SteamyTea

Sounds dreadful, over protective, dull, and everything I hate. If they ran a climbing tip, would they put fluffy cushions on the deck and a lift up the rocks.

You should try Cornwall! I go to one of the most visited spots, I just see cars as a challenge and refuse to ride in the gutter. Having said that, I don't ponce about and if I can get out the way I do. You can usually tell if a rider is confident or not by the way they position themselves on the road and how much they wobble.

I use this for my stretching exercises. Got it for nothing as the rear brake had disconnected itself. The mudguards and saddle cover were from Poundland, water bottle I picked up in the 90's while watching the end of Le Tour in Paris, I like to think that Alex Zulle drank from it. The speedo was from B&M for a fiver. The rack and bags I already had. So a 7 quid bike. How much is a yoga lesson?

On a more serious note, it is going to be a struggle to get adoption of these sorts of systems until the price is really low. I was chatting to a biker yesterday and we started to talk about EVs and climate change. His view was that you never pay back the embodied energy and carbon on batteries, climate change did not exist as 'the climate has always changed', RE was too expensive, solar and wind power just 'don't work at all'. I asked him where he got all this information from and he could not say. He also thought old cars and bikes where better as some produced the same power as today's vehicles. He then told me that methane was the real problem as it had a higher GHC potential than CO2. So 'we need to burn that instead as it only produces water'. I pointed out that not eating meat would have a greater benefit, but he did not like that idea, so it was rubbish (and it is in some ways). I come across these sorts of 'fact' quite a lot. I really think that there needs to be proper education on this, not popular newspapers spouting total rubbish all the time. I am not sure how to do that without it sounding like a sermon. I always pose the question 'what benefit is it to you keeping things the same?'. Usually goes unanswered.

Because they are generally wealthy tossers that like showing off and self promotion.

Not many location suffer the voltage problem, a few rural ones maybe. Trackers are just a waste if time really. If they were so great, all the solar farms would have them. If you go for a multi-split system, then you need to make sure the inverter can handle the number of strings, or have multiple inverts. You have to remember that an inverter needs a minimum voltage to start working. And it is best to undersize inverters, so you are limited on choice. My idea uses a single inverter and a box of switches. You could dump to a load, but take the day before yesterday, that load would be on for a fair slice of the day, much easier to just disconnect excess generation surely.

Of just watch some youtube videos and teach yourself. Then a Big Mac for tea. Just remembered that two ex-girlfriends now teach yoga. Looking back it is amazing the similarities between them, and the reasons they are both ex's. Here is a video about Meditation for Humility, what a load of shit.

If you want all the news on energy storage, and in a very rosy delivery, then go here: https://www.energy-storage.news/

I ride my bike to the woods, there is a cafe there and it is a simple ride. Up hill on the way home though

Just Ohm's Law really. Change the amps or the volts and you get different power. The amps or voltage are changed when the internal resistance of the module varies with different light levels and temperatures. Some people may notice that they are getting less power this week that they were in April (did we have any sunny days this year back then). This is to do with sun angles and panel temperature. It is the sun angles that people tend to get hung up on, but usually that is set by the design of where you want to place them, so you have little choice. I did suggest that if you have lots of area and choice, you could have as much PV as you like by switching the arrays as the sun moves across the sky, while still staying within the DNO imposed limits. Surprised no one has picked up on that. You do need a big DC switch though. Or power down the inverter, switch array, power the inverter back up.

Yes, things have moved on, but they now dress it up as 'complimentary therapies'. Why not sell it for what it is, a pleasant experience. I can't stand the spiritualism of it all, bloody whale music and scents that make me sneeze. Like Yoga, good for you all that stretching and balancing, but I am sure no one has really been enlightened to the mysteries of the life, the universe and everything from it. LSD does that. Off to pick wild mushrooms in the woods now.

