How bad is it?

[tw18]

I’ll start by saying sorry for the long post which I’ve already cut down 2/3 times as I have tried hard to keep it shortish figuring that I can reply with details later should it be needed and start with some background. Our previous house was a 2008 build, 1100sqft, 2 storey semi-detached 3 bed. It was fully electric, with 2 storage heaters and 4 panel heaters. DHW was a 250L unvented cylinder heated with just an immersion heater. The heating and hot water we’re only on for 8 hours a day because of a ‘comfort heat’ tariff.  We had 2 young kids back then so would have been running half a bath or 2 most nights as well. The house was always warm, and we never ran out of hot water. In the heating season it would do circa 25kw per day, just on the heating and hot water and was circa 12kw pd for the rest of the year, so that’ll just be water. 

 

In the summer of ’21 we moved to a new (to us) house that was also built in 2008, this time 1800sqft, 4 bed, detached with integrated garage, and again 2 storeys. It is also electric only, comprising of a 22kw electric boiler (which is actually downrated to 15kw, something to do with limits on the 3-phase supply) and wet underfloor heating on both floors. Downstairs is a slab of unknown construction and upstairs is suspended. Everything is fed into and from a 600L AVC tank in tank cylinder. It also has solar thermal, again original to its build in ’08.

 

What am I surprised by is that in the heating season it will chew through an eye watering 100kw pd, I’ve even seen it do over 120 when it is close to 0 degrees outside. And it is not like the house is super-hot or anything, if anything the opposite is true.

 

Given the shock of the first winters heating in the summer of ’22 the thermostats got changed out for Heatmiser NeoStats, and the ACV cylinder got hooked up to some temperature probes via the solar controller. Along with the pre-existing energy monitor all these feed into home assistant for monitoring / logging, which truth be told doesn’t help as you get to see the scary figures on a daily basis! Towards the end of ’22, Salus Auto Balancing Actuators also got fitted.

 

Now the bigger problem stems from the fact I live on the small island of Jersey. So, I have had multiple plumbers around and all they ever say is that I need to install a heat pump at a cost of 13k. Which when I do the calculations it won’t appear to pay me back for 13-18 years, and potentially has a 10-year life span. So surely that cannot be the answer. They never proposed any other changes.

 

I have already blabbered on too long, so will just say that I’ve read, changed, evaluated many things on this journey, seeing as no-one locally seems to be able to advise any better (my notes are currently 35 pages and still going). Over the last 3 years I’ve read with great interest this forum and threads / blogs, such as newhome’s nightmare heating system, TerryE’s timed and calculated willis heating of his slab and then seen revelations like JohnMo’s major modifications to his heating system including a plate heat exchanger. Which leaves me wondering how bad is it? I’ve only the comparison of our old house to go off and the fact that people are telling me that it is expensive comparatively. If I look up the average UK energy usage it tells me that that we are well above average, which given the fact that I turn the boiler off for 4/5 months of the year (due to the solar thermal) alarms me. Is there even a problem, is this expected usage? Is it expensive to run? Is there a configuration or design issue? 

 

As a picture says a thousand words, here are a few although I’m not sure how accurate the layout diagram actually is, but it gives some context.

[mike2016]

I'm not sure where to start unravelling a system like that but if it was my house I'd be looking at installing an Air to Air system for the main rooms, plug in heaters on a smart timer for the bedrooms, see what is the cheapest way to heat hot water with the system you have & if you can disable all the underfloor stuff and get some Solar PV going, the cheapest way how to help offset the Electric costs a bit. Youtube channel EV Puzzle has some info on Air to Air & oil rads on a smart timer. At least it's an option if the current system is dimming all the lights on the Island?! Hopefully more knowledgeable chaps on here will have better suggestions shortly.....

[Lofty718]

Are you not able to get a £7500 grant for a heat pump there? your energy costs are obscene

 

Also on your install why is there a pipe discharging into a jerry can? lol

Edited February 2 by Lofty718

[ProDave]

Let me start by saying an electric boiler is the most useless invention man has ever made.  IF you are going to use direct electric resistance heating you are better off just with panel heaters and an immersion heater.  Putting a big heater in a box on the wall and using water to move the heat around that will never make it more efficient.

