Beelbeebub

What could the same unit do to an oil refinery or storage depot? Remember Buncefield? Strangely, the distributed, relatively low density nature of renewables males them more resilient. Many smaller generation units spread over a wide geographical area are harder to disable than fewer larger units. Truck bomb at a nuclear plant - knprobbaky cause a precautionary shutdown and knock out mutliple GW of production. Blow up a solar farm, maybe lose a field, which would be a few MW tops. It feels like you really are grasping for reasons against, whilst not addressing the fundamental issue of our current dependence on oil and gas rapidly becoming unsustainable. How would you approach the coming increace in our reliance on imported fuel?

The UK isn't big enough to vertically integrate everything - almost no nation on earth is except perhaps China (now) and India (eventually). Certainly no European nation. But thr build out phase of renewables is less important than the maintance of renewables. As has been pointed out - renewable infrastructure lasts a long time. It doesn't really.matter if Danish, American or Chinese companies build the turbine as long as you control it and can maintain it. How many of us built our own houses?

You may be right, I was referring to oil supply and this https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2024-07-24/1543/ Realistically we would buy gas from Europe but as 2022 showed it puts us at the mercy of world events. We will almost certainly require gas generation, probaly more than now, to provide backup and supply for winter, so we certainly need to increace our storage. But if the majority of our hearing uses gas boilers, we need gas. Nothing else will do. If it is electric we can heat out homes with wind, nuclear, solar, coal even.

TBF the UK has considerable expertise in designing, building and maintaining large structures offshore in hostile environments. Aberdeen could continue booming by switching to the next energy source rather than trying to sweat every last penny from a declining reserve.

I've got 24 panels in not a great location, but even so they are producing an average of about 4kwh over December - most of an average house demand (sadly not my house) With the battery it was about 10k all in. If built into a new build could be less. Say 7k. For an extra 7k upfront a new build house could have zero elec bills for thr next 2 decades and never habe a power cut.

One of the issues is that China is going all in on renewables, they are installing more than everyone else put together so they have huge economies of scale. On the other hand wind turbines are big and hard to ship and we (and Europe) have significant manufacturing bases. We don't have to buy from china - we can and do make all of the kit (the exception being the battery cells which the Chinese do have a major lock on the production facilities. But new battery chemistries are emerging that China doesn't have a lock on and Europe could build a lead on. Note that China only has the lead in these areas because the UK and Europe have dragged their feet - witness cars, thr legacy automakers pissed around with various campaigns against EVs rather than knuckling down and transitioning. Now Korea and China have stolen a march on them.

The UK holds around 90 days of oil and gas reserves. If we stopped receiving supplies tomorrow, we would run out in 3 to 6 months, maybe 9 if we rationed and had a mild winter. That's not enough time to do anything significant. If China stopped shipping solar panels, wind turbines, batteries etc tomorrow - our existing solar panels and inverters would keep producing happily for a decade or two before we needed to replace them. Plenty of time for the issue to be resolved or alternative suppliers be spun up. There is an issue about online networked systems being dependent on remote severs etc (IIRC a major battery brand ceases to function of disconnected from the Internet for more than 90 days) but that is merely an issue about regulation ie allowing products to be sold with that "feature".

