ProDave

I have only been to Barrow once, out of curiosity. It lives in my memory like Merthyr Tydfil as a place that begs the question, why would anyone live there? (sorry to all residents of those places ) Run down does not begin to describe it. I am not convinced bargain basement properties have much potential to make money. Polishing a t**d springs to mind.

When people mention "ECO" I always think of the house at the top of our road. When last sold it was advertised as an "ECO" house. As far as I can tell the only "ECO" thing about it is it had (not especially good) tripple glazed windows. It has an EPC rating of D, is the first house in the street that the snow melts off the roof, and the present owners complain how high the heating bill is. Are estate agents not supposed to ensure the claims they make are accurate?

The point is, if you build a house properly, you are not relying on the sockets to make a seal. You have an air tight layer around the inside of the house, then a service void inside that sealed envelope before plasterboard etc. It would make no difference if my sockets were removed. I work in plenty of old houses where when you remove a socket, a howling cold gale comes out, it is truly shocking that the wall structure is open to the roof or the floor to let cold air into the building fabric.

Another vote for find and fix the fault causing the "rising damp" I bought a 1930's semi that was very damp in one corner, made worse by the fact the owner had tried to hide it by lining that corner with polystyrene tiles and wallpapering over it. The fault was just that the pebbledash was bridging the damp proof course, coupled with the ground being too high in that corner. Once that was fixed it dried out and I didn't even need to re plaster. That didn't stop it being a cold and expensive to heat house. Knowing what I know about houses now, I would not be in a hurry to go back to one like that.

You are lucky around these parts to have spring water that does not come out the colour of weak tea from all the peat. We have mains water that comes from Loch Glass above Evanton. It's lovely pure water but before they built the new treatment plant a few years ago, used to come out of the tap with a slight tint when the wind was in a certain direction and srirred up the silt in the loch. Am I the only one that when you mentioned bottling it thought of "Peckham spring water"

The Joys of small engines only used occasionally. I needed to use my wacker plate for about 15 minutes work. Took well over an hour to strip and clean the carb to get the damned thing to run. Perhaps @Onoff has the right idea with an electric one?

It wasn't an accident, he was messing about. I managed to hack into his security camera and found the footage

If my words are not typing proper;y it;s brcause of all the tee I just spreyed all over my keyvoard.

Yes I think it was Citizens advice. I phoned TS and they transferred me to another "department" that may well have been Citizens advice.

Hadn't seen those before. I thought screws would be too big hence secret nailing, and glueing as nailing is never perfect. So is the consensus to glue the boards to the joists, or glue tongues and grooves together, or both?

I ask because it must not creak. Let me spell that out MUST NOT CREAK. So thinking it needs glue as well so nothing can move in relation to anything else.

Engineered structural floor, 190mm wide planks with an Oak finish. Laid on joists at 400mm centres as a structural floor. Is it best just to secret nail the tongues? Glue the planks to the top of the joists? Glue the tongue and groove between adjacent boards? Or a combination of those?

Wood burners is a marmite subject here. You love them or hate them, no inbetween. We are having one more as a lifestyle choice and we usually have plenty of free wood. You have to be very careful not to oversize it, so a monster from a previous poorly insulated house might not be a good choice. The other "must have" is a room sealed stove, i.e. the air intake is ducted in from outside so it is not drawing in room air. Several have fitted the little Burley Springdale (or firebox) which at 3KW believe to be the smallest room sealed stove available, though we are fitting a slightly larger one at just over 4KW. Ours is going in the large room, and there is potential to leave the double doors to the rest of the house open to let heat out if (when) it gets too warm. And I don't expect to be burning it often or for long.

Yes selling the old one is only viable to someone who can collect it. I believe carriage is something like £80 with Palletways so a big cost to anyone wanting it from afar.

The list price of the new one is a LOT more than he one I bought, but then the list price of that was a lot more than what I paid. I very briefly toyed with the idea of paying to fix the old one and selling the new one, but that would just be silly.

It's not our fault we have a stupid system. I still believe a much better system would be simply to pay you a slightly below retail price for what you export, but that would mean everybody having a meter that measures export separately o import.

