SteamyTea

I use my 10 year old Motorola E5 as a WiFi hotspot. Works very reliably. As it is a phone, it has a built in UPS that lasts hours.

If it is a suspended floor that is open to the atmosphere (via air bricks) you can treat it like an insulated wall. Room--Floor--VCL--Insulation--Windtight Layer--Atmosphere. The theory is that the closer to the warm, moist air in the room, the harder it is for air and water molecules to pass through.

The Grid's peak and troughs are fairly well understood and very predicable, by putting in micro-balancing, at the home level, existing algorithms would change the current (pun intended) predictions somewhat. Where balancing is really needed is near existing grid infrastructure so that unscheduled disconnects can be dealt with. This obviously will not help when infrastructure is expectantly damaged (pylon problems), but it can help deal with cascade disconnects i.e. 2 large generators come off line together (which has happened).

There is a radio play on at the moment about a woman with dementia and a trip to Switzerland. The Barber of Moville https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gg7f Have we not seen this before? Looks good though.

Don't think I have mentioned space heating, but to clarify. It is about offsetting loads i.e. heat water by gas or use electricity.

Yes. I am not sure where the real, sensible, break even point us going to be. 10p/kWh delivered seems sensible as then it is competing with gas, which most people have.

When I go walking, my whole world is on my back. Total mass, before food and water, is 7.5 kg. 10 kg with food and water. I really should get a campervan, that way I can have a shower, rather than a dip in a cold stream.

Spend another £50k on another one and you could run a small shower. Or just stay in a hotel.

On the other hand, Octopus may stop the tariff on a whim. They are a relatively new company, and a technology company, not a power company (they bought established companies). Market Disrupters do not have a very good long term track record, very few last.

Shower and bath. My biggest usage in bath water, my one luxury in life, and a daily one at that. This time of year it takes about 2 kWh/day, winter goes up to 3.

If it is going to stay as a shower block, salvage the good timber, windows, doors, roof maybe etc, and rebuild in block. It will last 100 years then. Probably cheaper to do as well.

Do you have the smart meter data from your last house? If you think you only use about 5,000 kWh/year. That is 1,000 kWh/person.year. 70% of that will be in the winter. So 6 kWh/person for 120 days (ish). Or 3,000 kWh for the family. So to run purely off batteries (not realistic) you would need 25 kWh of usable storage. Now as you are renovating, you could put in a large (say 400lt) DHW cylinder and heat that up. You could store about 15 kWh/day in that (can be heated directly from PV when excess and a combination of ASHP and PV, with a bit of grid import when no excess). That will then reduce your battery size to 10 kWh. Storing energy thermally is probably the cheapest and most reliable method, and you need hot water all year round.

Have you monitored and analysed your current usage patterns. That is a better place to start.

Just had a thought about the Grid balancing capability At the moment there are just not enough vehicles capable of doing it to make a difference (about 1.3m BEVs). But let's say that in 5 years there are another 2m BEVs and at any one time half if then are capable of discharging 4 kW to the grid. So 2 GW is available. Sounds useful, but I am not so sure. If the vehicles were connected where the power shortages happen, then it could work, but I suspect that the cars are in suburban areas and the power shortages are in urban areas. It is possible to get the local area data, but not sure if it is available as a time series.

I think, in most peoples minds, that green roofs are to do with biodiversity. The tiny (in global terms, 37,782,264,063 tonnes since 1750) of extra CO2 produced over a the roof lifetime, include maintenance, will hardly show up as an increase in global temperatures (around 1.5K since 1750). So undetectable. A biodiversity argument i.e. to stop a monoculture of invasive plants taking over (nettles, brambles and bind weed), constant maintenance would be needed and this cannot be guaranteed.

So if you rented it out, you must get get a tenner a month. (May work that out properly later)

Fake grass on the roof until it blows away.

My cheap, timber, shed just sits on some old paving slabs and bricks. Been like that for at least 15 years. Think it really comes down to what you do on the floor i.e. gym equipment or light engineering. I just store shit in my shed, and last night, the neighbour's cat.

Waiting for a mate to turn up for a coffee at the new coffee shop, diagonally opposite is a property rental shop. Of the places advertised for rent in the shop window, the EPC rating is as follows: C 5 off, mean rent &782 D 8 off, mean rent £1032 E 14 off, mean rent £1066 Now this says nothing about the size, age, location in town or quality. Just thought it was interesting.

What, every time you use one.

Sum the R-Values of each component, assume a ∆K for each area, take the reciprocal of the result, calculate the hours of run times for each components per year, divide by 1000 and see what the differences are.

Run it through this and see what comes out. https://portableapps.com/apps/development/portableapps.com_launcher

Have you thought about additional plinth heaters (radiators with fans in them) to supplement the UFH in the colder areas? You really should do room by room heat loss calculations, they are not hard, just a bit laborious, but spreadsheets make repetition easy.

Had a West Indian guy called Tony, he used to do all the sealing on our steam rooms. He used to leave spotless. He also knew when to leave a bit till hard, trim back, and redo. White spirit, on a lint free cloth, is good for ridding excess. If you mix white spirit into some silicone sealant, it makes it more pliable and stretchy.

Both these blokes have.