Jeremy Harris

Lots of selectively quoted stuff there, and some it is a bit old and been overtaken by both technology and software improvements, but there are two points worth noting about rapid charging. The first is that the UK only has one V3 250 kW Supercharger area, at Park Lane, that opened about 2 weeks ago, and only Model 3 Teslas with the software update rolled out about a month ago can take full advantage of it, so any experience of it has to be limited at the moment. The highest power non-Tesla rapid chargers are currently around 200 kW, I think, but these cannot charge a Tesla as fast as a Supercharger can (for several reasons, from the way data is passed between the car and the charger to the point below about preconditioning). The other main consideration is that reviewers almost always seem to forget that it is essential that the battery be preconditioned (warmed up) in order to accept the full fast charge rate. The car does this automatically IF the driver taps the Supercharger location on the nav screen at least 20 minutes to half an hour before arriving there (something you'd do if route planning anyway). Doing this starts a routine in the car that measures the temperature of all the key stuff and starts diverting motor coolant around the battery pack to warm it up, so that when you arrive at the Supercharger the battery pack is at the optimum temperature to accept the fastest charging rate possible. If the battery pack is cold it will not accept a full rate charge for long, and sometimes may not charge at a very high rate at all. Once rapid charging, the car temperature control system works hard to maintain an even temperature throughout the whole battery pack, as this is key to enabling efficient rapid charging. Battery pack cooling does kick in towards the end of a rapid charge, and this can be heard as the coolant fan kicks. AC charging efficiency varies a lot with charge rate. Charging at a low power is less efficient than charging at a higher power, as most of the losses in the on board chargers are fairly fixed. According to the data I've been pulling off the Tesla API, it looks like the overall energy transfer efficiency is around 83% (electricity in to energy actually used by the car), but I've only ever charged at the maximum available from a single phase supply, 32 A. I suspect that if I had 3 phase, so could use the full 11 kW OBC capacity that might increase to around 85%. Still a heck of a lot better than wasting ~75% of the energy put into the tank of a petrol engined car.

Exactly! An interesting observation is that my energy efficiency tends to be a lot better when my wife is in the car. As other Tesla owners have noted, the high pitched noises from the passenger area whenever the accelerator is depressed tend to be performance-limiting... During the time I owned the little BMW i3 I became a great fan of one-pedal driving, and with the automatic "hand brake" feature that the Model 3 now has that's become absolutely brilliant. I very rarely ever need to touch the brake pedal, as just lifting off stops the car fast enough, and if you get the timing right you can take your foot right off the accelerator just as the car gently rolls to a stop, which automatically applies the brakes to hold the car stationary. Makes for a quick start when pulling away from traffic lights, too, as all you need to do is just stamp on press the accelerator... I drove most of the way down to South Devon for our Christmas break on autopilot, and have to say that it's better than I thought it would be. Makes driving in busy traffic a lot less stressful, and a lot safer, as I found I could concentrate more on keeping a good look out all around.

Remember that every cell in the battery pack is wrapped with a liquid-heated/cooled alloy strip, that has tiny channels through which liquid is pumped, with any excess heat (most of which comes from the motors) being dissipated by a small radiator and fan. Lithium cell charging efficiency is close to 100% for most of the charge cycle anyway, there are virtually no charging losses in the cells during most of the charge, really only during the final few %, when the BMS goes into cell-balancing mode. Rapid charging doesn't even have this inefficiency, as it doesn't allow the pack to charge to the cell-balancing stage, it usually only charges to around 80% or so of the pack's real capacity (real capacity and usable capacity are two different things, for a host of reasons). Most of the time the liquid temperature management system is used to heat the battery up, ready for rapid charging, not cool it down, anyway. Waste heat from the motor cooling system is pumped around the cells to warm them up, ready to accept a fast charge. The battery pack spends far more time being actively heated than it ever does being cooled. Almost all the charging inefficiency when charging from AC is in the onboard charger, and likewise with DC rapid charging most of the inefficiency is from the AC-DC converter in the supply to the Superchargers (these are big, fan cooled units, often sited close to the bays). Not sure where you've got the 95% and 25% figures from, but they don't seem to be related to any of the EVs/PHEVs I've owned. All three have charged at full rate until about 96% to 98% of usable capacity, then charge tapers off for the last few % as the cells balance. Looking at the data for the Tesla, it seems that cell balancing starts at around 99% of usable capacity; last night it charged at maximum current until the pack hit 99%, then the current tapered off a bit over about 10 minutes during the final 1%. Rapid charging typically gains me around 250 miles range, and at a V3 Supercharger will take around 17 minutes. I've not ever stopped to charge on route anywhere, either, in either the BMW i3 or the Tesla. Home and destination charging is easy - just takes a few seconds to plug the car in when I get home, or park when away somewhere, and it's fully charged by the following morning. Charging on route is something we may have to do once in a blue moon, but isn't needed most of the time. I like knowing that my car is sat on the drive now with a near-fully charged battery, as it almost always will be every morning.