 

However it has given you wet under floor heating so that might be useful.

 

No 1, separate out your space heating and hot water heating, before you can go anywhere you need to know what is using what.  If it were me I would be fitting an electricity meter on the feed to the boiler, setting heating and hot water times differently NEVER on at the same time and taking lots of readings to see how much the HW and heating are using separately.

 

How good are you at DIY?  With help from this forum would you consider DIY fitting an ASHP?  I have no idea what the regs are on Jersey but the parts are likely to cost no more than £5K and DIY might make it viable.  You might be better off just with a good plumber and electrician that you can trust, and who are capable of reading an instruction manual, rather than a "specialist" heat pump company which is what I suspect you have been talking to?

 

Do you know anything about the building construction, what levels of insulation for example, particularly under the floor?

 

And what temperature is your UFH running at the moment?

 

 

[TonyT]

48 minutes ago, Lofty718 said:

Are you not able to get a £7500 grant for a heat pump there? your energy costs are obscene

 

Also on your install why is there a pipe discharging into a jerry can? lol

For the solar thermal.  Seen that done before 

[marshian]

I looked at the pictures and went YIKES!!!!

 

But the installation is really neat and tidy even if it looks horribly complicated and possibly highly zoned?

 

I assume Gas is not an option???

 

Why is a heat pump only 10 years?  We have AC units where I work that are 20 plus years old and still work great!! If they fail the have to be replaced because wrong gas but while they work (and don't leak) they are fine - I don't understand why a heat pump would have a shorter life.......

[TonyT]

1 hour ago, TonyT said:

For the solar thermal.  Seen that done before 

Drain back

[TerryE]

If you are using ~120 kWh per per day heating a ~180 m² house at ~0°C, then it has 3-4 times the rate of heat loss compared to my house which is a bit larger and which we maintain at about 23°C.  OK ours has a near passive design, but it still seems as if it has been built to a poor insulation standard especially for a 2008 build which if build to code would include 100mm insulation in the walls and some form of insulation under the slab. 

 

I would be tempted to get a remote FIR sensor and camera and do a survey inside and out to see if there are any quick wins that you can do to improve the general thermal performance.  Example include:

• Missing or poor insulation and cold bridges.  Some remediation might be possible, especially in roof voids.
• Bad air leaks and air circulation behind dot and dab plaster boarding
• Poor window performance.

The challenge is that fixing these during build is cheap and easy so long as you have decent on-site inspection, but doing so in retrospect is a lot more problematic and can be costly.

 

Whilst ASPH installations aren't cheap (as you know I can't make the numbers work for me and I designed my house to be ASHP ready).  The 3kW A2A units are pretty cheap and you should be able to get one or two installed at around £1K ea.  These have a CoP of around 3 and can also be used for cooling in the summer.  They aren't a complete solution as they can be quite noisy, but they can dump heat into the house interior quite cheaply.

 

At some point a ToU (Time of Use) tariff option might become available which will allow you to shift heating to cheaper ToD (Time of Day) rates.  This will give you a grater ripple on room temperatures, but using in-room heating (e.g. I use an oil-filled electric rad connected to a smart socket in the living room).  This is at a CoP of 1 (the same as your electric UFH) but more responsive and localised to the rooms that you are sitting in. 

 

PS.  use the @name trick if you want to notify a member about your post.🙂

 

[Alan Ambrose]

I think a post drifted by me a couple of weeks ago which suggested that you could measure the overall U-value by switching the heating on and measuring the inside and outside temperature difference, the ramp time, and thus calculate the heat flow. Or maybe just get it into a steady state and then observe the energy input, the delta T, and the surface area?

 

Is that an option here?

 

BTW I have a similar set-up to the OP, but a lot of our heating comes from a log burner. Maybe that's an option? Also, I have not done the figures yet, but I believe Agile is working out a lot cheaper for us this winter.

