AliG

I actually think FiT payments should be reduced considering the current price of electricity. Instead they are index linked so will be increased. Of course no one considered the price of electricity going up like it has but this is an unexpected windfall to people who are still receiving FiT payments. A simple solution would have been that the FiT payment reduces by 1p for every penny the price of electricity increases above 15p.

I am well off but tight and do see that we can do things to improve the environment with little personal cost or indeed a benefit. However, a large number of people think solar panels are ugly and care about that more than money, never mind the environment. Lots of people are also too lazy to do anything. This applies to many things such as recycling, electric cars etc. You either have to order people to do stuff (regulation) or make it so financially attractive that it overcomes their other instincts. Almost universally everyone I know who has got an electric car in the last two years did it as a tax dodge. None of them give a hoot about the environment.

I guess that’s my point though. People hated recycling (actually I quite enjoy it). They were forced into it by regulations otherwise many people still wouldn’t recycle. So it was government interference rather than people changing. As mentioned the point of packaging should be that it’s more efficient to package things than deal with damage/spoilage. The two companies that really annoy me on this matter are Costco and Amazon. Costco love to take things already well packaged and put them in another larger box to sell a bigger quantity. Why not tape things together or make people pick up two to get a lower price. Amazon’s liking for putting things already in a box inside another much larger box is very irksome. Why not just stick a label on the original box.

Sadly I am surprised how unreceptive most people are to the argument that they might want to save energy or in general reduce waste for the greater good. It drives me crazy how much recycling we throw out due to the enormous over packaging of things. It is one of the few areas where I would argue for more government intervention, because people don't put enough value on externalities or long term issues so won't do anything about them themselves. My in laws are American and I deal a lot with Americans for work. They have even less concept of this with almost all decisions being made solely on maximising your pwn personal utility at the current time. I think we just have to recognise that this is how people work and try to work around it. We are unlikely to change human nature.

The trouble solar has at the moment is the very low payments for exported electricity and the very variable output. If I look at our system which generates around 4000kWh a year, this varies enormously by day and by season. Good days can be 20-30kWh, but the next day even in summer can be cloudy and wet and then generate almost nothing. I think it works well in our system as we have a very high base use of electricity due to our pool. I think we will export a bit less than 1000kWh over the year, but if I look at my daily usage most of this comes on a very few very sunny days. It looks like I last exported electricity on the 11th of August. When I consider putting solar into my parents' new house, their daytime use of electricity would be minimal, maybe just a 2-300 watts of steady demand, with spikes when they use the washing machine or cook. I struggle to see how I could actually offset more than 1000kWh a year of electricity use without a battery. Thus what might actually make sense is quite a small array 2kW ish. What I am really saying is that the payback period depends very highly on how much electricity you use during daylight hours in the summer. My mum is very tight so won't get anywhere near the payback other people might get. If you can divert all spare production to DHW or charging an EV than the numbers look better. However, we use Octopus for this at night when prices are a lot lower, arguably you are only offsetting gas or low cost electricity with this generation. Better returns at the moment, but I am not sure I would value it at more than 7-8p/kWh in the long run. Net net if you use 100% of the electricity generated it is probably worth around 15p/kWh, if you use half the electricity generated and export the rest it is more like 12p/kWh. Of course a couple of years of high prices before going back to normal would dramatically alter these calculations, but I would not use current prices for more than a couple of years. So for the sake of argument if you assume £5000 for a 4kW set up with 3500 yearly generation then you are getting around 10% ROI. However, you might get close to 20% return for the next two years.

