jack

We mostly get away with 4 hours a night, it's just when we do a long drive and then need the car again quickly. Maybe a handful of times a month. I doubt it'll pay for itself all that quickly, but it'll be nice to not continuously be thinking about how to optimise charging.

Ours bumped from 5p to 7.5p /kWh a few months back. Still amazing value compared to the peak rate. The inability to properly take advantage of the 4-hour cheaper overnight rate on a 13A plug is a major factor for getting the charger installed now.

Still on a 13 amp plug after 2 years! We're about to have a Zappi installed, to go with the Eddi diverter we already have. The recent increase in electricity price when we came off our fixed price deal means we really need to be able to take better advantage of the 4 cheap hours we get overnight.

Massive NO to the Pod Point for me. I can't tell you how much trouble I've had with their public chargers (mainly the app forgetting that I've claimed the session and then refusing to release my car). The last time I was forced to use one of their chargers, it refused to disconnect. In the end, I had to change the max charge setting on my car to force it to break the session. It took me over 20 minutes to think of this solution, so I had to buy a lot of expensive electricity that I didn't want or need. Unbelievably, they no longer have a phone number you can call for help, either. I sent them a message via their (very difficult to find) contact form when I couldn't disconnect and it took them over 24 hours to reply. That was event though I'd selected the "I can't release my car" from the drop-down in the contact form (which would seem like an urgent issue to me!) I don't believe there's phone support for their home chargers either, but check. Also, take a look at the online reviews about support generally.

I drove past a wheat field being harvested on Sunday. The dust cloud it generated was visible a mile away!

I had to help our sales team during a startup I was involved with many years ago. I was basically the industry specialist who knew the details of the business we operated in, and got wheeled in when potential clients got the point of asking questions beyond what was in the salespeople's flowcharts. Some of our salespeople used to get frustrated with me answering questions honestly, because the honest answer sometimes involved acknowledging the existence of a compromise. However, what we were offering had massive advantages to the average potential customer, and my opinion was that if anyone was going to get hung up on the inevitable slight compromises that led to us being able to offer these advantages, we probably didn't want them as a customer. Interestingly, our most successful salespeople were never the ones who had issues with me being honest.

Part of the reason I'm wary about high-speed bladed power tools:

My feeling is that something like this is fine for a job like the one you're planning(/planing). You set it up once and carefully do the same thing over and over in a single session. I think it's more when you're using something often enough to get complacent but not often enough to become experienced that you're more likely to have trouble, especially when every job is different to the last.

Yes, I assumed he was using this sort of thing from his description of it (before the accident): But it may well have been one of these convertible types that can expose the blade:

He definitely said it was a thicknesser, but it does make more sense if he meant one of those open-top planers (which I know can be extremely dangerous). I didn't really want to go into the details given it had only happened days before. He was still in a lot of pain and concerned about long term damage. He ended being fine after a few months.

Me too, until I saw the damage a friend of the family did to his hand on one a couple of years back. It was only a small one too. I still don't have any idea how he managed it.

This could be a very long list, but a few thoughts: - More blinds. Currently have external blinds on most east, west and southern windows, but we stupidly left them off the large east-facing glass french doors in our bedroom. The idea was to reduce costs, but we're going to have to retrofit, so it'll cost us more in the end. - Recesses in ceilings for curtains. The external blinds don't block out all the light, and I end up being woken up by the light in summer. We can retrofit in most places, but it will be messy and a lot of effort. - UFH heating in the bathrooms. I was talked out of this by people with passivhaus levels of insulation and airtightness. It isn't that the bathrooms are particularly cold, but they could be a lot warmer. We've ended up fitting aftermarket electric heaters that certainly cost us more than UFH would have, and aren't as neat a solution. - Insect screens on bedroom windows. This is a massive oversight that I hope to rectify at some point. It would be great to be able to open the windows and our large skylight when the external temperature falls below the upstairs temperature in summer, but we can't do it at the moment due to insects. - Less floor to ceiling glass in the kitchen. People remark on how nice it is to see out into the garden, but it really isn't great for furniture placement. - Think harder about placement of electric car charger. We thought we were clever running heavy armoured cables to the garage, but in the end we decided that we wanted a workshop and gym more than we wanted to garage the car. Solution (again): retrofit cable through ceiling then outside to where we actually park the electric car! At the very least, we could have run a duct that would have allowed a new cable to be routed. Ducting is cheap - I think I'd have run a lot more of it all over the house if I'd known what I know now!

