MikeSharp01

Can I ask when is it right to and not to lollypop the manifold as it you have it on the 7 way but not on the 2 and 3 way when would a 5 way need it or not or are there other factors?

Our solar panels have been on the build roof 1 month, admit its been a good month, and we have exported 1133.2kWh at £0.15 or £169.98 which pays the electric bill on both properties, and some, so I love solar - not so much the seagulls who deposit excrement that reduces our output! It will be fun to find out if it was the renewables that tripped the Spanish / Portuguese & a bit of Frances grid yesterday though.

Just to add to the pot of 'issues' with green and power generation agenda's interesting report from the IET today that tells people how much more expensive it is to bury the grid (4.5 times overhead) or keep it under the ocean than it is to pop up pylons everywhere. https://www.theiet.org/media/press-releases/press-releases-2025/press-releases-2025-april-june/29-april-2025-rewiring-britains-future-iet-releases-key-report-in-helping-britain-s-power-grid-reach-net-zero so, as ever you can spend money going 'green' assuming you equate green with burying cables and that's not a done deal either, or not and put up with the pylons, can't see any other way around it unless we find a way of transmitting it about without wires or perhaps we could install Wind turbines locally if we don't want pylons. Direct link to the full report here: https://www.theiet.org/media/axwkktkb/100110238_001-rev-j-electricity-transmission-costs-and-characteristics_final-full.pdf

3000 ft2 is roughly 280 m2 £600K divided by 280 gives you £2143 per meter2 which is a relatively low budget and you will need to do a good deal of it yourself to get to that. £3K m2 is more doable but won't be a very high end finish - unless you do even more yourself. So as ever you can spend money saving time or spend time saving money or make the house smaller and play with the ratio's that way.

Looks like a great event - sadly I cannot make that day otherwise I would have attended - hope it all goes well.

I thought the abstract said it all really - it says that someone just used Google to find some connection between C02 and brain activity and then just posted it to sharpen up the tone of the conversation / make their tribulations with MVHR appear somewhat technical - so probably a bit of wind up. In fact what these researchers did was to use a process called microdialysis which involved pushing tiny tubes into the brains of Goats and then injecting mock brain fluid mediated with CO2 , hence Google found it, to see what effect this had depending on what the goats were doing at the time - awake or sleeping. They found a number of effects during waking which were not there during sleeping and the common effect was that the goats brains worked really hard at keeping the brains chemistry balanced and that they were quite good at it. It is not obvious that the same effects might be connected to the concentrating of CO2 in the breathing atmosphere of the goats and they may or may not have developed insights into a number of other things but then I only read the abstract. There is, of course, an alternative explanation for the OP's highlighting this piece of research and that is that they are a retired vetenary brain surgeon masquerading as a self builder.

Classic system of systems issue. If you choose to use systems built by others that are controlled by others then you should expect to play by their rules. Open source, local hosting and Linux operating systems are perhaps the only way to go.

It's time to insulate water pipes and I am looking for the best options given the vast array of products out there and where to insulate, we have several water mediums to consider, some like anything to do with hot water - including UFH, are obvious but the cold water supplies not so obvious. Should I, for instance, routinely insulate mains / softened potable cold water to taps, basins, cisterns etc? The house is very well insulated and air tight.

Can you use 600 on the walls with 12.5mm?

You are allowed to wear your boots in the house - 🫡

So that would be 9V AC relative to Neutral, wonder why they chose 🤔

Are they still talking with 9V?

Best of luck with it anyway all you can do is keep narrowing the odds in your favour - feels very much like it's a lottery after all.

So a resistive heater, EG your immersion heater, puts 100% (well very nearly - some energy is always converted into a less useful form) of the electricity consumed into your water but you cannot go the other way? I suppose a question might be "Is that because the 2nd law says so or that we just don't have a technology that does it." after all the Kelvin-Plank statement mentions, IIRC, that any device operating a 'cycle' cannot achieve this perhaps leaving open an opportunity for a device not using a cycle to achieve this.

One thing I have noticed, although I guess I could have worked out it was there, is the amount of power the inverter (ours is hybrid so ready for a battery) draws. I have not done the long term math yet but if feels like about 5-7% so for example at 6kW of generation the Inverter is using around 350W. I am somewhat with @nod - the numbers on the battery just don't add up but if I take the 'save the planet' line I can square the circle so if there is any money left at the end of the build we will get a couple of batteries.

How do you keep the data loggers running - batteries?

Yes we exported 26kWh today, frustrating waiting for the export MPAN number to come through after we commissioned the PV 3 weeks ago, then we can get our 15p per kWh!

Get yourself a BMW era Mini Cooper S, like driving a roller skate - fast enough to be fun, especially in 'SPORT' mode, looks great when clean, mostly comfortable - give run flat tyres a miss, and mine has 200K miles now - still smiling.

So are there two branches off the MVHR and are there two heat batteries, the things the water flows through and the air passes over on on its way to the rooms - one on each branch? The counter flow heat exchanger deals with the heat recovery bit of the job. If there is only one branch / heat battery then the problem must be a flow rate / balancing issue because the difference cannot be explained any other way I can see and even then its a long shot so something odd at the very least.

Good to see progress, keep on keeping on.

No I agree, mine runs on a PI 5. Yes we are using a hive cloud mainly because I have access via work but I can encrypt anything I want. My goal in using the phone is to show people how simple it can be but it has all the down sides of every other system of systems on the planet. They do, but that doesn't stop them being complex in all other respects and most people don't know what those respects are.

Not 100% sure, because there might be much more complex things coming, but I think the average modern car is a phemominally complex system of systems and some people others may define as 'right plonkers' seem to manage them in getting from A-B mostly without incident. So it looks like you can make extremely sophisticated systems work for the general humanity you find about the place - perhaps this should be our aim.

What if the house is autonomous - IE runs itself? Then the human interface can be a normal on/off switch for the heating, MVHR, lighting etc. (naturally with a parallel app interface to allow on/off from anywhere on or off the planet.)

Provided your sensors are sending MQTT messages you don't need Node Red on a PC to subscribe. The little app I feature above just needs you to enter the broker details and build simple tile based dashboard on your phone each tile can subscribe to one or more topics. So my graph subscribes to 3 topics and stores 1000 readings.- All free and no PC needed..

Welcome to THE forum for people like us.