SteamyTea

I think MacKay addressed the 125 kWh/day figure in the book. It is a long time since I read it though. Seem to remember that it also includes "stuff". I think Primary energy is really the better figure when talking at a national scale. Harder to know what it is at a local scale though as we do not know all the efficiencies off the top of out heads. The difference between Primary and Delivered makes it hard to compare some things, vehicles for one.

More like 0.8%. I work on 0.25% conversion and that is before combustion losses. Plants are just terrible at converting sunlight. If plants were good, we would not be using solar panels, or burning fossil fuels for that matter. I calculated that if we burnt all biomass on the planet, and that includes the sea, we would have enough energy to last 400 days. I am in good company there as Prof Brian Cox came to a similar conclusion.

I can't, in the medium term, see much difference coming for domestic users. People struggle with dual pricing already. If that was changed to even triple pricing, say day, evening and night, the general population would just not get it. One only has to listen to You and Yours to realise how people fail to understand even basic price switching, let alone variable rates.

Cornish Hedge, proper job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_hedge Should cut out some noise bird.

Called Economy 7 isn't it. Used to be a third of the price, now it is under half the price of the E7 Day rate. Not surprising as the idea was to mop up excess nuclear during the quiet times. Not much nuclear online these days.

ICE cars have a gas peddle and gearbox. So think of it as the input being like the gearbox, it limits the maximum speed. The gas peddle finely controls the speed for any given ratio. So that is your output. Higher gear, little throttle, you go further, low gear, heavy foot, you don't go far. Simple.

One way to look at the disparity between the EPC/SAP and reality is think about what a good job you have done. Shame I did not read your meter when I set up the logger, and when I was last over. But according to my logger, you have used 6,109 kWh of electricity. That is only about a third larger than mine, and your house is at least 4 times larger. 6,109 / 200 = 30.5 kWh.m-2.year-1. Apart from the energy input from that smokey wood burner that is. Still, most of that goes up the chimney.

I don't know what an OAP is. My Mother is 90, she would understand it. She understood the mathematics of some multi-directional arithmetic I was doing a while back. A work mate of mine is 35, he don't, nor does his wife. So not an age thing, more a case of not having it explained correctly. There is less terminology than characters in a Soap Opera, or players in a soccer team, less to learn than in the Foxtrot. There are a few OAPs on this site, not counting myself in that group yet.

This is the problem with the EPC. It is really the underlying legislation/standards. They are generally worse case scenarios or the complete opposite. Nothing self builders can do about it. Except put in some PV on your huge garage roof. You like roofing, pull it off and fit some integrated panels, they will help keep the garage cooler in the summer. Your B is just one above my 1987 built timber frame house

No, because it is the input. There are two main things that govern the performance of a storage heater, the energy stored, which is in kWh and the power they can deliver, which is measured in kW. Think of it as a box of hot stones. The greater the number of stones in the box, the more energy is stored, that is the kWh's. If you take a stone out you are delivering power, power is kW's. So dividing the kWh by the kW, gives you the amount of time that the stored energy can be delivered. So varying the the amount of energy in the store, the kWh, by adjusting the the input, also changes the amount of time you can deliver power for. If you only have 1 kWh stored and you deliver power at 1 kW: 1 kWh / 1 kW = 1 h Sometimes this is hard to understand because the units kW and kWh are so similar sounding, even people that used them day in and day out often get them muddled. It really comes down to SI units and there derived units. SI units are things like metres, seconds, kilograms. From these we get derived units. These have symbols and names such as J for joule, W for watt... A J is a unit of energy and derived by multiplying mass, in kg, by distance, in metres. A watt is a joule divided by time, in seconds, so J / s = W. This can quickly lead to very large numbers, energy is often in the millions or larger, giga, tera multipliers. One thing done to reduce these large number is to change the number of seconds into an hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. (I may have not explained that too well, ask @Ed Daviesas he has something up on his website about it)

This limits the maximum temperature that the bricks get to (generally on older storage heaters). It is done via simple thermostat that just cuts the power. The reason that it is there is because it is impossible to have a storage heater that is perfectly sized. By limiting the brick temperature, the total amount of thermal energy stored can be controlled. So say you need 12 kWh of energy stored, but you can only get storage heater in 10 kWh and 15 kWh, turning now the input control, a 15 kWh store can be reduced to 12 kWh. If only it was that low, I suspect that 95% of users have no idea how to set them. That is about 6.5 million people that fell asleep during science lesson at school.

If you mean automatically set it, then no. They are very basic electro-mechanical devices. Thing is, you should not need to. First things to check is that all the elements are working, then just set the two dials in the mid position. See what happens. I know this is not the time of year to do this, but it can wait until the right time as any repairs should be easy and quick. Or just replace them. https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Type/_Heaters.StorageHeaters.html

That reduces the solar gain to a certain extent. More in your case as you have rooms in your roof.

