ProDave

I think this topic has strayed a long way from ASHP's. Can we bring the earthing discussion to a close please, or start a new thread to discuss that aspect. And play nicely please.

Re neutral faults on a concentric incomer. It is actually a well known fault condition. If the outer sheath of the concentric cable gets punctured, water can get in and corrode the outer (unsheathed) PEN conductors. Eventually it will give out and you have no neutral. Inside the EZ it is surprisingly not much danger, but an exported earth to say a shed can rise to a lethal potential wrt local earth Carvans are the big risk where the metal bodywork is usually connected to earth and if you fed one of those with an exported PME earth you could have a lethal situation as you step in or out of the 'van, that's why the regsdemand they are fed from a TT earth. Up here, the DNO's token gesture to make TNC-S a PME is a little pig tail of "earth" wire buried in the connection pit alongside the potted joint box.

+1 to dig a hole and postcrete a post into it. A half way house I often do, is dig a hole to part depth, then use a post with a pointed end and hammer the post in as far as it will go then postcrete in the hole. the important thing being you only need a small hole (I use a 6" "ladies spade" and you want nice parallel sides to the hole, not a V shaped hole. Then just pour the postctrete in dry and pour water on it. It sets in minutes. As to panels, buy 6" treated fencing planks and nail them horizontally alternating between one side of the post and the other. A lot lighter and cheaper than scaffold boards. This method lets a lot of the wind through so the loading on the posts is a lot less than a solid fence panel.

My builder thankfully incorporated a tony tray, before I had even heard of it, and I am sure they would not have referred to it as such. Another new build up here didn't and I watched slightly smug when I saw them taping the VCL around every single joist.

What I am finding up here is most people totally over state the circuit breaker requirements for a heat pump. Most have their heat umps fitted at an inflated price by an mcs approved contractor so they can claim the RHI. It is the installer that usually gives me the spec and it's quite normal for them to specify a C40 breaker, so I install an isolator with appropriate cable for that, and they connect from it with a bit of 2.5mm flex, and the unit turns out to have a max load of a little over 3KW. I think they are stuck in the dark ages up here when heat pumps didn't have variable speed drive and soft start, so had a huge start up surge.

Advertise the stones on Freecycle "collection only" That is certainly a big improvement opening that up, and I would sleep a lot better with that new pillar to hold it all up.

I am doing much the same, but do not tape the VCL to the floor, cut it a bit shorter, and tape the VCL to the tony tray. You can save quite a bit of material, the VCL only needs to come just below the top of the tony tray, say 100mm overlap. Why horizontal battens for the service void? that will make fitting the PB a bit harder won't it? I am having vertical service void battens following each wall stud.

Put the oven on it's own circuit as noted. Also make sure there are 2 or 3 spares ways in the CU, e.g. you might want an electric shower, and of course one for the solar PV. Mains drainage if not a circuit for the treatment plant. I have a broadly similar mix in a 20 way all rcbo board.

I was going to comment in a previous post about that CPC. I was going to ask if it was some previous 16th edition cross bonding gone wrong I didn't realise it was "supporting" the waste pipes. Some people install waste pipes thinking they don't need much support, not realising they get a lot heavier when the water runs through them. P.S the insulation on that stud wall wants an upgrade.

If you apply for permission on land you don't own, you have to serve notice on the owner that you have done so. This is quite normal when buying a building plot. When I found our site, that had planning 30 years ago but was never built on. I made an offer to buy it subject to getting planning permission, and I then submitted the planning application even though we did not own the land yet.

The electricians on this forum are a bit more friendly and will try to help. You definitely can bury SWA direct in the ground, that's what it was designed for. And terminating it in glands is not particularly difficult, but I guess I have had plenty of practice. The concentric cable that the DNO's use is not recognised in the wiring regs (they have different regs to work to). And in any case it's only a 2 core cable. There is a variation on that, split concentric, where half the outer cores are bare, to be used as the earth, and the other half are sleeved, to be used as neutral but that does not strictly meet the requrements for direct burying.

That's funny. The panel had a window in it when it was lying down.........

Building Warrant is the Scottish term for Building control approval. I have to question the motive for squashing the kitchen into the lounge and making another bedroom. I did the wiring for a similar conversion (1 bed house into 2 bed house) and it made a very pokey bedroom where the kitchen was, and a very cramped living room. The owner did it so he could let it as a 2 bedroom house, but I suspect it would not have added any value to the property if selling it.

What I did with mine, was stack them all together, and mark out and drill pilot holes through all the sheets in one go in the stack. That also helped to get all the screws in line. NOTE I found a variation in length between the sheets of up to 10mm. So I made sure all the bottom edges lined up and the variation in length would be hidden under the ridge cap. I used mole grips to tighten any screws that stripped their plastic heads before they were fully home. You will have "fun" fitting the ridge piece. The only way I found was sit astride the roof and work my way along it drilling and fixing as I went.

