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AliG

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AliG last won the day on October 20 2023

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  1. I agree with the first point, if you wanted to claim your own labour then you would have to report it as Income which would carry a higher rate of tax than CGT. On the second point you are not intending to be in the business of property development, so I would expect it to be CGT and not income tax, although HMRC can always disagree.
  2. Welcome, I am probably one of the few people with a similar sized house on the forum. I think this is quite a general discussion and if you want advice on anything specific such as ICF then it is probably best to create a specific post referencing that. This kind of intro post is likely to become quite rambling. To some extent you are really building three houses which makes things more manageable, but I would not underestimate the costs and time require to maintain such a large building. I would maybe try and decide this within the family before going ahead. There is always something breaking, not working as expected, needing replaced etc. it takes up a lot of time and money. Think of the maintenance on 10 standard three bed houses. How will it be owned, costs apportioned etc. My house is around 1000sq metres including the integral garage. It cost around £2m to build 8-6 years ago. We just finished a smaller house for my parents last year and it cost around twice as much per square metre. I would be quite concerned that your budget is low and already seems tight. In my experience I got constant questions from the architect and builder over the course of construction. The questions always went along the lines of we can do A that costs X or B that costs 2X. 9/10 B was the right decision. It would get very stressful if the budget was tight.
  3. Is there a reason the stairs start at the back? Turn them around and you can use the space behind them on the ground floor. You can still get light from a window upstairs and the double height area. As @ProDave says move the lounge door round to face the kitchen door. Don’t put it in a little alcove. Shower room behind the stairs with a window and then more room for utility and plant room and larger lounge. Upstairs move en-suite onto landing then move dressing room back allowing larger master bedroom with direct access.
  4. These arguments generally just prove that energy is too cheap. At least it is too cheap for people to naturally reduce usage in the way that gets us to zero carbon. Clearly many people struggle to pay for it. Running the numbers indeed suggests that on a purely financial basis extra insulation rarely pays for itself. Cheap glass wool that you can put in the loft and stopping air leaks probably has the best return. Cars are a funny one. Depreciation is such a large expense that other running costs are almost irrelevant for many people. I have an electric car mainly because they are much nicer to drive and I like never having to go to the petrol station. It won’t be long before they cost the same as ice cars and the market will quickly move over. A quite high percentage of luxury cars are already EVs as there is less of a price premium (think Taycan vs Panamera) so people seem happy to make the switch once prices are similar. To the original post about using your EV as a battery. This has a cost to the owner in battery degradation and perhaps inconvenience hence they are offering you free electricity in exchange. I’d happily do that if it made financial sense. At the moment I’d save £200 in car charging a year and have to buy a £4000 box for the privilege. Actually as I couldn’t use IO I’d have increased electricity bills so a non starter. But for some people this could make sense
  5. Well looks like I was wrong. I was assuming that as some cars offering V2L also offered V2G that they were using the onboard charger/inverter for both. I eventually found this article https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1140803_2024-kia-ev9-bidirectional-charging-here-s-how-it-will-work This agrees with what you have said, the V2G functionality allows the separate charger/inverter to bypass the onboard charger and connect direct to the battery using DC then converts this to AC. The article suggests that this Qasar 2 might cost around $6000 because of this. It is not clear to me why it should be so expensive when solar inverters cost less than £1000. I was hoping they would be able to use the car’s inverter to keep the cost down as this is already being used to convert DC to AC for the V2L capability. As you say this would still need management to meet the DNO specs and maybe they have decided it is easier to separate it totally from the car due to the multitude of utilities it could be connected to around the world.
  6. That’s not what I said. I said that these cars claim to have V2G capability. If you have V2G capability then the equipment necessary to provide that can probably be used to provide their V2L capability.
  7. The EV9 and I think the new Volvo EX90/Polestar 3 say they have V2G technology included. I assume this means that they have a DC inverter which can take energy from the battery and send it back to the grid. They then use this to provide V2L, I was being overly brief in what I was typing. However, things are all a bit vague at the moment so there is no information yet on what other equipment will or will not be needed to get this up and running. For example will it be compatible in all countries. Hence why I am in wait and see mode re getting a new wall charger. However, if I lost IO then it would not be worth it and so it was not in any way a reason for buying the car.
  8. The original Nissan Leaf had no battery thermal management ad is well known to have many issues. It is not comparable at all to a newer EV. It was introduced in 2010, the same year as the iPhone 4. We literally just bought a Kia EV9 to replace my Model X, but I am seriously considering keeping the X as it is in excellent shape. The X is a 2017 75D with 39,000 miles on it and last time I looked showed 4% battery degradation. Other parts will give out long before the battery.