Me too, and for several years having "winter yacht parking space" was also on the essentials list! The first house we bought in Scotland was a new build, and I got the builder to put an additional concrete hardstanding in, accessed via a double gate, so the boat could sit around the side of the house, rather than down at the sailing club, during the winter. The first house we ever bought had a drive large enough for one car, and by the time we sold it that had been widened to take two cars (just). The main problem area as far as on-street parking goes is almost certainly in cities and urban areas, and isn't really connected to wealth. I have a friend that lives in a fairly expensive part of London (Regent's Park), in a large house, and he has no off-street parking. Similarly, in our rural village we have a significant on-street parking problem, as all of the older houses (a lot date back a couple of hundred years or more) and the two small council-owned housing estates, don't have any off-street parking. Providing charging facilities for all those who have no choice but to park in the street is something that I'd like to see the government invest in. handing out (up to) £500 grants for people to have "smart" charge points fitted to their homes isn't good value, as it seems that, as with many similar schemes, the providers of the charge points are just inflating the price by £500 to increase their profits.

The model for this is already used for supplying electricity to large commercial consumers. They can choose to pay a lower tariff and be higher up the LFDD (Low Frequency Demand Disconnection) list, or pay more for their electricity and be lower down on that list. Best recent example was probably Newcastle Airport, following the Hornsea/Little Barford incident last August, where, under the tariff that Newcastle Airport had agreed with their supplier, they were in the first tier to be disconnected as the grid tried to get the frequency back up. The cost to the airport was apparently rather high, as the knock-on impact of the airport being closed for an hour or two extended over several days. I gather that they have since agreed to go on a more expensive tariff, in return for not being on the tier one LFDD list...

As far as EVs are concerned I can foresee there being a "smart conflict" (it's already happening with Tesla Model 3s, big time). OLEV require that all domestic charge points that are installed with an OLEV grant (which is the vast majority) have to be "smart", so that the DNO/supplier can control EV charging , as required to balance the grid. "Smart" charge points are not connected to "smart" metering, as the two are run independently of each other, with no clear intention at the moment to ever get them to talk to each other (not sure it's even practical to do this given the way that DCC has been set up). Ignoring the fact that some cars refuse to work with "smart" charge points (all Tesla Model 3 owners, for example, have to find a way to disable "smart" functionality in order to get their cars to charge), there is a fundamental problem in that users will need their cars to be "fuelled" to a certain level for travel the following day, yet the DNO/supplier neither knows nor cares about this (and vehicles cannot communicate their needs to "smart" charge points - there is no communication link in the spec to allow this). For example, I like to keep my car topped up to 90% charge every night. The reason being that we have ageing relatives and we never know whether we may be called on to do a long trip in a hurry. If the DNO/supplier decided that they weren't going to let my car charge, for whatever reason, then that could cause a great deal of pain and grief. Likewise, if the DNO/supplier decided that they would only let my car charge when the electricity tariff was high, I'd not be a happy bunny. In an ideal world we'd have a unified system that allowed the grid to be balanced by load management, and for consumers to have all their requirements met, at the best possible value. Call me cynical but I just cannot see that happening, somehow.

