SteamyTea

How do you fill it up? Is there an 'app' for that. https://www.rt.com/viral/362570-briton-wifi-kettle-tea/

Bugger, I have loads to say, but just in from work. I like a good rant.

Would that be 100W peak power? In reality you will get a lot less than that. Just had a look at my local weather station and today the sun has peaked at 157W.m2, currently at 91 W.m2. At those levels you will be lucky to get a usable 10W out of it. So by the time it has been though a charger, a battery, an inverter, you will have just about zero. As you are going for PV anway, you may as well use that as an off set. The 45 W 24/7 or a burst of 1.2 kW (by my thinking about 54 minutes run time) amounts to the same thing. It is the amount of mass that the pump has to shift that is important, not so much the way it does it.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/waste-exemption-u4-burning-of-waste-as-a-fuel-in-a-small-appliance Just to remind people about burning waste wood.

If the stuff is being used outside, there should really be an RCD fitted, so one safety problem should be removed.

Can I come and watch

I tend to agree with this (not that I have on site experience of the trade). My house is one of the first 6 of their type built in the SW. They showed that there was not any problems with the design, then built thousands of them (they are ugly grey boxes, but I sit in it an look out, not the other way around). I think what the volume builders suffer from is lack of on site build quality control. Details like fitting insulation correctly, plumbing and wiring not to the drawing, fitting MVHR badly, and the big one, fitting windows and doors. The last one may benefit from better detail design to make installation easier, but probably the biggest benefit would be had from not having a pile of 'stuff' not sitting around getting covered in crap. It is hard to motivate a person to do a good job when you supply them with substandard goods to start with. So this comes down to training and management. Two things that the UK seems to have forgotten how to do. I worked in education for a while. I lectured in IT, but the courses were tailored to cover everything from first year plumbers, to Ma courses in Journalism. So I had an interesting spread of people, including a couple of Architects. I would often read the press, and hear on the radio, that the education system was not turning out students that where fit for the workplace. Not once in that time did a company come to me (apart from the NHS and Network Rail who had large budgets to dispose of) willing to pay for a tailored course. I wish they had, as I could have easily done a basic Mathematics and Science course that would allow ordinary people to appreciate what highly educated people where talking about (most science is pretty basic really). One of the problems is, I think (personal experience and a lot of prejudice), that you get some people that will justify a wrong decision and defend it to the end. If that person happens to be articulate (think Boris Johnson), many people are taken in. This is why the real sciences use data. Without it, or if it is not disseminated, society really cannot move on and probably goes backwards in some situations.

I agree with Mike George (I think). All I do is work out the chance and frequency of hitting a dew point condition and use that to calculate a risk. Trouble starts when you take data from one place (say the gap between my roof and the extra insulation on my rafters) and transferring it to someone else roof. They may not have the same orientation, weather or climate. I have a very moderate climate, only two seasons really (my winter is like early spring or late autumn, summer is like a late spring or early autumn) , very strong winds (at any time of year) that hit my house side one, so nip up into my roof nicely. I have higher than normal insolation (for the UK), but in a more spasmodic manner. Higher RH levels but very really cold enough to hit the dew point.

If you can't put a sensible unit on it, the term should not be used, ever. There has been long discussions about this.

I found moving from Hertfordshire to Cornwall improved the air quality in my home. Good only wikipedia has this to say about the fraction of air actually changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_changes_per_hour I have heard this figure quoted before.

Andrew Bissell, CEO andrew.bissell@sunamp.co.uk 0795 774 8445

Have you read though this? http://www.ebuild.co.uk/topic/17614-sunamp-pv-vs-thermal-store-heat-loss-comparison/

With the trend towards radial circuits rather than ring circuit, is there any real safety advantage in using double pole switches (general question as I can't really see why we don't have double pole switching on everything).

They can isolate an appliance easily, so yes, they can reduce a fire risk if switched off at the socket. I swap between bedrooms quite a bit and I find that flicking the switch on the unused alarm clock is useful, it don't go off at 5:15AM.

