Ed Davies

My site had, when I bought it, outline planning permission for two houses. At the time the council charge was about £80 for the first house and £40 for each additional house so I paid to register addresses for both. When I had an entrance, fence and postbox I then activated the address for the plot I'm actually building on. If/when I sell the other plot the new owner can change the name (should be free) and activate the other address. I think about half that price would be more reasonable but otherwise all OK. The house I'm renting in the mean time shares its address with the adjoining house (“everybody knows” which is which, etc). Unfortunately, it also shares its name with another house in the same village with a one letter difference in its postcode. Neither are officially registered under that name. When I tried to get this sorted out with the council they wanted to charge me £160 for a new registration on a house which predates the concept of “database” by at least two world wars. Despite my protests that it was just a correction to an obvious misregistration in the past they insisted that was the only way. Nope.

An aside: there are two steps to setting up the address. First is to get it allocated by the council, the £75 bit you mention. The second is to get it activated by the Royal Mail, that's free. The second is well worth doing as soon as you're ready to do stuff on the plot as it'll mean that the address appears in on-line retailer's databases, etc. Handy for deliveries. The downside to activation is that you then get bombarded by TV licensing wanting to know why you haven't got a TV licence yet. At least that gives you a supply of scrap paper on site for days you've forgotten to bring your notebook (except when they use red envelopes, they're harder to write on). AFAIK, council tax is payable from when the house is ready for occupation, whatever that means.

Something really weird happens on the first page of this thread. @JSHarris has a post starting “It's worth looking in a bit of detail at just how great the emissions are from some of the building materials used”. Two posts below @Big Jimbo quotes this (I assume, maybe he's quoting from somewhere else) but the text is significantly different. @JSHarris did you edit that post? If so, why is it not marked as edited? Was it because you edited it with your moderator superpowers or something? Whatever, even the revised version seems low to me. “so taking our concrete slab as an example, that uses around 25 tonnes of concrete, plus around another 120 tonnes in our retaining wall (!), plus another 10 tonnes for the garage slab, so a total of around 155 tonnes of concrete” … “and for all the concrete in our build (which is a lot more than average, because of the big retaining wall) it looks like the CO2 figure is around 11 tonnes”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete says: “The carbon dioxide CO2 produced for the manufacture of structural concrete (using ~14% cement) is estimated at 410 kg/m³ (~180 kg/tonne @ density of 2.3 g/cm³) (reduced to 290 kg/m³ with 30% fly ash replacement of cement)” so that would be 155 tonnes x 180 kg/tonne = 29.14 tonnes (so about 2½ times as much). The 120 tonne retaining wall is a bit atypical, though. Counting just the 35 tonnes in the house and garage slabs it would come out to 6.3 tonnes of CO₂. That's for a house which is otherwise regarded as a pretty much pure timber frame. Of course, the timber frame will be sequestering some carbon at the same time. Still, I think we could do better. For example, my house is built on concrete pads which came in one mixer load, 6.75 m³ IIRC (could find the slip in my invoices box but I'm reasonably sure it was close to that) so that's 2.7 tonnes of CO₂. I mentioned this thought before on here but it didn't get any attention: could the typical passive slab be built in the normal way with blinding, DPC, EPS but then, instead of concrete, use CLT (big kids plywood) to sequester carbon instead of emit it?

When “meets the Building Regs” should be translated as “not quite bad enough that the state would ultimately be willing to use violence to prevent”.

Thanks, I was going to pipe mine up to the loft but, on reflection, it'll be easy to box it in (accessibly) to just above the basin.

Not sure but shouldn't the AAV be above the highest water level in the associated thingies? So above the overflow in the basin, presumably.

IMHO any RHI payments for new build should be on the assumption of A rating, whatever the house actually is.

The legal limit is 16 amps per phase which works out as 3.68 kW at 230 volts. In practice, DNOs accept the power limit even though it'll technically be putting in a bit more than 16 amps when the mains voltage is below 230 volts. However, that's the output to the DNO's network; there's no legal limit on the size of the PV itself [¹] so it would be quite reasonable to have a few more panels, say 4 or 5 kW's worth, as most of the time they'll be generating less than 100% of their nameplate power. When they are generating more than 3.68 kW the inverter will just not draw that power from them and it'll be dissipated as heat on the roof (in just the same way that waste heat is dissipated when the sun shines on any dark-coloured thing). It's also possible to generate more power out of the inverter then use a divertor to limit the power or current fed into the network. The rules vary between DNOs on this; AIUI only a few will allow this and only with specific approved diverters but my information on this is possibly a bit out of date. Once upon a time the FiT scheme had a separate break-point at 4 kW where the payment dropped down. That was determined by the panels, not the inverter. That big difference has long gone from the FiT scheme and the FiT scheme itself will be gone before anybody just contemplating it now could get in so that limit is now very moot. [¹] Permitted development rules are typically phrased as being for “microgeneration” but that's defined as up to 50 kW so not likely to be a consideration for domestic PV.

Only looked at the Scottish regs but I think you'd be OK. Personally, I'd be happier if the living room window was an escape window, though, with the kitchen being nearer the main entrance than the living room.

Yes. Though bright sunshine keeps them in too, so that accounted for about 3 of those days. But the wind last year really was the problem - why I was so frustrated to begin with.

How are you going to get the logged information out, via the serial port? In operation, is it powered via the USB or a separate 5V supply? I.e., can you plug the computer in without switching it off? You're counting mains pulses anyway so can't you do a real-time clock from those? Set the clock via the serial port after any power cuts.

A big part of the cost of a retrofit install is the scaffolding. For a new build the scaffolding is there anyway…

I have a system like that. All a bit ad hoc and the supplier of the temperature sensors has gone out of business so not easy to replicate. It's a prototype; one day I plan to write a proper one for my own use and to open-source. OpenEnergyMonitor seems like the most plausible off-the-shelf answer. As far as I can see, well packaged but you pay for that.

Indeed, it can be a pain. The last straw for my major meltdown last August/September, just after I'd joined this forum, was the struggle to put up the scaffold tower when something wasn't fitting properly for some reason whilst wearing a midge net (thousands of the little buggers around that day [¹]) and having my bifocal safety glasses (which I really need for close work) keep steaming up. On the other hand, I can usually put it up or take it down in less than 20 minutes, including getting the bits in and out of the container. Probably a bit longer if somebody's helping ? It's quick enough that I only usually leave it up overnight if I'm sure I'll be wanting it first thing the next day. [¹] One of only about 3 or 4 days they were a problem last year.

I don't much like ladders, either. I use my scaffold tower for anything that can't be done in a minute or two on step ladders with something to hold on to. I'm pretty comfortable on the tower up to 6 metres working height (4 metres deck height, 5 metres hand-rail height) but the last bit up to 7 metres working height I need to reach the peaks of my gables makes me nervous though I've got used to it a bit. I know it's not going to fall over but the extra bit of wobble it has at that height bothers me disproportionately. It takes a while to put the tower up and take it down, though I've got reasonably slick at doing that now, but it's probably worth it just in time for any even slightly complicated job as there's more space to put tools down so less climbing up and down needed.

Snap.

Why keep the circuits separate? Cost of the PHE and an extra pump vs the cost of a few more litres of antifreeze.

Sucking eggs, but the leading slash in “/dev/ttyUSB0” is very significant. As to where the executables are, it depends on how you installed the software. If it's the version in the Ubuntu repositories then, IIRC, it's in /usr/lib/arduino or some such and there's a symlink from /usr/bin/arduino so it gets picked up by the $PATH that @TerryE mentions. Following the instruction to install it from Arduino site puts it in the a bin directory in your home directory (there's quite a lot of software around these days which does this sort of thing; I disapprove). Using the command which arduino at the command prompt will tell you - it just searches the PATH for you and tells you what it finds.

Going with E/W first with the option to add S later seems back-to-front to me. For 1 kW of panels on Hengistbury Head angled at 35° elevation PVGIS (CMSAF) gives the following numbers of kWh for December and annually: Dec Annual South 34 1170 East 16 917 West 15 918 Since almost all the benefit of PV these days comes from self consumption and, as @Stones says, you have too much in the summer it seems to me that the main aim should be to maximise winter production even at the cost of reducing the overall production. If doing two sides first it seems to me that doing south and one of the others would be a better option. Which of the others is an interesting question depending somewhat on lifestyle, whether you have batteries immediately and so on but not terribly important, I don't think.

The classic Unix tool for this sort of thing is cu. Haven't used it myself; these days I'd use screen. PuTTY is sort of a mixture of ssh and screen written originally for Windows (which had neither screen nor ssh) but ported to other systems. Neither the Arduino serial monitor nor screen work for me at 250''000 baud. The Arduino monitor says “Error while setting serial port parameters: 250,000 N 8 1”. Both work fine at 230'400 baud.

When I order OSB3 I get stuff labelled 2+; they assure me it's 3.

Nobody who knows what they're talking about has said anything here for 5 hours so I'll have a go: wouldn't something a bit more vapour open (“breathable”) be better than concrete?

MK08 mounted vertically - it's my only vertical window, the other 6 in house will all be roof windows so I thought I might as well get them all from the same source. And I wouldn't really like to have to escape through it with the glass so close above followed by quite a drop to the ground. Would much prefer the nominal escape MK08 top-hung I'll have in the south roof of that room. But it's nice to know it's possible as I'll have PK08 centre pivots in the main rooms. But, as @Ferdinand says, this all beside the point for the OP's actual problem.

I've got a centre pivot in the gable end wall. It's not the means-of-escape window for that room so it doesn't matter but I measured it up the other day and it does, just, comply (> 450 mm each way and >0.33 m² - the opening below the sash with the sash horizontal is well over 450 wide, just over in height and about 0.036something in area).

BC here (Highlands) were happy with roof windows (top-hung Velux) as means of escape in my bedrooms. Ground floor (it's an A-frame) but at least shows that it's not, in principle, a no go. Remember that the primary size requirements for means-of-escape windows is not that somebody inside can climb out but that a fire fighter in breathing apparatus can climb in.