SteamyTea

Part of the question was My view is that building is just that. Foundation and services, walls, roofs, windows, doors, heating, wiring. Basically a finished shell. The rest is decoration. Some people could spend the price of my house on a kitchen, bathroom and garage.

Is footprint, in metres squared, really the best gauge the building industry can come up with. Would £/total wall length be better. Then exclude kitchen and bathrooms and plot. Then adjust for number of levels.

On the roof, would make the difference between 6 PV modules and 8 PV modules.

In the UK, a totally unqualified person, if often called an 'engineer' by their employers. It used to drive me mad, as an engineer, that my boss would send the storeman (he was a good bloke and a very good storeman) out on a service call as an engineer. Mind you, the one other real engineer we had, sawed though some roof trusts to fit a sauna, on a listed building. He got thrown off site. Is Tesco still about 100 times the size of Sainsbury, or was that just the profit they made a few years back. Re: Investing in UK manufacturing. Why would you invest in high capital cost, low profit industry?

Is it really about teabags and horse meat though. Most of our trade is finacial and other services. Many people think that these are not real goods, but they generate income, so are. We do, as a nation, fixiated with making things, eventhough we don't manufacture that much in the UK. Last year, Germany made 6.3 million cars, we made 1.52 million. About a quarter. We like to think that we are world leaders in pharmaceutricals, well in 2017 the UK employed 73,000 people, Germany, in 2015 employed 114,000. Even France employed more people at 92,000 The EU employed 723,000 in total. Finacial services in the UK employs 1.2 million people. It is in a totally different league.

Since 1985 the EU and China have had a deal. EU-China Trade and Cooperation Agreement. This has been upgraded to the European Union Association Agreement and since 2007 is still being worked on as things change. Who knows how, or where, the UK will fit into this if we have a no deal exit (I don't think we will).

I don't know why, but I have this image of your place in my mind.

Don't we, as the public, have to trust journalists to know their subject, regardless of personnel views. Maybe a few should be taken to court for misrepresentation.

Does that 18 kWh/km include stopping and starting, every 15 minutes after Exeter. That is the part of the journey that takes all the time.

Enough to run it for 15 hours each year. About the time it takes to get from London to Penzance and back.

I know someone that would pay good money for that. Odd though as he installs fire alarms systems. I always wished that someone had offered me a packet of fags when I was 13 and been told to smoke them all. I would have developed an aversion to nicotine. Or I would have had a free packet of Marlboro.

There is quite a difference in the power of the units. 0.33 or 0.24 Wh.m-3 And the sound levels. Seems to me that the more expensive on is a lot better.

Isn't Net Return what you get back after all gains, losses, costs etc are calculated. So it does include your original investment. Think it is usually called Total Return. I think these would be a B on the credit quality rating.

The only thing I would change about our voting system is that uncast votes go to the incumbent party, or in the case of a referendum, the status quo. As long as everyone is away of that, they know what not voting means. Hopefully it will get better voter engagement and reduce tactical voting.

Not so sure about this. With small turbines, the area in the centre is pretty 'dead', so generally small turbines have very poor efficiency. Also as the blades are fixed, their efficiency tends to vary with windspeed, with peak efficiency generally happening a little below the windspeed where peak output happens. That is before all the electronic that convert or condition the output have had a chance to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and thermal energy. You can get a rough approximation of yield by using statistical methods involving an accumulative weibull distribution, but this tends not to work too well for small turbines that are affected by the ground, wind direction and the other problems mentioned above. As a general note about wind turbines, they very rarely produce the name plate output as the windspeeds needed, say 15 m/s is quite high for close to the ground. With small turbines (domestic), they are designed to automatically stall at just over the maximum rated windspeed for safety reasons. The rule of thumb for large turbines is bigger, higher and with as little 'clutter' around them. Why they work so well out at sea, or on top of a hill, or even on a plain, they are rubbish alongside a hill, high buildings and even woodland.

If you are making a WT for fun, it need not be expensive, or that efficient. When I worked for a small turbine manufacturer, I suggested that they just made the tower and generator. Let others make the 'sexy' bladed. People seem to think that is where they can improve over Betz, so let them learn. I still think that the idea has some legs, but it does require a stringent understanding of what loads can be placed on the generator. Also, rather than an electrical generator 'up top' why not a simple air compressor. Store the air in a tank, or lots of tanks, release through a turbine when needed. Can get a bit of thermal energy to. Only for small off grid stuff. Large turbines need to pump the juice straight to the grid. Less waste that way.

