SteamyTea

There is RHI on ST as far as I know. But then there are maintenance and running costs too. And a more complicated plumbing and storage design. First things first though is to measure your water usage, and energy to heat that, without that information it is impossible to make a proper decision.

That demo video reminds me of Blue Peter. "and some sticky backed plastic" I wonder what it is like to fit on a wet and grubby, let alone windy, building site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tML48HtUIS8

How about a decent pair of cushion soled shoes/boots. When I worked in toolshops, which all had concrete floors, some days after my drive home I could hardly walk (still have same problem in the mornings thesedays, but I am older), but found decent shoes made a big difference.

So that people know the difference, I have done a screenshot of Palemoon and then Firefox.

As long as it works, the rain and flooding in Cornwall is better than other places

Not going to look at the details, just ask a question (I have mains drainage that overflows onto a beach when it rains, makes a change from seeing dog turds). How well/easy is it to anchor to the ground? In other words, what is to stop if floating away if the ground floods?

Why are you concerned about condensation? A condensation risk analysis should have been done when your house was designed. Also, what are the details between the SIP panel and the ground/floor, there has been much discussion about this in the past.

Don't you want the glass to cover the top, stops rainwater pooling at the lower edge. Or you could just mastic on a second sheet of glass to totally cover it.

I don't think that heat losses from convection are much of a worry.

Generally speaking. PUs don't catch fire these days, they have a retardant in them as part of the mix (remember the Manchester Woolworth's fire 1979). If the celotex, or similar, is not in direct contact with the cans/tubes, then there will be little distortion/melting. http://www.talkcomposites.com/22732/celotex-in-a-composites-oven

I was told that you should never use a soldered joint on solar thermal. May be just on high temperature or pressurized systems though.

Take half an hour out of your life and listen to this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08n2v3f

It seems to me that you are set on a secondary cylinder, so can you lag all pipework well to reduce losses? It is just like electrical wiring, except backwards, you need to insulate it well, odd I know, kind of goes against the grain, even for most plumbers

Are they both used equally as much, or is one for guests or mainly showering?

Make a male and female mould from a resin and stamp them out with a press (hydraulic bottle jack).

Is electrolysis efficient really, I thought it was a pretty poor conversion in reality. Even worse if you have to cool it/compress it to store it. Why we make if by steam reformation from natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

Yes it is, but is it is slow and expensive. Thursday on Inside Science (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08m8z38) They had a bit about diesel car scrapage. One reason that it may happen is that the product development lifecycle is very fast for cars at around 5 years. Trains are about 20 years. I would hate to think what housing is, 40 years? and a very low replacement rate. I mentioned over at the other place that if we get very low carbon generation, then the DER-TER standard will need updating as it will be irrelevant.

No Athletics, it is windy down here and buildings move

If we forget the dream of being self-sufficient in energy at the domestic level, then you really only need very small scale storage per household e.g. <1kWh This would be enough to run a kettle till it boils (0.2 kWh) , smooth out the peak of a washing machine heating water (1.1 kWh), half an hour vacuuming (0.8 kWh), fridge (0.1 kWh). Those figures are per 'cycle'. What it would not help with is things like cooking, resistance space heating, resistance water heating i.e. showering or vehicle charging. I would need a bit of education to learn to use equipment sequentially with a little bit of recovery time between usage (or circuitry to manage some of it e.g. fridge cannot start if kettle just boiled), but I don't think that is too complicated. It would stop me turning the kettle on as soon as I get in from work and then having a shower while it boils, but I could live with that.

May be easier to just put up a large thermo-nuclear power station and beam the power down via microwave. I think any space based system has a cost issue. I had a 70gm package come from China (5000 miles away) delivered for a fiver, and that included the goods, so about 0.03p/kg.mile. It currently cost around £17,000 to get a kilo of cargo to the space station (£68/kg.mile). So about 24,000 times more expensive.

How hard are these redflow batteries to make, are they DIYable?

Had a quick look at the DECC PV figures and using the criteria of below 50 kWp is not metered i.e. domestic and over is metered, then we have 903,513 MWp as domestic and 4,084 MWp commercial. So if that commercial generated 48,788 MWh on the 19th April 2017, 12 MWh per 1 MWp installed, that seems a bit high to me Domestic would be 11,000 MWh. I may have misread the units of the DECC spreadsheet (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/603803/Solar_photovoltaics_deployment_March_2017.xlsx) But I am in a hurry to get to the food festival. Others can look at it and put me right. There is a bit in the spreadsheet about where the money comes from i.e. FiT or CfD, that may help clarify it. Edit: Just relaised those calculations above a nonsense, so shall try and have a better look later if no one else does.

I think it is from large solar installations, domestic just shows a drop in other generation, but hard to get a clear picture. But as we know the amount of small and large scale installed, we could take a stab at working out what is happening on the domestic side. The main consequences of a space mirror is someone like Trump. Thankfully it is not really a viable idea.

I am not sure that the air temperature would have a big enough difference to worry about. We tend to think that the North side is cold, but that is more to do with solar radiation than the actual air temperature. And at night (50% of the year), it makes no difference at all. There will always be exceptions i.e. a windless back alley, but that is another story.