jack

Yep. Would vastly prefer a range of styles, some of which are out there and/or ugly. Much better than estates full of dull, cloned, pastiches of another era.

It's a common theme on this forum. I had one bad experience when we started. Expensive, and just didn't seem capable of designing something that met all the requirements of our brief. We'd have a meeting, point out what was missing and what we didn't like. They'd come back three months later with a new design that fixed many but not all of our concerns, while throwing out a couple of things we liked and changing a bunch of other stuff for no apparent reason. We then found someone else to take over, and their first design just blew us away. It had everything we wanted, was set out on the block in a way I'd never considered (and yet was perfect for both planning and tree preservation reasons), and just needed a few tweaks before we signed it off. No way we'd have come up with something like this ourselves.

Out of curiosity, why did you give him all the other info about your needs and wants if you were just asking him to do CAD drawings of your design? Also, usually it's very clear what is involved (and what you're paying for!) at each stage, so again it's surprising that you could have been at such cross-purposes with each other. It sounds like he's just completely misunderstood what you wanted from him!

I doubt they're trying it on, but missing so many clearly listed essentials (I assume they were all listed as essentials, not wants or "nice to haves"?) is a red flag about attention to detail. Like every profession, there are good and bad architects, with most sitting somewhere in the middle. Certainly getting something so completely wrong from the start is not the usual way of things.

Not as I read it: My point is just that you were focused solely on inertial storage, when there are many other ways of supporting the grid over various time periods. I believe a synchroinverter adds voltage at a phase that tends to stabilise the frequency, rather than merely remaining in phase with whatever the grid is doing. A grid-connected PV inverter would be an example of the latter. I think that's right to a point, but you still need sufficient available power for this to happen. If that power isn't available, all the inverters in the world won't help you. I did a bit of digging around yesterday and was surprised to find that grid-scale storage projects are already well along the development pipeline for the UK. See this link for an example of a very large-scale battery in the works, and a discussion of some of the existing battery storage projects.

Do they say how it's supposed to save money?

You're obviously way more knowledgeable than me, but my main point was just that there's more to frequency stability in modern and future grid systems than the rotating mass of turbine-based generators. I hadn't followed it after the initial launch, but the Tesla grid-tied battery in Adelaide I linked to above appears to have been a roaring success technical and financial success. Worth a read of the short Wikipedia article.

We have a Brink Excellent 400, which can run at up to 400m3/h. The regs say it should be run at (I think) 280m3/h, which is insane. I'd have to check, but I think we currently run it at 100m3/h, although it's been as low as 50m3/h without any apparent condensation issues.

Just learned that there's a name for power converters via which non-synchronous power sources supply power to the grid to support frequency stability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronverter

Our pantry total is 12W, from memory. An hour with those lights on is 0.012 kWh, or about £0.0018 at £0.15/kWh. Leaving them on 50% of the time would cost less than £8 a year. If it costs £60 to supply and self-install a motion sensor, the payback cost is something like 7.5 years. I don't know how often a motion sensor needs replacing, but if it's every 10 years, it marginal whether it would ever pay back its costs. You also need to factor in energy consumption of the sensor, and the embodied energy of manufacture and disposal. Worse, I doubt the light is on for more than an hour a day though, so even ignoring replacement costs it's more like a multi-decade payback. This is the sort of maths that ends up applying to all those small rooms that you nip in and out of during the day: toilets, pantries, bathrooms, utility rooms. In the end, it's just difficult to make a financial case for it, so it comes down to whether you want to reduce your carbon usage to the absolute minimum, or consider motion sensors to be something that improves your life enough to pay for them.

If all you have providing power is turbines that spin at a highly controlled rate, there's an element of truth in this. But when you start bringing online significant numbers of power plants that can output AC at an arbitrary frequency (as is the case with all wind turbines, for example, given that they use power converters), the issue becomes less one of frequency stability, and more one of a lack of available power. The solution is to provide a deeper power reservoir from which to smooth brief transients. Pumped gravity-based hydro is one way of achieving this, although it isn't fast enough for very high-rate fluctuations. Grid-scale batteries are another that could well be a useful addition to the grid in the short to medium term. Smart grids using car batteries and grid-connected home batteries are almost certainly in the mix longer term, although the complete farce that is the smart meters roll-out to date suggests it's going to be a long time before we're capable of doing this properly.

