Post and beam

North Hertfordshire East Herts for planning

This summer we paid.... £11250 for electricity from UK power networks. maximum of 8 metres from other side of the lane to our green temporary cabinet. £6500 for water for a dig from the near side of the lane. probably 2-3 metres. No gas

No, it was the UFH installers. And it was done the 'proper' way as per Nicks description.

They did. A different company installed the heat pump, UVC and most associated pipework and wiring. There was a 3 month gap between the 2 installations. Unfortunately i fell out with the original installers over their attitude to an underestimate of the amount of screed required. They were due to do everything related to the heating install.

I meant furthest from the house of course.

Yes they would be steel. Perhaps i should have said 'woodscrews' not wood screws. Anyway, i have read up on this somewhat since yesterday. Not as rare or new idea as i thought. Now i need to decide whether this idea or old fashioned brick piers to support a deck is the best option. As i said, i need to bring the level up by almost a metre closest to the house.

I have started to get a load of facebook adverts for a type of decking solution that uses what look like 5 foot long wood screws driven into the soil in a square pattern arrangement. As i will need to build up the area behind our new build by as much as a metre to give us a level patio area i wonder if this might be a good solution. So, does anyone recognise what i mean and have you used it or considered this product?

If i knew where and how many i could do this. Do you mean the tundish?

This is the kicker, i have not been bleeding mine every time. It needs topping up , and much too frequently. Which led me to believe it was a leak. No signs of water leaking inside the house and i certainly hope there are no issues between the floors with all the joints. I would expect to see patches on the ceiling if this were the case. If it stops raining i might be able to monitor the unit outside for damp patches.

I have to restore pressure every day or every other day on my installation, by about half a bar to be accurate. Only been in the house for one month and had assumed this was air gradually settling out of the system. Although it never seems to appear anywhere. But, i saw on a facebook page today that someone asked about a very similar scenario and was told that this is a known issue with Vaillant arotherm heat pumps. Mine is a 5Kw version. Lots of Vaillant user on here so my question is, is this a widely known issue?

It all fits together like this. Its a very positive and secure 'click' when it goes together. I have used an adjustable ceiling grill in my house which i hope will allow enough adjustablilty to mean i dont need to use the restrictor rings that come with the distribution box. If you think about it, using those means you need to open the distribution box for every minor configuration tweak. All of your ducting will be connected to the box and i imagined this would be a nightmare.

I have just been through this pain most of this year while installing mine. For the first floor ceilings i had to build a wooden 'bridge', screw the piece to it and then mount between the rafters. In my case the blocks were 85mm tall. I chose that height so that the opening at the bottom was either flush or 1-2mm up inside the ceiling plasterboard. Dont forget the gaskets around the Ubbink part for your airtight seal. They are not cheap. I have 250mm posi joists downstairs so there was more room to play around. Still had to screw in a mounting block for the piece to screw up into though. Most of my orders for bits took about 3 weeks to arrive from Holland. I was not organised enough to plan out and remember all the other bits i needed so multiple orders were needed.

Newly built house this year so an EV charger was mandated but i dont have an EV car. I do have a Vaillant 5Kw though.

Thanks dude, thats sort of what i was thinking. The half price during the cheap periods sound attractive but, like you, not sure its going to work out. For the first couple of weeks here we were getting high 5'S for COP. Last week it fell to high 3's while the temp was about -2. These are reasonable numbers i think considering the short sample period. I will look for an Economy 7 type deal i think. Probably a better fit to low & long.

Having only just moved into our new house we are on the standard Octopus tariff. We run all day 'long and low' with a flow temperature not much above 30 degrees. A little higher for some of last week when the temperature dipped below -2 for a couple of nights. For those of you happy on Octopus Cosy how do you adjust your time periods to best exploit the triple cheap slots during the day? Do you charge to a higher temperature during them for example. Thanks in advance as always keith

Understood. I have a 5kw Vaillant arotherm. Will give this 'wide open' strategy a trial.

Interesting strategy, my design was presented to me with each of the 11 circuits assigned a flow rate. I do not have a buffer, well i dont think so. I have a RED pressure vessel and a white one in my cylinder cupboard. All discussions with the installer made it clear i wanted a single zone downstairs for the UFH. WC and as simple as possible. Thanks for the response by the way.

Apologies guys this is an ASHP related question. MODS: can this post be moved please?

When adjusting the flow can anyone confirm its the RED disk shown by the Red line. I guess so but there is that other disk just below it( blue line)

I started with cable ties and the Ubbink plastic mounts for my 90mm Ubbink green ducting. Neither are up to the job of keeping it where you want it, not if you like nice straight runs anyway. There is a curve to this stuff from when it was rolled up. This needs a lot of persuading to behave itself.

If i were going for full on Passive house i would not entertain any contractor that did not have a long track record of doing so. And a list of satisfied customers. Although i am very happy overall with my new house (not passive) i can say that not a single contractor actually did exactly what they said they would.

In my case and in the village i now live in, the 4G is patchy and 5G non existent.

Thats what the 5.7 is, well its 5.5 for today actgually.its todays daily values so far. If i manually take the heat generated for both water and Heating and divide by the electrical energy used i get 5.5

Understood. So that is our reference. For my installation there are very simple controls and no un necessary pumps buffers or anything. So i am going with the belief that my values from the 'Vaillant connect' app are likely to be less than the 20% potential margin of error. So if i say that 10% margin of error is reasonable i am still happy enough with my current running value of 5.71

From a purely empirical point of view, which method is the reference? Or for that matter any other method. How does anyone determine which is the more accurate?