[tw18]

Wow, genuinely thank you! I did not expect that many replies! I will try my best to answer what I can and get back to you all!

 

6 hours ago, Lofty718 said:

Are you not able to get a £7500 grant for a heat pump there? your energy costs are obscene

 

Also on your install why is there a pipe discharging into a jerry can? lol

 

We have now, but only recently do we've had a £5k matched funding scheme introduced. So consequently most plumbers are busy jamming those in any way shape or form they can. I guess similar to scheemes in the UK, where the appropriateness or efficiency of the whole design is questionable.

 

As someone's already said the pipe comes from the solar thermal, some sort of over flow.

 

5 hours ago, marshian said:

I assume Gas is not an option???

 

Why is a heat pump only 10 years?  We have AC units where I work that are 20 plus years old and still work great!! If they fail the have to be replaced because wrong gas but while they work (and don't leak) they are fine - I don't understand why a heat pump would have a shorter life.......

 

Correct, there isn't a gas line to where we are (and don't get me wrong we're not out in the sticks, we're just in a main village on this 9 by 5 mile island). And given the whole island had a 2 week gas outage last year their future isn't looking bright!

 

TBH that was just a side note, when I did my calculations of how much it was going to cost vs save, it was as still 13-18 years before it had paid back. I just remember recalling at the time the 'service life expectancy' of a unit being circa 10 years so had factored that into the budget which they it didn't make sense.

 

3 hours ago, Alan Ambrose said:

BTW I have a similar set-up to the OP, but a lot of our heating comes from a log burner. Maybe that's an option? Also, I have not done the figures yet, but I believe Agile is working out a lot cheaper for us this winter.

 

So along with the ST and this switching the boiler off completely in the warmer months, we do also have a wood burning stove in the lounge, which Nov-Feb gets used in anger if not daily. This does have the side effect of disrupting the downstairs thermostats as they'll then not kick in to circa 0400 the next morning after the fire's been on.

6 hours ago, ProDave said:

No 1, separate out your space heating and hot water heating, before you can go anywhere you need to know what is using what.  If it were me I would be fitting an electricity meter on the feed to the boiler, setting heating and hot water times differently NEVER on at the same time and taking lots of readings to see how much the HW and heating are using separately.

 

How good are you at DIY?  With help from this forum would you consider DIY fitting an ASHP?  I have no idea what the regs are on Jersey but the parts are likely to cost no more than £5K and DIY might make it viable.  You might be better off just with a good plumber and electrician that you can trust, and who are capable of reading an instruction manual, rather than a "specialist" heat pump company which is what I suspect you have been talking to?

 

And what temperature is your UFH running at the moment?

 

Over time as part of my 'notes' the boilers 'on' times have changed with a view to seeing how the costs were and how the whole system responded. So to a point I know that a bath cost in x kwh, a shower in y and even have a concept of how much the hot water circulation including its pump cost us.

 

So I've got a sparky mate and a builder mate... just need to make a plumber mate, but given the circa 8k cost for a 12-16kw unit when I looked at it, it still didn't make financial sense. Then I was still under the impression that the whole system might not 'be' right I was left considering if that was good money after bad. Hence the ultimately generic post of is 100-120 kwh pd 'ok'.

 

So over time I've experimented with the primary and secondary bypasses on the manifolds (to little or no scientific resolve) and of course the mixer valves on them. When I moved in the previous owners had the mixer to both the upstairs and downstairs UFH manifold set at 60. Now they're set at 45, with the bypasses high to return mostly hot water to the electric boiler in a effort to stop its constant short cycling (again my interpretation in layman's terms). The downstairs stats are set to 19.5 with a 0.5 degree swing before the heating kicks in.

 

@TerryE I know how to quote, I just didn't need to as I  was just referencing some topics which had struck home. I'll look to quote you in the morning.

 

 

 

[Adsibob]

7 hours ago, marshian said:

Why is a heat pump only 10 years?  We have AC units where I work that are 20 plus years old and still work great!!

