Leaderboard

If only every company were as open with their APIs, another big plus for Octopus.

You've got me reliving these products, and looking them up , as I used kerto big time a couple of times to replace steel. Reason? 1.Workability, joiners instead of steel fabricators, 2. Making up a solution on site with complex angles.... wood is easier than steel. Notes. Kerto is a trade name. LVL (laminated veneer lumber) may bring up other manufacturers. It is really strong and also hard. It needs a very good circular saw/ nail gun etc. Another product is made of longitudinzl shards of timbe in resin, like osb, but in beam sizes. Super strong. I can't remember it's name, or find it online.

AFAIK the OVO portal doesn't have a publicly available RESTful API for you to be able to download the sort of detailed half-hourly usage analysis that you can view online through their portal. However the portal's user interface makes heavy use of Javascript (JS ) scripts to do the webpage renders, and these in turn make internal JSON callbacks to the OVO server to fetch the data. I reverse-engineered this internal JSON API using a Chromium browser and its webtools window, so that I could automate downloading this usage data and aggregating store it in a database. I have now collected 5 years of this data. I wrote earlier versions in Python and Perl, but I now only maintain a JS script version that runs as part of my NodeRED system used to control my CH, DHW and temperature logging. If anyone is interested in doing the same, I can share my script and NodeRED flow, and if you have NodeRED running on an RPi or equiv, then you should be able to use this pretty much as-is. Alternatively if you know enough Javascript and MySQL to read and understand what I am doing, then you could recode this into your favourite scripting language. I am also considering switching to an Octopus Agile Import tariff, so what I want to do over the next few months is to benchmark my current OVO plan vs Octopus Agile to see if there is an overall benefits case for our doing this. Luckily Octopus do make their Energy API publicly available here. I plan to do a similar download exercise for Octopus Agile half hourly prices, as well as some what-ifs based on having this day-ahead data available. For example my CH algorithm also works day-ahead and computes how many hours of 3kW Willis heating the in-slab UFH to keep the house within planned set points. Using an example 360 minute heating requirement, I currently schedule this during the 7-hour E7 cheap rate window (from 1-7AM), but I could just as easily use the cheapest 12 half hour slots during the day. I could also switch some heating to my (remotely controlled) oil-filled rads, turning them on during the cheapest half-hour slots. Ditto for scheduling our SunAmps. Also because the price dips tend to follow low-demand periods, e.g. prices between 0-4 AM are often a few pence per kWh or negative, we could also reschedule time-settable devices such as dish and cloths washing to use these cheap windows (ours are electrically heated cold-fill so are quite power intensive when heating). We seem to have around ⅓ kWh / hr base load in the house from electronic devices, fridges etc. Another what-if game to play is what would the cost benefits of adding say a 6kW battery to shift all use to these extremely cheap priced half-hour slots, but that's a separate topic in its own right. I suspect that we aren't there yet but soon. 😊

I have been heating the house with just a stove, three 1/2 years in now, and, an electricity bill for heating of £10 since June 2020. Just needs the right house design and the right location.

I've done the Perl script that downloads the prices since the start of the current Agile Tariff in March for a given Grid supply point. (You can lookup the GSP for your MPAN.) I'll dump this into a SQL table and mod the script so that it only requests new data from the last dump. Lots of fun analysis to follow. 🤔

I seem to remember all you wood burner people claiming it is the warm glow from the fire that keeps you warm.

If heat pumps aren't the solution, what is the solution to heating your home without causing unsustainable global warming? If you have one please tell us! Its really, really 'cosy' in the places that have wildfires or heat waves due to global warming, not so cosy in the areas that have suffered flooding due to the same cause, and wont be at all cosy when tens of millions of human beings are displaced from their homes by a climate that's not liveable in. Heat pumps take longer to heat up but you leave them running for longer to compensate. Running costs of a heat pump which has been properly set up are currently broadly comparable to gas (that's, however, a political decision because relative energy prices are driven largely by politics not economics). They are much cheaper than any other form of electric heating. Many people with heat pumps report higher levels of comfort. They aren't perfect by any means, but neither is any other known way of heating homes. As to electric cars, imagine they had been there first, and then someone tried to sell you a car that you couldn't refuel at home, that is driven by a series of explosions and contains an explosive, oily liquid, doesn't accelerate anything like as quickly, and needs more expensive and more frequent servicing. Are you going to buy one, I thought not!

