote controller" which is it's own user interface. The idea is you are supposed to use that to control the whole house heating system and that alone. BUT it is a fiendishly complicated thing, I am only just beginning to scrape the surface of how you program it and use it. I remain to be convinced that this is the only user interface I want to have to control my whole house heating system. I have some ideas that I will discuss in due course. As well as being the heating programmer, this remote controller gives access to many setup parameters to vary some aspects of how the heating system works. The first of these that has jumped out at me as being "odd" is the default parameters for hot water heating. When I first turned it on, it heated my water tank for 30 minutes then shut down. It had not reached it's target temperature. Looking through the parameters, it seems there are some timers set up. The first sets how long the heat pump heats the hot water for at one time, and is set to a default of 30 minutes. The second sets how long it stops heating the hot water for, and is set to a default of 180 minutes. I can only assume this rather odd timing is because when heating hot water, it stops heating the rooms. and someone felt that turning the room heating off for more than 30 minutes might cause an issue. For the moment I have set both timers to 30 minutes so when heating the hot water it is now 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off. That might mitigate against defrost cycles when conditions are poor? There is a third timer parameter relating to hot water heating, and that is a time delay before it turns on the immersion heater in the HW tank. Again I assume this is done to speed up HW heating? But I don't want it to use the immersion heater except for anti legionela heating. There are other parameters that affect the operation of the electric heaters that require further investigation. What I want to end up with, is the supplied remote controller being just a tool to set up the unit, and day to day operation controlled by a 3 channel central heating programmer, so I can set times for upstairs and downstairs heating, and hot water heating, and quickly and simply turn any one on or off using a simple standard programmer. I have some ideas, and also some challenges ahead to implement that, more of which I will discuss later.

I see no mention of the right of access being passed down to successive owners? Normally that is explicitly stated.

My plumber friend nearly installed the Grant oil / ashp hybrid 2 years ago but I believe the price was eye watering. He ended up just with the Ecodan Air source Heat Pump and I believe it is working okay.