SteamyTea

Yeah right, I can use a bedpan to save to ever getting up as well.

I could easily live with that restriction, but it is nice to be able to get up in the middle of the night and make some tea and not have to worry about whether the water is heating or not. A m2 of biomass will yield around 2 kWh/year, a m2 of PV will give about 130 kWh/year. To put that into perspective, in December, that same m2 of PV will yield over 10 kWh. Not much I grant you, but a lot better than the 'sustainable' biomass option. Eigg has a total surface area of 30.5 million m2, at 0.25% efficiency (about what plants produce) and at an annual irradiation level of 90 kWh/m2, the island could produce about 7 MWh/year of biomass energy. There is no 'sustainable' biomass plan for the island.

Dug out my BME280 sensors and fixed them up to my RPi Trouble is I am not getting a humidity reading. It would also be nice if it was easy to use the SPI bus rather than the i2c one. I have the RTC on that and one BME280. If I plug in another BME280, it gives gibberish readings for the air pressure. How easy is it to make something that can cycle though the sensors, maybe just by switching the Vcc in and out.

I slept in the rain last night (wind changed direction and had window open). So had a little think about this 'semi' off grid problem. Could you not wire the house a bit differently so that you have light, fridge, freezer, central heating pump/controls and maybe a couple of spare sockets on the island grid. It may still be possible to use more than 5 kWp, but mush harder to. I have no idea what actually happens if you do go over the 5 kWp limit. Does it blow a fuse and need someone from the DNO to fix it, or trip out and just need a reset? Or do they do the decent thing and charge £2 a unit. The rest of the house could then be on a secondary circuit, one that is only connected to your own generation and storage. That way you can use more power if it is being generated or has been stored. As the island increases its renewable generation/storage, they may give you another, higher limit, then it is just a case of transferring a few circuits to the island grid. I also think that it is worth moving away from all combustion technologies. Shame that the island is going RE electric, then some islanders fill the local area up with smoke and fumes. Rather defeats the object.

Does it do that with the TV turned off too?

Welcome First thing you need to know when going just about off grid is what your energy and power requirements are. So you need to break them down into categories i.e. Space Heating, Hot Water, Cooking, Lighting, Clothes Washing, Vacuuming, etc. Then look at the maximum power needed i.e. 100W for lighting, 3kW for water heating, 4 kW for cooking. Then the total energy required for each over a 24 hour period. Add in some contingency and you should be able to work out the storage needed. It is harder to reliably calculate the generation from wind and solar, but that is what the storage contingency is for. Or just get a generator and a relatively small battery storage system.

All I am going to say on this subject

What a good idea. I would be quite interested in making a couple of them too. One for home and one for the car. Maybe the home one should be an inside and outside one.

Welcome I like charts

Yes, and I think that I read somewhere that the control system has to be 'non propriety', whatever they mean by that.

That is only comparing one plug which we are familiar with, against another one, which we are not familiar with. what is really needed is for the world to agree on one type that has primary and secondary features built in, and is small. it is really not hard to do. But that would take cooperation and the putting aside of national prejudices. In 2013 in the UK, there were 3 domestic deaths from electrocution.

Totally moving away from storage heaters (not that I mind as I was just highlighting some change). If, for whatever reason you change something and the cost becomes prohibitive, you don't achieve your aim either. So regardless of who a product or service 'safety' or 'best practice' body is, and it probably does not matter if it is local, national, trading block or global, they have to keep the cost of implantation down. The BS1363 plug is now rather outdated as be also protect out mains voltage circuits with other devices. But there is a good reason to keep it in the UK as the cost, and in some cases there will be danger in changing outlets (a cack-handed DIYer), far outweigh any advantage. Having worked in two industries that have loads of legislation attached to them (catering, and health and leisure), it is really not hard to comply. I do wish that all legislation, and an easy to understand guide i.e. IEE17th Edition, was freely available. There would be no excuse for non compliance apart from laziness. I also think that anything that has to be administered by a local body i.e. the local council, needs to be to the same standard. It s no good having one LA saying you can do something while another cannot.

That is the way I understood it too. All pretty basic stuff really and probably no bad thing.