Plus one. There is an Austrian manufacturer which is known for making heat pumps that last decades:

 

https://www.ochsner.com/en/

[SteamyTea]

TL;DR

 

I suspect that you don't have much insulation under your floors and the flow temperature though the UFH is set too high to compensate.

 

Jersey has a very similar climate to where I am (Cornwall), so luckily you don't have a long heating season (mine is almost over), so better thermal management may pay dividends i.e. more selective timing of when the heating is on.

 

The physics of heat loss is really quite simple, but often made to look difficult.

Basically changing a heating system does not change how much energy the house uses, though a heat pump may, if designed correctly, reduce the amount you import/pay.

 

The British have got too used to heating systems that blast out heat at a great rate, warm the house up, then let it cool down, then blast out heat again.  While this may seem to be an effective method, what is actually happening is that there is a cycle of constant over heating and over cooling, it is like driving in Jersey, either accelerating or braking, never cruising.

 

Now for some terminology clarification.

 

kW, not Kw, or KW or kw, or even killer what, is the power of your system.

kWh, not KWH, kWh, kw/h or killa wot our, is the energy.  It is the power, multiplied by the time.

Think of the power [kW] as how powerful your car engine is, and the energy [kWh] as how much fuel it uses].  Your 600 litre AVC is how large the fuel tank is.

 

So your

17 hours ago, tw18 said:

chew through an eye watering 100kw pd, I’ve even seen it do over 120 when it is close to 0 degrees outside

is really 100 kWh/day.

100 [kWh] / 24 [h] = 4.17 kW or at 0°C 5 kW

 

Now as your house is 1800 square foot, which is really 167 m², (keeping it all metric makes life easy) your heat load is 0.025 kW/m², which is not dreadful, though on here we like to get below 0.010 kW/m² [10 W/m²]. Mine is currently 0.011 W/m², and apart from curing nearly all the bad air leaks, adding in some extra loft insulation and adding secondary glazing to my old timber frames double glazed units, makes my 1987 build pretty good.

 

So what do to.

 

Initially keep records i.e. internal and external temperatures, energy usage and behaviour patterns (if you are away or have extra people stay).

See how much loft insulation you have and find out what is below your ground floor, insulation wise.

Find and fix any leaky windows or doors, if there is a draught, cure it.

Check how much heat is coming out of your water storage cylinders, this is easy to do with an infrared thermometer as you just check the cylinder external temperature and the the water temperature.  You may find that the storage temperature is a lot higher than what is needed.  Heat loss is not linear, but hopefully most of that energy goes into the house anyway this time of year.

Sketch up your house, with dimensions, and work out where the greatest heat losses are i.e. though walls, windows, floor, air leaks etc as that will show the best place to spend your money.

As an example, the few cheap changes I did means I now us almost a quarter of the energy I used to when I first moved in.

 

A heat pump, of any sort, should reduce the amount of imported energy, but there are some caveats.  They have to be sized correctly for the heat load of the building, the power delivery, as a multiplier of the power in, is very sensitive to temperature differences.  The smaller the temperature differences between outside and inside temperature AND between the inside temperature and the heat emitter (UFH in your case) temperature.  This is why they are designed to match the most likely range of temperatures during the heating system i.e. 21°C inside, 8°C outside, emitter temperature >30°C.

An air to air heat pump (A2AHP) is a good choice initially and there are some cheap units that can be easily installed.  May be worth fitting one in the main living area as an experiment (a few people on here have a lot more experience and have fitted their own).

 

Also worth remembering that your new house has a much larger exposed wall area, and probably much larger window area, but again, this is not the whole story as volume to exposed area ratio makes a difference, smaller houses have a worse ratio than larger ones (generally), bungalows are worse still (lots of floor and ceiling).

 

And never trust sales people and most plumbers, very few will have studied thermodynamics at university.

[MikeSharp01]

9 hours ago, tw18 said:

for a 12-16kw

Only with current insulation config - by taking some steps to improve thermal performance you may well be able to get the gap closed and so get the size of unit down - I think that would be my starting point.

[SteamyTea]

21 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

I think that would be my starting point.

Should always be the starting point, make a problem smaller.

