SteamyTea

Water meters are great. When I chat to people I know and the tell me that they pay half what I do, I know they don't wash much

Cucumber is edible, as are strawberries, but they taste awful.

Yes, Raspberry Pi Zero with wireless, a DHT22 sensor, a MicroSD card, a cheap 5V phone charger and a 4.7K resistor. All the software is downloadable. Job is done.

Pity I did not take a picture earlier today. I made a cheap ply planter and painted it with cheap fence paint. After 4 years filled with dirt and plants, the ply was fine, the screws had failed due to corrosion.

Measure and log it, only cost 20 quid to get high quality data.

Seems very cheap, will it last. And pay the 8quid or so a tonne for water, to keep the beaches clean. When I heat water, the water costs more than the heating.

Doing a quick calculation, if you install PV at £1000/kWp, at the 5 year mark the power will have cost you 22p/kWh, so about the same as E7 day rate (slightly less than mine). If you do go down the PV rout, you will ditch the ST anyway. Probably worth getting rid of now and save yourself approximately £120/year maintenance. Generally, any 'improvements' only add a little to the value of the house, any renewables will add nothing and, in some circumstances, detract from a house. If you said to someone that your RE systems gave you an income of £5000/year and paid for themselves in 2 seconds, that would make people suspicious, if you told them the opposite, they would not buy, tell them the truth and they will not understand it. We tend to get sucked in to all the RE technology and low running costs of a house, most people want a good school near by and some shops/pub. Sell a dream, not a reality. Infact you could market it to dog owners, that way it is one less near to me.

If it is genuinely a 5 year plan, do nothing.

I think in your case you would be better off fitting PV, it would be cheaper and you will offset a fair slice of your usage as you can store a fair bit. Ditch that ST while you are at it.

Every year, when we get a few sunny days, we have the same conversations about over heating. We do the same when we get a cold week too. It is easy enough to do an estimate of extreme temperatures, but they don't correlate with time of year too well. This ear we had the cold spell in March I think, may have been April. But I think in your case you have a more fundamental problem caused by too much glass area, that is not going to change. A quick look on ebay and you can get some delivered for a few quid. Got to be worth a go as this is a problem that is not going to go away, just hide itself for 50 weeks of the year.

DIY one window yourself and see what difference it makes. Or just move to the coast. No real problems here

What a brilliant tool.

Except we have been told to get rid of the old refrigerants. It is legislation not company policy.

Forgot this bit. The gasses currently used are being phased out and are almost certainly going to be replaced with CO2. CO2 is a much better gas as you can get delivery temperatures up to 90°C. Though how this affects the physical size of the units and the frosting issue I don't know yet.

I answered it, buy the correct cleaner

That does complicate it a bit. With an ASHP you have 3 temperatures to consider. The temperature you want your house at, which is affected by such things as insulation levels, airtightness, solar gain, wind losses etc. External air temperature, this affects the overall performance of the ASHP and gets more complicated when the affects of humidity are taken into account. The delivery temperature, this is just what temperature you want the heat pump side of the ASHP to output. Too high and the advantage of any heat pump is quickly lost. This is related to to the type of refrigerant gas used (more later). See above, you need to know the coefficient of performance at different temperature and RH levels for each output temperature. It is why an ASHP needs to be oversized. This is not a fault, it is just the way physics works. You can think of it as similar to the way that fossil fuels are made. Each year that organic matter grows to get laid down in the correct place on the earth for form fossil fuels, there is a variance caused by different weather. Some years more gets laid than others (bit like my love life). The end product, say natural gas, is just the store, same as a thermal store, in a way. I have no idea what my house is TBH. I've never been asked for it. Find out, or work it out, otherwise you are just guessing and can never make an informed decision. I suggested that the forum could have a calculator, but apparently it is 'too hard' to do. So we shall just keep answering the same question with the same incomplete answer. Or get a copy of @JSHarris's spreadsheet. Detailed weather data is available here: http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukcp09/data/gridded-land-obs/gridded-land-obs-daily/timeseries/maximum-temperature/ http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukcp09/data/gridded-land-obs/gridded-land-obs-daily/timeseries/minimum-temperature/ So no excuses for not knowing what the temperatures are.

Remember that when speccing an ASHP, you need to oversize them.

I tend to avoid the 'sticky stuff' these days, though I am always looking at houses and wonder why composites are not used more. Seems silly to me that we can make complicated shapes that are waterproof from cheap hand laminated GRP i.e. a fishpond, but we make walls and roofs of houses from small components with joints between them. And they tend to be put together by people with hangovers and little education in material science.

Dichloromethane is better for Polyurethanes, it will dissolved them when they have cured. Not flammable either. Why we used it when I was moulding PUs.

If it is acetone, you have the wrong stuff.

That was a design that had a cold tank above the hot cylinder, and some pipes running up the side wasn't it. My cylinder is a bog standard E7 one of 220 lt. Cold in the bottom, hot out the top, top pipe bends 90° then a T. One side goes to the FE tank in loft and other side supplies hot water. Initially I had losses similar you @JSHarris, but by lining the cupboard with 100mm celotex and lagging the pipework I now have that down to very little. Less than 0.5 kWh/day and probably less. So don't dismiss an ordinary system on a standard heat loss assumption, it can be easily overcome.

As usual, when talking about heating systems, there is a lot of bollocks spoken about the details. There are two basic ways to heat DHW. Directly when needed or heated and stored until needed. Directly heated when needed requires a large boiler, the more hot water needed, the larger the boiler. Stored until needed can use a much smaller output boiler, but it needs to run for longer to recharge the DHW cylinder. All the rest, that nonsense about vented or unvented, large cylinders or thermal stores, thermostatic valves, heat exchangers etc is just the detail bollocks. Similar with space heating in a way. You can heat the air directly or heat some water, then pump it around the place to radiators A radiator is really a convection heater, but an UFH systems is really just a large radiator. The theory is the same e.g. how much power will it deliver. All the rest is detail i.e. gas, oil, solid fuel, heat pumps, solar, PV. What it really comes down to is how easy it is to install and how well you can insulate the parts that need insulating and place the parts that are hot. One of the problems is that we have got used to combing and system gas boilers and most plumbers are only happy to use these. They are not really that efficient, just that natural gas is so cheap that it looks that way. But I think it is about time one of the plumbers did a few sketches of different wet heating systems and explained the differences between them. Trouble is that prejudiced comes into it and to the unwary that can cause problems and confusion. My view is keep it simple and split the space and DHW systems if possible. One size does not fit all.

Is the whole area you live in without gas? That makes a difference to peoples attitudes as they may well be used to all electric.

Part G of the building regs has it all. Page 36, 125 lt/person.day. Baths can never be big enough.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel