SteamyTea

Shall I go around and 'charm' her.

Tell her how brilliant fast your Broad Band is, and how it will be so much easier to run your business from home. Point out that there is enough parking and turning space for even quite large trucks. My neighbours still think I am a vivisectionists for the government and I do taxidermy for a hobby. Well one side does. The other thinks I am gynaecologist, all I said was 'acute angina', but her English is not too great.

Are they allowed to do that. Some utilities have a statutory right of entry.

I pretended to be that friend. Here is what it costs to heat a small section of pool. https://jubileepool.co.uk/pool-info/geothermal/ It was meant to be all GT, but as they were over enthusiastic amateurs, it all went wrong and they fitted a HP. So really just a GSHP. Odd choice as they have one if the world's largest bodies of seawater, that they pump in anyway, a few meters away. It is 34°C today, they are proud to say it is too warm. So they have no thermostat on it. They also have the phones switched off 'because it is Monday, we don't open Mondays'. They do, (expletive deleted)ing amateurs spending my money.

One of the problems I found when doing my ResM was that nearly all the research is either small scale, i.e. load reduction to take the load of a large diesel generator, or purely academic i.e. what would happen if we turned fridges on and off in response to grid frequency fluctuation. We do have large scale grid modulation though load shedding, it is well managed and is based on historical scenarios i.e. kettles on at half time. Our grid is based on predictions i.e. weather, time of day, marginal generation capacity, voltage and frequency tolerances. If say a million automatic storage devices started to switch half a gig of power on and off in response to changes in parameters, when they decided it was right to do so, our grid would quickly become unstable. Case of tail wagging the dog. This is why, even though we have the technology, it is not done. Everything on our grid has to be controlled centrally, and the effects predictable. We have seen what happens when an unusual, but predictable event happens alongside another such event. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-power-cut-cause-national-grid-wind-gas-energy-latest-a9051016.html

I am in the far SW of the UK. The Spring is cold, the sea has not warmed up. Makes for very mild autumn. Biggest weather related problems here are cloud cover and Northerly winds. Had a lot of Northerly winds this year. I take it your R values are in metric as NZ is all metric.

Can't get more succinct than that.

You find those files and I shall see how it correlates with grid frequency.

If a solar house, or an interseasonal store were viable in the UK, there would be lots of working examples. Fact is, there isn't. If my memory is correct from when I studied this, we have a mean insolation of 135 W/m2 down here. The very best PV modules will, over a day, give you 15% efficiency. So around 20W/m2. Just not enough. Even ST, at 80%, only gives you, on average, 110W/m2, of low entropy energy. It is that low entropy that is the problem. You need a machine, or a Maxwell Daemon to make it useful. Redo all your thermal calculations on Kelvin scale and it highlights the problem nicely.

It was still logging when I got home a few minutes ago. File was almost 7 meg. Just left it going and shall see what is happening in the morning. I should be able to calculate how many pulses have been missed. Would be happy if it was less than 1%.

Short of a totally isolated system, the inverter/auto isolator needs to be if a minimum standard. I think it is reasonable that even if an approved isolating devise is fitted, the DNO still know which, in event of failure, houses to check out.

@MikeSharp01 As a test, I have set up an LED to flash for 0.01s then wait for 0.03s. Left it logging, expecting a large file when I get back. I think that will work out at 25 Wh per second. 90kW draw. Few houses will go above 20 kW. Dropping the odd Wh is not really a problem, and I think my CurrentCost does this anyway. I did initially try to append to a list, then when the list got to length 10, timestamp it. Was not very successful. Be interesting if it works in the WEMOS D Mini. I have some ESP 8266s, but not that good at micropython, not that good at python. I did wonder about the file write time, if I deleted the tfile.close line, what are the consequences?

The French copy no one.

@Tommytipee Had a quick look on their site and can't find a performance curve either. Pretty poor that is.

I think you will find that it has been done, and failed big time. There was an Irishman, that some will remember well from the Other Place, that got a customer to pay for it. He also got another customer to buy into a domestic AD unit. When I met the Australian 'Inventor' my 'con man' flag went up immediately. “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE) Carl Sagan 1979

Should not be a problem as the RPi has loads of GPIO pins, Just add button1 = Button(23) and button1.when_pressed button1.when_released = sort_time1 Also add def sort_time1(): dt = datetime.datetime.utcnow() runday = dt.day dt.day == runday ts = time.time() UTC = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(ts) logfile = '/home/pi/monitoring/data/PV-%s-%s-%s.csv' % (dt.day, dt.month, dt.year) tfile = open(logfile, "a") tfile.write("%s"%UTC + '\n') tfile.close Though there is probably a more elegant way to do the above.

I had clumping Black Rod and Golden Rod bamboo. Both grew gently for many years, then spread very quickly, into neighbours garden. Was a right (expletive deleted)er to dig up. No idea if it really can damage buildings.

No it don't, the UK spans nearly a 1 hour timezone, and we frequently have large difference in cloud cover as well. From an academic viewpoint, if we wanted to limit energy usage with the least disruption, we would place maximum generation at times of maximum usage i.e 7 AM for an hour and 4 PM for 4 hours. Hard on emissions, but better on stability as it is easier to coordinate 300 large generators than 70 million people.

Could they be made to run reliably for a couple of years on a couple of D batteries like the CurrentCost does. My old clamp ones lasted 5 years transmitting away. The Optisence uses just one D cell and lasts at least 2 years, as long as I don't put my metal frame collapsible chair in the way. It is better that a tinfoil helmet at blocking a signal, and you can sit in it.

I think the problem is not technical, but financial. I did a write up several years ago about adding small amounts of storage (sub 1 kWh) to each house to help grid fluctuations. One problem would be who owns that unit and who owns the energy in it. The decentralising fans would point to a blockchain solution, but that is just energy intensive, even using 'proof of work', fine for a few bearded hippies, not so good for 30m homes doing 540 transactions a day. Easier for a DNO to just plonk a shipping container with 100 kWh of storage next to a local substation. Then there is only one thing to worry about, not 100.

You live in a rural area, so only a few tens of homes, and a milking parlour are affected. Not the same in even a small town where 1000 houses can be without power for several hours. There is a good chance that we will have energy rationing come this winter. The easy way to do it is via scheduled disconnection.

Me neither. In law, silence is not acceptance. So I silence my critics.

I suspect, anyone that fancies making one, will be a bit of a DIYer. So you had any thoughts about adding a cheap display, but not one of those tacky LED matrix ones. Something like this. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165511794894 And the code to display useful stuff, i.e power, energy, time, price, temperatures. It is that side of it that I have never done before and find frustrating.

As it is Sunday, thy will will be done.

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