Got our smart meter being installed by them in about a month, and will definitely be watching it carefully!

I'm sure it was just an oversight, but that list included the name of the company you work for. Please take care not to include this information.

I could be wrong, but I think that info came from a single poster (I believe I remember who, but won't say in case I'm wrong). I actually think it's more usual for the GSHP unit (the heat pump itself) to be placed outside the house. Since it doesn't need a high volume airflow like an ASHP, there's also nothing to stop it being enclosed in a relatively sound-insulated enclosure. I think the main issue for the low interest in GSHPs is relative cost. It costs to dig, then you need to buy loads of pipework, then you need to buy the anti-freeze that fills the pipes. The anti-freeze then needs to be replaced every few years, from memory, which adds more cost, along with the hassle of safe disposal of the old fluids. For all this cost an effort you get a slight improvement in COP relative to an ASHP. The additional costs of GSHP mean you'll probably never make up the higher installation and maintenance costs.

Congrats on the best introductory post I've seen in a while! I'd be really surprised if you can't slot in an identical motor from another manufacturer. It's surprising how much of the components these things share. I think I read something like 80% of the market uses exactly the same plastic heat exchanger, for example. If you still have the unit and are interested in following up on this, post some details in the MVHR sub-forum. I'd be surprised if someone can't help you with some clues about a potential replacement.

Definitely sounds like a mathematical problem - maybe the meter is double-listed against your account somehow? Odd that this could be possible though.

As with panel heaters, everything is carefully worded to be literally accurate while misleading the unskilled reader.

I assume that's the general idea, but the way they're selling it is very snake-oily. They're comparing the efficiency of stored water immersion heaters with on-demand microwave-based heating. They should be comparing it with instantaneous electric hot water heating. I suppose there could be opportunities to increase the efficiency of those devices, but they're selling this like it's a revolutionary energy and carbon saver, which is just plain horse5hit. Edited to add: some incidental efficiency gains aside, I just can't see how instantaneous electric heating is going to be price competitive with the gas it's replacing. Bear in mind that if it's instantaneous, you can't take advantage of cheap off-peak power.

From the FAQ on their website: The last paragraph sounds like it was written by an AI that was given a list of technical words and asked to assemble them into grammatically correct sentences. Edited to add: They may even find a way to let poor people invest:

For me, the best option is a combination of switch to turn on (and off, if you wish) and a presence sensor to keep the light on for as long as someone is in the room. I'm not a fan of lights coming on automatically - I don't want a light to come on if I go to the bathroom at night, for example.

My parents in law are like this. They like the house to feel bright, and they can afford the electricity, so they just leave the lights on without any consideration of wasting energy.

I have wiring for sensors in a lot of places but didn't get around to installing them during the build. Rough calculations suggest it would take a long time to pay back the cost of the sensor in most positions, so I haven't (yet) bothered.

Double-clicking my bedside light switch turns off all lights in the house and garage. I'd put this feature in the top three must-haves if I were to build again. I also have a dedicated switch at the base of the stairs that turns off all the upstairs lights. It's nice to be able to click it as I walk past on the way to the kitchen from my office! I've also put many of the lights on a timer, so they turn off automatically after a certain period. I think it's a couple of hours for the kids' rooms (I started with an hour, but there were complaints about the lights turning off too soon). It's half an hour for the pantry and the laundry, both of which my wife would leave on all day after using them for 30 seconds in the morning. None of this would be necessary if anyone but me knew how to switch off a light as they left the room. Still, I distinctly remember how bad I was at this even when I was in my 20s, so maybe there's hope for the kids yet, even if the wife is a lost cause.

Good lord, what a steaming pile of nonsense.

I came home on Christmas Eve a few years ago to find that every single light in the house was on. I mean that literally - every bathroom, toilet, hallway, bedroom etc light was blazing, with just my wife and two children at home (all of them downstairs in the kitchen). A recent tweak to my home automation programming lets me open my phone, click a single button on the app, and turn off every single light in the house except the living room where we watch TV. It gives me great pleasure.