What's interesting is that our house pretty much proves that mass doesn't determine the thermal time constant, as it's timber framed and timber clad externally, yet has a thermal time constant that is a fair bit longer than a diurnal cycle. There's not much concrete in the house at all, just a 100mm thick concrete slab, laid on top of 300mm of EPS, and surrounded by 200mm of EPS around the periphery. The pumped cellulose in the walls and roof helps a bit (300mm thick in the walls, 400mm thick in the roof), but not by that much, as there's a 50mm service void between the VCL and the plasterboard. Pretty much all of the heat storage that helps to maintain a pretty constant temperature comes from the concrete slab and the plasterboard, in practice. I guess a little bit also comes from the water in the UFH pipes...

I charge pretty much exclusively during the night, with the car set to start charging at midnight, whether I'm paying for the charge or not. A typical charge will be between 30 kWh and 60 kWh, usually at a rate of around 7.5 kW, so the car's pretty much always charging when the grid has a lot of spare generation capacity. Most BEV owners seem to do much the same, but that's mainly because most early adopters have off street parking, and access to home charge points. There are a lot of people who don't have off street parking, and would be unable to take advantage of off-peak home charging, and that may well be one of the biggest problems to overcome.

Does that allow for the efficiency difference between fossil fuelled vehicles and BEVs? Allowing for charge and discharge losses, BEVs are around 80% efficient, whereas fossil fuelled vehicles struggle to get above about 25% efficient in practice. Peak engine efficiency is around 34% for an Atkinson cycle petrol engine and maybe 40% for a common rail diesel, but very few ICE vehicles run anywhere near peak efficiency. BEV efficiency is pretty constant, and tends to be better at lower speeds, the region where ICE vehicles are often least efficient.

Just had a look at Zap Map and it's showing that there are currently 14 hydrogen filling stations across the UK: Just for comparison, this is a map showing just the rapid (50 kW or more DC) charge points across the UK (albeit filtered to only those that will fit my car - so this doesn't include all the Chademo chargers):

Or not perceived, as one significant issue with a hydrogen fire is that it cannot be seen - the "flame" is completely invisible. I remember this being demonstrated many years ago during some lab safety training, pretty scary having an invisible, high temperature "flame".

Tesla are in the process of rolling out 250 kW rated Superchargers across their network, now that cars (like mine) can charge at 250 kW. The first Supercharger bays to get uprated were the Park Lane ones, which went live just before Christmas. Given that Tesla managed to convert all their Superchargers to accept the Model 3 in the space of a few months (needed a connector change, as the Model 3 uses the CCS international fast charge standard) then I doubt there will be much delay in getting their network upgraded. The paired Supercharging rate halving issue has been around since day one, but every Tesla owner knows about it, and it's easy to see from the screen in the car if you're heading towards a Supercharger where there's a strong probability that you'll end up being paired. Anyway, with the roll out of V3 Superchargers this issue goes away. Not at all - the HV lines run in to Supercharger arrays are massively more capable than 250 kW and the V3 Superchargers being rolled out all have a dedicated 250 kW feed to each one, unlike some of the V2 bays that used a shared feed between two stalls. There's some info here on the V3 Superchargers now going in: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/16/a-quick-guide-to-teslas-new-v3-supercharging/ Quote from that article: At the moment, yes. However, the cycle life issue seems to have been largely resolved, and the output capability is gradually increasing, but seems to be driven by the demands of the primary market, which aren't that high. The useful thing about liquid fuel cells is that they open up several, fairly safe, ways to refuel, or make the fuel in the first place. We already know how to make alcohol cheaply and in large volumes (petrol currently has 5% to 10% ethanol added). Similarly the distribution network is already in place - nothing much needs to be changed to switch conventional filling stations over to dispensing alcohol; I'd guess that the same tanks and pumps used for petrol could just be relabelled, almost. The real issue is whether enough investment is going in to liquid fuel cell R&D, or whether most of it is going into hydrogen storage and distribution, or battery development. My gut feeling is that gaseous hydrogen as a road vehicle fuel may not prove to be cost-effective. The cost of producing hydrogen is high, and it's a wasteful process, plus it costs a lot to transport (the vehicles needed are expensive) and it costs a lot to store and dispense (the storage tanks and dispensing systems are very expensive, because of the pressures involved and the fire hazards associated with hydrogen).