There is a review ongoing to try to fix these issues, it is due out in October. Not great and maybe they could have focused more on the short term issues as this appears to be a longer term review looking at the next 40 years. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1098100/review-electricity-market-arrangements.pdf The government was aware of these issues, in a generating market designed for variable cost fossil fuels, fixed cost renewables were not being treated correctly. From reading this they seem to have moved to a contract for differences system for renewables where they pay back to the system when prices are high and get paid extra when prices are low, reflecting that they are a fixed cost asset. However, most renewables are not under this system currently (see page 43) and see prices driven by the wholesale market. As renewable capacity has to increase roughly 10 fold then eventually 90%+ of renewable capacity will be on largely fixed price contracts not impacted by gas prices. The trouble is of course that this will take a long time and we have a problem today. I agree with @andyscotlandwe could retroactively impose a price cap for renewables in wholesale markets. Trouble is that this would be a breach of contract and end up in court and the UK does rightly frown on this kind of thing. Spain did this previously and wiped out renewable energy companies. A lot of this discussion focuses on electricity. Gas of course is simply dominated by the gas price and most people in the UK use gas to heat their homes. It looks like the gas unit price is going to double and the electricity unit price increase 83% in October, standing charges are only going up modestly this time. So high gas users (me) are looking at big increases. In the long run the expectation is that gas boilers are replaced with ASHPs and electricity forms an ever increasing proportion of the UK domestic energy mix, but today most of people's energy comes in the form of direct gas and we have to buy the gas.

Is there something different about the Bora surface. We have had 3 Siemens induction hobs over the last 20 years and not had a single scratch on any of them. Actually looking at the picture of the edge, is it coated with a black coating, it looks like it is coming off at the edge? Siemens hobs are ceramic glass with any colour under the glass. My wife's friend did scratch a different one by dragging an iron pot across it, but that was her fault. It was just a single scratch though, never seen anything like that. I wonder if T-cut might fix that, I would suggest a magic sponge but the surface should too hard for that to work.

Ok true, but an unusual occurrence in the spot market/at expiration of futures and likely only for a limited amount of the product that cannot be used or stored economically. Futures markets should generally not trade below zero. Although if the war ended and Russia restarted exports the price would plummet very quickly indeed.

https://www.centrica.com/investors/results-centre/2022-interim-results/ British Gas also produce gas. The profits of their residential distribution business almost halved in the first half of the year to 90 odd million. The profits of their gas production business on the other hand went up more than 10 fold to over 900million. Basically non Russian owners of energy assets are making out like bandits as they can sell all the gas they can produce at massively inflated prices. The media has absolutely no interest in reporting things calmly and sensibly so just lets people be confused by the thought that their gas supplier, British Gas, is making lots of money. It’s not even called British Gas any more, the company is called Centrica, BG is just their energy supply brand. If BG is doing well then all energy suppliers must be doing well. Energy suppliers are of course majorly hurting, it is energy producers that are doing well. Norway must be making an absolute fortune. We can’t charge a windfall tax on Norway! One possible solution would be to exert political pressure on countries like Norway to sell gas at below the market price. They won’t like it but it is totally immoral of them to be taking advantage of a situation caused by a war. Now I’m all for free markets, but within reason. They could be selling gas for twice the previous price and still making a fortune. They need to be able to do this to offset times when prices are low. No one offered to pay extra when prices collapsed due to COVID. But prices are not symmetrical, they cannot go lower than zero but can go up infinitely in theory. This ceased to be a normal market when Russia invaded Ukraine and restricted supply. Windfall taxes are a roundabout way of taking away excess profits but they cannot totally fix things as net importers of gas cannot tax net exporters.

I see this one a lot. Makes no sense to me. If China builds a nuclear power station in another country they won’t be running it and able to switch it off. The locals would be running it.

40p to 700p. So plus 1650%! I am sure there have been worse isolated incidents. Like electricity prices in California when Enron went bankrupt. But I am not aware of anything on a large scale like this. The oil price was up about 5x from depressed COVID levels at its highs. In the 70s and early 2000s the oil price went up 5-10x over a number of years. That was a global issue though.

Another 60p on the gas price today. Probably adds another £600 to predictions tomorrow. As @SimonD said at this rate we would simply be giving all of our money to the owners of gas. They must think we are stupid/crazy. Amazing how little coordinated effort there is to do something. This is worse than COVID. Gas price now more than 15x what it was 18 months ago.

The building site for my parents' house has a smart meter connected to Scottish Power. I have the same issue, they have been issuing estimated bills and I cannot get consumption data from the meter.

