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He's been around for awhile now. Most of the stuff he finds is bad. There has been 1 or 2 things I've seen him put up seem petty.

Because the price of the official pots of 50 of these test strips is so high I bought a packet of five for £6-99 from ebay, arrived without instructions or colour matching chart. The online instructions say read the strip within 10 seconds but they showed little colour by then. However a dark brown shade developed after about 30 secs. Google AI says this means they are time-expired or contaminated. The system was power flushed before the HP was fitted in 2024 and Adey inhibitor and biocide added afterwards. I am not particularly concerned but both years since, the Vaillant service technicians have said that they do not test inhibitor strength. Should I be worried? Should I return them to ebay and claim a refund? Are THESE PHP tests at £3 per test any better? Is there an alternative? TIA.

Depends on your battery as well. I have a 8kW inverter but only export around 4.5kW due to max battery discharge current (50A). Any solar generation is on top of that since it is not going in the battery.

That's only part of it, you still get paid for export by your energy supplier as well. Tonight I get £1 from Axle plus 39.8p from Octopus per kWh. Plus that's only 5 months of the year so far. Good chance winter will yield more money.

Doesn’t it just! Mind you, I suppose the thing we have done is invest in a battery, the VPP could not exist without that.

You can, but under current tariffs why would you? Axle buy it for £1/kWh, if I need to buy it back at peak rate it’ll cost me around 30p/kWh so effectively I’ve only got 70p/kWh instead of the whole £1. That’ll do nicely.

Yeah I signed up for this and linked my inverter but so far I’ve had to do everything manually despite them saying it’s supported, I’ve emailed them but so far not heard back. seems odd that you can literally do nothing and earn £120 a year!?

Think you would have to go in manually to adjust min SoC, mine just gets pulled at max rate, but if I start at around 100% we are never below 50% at the end of the event as you are limited by inverter size.

Sounds like a goer:) Can you limit or fix how much they take from the battery?

I took it that @andeh was looking to put the battery in the garage and inverter in the house hence the query over comms between the 2. Probably doable but would need some hefty cables between the 2

Almost exactly the same as us, 1 2hr event and £106.60. Hopefully another £5ish later today.

Tried changing this today the brass olive wasn’t even compressed it slid off. I can’t for the life of get a copper or brass to compress properly on the brass stub

This came on Facebook, so maybe you've all seen it. Not encouraging. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c64gj95pv2nro

Not been about for a while - it's been a bit of a year - but getting back into my project now and the next step is to connect up the water underfloor heating in the extension into my existing heating system. I believe the existing system is S-plan fully pumped open vented, with a couple of anomalies / issues: The pump is on the return, rather than flow - I understand this was common in the past. The system was extended when previous owners extended into the loft. The upstairs radiators are teed directly into the rising vent pipe, with no motorised valve - so even if running hot water only, the flow also goes upstairs. We've worked around this by turning the TRVs fully off upstairs in the summer, but it's not ideal... The heating 2-port valve has now failed (stuck part-open). The pump and both 2-port valves are buried behind / below the tank and almost impossible to access for maintenance. I'd basically have to remove the water tank to be able to work on / replace the failed valve. So as part of connecting in the UFH, I want to take the opportunity to fix / reconfigure the existing pipework in the airing cupboard. I'd like to fit a magnetic filter, and relocate the pump & valves so that they're accessible in future. I've attached a rough drawing of the current setup and what I'm thinking of doing. For clarity, the boiler itself isn't in the airing cupboard - it's a Baxi Bermuda gas back boiler, mounted in the wall the cupboard backs onto. In future, we plan to get the boiler replaced / potentially move to an ASHP - but that is a whole other project that I can't start thinking about (it has a lot of knock-ons) until the extension is finished. So I'm looking to do enough now to be able to connect in the UFH and keep the system running in the short-to-medium term, I can cope with it not being a perfect solution. Any advice / comments would be very much appreciated!

Or use the exemption in Part 7 .... CLASS 7 Extensions The extension of a building by the addition at ground level of— (a)a conservatory, porch, covered yard or covered way; or (b)a carport open on at least two sides; where the floor area of that extension does not exceed 30m2

All good here, signed up beginning of May (£25), one referral bonus (£25) and total export credit to date £105.73 from Axle. I do nothing, just let it get on with its thing when it wants to. I normally get around £5:50 per 1hr event and £11:00 per 2hr event, only had one of those so far.

Our original plans were for the rail to run across the niche, but that didn't look right at all. We though that the hose would bother us so we planned to get a simple shower hook to hang below the nook. In reality we never bothered and the nice quality Mira hose hangs nicely and isn't as offensive as we feared. The extended niche was our builder's idea and we love it. It extends the whole length of that wall and has a piece of glass (the same thickness as the shower screen) blocking the gap. (side shot below). We have the same in our main bathroom as well. It avoids corner cut tiles and is simpler to construct than a cutout box, there are no additional corners with added trim with fiddly joins. Both pieces of trim are continous wall to wall. The tile shelf is cut, but eagle-eyed viewers will note that the vertical grout line in the shower area are missing. This removes another potential point of weakness/leakage. In the bathroom the niche is 3m but all the vertical grout lines (actually horizontal, but run up the wall) are outside of the shower Regards Tet

Great, generally had 3 events a month since May. Seamless especially when managing your battery via Predbat. Have event today. Axle link referral https://vpp.axle.energy/landing?ref=R-VYFYIHBL

Works perfectly for me with Fox ESS battery and inverter. I believe some other systems can be troublesome, some not supported at all. PM me if you would like a referral 😃

Not an issue if it’s feeding AC into a CU in the outbuilding? On the current project we’ve put a 3ph CU (DB2) into the ‘garage’, and that’ll have full LAN and WiFi access hard wired from the house. DB2 will feed back into Henley blocks at the DB1 location, and there is where the meter resides for CT’s. Will likely be a hybrid inverter, as all of the solar PV is going on the outbuilding. I don’t actually know of any installs where DC was exported long distances, is this actually ‘a thing’?

For anyone signed up to Axle, how's the service going?

The comms between our solis inverter and the fogstar batteries is over CAN bus. The cable came with the inverter. I'm sure you'll be able to run CAN over a cat 6 cable with the correct connectors, but.... If you want to use your cat 6 to link the battery and inverter then aren't you going to run into the issue discussed up thread of needing massive cables between the inverter and battery if you have them separate??

Thank you! What's the Comms between battery and inverter? I installed cat6 cable alongside my armoured cable, between house and garage, where I want batteries installed . Is there any system which uses cat6 for the Comms?

Looks like I'll be going with something similar. How do you feel about the hose going through the niche, that might drive me wild so might have to offset the niche instead.

Well that all v interesting, thanks. I guess my longest straight runs are about 6m, so maybe 15-20mm expansion at a delta T of say 25C. So, it sounds like expansion is a thing to think about but mostly taken care of by pipe geometry and a little care with installation i.e. allowing it to expand and shrink and generally move about a bit without a problem. Could trip you up though if you were not bearing it in mind.