The most common failure mode reported seems to be MC4 connectors, so adding more connections seems likely to create more potential failure points. Having said that, I suspect that most of the reported MC4 failures were down to installation, most probably a bad crimp (there are lots of not very good crimp tools around). If it were me I'd just keep things dead simple, connect each panel to its neighbour as it's fitted, not faff around punching holes through the roof membrane (that are bound to create an issue sooner or later) and run the combined string DC cables through flexible conduit over/along the roof and down to an externally mounted inverter, in a cool location. That way all the DC wiring is outside the envelope, well protected by being under the panels/roof covering, the inverter can run in a nice cool environment and if a panel has to be changed because it gets damaged there's no need to disturb anything, risk damage to the membrane trying to pull cables out, etc.

The big problem with shifting to another energy source, for any new car technology, is the same one that petrol engined cars had to tackle when they first came into being. The first car owners had to buy fuel in cans from a chemist, storing it at home, and strapping extra cans to the car if they needed to make a long journey. Gradually, over a few decades, filling stations started to be built alongside well-used routes, to save owners having to take cans of fuel with them. We've become used to a pattern of car use where we fuel cars exclusively at roadside filling stations. Both hydrogen fuel cell powered cars, and battery powered cars, face the same issues that early car owners faced, but with one key difference. Hydrogen fuel cell cars owners cannot keep a store of fuel at home, so are wholly reliant on new hydrogen filling stations being built along commonly used routes. It may be that some existing petrol/diesel/LPG filling stations can be adapted to include hydrogen storage and filling, but many cannot, primarily because of the additional space required to accommodate hydrogen filling points (for safety reasons). Battery powered cars have the advantage of being able to be "refuelled" pretty much anywhere that there's a supply of electricity. The snag is that maximum recharge rates are (as of a couple of days ago) limited to 250 kW, which is roughly 900 mph charging speed (versus a typical petrol engined car's ~3,000mph refuelling speed). The upside is that many battery electric cars can be charged fairly slowly whenever they are parked, at home, at work, or when parked away overnight. Right now, it seems that very few EV owners do much charging at public, roadside, charge points. The majority charge overnight at home, or during the day at work. Whether hydrogen fuel cell powered cars will become mainstream very much depends on whether enough investment is put into refuelling facilities. I'm inclined to think that it's more likely that alcohol fuel cells might be more likely to be a better option, as they are already available (in the form of generators for RV's, etc) and a petrol pump can easily be adapted to dispense alcohol.

Something changed after Shoichiro Toyoda retired, I think. He shook up Toyota, by almost single-handedly pushing through the "car for the Millenium" project, which became the Prius. There was a heck of a lot of internal strife within Toyota at the time, as, by nature, they were a "conservative" car manufacturer, one that believed in small, incremental, changes, and high levels of reliability. I strongly suspect that the company just reverted to type when he'd gone, and scorned the idea of ever designing a radically different type of car again. It seems odd, given the success of the Prius, and the other hybrids that share the same core technology, but it was probably seen as a safe thing to do when there was that massive downturn in vehicle sales around 10 years ago. Interesting that Nissan decided to take the fairly radical (for a Japanese car company) step of creating the Leaf. They've almost certainly gained a great deal of EV experience in the years they've been making and selling those.

