ProDave

You (or at least your electrician) can replace the meter tails with longer ones. However another issue coming down the tracks is the future of THTC. It is an old SSE system with the USP of offering cheap rate 24/7 for heating appliances. I hear nothing but complaints now as not many suppliers other than SSE will take it on, and it has become expensive. A long term future perhaps is converting to standard E7 or E10. While it is possible to do that just by reconfiguring the existing consumer units, it might be time if doing that to replace with new CU's one for peak one for off peak all correctly wired so all the issues go away.

I have a really really low opinion of BT / Open Reach. For years and years, we had to put up with very poor "end of the line" ADSL as our only option. Then OR started laying fibre up the trunk network that passed the end of out road. They missed, or rather could not be bothered to put a cabinet there and give us all FTTC broadband. It would have still used copper for the last 300 metres but would have been a vast improvement for relatively little upheaval. Of course they did nothing. Later a local company installed a wireless network covering our village and we now get 100mbps from them. Of course that now means OR won't install fibre down our road as I don't think there is a single BT customer left here. That's probably good because I would not allow OR to drill through my air tight walls to shove a fibre through.

There is an even simpler way I did not bother looking up the OAT data for my location so I only filled in the spreadsheet down as far as row 70 so row 70 column H shows me with a delta t of 30 degrees (20 degrees inside, -10 outside) the calculated heat loss is 2310 watts. So on the coldest day in winter my heating needs to put 2310W of heat into the building. Why make it any more complicated?

An Ecodan plus FTC6 is probably one of the simplest ASHP's to install from the electricians viewpoint. The FTC6 connects to the HP just with a 2 core cable and all the user control connections are in the house in the FTC6. In it's simplest form there is just a pair of contacts for "call for heat" which is just about exactly what you get from say an UFH system with a standard UFH manifold controller. Any electrician that cannot look at a manual and connect that is not competent imho. The MCS companies not wanting do do non MCS work, it probably just a thinly veiled way of saying why would they want to work at normal labour rates when they can do as much MCS work at inflated MCS prices as they want to.

The other "trust the theory" thing, is from the experience of others, I believed my house would be well insulated enough not to need any heating upstairs. So I didn't for any in the bedrooms. Instead I fitted an electric point on the wall of each bedroom for a panel heater if they proved to be too cold. I have never needed to fit those panel heaters and the points for them remain unused.

It is not difficult. I put all the details of my house into Jeremy's heat loss spreadsheet, and it told me at +20 inside and -10 outside my house needed a little over 2kW of heat input. That was not exactly difficult therefore to specify a 5kW ASHP, about the smallest generally available. And it is working fine. Before actually buying the ASHP I ran a convector heater for a week, plotting inside and outside temperature and that confirmed the heat loss was in line with the calculations.

An ASHP is NOT rocket science. All you need is a plumber, to him is is just about like a system boiler driving a heating system (hopefully under floor heating) and a hot water tank. He just needs to be able to read a manual, and be prepared NOT to use a 3 port mid position valve. And the electrics, it is close to a system boiler, but every ASHP is different in the way you connect it, and the way it interfaces to the rest of the system. It will all be detailed in the installation manual, so all you are looking for is an electrician that is literate so can read and digest the manual, and be prepared to do something new to him following the manual. It does annoy me when they say "I can't do that" Also agree £600 per day for the plumber is too high, but that might be the going rate, one of the reasons I left the south, everything was just too expensive.

Another point, I stayed in a passive house many years ago before I knew much about them. And like you, thought it was stuffy. The house was empty and we were offered it as workers accommodation for a few days. It was well into the stay that we realised the mvhr unit was turned off, probably because the house was empty before we were given the keys.

We don't weather watch, everything just controls itself with the magic of thermostats. We often have our bedroom window open, we like a cool bedroom. No issues.

I would expect with an UVC the hot at least would flow for a good few seconds while it emptied the pressure from the expansion vessel. If the hot stopped immediately on shutting the cold inlet to the UVC, I would be checking the expansion vessel.

If the vendor carries on like that, they could end up in a tricky position without any functioning drainage if an unsuspecting buyer just buys the plot and digs up their drainage field. Then the man with the paddock could charge what he likes to give them a drainage solution and make their house habitable again. The logical solution to make this plot viable is design a drainage solution for both houses, possibly shared, and the vendor to install it. The cost is probably a small fraction of the plot value? Out of interest @flanagaj how would you deal with the drainage if you bought the plot?

