@mike-camelot Your house is an area which has been extensively flooded overnight.

Can you give us any news on both the way your SIP house has been affected, and the situation in the surrounding villages?

Here's a snapshot of NGED's power-cut map for 11:30 today (27th Jan) showing East Devon where Mike lives.
For the benefit of readers in other parts of the UK, the main A30 has been closed due to flooding east of Exeter.

Yesterday, the Leader of Devon County Council, Cllr Julian Brazil, has stated that the region lacks resilience.

That's true in so many ways: roads, railways, internet connectivity, electricity supplies, housing, ecological imbalance and food production.

There's probably a lot of 'knowledge' on this Forum which could be tapped into, with a view to developing a more resilient society and infrastructure.
The 'solutions' are not going to magically appear from Westminster.

@transparent No problems today. We had a power cut Sunday night Monday. I don't what time the power went off.It came back at 01.32. I think that it was about 1 hour duration but I can't be  certain. I have lived here for 2 ½ years. In that time there have been 3 other cuts. One lasted for 18 hours when a sub station had a problem.

Thanks Mike. Glad to know that you and the house are both intact.

I have access to many of the NGED in-house data and network maps, within a 'partnership agreement'.
That means I can 'see' the connections in your area, and statistics on the physical cables.

Whilst I don't know which is your house, I can already see that you are connected to a pole-mounted local substation, which will be one of:

• Awliscombe 31/1248
• Losses Farm 31/4426

The substation reference number is on the pole at 2m above ground level.

The '31' refers to the Bulk Supply Point (transformers) from which the 33kV cabling originates that you are connected to.

I have a particular interest in increasing network resilience.
That means I keep a lookout for areas which suffer power-cuts more than once for the same reason.

@transparent, not wanting to derail this thread, I really feel that there are way too many power cuts in the UK. This is a relatively small country and homeowners are paying a stupid amount of money for grid maintenance, upkeep, etc. We're OK where we are, but family in East Sussex/Kent have power outages lasting upwards of 6 hours on a fortnightly basis. It's nuts.

We used to one or two powercuts a year but I believe they may have put us on a different type of circuit, so it became a lot better. 

Not long ago, when going on a hike in Herts we heard about some case where roadworks changed water drainage and some local substation was being flooded on a regular basis. What amazed me is this seemed to be going on for over a year!   

I remember thinking about it, all talk and no action..

Posted by: @editor

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I really feel that there are way too many power cuts in the UK.

True... but I'll be the one derailing this topic if I respond here.

Firstly I know how to reduce the number of power cuts, in which we can make a difference.

Secondly, this is another instance of customers in SE England being treated differently by their DNO to those of us living elsewhere.
That DNO is UK Power Networks, which appears to be operating outside the norms which other DNOs implement.

The DNO 'UKPN' is more than 75% owned by UK Power Networks Holdings Ltd. which has 10 of its 14 listed Directors based in China.

UK Power Networks Holdings Ltd. is between 25% to 50% owned by Cki Number 1 Limited.

Cki Number 1 Limited is more than 75% owned by Cki Number 2 Limited

Cki Number 2 Limited is more than 75% owned by Cki Number 3 Ltd.

Cki Number 3 Ltd is owned by Ck Infrastructure Holdings Limited, which is based in Bermuda.

All companies in that chain substantially share the same directors.

In effect it's an international financial company which holds an Ofgem Licence to act as DNO for three regions in England.
Whatever gets discussed at Board level is unlikely to have much to do with power outages in East Sussex or Kent!

Further discussion needs to be in a new topic...
... so that @mike-camelot can revert to being worried solely about his hostile installer!

@transparent 

Posted by: @mike-camelot

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I now believe that my installer over sized my heat pump so it is still cycling at about 1 to 1½ hours. This means that the UFH pumps are running 24/7 and for much of the time are circulating increasingly cooler water while the heat pump is off. I am looking at installing a single pump in the heat pump to UFH supply line. The problem I have is that I need a way of sensing when the heat pump switches on so that it will switch on the “supply pump”. This will result in the pump running only while the heat pump is on. Anyone got any ideas?

er, if you do this how will the heat pump ever know to switch on? The obvious thing is to tie it to the heat pump's water pump so it switches on whenever the heat pumps pump switches on.  Then if, for example, it runs a sniffing cycle it will sniff from the UFH which is what you need.  basically you need to be careful to think this mod through.

Posted by: @mike-camelot

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I now believe that my installer over sized my heat pump so it is still cycling at about 1 to 1½ hours

That's not bad.

We've had visitors to this forum with cycling 20x per hour!

If 'James' can't or won't resolve the issues, then you could take this issue to CAB with the prospect of them ruling that he should refund some of your money for 'services' that weren't carried out. Those include

• commissioning the system to use as a little energy (input) as possible as per Building Regs Part-L
• producing full system drawings and operating instructions
• application for BUS
• registering the installation with MCS