It almost certainly has as much to do with Toyota losing out on a source of suitable batteries, I think. Toyota has always had battery supply problems. When they chose NiMH cells for the first volume production Prius models, they were hampered by the inability of any suppliers to let them use larger format cells, due to the patents having been bought up by another car manufacturer, who just sat on them, and refused to licence the technology for anything other than small cells. Toyota had to use a work-around, which (like Tesla years later) relied on using lots of small format cells to make the HV battery pack. At the time, this made the HV battery, and its management system, expensive to manufacture, as unlike lithium chemistry cells, NiMH cells don't take kindly to just being connected together in parallel. By the time Toyota shifted to using Lithium Ion cells for the plug-in variant they were way, way behind the curve in terms of access to decent battery chemistry. Access to batteries has been well and truly stitched up by the early entrants to the EV market, some of whom realised early on that control of battery availability was the single biggest production problem they had to overcome. Even Hyundai/Kia, who have access to probably the best/second best, battery technology around, are having major supply problems at the moment, which are delaying sales of their Kona and eNiro models, and they have the major advantage of South Korea being a world leader in the manufacture of lithium cells. Tesla got around the battery problem by bringing battery technology in-house, and stealing a march on Toyota at the same time, by partnering with Panasonic (who had been Toyota's NiMH battery partner).

Someone needs to call Toyota/Lexus out on this BS. My decision to get rid of my plug-in Toyota Prius was driven, in part, by the "self-charging" crap, and I made it clear to the local Toyota dealer (that I've been using for ~15 years) that I was never going to buy one of their cars again because of this, in my view, fake advertising. No hybrid (that doesn't plug in) has "two sources of power". ALL of the power comes originally from burning fuel within the engine of the car, without exception. Even the regen charging comes from fuel burned to get up to speed/up a hill before slowing down recovers a portion of the energy used. I was a great fan of Toyota's hybrid technology for years, and owned three Prius variants between 2005 and 2018, but there is no doubt at all that Toyota have been left behind by many other main stream car manufacturers. My guess is that they are trying to cover up their lack of progress in developing EVs by trying to pretend that their hybrids are, in some way, the same as EVs. Clever bit of marketing strategy, as I'm sure that most punters will get completely suckered by this. Probably the only way to get the message across that these cars are just fossil fuel burners may be to remove the zero rate VED for them, and stop classifying them as an "Alternative Fuel Vehicle". I never could understand how the government came up with that classification for hybrids, anyway, given that they get all their energy from fuel, just like any other fossil fuel powered car. The real shame of it is that, back in the very early 1990's, when the then chairman of Toyota, Shoichiro Toyoda, pushed the development of their very first hybrid drivetrain, his goal was for this to be a stepping stone, a way for Toyota to gain experience and knowledge of designing and developing an electric drivetrain, so that Toyota would be ahead of the rest of the world in electric vehicle technology. Now Toyota are probably right at the very bottom of the list of manufacturers developing electric vehicles, even the traditionally conservative manufacturers, like GM and Ford, are way ahead of them in EV technology. Pretty much every major motor manufacturer in the world is either already selling EVs, or is just about to. The best Toyota can manage is to develop some low speed electric mobility machines for the 2020 Olympic Games, with no sign that they are looking to release production-ready EVs any time soon.

With the exception that what they refer to as "thermal mass" is really just another (spurious) name for heat capacity, and has no units of measurement that include a term for mass. The easy way to distinguish whether a property is real or imaginary is just to ask what the units of measurement are. For example, we can define power in watts, horsepower or probably a few other less commonly used units. Likewise we can define energy in joules, kilowatt hours etc. The only answer I've heard from any supporter of thermal mass has given the unit of measurement that supposedly applies to it that which has already been allocated for an entirely different property, heat capacity. Heat capacity on its own isn't very useful though, as you also need to know how well heat can flow into, and out of, any element for to work out how much effect it may have on maintaining temperature stability. For example, the heat capacity of the phase change material inside my Sunamp is pretty high, yet because the case is highly insulated that stored heat contributes next to nothing to the temperature stability of the house. In contrast, the gypsum plasterboard and plaster skim on all the internal walls has a moderate heat capacity (but less than that of the PCM in the Sunamp), but gypsum has a moderate thermal conductivity, plus there is a large area in contact with the air inside the house, so it has a massively greater impact on maintaining the thermal stability of the house. With specific relation to that article, it refers to concrete for heat storage. The heat capacity of concrete isn't that high in relation to its mass. For example, 1 kg of concrete can store about 880 J/K, whereas 1 kg of water can store about 4220 J/K. Even 1kg of plaster on the walls can store about 1090 J/k, so significantly more than concrete. If someone wanted to improve the heat capacity of their house, the very simplest and cheapest way to do it would be to just double up on the thickness of plasterboard on the walls. The combination of the reasonable heat capacity of gypsum, its moderate thermal conductivity and the relatively large area in contact with the air inside the house, means that this would be very much more effective at improving thermal stability than adding a bit more concrete to the floor. It would also reduce sound transmission from room to room, too.

You can easily compare the various forms of insulation performance by looking at the thermal conductivity of each, usually given as λ or lambda. If you want to do some rough and ready comparisons, ignoring thermal bridging and edge/geometric effects, then this simple U value calculator may be of use: Simple U value calculator.xls There are some typical λ values given in that spreadsheet as starting points, but you can usually find the exact value for any particular product from the manufacturer's data sheet. As a general rule, the thickness needed will be directly proportional to the λ value, so PIR with a λ of 0.022 W/m.K that is 200mm thick will be equivalent to rockwool, with a λ of 0.037 W/m.K that's 337mm thick.

That;s most probably because the LV overhead network is being changed from the older separate conductor system to ABC, Aerial Bundled Cable, whenever a section needs replacement. ABC is more reliable and cheaper/quicker to install than the old separate conductor system. As an aside, ABC is rather cleverly designed, as the outer sheathing of each of the bundled conductors is moulded with a number ridges to denote the phase, so 1 ridge = L1, 2 ridges = L2 etc. The PEN has lots of ridges, around 12 IIRC. This means that the people working on it can easily identify which conductor is which just by feeling the outside of it.

As earlier, we need to define efficient. Does it cost more if only 75% of the possible binding sites are regularly used, for example? Not really. If anything, it probably extends the resin usable life before exhaustion, so may well be cheaper, and so arguably more efficient. Efficiency is the wrong term for defining convenience properties of any device, as by definition, in this case, it relates to the amount of waste generated (salt solution wasted plus water wasted) relative to the amount of treated water delivered. It's absolutely true. As a former chemist, who used ion exchange columns in the lab, then I can vouch for the fact that any ion exchange medium has a defined number of binding sites for a given volume of media. No commercial water softener ever runs until all the binding sites have zero sodium ions, for several reasons: 1. Any practical mechanism for controlling regeneration has no way of knowing how many binding sites have already exchanged their sodium ions for calcium ions at any given time (or volume) since the column was last regenerated, so any timing/metering system can only make a very approximate estimate at the remaining capacity. 2. Any metering system will have some inaccuracy, largely associated with the dynamic flow range that it needs to operate over, plus an inherent tolerance on any initial calibration. Even a domestic water meter, as used for billing, is only accurate to about 2% in the upper band and may be as much as 5% out in the lower band. Metering systems fitted to metered softeners are unlikely to be more accurate than this, and may well be significantly less accurate at low flow rates. 3. Water hardness varies from time to time, often seasonally in some areas, so the setting used before either timed or volumetric regeneration sequencing has to be based on the worst case, that for the hardest water likely to be experienced in that area. 4. There has to be a sensible initial allowance for the reduction in ion binding sites with time, both because of the fairly slow chemical degradation of all ion exchange resins, and because of the slow mechanical changes within the resin bed that reduce the available number of binding sites with time. The net result is that all ion exchange water softeners will be initially set up so that they use more salt solution during regeneration than might be assumed by the absolute ion exchange ratio of ~0.46. If any ion exchange softener was initially set up so that it regenerated when exactly 100% of the initial ion exchange media binding sites had been depleted, then it would start to deliver unsoftened water before long, due to all the variables given above. The sensible thing for all manufacturers to do is err on the side of caution, and ensure that any unit is initially set up to ensure that there will still be enough working binding sites available close the end of the units working life (or life before ion exchange resin replacement). This always means that some salt solution will be wasted, as will some flush water. The question is whether this variation in wastage/efficiency between different brands is significant. Clearly any metered unit is more likely to be more efficient than any timed unit, but whether some metered units are significantly more efficient (in terms of generating less waste per unit softened water) than others is debatable, and, as mentioned earlier, highly dependent on usage pattern within the household, as that has far and away the most significant impact of metering accuracy. Agreed, but I've never seen a domestic unit that has any form of reliable, process control, type monitoring and control system in order to reduce both salt solution usage and water wastage. I recall seeing one unit years ago with a supposed hardness meter fitted to the outlet, but in reality it was a simple conductivity (a.k.a. TDS) meter, which was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, given that its electrodes were permanently in the outlet flow.