I said breeze blocks. They are actually massive lumps of marble.

If you have surplus, then absolutely perfect! Just to get a little acoustic decoupling, but a well designed system should already have this consideration included inherently, eg slightly oversized unit & lower fan speeds etc. Belt & 2 braces is always good when something makes noise / sound / vibrates, and I could think of nothing worse than choosing a cheap Chinese MVHR and putting it in the attic of your new TF home to find out it is really nasty and audible. Literally NOTHING worse than that happening. Sleep is precious!

Rockwool Flexi slabs, stiff with one edge soft to fill any gaps

Just going through this right now... Without ringing the builders merchant the best price I've found online so far on 60mm rwa45 is 30.73 per pack delivered. But this is what we SB'ers do... trying to do the best we can without prior experiences to call upon. and are afraid of the sucking through teeth trades when they come on site, and the 'you dont want to do it like that, you should have done it like this'... Was the 70mm stuff, acoustic roll stuff? As that's quite a bit cheaper for coverage than slabs

I’m basement also lol i have PowerWall and SolarEdge . yep effectively act as a ups to the sump

First thing to do, is check to see if the different thermostats are switching the heating zone on/off during the day or night. Systematically go around each area and note down if none, some or all are switching on/off. Do this when it's different temperatures outside, this will also tell you if your WC curve is correct. Write it all down so you make sense of it later. Installers will set everything too high and let your thermostats sort it it out, great for a gas boiler, but rubbish for a heat pump. The switching on/off would indicate the flow temp is too high, lowering flow temp has a big impact on running cost. Second, you need to have a small setback overnight, about 2 degrees. This will again save you money. The timing for the radiators will be easy enough, about an hour before you go to bed and a hour before you get up. The underfloor heating, will have an offset, due to the storage heater effect, so that maybe turned down and started up 4 to 6 hours offset from your radiators. Analysis first - adjust second

Just swapped to cosy . Do have ASHP but also batteries - so no need to modulate my ASHP with off peak times

Actually, looking at the cosy, if you just set your ashp to avoid the evening peak, looks like a winner, esp as it sounds like, you run your ashp near continuously. Set your timers, weather comp and stats accordingly.

If you look up past the stove, is the chimney open to the room or is there a closure?

can you program a slightly higher flow and room temp during the E7 period, to charge the house up? Whilst there's a small efficiency loss running during the lowest ambient temps of the early morning you're still going to gain over running at the day rate. That's what we're doing, and solar gain reduces daytime losses so there's actually very little heating needed during the day and evening

Are you able to just run the ashp on the low rate only? We're on economy 7 and do exactly that, 90% of the time. During a real cold snap we'll run it 24x7 on the days required. If your heat losses are high (sounds like a a big house) then you would be better off running 24x7 on weather comp, low flow temp and a the cheapest standard tariff that doesn't penalise you for daytime use.

If you are burying a waste pipe it has to be underground rated, and rod-able, I.e. 110mm brown PVC. Sorry, but there is no shortcut for this. It'll be a lot of work. The water supply is simpler, run the 15mm feeds inside some 25mm blue MDPE. You want at as much cover as you can get over the pipes.

That’s not true - R290 (propane) is just about as good as you get for a refrigerant. It was shunned for years because it’s flammable, not for performance reasons. All else being equal, if you’re manufacturing or maintaining a heatpump, you’d prefer a gas that isn’t explosive. Unfortunately there’s no perfect gas - they all have downsides - ozone depletion/global warming/flammable/toxic/very high pressure needed. Propane (HC in graph below), ammonia, CO2 were used 100 years ago, and are coming back after a while with CFCs :

Not even certain a sunamp even works with a heat pump, they say they do, but the heat pump specific one requires a minimum flow temp of 65? Not really sure they would be much use.