  9. Fair question. Most cars do not currently support V2G so the warranty doesn't mention. The warranty is generally 70-80% of capacity up to 8yrs/100,000 miles or something similar. If someone sells a car boasting V2G it will be pretty embarrassing to then exclude it from the warranty.
  10. The Qasar looks to be single phase as it is a 7.4kW charger. The Qasar 2 is 11kW but mentions 48A which is the US single phase way of getting 11kW so still may not be 3 phase. It may not be necessary to be 3 phase as the phases are netted off against each other for billing purposes. 3 phase would simply increase the amount you could import and export to the grid at any one time. As the amounts of energy being talked about are quite small 3 phase probably wouldn't be necessary. It may be that this kind of box would be unnecessary if the car includes V2L technology. My new car can supply 3.6kW so might not need this expensive box. My Tesla charger broke and I am waiting to see if all of this means I should get a different kind of charger. In the meantime I am using the granny charger and bought a cheap used Tesla Wall charger as I could easily switch it over myself. But really when you are talking about saving £2-300 a year versus Intelligent Octopus, this is a non starter if it requires a multi thousand pound charger. You'd be as well buying a Powerwall or other battery system which wouldn't cost much more, would be permanently available and could be used to time shift on IO providing a much better return.
  11. I'm not sure the Wallbox Qasar charger they mention is still made. Wallbox have announced a V2 version but it is not available yet. The V1 charger Wallbox Qasar V2G charger was a preposterous £3950 meaning that all the benefit would be accruing to Wallbox. Looking at the cost of inverters there is no justifying this price. I was originally worried about the impact on the car battery but having looked at it further am less concerned. Car batteries are generally considered to be good for around 1000 cycles. This would be 2-300,000 miles. Of course the odd battery will suffer premature failure but in reality other parts of the car will probably give up the ghost before the battery. I found the data on the average mileage cars in the UK do before being scrapped. Very few make it past 200,000 miles. I think they will only be allowing around 10kWh per day between the battery and the grid. This is consistent with the 333kWh a month limit and the 13kWh capacity of a Tesla Powerwall for example. Assuming an average battery size of 80kWh, then you would use 45 battery cycles per year. Over 10 years of constant use this would reduce the lifespan of the battery from around 300,000 miles to 150,000 which is probably around the useful life of most cars. Further the batteries don't just stop working, it would simply increase degradation. Arguably it would be more of anise for a car with a smaller battery of around 50kWh where you could be using 70+ cycles a year. I would feel more comfortable using it with a 100kWh battery or having a import/export limit based on the size of the battery.
  12. I just bought a Kia EV9 which has been designed for this feature and will likely be compatible at some point. However, to take advantage of this with Octopus you have to move from Intelligent Octopus. So you would get car charging for free but pay full price for your other electricity. As we can charge the car overnight at 7.5p, the saving from being able to charge it for free is small and much less than the extra cost of all the other electricity being full price. However, we use a lot of electricity overnight. If car charging was your main electricity use you could save by moving to this plan. It is, however limited to 333kWh per month. So the maximum saving if you are on Intelligent Octopus is £25 a month or £300 a year. Chances are that you will save less as you will not use exactly 333kWh every month. Offsetting this the special charger required might cost £2-3000. Basically I'd stick with IO. Further gas and electricity prices continue to fall. We are paying less than 4p for gas on Octopus Tracker now. Electricity prices should fall quite substantially over the next 6 months.
  13. They still sell the Gazco stove we have. It has a remote control and to use the remote control to switch it off and on you have to leave the pilot light on. The other fire made by Bellfires has full remote electric ignition.
  14. I cannot find any regulations re pilot lights. A boiler with a pilot light would have appalling efficiency hence they have been phased out. Gas fires have appalling efficiency anyway so might well still have them. One of ours does and one doesn’t. Of course many people will have older appliances which would have them. 4kWh would provide around 80litres of hot water a day. I found someone with an old boiler just used for hot water saying the pilot light was 40% of their gas usage! Seems ridiculous that we are regulated down to 0.5W standby on electrical equipment when a pilot light could be using 150-200W so way more than all the standby consumption of electrical equipment in a house.
  15. I thought it was a lot but I googled how much gas does a pilot light use and the answer I got was 14400btus a day which is just over 4kWh so is consistent with the amount I was using. Worth noting as most people with gas probably have a boiler also so would never notice this small usage. There is also a thread about it on MSE where people noted similar usage.
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