Posted this in the off topic forum but am also posting here.... To cut along story short I've not included links but can provide if anyone is interested. The UK urgently needs to reduce of consumption of fossil fuels - and it has absolutely nothing to do with the climate. The UK is highly dependant of fossil fuels for 2 areas: - Transport (petrol & diesel) - Domestic heating (mainly gas) For the above uses we currently import 50% of what we use. This leaves us vulnerable to price shifts in the global market and outright coersion should someone sanction/embargo/blockade our supplies and the majority of the suppliers of those vital resources are not friendly states and have to travel via long sea routes. By 2035 - just 10 years away - we are predicted to need to import 75% of oil and gas (if demand stays the same). At this point someone usually says "ah! That is why we must drop this net zero nonsense and drill for oil and gas to become self sufficient!" The problem with this argument is that figure of 75% imports is from the oil and gas industry's most optimistic projections. It assumes that: - we are able to extract the maximum predicted amount out of our existing fields - we are able to extract the maximum predicted amount out of all the fields awaiting licences - we are able to extract the maximum predicted amount out of all the fields we know about - we are able to extract the maximum predicted amount out of some fields we haven't yet discovered In short this is like predicting our future income assuming we get promoted, get a bonus, a distant uncle leaves us his fortune and we win the lottery. If we use the more sober assessment then in 10 years time we will need to import 90% of our consumption (assuming it stays the same). In short UK oil and gas production will fall every year even in the most optimistic predictions. In order to avoid this major vulnerability to our economy and sovereignty we need to reduce our demand for fossil fuels. 1) Reducing our demand for gas heating in houses by insulation and moving away from gas boilers would reduce our gas demand - yes, even if we generate the extra elecreicty needed by burning gas. 2) Reducing our demand for oil by (amongst other things) reducing the number of fossil fuel vehicles To support the above we need to increace our electrical generation and distribution capability by building new wind farms, solar farms, rooftop solar, transmission lines etc In short all of the "Net zero" things that usually sit in the "green" forum and regularly get trashed by people saying "ah all this green nomsense! Just woke crap a making us poorer! Bloody Greta etc etc" But really it should sit in the national security and economic forum.

Honestly, there are too many types to say. Sometimes they have levers on, or "butterfly" handles, a slot for a screwdriver or sometimes thry are removable so there isn't much to see. Without wanting to sound mean, if you have to ask, you probably need to wait until tomorrow morning and get the engineer out. It wouldn't be the first time an engineer has left a Friday job forgetting to turn a critical bit of of equipment back on. Good luck.

Have they left an isolation valve shut somewhere? Eg the ones usually by the HP outside? Pretty poor show though.

Holy crap! Is that wiring center also the controller ie the outdoor unit has no brains at all and it's all inside? That seems like a lot of relays, chips and the like just to connect the various valves, pumps and thermostats.l!

I think the issue is with air escaping. With a drop you essentially get air locks in the pipe. The water is trying to go down and the air is trying to go up. Paradoxically a bigger vertical might make it worse as there is more back pressure from the air lock before any horizontal section where the air can sit above the water. The idea of a tundish always confused me. I get there is a reason for them as an anti syphon device and there is a visual indication argument. Except the visual indication is useless if the thing is in a rarely visited cupboard and the antisyphon argument doesn't seem relevant if the pipe is leading directly outside or even if it's leading to a soil stack. A clear glass section with a properly designed air admittance valve would probably be better albeit more expensive than a tundish.

You can do that too, or you can pump the whole hot water supply - either way you need a pump. On the plus side newer inverter pumps are pretty quiet and can provide nice even pressure without the old on/off/on/of pulsing behavior of the old ones.

If you want decent hot water pressure. The vast majority of the properties I look after are flats so the tank is about 400mm above the shower head so the showers are rubbish. Wasn't a problem 40 years ago when people predominantly had baths but now people expect showers at a decent pressure (coincidentally we have seen a big rise in bathroom damp/mould issues as showers out in vastly more moisture into the air)

Exactly (this is what happened to us). In addition, the approved tundish allows a slight trickle of water to track around the support arms to the outside of thr tundish and onto the floor (again also happened) . I modify the tundishes so the copper pipe can drop 10mm or so below the stop o form a drop edge and stop this. These and various other problems with the venting are what has soured me on UVCs. That said they are neccesary for HPs - the only alternatives are thermal stores, which are inefficient for HPs and vented cylinders, which require pumps. Which it to explain why I keep thinking some sort of relaxation/rewrite on the regs to make it easier to install and actually work on the rare occasions thry are required to work. Now all immersion have the double thermostats/cutouts and boilers also have mutiple systems to prevent them boiling the chances of a boiling event are extremely low (though the consequences are still high)