SteamyTea

We need to start a thread about current draws of ordinary household goods. There is a Daily Telegraph headline about it, today.

Handy guide.

I think part of the problem about airtightness is too much trust in the techniques used. Examples being: "We parked the walls" "All internal walls are plastered" "The windows were taped" "All insulation is sheet/board" "It is timber frame" "The VCL is the airtight barrier" "The whole house is covered in Tyvek" "It is triple glazed" Non of those are inherently airtight. As others have said, it is the interfaces that are important, and they get covered up very quickly and cannot be visually checked after the event. Then there is twats with drills.

All my ideas are at least '2 packet problems'. I should have a better resolution in a week or two as I fiddled a bit with the storage heater input. I had turned it down a bit too low. Outside air temperature has been a bit up and down as well. Ideally need at least 25 samples in each temperature bin to get reasonable accuracy.

Seems a lot of money for what it does. Apart from that, I have no experience if them. South West Water sent me a thing that straps to a pipe that was meant to sound an alarm when a tap was left on. It never went off, even when the squirter in the hosepipe fell off, and discharged a couple of hundred quid of water into my garden.

How do you get an RPi to draw that much. My usage on them is too small to meter.

To the Tamar, and beyond.

Start up voltage is 120V. So make sure your modules, when in series, can supply at least that. And make sure they do not supply more than 11A per string.

Check the inverter manual for minimum voltage per string. If it is a single string inverter (doubt it is) then it is the wrong sort for a split system.

I think this shows how successful the RPi has been. It was developed/designed as a very cheap development platform, for school kids, it was never really meant to be an industrial standard bit of hardware. I have had laptops fail.

Not with the module, but you can store the energy in a slab, in water, or a battery even. Was using that to sow how inefficient biomass is as an energy crop. Not when you set fire to them. Would still be better than a tree. Yes then can, can the CO2 emissions from combustion be recycled? Solar would only take up a smaller fraction of the land, they do not create a sterile desert. Count the tree rings and work out how many years it took to grow. Then work out the mass, then you can calculate the amount of energy per year you burnt in a day. A half decent wood burn is a few thousand quid, so not free. Not so different from the price of a PV installation. Or it could be run from the PV. And you would still have 80% or so of your land to grow trees on and let woodland creatures enjoy.

Secret.

Was talking timber, morning wood, if you like.

How so. PV will convert, on average, around 10% of the incidental solar radiation into energy. A tree, probably 0.1%, if you are lucky. So it is going to take you 100 years to get the same energy. Now I know you are going to say that PV does not work in the winter, and that is when you burn logs from your home grown trees. But you need to plant 100 times then land area with trees than you would cover in PV. But if you only get 20 of the annual generation from PV in the winter, you would only have to cover a fifth of the land with PV, compared to planting trees. And if you could string it out in an arc, and vary the angles, probably a lot less.

What was the feedback. Was it cold houses or lower than expected CoP. We have had a couple of winters that were extreme for the UK in recent years.

It is more usual to use power per degree temperature difference, this gives you a kW/K metric. kWh is the amount of energy used and is a function of the time the house is heated, what the 'h' is, hours. You can quote kWh/year, or any other secondary period i.e. day, week, month. But when it comes to sizing a system, kW//K is more useful as you can make assumptions about minimum external temperature and internal temperature. Eternal temperatures can easily be modelled from the CET temperatures. If you take a mean external temperature of 10°C, and a standard deviation of 5.2°C, you can do a normal distribution curve in a spreadsheet that closely resembles reality. Multiply results by 100 to make it a percentage of time. If you want to be on the safe side for heating, the 1980 to 1990 mean temperature is 9.5° and SD 5.3° If worried about cooling, then the mean is 10.2° and the SD is 5.2°C.

Yes, just checking your favourite website to make sure you are not turning up.

Had a large lunch. May go for a kebab later.

Because More seriously, we know how to make, process and store it in vast quantities. Been used as fertiliser for decades.

And then into ammonia. Much easier to handle than raw hydrogen.

To most people there is no connection between wind/solar/RE and climate change. They have to stop and think about it. The problem may be that we 'engage and empower' the general populous too much. And as you point out, they are (expletive deleted)ing thick (expletive deleted).

Must have one. Goes with the London salaries.

The history of haggis.

Yes, but I don't understand why. It can't be 'fear of change' as we have, over the last 60 years gone from mainly coal fired, to nuclear, to gas and now to RE. Most people don't think too hard how it is made, and actually care even less. I am sure that if we had a better pricing system which stopped the cost of electricity being based on the most expensive generation, then we would hear a lot more about how coal and gas cannot work and must be shut down. There is a lot of research, and all the high quality ones say it is only going to be cost effective for aviation and some long haul freight haulage. In reality we have to stop thinking 'how the UK has done it'. Sub Saharan Africa is already following a decentralised electrification model. Rural India and China will probably do the same. That is at least a third, and maybe a half of the world's population that will drive a new generation model. A decentralised model is more to do with geographically distributed generation with central, or regional control, rather than a backwards model of Pico and Micro generation feeding into a large grid in a willynilly fashion.

Guidance at the moment. Here I still miss it, so much to do and see. Cultural highlight down here is this.