SteamyTea

So we are keeping the £400 grant, spread over 6 months. Shall have to see how much extra I need to add to my readings to get all of that. 100 quid is gobbled up by meter rental, so that leaves 300 quid for usage. If my night rate is 22p/kWh, that is roughly 1,400 kWh over the 6 months (from October), about an extra 8 kWh/day. I am going to have a warm house, or a lot of credit.

A mate of mine makes those sorts of planters. No idea what he charges, can ask him. You got any dimensions? I usually knock things up from timber I have laying about. By the time an inch of timber has rotted through, it is time for a change anyway.

Don't tell them that hospital have them. I think it is about time that everyone realised that power is not delivered from just one source. All countries need a mix of sources, it is just the fraction of each that seems to be misunderstood. I can play with figures and create a number of different scenarios to achieve the same end i.e. adequate power 99.9% of the time. I could show prices and delivery based on historic data (it's all there for anyone to look at). I could even throw in environmental issues. But it will make not one jot of difference to most people as they take no interest in it, and even less willing to learn about it. The best thing would be to let the National Grid sort out the size and location of generation installations (they know how to manage what they have incredibly well), then invite tenders from the generation companies. So planning rules will have to be overturned, but it is about time individuals realised they don't, through a fluke of wealth and location, have the right to deny others what they can easily afford. To show, in an odd way how fickle people are, the tourist figures for August came out yesterday. Allowing for rounding, Cornwall had 1 million less visitor trips. So about 20% down. Cornwall has not changed, except we had very little rain this summer, prices have not changed much, no travel restrictions and the people down here still hate the Emmets. Where did they all go, abroad or stayed at home?

The recent details are here: https://electionresults.parliament.uk/election/2016-05-05/results/Location/County/Cornwall Seems the Tories and LDs where in lockstep until 2010, then the LDs lost support. I wonder what happened in 2010 to make the bigots down here change their minds. Must have been a local MP misbehaving, as we take no notice of what happens up country. The Tories are only where they are because the LDs and Labour lost support. Even the Greens and UKIP (what happened to them) had the same pattern of increase after 2010.

Have you thermally modelled your house? You can then change things and see what is important and what is not. I find it easier to set a total target energy use for a building, then see what needs to be changed to achieve it. Using a metric like kWh.m-2.y-1 is pretty pointless as it takes no account of the buildings form.

Yes, integral face of the external brickwork. There are also cavity closers for openings, they need to be fitted well.

We had a huge property price drop between 1989 and 1991, the same government still got elected in.

If cold outside air can blow around, or though, insulation. This is a particular problem with mineral wool insulation.

I am not so sure. Say oil is available at 60p/litre. To just produce electricity from a diesel generator will probably have an efficiency of no more than 25%, and at small loads 10%. There are roughly 10 kWh in a litre of diesel, so somewhere between 2.5 kWh and 1 kWh of electricity, so at 60p/litre between 24p/kWh and 60p/kWh, with the vast majority being at the lower end (a few hundred watts). Different if you can get some thermal energy from it as well, and store electricity, but the capital cost becomes high.

You have to make sure that your insulation cannot be wind washed. That would bypass all advantages. Then you have to consider condensation risk. 1 sheet of glass or 3 in the windows does not affect airtightness, it is the seals and joint to the openings that is important. There is thermal bridging to take into account here. Frequent testing is important if it can be done cheaply. If you get to 1 ACH then MVHR is important. I think there is a limit where forced ventilation becomes compulsory (<3 ACH?). Can you improve the U-Value the walls and ceilings? Ceiling especially, walls depend on the total exposed area.

Kelvin x angular rotation x Henrys No idea

Fresh. Matured has already started the process, so the wrong bacteria will be there. Aerobic and anaerobic, you don't want the first sort (I think). I have lost contact with the guy I know that commissioned digestors, but maybe a trip to your local old landfill sight or sewage works may help. They often have a person on site that knows about them.

Can you just divide the total amount payable by the number of units. Too hard for me to work out while sitting on the beach.

I realised 30 minutes, and one nano second after posting that it was the FT, not the Sun.

Can you just copy and paste the article. Most people don't feel the need to add to the Murdoch Millions.

How many kWh was that for? Just paid mine, £122.55, I was £0.75 in credit. All electric, even cooking. I used, in total 305 kWh over 86 days. So with everything included, it works out at 40p/kWh. It is the 55.1p/day standing charge that is killing me. Just power would have been 23.4p/kWh. This period last year, I used 479 kWh, this year, 305 kWh, so putting only the top heater on in the 200 lt immersion heater has saved me nearly 200 kWh. Cost about 20 quid, so far has saved me about 37 quid. Only had a couple of luke warm showers, one was last night.

Interesting. I don't know enough about condensing boilers to know how they work, or are meant to work.

When a cylinder is heated from the base, there is a fair amount of turbulence in it. Take away the heat source (no input to coil at base) and there will still be some turbulence for a few minutes. That needs to settle before a true 'spot' temperature reading can be taken. What does this mean?

Comes down to the dump load being a 'thing' that is useful, usually later in the day. So hot water is useful, as is a charged battery. Extra lighting and a freezer at a degree cooler is probably not useful.

How do you know it is condensing? I had a condensing combi when I lived up country. It used to make snow when it was really cold outside.

While I agree with this, freezing at around double last year's prices should help. I just tried to explain the difference between a 3 kW resistance panel heater and a 3 kW A2AHP, that draws 0.8 kW, to my coffee drinking mate. He still think the resistance heater uses less and will store energy for later. He has magical physics that can prove it is better. He showed me a picture of his smart meter as proof. What he actually showed was the unit price, but has convinced himself that it is the daily total. His bill is going to be a shock.

There was a guy over the other place that paid 50k for a micro bio digester. It never worked. I would look at properly designed commercial shit kit. It is one of those things that works better when larger. They are not fit and forget, they take constant monitoring and fettling, then the depleted waste has to be got rid off. And there are tonnes of it.

I cobbled together a logger using an old CurrentCost monitor and a raspberry pi. Then analysed the data in a spreadsheet. Also put this together to make a logger. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/entry/946-the-energy-meter-experiment/

It is a log scale though. "Two principal types of scaling of the decibel are in common use. When expressing a power ratio, it is defined as ten times the logarithm in base 10.[5] That is, a change in power by a factor of 10 corresponds to a 10 dB change in level. When expressing root-power quantities, a change in amplitude by a factor of 10 corresponds to a 20 dB change in level. The decibel scales differ by a factor of two, so that the related power and root-power levels change by the same value in linear systems, where power is proportional to the square of amplitude." Let us know how it goes, would heat my house very nicely, and could go back under the window where the storage heater was.

That is up to the individual to decide. £5k would buy me around 6 years of electricity at todays prices. And I would still have £5k in the bank.