I should probably move any further discussion of the pool into my thread about my pool. Running the same experiment as yesterday to heat the hot eater back up again. The start temperature was 31.5 and the end temperature was 49.5 at the tap. I think the boiler at 62 may not have been high enough to hit the 55ish where the tank thermostat is set as it seemed to run for a long time. The boiler seemed to use 13.5kWh of gas for a temperature increase that should have taken 10.5kWh, so again 78% efficiency, similar to yesterday. It may be that you cannot get your boiler to run in condensing mode if you want to heat your hot water to 55C, which is where I am set. It probably requires a low-mid 60s flow temp for the boiler. Note my UFH manifolds are set between 38 and 42C so I could run the boiler a lot lower for heating, but the boiler does not have separate temps for heating and hot water. I will try this one more time tomorrow, turning the boiler a little lower and my hot water thermostat to 52C. One of my suspicions is that there is a lot of heat lost in all the little bits of pipework and pumps the water runs through. Thus it is probably more efficient to only turn on the hot water a couple of times a day rather than leave it on from 5am-9pm as I have done previously. It also seems that it will be somewhat cheaper to use the immersion at night on low cost electricity or during the day on PV as it will have much better efficiency.

It looks like I am set at 62. Hard to say when its just a dial that goes from 1-6. Only used 35kWh today for the pool, compared to 45kWh yesterday. Hard to know if this is because I insulated the low loss header, I turned down the boiler or it was a lot warmer today. 22C vs 13C (lovely day actually). No doubt a bit of each. At 9am consumption overnight was 81% of the day before. This would have been less impacted by the nicer weather. Between 9am and now the consumption was 64% of yesterday's likely more affected by solar gain. The smart gas meter doesn't connect so I have to manually go out and take pictures of the gas meter. A stroke of luck was that all this looking at pipes etc made me realise that they didn't insulate the pipes from the ASHP to the hot water tank in my parents' house before they sheeted the walls. Luckily they haven't been taped and painted yet, that was due to happen this week. The builder was very unhappy about being asked to take off the plasterboard and insulate the pipes, mainly because the ceiling is double boarded.

The gas price went up another 60p yesterday leading to even higher predictions this morning. Yesterday's increase is of course more than the price of gas in totality for most of the last few years. The 16% increase sounds a lot less bad than 150% of the "normal" price. Apparently the increase is caused by Russia planning to close Nordstream 1 for 3 days. I really do think someone has to explain to politicians that the more they say that governments will cover any increase in the cost of gas the more the price will actually rise. You are getting a hyper inflationary effect where the expectation is that governments will just print money to cover the cost of gas. This probably also explains the massive weakness of the Euro and GBP against the US Dollar. The Euro is even weaker than the Pound. Both have depreciated over 15% in the last year. Arguably we are at about as bad as it can get if the market is pricing in no Russian supply at all. Russia has to sell some gas to profit from the increase in price. 10-20% of capacity is probably as low as they can go.

Sorry was thinking square feet. Pool room is 10x7 metres. Including the charging room and plant room it is around 84sq metres of heated area. The pool is around 35sq metres. Had it set a bit lower until a few weeks ago. A valve actuator broke in the pool heater and the engineer was insistent that it wasn't heating up because the boiler had to be turned up to 70C. Despite the fact it had worked fine for four years. I turned it up and funnily enough it made no difference, so he eventually replaced the switch, which promptly broke again after about three weeks. So I had to turn it up again so as to not have the same argument. I was told the switch was tested before it was sent out and it was almost impossible that it had broken again. It had! Turned it back to the mid 60s now where it was before.

Have used 16kWh of gas. Temperature at tap increased from 29C to 51C. Suggests about 80% efficiency for the boiler. Have turned the boiler down a bit to make sure it condensing. Will turn off hot water after people have showered and try the same experiment tomorrow.