This one slipped by me, does anyone know what it really means. It also may account for why I got a letter offering me free storage heaters (as long as I was on benefits, which I am not). Here is a link to some 'stuff': https://www.lot20.co.uk/

Mother said it would make me go blind!

@JSHarris Just borrow a couple of number plates and double side then to your existing number plates. You know the original registration for your car, use that one. I got told off for walking into the local tip, after I had actually walked in. They refused to allow me to put one small bag of rubbish in the skip, tossers.

Does the iPad have Numbers on it, if so, that will be perfectly good enough.

You can get LibreOffice for the iPad, and it is free. Most of us work with Excel and there may be the odd incompatibilities, but generally for basic stuff there is not a problem. If you have a PC, it may be easier to do all this calculations and stuff on that.

Yes the * is multiply Sometimes a . is used, as is an x, and sometimes there is nothing. U-Value is a measure of power, with the unit W. W means watts and is what is called a derived unit. It is derived from the basic SI units of mass, distance and time. This may sound a bit odd when you think of electricity or solar power, but it really does all make sense. The other derived unit is the joule, J, and is the unit for energy. The old name for energy was heat, and is descried as the ability to do work, the rate at which work is done is called power, which is watt, W. So you can see that there is a relationship between energy and power, with the only difference being time, which is measured in seconds, s. We sometimes use hours (h), 1 hour is 3600 seconds. You may also often see 8760h which is 1 year. So U-Value is W.m-2.K-1 All that means is power divided by metres squared multiples by temperature difference. It may also be written as W / (m2 . K). So if you have a wall, or window, or anything that allows energy to pass though it because of a temperature difference between one side and another, you need to know 3 things initially. The U-Value of the element you are looking to calculate, say a wall with a U-Value of 0.15 W.m-2.K-1 (°C and K are interchangeable) , the surface area on the cold side, say 7.5 m2 and the temperature difference between the two, say 12°C. Multiply them all together (called the product) gives you the power loss in W (watts) 0.15 [W.m-2.K-1] x 7.5 [ m2] x 12 [°C] = 13.5 W Now say you have those exact conditions for 8 hours, you can work out the energy loss in watt hours. This is useful as we buy our energy in kWh, or 1000 Wh. So 13.5 [W] x 8 [h] = 108 Wh, which is 0.108 kWh. If you pay 3p per kWh for gas, then the losses will cost you: 0.108 [kWh] x 0.03 [£] = £0.00324 (or about 0.33p). Now what you have to actually do is work out all your areas and the associated U-Values, get some local weather data, and work out the losses for a whole year. This may sound daunting, but it is what spreadsheets are made for. Hope that helps and feel free to ask about any bit you do not understand (and I may have made an error anyway). Here is a power loss calculator I knocked up a while back. https://steamytea.wixsite.com/u-valuecalculator

Can I have subtitles please

Welcome Albert. Devon is a large county, which part of it are you in.

I am away for a few days, but have taken all the advice on board. Looks like it will be a job for next Sunday now. I have had a word with my not unattractive, single, blonde, European neighbour about using her shower if it all goes tits-up. That could cost me

I made a large drip tray for our spa baths to drip into. I am surprised that it is not done more often, almost as a standard. But a pipe can leak anywhere, but usually and a joint or junction I would think. A simple way to detect a very small leak would be useful, though it may not show where the problem actually is.

Part of the reason is that they now know the causes better. In the past you just got labelled as a 'wheezy child', now, because of better understanding, treatments and GP incentives, it is treatable. Once you put a label on something, you can treat it for life, the big pharmaceutical companies love that. Asthma is something that you treat the symptoms of, not the causes, rather hard to recommend 'stop breathing' as the cure. The other reason may well be poor air quality, in the past, when air quality was a lot worse, people just died. We also have more pets, I think it is something like 50% of households have a cat or dog. But may have just dreamt that. The jury is out on our clean lifestyle causing problems. There is some research about some sort of stomach worm not being with us so much these days. We also tend to know a lot more people as we get older.

After 30 years being in place, it may well be a bit solid. If I manage to get it out, how many times should I wrap the PTFE tape around the thread. And are all the threads the same size 2 1/4 BSP?