This perception of noise from a heat pump is a strange thing. Ours will go on the back, south facing wall of the garage, which means it's adjacent to the main bit of garden we will use. SWMBO is very concerned about the perceived noise from it. But the funny thing is, she is not bothered by the roar of the oil fired boiler in a similar position in our present house, which I am sure is louder when it's firing than the heat pump will be.

I don't think my builders were "approved" by rationell, it's just that they thought to ask about the floor make up, and what the finished floor level would be, and set the doors to that level. If you want to spend a night in the spare room, suggest a sheet of linoleum glued down in the entrance hall will solve all the issues. You can get some that is made to look like tiles.

And reading that MCS planning document, on page 15 paragraph 3.1(a) "The air source heat pump product will be certified witn MCS007" and 3.1 (b) "the air source heat pump shall be installed by an MCS contractor in accordance with MIS3005" 3.1 (c) "the installation shall be carried out in compliance with the calculation procedure contained in table 2. MCS contractors must complete the results / notes column in table 2 for each step of the calculation procedure to show how it has been followed" Like I say, a stitch up, jobs for the boys etc. At least I have PP for my ASHP with no such conditions.

Nice to see it's now permitted development in Scotland, but "must meet MCS Planning Standard" seems a stitch up to me? Does that mean you can only install an MCS listed ASHP, or even worse, it must be installed my an MCS installer? Glad we got ours included in the planning permission. P.S re extra spacers in posts. There is a bug in Opera, than whenever you edit a post, every CR/LF becomes two and I don't always edit out the spare ones.

^^^ or just buy wood bits that fit an SDS

The link works for me. But try this one http://www.bimblesolar.com/batteries/nifebatteries That's direct to bimble solar's website rather than one of their ebay listings.

The idea that I am "wedded to" is that you should be able to move from a 5 bedroom house, to a 3 bedroom house just 2 doors up the road, so same area etc, and you should be able to release a bit of equity in the process. It certainly should NOT cost you money to downsize. That is the big issue. It's not as though our new house is anything unique or has any expensive features,. and even doing a lot of the work myself (a lot more than I originally intended) I think I will struggle to achieve that financial goal. I have already formed the opinion, if I had just paid a builder to build a complete house ready to move into, then there is no way I would achieve that.

Sorry to say, I think your builders "messed up" here. Our Rationel doors have basically an aluminium theshold bottom plate. As delivered, there is a wooden piece then fixed to the bottom of the door. Our builders removed the supplied wooden piece and then packed up the door after discussing with us the floor make up and finished floor height. The reason for removing the supplied wooden piece was to allow tiles or floor boards to slide under the aluminium threshold. It sounds like your builders didn't discuss this with you? Did they leave the supplied wooden piece still there, or remove it and sit the aluminium threshold straight on the slab? Could you argue it's "their" mistake, and therefore their solution, including any making good to the render etc if they move the whole door and frame up?

These are about the only ones I can find for sale. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12V-bank-Nickel-Iron-NiFe-Battery-400ah-10-x-1-2V-cell-/292003393183?var=&hash=item43fcc22e9f:m:m3iaFCECxzgoMsUm4Ksm4bw That example is 10 400Ah cells so a total of 4.8KWh of storage. (Not sure what that translates to as actual usable storage) for about £2000 They list several packages of different sizes. Shame they are the wrong end of the country to me so no easy way to collect and avoid the high transport costs. The rest of the parts to make a DIY system are much cheaper, I would probably make my own charger, buy a couple of cheap Chinese grid tied inverters from ebay and control it all with an arduino. So given you might get say 3KWh of real usable storage, at a total price to build it of no more than £3000, that's £1000 per KWh of storage for a system that should last a lifetime with no battery replacement costs. Is it viable? Well say I could use all 3KWh every day (unlikely but it makes the maths simple) in a year, I would be able to use 1095KWh of otherwise "wasted" solar PV, lets round that down to 1000KWh per year. Assuming I pay 15p per KWh, that has the potential to save me £150 per year in electricity costs. So that is still going to take 20 years of use, to pay back it's capital costs. So it's marginal to say the least. But at least after it has paid for itself, the batteries would keep on going. What is the typical cost per KWh of storage, for the present commercial packaged offerings?

Have you costed "pence per KWh" at battery renewal time? I.e how much it costs to replace a complete battery stack, compared to how many KWh of (free solar pv) power it has stored and delivered to you? This is my main sticking point that any battery with a life of less than say 10 years ends up as rather expensive "free" electricity. Which is why I am leaning heavily towards NiFe What sort of costs and how many suppliers did you find for NiFe?

I have a "plan B" to get the house finished but the funds for that won't be available for another 14 months. I will use that time to slowly progress the build doing the low budget items with what I have. The reason I am "down" about it, is the plan was to downsize with a reasonable expectation of releasing some capital for retirement. If I had know it was likely to cost me money to downsize I simply would not have bothered. But I am now at a point where I simply have no option but carry on.