[tw18]

Oh, so I was just digging through my emails as I was sure I had managed to gleam some information out of the architects practice. They said that "the building design was approved back in 2006/7 and the thermal performance was set at a good level then.  Of course since then building regs have set higher standards and windows have got a lot better as standard.

• Roof Construction - 0.18 W/m²K
• Wall Construction - 0.35 W/m²K
• Floor Construction - 0.25 W/m²K 
• New Windows - 2.1   W/m²K

The walls are a standard timber frame construction with an external skin of rendered blockwork. The roof construction is a warm roof configuration." In the loft I've got circa 100mm of rockwook type insulation above the ceilings and then 100mm of kindspam between the roof joists. The floor is unknown, it looks like I asked the questions but didn't get an answer to that one!

 

On 02/02/2024 at 17:23, TerryE said:

If you are using ~120 kWh per per day heating a ~180 m² house at ~0°C, then it has 3-4 times the rate of heat loss compared to my house which is a bit larger and which we maintain at about 23°C.  OK ours has a near passive design, but it still seems as if it has been built to a poor insulation standard especially for a 2008 build which if build to code would include 100mm insulation in the walls and some form of insulation under the slab. 

 

So you're saying its bad, like 4 times worse that yours, but what would a passive house be, 2/3 times better than average?

 

On 02/02/2024 at 17:23, TerryE said:

At some point a ToU tariff option might become available which will allow you to shift heating to cheaper ToD rates.  This will give you a grater ripple on room temperatures, but using in-room heating (e.g. I use an oil-filled electric rad connected to a smart socket in the living room).  This is at a CoP of 1 (the same as your electric UFH) but more responsive and localised to the rooms that you are sitting in. 

 

So we are kind of on a time of use. We've recently moved from E20 (a cheaper off-peak for 20 hours for the boiler circuit) tariff to E20 Plus (all day electric for the boiler, but you pay a premium between 1300-1500 and 1700-1900) as we we're running out of hot water between the previous 1630 - 1910 outage (which then lead to the boiler being on constantly for 2/3 hours and the heat drop / loss taking hours to recover from. So the methodogly was that it would be cheaper to take the hit on the more expensive tariff as you'd be saving the other side, to which the jury is still out on.

 

@SteamyTea Thank you, that's alot to digest, I will come back to you on that one. Although I think I've for the logging part down. FYI the boiler is now set to 60. it previously used to be set to 80 odd. 

 

On 03/02/2024 at 07:32, MikeSharp01 said:

Only with current insulation config - by taking some steps to improve thermal performance you may well be able to get the gap closed and so get the size of unit down - I think that would be my starting point.

 

That was just a note on what the plumbers had quoted for, and given the load I'd been using seemed to be in the ballpark.

[TerryE]

3 hours ago, tw18 said:

• Roof Construction - 0.18 W/m²K
• Wall Construction - 0.35 W/m²K
• Floor Construction - 0.25 W/m²K 
• New Windows - 2.1   W/m²K

My corresponding as designed figures are around 0.12 for the first three and IIRC 0.9 for the last.  As I discussed on some of my blog posts, the total heat loss from air exchange is about a quarter of that that of the combined loss from the walls, roof and windows, but that is because I have an airtight house (~ 0.5 ACH) and MVHR.  But this would not be the case with a leaky house built to typical 2008 air-tightness standards and no heat recovery.  This would increase this element of the pie maybe 5-fold and would become the biggest single source of heat loss.

 

Do the quick check, eg. a JSH style spreadsheet of Σ A×U×Δt, to get the as-designed heat loss,  but I suspect that your losses are so high because:

• The as-built performance is nowhere near as good as the as-designed spec. IMO, most builders are often very slapdash if not under tight quality supervision.  It's just that their general ethos does value good thermal performance.   Jeremy Harris once did a walk-around a new estate near his house (on a very cold Feb evening IIRC) with a decent FIR thermal imager and there were whole wall and areas of roofing with missing insulation, major leaks and hot spots around fenestration, etc.
   
• It is very leaky so your air-exchange losses are significant.

