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I was thinking of things to do when dealing with architects and planners, not once you actually got on site. Doing the excercise then also hopefully gives a outlet for the frustration of dealing with the planning aspects 😛

This might be a bit late for @flanagaj but has anyone got any suggestions on getting fit before starting a build? ie, what to focus on? My guess is focsusing on broad (+core) fitness/stamina, rather than heavy weights or similar but any specific suggestions would be useful.

That sounds right (don't have one myself). A quick google reveals this link that suggests one line is 1/4" and the other 3/8" for a 12k BTU system. So both lines are still much smaller than the 22/28mm+ pipes we see on monoblocs here. https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/165244/lg-line-set-size

Refrigerant lines will be small diameter copper, not large diameter flexible hoses. Fittings are different too.

Airlines don't pay VAT either AFAIK railways do. Fuel is a relatively small part of a railways cost but is a big big part of the cost of the flight. If Airlines did have to pay taxes on fuel their competitiveness would be a lot worse. Indeed Have we knowledge and skills? sure. All of it, absolutely not. Part of the HS2 project was to set up training schemes for new hires and also it was timed to try and keep workers who were working on Crossrail employed in the rail industry. We have a bad habit in this country of training people up to do a job, then employing them for that one job where they make all the mistakes and then we don't have something for them to go on to next, so they end up going abroad where they don't make the same mistakes because they've learned. From what I understand (and I've not been paying anywhere near as much attention as I used to) the actual construction part of HS2 has been relatively smooth. The project has been a disaster because of the planning, environmental and political aspects. Thames Water is in the running! Also, it's always worth pausing and thinking when you see waste: 'Is that waste caused by bad management or is that caused by constraints imposed on management by forces beyond their control?'. I'm sure Network Rail has plenty of poor management, but again the impression I have is a lot of things are done a certain way because of the structure of the industry, DfT orders, etc. I used to read it fairly regularly. Been a while though and I have enough other things going on that I'm unlikely to go back soon.

Railways do indeed have a lot of infrastructure and it's not a simple matter to compare them. However, Aviation does have a lot of 'unfair' advantages and indirect subsidies. For example: - aircraft fuel is tax free, railways pay for their fuel - a lot of airports have received significant public funding/tax advantages (more so outside the UK than inside so advantage not as big for domestic flights) - domestic flights are at least somewhat subsidised by long haul carriers in this country (even if you fly a small carrier that doesn't directly benefit, they will likely be able to offer low prices off the back of capacity initially built for the bigger, long-haul carriers. Personal belief with no data to back it up: subsidies are so high because the government over the last 10 years or so have badly managed the railways in a penny-wise, pound foolish way. HS2 is the exception, the problems there are different. HS2 has been a disaster no doubt and a painful lesson. We should learn those lessons and continue investments. Globally there are large numbers of countries successfully deploying rail infrastructure, we are an outlier and I don't think we should throw our hands up and say 'wahh it's tooo haaarrrd, i'm giving up'. Scaling back ambitions to smaller, more easily delivered stuff does make sense though. Part of the problem with HS2 was the attempt to be 'world-beating' which politicians in this country seem obsessed by.

AFAIK Corten is a specific alloy of steel designed to be exposed unprotected. Normal steel will rust and degrade faster than corten.

Cost/performance difference between those size inverters should be negligable. Get the G.98 maximum, can't see any reason to go lower, but obviously not worth going higher. Look at inverter specs for minimum panel voltage/startup voltage. You are wanting to optimise for low light performance so you want an inverter to be able to operate when the panels are only 10%. Choose wrong here and you might get an inverter that doesn't start producing power until the panels are 25% or more. You also want the string voltages at 100% light to be under but closeish to the maximum mppt voltage for the same reason. So decide how you wire things once you have those specs.

Even then they should be insulated. They aren't refridgerant pipes though.

closed-cell

Unless you want strict rationing, overproduction of food is inevitable. The sector is big, complex, with many interlinks with our economy and environment. Sure, there is the possibility of saving a bit here and there without too much effort, but it's going to be small fry compared to other areas and anything more than minor changes risks some large unexpected/undesirable side effects. If you want a focus for consumers 'reduce waste' rather than 'eat less meat' is a much broader and easier to swallow message.

I said it earlier but I'm of the view that food is a difficult problem that directly impacts people in a way that many may feel is negative. The emissions from food are also at least somewhat circular (fertilizer being the main fossil based input). We need to stop burning long sequestered carbon so better to focus on moving transport and industry to electricity. In the process of doing that we would eliminate a lot of the transport emissions from food anyway. Focusing on food means people are distracted from applying pressure in areas that would have bigger overall impacts. In terms of things consumers can do that has a direct impact on fossil fuel burning, focusing on producing less rubbish, moving away from fast fashion, disposable technology, repairing rather than replacing and taking less long haul flights I think are more valuable than saving emissions from food.

It really depends where you live. Most of the population live in more urban areas, these will commonly have three phase in the street. I'm pretty sure the grid know that one size does not fit all, but if there is a solution that is easier for many then it's still useful.

Yes. Putin is outside your control so don't worry about it. It's sensible to plan for the occasional power cut, but beyond that focus your attention on things you can control.

