SteamyTea

Allergies: I am allergic to just about anything with fur. Most of my early life I was a wheezy child. Because it was the 1960's and 70's it was because I was all caused by what we now call stress. My parents always had a cat or two. Left home to go to university and my wheezing cleared up. A decade ago I started working back in catering as the hours suited me while I was studying again. As it was a fish restaurant I was eating fish 3 or 4 times a week. Fish is good for us as we all know. After a few weeks I could hardly talk, my voice was croaky and I had trouble swallowing. This was put down to me being a smoker. Stopped smoking and it did not get better. Bugger me I am allergic to fish. Rub a tiny bit on my skin and it erupts and cracks in minutes. So I am very wary of 'diets' being a cure all. The Mediterranean diet is a killer for me, almost. I like Pizza. Cleanliness: We live in a society that takes this seriously, it is very unlikely that we by goods that have anything nasty on them, food included. So an extra bit of cleaning around the house with bleach and sprays is not going to make much difference. I think obsessive cleaning is a different problem and often forced on others. I think they call it Münchhausen Syndrome by proxy. Medical Research: Just read Ben Goldacre's (who has a fantastic mother) Bad Science and other books to realise just how hopeless medical research has been (thankfully improving now).

I agree, and shall ponder it more as I drive up to Devon in a little while.

I am still thinking about this. My first thoughts are that there is a big difference in comfort levels at different RH levels when the temperature changes. I don't think that it is simply a case of trying to keep the RH fixed regardless of the temperature. The second thought I had was how will it cope when conditions are out of range i.e. high internal temperature and very high external RH (like yesterday). would the boost just be permanently on. Also, would the rate of change curves be fixed or dynamic? In the UK it really is possible to have 4 seasons in one day. I am sure it is all solvable, just a case of working out what is really wanted.

If you can't fit East or West, but have spare room on the South, then a few extra panels could generate just as much in the mornings. It is easy to be amazed by generation figures on a very sunny spring or autumn day, there are a number of reasons these can look impressive i.e sun angles, temperature. But the truth is we usually have cloudy weather, and when we do, angles become less important. Part load inverter efficiency can dominate then (though they are all pretty good these days).

"That's entropy man"

Shower circuits often take a tortuous route to the shower, often many times the shortest distance. Just a matter of cable sizing really.

As far as I know the rules about storage are the same as PV. It is to stop linesman's being shocked. And they like to know where all the isolators are. I would not be surprised that in the not too distant future the fire brigade would need to know as well. Lithium and fire do not mix well.

The main point I would like to make is 'know your usage pattern'.

Yes I am on E7 only. If I take the total cost i.e. standing charge and VAT into account then my kWh price is, on average 15p/kWh over the last 50 days. This goes down in the winter as my day time usage is pretty constant, but my night time goes up (all to cock this year as my E7 element broke, but other years show a consistent pattern 15% day usage, 85% night usage). Quite simply, if you want to store energy, do it as DHW first (200 lt cylinder with elements about £300 and will last 30 years), this can be either for direct usage or as pre-heating. A Sunamp will do the same, but at several times the cost. Then, if you have any spare electricity, stick it in a storage heater that is placed centrally in the house i.e. hallway, or somewhere that is permanently cold i.e. dark north side. Whenever I look at batteries they just don't make technical (you have to inform your DNO you got them if grid connected) or financial sense. Good fun to play with though. Realistically rather than looking at price, CO2 emissions should be the metric.

Lots of talk about what can be generated by PV, not much information about time of demand (TOD). That is the important thing here, the rest is just hardware (either what you have or can afford). TOD is behaviour. Here is mine for the last 90 days.

ROFL as they used to type in the 1990's

Well lets see if it consistently happens.

I think that is totally missing the point that Ultramods is making. There are plenty of resources on the WWW and Buildhub is just one of them. If the site is to succeed as the premier self build site, then it has to have easily accessible high quality information. Not just a library of links. We have Google for that.

My old Dad used to cut down this large weed every year and take it to the local tip to be composted. I was up there one time and pointed out his lovely example of Japanese Knotweed. He said, "Is that what it is I have been taking it to the green waste for 20 years". I bought him some glyphosate, problem solved, he outlived the weeds but they are probably scattered all over Buckinghamshire now.

@ultramods Not so different from what our old mate lineweight is suggesting over at the other place. http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=15720&page=1#Item_30 It is amazing how quickly this sort of idea gets criticised and not acted on (my very first post was about open source housing and got bogged down in irrelevant detail) and being told it is too hard and that there are too many variables. I would have thought that was the whole point of implementing good practices rather than letting everyone reinvent the wheel, or a thermal break, or a gutter and downpipe. What may be useful are some static pages that show basic principles and formula used, maybe even a simple calculator, oh hang on, that has been suggested before and not happened as someone may have an out of date browser.

All depends if we want to inform, educated and entertain. I shall stick with entertain as there seems too many barriers to educate.

Aren't they called feature editors?

I was quite happy with DOS 5 and Windows 3. But things move on and apparently I can now use Notepad to read and write LINUX and MAC scripts properly (MS did the correct newline and carriage return, the others did not). OS's come in for a lot of stick, but it is usually the packages they are bundled with that is the problem, not the underlying system. I had a MS Vista laptop for years, never gave any problems. But then I tend to use portable apps rather than fully installed stuff, the exceptions mainly being MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and Turbocad. Means when it all goes tit's up I just take my memory stick out and plug it in another PC. Backups are dead easy too.

Give yourself about 4 hours to download and install.

I agree with Nick (on deciding if you go with PV) . What is the roof area and angle 'to the sun' i.e. is here a south facing side to your house, and can it be made strong enough to support PV? I know that there are parts of Aylesbury that still have very poor water pressure and flow, so get your water pressures and flows checked out.

Or no, if you want to install it yourself, it avoids the certification. What are you doing about the very hard water in Bucks? Fur up the heat exchanger and you may well be into a new thermal store. I had so much scale in my cylinder it actually poked itself out the side.

Probably not, it is the kind of 'sticky plaster' solution that an Architect will come up with. My solution would be gas for the DHW and an ASHP for the space heating as that will probably deliver at the lowest CO2 levels. DHW really is a pain as you either have to deliver on demand and possibly suffer the lower flow rates or store and suffer the thermal losses. The Sunamp does address the losses (as does a well insulated cylinder) and takes up less space.

I am not an expert on makes and models of combi's, and being from a renewables background, not that pro them. But from my understanding you get get some models that can modulate down, while still condensing (and therefore being more efficient) to a relatively low level. With DHW you do at least know your minimum and maximum usage, so model choice is fairly easy. And there is nothing to stop you having two boilers.

Then you look at all the heating options and decide. The options can include air to water heat pumps, air to air heat pumps, gas, solid fuel (though not a good idea), electric (low capital cost).

I like the idea of DCV, but is it really just a poshed up single room ventilation system? Some people have fitted CO2 and RH sensors to their MVHR, so this amounts to the same thing. Seems to me that when fitting MVHR, the initial design/layout is important as it makes fitting easier.