That's why I suggested you borrow rent or buy a FLIR add-on for your mobile or even buy a cheap spot IR thermometer.  Work out why your house is leaking heat like a sieve first before spending 10s £K on getting a more efficient way to generate that wasted heat.

 

Edited February 4 by TerryE

[tw18]

OK, so I think I've read and digested all of the above (again thanks to everyone for their contributions). The interesting take away has been, the focus on the building design, construction etc. In my naive way I had focused on the heating and hot water system, controls and various variables and concluded the boiler and tank setup was the biggest problem. I haven't seen a positive thing writing about the tank in tank design and I was thinking along the lines of that I've got 1 body of water heated to 60 degrees, which is conflicting as the under floor heating is set to want a lower temp but is circulating that hot water and stirs up the tank. Which when I've read about low temperature heating and just circulating 30 odd degree water in the slab is potentially more efficient, but is something in the current design I cannot do. Which had lead me think that going to with a 2 cylinder design (I've seen people refer to the concept and pre-heating) would be better and something that could've been done for under 5k, and would've been beneficial should an ASHP come down the line.

This shows the idea


Source - https://originaltwist.com/2019/11/26/heating-system-for-heat-pump-2020-revision/

 

All I know is that I’ve only scratched the surface on hydronics, such as I’ve seen diagrams where the implication is the water should circulate in a loop, with it being tee’d off to go to the UFH manifolds, where mine appears not. But then I don’t know if that is more applicable to condensing boilers as appear to be more of the norm in the UK. So is this an incorrect interptetation on myside?

[SteamyTea]

11 minutes ago, tw18 said:

This shows the idea

Start butting some numbers on the design.

Store volumes, mass flow rates, temperatures and then calculate the energy levels.

 

Lower storage temperature just mean lower potential energy, not less energy per se.

[tw18]

On 03/02/2024 at 07:18, SteamyTea said:

And never trust sales people and most plumbers, very few will have studied thermodynamics at university.

 

Just found something I'd cut out of my original post to keep it short, but feel it might be worthwhile posting up for context and 

 

The house is actually 1 of 2. There are also 2 other different and bigger properties (on the development of 4), but the common thread with everyone else is the UFH is super expensive to run (hence my focus on it)! But they say this is offset by not paying for hot water in the summer (due to the solar thermal), which doesn’t make sense when you’re doing 100 kWh pd in the winter! Between the 2 houses there are now differences, as early on the original ACV tank of the sister house developed a leak, and got replaced with a smaller one (I believe the 400L and they've had no issues). And then there was a fire in the manifold cupboard of our house (as a result of some telecoms equipment), which meant new manifolds, wiring centre, pumps, flow controls and actuators were retro fitted.

 

Given the new system and controls I have had the original plumber around (who is one of the bigger reputable firms locally), who was unable to provide any actual details of how it should be setup, run of configured (apart from saying all flow meters were just set to 2.5) and simply directed me to someone he claimed was the original supplier / system designer (who of course they turned out not to be). I have also spoken to the original architect practise but again given that it was 10 years plus they haven’t been able to provide any details of the floor makeup either. So I have no idea on loop lengths, pipe diameter, pipe spacing, floor makeup etc. The plumbers words were ‘back then UFH was new and we had no idea what we were doing so we were led by the manufactures, and most of what they sold us hasn’t turned out to be true’. What I can tell you is that the UFH loop from the cylinder runs straight into the garage floor on its way to the manifolds and seemingly heats up the garage slab / floor which means the is garage is some 20+ degrees (right now the boiler cupboard is 31 degrees, the garage is 20.5 and the rest of the house is circa 20). There is a patch on the floor, by the door to the garage that is the warmest part of the house!

 

35 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Start butting some numbers on the design.

Store volumes, mass flow rates, temperatures and then calculate the energy levels.

 

Lower storage temperature just mean lower potential energy, not less energy per se.

 

Thanks, I don't know how (yet) but something else to understand.