Use 50mm waste for the ducts with 20mm concrete or self levelling over the top and will be fine. All the bends need to be pairs of 45° at the ends or into boxes that you can get push fit fittings in to. Waste wants to be in 40mm solvent weld but put a Y branch into it and flow the waste into the branch from above using a long bend to bring it up out of the slab. Then on the run add a 45° bend and then an access cap above slab level in case you ever want to run a jet or small rod down it.

Horizontal cylinder should be okay, at least you are lifting it up into the loft empty. A sun amp weighs a LOT. Best of luck lifting that into aloft and making the loft string enough. I have heard of people struggling to get one up an ordinary staircase, let alone somehow up into a loft.

I also ended up getting g99 approval for 8kw on a single phase, so I’ve got all the options available. Nice chunky 25mm 5 core to the house and 2 x 10mm 5 core for 2 x 22kw car chargers.

not sure whether to laugh or cry at this one! well done for just doing it though. that happens a lot.

Stick some compriband in from the outside which will give you the watertight seal but allow vapour through. Then foam up to the compriband from inside...try not to overfill so you aren't trimming the foam too much then apply airtight tape across the window to the reveal. Should only be about 10mm on the frame which will get hidden by the plasterboard. Look at the illbruck 'i3' system and you'll see how it all works together.

The veneers are bonded with weather- and boil-resistant phenol formaldehyde

Routers also great for slots etc. Most wood working tools seem to fine also.

Check with your supplier, mine sat out in all weather until the roof went on, probably 6-8 weeks, I believe it’s all waterproof glue like a version of D4 glue on steroids.

Update So, it looks like I've been accepted through the first stage of the Octopus no-MCS. However... "The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has informed us that we are not to offer the regulated SEG tariff to anyone who does not have an MCS certified install. We are only able to offer our own export tariffs." I need to do a bit more reading on what this actually means for me, but on the surface of things it means a much much cheaper solar installation and still having the ability to sell at least something back. There's a load of terms and conditions sent over that I'll filter through this weekend as I want to move fast on this. In other news I had a typical follow up phone call from one of the MCS approved installers I had a quote from. I was honest and explained the reason why I hadn't made a decision yet. After explaining to him how I was exploring the DIY/Octopus route, it completely blew his mind. I could hear the cogs winding around in his head trying to comprehend what I'd just said to him and how this would effect his business. I felt bad at the time, but in hindsight now, if he's an expert in this field surely he should understand quite relevant news regarding it?!

Sometimes it is easier to gloss the woodwork first, then and small smears, splatters, spills of emulsion can be wiped off with a damp rag. Ceilings first though, just get the neck ache over and done with, before the back and knee ache. Not many professionals clean up at any stage.

And in the wet paint 🤷‍♂️

Professional painters generally don’t do what DIY’ers do. start at the top and work down would be my advice for general painting.

Quick update, fired a few question over to natural green heat and got a reply almost instantly so ordered the system (duct and plenums) Shortly after ordering got a call from them explaining how the Heatpex system goes together and confirming it’s all ready to be shipped! I can’t remember the chaps name who I spoke to but he was extremely knowledgeable on the product, gave me the company backstory and I’m glad jayc89 put me onto them👍 For anyone contemplating 75mm or 95mm ducting pick up the phone to them for some good honest advice. Companies like this are rare so we have to keep them going🫡

I have researched this quite a bit and finally settled on @JohnMo method. I mix approx one cement (mastercrete), three sand (building sand) and a bit of hydrated lime (hydralime), mix to a slurry / double cream thickness. I apply it by hand one block at a time with a block brush, rubbing into the surface so all holes are filled, then after 3/4 metres go back and brush the excess off with a softish brush. It's taking ages but doing a good job of it, and saving a huge amount of money compared to airtight paint / membranes etc. I'll be using the paint and tapes at junctions and windows but for the large wall sections this is going well. As they say, want a good job doing, do it yourself. Here's a photo of the mid floor area done, before fitting the wall plate for hanging the posi joists with joist hangers.

So its more or less bound to happen then!