It may be under File-->Export-->[pick your format from list] Quick look at their website and it says that it can only export as PNG, SVG and DE https://drawexpress.com/faq.html

@DarrenA Do you know if anyone has started but abandoned their project yet?

If I could do that, then I would not need any heating.

There is a bit of a myth that supply and demand keeps prices at the optimal level. This is only true if you take a medium term average. That happens in the short term is that prices go up, or down in steps. This is because of production capacity. So say you have a factory that can produce 1,000,000 bricks a week, to make 1,000,001, you need a new factory. It makes that extra brick quite expensive. So what happens is that before the major investment is made, prices start to rise, regardless of production or sales volumes. Perversely, this also happens in the reverse situation, This is to pay the costs of reducing production i.e. righting off capital expenditure, staff redundancy payments, relocation expenses, different marketing strategies. With small companies, that may have overproduced and then gone bankrupt, there were bargains to be had at auctions. This tends not to be the case with larger manufacturers and suppliers. They now go into pre-pack administration, fail to pay their suppliers/landlords/councils, but don't pass on those savings to the consumer. Or sometimes they get bought out by another company that is in a similar or allied field. Buying up a competitor is a good way of charging more. Now a quick look at the UK economy on Wikipedia shows that 1.5% is agriculture, 18.8% industry and 79.7% services (2016 figures). So where would you sensibly put your money, in agriculture or services? Industry is quarter the size of the service sector. It could be argues that agriculture, being so small, has the greatest potential for growth, and if you listen to Farming Today, they seem to think that the market will be challenging, but have greater opportunities. This may or may not be true, but I suspect that the opportunities are for the land owners, rather than the people doing the actual work (we have some odd tax rules around farming). Many think that once we are free of EU rules and regulations, and even if we just trade under WTO agreements, we will be free to buy from whoever we want. Ask a USA dairy farmer how much they now sell to Canada, which has an agreement with the EU to buy 80% of all their dairy from the EU, in exchange for concessions to sell grains and metals to the EU (they can sell a few other things as well). Canada was not a dairy nation, but it wants to do more trade with the EU, so the deal they agreed did not affect their economy much, probably reduced prices, but it has locked out trade with some other nations. The knock on affects of this are currently unknown. So for Canada, they got a good deal, the EU got a good deal, for everyone else, not such a good deal. So this idea that the UK can freely trade 'with the rest of the world' is nonsense, there will be restrictions, usually financial. This is why one of the UK's economic successes, the banking, insurance and financial services is moving registered offices and personnel into EU countries. The bulk of our earnings, as a nation, is in those sectors, neither the UK government, or the EU parliament are in the least bit bothered about the cost of bricks or windows. If you take cement production in the UK as a proxy of general construction, then the figures are not looking good. There was ~2% decline in 2016, by 2018 the market was 4.5% smaller, but the cement industry put a glossy spin on it saying that sales had increased. Increased from a lower base. Capacity has been taken out of the market and prices have risen above general inflation. Much of of the supply has been for large infrastructure projects, mainly Cross Rail and the hope of HS2. Cross Rail is at an end now and HS2 may not happen, nor will the Severn Barrage. Or a new London Airport. So where does all this leave us. In a tight place financially. Expect price rises, harder to source materials, lower quality and less choice. Refurbishment may be a better option that new build.

Welcome I speak no Portuguese, except two words, one is rude, but my neighbour is fluent in it. What kind of timber cladding for a roof are you thinking off. In the UK we tend to use tiles or slate. Though we do use rolled steep sheet and composite plastics (rubber). But the best is really solar panels, they can act as a protective cover and generate electricity.

One of these, £112 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Machine-Automatic-Cordless-Rechargeable-Electric/dp/B07TN6QL26?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-brave-uk-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B07TN6QL26

But he probably already assumed that there was something wrong, He should have done the heat calculations first, then based on that, looked for evidence. (he may have, but my experience of dealing with ecology students is that they assume that 'man' will change everything for the worse, and the food chain will always collapse)

If you know the maximum power of the windfarm, the length, diameter, resistance and specific heat capacity of the cable, then look at the conductance to the round, you should be able to get a figure.

Just ask for a smart meter to be fitted, they will be out like a shot.