SteamyTea

A couple of people have built to Passivhaus standard and I think that @Gone West got certified. But then he did move down my way. As @MikeSharp01 says, it is easy to go 'geeky'. Good engineering practice will get you to 90%, the thermal properties are not that hard. Then, as we often hear in here, you only have 90% left to do to finish.

Welcome. Building to Passivhaus standard is a good goal. But why do you want the certification? If it is low energy running and minimum embodied CO2 and energy you are after, there are cheaper ways to achieve this.

Less than I thought, and similar to Windows, which is a bit messy with RAM. Many years ago I used Puppy Linux, that ran totally in RAM, including all the applications. Was pretty good on my old laptop that had only 4 MB. Screen died eventually. Often wonder how it would perform on a more modern machine. I think DSL works the same and that was only about 50 MB for everything.

I am quite interested in this. I can understand needed a fair bit of RAM to run the LLM. But is there something special about the OS that it needs a massive amount. I know OSs are RAM hungry these days, unlike 35 years ago when an image file was larger in RAM than the OS took up. Can the OS be stripped back to the very basics of what it was originally designed to do?

I am waiting for the ultimate answer.

The trouble with lighting is the horrible combination of units used. Luminance Luminance Flux Luminance Energy Luminance intensity Luminance Efficacy Candela Candela/m² Lumen Lumen/m².steridan Lambert Nit Skot Stilb Apostilb Bril Blondel It's a (expletive deleted)ing minefield and after having done a contract for one of the biggest manufacturers of controllers and diffusers, I was non the wiser, except that every 'lighting designer' I met, knew less than me, and my contract was nothing to do with the lighting side of the business. Get a bulb and hang it from a wire dangling from the ceiling.

Mean coating, hay fever eyes, fat fingers and autocorrect. The holy trinity of (expletive deleted)ing up text on a phone.

Oil and water. You should see my streaky doors where I did not manage to fully remove all the old, oil based, paint. I love the modern water based glosses, but hate the sanding down to bare wood, and then a bit more, before application.

And measurements.

Lime can take years to dry, then it crumbles and falls off. As the wall is SW facing, it will have the larger temperature swings as well as driven rain. Hard to know what to recommend as, chemically, until it has fully cured, it can react negatively with costings. Scrape off what you can, then leave till October and reassess. I should have said cure, rather than dry.

Yes, which is part of my arguement about using it to detect load, and then use it for local management. I prefer to let they big boys, who knows what they are doing, manage that side of it.

While that is correct in a simple system i.e. one large generator and multiple variable loads, in a dynamic system, where there is intervention, the formula is not simple. If I remember my electrical engineering correctly, rotational speed is proportional to voltage and as voltage lags current (current is infinite at zero voltage), a certain amount of variability makes a tiny difference. It is only when generation equipment goes out of bounds that it become a problem i.e. a generator becomes a motor (though I am sure they have systems to stop this) or a generator slows too much and overheats. We like to think that the grid has a very stable 50 Hz, sine wave, but in reality it is very messy with a mixture of frequencies and even some DC in it. A quick look at Gridwatch shows that for the vast majority of the time (99.98%) the frequency is pretty stable between 99.99 Hz and 50.07 Hz). Interestingly (to me anyway) is the extremes of low and high generation. When demand is low, the frequency drops down for the mean, and when demand is high, it increases. This is where intervention is happening most. If we take the samples between 20000 MW and 40 MW (94.42% of demand), the mean frequency is 50 Hz, bang on the money (well to 2 decimal places). The National Grid really is an engineering marvel and it costs us less than a quid a day.

Short term it may be cheaper to install some batteries, rather than change transformers. I am sure someone at the DNOs has looked at that.

Loads, but still time.

No data, but when I was installing them I often noticed that the cooling fans went to full power as the voltage limit was reached. The power meter also showed a decline. We almost exclusively fitted SMA inverters.

I think it does that because as it approaches the max voltage (253V) less current will flow. There will be variations because local grid voltages will vary.

Rather throws a spanner in the works for the anti net zero argument, the ones that goes along the lines of 'why should we pay more when the rest of the world does nothing, and 'the UK emissions are so small they make no difference'.

Brian May is still composing, but Freddy Mercury is decomposing. No help whatsoever.

Midsummer, the PV people, have put £250k into the company. I worked for a small wind turbine manufacturer a long time ago. Part of the investor conditions was that they had a patent on their design. Gave the investor something to sell when it all folded, which it did.

We had a strange, intermittent smell at work, seemed to be coming out of an unused air vent. Turned out to be a dead rat in a ceiling void. The intermittency was caused by water leaking through the roof.

How about this one. SFO involved https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sfo-launch-appeal-into-suspected-home-heating-insulation-fraud

I recommend an armchair, tea and some biscuits at 3PM https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b006qp2f

I am not sure it is a good idea as it increases inequality. Rural people often complained about the lack of public services i.e. schools, doctors, libraries, policing etc, the money may be better spent on those. I live in one of the poorest parts of Europe, the wealth inequality is huge down here, even if the income differences are not that great (may have to look that up). There is a world of difference between a retired person on modest pension and a recent graduation doing 20 hours a week on minimum wage, even if the income is similar. Giving energy bill rebates, just because there is a field with some PV in it, 2 miles away, or a windfarm that cannot be seen at night, does not seem a good policy to me. I don't get a rebates on my transport costs because I can hear cars, or free medical prescriptions because, at the moment, I can see B1 bombers. But let's say I did. Should it be based on a fraction of my current usage, a fixed amount off i.e. 2 MWh/year. Maybe just a rebates to spend freely. Then what would happen if I still failed to pay, should I be forced to pay the rebate back? The best way to reduce bills is to reduce usage and then increase local RE generation and storage.

I missed the first page of this discussion. I like the bits about 'radiative' energy. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/679165/stefan-boltzmann-law-applied-to-the-human-body

Eh How does one size the thermal emitters without knowing what they need to cope with. May as well go back to an open fire on an outside wall if RbR is of no relevance.