SteamyTea

So heating and cooling is done with a heat pump. A2A is the most efficient for this, for many reasons. What do you do for hot water?

No. It is unique to Redruth about some public art.

May have been that I was thinking of. CORTEN is a trade name made from Corrosion and Tensile. A quick search showed that even CORTEN is affected by a 'wrong atmoshpere'. To dry, it does not create the crust, rain not acidic enough, not enough crust. I suspect that either high or low levels of sunlight will also affect it (photoelectric effect).

"We have South West Insulating from Redruth coming along from 28th July to do that work." Say to them "Welly Dogs". They should laugh.

I have a vague memory that the steal used in RSJs is meant to get a coating of corrosion. It gets a thin layer of oxidation that creates a skin, which inhibits further oxidisation. I may be wrong though.

Intuition and a good sense of proportion is so important in most areas, especially important in engineering, which housebuilding is. I am not sure if I have learnt it, or I have a natural ability to estimate the outcomes. Though there are some things that I find hard to judge at work, portion sizes are one, I look at what I think is good value for money, not what the company dictates is the right size (eating out is such a rip off really).

I have not looked at peak power (the monitor is currently on the kettle), may do that later. What laptop do you have as I thought that USB powering would be useful as it can be easily charged in the car. I currently use a 12V (DC) to 230V (AC) inverter when away.

You did. Friends are like that. Still have a mate from school, we have not seen each other for a decade, but the friendship is still there.

Wow. I think you have done amazingly well. Bet the things that seemed big problems at the time, will seem trivial in a week. You also seem to have a good crew around you, and as you said, most people want to help. Keep that Steve in board, maybe offer him something to come around to have a look and make suggestions, without any physical work involved (he may like a curry night out, or if you are lucky, a kebab supper, we got out for an all you can eat Chinese when we are all feeling a bit down, works a treat) Do you find writing the blog cathartic, reading it is good.

Not the best way to run a low temperature heating system, regardless of the heat source. Day and night temperature difference can still be different, but that often comes naturally because overall heat losses are greater after sundown. If you are used to high temperature gas boiler systems, it takes a while to appreciated the difference.

Would be at least 6kW if a Granny Smith.

The home my Mother is in seems very noisy. It is an old vicarage (ironic as we sold her The Old Vicarage to pay for her to stay in an older one. Sound is a strange thing, but I can recommend secondary glazing over the existing double glazing, it really cut the outside noise down in my place, and saved loads of energy. That makes me think that maybe internal walls should be three layers of something dense, probably not hard to do at construction stage.

Right, I am very tired, but we see post like this quite often. Without more details of the insulation levels, it is hard to really work out what is best. Basic heat loss calculations really need to be done before you delve into detail. 12 kW ASHP seems quite large, but your house may be huge, without some more details we cannot properly comment. Regarding the bathroom floor, I went to a minor Public School, rough textured, cold concrete floors and tepid water, with the company of many other naked bodies, made me the person I am.

Well I actually bought it towards the end of last year. It was a cheap Asus i5 from AO (brilliant delivery, less than 18 hours). Anyway, I always like to check how much power things actually draw, my last but one laptop was great at 8W, the next one I never checked as it was my Mother's old one and I only used it for a few weeks. This one, I started monitoring on the 5th July at 18:15. Just seen the energy monitor tick over to its first kWh, 337.25 hours later, so that works out at 2.97W. Pretty good I think as it probably gets 3.5 hours of usage a day, but is permanently plugged in to keep the battery charged. If I just assume it has had 50 hours usage in the last 2 weeks, that is still only 20W. Still pretty good.

Not sure if the predictions take into account air temperature, but they can, if unseasonably high (i.e. 1.5K above mean) reduce output. Like climate science, which is generally 30 year weather averages, solar prediction does not take extreme variables into account. (Also just noticed that a data series on my last chart is missing, the deltaT, because I used a cell to make a random date calculator, makes no difference to what I wanted to show)

Knowing means values is one thing, but they cannot recreate a detailed, fine grade, model. For that you need other statistical parameters. As an example, here is some of my usage data. It is my mean usage figures for a 5 year block, then a couple of random days.

Got a vision of Felicity Kendal now. And Rick Mayall.

That is impressive. But not wanting to dampen things, you have also paid for a better insulated house, a heat pump (I assume) and probably tough out the odd days with thicker jumpers. But it does show that a lot can be done, relatively affordably.

Did you calibrate yours, I can't remember.

Still an expensive way to supply power. Large scale solar is so cheap, compared to domestic scale, you can't really compare the two. It is even cheaper where land, and associated planning restrictions, are not pushing up the development costs.

The pricing structure will change. Reform have started the ball rolling, even if they call the auction system a subsidy (factually wrong), it does open up the topic for debate in parliament. Trump did a similar thing in the USA during his first term as president. What happened was that Texas, the oil trading capital of the world, invested heavily in wind and solar. The bottom line is that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of generation, so investment will head there because the returns are better. Why would they invest in new generation, even if it is replacement generation, when the cost is double for the same wholesale price. What I think is the problem is the general perception about power generation, these are long-term projects with even longer term paybacks, but still profitable (unless you are French). Too higher priority is currently being put on 'intermittency', all generation is intermittent, gas especially. The gas supply has to be managed, it is not as if the bulk natural gas supply is infinite. We don't notice this as consumers, but the large generation companies have to carefully manage and arrange for future deliveries, which is why the price of natural gas is volatile. If we relied on coal fired generation, even assuming we had 60 GW of capacity available, how much do you think a tonne of coal would cost, more than the current price of about £100/tonne, before processing.

Do a dimensioned sketch and see what the creative minds on here can come up with.

Put your grizzle in a pasty.

You could have spent a day a week getting those qualification. Just think if you could have done an environmental qualification and sorted them newts out on the cheap.

In a flood zone.