No not done it yet. Up until a day or 2 ago we have had some lousy wet cold windy weather. Plus I have been quite busy. I have been waiting for a weather window where I can be certain it is going to be dry the whole day so I can dismantle it without pressure to get it done in a hurry. Unfortunately the next 7 days forecast on XC weather all show rain. It is a good job I am not in a hurry. Heating is off now (at last) and it is only running for DHW now.

Don't use a diverter. Use 2 (or more) 2 port valves.

Well without doing ANYTHING more by way of re booting stuff, this morning it is all running fine. There must have been an issue somewhere and eventually someone realised it and re booted something and it is back to normal. I wish I understood why you get to the situation that parts work and other parts don't like the "reply" box does not populate so you can't type anything. I can only imagine that is calling code from a different site or at least on a different server somewhere and that is where the problem is.

Sorry but I can't see ANYTHING in that kitchen that will make it £55K. Howdens could replicate that, or any other kitchen supplier for that matter. Choose the best of their range, and fit yourself, Get good stone worktops and splashbacks, and buy the same top end ovens and hobs and other appliances as the German supplier is proposing. (yes this is an answer from a man)

Post your findings here please, as I am in the same dilemma, buy now for use later, or wait.

So you go ahead, buy the plot, start digging for the house and find their drainage field. You will have to dig all that up which is likely to be a lot of foul ground, dispose of it, and build up and re fill from good ground. And then what? Just cap off their pipe feeding it? That will get nasty and messy both physically and legally very quickly. The only way this is ever going to work is alternative drainage for the existing house installed first and you still expecting to find at least some foul ground to remove and replace.

So basically they have a large garden to accommodate their drainage. They want to sell a big chunk of that large garden that probably accommodates their drainage field so they will need to pay someone to allow them alternative drainage under a paddock. Their motivation for selling is no doubt a lot of £££ so if I were the paddock owner I would bt asking for quite a lot of ££ to allow that. It would almost be a ransom situation.

It is really weird. Speedtest tells me I am connected at 75Mbps up and down, and just about everything else works, but this forum is more off than on today. Is there some sort of DNS problem or server problem? Edit took multiple tries to get this reply to post.

No other problems for me, just this site. It partially loads, e.g I can read a thread, but the "reply" box at the bottom does not populate with all the code needed to post a reply. I think this is only the second post I have managed to make all afternoon. As the internet is all about packets of data and IP addresses, i fail to understand how some of it works and some does not.

All afternoon the forum has been flakey, pages not loading at all, timing out, or only partly loading (e.g reply functions not loading) I have re booted my router, my computer and browser. It has taken me over an hour to get this to post, I regard it as a temporary message to be deleted when the issue is resolved. I will keep trying to see if others have the same issue if I can get the forum to load again.

The trouble is, this law is here for good. I really do hope for a change of Scottish government at the next election, but no new different government will re allow WBS's. Imagine the bad press that will follow if they even suggest it?

This is a ban not just on WBS but anything that produces CO2 so no more oil boilers or gas boilers or even gas fires on new builds. What about bio ethanol stoves? I am glad my house is complete, with WBS. This new ban really is the nail in the coffin for any thoughts of doing a third self build. Not that I had any such thoughts at the moment, I am happy where we are in this house. By next winter the press will be full of "lousy ASHP" articles as the mass builders step change to fitting ASHP's and do it badly, or worse still they take the easy option and fit electric boilers giving customers expensive eating bills. Also in other stupid housing comments, from another article linked to that one "His comments come after Location, Location, Location presenter Kirsty Allsopp, 52, said in January that detached houses should be banned for being “environmentally impractical”.

It sounds to me the vendor has not done due dilligence, and what they are selling as a building plot may not in fact be suitable. That is not something you want to gamble on. If it is a viable plot and you buy it, where will YOUR drainage go to? Assuming there is a solution to that, then the obvious next question is as part of preparing this plot to be suitable to build on and therefore suitable for sale, why is the vendor not first updating their drainage system so it is both up to date and certain they know where it is exactly? This one might get a laugh, but trust me is meant as serious, have you tried divining? Or know someone that has?

Flexi conduit is awful for pulling cables. Use rigid conduit with SWEPT bends not elbows. Any conduit is virtually impossible to pull a second cable through with one or more there already, so you have to plan it that you are pulling all cables together. In a previous house I did such a refurb by starting with two radial circuits adding on as the next room or part room was done, and they only joined and got reconfigured as a ring upon completion of the final room.