I have been pondering this battery storage issue. Couple of things crossed my mind: Power Density Power Delivery We usually talk, and record, how much energy we need or generate, but at the relatively small scale of a single house, power is what matters. No matter how much you generate and store, you still need to get it to a machine i.e. your kettle. So one of the problems of self consumption is the size of an inverter needed. Up to 5 kW is pretty cheap, starts getting expensive after that. 5kW is pretty large, but can soon be used to capacity i.e. immersion heater and a kettle, put an induction hob on and you have exceeded that capacity. Taking a lithium ion battery with a power density of 300W/kg, to deliver 5 kW you need 17 kg of batteries. That will give you a storage capacity of 3.3 kWh. Except that is the mathematical maximums and you have to apply Peukert's Law, which basically states the higher the discharge, the less time it work C = Ik.t Nothing clever there really, but something to remember. Typically batteries are discharged to 80% (well for lead acid ones) of maximum capacity to prolong life. Some more modern chemistries claim a safe 90%. The trouble with that is that they warm up, and it is the warming that causes the degradation to a certain extend (along with oxidation and other chemical reactions). This basically means that if you discharge a battery too much, and too quickly, then you have to let it cool before you can start charging. Charging/discharging rate is affected by temperature, why Tesla warm the batteries up when you press 'Ludicrous' mode. There was a rule of thumb of lead acid batteries of 5:1 i.e for every 1kW you wanted delivered, you needed 5kWh of storage. I am sure there is a similar metric for lithium ions, but not looked it up. So basically what I am saying is that you need to know your power delivery, which means doing so proper modelling or monitoring and then decide if the costs of that large battery pack and secondary inverter is worthwhile. As for electric cars, still a bit early to put in the infrastructure, we are probably going to have a Betamax/VHS war and we know where that ended, with a totally different method of storing movies (.mp4 .mpeg .avi .mov .flv .wedm .mkv .vob .ogg. vog .drc .gif .gifv .mng .qt .wmv .yuv .rm .rmvb .asf .amv .m4p .m4v .I have lost the will to live).

I was working very late one night on the tooling for the Ford P100 pickup. We had a small chip that needed to be repaired, so decided that I could superglue the broken epoxy back into place. Stuck my fingers to it so well I had to spend 2 hours trimming them off with a Stanley. My boss thought it was funny, especially as I needed a wee. I had visions of being taken to the Ford P/Type shop with wet knickers. As for the manicure course. When I was lecturing we were allowed 2 free courses a year, one as professional development and the other was for fun. Professional development I learnt BSL as no one could test me on it apart from the examiners, so that worked well (and I am qualified to level 2, so was pretty proficiency and I had a deaf student). For the fun courses I did things like catering, picture framing and art. Once I had run out of those interesting courses I was struggling to find anything interesting. Luckily a friend of mine from the BSL courses had the same problem and we decided to pick something at random, bit like playing snap. We got the nail course and the rules were we had to do it. Thankfully I got some more lecturing hours that happened at the same time as the pampering sessions, so could pull out. I should have done massage really, but I used to be the dummy on that quite often (hard to believe that they struggle to get people to have a soothing massage). I was always the only bloke on that too.

I did a City and Guilds manicure course Long story, but I was the only bloke on it.

I think the IEEE brought it in when they updated the regs. Might have been MCS, but they do not set the electrical rules, just the FiT/RHI ones. I had left the industry by then, but when chatting at my old electrician, he mentioned it. I always thought it strange that the inverter was tucked away up in the loft. Seemed harder work to fit them as well. Clarification on this point would be useful. Anyone got a set of the lasted Edition.

Hardly fluent, but I really dislike all programming. So the less I have to learn/relearn the better. I shall stick to just Python and HTML, and then only at a basic level.

As the sensors are only a couple of quid each, why not fit more. The cabling is easy as they are 1Wire.

You are not allowed to have the inverters in the loft anymore, unless there is dedicated cooling for them.

I tried using Lua, just could not get it to do anything at all. Probably my inexperience. So gave up and went back to the more familiar Python (well familiar to me anyway).

You can set the Wemos up with a USB cable and a PC. In Micropython all drivers for 1Wire and DHTs are already done. I think there are quite a few more as well. I keep meaning to get back to sorting mine out. All that was left to do was to get it to save the data somewhere else. Which should be fairly simple, but as it is Linux, it is probably not.

@newhome There was such fun when deciding on the domain name for this site. Much of it was down to @Construction Channel suggesting the 'hub' part and knocking up a quick logo. I thought that it looked a bit like the Halfords logo, but others saw it for what it was. A complete rip off of the better known 'hub' site. Oh happy days they were.

That's the one I got two, couple of quid at The Works.

I read a book about it, all I learnt was that the Dutch are tall because their grandmothers got starved in WW2.

Eat enough cakes and drink enough alcohol then you could self studied epigenetic.

I lived in Pennsylvania, just outside Harrisburg. Literally down the road was Three Mile Island, and the other way was Lancaster County. You could always tell when you were entering Amish areas, they smelt of pig shit. And then there was Centralia, if you think that a nuclear meltdown was bad, you should see that place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania