Dillsue

If you mark up the area where the panels will be mounted with typical panels, you'll have a fair idea of what you likely max output will be. You can then tell them that figure and they can move the supply design forward with a bit more certainty. In your shoes I'd be using figures of 450watt/panel with the panels 1150 wide x 1800 tall which includes gaps between them. Otherwise get a local installer to size thing up off your drawings

The DNO and MCS are completely different things independent of each other. DNO interraction is to ensure grid safety/security isn't compromised. Search the forum for G98 and G99 and there's a mountain of info MCS is to ensure your generation is from renewables and meets certain standards

Unless you've got a massive array its almost certain you'll use everything you generate in the winter and a fair chance you'll need more on occasion. The 4.5 kw you've got on a pallet will just scratch the surface in the winter. Even with a big array how are you going to power things if you have a run of bad weather. What if you have a breakdown without the back up of a grid connected system? Assuming your house already has a mains supply, connecting up PV costs can be minimal. Export less than 3.68kw and DNO costs are £0. Getting a spark to make the final connection to your consumer unit can be a couple of hundred £, less if youre well acquainted. The rest you can do yourself with research.

Restrictions like these need to change rapidly. If the IPCC are correct then the bulk of planning considerations need to be dispensed with for essential infrastructure. I beleive current planning can limit the duration of a turbines presence so they can be "temporary", renewed periodically whilst we're in a climate emergency.

Compulsory purchase is going to add to the £ burden. Those that object to essential infrastructure, which benefits them and wider society, pay a NIMBY tax which is applied as a credit to the energy bills of those that live with ugly infrastructure:)

Why off grid? Is this for powering some parts of a grid connected house?

Have you looked at PVGIS to see what you'll likely generate. It'll give you year round breakdown so you can see realistically what you'll have spare to export year round. AfAIK the only way you'll get reasonable export rates is with a variable export tariff like the ones Octopus offer but I think you need to give them control of your battery or be hands on exporting when rates are high

My understanding of things is you shut the inverter down before switching any isolator so there's unlikely to be any power flowing in the DC or AC side. Thats certainly the case with solaredge optimisers but maybe different with string inverters?? You'll not get any arcing if there's no power. Not sure how much arcing you'd get, if any, with a correctly rated DC isolator. Bit lax of the manufacturer if that was reasonably possible

Stop doing all the things we shouldnt in the next 5 years, job done with recovery over the next decades. Like I said gonna be very painful and expensive. Particularly in the first world, we don't have the appetite for it as most people aren't capable of assessing and appreciating the risk to them and their offspring and don't give a monkeys about the billions they aren't acquainted with.

I don't think theres any doubt we can fix the mess we've made to the climate/environment but it's likely gonna take many decades, be very painful for much of the world's population and eyewateringly expensive

Indra- manufacturer of EV chargers Chademo- specification for bi directional charging(putting power into an EVs battery and taking it out again when you need/want it Power pack- Octopus scheme to use your EV battery linked to in first post.

You need both the car and the charger to support bi directional charging/discharging. The car and the charger have to be built to the same standard which Octopus are saying needs to be Chademo for their power pack scheme. In the UK, other than Chademo I don't think there's any other working standard available yet but I think CCS is planned to support it some time in the future. I beleive grid connected Chademo is only in use in the UK for trials hence me asking if anyone knows what Octopus have planned for public use

To get £4k at 15p/unit you'd need to export 26666 units. Our 4kw system limited to 3.68 kw output is forecast to produce 3600 units and actually does a touch more than that. 4kw for 10 hour/day x 365 gives 14000 units. Unless Im missing something I can't see how you'll get anything like £4k export payments from PV over the year. If you start playing with peaktime export then rates go up quite a bit but its hard to see how you'll make £4k. Has the installer given you calcs to show how you'll make this?

Back to the original post, I read earlier that Indra don't expect to have a Chademo bi directional charger available till 2025 so how they envisage the Power Pack scheme working is anyone's guess?? Anyone know their plans??

All our surface water stays on our level plot and we don't flood. We have some pooling and you need wellies in places but its gone in a day or so. The ground is more than capable of dealing with repeated heavy downpours. What causes flooding is people dumping their water on others via drains and water courses. If people upstream of flood prone areas dealt with their surface water flooding will be drastically reduced. In terms of who is thinking of it/planning it/dealing with it, I believe the new land payments scheme will pay landowners to retain water in areas upstream of flood prone areas. Water from commercial and domestic sources will need a bit more thinking about but turning the shoe on the bottom of down spouts 90 degrees to dump water on your garden and not into the drains will do your bit to help not flood your neighbours. It'll also help not inundate sewage treatment plants and wash all your sewage into seas and rivers, so a double win. Have a look a gridwatch and you'll see that solar only makes up a small proportion of generation so when it's sunny and hot turning AC on just ramps up a gas power station. I guess that's why the grants won't cover cooling as its just exacerbating the problem.

It's straight forward when you break it down into separate units. I have a PV install training rig and be happy to give you a bit of time on it if it meant getting your panels off that pallet and working.

We're 3 miles outside of a city of 70k people and I ride in and out several times a week without any drama as do the couple of other people I know that regularly cycle. I think people who like the cheap convenience of jumping in the car for even the shortest journey are the ones that think they'll die as soon as they sit on a bike which unfortunately is the vast majority of car drivers.

The average car journey is under 5 miles so easily done with a tired battery. 5 miles is easily cycled if you can't afford an old EV, or you want to do the right thing for the environment, your health and pocket

What on earth makes you think I'd welcome mandatory restrictions? If everyone doesn't voluntarily do their bit then yes lots of things will need to become mandatory and that would be sad, but necessary

Not sure what it is that you think you'll be proven right about?? That we should all do nothing about climate change? We should all carry on driving ICEs? You're right some ASHPs and EVs won't make much difference, but lots will. I don't believe its futile. I know that in my 60s I'm not gonna benefit whatsoever from the cutbacks and sacrifices I make, but I have kids and grand kids that I don't want to avoidably burden with the crap that extremes of weather might bring to their world in the future because of current and previous generations lack of consideration. You're right that the majority of the first world isn't interested because climate change isn't biting yet and the first world has the resources to deal with the effects of climate change, at the moment. Unless the masses wake up to the risk they are taking by ignoring requests to cut back, I believe we'll start to see more and more mandatory restrictions. If you dont think that can happen, I bet you didn't think the government had the power to mandate lock down and certainly not to use it..........

I've little knowledge of sunamps other than they come up on here regularly with problems. I wouldnt use a sunamp on a rental property unless I had a back up for hot water. Anything you put in needs to be repairable by yourself or your average local plumber so it can be repaired ASAP when you've got guests For the heating, leave the towel rail in the bathroom controllable by guests but switch the rest of the heating with a movement sensor so the heating goes off 1/2 to 1 hour after last movement is detected. Or, you could put switches on the windows to inhibit the heating if they're left open. Add a timed inhibit and the heating can be off during the day and come on late afternoon if the windows are closed. That would keep the accommodation cosy for returning guests without it all going out of the windows

The guardians mining article finishes with- "The verdict The data we have leaves little doubt that resource extraction will be significantly lower for electric cars compared with their petrol or diesel equivalents as recycling increases. And neither do the green credentials of electric cars absolve the buyers of battery minerals of responsibility for abuses in the supply chain. Dummett said he hopes the mining industy will “use this moment to reform itself”" A quick search on EV battery recycling found this site-https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-be-recycled which includes this- "However, as the world transitions from gas-powered to electric vehicles, the demand for these materials will far outpace the supply from recycling, so mining metals such as cobalt will still be necessary" Seems to me that the guardians debunking article relies on significant recycling which doesn't happen to any significant degree now and is unlikely to happen for a while until there's much larger numbers of old batteries to be recycled. That article may be valid in a decade or two but doesn't seem to be just now??

Everything I've read says battery manufacture produces significant emissions. I don't believe the raw material mining is particularly environmentally friendly either.

There's grid scale battery storage being rolled across the country to store renewables and help with the peak demand so you're already funding that through taxes and levies on your energy bills. Battery production has massive environmental impact so its ridiculous for the first world to have thousands of EV batteries sat doing nothing for most of the time when they could be productively utilised to reduce the amount of dedicated battery storage being installed. It's not your power. If you read the link in the first post Octopus are going to charge your battery for free and take back SOME of it at peak times. Net result is you get some free energy in return for helping society keep the lights on. If you are wanting a grid connection then why the obvious objection to helping society run a serviceable supply?

Yes, if the full V2G functionality was built into the car then they'd need differing cars for most countries due to diverse grid connection specs. But that could be something configurable as it is with PV inverters. Unless limited to 16A to meet G98 limits they'd likely also need an export meter connecting to the car so it starts getting complicated and easier for the manufacturers just to make the cars V2G/H ready but leaving the external bi directional charger to do the grid/car BMS interfacing.