SteamyTea

I suspect that gas is cheaper at the moment. Just divide their electricity price by the gas price and see if the number would be acceptable as a CoP number i.e. 3+. I wish the council down here would spend some money on my house.

I just use a cheap electronic timer in each one. I am still in my original elements after 36 years of usage. Those old Credas are a miracle of reliability.

Yes, but if you have decided it is going to fail, then no. Ok, here is my opinion about it. The reason it is getting a buffer is because they know from your complaints that you will not run the system as it is designed to be run. So by fitting a large buffer, it can seemingly run more like a traditional boiler i.e. on/off/on/off all day It will be using the built in, and possibly supplementary resistance heaters, more than it needs to, but the extra running costs are not down to them, but down to the way you think, in your wisdom, what is best for the system, in what I shall call 'future failure mode'.

Mine generally take a couple of nights to get up to temperature, but then I do limit the hours they can charge to the last 4 hours of the E7 window. This reduces the amount of standing losses during the early morning when the temperature does not need to be so high. Do you have fancy fan assisted smart storage heaters, or dumb, government issue Credit ones like mine.

I tried to take some of my Mother's house hold rubbish to her local tip in Buckinghamshire and got refused entry because my car was registered in Cornwall. (expletive deleted)ing Nazis.

Not that big really. Your place is larger than my 48 m2 over two floors and I could easily find room for a buffer that size. If your heat load is as great as you claim, which I doubt is actually is (10 kW wood burn to make a small living room almost warm), I doubt if you really need a buffer at all. But, and as you know you will get a but from me, if you insist on running an ASHP like a traditional thermal boiler i.e. 25 or 40 kW blasts for a few minutes every hour during the day time, then let the house over cool at night, then a heat pump will not be given a chance to work effectively. I seem to remember that you had storage heaters and you struggled to get them to work, and even after many explanations about how they work and the best way to let them work, you still did not set them up correctly. If you fail to use a system as it is designed to be used, it will fail, but it is failing because of you, not the type of system installed. I lost count of how many people told you to leave your last system on all the time and let it sort itself out, but you flatly refused to do that, claiming that it made a noise at night. I very much suspect that the noise, which was probably very minor, would have stopped once the system was up and running within its parameters. It is really down to you to make the system work, not look for spurious reasons as to my it MUST fail, and then make sure it does fail to prove your point.

Do you think that when your place got burnt down, the wrong house was targeted.

Why on the face of this it may seem to make sense, you and I probably heat our houses to similar temperatures, and out OATs are probably quite similar, maybe shifted along the x-axis a °C or 3. To put some more light on the matter I have looked at energy use and temperature difference (house temp minus outside temp). Like the previous energy chart, the bulk of the energy usage is in the middle. From Δ12°C to Δ17°C, there is 73% of the total heat load, 712 kWh. Δ17°C to Δ22°C, the coldest periods, 10% of the heat load is used, 112 kWh. The warmest part, Δ8°C to Δ12°C, which accounts for 17% of the time, is 366 kWh This may seem odd that more energy is used to heat the house when it is warmer, but as I said above, it is probably accounted for by being away for a few days. DHW usage will also skew the figures a bit, but they are pretty constant at 3 kWh/day, so about 120 kWh for the period. Another thing that may skew the figures is the amount of winter sunshine and the associated clear nights that cause a larger variation in temperature range, even if the mean temperature is the same.

Did you play marbles. Give me my marbles back.

When I visited @joe90's, the neighbour had erected a manakin up to try and look like someone official keeping an eye on the build.

Well price is no guide. All I can say is that my cheap bathroom mixer tap from Screwfix has lasted, so far, 15 years.

@TonyT It is still August, why is your heater on? My whole house is heated on about 12 kWh/day when it is the coldest time if year.

Well done. Does that mean you can do the annual checks as well, or does that mean you have to keep up a subscription? You can fit other people's UVCs. F-Gas next. Then your electrical ticket. Then you can properly, and legitimately moan about other people's work.

How big is it, huge is a dimentionless unit and means nothing. Sounds like a teacher with an uncooperative student.

You should be happy that you have insects to kill. Rachael Carson said we had killed them all with DDT. She was wrong.

The E7 radio service is being switched off, and it also give me the opportunity to try other tariffs and supplier easily. I have nothing against smart metering, but EDF have a hopeless support system. I think they find a homeless person, given them a phone, then teach them how to disconnect customers. But if I keep escalating them problem, I may get 50 quid back.

EDF installed my smart meter a few weeks back. The in home display lasted less than a day. Getting that sorted out has opened a can of worms. They are now claiming that they can only offer me monthly billing, after I have been on quarterly billing for over 30 years. Shall kick up a proper fuss.