In input dial limits the maximum temperature that the bricks get to. The higher the temperature, the more energy is stored, but also the more losses. But it does mean that more power can be delivered. There is generally a sweet spot for storage heaters. I set mine so that both dials are at 6 (half way). If I know we are in for a few days of extra cold weather, I turn the input one up. warmer weather, I turn it it down. Sometimes I forget, but soon realise and can then adjust with the output (flap) knob.

Probably both, we live in enlightened times.

It does, but as the area that strip covers is small, not much heat escapes. It is really to do with stopping the convection, not radiant heat. A radiator is really a convection heater. They would have to be glowing to radiate a decent amount of heat (opinion is divided here, but that is another subject). Just take it as read that this small, think strip, does stop most of the heat escaping during the charge up period.

I use an old CurrenCost device with an optical sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi. I wrote the code myself, so not perfect, but it does work. I set one up at @Joe90 house. That one has the more basic and less accurate clamp on sensor. That is chugging along nicely and I can even remotely access it when I am parked in his drive. I have seen some designs for a basic optical meter, these read the red flashing LED and intend to make one up and see how good they are. The trouble with homemade stuff is that there is a lot of fiddling about to get the data off them as one needs to get them networked via the home router, or your phone.

The strip reduces the airflow to almost zero, so no convection happens. The rest of the heat is insulated, so little is lost (they are warm to the touch, but not hot. So a small strip can reduce the overnight heating. Assuming that storage heaters are not faulty, they work incredibly well. As an aside, check your parents water heater. There are two elements usually, one at the top and one at the bottom. If the top one is switched on it can heat water anytime of the day or night. This gets expensive. Ideally just the bottom heater should be on as this is the Economy 7 one. It heats the water during the night and even if you only use water during the day, it does not get thermally recharged until the next night (usually between midnight and 7 AM, though this can be different in different areas). If you can read the meter, post up the numbers and that gives a fair bit of information. There should be 3 readings t= total, 1=day and 2=night. If you can also see the date the meter was installed (often just crayoned on the meter) then that is also useful. Some more modern and key meters give more information, but it should be fairly clear what is what.

Not surprised the tenant left with a bog like that. I bought a house in a very hard water area (Aylesbury). The bog was like that when I moved in. I bit the bullet, put on rubber gloves, got a kitchen scourer and a bottle of Toilet Duck or similar, and just started scrubbing. Not the worse job I have had to to (that was cleaning out the spa bath filter from the YMCA Sheffield, I have no idea what those young men got up to). There were a few really sticky bits that needed to be sanded away with a pumice stone (which also got rid of the greeny blue streak on the bath a treat). Friends and family were well impressed with how clean I got everything. But they never shook hands with me again.

Energized just means it is getting electrical power. The power for night storage heaters is from a separate circuit and is switched on and off by a radio signal receiver in the main meter. There are some very old systems that still have mechanical timers, but not many left now.

I am not @ProDave but I use storage heaters and Economy 7 The type of tariff that you use does not change your energy use, it just allows you to time shift your usage to a time when the electricity is cheaper. This is why storage heaters are used. They store the energy for later, controlled release. If you took the bricks out of a storage heater, you would be left with a normal panel heater. Now imaging that this is a 1 kW panel heater and you need it on permanently. This would use 24 kWh of electricity and deliver 24 kWh of thermal energy into the room. At a normal electricity tariff of say 16p/kWh, that would be £3.84/day Now imagine if you can store the same amount of energy and still release it at a steady state of 1 kW. You still need 24 kWh/day, but you only get a 7 hours window to use it in. That mean you have to charge up at a higher rate, in this case 3.4 kW. A typical night rate for Economy 7 is 9p/kWh, so now that same energy is costing £2.16/day. The down side to this is that rather than having a day rate at 16p/kWh, it is charged at 22p/kWh. This is why, if on Economy 7, supplementary electric heaters are used during the day, the price seems very high. Getting the storage heaters working correctly is quite important when it comes to price. Storage heaters and Economy 7 have had a bad rap over the years, which I think is unfair. If they are used incorrectly i.e. flap always open, then they are in effect just a convecting panel heater and will cool off quite quickly. Once cool, supplementary heating is required and if that is during the day, then the price is high. It is why we hear stories of the house being hot in the morning and cold in the evening, and very high bills. One way to check what the balance between day and night usage is, is to look at the electricity bills or meter. If the day readings are similar to the night readings, then the heaters need setting correctly. As an example, nearly 90% of my electrical usage is during the night period. I have low bills and a warm house.

I thought Goop was Gwyneth Paltrow's website that catered for the idiotic worried well. I have purposely uncoupled myself from her. Does this goop uncouple too?

Downers work a treat.

https://news.sky.com/story/alabama-man-fed-meth-to-caged-attack-squirrel-11744502

I have basic storage heater and they are pretty simple inside. Spares are not always cheap, so shop around for them. You could look in the local paper for secondhand ones. They usually go for nothing (3 in the street in PZ last week, nothing wrong with them). Don't go for oil filled heaters, these don't store energy, they are just convection heaters. If heat is needed in an emergency, get some cheap fan heaters. They warm a place up very fast, are easy to move, and the noise is a reminder that they are on.