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No I know it's not worth it with the current energy market but what if things change down the line? What if Octopus follows the trend in Europe and offers more lucrative feed-in tariffs in the future? Export needn't reach full parity with the import tarrif to make battery storage economically unviable. Then, unfortunately, an MCS cert will become a requirement to join in with the fun.

The upper edge of a standard UK basin rim is 820-830mm from FFL. A kitchen worktop surface is around 900-915mm off FFL. A counter-top for a 150mm deep sit-on basin "bowl" should be no more than 700mm from FFL afaic?

If you want to travel a long way you need to build as abstractly as you can on the shoulders of giants rather that reinventing the wheel all the time. No point in striving for the moon and first setting up a bauxite mine, associated power station and smelter to get the ingredients and then process them into the aluminium for the outer shell! The challenge, as we have seen above is, is choosing your giants on the basis of not just 'does it today' but will continue for a good number of years without the giant disappearing from beneath you!

Does not matter if every single lender will lend against it, except one. If the purchaser has the loan with the one that does not lend, they are not buying your house.

I was astounded to read that some of the currently free facilities provided by Ring cameras will be disabled unless a paid subscription is taken out. I'm glad I don't have any of this kit but it makes my blood boil when this kind of thing happens. I see this development as a much clearer case of bait and switch which Ring has already been taken to court in a class action about hidden subscriptions before. To pay-wall-off a previously free facility (that may well have been the deciding factor in a purchase) after the purchase has taken place looks like nothing short of a gangster move to me. I wonder how Ring customers here would feel about this?

If you want to buy a cylinder, contact Trevor from cylinders2go and mention my username and the forum for a discount . He can price you for an additional immersion too. Many on here have bought from him ( Telford cylinders ) and the stainless steel ones have a lifetime warranty. Their all I have fitted for over 20 years, with zero issues, ever.

Not quite. What I was saying is that if you have lots of excess one day and not the next, you'll will have stored as much as you possibly can each day and have some 'spare' capacity to see you through. Quite coarse 'maths' here as I'm flying blind . All cylinders will come with an immersion, but you may benefit from adding a second one, by choice, so the PV can be fed in as low down in the cylinder as possible, eg to heat the whole tank with any excess. With a large tank, the PV will be topping you up vs hating you from cold, and heating from cold ( recovery ) is a big ask, whereas topping you up is a doddle.

Typically the bigger the cylinder the more heat loss per day, the variables are energy rating and size

A 120l cyliinder will be perfectly adequate for your use, if correctly designed and operated. A 300l cylinder will just waste energy. However good the cylinders insulation you will inevitably have large losses from the pipework. Keep it as simple as possible. Solar thermal is expensive and not worth doing these days. My system has a 120l cylinder with a fast recovery coil heated by a 19kW boiler with hot water priority. The boiler runs at 70-75C when heating water and will heat the cylinder from cold in 20 minutes and much less time for reheating after some hot water has been used. Weather compensation is used for central heating water. There's an immersion heater at the bottom of the cylinder which can be fed from excess PV production.

So if you have options go with X plan for the control scheme (do web search). This allows you run two different temperatures from the boiler, one for central heating, so you can go with weather compensation, running the boiler at much lower temps and get plenty of condensing. The other temp is just for heating the cylinder. Also specify a heat pump coil, circa 3m2. This will give good reheat times, future proof also. As you say if there is no solar available you end up heating a 300L instead of a small cylinder. This what I did. The cylinder for DHW is dedicated solar. The boiler is a combi, if the solar water is above 45 it flow from the cylinder direct to tap. Below 45 it is heated by the the combi boiler.

Usually the larger Solar thermal cylinder would be twin coil with the solar coil at the bottom to heat the whole tank and the gas coil half way up to heat the top 150l only. Used carefully Solar thermal can provide about 60-70% of your yearly DHW. That's what I found anyway. The huge drop in the cost of Solar PV in the last decade has largely seen Solar thermal relegated to history as electricity is so much more useful than hot water.

It was over 20 years ago when i was in the last year or 2 of a "proper office job" where we had a pretty normal setup, with individual desktop computers with the software needed installed on them, and an office network for data storage, backups and handling the email servers and wed service. Then one day it was announced "we are going to outsource all out IT to a cloud based service" so all programs, and all data would be served from and stored on an outsourced data centre somewhere. I remember at the time thinking "what a bloody stupid idea, what idiot decided that was good?" Thankfully I left shortly afterwards and have been self employed since in charge of my own destiny and free to make my own good or stupid decisions.

That's perfectly fine! Since when can't grown-ups have fun.

You can go for a dual string inverter and put E in one input and W in the other, without optimising, as long as there’s zero shading.