Which bit of the stock market, it has many parts So what he was saying is that the replacement batteries will cost more, changes the ROI somewhat. Is that legal, I thought they were meant to trip out for grid protection. Depends on how/where it is doing it I suppose. If only people had stayed awake during mathematics and physics lessons, we would not have this sort of selling. But then Grove said "we have had enough of experts".

Not sure, they are similar, both have limitations and different prices. I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the RPi, probably more down to the scripts that I write for it. I have actually gone and dug one of my old ones out (an RPi Model B) and am just downloading the latest Debian for it (on my very slow 3G, so probably be morning when I can do anything more with it.

All pretty simple really. A Raspberry Pi is a small, fully functional computer. Some people criticise it because it does not accept an analogue input, but there are enough sensors around that output a digital signal that it can read. The ftps and AWS is just remote storage, and the SSL is just a security method to stop other people reading it. Everything should really be sent securely, just think of it as a well wrapped package rather than something in a clear plastic bag. What gets hard is setting these things up reliably so that they can be left unattended and unchecked for a few months. That is generally where 'computer' based systems rather than dedicated systems fall down. Now if anyone on here knows how to write good code and set up a Raspberry Pi to run reliably for months, let us all know.

Yes, but I have not found a decent sftp site that is subscription free.

Definitely go for a GRP roof. These don't have to be totally done on site, any half decent GRP company could make you some 8 by 4 ply sheets with some GRP laminated to them. Then they would only have to seal the joints once installed. This reduces most of the risks caused by weather i.e. too hot, sunny, dark, cold, wet. As for a green roof, they don't change the thermal properties any more than a mud roof from the experiments I did a few years back. I was never happy with the explanation that the plants transpire and help regulate temperature. If you want to reduce thermal transmission, start by painting it white, or cover it in something that will stay shiny. As for decrement delay, the calculations are fairly simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_heat_capacity#Thermal_inertia There is no 'magic' involved, just basic thermal engineering. There is an awful lot of bollocks spoken about it though. As a general rule, the more mass of any material you have, the closer to the mean daily energy levels you can store, once you know the energy levels, you can calculate the temperature range. It is a non linear function though, which is where it gets tricky. So you only need to put in enough insulation to keep the place warm at the coldest time, and then deal with any overheating by other methods i.e. a reflective outer surface or forced cooling. And just remember that half the time the world is dark, and a good 2/3rds of the daylight time it is cloudy. of the remain 1/6th of the day, there is probably not enough temperature difference to worry about, leaving you with a few hours a year when your house may go over 26°C. A portable aircon unit may be your best option for those few times.

Latin is a dead language As dead as it can be First it killed the Romans Now it is killing me

How much would your water and waste cost. Down here in the SW it is very expensive and having noticed that the water table is about 10m down, it may be worth me getting a borehole. Thing is I would still have to pay for sewage, which is over half my "water" costs. With PV (or most RE systems), there is a lot of talk about how much energy it produces over a year. This is all well and good, but it is delivering that energy that is important. A basic 4 kWp system very really produces enough power to boil a 3 kW kettle on its own. Over a year though it could produce enough energy to boil a kettle for 1100 hours or about 3 hours a day (more than enough for even me). So it is good for offsetting, but not good for living with. This is why they are grid connected.

Paint it green then

Yes, it is NE facing window, with the one infront blocked of with part of my boat (great living alone, you can build a boat in the kitchen). It was about 8 or 9 this morning I seem to remember. My main point is that you don't really need a lot of light to do most things, just let your iris do the work.

Right. For what that farmer robbed them off for access, they could have put an airbed in a tent on the site, they would have enjoyed the view. Then, with the cash saved, bought a place in Penzance and lived there

Are we talking about the house at Marlow Lock. If I remember rightly, it was not really a floating house, more a place that had flood mitigation (I have seen the Complete Angler flooded and kayaked though the sluices a few times).