SteamyTea

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.

I think some 'unwind' the cable every now and again. Small ones often have a stop, so can only rotate 359⁰.

https://www.hedgesdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Pyracantha-hedge-plants.html Keeps out just about everything.

Did they charge you for that? I see they charge 3p/minute for telephone calls, even if placing an order.

This has been an ongoing debate in education. Some educationalists think that courses should be developed to a more specialised areas i.e. Forensic Science, Renewable Energy, while others think a more general education is better i.e. mathematics, Physics. This gets much harder with the arts and humanities i.e. painting or sculpting, early learning or phycology. As part of my post grad in education, I had to observe a lesson in the art department, it was in textiles. I pointed out that it was really engineering and technology, but the 4 students thought it as art and craft (incidentally I had 30 IT students when I was observed, and only 26 working PCs, that is a challenge, peer learning comes to ones rescue in that situation). My view is that with the sciences the first year should be the basics, second year students split off into interest groups i.e. chemistry, software, botany. Then the final year should be projects. Take my first degree, we had I think, 6 or 7 subjects (we turned down vehicle electronics, but it was over 40 years ago), second degree I think it was 18 subjects in all, including my favourite, environmental economics (I can put a price on nature, it is easy with proper surveys), and philosophy (which at the time I thought was nonsense, but looking back, was useful, should have been in the first year). Everyone should be taught Thermodynamics, Laws of Motion, the SI units, Laws of Indices and Algebra, along with English (or whatever language in your country). International Sign Language would be useful at primary school for a few years, it is the closest we have to a universal language (I am a BSL user, though out of practice now). There should be a 'how to deal with OFSTEAD inspectors' as part of the PGCE, it is all that college managers seem to care about. I have seen really good lecturers go to pieces and leave because of an over promoted, useless colleague, has been put in charge of internal inspections and totally missed the point of education.

Around 61 MPH gallon then. Sea is only a couple of miles from me. Tell that to the emmets in St. Ives.

Or go digital, for 11 quid. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/184762902220 Drive up hills at a constant speed, accelerating against gravity cost way too much.

Just goes to show that I did not totally waste my time studying automotive engineering.

Unless you can dig the floor up and add about 150mm of insulation, forget UFH. The temperature differences are to great. All you will be doing is warming up worms.

@joe90 knows a fair bit about warm roofs. Hopefully he will be along.

Along with the insulation (warm roof helps all over) have you considered integrated PV? It can help reduce temperatures in the summer as the energy is converted to electricity and does something useful.

I think Cornwall's CIL goes to pay for the pension deficit of £300m (ish). £400/m2 in Zone One down here. Wish I could charge builders to pay the deficit in my pension, with the threat that if they fail to pay I have their homes.

Welcome Non negotiables should be insulation and airtightness. This helps all the time. From my point of view kitchens, bathrooms and lighting are where money can easily be lost for little benefit.

Glad to hear it. What does that mean (as simple as you like) Diesels are lean burn engines. The power output is varied by making the mixture of air and fuel either fuel heavy (more power) or fuel light (less power). Petrol engines have the same air/fuel ratio across the whole power band (stoichiometric). You may have noticed that when some diesels pull away, or accelerate heavily, they smoke. This is unburnt (wasted) fuel. No extra power is produced at the smoke limit. There is a fine balance, for all combustion, on the air/fuel ratio to get maximum power at any given moment. This has got more complicated with the introduction of turbo charging. This has the same effect of putting in a larger normally aspetated engine i.e. you get more fuel to burn in more air. Turboing has the advantage that it is also scavenging energy that is usually wasted from the exhaust, and you can have a better bore and stroke ratio i.e. reducing the total surface area to reduce heat losses. The compression ratio has two functions. The higher it is, the more air is heated up, this aids combustion in a diesel. But go too far and you get pre ignition. This is when the compressed air is hot enough to ignite the fuel, before the piston has reached the top (TDC). Fuel in both types of engines is actually present before TDC, this is to allow for a few milliseconds that it takes for combustion to start. To get around this pre ignition problem, fuels have ignition retardants added, octane and cetane are the rating numbers for gasoline and diesel respectively. Low numbers burn faster. This is why old American cars had large engines, their fuel was at a lower octane rating (this does not mean lower energy density or quality), so lower compression and lower power. But also lower emissions of CO2 and NOX. It is the higher compression ratio of diesels that has caused the NOX problem that VW cheated on. By reducing turbo boost, and running the engine cooler while being tested, less NOX is produced, there is less power, but they does not show up during a static tests. Ideally an engines power is measured as Specific Brake Power. All this means is how much power comes out for the amount of fuel put in. It leads to some interesting numbers for large engines, which are generally more thermally efficient at part load. Tried now and it is getting dark, time to head home from the very end, almost, of the country.