Having turned the hot water off yesterday, the only thing the boiler was doing was heating the pool and pool room, circa 700sq metres. It used 44/45 kWh of gas. The temperature really dropped today to around 13C outside, which I think is around the average for the year. 45kWh a day equates to 16000 for the year which is almost bang in line with what I thought it used. £500 a year before the recent surge in gas prices. £1200 at the current price. On top of this the pool pump uses a bit less than 2000kWh a year of electricity and the dehumidifier uses around 2500kWh. I have altered when they run so that much of the running is overnight at lower prices. So they would have cost around £500 a year also before recent price increases. Around £900 a year on Octopus Intelligent at the moment. I have not thoroughly investigated this before, frankly gas was too cheap to worry about it, I was paying just over 2p a kWh last year. It looks like I use around 45kWh a day of gas for the pool and 40-50kWh a day for hot water. I would guess we use around 4-500l a day which should use 26kWh. Assuming 3kWh a day of standing losses for the tank suggests that the boiler is only around 60-70% efficient heating hot water or heat is being lost somewhere else. I had not really thought about it before, but every part of the heating system is insulated except a low loss header. All the water gets pumped through this from the boiler and it is considerably hotter than any other component in the plant room, it was at around 40C this morning. I am going to wrap it in duct insulation and see if that impacts the pool consumption tomorrow. The other thing is that using the immersion to heat the hot water directly then no pumps would run and the water wouldn't go through the low loss header. Harder to calculate consumption of electricity though, so I will see if I can do that next. If I can reduce the apparent 10kWh a day of disappearing heat that is equivalent to a 5% reduction in my gas bill on its own. The pool heater is off now, so I have turned the hot water back on. It is at 29C at the moment, so I will see how much gas it takes to get back to the normal 55C. My calculator says it should need 15kWh, I think the heat exchanger in the tank is 27kW so it should maybe take half an hour.

We have Ubiquiti today and had a Ring doorbell in our last house. My parents' new house will have both. You have a couple of issues. Block walls and double glazing reduce wireless signals considerably. I recently put a router right up against the wall in the kitchen to get a signal directly outside. The signal was intermittent from a router in the middle of the kitchen ceiling despite being through just one block wall with foil backed insulation or triple glazed french doors. It is OK now, but runs at a fraction of the speed it runs at in the house. Simply opening the doors makes a massive difference to the signal. When the house was being built the 3/4G signal became pretty much unusable inside as soon as the windows were put in. Triple glazed windows seem almost as bad as walls from a wireless signal perspective. The second issue is that Ring's have quite poor WiFi reception. In our last house which was timber framed and with much thinner walls and windows, we just got a signal outside the front door despite it being only a few metres from the router. In my previous house where we did not have Ubiquiti I reckon that WiFi speed pretty much halved with every wall/floor that the signal passed through, even just stud walls. Compounding things though is the positioning of the router and Ring. The signal will travel pretty much in a straight line in all directions from the router. You have a wall directly along that line. The signal would have to pass through over 1M of wall. Can you get a long ethernet cable and move the router around to see where it would work better. On the thinner bit of the wall at the top of the porch looking at the screen might work better, otherwise actually in the hall and passing through the door would probably work better. You want the line of sight between them to have the least amount of material in it. Knowing this issue, I have purchased a wired Ring for my parents' house which is absurdly more expensive than the WiFi one. (Got a discounted one on Ebay). Theother thing is there is quite a bit of latency in the wireless one, so it can be a few seconds before it rings on your phone and people think there is no one home if you aren't quick to answer.

There has been some mention of the efficiency of using gas vs the immersion to heat hot water. My gas consumption is higher than I expected when the heating is off. I have never really got to the bottom of it. I am going to turn the gas hot water heating off for the next 24 hours and compare it to yesterday’s consumption. For most people there wouldn’t be an issue but I have a pool so I can’t separate pool heating from hot water easily. Then I will try using electric heating for a day. I am curious if there are a lot more losses than I expected using gas. The way my system is set up the water seems to get pumped around quite a lot.

Maybe worth pointing out that the sad thing so often in these instances is that the people worst affected are also the people least able to do anything about it. I can afford the increase in prices and I also think I know enough about what’s going on to minimise my consumption. Still showing how tough this is, I reckon since the house was built I have reduced my consumption of gas and electricity by around 6 or 7% as I optimised the systems and maybe could get gas consumption down the same amount again by finding the weak spots in my insulation or air tightness. But that’s it. Many people are putting in solar panels at the moment, to reduce electricity consumption. But I am sure there are many older people, single parents etc who either don’t understand what is going on and what they need to do to cut their costs or don’t have the money or ability to do things such as put in solar panels or improve their insulation. I don’t actually think sending people out to help explain what people could do to reduce consumption would be a bad idea. Maybe another thing they need to teach at school.