Another "wrong end" way to look at it, is you want to bu the kit as cheap as possible, so keep your eye out for bargains. Something may come up as a particular bargain and what is available cheap may end up dictating what size of system you install. For self usage there are 2 basic things that will go a long way. First is use the big appliances like washing machine, dishwasher and fluffy towel machine one at a time in the daytime. The other is excess power diversion to hot water heating. Another one to keep an eye on but I don't think we are there yet, is battery storage. There will come a time, and I suspect not far away, when that will be viable to store excess power for the evenings.

I now wish I had tried this as soon as I got it. All I did was power it up and establish communications with it's built in user interface. I now wish I had rigged it up with some hoses to a water butt and tried running it to make sure it worked.

That is a valid point. I knew we would not do well with roof panels due to the shading from the trees, so on my planning application I included ground mounted panels. I must admit is was more for completeness rather than thinking we actually needed PP for them. A sort of fortunate accident that they are now included in the PP.

I still think it best not to mention the companies involved, such threads occasionally "go bad" when names are named. Watch out for a new thread when the new one arrives and I start to connect it, probably some time early next week. I will probably try and sell the old one on the bay. The problem is I am sure it is repairable, but if as I suspect it is lacking it's refrigerant gas, then it's about £100 worth of gas, and finding someone to do it. The one person I found locally that would do it was talking of at least £300 for the gas and the job of filling it. It's not even very useful to strip for parts. The control boards are too proprietary to be of any use for anything else. There is a small inverter and a Raspbery Pi in there which is about all of use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_tracker Basically a device to move the panels to follow the sun. I might make a very much easier very basic single axis tracker to flip the E facing panels over to the W for the evening.

I think the key to maximum self usage is to try and spread the generation throughout the day. For instance I plan to start with 4KW arranged as 2 banks of panels. One will face just a little south of East along that boundary to try and catch the first sun of the day and start useful generation as early in the day as possible. The second string will face due South to get the main mid day peak. If I can, I might try a third, probably smaller string facing West to get more late in the day generation, but that is not so easy. Of course if you have the capital (or can DIY it) and have the room, put them all on a tracker. The normal arrangement for a FIT system is put the whole lot facing due South. This gives the maximum yield, but also a much larger mid day peak, that will be harder to self use, and less generation at the ends of the day. Sticking with no more than 4KW means you can fit it and notify later without fear of being refused. Any more than 4KW and you have to get permission first. All a bit of a moot point if you don't intend exporting anything significant.

The "resolution" to this is on it's way. Literally. Firstly how did I persuade them to take the issue seriously? Well mainly thanks to another forum member, I found that the company I bought it from, and the brand name that it was sold under, are owned by a well know national company that owns amongst other things a builders merchant and a DIY chain (I did not know that at the time of my purchase) So I stopped talking to the monkey and went for the Organ Grinder in the form of the CEO of that parent company with my issue, keeping the message polite, factual and non threatening. I typed my message last Thursday and kept in in my draft folder reading and re reading it until I was sure everything was correct and finally sent it late Thursday evening. By mid Friday morning I had received a phone call with the offer of a resolution. They really don't want to repair this unit and then have to support it throughout the remainder of the warranty. So the resolution offered is they are sending a different make of heat pump, a more well known make and still a current model. I now have confirmation it is on a pallet en-route to me. There will be a small amount of re plumbing and a lot of rewiring when the new one gets here but lets hope this one is not another dud. At least I will be connecting and testing it quite quickly after it arrives. They don't want the old one back.

I think you are getting confused. 12KW might be the maximum amount of electrical power you would want to use on one appliance on single phase, but a 12KW heat pump will probably only use 4KW of power. So on that basis if the heat pump were to use 12KW of electric power it would be a monster with an output of over 40KW Re heating power requirements, our house is not as good as some on here, but not bad, needing about 2.5KW of heat to maintain 20 degrees inside when it's -10 outside. And that will be provided by a 5KW ASHP.

Don't tell me you bought the one Jeremy was selling?