SteamyTea

Welcome Can you fit external wall insulation, or are the planners against changing the look of the place. What state is the flat roof in?

Last time I was up your way, I asked Mr MacDonald to show me his quarter pounders. I was quite shocked when he lifted his kilt.

Pumped storage was traditionally used to mop up the night surplus from nuclear reactors, trouble was, we did not build enough reactors as we retooled the grid to deploy CCGTs. In recent years, pumped storage has been used as scheduled generation (you can see this on GridWatch). This is not very efficient, but probably helps out financially. I think that was out of desperation after the tsunami. Japan has a very fragile energy balance, back in the 1970, they broke the oil embargo as they had 3 days of power left. Vertical panels, do work, but very expensive as they yield is relatively low. Solar farms are not all about land area. The costs of fitting to buildings is quite high compared to fitting in a field. And that is before the legalities of renting a roof. As for letting the plants grow, this time of year, down here, is daffodil time, fields full of inedible plants. Not all agriculture is for food stuffs. Plants have crap EI:EO ratio, about a 40th of PV. You also don't have to fertilise, irrigate and harvest PV.

Would need to knock up a spreadsheet, I am sitting in a cafe at the moment, maybe when I get home.

Large, land based, wind turbines are, to keep the sums simple, about 1.8 MW, so to match the same power as Loch Ness, you would need 1000 if them, all running at full power. Now turbines don't often run at full power, usually around 40% on average. So around 2,500, to match the 36 GWh generation. An average house uses about 3 MWh a year. Assuming a fairly event power spread thought the year, that is About 4.4 million houses. Something does not seem right somewhere.

Post up a sketch of the layout. Is there any reason you cannot put a horizontal DHW cylinder in the loft? A properly sized and commissioned monoblock ASHP would be quiet, easy to install and cheap. Get as much PV on the roof as you practically can, you may want to fit some batteries one day (they could be fitted outside). MVHR should be fairly simple in a bungalow. But layout sketch first, gives everyone an idea of what is where. Don't forget to put the roof orientation on.

Let us know how you got on. I often think about sunpipes, still have some prototype bit kicking about.

I did some work for Monodraught back in the 1990s. They were decent to deal with.

Probably as a general water management policy, similar to our SUDS. That raises an interesting point, if SUDS has to be employed, can a rainwater harvesting system replace it.

Base the price on South West Water. Have I ever mentioned that we have the most expensive water and waste in the country, which probably makes it one of the most expensive in the world.

I had one as well, head gasket had blown.

Get a different builder.

Going to be even longer now.

So Ripple Energy has gone tits up. May get rebranded as Nipple Energy by the receivers.

A quick Google and found this. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702 Seems that 4K TV can run at 10Mb/s. No point going above 40Mb/s.

Why if you are single. Seems a high price to pay for marriage.

Some connected devices report back to the manufacturer. Whether this is for quality monitoring or spying depends on how paranoid the customer is.

Measure the DHW temperature coming out of a tap, probably find it is a bit high. Is there an immersion heater that is coming on too frequently? As your minimum temperature is showing ~37°C, and your temperature sensor is low down, I suspect you are overheating. As a test, can you stop the heating for a day and see what happens to the tank temperatures, maybe some extra insulation will help. Take shorter showers.

Not easily as it all depends on which components you choose and how they interact with each other. Take @JohnMo's advice, fit and forget, when it breaks or looses too much performance, salvage what you can and replace what you cannot.

But what text format are you saving it as, will it be readable when you get to my Mother's age (95 years and 51 weeks).

Just don't over think it. Just do costings of a hybrid system and a separate component systems. Base it on 6 years of life. Things will have changed by then.

Interesting question. Basically, you cannot just pump energy into a battery, even at the correct levels i.e. volts and amps, though should really be talking about coulombs. When batteries are charged, and discharged, there is an optimal temperature range the ensure a reasonable charge/discharge rate. Keeping within the correct range will give maximum longevity. As battery chemistries vary, even within a similar group i.e. lithium, lead, sodium, different charging and discharging regimes are needed. This is usually taken care of by a battery management system (BMS) which may be a dedicated unit for a particulate battery chemistry, or programmable for different chemistries. They can often sense battery state of charge (SoC), temperature and individual cell conditions. But not all will. BMS are often built into the battery packs. Now an inverter is, in basic form, a controller that can take in a 'wild' voltage and amperage, process it to output a very controlled alternating current i.e. 230V at 50 Hz as a true sine wave. Then it gets complicated. Safety features are added on i.e. grid impedance for automatic disconnection, voltage regulation for local standards i.e. 230V -6% +10%, power limiting i.e. 16 A per phase, frequency matching to stop poor power factors and unwanted harmonic, maximum power point monitoring (MPP) which is an interface between the inverter input and the load that it is supplying, there is often a minimum load that an inverter will supply i.e. 200W. So even before one starts thinking about charging batteries, an inverter is doing a lot of work. Chemical batteries do not like to be worked too hard, especially when charging. You can think of a discharged battery as an empty carpark. Initially it is easy and quick to park a car (high voltage and current) as it gets fuller, finding a free parking spot is harder, especially if the cars are not slowing down (electrons move at close to light speed in a pure vacuum, bit slower in copper wires). What the BMS does is control the rate that the electrons can enter the battery. This is part of the reason why batteries are often charged between 20% to 80%, it is faster and preserves the battery's chemistry. Expecting a single inverter to do all the above i.e. legal requirements (grid disconnect), power management, variable load delivery and battery management is a big ask, especially for under £1000. So does it matter, yes, is it best to buy into one system, for reliability, probably yes. Is there an alternative, yes, but takes a lot of homework and fiddling. The way around this is by having an inverter and BMS that plays it a bit safe, so not the fasted charging or discharging, may compromise the overall efficiency, and can reduce the effective life of the batteries. It is a bit of a minefield really, but clever engineers do their best to get the optimal systems all working together, at an acceptable cost. So either don't overthink it, or overthink it too much.

Just been catching up on posts, and it has struck me that choices are becoming overcomplicated by things that may not really matter. By this, what I am talking about is basic systems i.e. home automation, heating systems, plumbing, security, entertainment etc that get sold on the technology and communication abilities, rather than the functionality. A few very technically minded people have bought into quite interesting control systems, then ripped the controls out, and replaced them with something very basic, but functional. Discus?

Not by much though. Most people will learn how to shower with a 2.5 lt/min flow.

So true, in many areas. When I was a lad, we had fitters/machinists, they learnt on the job and basically needed retraining when a new part needed fitting or machining. Then we had the Technicians/Toolmakers, they had gone to college to do a G&G or BTEC and could understand drawings and written instructions, so set up the machines. Then we had the Production Engineers. Minimum qualification (where I worked) was an HND in the appropriate engineering discipline. They understood the jobs and the machinery that it was made on, and importantly, what the part did in the final product. They seemed to spend a lot of time in meeting, but everything fitted together and worked reliably. The main person, on the production side, was the Chief Engineer, they were responsible to all the costs, timings, quality control etc, they had an Engineering Degree or MSc, a couple had PhDs. By the time the 1990s came along, that structure seemed to have vanished and at best, in smaller companies, you got a Technician i.e. had a C&G or BTEC/NVQ. I generally found they disliked anyone with higher qualifications. A friend of mine, a very experienced and qualified Chartered Mechanical Engineer, worked for a company that was run by an Accountant (a qualified one), was asked to cut costs by getting rid of the Engineers and employing unqualified replacements and training them up. That company made fuel metering systems, so safety critical in some applications. Thankfully the company folded before any damage was done.