epsilonGreedy

You are seeing moral complexity and drama where none needs to exist. Your neighbour and his architect have formulated a plan that enhances his lifestyle and/or the value of his house. Most people and hopefully the planners would consider the extension over development since it fills 90% of the back garden as I recall. If built the extension would devalue the enjoyment you get from your house and would undermine the value of your house a bit. So you object and the application needs to be resubmitted for proper review. Unfortunately your earlier mixed signals have given them hope you will acquiesce. Stop expending brain cycles worrying about how the neighbour and the architect perceive your actions, they have hatched an unreasonable plan. Don't get involved in an emotional txt exchange with the architect because it gives them hope you can be manipulated.

When you say natural slate "works well" and is a "safer bet" what criteria are you assessing against?

Hmm. You say after connecting a test water supply to the far end of the 200m blue pipe you can hear water moving through the pipe. For how long do you hear the flowing sound? Did you wait long enough for a fountain of water to gush out of the removed meter plug? The air in the empty blue water pipe is quite compressible under mains water pressure so you might be hearing a short flow of water. Does some water squirt out of the blue pipe when you remove the test water source?

Which end? The blue tap end or the other? Please do the following: Remove your own "high pressure" test water source. Unscrew the cap/plug. Turn the blue tap 1/4 opf a turn. Tell us what happened.

Anglian Water installed one of those at the boundary of my plot when connecting my builders supply standpipe to the water main. In my case there is a meter in place of the screw plug shown in your photo. Have you tried turning the blue tap 1/4 of a turn anti clockwise?

So do yachts, £15 example here https://www.force4.co.uk/item/Force-4/Waterproof-Toilet-Roll-Holder/JO1

How does PV production drop off in the winter? In my planning approximations I am assuming PV production varies from zilch to very little 165 days of the year.

48C - I am correct in thinking that the E7 electricity powers an ASHP which then heats your DHW tank? In my case I am leaning towards DHW heating via immersion element which would allow a tank temp of 60c. This would effectively double the energy capacity of a 200l tank and the only downside is higher tank loss say 1.5kWh per day rather than 0.75 = 0.75 x 365 x £0.10 = £27 per year = more than I expected.

That's true, car batteries have multiple thin plates to deliver high starter motor amps. I used the size, weight and typical amp hour capacity of a car battery because it is familiar unit of measure to most here.

The raw numbers are sobering when you dig into the details. For example that 130Ah battery mentioned earlier would weigh around 50kg and would hopefully come with carrying handles. Despite its mass it could only deliver about 0.7 of a kWh in total to a home before it requires a deep recharge. During a winter evening a home could easily be consuming 5kW of electricity per hour if heated with an ASHP. Just makes me realise how much energy each house draws from the grid when 24 hour of grid consumption is converted into car batteries, off the top of my head I think we are talking around 120 car batteries to keep a house powered and warm up for a day. It helps to define the problem that an offgrid solution will solve. The subject that interests me is national grid instability (energy security) in the mid 2020s. The problem definition that I will design for is scheduled area blackouts of 4 hours on 2 to 3 days each year when the UK cannot generate enough electricity because of a global shortage of natural gas combined with little wind across the UK, the loss of half our present nuclear capacity and the dismantling of our last few GWs of coal power.. I have a 900w suitcase generator left over from my boating days, for the minimal effort of fitting a master switch to isolate the house from the grid and running an armoured cabled from the consumer unit to a remote corner of the garden I will be able to keep the lights on for about £5 per blackout.

I am beginning to think ASHPs are a curse for most people like universal size mens socks. Flexi size 5 to 11 mens socks are a missing selling scandal because they only really fit someone with a shoe size of 8.5, anyone with a larger shoe size risk developing clubbed curled toes. The same applies to ASHPs because unless a property has an EPC score between a low A or very high B they are problematic to live with. I also clocked a recent post from @Nickfromwaleswho said he has advised some of his customers not to heat DHW from a heat pump. If I go for a small PV array that should heat the hotwater tank 200 days a year then for the rest of the year a 5am boost from Economy 7 will deal with winter DHW.

I thought the requirement for a buffer tank was specific to ASHP+ UFH but I am starting to wonder if a highly zoned heating design with a gas boiler, needs one as well. Right now I have crossed back to gas central heating camp having settled on an ASHP for the past 6 months.

Don't do it unless you think multi hour power cuts will be a monthly event. Drawing 1000 watts from a battery bank requires seriously thick cables and special connection clamps. You will need 300 to 500 amp hours of battery capacity for a working winter solution to cover a 3 hour power cut and best buy a low power kettle as well. If you cannot afford to buy a lithium battery bank the array of lead acid batteries will need to be in a vented housing. The batteries will need topping up with electrolyte and will consume power to maintain a full state of charge. 1000's of people have thought their way through this off grid challenge, most buy a 1 to 2 Kw generator for occasional use or spend £10K on a lithium + PV solution. A few die hard survivalists types build a large lead acid battery room coupled to a high quality Victron type inverter. The notion that a UK household can get through a > 30 minute winter power cut by hooking up cheap batteries via jump start cables to a 2Kw cheap inverter is just plain daft.