Our plumber recommended least a 12 kW ASHP for our house. Even after I showed him the heat calculations, he was still concerned that the house temperature would drop to uncomfortable levels when recharging the DHW on cold winter days. The 5 kW ASHP we installed has been perfectly adequate for nearly 7 years now.

Welcome to BuildHub. Are you sure the cooling isn't controlled by dry contacts (i.e., a separate set of contacts to those probably controlled by your thermostat for heating)? If so, you'll need a separate thermostat (or a switch if you're okay with manual operation) connected across the cooling contacts.

Yup. I don't see any other way around this.

Yes, that's the component I'm referring to. It would be a shame to lose those permanently and then have Octopus withdraw this tariff in the near future.

Interesting. I think this offering has changed since I looked into it a while back. My recollection is that you couldn't previously sign up for this if you received the feed-in tariff. Withdrawing from the feed-in tariff concerns me slightly. Do they say anywhere whether you can re-join in the future. If that's not possible, there's a bit of a risk if Octopus stops offering this or changes the payments so they're less than the feed-in tariff.

We have 8.5 kW (peak) installed, but our panel orientation is a long way from ideaI, and I don't recall ever seeing more than 6.6 kW (~78% of nominal peak output). We regularly hit 6.1-6.3 kW during June, and usually exceed 6 kW at least every few days across the whole of summer.

How much sun do you get during the months in which you need heating? Given the much lower insulation offered by glass compared to walls, are you sure you won't lose more energy through these windows than you'll get back through solar gain?

I suspect I've been a bit lucky with the sweet spot. No idea about cycling, but it's a good question. I think it's more likely to be a bigger issue when leaving it cooling for several days, rather than just for a few hours through the middle part of the day.

I don't have the actual numbers for my setup, but what you've recorded seems similar to my subjective understanding of how my house responds.

Ha, you'll fit in around here.

Not exactly. I was responding to these points: You're talking about control theory problems that arise out of system behaviour - time constants, cycling, flow temps, etc - but my experience doesn't agree with that. My point was that I can push one button on the ASHP controller and leave the cooling system on for days if needed, without any further intervention. Even without any form of thermostatic control, it will happily keep the downstairs area pleasantly cool without me having to turn it on and off or adjust flow temps to keep things comfortable. The question of manual control is a bit of a red herring in my response. I control it manually because I want to choose when I consume energy for cooling, not because I have the problem with automated control that you describe. I may eventually get around to installing a timer (and maybe even a thermostat), and perhaps control it via Loxone. But at the moment, it works perfectly well just turning it on and off when I feel it's needed. Sure, but my comment was in reply to Nick's regarding his problems with control theory issues like time constants and temperature stability. You have an interface problem, which, while frustrating, is not what I was talking about. In the warm weather leading up to the big heat wave recently, I was running it most days during daylight hours to use as much PV as possible. I forgot on the odd day but it didn't make much difference. Even without intervention, it takes a good couple of days for the slab to warm up when the weather's hot. A couple of days before the record day, I started leaving it on 24 hours day. I left it on continuously for maybe 5 or 6 days that really hot week. Edited to add: Hence, this: ... is not my experience, despite the fact that I have to manually choose to turn the system on. More generally, if I know it's going to be a warm day, I'll turn it on if I think of it in the morning. It takes a few hours to kick in, but the slab time constant is so long that even if I forget on a hot day, it doesn't make that much difference. The cooling's been off now for a few days and the floor is still slightly cool underfoot despite the temperature having been in the 20s this week. I do think that concrete, and presumably similar surfaces such as tile, are just inherently more comfortable in warmer weather.

Interesting. This isn't my experience at all. I just have mine set to output 15 or 16 degree water (can't remember which) and turn it on manually when the house is too hot or there's a heatwave predicted. I run the cooling open loop - no separate thermostat. I don't care if the floor's a bit cold underfoot, but realistically the downstairs floor temperature never drops below 19 degrees or so. I had it running for a few days in a row when things were really bad a couple of weeks back and it worked perfectly. It's lovely to come downstairs when it's been hot overnight and feel the steel banister get colder and colder with every step! I do wonder whether having polished concrete floors helps. I imagine it absorbs heat from the air pretty well compared to, eg, wood.

Agreed. Even in just the 7 years we've lived here, I've had several situations where having an RCBO allowed much quicker identification of problems. One was a heating element in a coffee machine intermittently causing problems. Another was an UFH leak (due to our poor electrician accidentally hitting a pipe with a screw) that flooded an underfloor socket cavity. Another was a bad earth on a light fitting. I'm sure there were one or two others. In each case, knowing exactly what circuit was affected was a massive timesaver.