To state the obvious this is a very difficult problem. Russia was almost 40% of European gas supply. As they have cut supply by 80%, then we are short around 30% of previous supply. Note that as the price has risen around 10x then they will be making twice as much money at current levels of supply as before. This might actually suggest that even if the war ended they could just restrict supply indefinitely, although it is hard to say how much of the current price includes an certainty factor due to Ukraine and the unpredictability of Russia. The SNP plan had me looking at how gas sufficient the UK is. It appears as if the UK produces around 66% of the gas it uses (quick Google so may be wrong). So nationalising our energy companies would be entirely pointless as we would still have to import lots of gas. This kind of nonsense would even more destroy the gas markets and drive prices further up. The £6000 number being bandied about just does what I mentioned the other day, which is take the latest spot price and project it out forever. As the spot price can move dramatic amounts in a few days this has almost zero value as a prediction. So what to do? Basically Europe needs to get the market as close to back in balance as possible. i.e. they need a combination of supply increases and usage reduction that offset the 30% reduction in supply. It looks as if the increase in LNG imports is equivalent to between 10 and 15% of EU demand. Of course this also requires increased gas supply outside the EU and has driven up prices in the US. But assume that other countries can cover this extra supply. Then this would suggest that Europe needs to increase supply/reduce demand by around 20%. At this point the loss of Russian gas will be irrelevant. Prices would still no doubt be higher, but not anywhere near as high. It takes a long time to bring on gas supply, we can probably only increase it by a few percent a year. This suggests that the 15% reduction in demand being bandied about is maybe correct. As someone said though, how much gas is wasted? I think you do need prices to go up quite a lot to encourage people to reduce consumption, but £3000 is probably the price where there is enough pain to do that. The problem is though that as a very high percentage of gas is used for space and water heating as well as electricity production, people cannot alter consumption of these that quickly. We cannot insulate every house in the country in a few months. Reading Facebook utility user groups suggests that a lot of people, unlike on here, just don't understand enough about the workings of their heating system and use of energy to maximise efficiency (e.g. people who worry about phone chargers being plugged in, which uses a laughably negligible amount of electricity) Still it does give me hope that over a couple of years we could pretty much wean Europe off Russian gas through a combination of LNG imports, supply increases and demand reduction including more renewables to make electricity. It will be painful until we get there. One of the best policies might be to educate people about energy use and how to save it (frankly I sometimes think we need to send someone door to door to explain to people how to reduce energy use) Now all we need is a plan to do this and a politician willing to actually give people a straightforward explanation of what is happening. If the gas markets were convinced this was going to happen, gas prices would also start to fall. They don't want to buy up gas futures to find no buyers n a couple of years. Out the other side of this, it will have accelerated energy efficiency and the move to renewables but it is hard to see those benefits sitting on the precipice as we are now. This is the danger of allowing a massive short term increase in prices. People will find a way around using your product.

I just see a lot of people saying in passing that they have had devices burn out. I don't have any stats unfortunately. If you look at the immersion timers on Amazon there are quite a lot of one star reviews where they have broken after a year or less. The other problem on Amazon is that loads of people review things after a few days which doesn't tell you anything about their longevity. For me considering the small saving for export use and a 5-10 year payback period on an Eddi, it just doesn't seem worth it.

Having looked at this I think I am just going to install an immersion timer. I have looked at my export of electricity and I won't even make 1000kWh in a year. If I assume I can get an export payment of around 5p versus gas cost of 5-10p long term (more in the next year I know) then I can only save maybe £50 a year. Also it seems that these devices often burn out due to having 3kW going through them for hours on end. But I can save a few hundred in the next 12 months using Octopus to heat my water overnight with a £50 immersion timer. Any recommendations for an immersion timer that is robust and won't burn out after a few months?