I'm going E/W split for the majority of mine, with prob 30-40% of the array(s) getting true S sunshine ( irradiance ). Should give me a long steady solar day. I've decided on an E/W 25 degree apex for the pergola / shed at the top of my garden, with 10x400w E and 10x 400w W, plus then around 12 panels S-ish on my gazebo roof. Should see up to 4kW from E, then up to 4kW S then up to 6kW late afternoon to evening. Btteries are going in from the get-go, and just about to order them, plus a chunky hybrid inverter. Eventually I'll put another 10 on the E roof and another 10 on the W roof, and aim to provide a lot of space heating from A2A during the winter. 🤞 A machine plus driver will get the job done very quickly without damage. It also needs some thought as to spoil and residual useable manoeuvring spaces which is gained by experience only. Liability resides with them then also. You may have to get separate insurance for the machine also. Check it all out properly first

Reliability due to use of cheap parts and in the case of the microwave, an inability to design a simple 7-segment display without ghosting that comes and goes.

Can you get this to 15 or 20? Would make a huge difference and also then the panels would be deemed "self-cleaning". Below 12 and you typically have to mechanically clean these periodically, then they're not 'maintenance free'.

I think the main problems with spayed insulation inside roofs is that it is trying to convert a cold, ventilated, roof to a warm, airtight one, on the cheap. And uneducated idiots doing the preliminary surveys.

In a house designed for it spray foam should work well but it's getting a tainted reputation because of the above.

Are they really needed? Probably. There are some basic rules about maximum voltage drop for PV systems, an electrician should know these. Look up the regs and it will tell you. Run a bit more conduit, again, stick to the regulations about separation. Never know an IT person to do any physical work, ever. If you have to ask, all of it needs to be done by a qualified electrician. Maximum power draw will set the cable size to the garden office. t is sometimes. General rule is that if you can use the majority of the generation on site, then it is not worth it. Majority being exported, then is worth it.

Drying rack with mvhr works well. Upstairs laundry, you trade taking baskets of clothes up and down, for having to get a washing machine up the stairs. Not I job I would wish to do or regard myself as strong enough to do without doing some serious harm to the stairs. It's good to get some exercise taking the washing up and down from time to time. A laundry chute would deal with the "down"

We’ll see!! Indeed… and no-one else to blame for the mistakes. Very gladly… warts and all 👍 Yours is one of the builds I’ve followed… it looks lovely. You must be delighted with it

Like most things it all depends on how it's applied. If it's behind a vapour barrier to keep internal moisture out and has a breather membrane on the outside, and not spayed directly on the membrane you are getting there. Spraying in a ventilated roof space with out vapour barrier and suitable external membrane and closing off ventilation routes, you are asking for trouble.

No Would give good summer output, next to nothing in winter, assuming 10 degree from horizontal. Yes Consider a PV to immersion diverter also. If you haven't used a digger before, they take a while to get the hang of, so allow for the learning curve in your hire time.

Anything cloud based is always begging for a cash milk . Just get a nvr and a ip camera ( reolink video door bell ) . All quite cheap and cheerful.

Just get it right! There's a ramp up from my dining room to the lounge. Previous owners built the lounge extension then knocked through to find they were about 100mm out! Same with the bathroom that floor was originally 60mm too high. There's a thread on here somewhere where the same thing happened on a big extension.

What we need is and open source product with 3D printed package. This tutorial here: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-cam-video-streaming-web-server-camera-home-assistant/ gets you a lump of the way there, hopefully the ESP32 device, about a £10 er from Amazon, is not spyhardware . Maybe we should make this a BH project for the common good.

It’s why I won’t have anything like this that’s subscription based ever again.

NTC sensor + 8m of cable = profit. / in other words, just extend the cable...

We blast Tek screws through RSJs without any issues

Before you all bitch … 300 centres because plasterboard is only 9.5mm . Short boards as I can’t get full boards down my temporary staircase . So noggins at joins . Timbers deliberately left visible above ceiling line so I can a) fix any ha / electrics to them b) no need to “ hunt the timber “ when I need a wall fixing . So there !

It would be really good to have insulation all around the windows. You could use insulated plasterboard and stick it on.

AKA a wanker.

Suck on this humans

Passive house planning programme. Software to design a passive house.

Good shout and a timely reminder to ensure the bathroom design includes somewhere reachable from the tub to put the beer 😁

It depends on the finish you want to achieve. Companies like envirograf have clear varnish and paints and uses a multi coat system. For a clear 'invisible' finish that requires no further coating, there's products like Flametect C-WD

You maybe didn't read my post properly, there are no roof spaces in a vaulted SIPS build, and where a loft space was added I added a barrier on the outside but not required again at top as it cannot enter a roof space as there is no eaves access it is a solid panel. For typical timber frame with trusses you are correct. They are (I also spent considerable time talking to tenmats technical dept). For reference for others it is a tenmat FF102/50 for ventilated cavity timber frame systems or with outer block its a tenmat FF107 or equivalent.

View from lounge window, still need decking to be completed

Talk to @pocster, he's an expert on ring cameras.