 

On 04/02/2024 at 22:47, TerryE said:

That's why I suggested you borrow rent or buy a FLIR add-on for your mobile or even buy a cheap spot IR thermometer.  Work out why your house is leaking heat like a sieve first before spending 10s £K on getting a more efficient way to generate that wasted heat.

 

Found someone's that got a thermal camera for the phone which I'm gonna borrow.

[Iceverge]

@tw18

 

Welcome welcome. 

 

Where to start.........

 

Thinking always beats spending so keep the credit card under wraps for now. £200 and some DIY could make a significant difference. 

 

@Marvins  AIM APE is probably a good place. 

 

"A" Airtighness, lightly to be shocking on a 2008 build. Make a DIY blowerdoor like I did here as shown here and get sealing.

 

 

Given a day or two with the kids helping you might be able to half your ACH rating with some acoustic sealant and foam. https://www.dortechdirect.co.uk/tremco-illbruck-sp925-airseal.html

https://www.dortechdirect.co.uk/fm330-pu-foam.html

 

"I" insulation. 

 

The floor......not an easy fix. Probably not terribly well done by the sounds of things. 

 

Walls. What do you have? Probably 100mm of mineral wool? Maybe 60mm of PIR? Can you find out? It might be possible to top this up. 

 

Attic. I suspect you mean the kingspan is between the rafters (not the joists) if this is the case I reckon that it was a half assed attempt at a warm attic but they were ventilating as per a cold attic. Hard to tell without seeing. Pictures please. In any case the Rockwool isn't doing anything and I guarantee you the whole thing has a gale blowing through it. 

 

Windows. Jersey isn't cold but it can be windy. Are the windows all correctly adjusted. 

 

"M" Mechanical ventilation. Needed to contol humidity, CO2 and VOC's internally. It needs to be on all the time at a low level. MVHR is best, dMEV is good but PIV will work too. What do you have now? Noisy bathroom fans? A dryer house will heat quicker and feel warmer. 

 

APE IS air source heat pump, solar PV and Electric vehicle. Leave them until you have the fabric sorted in my opinion. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Iceverge]

4 minutes ago, tw18 said:

What I can tell you is that the UFH loop from the cylinder runs straight into the garage floor on its way to the manifolds and seemingly heats up the garage slab / floor which means the is garage is some 20+ degrees

 

It sounds like a poor install. 

 

Can you get your hands on some cheap electric radiators and not use the UFH for a while to test the difference? I reckon you are mainly heating the terrain of Jersey and not your house at the moment. 

Edited February 6 by Iceverge

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, tw18 said:

but the common thread with everyone else is the UFH is super expensive to run

Not really the UFH that is expensive to run, it work just like a radiator.

It is really down to two things, the thermal losses to the ground/building periphery and what temperature it is run at.

Covering an UFH system with underlay and thick carpet, could cripple a system quite quickly, it would be like replacing a window with a radiator, then shutting the curtains.

 

6 minutes ago, tw18 said:

I have also spoken to the original architect practise but again given that it was 10 years plus they haven’t been able to provide any details of the floor makeup either.

I am not sure, but maybe your local Building Control has some details, they almost certainly signed off the development, though it could be a private company.

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, Iceverge said:

heating the terrain of Jersey

Why they have such good weather.

[tw18]

27 minutes ago, Iceverge said:

Windows. Jersey isn't cold but it can be windy. Are the windows all correctly adjusted. 

 

Oh yes, I've not got a seaview or are costal by any means, but there isn't much between my place and the Atlantic, today's its 35 mph winds from the west. But that's a good point I've got a dodgy hinge on 1 window, but all of the trades are still busy from Storm Ciarán so aren't interested in a small job, I'll make some phone calls again.

[Iceverge]

1 minute ago, tw18 said:

 

Oh yes, I've not got a seaview or are costal by any means, but there isn't much between my place and the Atlantic, today's its 35 mph winds from the west. But that's a good point I've got a dodgy hinge on 1 window, but all of the trades are still busy from Storm Ciarán so aren't interested in a small job, I'll make some phone calls again.

 

If you have an appropriate sized Allen key it's not hard at all to adjust.