SteamyTea

Worked better than the solar powered battery backup I made yesterday. That died during the night. Hopefully it is just a dodgy cable/connection.

Frederick Winslow Taylor did. "One of his most famous studies involved shovels. He noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials. He determined that the most effective load was 21½ pounds, and found or designed shovels that for each material would scoop up that amount."

I must be getting out of touch, and living in a small, cheap to run house, in the warmest part of the country. But if gas is around 7.5p/kWh, that is 2.7 MWh/month, or nearly 90 kWh/day. To get that sort of usage, I would have to make my house ten times wider, to 40 metres.

Which bit will burn the best?

Welcome. Many of the technical aspects of houses are the same as vehicles. Just at a slower pace, unless you work for Williams that is.

You let your prisoners cook? Whoops, meant Austrian guests.

I open a window.

You really need to know the heat losses of the building. This is not difficult to calculate, just tedious getting all the right info. You say the UFH is working, but the radiators upstairs are not. This could be as simple as a valve not opening. You also say the the bill has gone up to £600/month. That is very worrying, but to be honest a gas bill of £200/month seems high. Do you have any idea how much insulation there is under the floor? You could be loosing vast amounts of energy there.

Combust is what I want to see. Shall look for a brick, some kindling, and set the camera up.

Fine for coffee, an abomination for tea.

Finally got around to digging out my old solar power battery banks. This one seems shot. Not sure what to do with it. May set fire to it just to see what happens. The other one was ok. So fully charged it last night, it took 26 Wh. Then put it in the power line for my back garden temperature logger, popped a couple of energy loggers on it, and waiting to see how it goes. So far it has drawn nothing from the mains and almost 2 Wh from the battery/solar. Got it set up on a little stand on the back (NE facing) window cill. Shall see what the meters read tomorrow.

You will need to see if that actually happens, and I am not sure how you would do that for your particular ASHP. Others may know.

If you drop the room set point temperature a degree or two, that will still allow the ASHP to perform as normal for a few extra days a year. My understanding, which may be wrong, is the the resistance heater does the last temperature uplift i.e. 55⁰C to 65⁰C or whatever. It does not replace the work the ASHP is doing. 30 quid is 75 kWh, but I suspect your total daily load is 75 kWh. If so, the ASHP should supply around 90‰ of that, leaving just £3/day for resistance heating.

Aliens.

Here is my cost profile for the last 11 days, £3.36/day all in.

Not the only reason. The phase change is the main reason it can stay usable for a few days. As a rule of thumb, 20mm of vacuum panel is about the same as 100mm of PU foam (give or take). I have only looked inside 1, early SA and seem to remember that the VP was not very thick, and poorly fitted. Very easy to add extra insulation around a cylinder, it reduces losses even when the thickness varies i.e. round cylinder in square cupboard, just stuff wool into the corners. You can also reduces the mean store temperature if you reduce losses and have the same usable amount of DHW.

Had a quick look at the photo. Seems that PV would not work that well as there are trees all around it. And your neighbours will be driving past all the time.

Yes. So better off selling the excess to the highest bidder and giving out a cheque at Christmas to everyone.

It isn't. It can take the odd splash, but not prolonged contact. Water is the 'blowing agent' for most polyurethanes, it gets converted into a hydrogen-carbon bond and an oxygen-carbon bond, but it is not a perfect mix, so some of those bonds 'off gas' and some of the polyurethane is not mixed too well initially. When the unmixed parts come into contact with moisture a new reaction tries to start. Unfortunately there is no room for expansion in the matrix, so mechanical stresses are created. It is these stress areas, which are generally on the surface, that start to break down first. It is why moulded PU car dashboards get tiny holes in them and unused seat cushions collapse. Cut an old surfboard in half and you will see many places that the chemical matrix has started to break down. I think I read somewhere that sheathing PU sheet to make aircraft wings is now outlawed.

What a twat. And he probably wasn't an engineer. Luckily though, @ProDave is pretty good at working out what is needed.

Section 39 of the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986. Just make sure the claim is in quickly after the death.

We used to make saunas similar to that. May be worth looking up Log/Garden Saunas. They were generally easier to make than panel saunas and only sold at a higher price because of the perceived added value.

Ah. Bad luck. Can you climb up the tower with an oil can and some grease? The grease is to get you down faster, without friction burns between the legs.

Yes. The emmets pay my wages. And we are immensely proud of the polluted landscape, we jazz it up with names like "Heritage" and "Historic". Allows us to charge and extrs quid.