ProDave

Horizontal cladding will men you have to shape all the edges so they are not square, to give a chamfer for water to run off. Hit and miss vertical won't let water in. I would not do vertical with gaps.

The trouble with an ASHP is they are not good at heating hot water especially hot. I have ours set to a target temperature of 50 degrees at the moment. That means you really need more water storage volume as when you run a bath for instance, you will be using a larger proportion of hot water and adding less cold to it. So I suspect that tank at only 150 litres might let you down. Also you really want the high capacity heat pump input coil otherwise it won't get up to the heat pump temperature or it will take longer or force the heat pump to heat it hotter to get there.

My vote would be bath under window, toilet to left of bath straight ahead as you enter, really generous shower at the end (what you have drawn is too thin, take the shower area right up to the edge of the window) And your bid double basin along the wall adjoining the dressing room. And do the whole floor as a wet room so you don't even need a shower screen if you don't want one.

My LG Therma V has a cooling function that I won't actually be using. I am not sure I would recommend it though, so see what others suggest.

I just tried simulating that and open circuited the thermistor while it was heating the tank. It throws up a CH08 fault "fault with water tank sensor" after 3 seconds but resets and continues operating when I re connect the thermistor. So I think it should be okay with a brief O/C while the relay swaps over. The trouble with parallel, is if the hot tank is already very hot, it might cause a reading that is too hot (above 100) Oh and I have just discovered annoying quirk #5 with this unit. You cannot adjust the set point temperature for the hot water when the heating is turned off. To do that, you have to go and turn the heating on, where upon it will let you set the heating temperature and the hot water temperature, then go and turn the heating off. I get the feeling I am using "user interface version Beta A"

I took a second reading from the thermistor at a different temperature, and concluded the best fit to the curve is what is known as a 6K thermistor (6K at 25 degrees) From that about 510 ohm seemed a likely bet for my "temperature satisfied" resistor. So I have tried it with a 560 ohm resistor and that gives an indicated temperature of 85 degrees. So I will be using a relay to switch from the thermistor, to this fixed resistor, when I want the hot water heating off. I have just ordered 3 relays from CPC as I didn't have any with 240v ac coils. One will be used to do the HW switching, and the other 2 will be used to spare the heating motorised valves being energised when the heating is off.

Sounds like a lot of work and hassle to solve a problem with an odd neighbour. I would just over board the gaps, then plant a fast growing hedge instead on the top of the wall just your side of the fence

Coving is a personal thing. For me it's yesterdays style. Agree 1" Celotx / Kingspan etc then 9mm plasterboard to keep the walls thin. You could take the worktop off and drop a lot more insulation down behind the kitchen units.

Did it make much smell during the cleaning as it presumably burned off all the residue?

Absolutely. We considered a built in FF but baulked at adding another £350 to the price of the kitchen just to wrap the FF in a box to make it look like a cupboard. Plus the integrated ones were just too small anyway.

If you believe the saleswoman at my local branch of Howdens, their own brand Lamona stuff is made by AEG but a LOT cheaper. Just what appliances are costing you £7K, I got my whole kitchen with appliances for less than that.

The kitchen has been the priority, with the ASHP being the background job. The caravan is now only serving as "storage"

Pretty much. You can't quite see the Ben from our house. If you could it would be a bit to the left. You can see it from the top of our road, but as you walk down, it disappears behind the tree line of a forest. I live in hope that one day the forest will be felled and we might just be able to see the Ben.

The whole house needs skirting, doors, door liners and lots of finishing off. It's definitely been a case of make it so it "works" then make it pretty later on. There is still plenty of wiring to finish, note the temporary light switch by the door. I have yet to build a piece of stud wall to the right of the fridge which is where the light switch will end up. the view from the West window, which you see from the kitchen sink or the breakfast bar has been a major feature that has shaped several aspects of the house

That is a very tidy job. I wonder will they leave out the screed upstairs on the bits where lots of pipes run together to the manifolds? That's what I did otherwise that area might get too warm.

Kitchen finished today. It took me about a week to put the kitchen together and plumb in the sink and dishwasher. The worktop under the window is a cheap temporary laminate one to get the kitchen functioning quickly. Later on that will be replaced with a stone worktop and that one will be moved to the utility room, which is why it has been left over length for now as that's how long it will be in the utility. I then had to wait for Gus the joiner to machine the oak breakfast bar worktop. Sometimes even when self building, it is worth employing a good tradesman when you know they can do a better job of something than you can. It was then 2 days to varnish it, and finally today it was dry so I could fit it and plumb in the hob. Next to the fridge, where the clock is for now, will eventually be partitioned off to form a pantry. Sunday dinner will be cooked and eaten in the house tomorrow. A little more and a couple more pictures on the blog at http://www.willowburn.net/ look for the entry "Kitchen Finished"

There was one on Grand Designs where they had not thought about this until the end, and the water connection cost them £40K

The trouble with that, is the water connection will need to be deeper. Have a brown envelope ready on the day to "encourage" the guys that come to dig a little deeper than they would jus for a phone cable. It was handy having Scottish Water make the road crossing as everything else went in as the trench was being back filled.

Mine was connected in 2015

Scottish water were a bit hard to deal with, but in the end they were very good value. Our quote for the water connection was about £1K but that also did not include the road crossing. The water main was a few feet into the field the other side of the road. and we had to do all the trenching on our plot. I then started looking for prices for the road crossing, an independent contractor wanted £2K as dis Scottish Hydro, but when asked Scottish water only wanted an extra £1K for the road crossing so they did it. What you need to ask them for is an "all works" quote including the road crossing. they supplied the pipe from the main under the road, and the boundary box, we just had to supply pipe from the boundary box to the house wtc. As it happens it was not SW themselves that did it, they subcontracted it to someone else.

Just to finish this off, I fitted the new jets today. Here's what I ended up with: Mains jet size LPG jet aize 103 67 103 66 115 86 72 50 I had bought a pack of 6 jets which gave me a few more options to play with. All seems to be working fine.

I see a house up the road has just had it's EPC re done. It used to be heated with an E10 electric boiler. The EPC was re done because they changed to an oil fired boiler. That was the ONLY change. The new EPC shows than annual KWh for space heating at HALF what it used to be. Please explain that to me? I would expect it to be exactly the same unless they improved the insulation, just a different, possibly cheaper fuel now?

It would be a bit of a pain and expense to change the motorised valves (all 2 port NC) But I can't see I want to leave them sat there energised almost 24/7, sitting there getting quite warm. One simple fix would be a small relay, only energised when the UFH is on, as an additional switch. Still seems a lot of unecessary buggering about to fix a flawed control system.

Still having a problem. The thing ran fine today, doing some heating and some hot water heating. All seemed to be behaving. Then I turned the hot water off at it's own control panel, and turned the room heating off at my programmer, so the heating would not be calling for heat (via the thermostat contacts) Since then, 4 times it has tripped out on a "CH14" (low flow) error. I can't see this is really a flow issue. Nothing is demanding heat or hot water. It should just be sitting there doing nothing. The pumps have not tried to start. So why is is tripping out? One to throw back to LG I think. This does seem to be giving more than it's fair share of issues, and if someone asked me right now, I don't think I would be recommending this particular heat pump to anyone.

Different register in Scotland I believe https://www.scottishepcregister.org.uk/