As a general rule of thumb, no one in their right mind is likely to sell land that has a reasonable chance of gaining planning consent for less than its value as a plot, simply because the uplift in value associated with planning consent is massive, maybe up to 100 times the value of the land without it. The fact that there are disused barns on the land does open up the possibility of building a house within the footprint of them, even if consent for development elsewhere on the land is very unlikely, for reasons such as being categorised as an important open space. Open spaces between houses within a settlement are often seen as being important and there is often a desire to retain them, particularly in order to maintain the character of rural settlements. We have a couple of open spaces between houses in our village that I doubt will be developed in my lifetime, as there seems to be a strong view that they are important to the character of the village as a whole. You may as well approach the landowner head on with the request, if only to find out if he/she is amenable to the idea or, perhaps, has already considered it, sought advice and decided that it's unlikely that PP would be granted, as the price will be what the price will be - that's set by local supply and demand, in the main. The landowner may well not have considered a Class Q conversion, for example, although that is very limited in terms of what you are allowed to do.

I tested the supposedly "anonymised" NHS data set a few years ago, when I wrote to the local NHS data protection chap to make it clear that I did not want my medical records included in any data set that was to be passed outside the NHS. The response I had was interesting, as it enabled me to show them just how totally useless their system was at anonymising records. I was granted access to my, supposedly anonymised, medical record, on request. Sure enough, there was no name, DOB, address or NHS number associated with the record. There was, however, date information included with specific record entries, together with the location of some treatments. The blithering idiots in the NHS simply hadn't realised how this rendered all their attempts at anonymising the data useless. There was a record for a hospital stay and orthopaedic surgery following a road accident, that included dates for admission, key treatments and discharge. As there was also location data (the specific unit to which I'd been admitted) it took minutes to do a web search for road accidents in that area on that date, narrow down the reported injuries to those on my medical record, and then get my name and age. Armed with that information it was then easy to fill in all the blanks on the supposedly anonymised data set, with the sole exception of my NHS reference number. Took me maybe a couple of hours to turn a supposedly anonymous medical record into one that was, to all intents and purposes, complete, using nothing more complex than internet access and the ability to do a few searches.

Although diversity rules are used when determining things like the maximum load, the over-riding principle is that the cable is always protected by an over-current device that will trip at a lower current than the maximum rating of the cable (accepting that ring finals are slightly oddball - two ~27 A capable cables run effectively in parallel and normally protected by a 32 A over-current protection device). This means that if you run a radial power circuit in 2.5mm² T&E, then you would most probably protect that circuit with a 20 A over-current protection device. It doesn't really matter how many 13 A outlets there are on the circuit (in theory) as the circuit is protected such that the cable cannot be overloaded. The same goes for any other radial circuit, the over-current protection device is rated to protect the cable, and so prevents the circuit being overloaded by tripping out. For example, we have a 20 A protected radial, run in 2.5mm² T&E, that supplies power to the heating system. That circuit has the ASHP, UFH, programmer, thermostats and a single 13 A utility outlet (just somewhere handy in the cupboard to plug a light in to see the UFH stuff) connected to it. I could plug a 2.5 kW electric heater into that 13 A outlet, and turn on the ASHP, UFH etc, which could add maybe another 2.5 kW of load, so overloading the circuit. If this happened for long enough the RCBO protecting that circuit would just trip to protect the cable from overheating.

The whole voice recognition thing poses a fair few privacy and potential legal conundrums. It does seem clear that speech recognition that is built-in to a device, and which doesn't rely on powerful external processing power, just doesn't really work very well yet, as anyone with this feature built-in to a non-internet connected car can probably verify (my experience with Toyota and BMW systems was that they were pretty hopeless).