A word of warning about high loads on a lead acid battery. A draw of 20% of headline capacity is considered to be a high load. Also the effective capacity of a lead acid battery is about 50% of what is says on the tin. Given 10% loss at the inverter that eBay battery would contribute ( 130Ah x 0.2 ) x 0.9 x 12 = 280 watts for 2.5 hours to the house. Subject to that sort of duty cycle it would fail far sooner than you expect. Battery based mains power is now feasible with Lithium batteries and live aboard boaters will spend £10,000 on this type of setup. Their battery banks are typically over 1000Ah.

The helpful planning officer said PD does not come into effect until the build is finished and I am a householder. Also some of my development rights were withdrawn with the planning approval though this appears to be specific to ground structures like a conservatory.

Thanks for that, I encountered this YouTube channel when viewing their riposte to the Skillbuilder anti heat pump video. Despite initial impressions they are a pair of smart dudes worth listening to. They raise some important points that I should consider but I am not sure if their general advice is applicable in my case: My house has an L-shape and I intend to zone the heating across a natural boundary at the L intersection. When calculating internal heat transfer between heated and unheated rooms they assume a U-value of 2W per m2 per Kelvin across internal walls. I expect that a modern internal stud wall with sound insulation wool will be better than that. I hope unheated rooms will drop lower than 18 degrees when it is -3 degrees outside thus lowering the overall building loss. Over all their video does highlight that with an ASHP the total heating costs might rise when zoning is used in an attempt to lower energy bills. I was surprised to hear that gas boiler efficiency also drops significantly when the circulation temp rises to compensate for the loss of emitters in the cold zones.

Hi @nodI have noticed a big price difference between PIR insulated plasterboard and an equivalent insulated with a polystyrene like material. Did you consider both options? Did you choose the more expensive PIR insulated board?

You have a fascinating flip from heating to cooling and two shoulder months when you require both. Does the house have a very low heat capacity or are the human occupants sensitive to temperature variation either side of a desired temp?

Before your post my thinking had gravitated towards an ESP32 solution. One microcontroller could control the manifold actuators and then if the ESP32 could talk MQTT across the house LAN I could skip to whole confused landscape of Home Automation and control the heating system n C# code running on a .net server. Once on my home turf of enterprise programming it would not be a major effort to knockup a mobile app to control the heating zones on-demand as a rough and ready equivalent of the Drayton/Wiser mobile heating app.

TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript so in theory it could be used for Node-Red. In practical terms doing this really comes down to having a community of developers creating interface libraries to present core Node-Red concepts as TypeScript interfaces. There seems to be some related activity: https://www.technicalfeeder.com/2021/07/how-to-implement-node-red-node-in-typescript/ Over in the non IOT world of software development many large teams have switched over to TypeScript. My motivation is not about being offgrid but I am concerned that a run-away of adoption of HA technology could start raising the household phantom watt count to the point where it might negate the savings from a high-tech heating control system.

Thanks. I had not appreciated that the intermediate circuitry to do mains power switching is so cheap. Has anyone estimated the power consumption of a Pi across a whole year when performing a micro controller type task? I had been looking at an Arduino that can be put into a very power efficient sleep mode. I see node-red getting mentioned in the HA world. I would prefer to program in C# but IOT and .Net is very niche. I hope node red can be programmed in TypeScript because I loath JavaScript.

So these valves also include a signal input wire that will allow a home automation server to open the flow to a UFH zone or an individual rad?

I am only part way through my learning curve on Home Automation. I understand that Zigbee is a wifi home automation standard that runs on a wifi mesh topology. I would not be happy moving into my new house and imagining the electromagnetic spectrum fizzing with a plethora of HA gadgets chatting 24/7 via wifi. My hope to get my limited HA plans implemented via wired controls or POE. The most popular HA projects don't appeal to me, I just want fine grained control of heating, detailed consumption stats at the 5 to 10 most power hungry sockets in the house, a robot vacuum and a sunrise smart light in the bedroom. Re. the heating. I want zoned controls of the following. UFH zone x 2, 3 rads upstairs and 2 rads downstairs. Happy to go with a standard manifold but the details of a wired link from a HA server to manifold zone valves evades me so far. I think @PeterWis hinting that a classic installation time only flow balancing could be thrown out of kilter with a highly zoned system. I will look into his auto balancer suggestion.

Following the latest kWH price hikes I think each phantom Watt-Year now costs £1.70. Your DIY valve port interests me because I would like per room zoned heating but I also dislike the thought of building a new house that is dependent on wifi at each radiator for heating automation. Currently mulling over the idea of computer controlled values mounted at a central heating distribution manifold with dumb (wax) TVRs on each radiator to control room temp. The dream setup would allow "Alex, heat bathroom for 8pm", even better would be a locally hosted open source Alex but such initiatives seem to be struggling.

Get your own back by flaunting your youth and vitality. Go for a daily jog around the village in your best gym bunny outfit then stop outside the houses of the evil ones, plonk your ghetto blaster down and do a 10 minute step routine to Eye of the Tiger at full volume.