SteamyTea

Not sure what you mean by a gantry, but you need planning permission if the modules are over 9m2 and not on a building.

Only 3 old lightbulbs, or 2 if you are blind. Open the case and see if you can touch the compressor when it has not been running. Could be a fault if it is warm (stuck relay, broken thermostat). If you cannot get your hand in safely, point an IR thermometer at it.

Band heater on the compressor maybe?

Why not use the latent heat of fusion in the refrigerant gas in a heat pump as a better option. They come in a box, all ready to go, and integrate well with standard domestic plumbing. The trouble with using paraffin wax is not the ~150 kJ/kg of storage between 48 and 68°C, it is stopping and starting the process in a controllable way. Liquid water on the other had, may only have 4.18 kJ/kg, but is very controllable between 0 and 100°C, well actually a little higher and lower to be useful. It is very cheap as well, so cheap that in the most expensive region to buy it in the UK, you can get 1 tonne of it for £8.

Be interesting to see if the local authorities, who currently charge for household waste disposal, allow asbestos to be got rid of free of charge. Cornwall Council, through their operators would like to charge everyone that gets to within 200 metres of a dump I think. And they wonder why fly tipping happens. Still, at least it eventually gets disposed of correctly that way.

Does seem high. Can you find any parts of it that are constantly warm. Or noisy. Just to put that 200W into perspective, about what I used, on average, yesterday, for everything.

PV/T=C. Trouble is when looking at this, phase changes happen: sometimes simultaneously. This means that V and C is also changing. So. 𝛿P/𝛿T X 𝛿V/𝛿T = 𝛿C/𝛿T Or in English, as the pressure changes due to the temperature change, and the volume changes due to the temperature change, their product is equal to the change in the constant at those temperatures. This can be simplified to. (𝛿P 𝛿V)/𝛿T = C, where C is a variable for any given value of T. We can thank Leibniz for the above. Differential Calculous is the underpinnings of nature. Or just use cement based concrete, at least you will know that bit will set hard.

Yes, washing line. Costs a quid, saves 50p each load. washing machines use about 1.5 kWh (kWh is the energy, kW is the power). So using the washing machine when the sun it high is useful, though the PV will not supply all the power. Water heating is a good use of PV, though may mean you need a new/different cylinder. You may find that it is worth changing to E7/10 but the saving are marginal now over a standard tariff and does take getting used to.

Welcome. Down here we had loads of timber chalet style houses. Most have been demolished and replaces with quite naff block and render places. So good on you for renovating. I assume you are basically going to have to strip it out to a shell, repair/replace timbers and then start to put it good. The wiring will need redoing, as will the plumbing. So that means temporary accommodation. So a caravan/mobile home on the site. They can be modified and improved to make 'winter ready'. That will give you time to decide how you are going to improve the old place. Thermal improvements are going to be the hard part as done wrong, they can rot a place faster. Post up pictures.

Have you seen the older parts of Toronto? They had no planning control until the late 1970s.

Run the risk of resonance being set up.

Why go to that expense. Plywood and paint. Then let the first storm blow it away.

Do you need the door handle heights to match?

Should be alright. Nothing mechanical is silent, but millions of places have air conditioning units bolted to walls. The thermal transfer pipework needs to be flexible and the correct length. The manufactures usually state this. There are some ruled about how close they can be to windows and neighbours. Worth checking them out.

What is the wall made from, is there a cavity?

Put a thermometer on it, probably high temperature.

There is nothing special about 0°C, it is the temperature differences. The kelvin scale should really be used, put it into proper perspective. If you have a decent flow, dropping the local temperature 0.25K should not be a problem. Would give you a 0.3 kWh for every m3 of water. So a flow rate of 3m3.h-1 will give you a power output of 0.9 kW. And that is a very low flow rate. But to keep it all real, solar down here has a mean power of 135 W.m-2, probably 90 W.m-2 up your way, and that is what is warming the water.

All down to the heat capacity, either volumetric or specific, by mass. The Urban Heat Island affect has been blamed for damaging the local flora and fauna, but I have not seen any studies at smaller scale i.e. a domestic ASHP changing a garden. But there are studies that look into the affects of combustion technologies at the street level, and other studies that look at combustion from larger thermal generation plants. The main thing about renewable energy extraction is that it is very diffuse circa 2 to 4 W.m-2. That sort of extraction rate is usually lost in the noise of variation. It really comes down to picking technologies that do the least damage, artificially compensating, or offsetting, environmental damage is a difficult problem i.e. changing a natural meadow to woodland, building a lake. Conservationists have a lot to answer for as they are often trying to recreate something that never really existed, except in their minds. There is a local project down here to get Cornwall's largest lake back to the condition it was in in 1935. "So full of arsenic and tin, and in black and white" was my comment. Did not go down well. But then I was suggesting that a small water turbine be fitted (~0.5 MW) and the overall level increased, and boating being allowed.

Welcome. Have you already got the Sunamp?

So you have saved the price of new jets being installed already. When I looked at biomass about 15 years ago, I was not impressed with the technology, security of supply, price, or the general knowledge surrounding them.

Should that be /14 Only got as far as that.

Basically down to the time it takes to heat a cylinder up. Gas boilers are usually sized for the water heating needs. Heat Pumps are usually sized for the space heating needs, with a couple of kW added on for the water heating. Thing about water heating is that usual households want to bathe at similar times i.e. mornings or evenings. With a combi boiler, which is often fitted these days, there is a limit to the flow though the system. This flow rate is the product of the temperature rise required, heat capacity of water and the flow rate, divided by the power of the heater. Why combi boiler are often 40+kW in a large house. Heat pumps are very really larger than 12 kW, so just under a third of the size. This means they take (roughly) 3 times longer to heat the same amount of water up. To get around this, large cylinders are fitted. 500+litres. This is alright, unless you are only drawing off say 70 litres. Trouble then is, you get the thermal losses of a 500 litre cylinder instead of a 100 litre one. It is all a numbers game.

6 people, domestic hot water is going to be your biggest challenge, whatever type of system you choose. Consider 3 phase power, if nothing else you can easily fit more than 4 kW/16 Amp PV system.

That only looks interesting in the spring. Some years it hardly flowers.

How much is the daily had meter rental? Electrical ones seem to be around 50p/day now. If the government takes the green levies and puts them on gas, that will save 20% on electricty and add about 6% to gas.