Yes, but at nearly a third of the price at night, and with my usage pattern, still better. The reason I started monitoring was to work out if I would be better off with a fixed tariff. By better quality appliances. My washing machine does not disturb my sleep, and my house is tiny, washer is only 9 metres from my bed, and I have all the internal doors open at night. We are probably going to be forced down the ToU route, especially after today's announcement about penalising energy producers for rigging there production capacity to fit in with higher demand pricing. https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/08/31/ofgem-cracks-down-on-winter-energy-price-manipulation/

That came from my analysis of @DamonHD's data from a class room (literally just finished reading one of his dad's books). It was pretty detailed as it took weather and traffic into consideration. There is a lot of false facts about CO2 and the affects it has on people. We can tolerate what seems quite high levels with no ill affects and often no noticeable affects. So, in my opinion, RH is perfectly good for ventilation control. It would be useful to add a couple of particulate sensors, then you could reduce infiltration rates when they are high outside, or purge the building when high inside.

Normal Sunday to visit my mother. I hardly ever use my large one and am actually thinking of selling it. I find an angle grinder the second most useful tool, use it for all sorts of things. Door sticks, grind the edge, screws to long, grind them off, car headlights failed MOT, polish them with a bonnet on the angle grinder, floor boards not laying level, sanding disk on an angle grinder, welding up rusty metal, angle grinder with a sanding disk again, metal curtain rails too long, angle grinder and a diamond disk, lost key on bosses shed, angle grinder sorts it in seconds. I have recently bought a multitool, that is pretty good as well.

As we are approaching the heating seasons after one of the most miserable Augusts in recent years, and spurred on by a few comments about when it is best to run a heat pump i.e. night time on the cheap, day time on the not so cheap, I thought I would have a look at my energy and temperature data for last January and February. These are two months when I know my heating is always on as if the mean outside air temperature goes above 9°C, I can turn my heating off, and that usually happens sometime in March down here. I also do not have a heat pump, but that does not make any difference to the house heat load, it just changes the magnitude of what is used. I am though, on Economy 7, which I have modified to Economy 4, even though I usually have all my usage in a 3 hour period from 3 AM to 6 PM, with the occasional on/off for the final hour as the DHW cylinder settles out. Being all electric means that it is very easy to monitor what is happening and when, which I do at the 1 Wh level. This first chart is to just give some context as to the house and outside air temperature. It is not greatly transferable as different houses will be at different temperatures, and local weather, mainly sunshine hours, can make a big difference. But it is useful as it shows the variations in temperatures over the period monitored. It is worth remembering that I have averaged the many thousands of readings down to hourly readings, and the mean, min and max temperatures shown on the chart are taken from the time period analysis rather than the base data, so the real minimum will be a little lower, and the maximum a little higher, but over an hour, they will be right. This next chart, to me, is much more interesting as it shows how often things happen and the magnitude of the events. Really cold times, -3°C and up to 0°C only happened for a total of 24 hours (1.7% of the time). These where probably the two frosty mornings I had (Cornwall is mild, but I am at 200 m altitude and 4.1 kM from the sea). So these times are rare events. Even 0°C up to 5°C is only 470 hours out of the 1410 hours (33%) of the period monitored. The bulk of the time is therefore 5°C and over, 916 hours (65%). Looking at the mean energy usage during those times, -3°C up to 0°C my house used 64.3 kWh, 0°C up to 5°C was 452 kWh and above that 491 kWh. The total for the period was 1008 kWh. Taking the temperatures below 5°C, 35% of the time, the energy usage was 517 kWh, near enough half of the total energy used. The very extreme low temperature though of -3°, only lasted 2 hours and used 0.1 kWh. I am not sure, without looking at the two 'heaviest' times when the OAT is 1°C and 2°C why the usage is disproportionately higher. The most likely reason was that I was away 'up country' just before and this is the house and DHW reheating (I turn the water off and the heating right down when away for more than a night). I think it does show that there may be some merit in using an ASHP during the day if you can store the energy in water or a concrete slab. This will depend on what the price difference between time of use tariffs and a standard tariff is. I currently pay 40.86p/kWh for day rate and 15.05p/kWh night rate before VAT. 7% of my usage was during the day (68 kWh for Jan and Feb), that works out at £28. Pretty low for two winter months.

On one my houses had a external soil pipe. It froze up one winter.

Dump it in a quiet country lane, then inform the council that someone has fly tipped some asbestos. The council will then come along and arrange for it to be disposed of correctly. It will get paid for by increasing car park charges and closing public lavatories. Well that is what happens down here.

I worked this out once when our old mate Jeremy Harris was building his own diverter. Your point is the very point I raised. While it may be possible to not export a Wh, that does not heat up much titanium or Inconel. Titanium 520 kJ/kg.K and 22 W/m.K Inconel 460 kJ/kg.K and 6.5 W/m.K A Wh is 3.6 kJ So Titanium 0.007 K/kg Inconel 0.008 K/kg Now I have no idea how much metal is covering an element, 0.05 kg (50 g) maybe. So a rise in temperature of about 0.15 K. And that does not include the actual element or the insulation. (I think, I have a headache, one of those ones that is so bad I somehow jumped a red light earlier)