Drifted from SMBS's original question I guess but it's all still about 24v lighting and how to go about it so compared to some of the other threads on here I think we are doing pretty well. You did ask for feedback on your approach

Funnily enough, in a previous life I was involved in sourcing US-UK data connections for my firm and we cared about lowest latency and also reduncancy so I got to see a lot of NDA details about various fibre links coming into the UK. A lot of international links do indeed land in Cornwall, but things are much more diverse these days that you might think. Also, the telcos don't usually break out of the cable in Cornwall as there's not enough demand for it. First real possible connection (at least for the fastest cables) was around Slough (at least when I was involved in this).

It wouln't shock me if its 2 years. The amount of planned data centre build in the US is mind boggling and they can't build power plants anywhere near as fast. Gas-turbine manufacturing capacity is booked solid for years. Edit: The more dissatisfied the US population are with Trump the better IMO. His project need to very visibly completely fail if democracy is going to survive. Unfortunately, it's going to impact us in a bad way whatever happens.

My completely uniformed first thought on this is this consultant is just a window supplier without offering any guarantees. They can source the windows and then leave the installation up to you (maybe they point you at an installer but aren't going to take any liability for the job the installer does). Are they going to come measure? Take responsibility if the order is wrong?

Everything is relative. Food costs quite a bit more in the US. Houses have been built without energy efficiency in mind so the average consumer uses more electricity than we do. 200A 240V service is the norm in the US (at least for new construction). Because of tarriffs and the immigration crack down (nobody left to tend the farms), food prices are going up like crazy. Electricity prices also going up by 20-30% wlil be felt quite strongly.

I saw some positive language about this a while ago but the bulk of data centres won't get built in Scotland. Tech companies want them near the high bandwidth fibre nodes and where the expertise lives which is mostly around London.

Watched a video on this recently. Solar panels are very expensive there. They have tariffs on panels to protect local manufacturers so they haven't seen the cost reductions the rest of the world has due to China's build out (though they do have domestic manufacture). Permitting is apparently a complete hodge podge depending where you live and it might take many months to get approved to install solar (and that's in areas that are actively encouraging it). The utilities have also been hostile to exporting in many areas.

Sticking with what I said above about making it so it's easily convertable to standard. I've been thinking along the lines of radials and conventional lighting circuits. Plan your lights in groups that you suspect you want to control as one. Put convential mains wiring in for that either wired back to the switch or via a home run to a control panel that could be simply connected to a cable that also runs to the switch (the switch on the wall should have enough mains cables in it to provide full convential control, even if you don't use them). Also run a CAT5/RS485/DMX bus around that you can hook into your dimmers. I want to find dimmers that either go in the switch backbox/form part of the switch or can be accessed via the downlight hole or be in a central locataion. The idea of a service hatch in each room seems really ugly to me. Maybe you could put some art over it but seems best avoided. Having a dimmer located near each four lights with extra wires to those lights, means you could easily replace with standard lights if needed because the wires are already there. If you have a wooden floor above then the plasterboard will likely be forming a fire-resistant layer, which will be limiting to what you can do behind the downlights. Do your own checking on this but I believe these days you need fire rated downlights and having the dimmers there may be a problem unless they can be installed within fire shrouds around the downlights, or you design the ceiling structure to accomodate. Assuming you solve the fire issue but your dimmers are too big for downlight holes then one option is to look at bigger fittings in some places as a way of providing access. Designers tend to advocate for purposeful lighting rather than a boring grid of downlights so consider clustering with fittings like: https://www.lightingstyles.co.uk/brushed-aluminium-twin-technical-spot which both provides a bigger hole for access and more visual interest. I wouldn't plan to run direct from battery. Battery voltage will vary so your lights will be brighter/dimmer depending on how charged the battery is. Battery voltage will also often be above the nominal 24v, shortening the life of the bulbs. You will also likely find a modern high efficiency power supply converting from 240v to 24v is more efficient than your average 24v battery to 24v nominal supply. Solar system batteries want to be 48v minimum for efficiency anyway. Many solar systems use 400v batteries now, though personally I'd want to stick to 48v despite the lower efficiency so make it outside Part P. Electrician will want singles to be in conduit of some form the entire run at least for mains voltages and as above I think it's wise to plan your wiring as if you might convert to standard mains fittings in future.

You have to be a bit mad to self build in the UK and going to this level of effort with lighting is a bit mad. But it's the kind of mad I like! I have been thinking about similar options. Have you actually built and tested a prototype of this custom hardware? The piece of advice I've taken from here and want to follow in anything I do is that if you do something a bit different or unusal, do it in a way that you could rip it all out and replace with something standard without much effort. So for me that means installing mains cabling in all the relevant places that would mean that the low voltage system could be replaced by just changing the fittings (no threading wires or breaking into walls/ceilings). Another focus for me is to ensure that whatever lighting scheme I come up with works together well. If you just build a system for downlights that doesn't also plan to work with task and accent lights and also LED strips then you wont have a cohesive system. A ceiling full of downlights is in the end the bog standard developer option and options with variety and layers of lights is a nicer, more comfortable and more premium option.

Looks like this inverter only has an EPS output for when the grid is down. So needs to be separately wired to circuits that need to be protected by the battery. It's a beefy inverter though so could probably power your whole house from the EPS output in all but the most unusal situations. If you want to do this properly you would ask for some of your house circuits to be moved to a separate consumer unit and have that wired via changeover switch to both the EPS output of the inverter and your normal consumer unit. Big change at this late stage though. Your idea of a few sockets near the inverter is a good one. You will likely need a small consumer unit with an rcbo in it to liimt the current to that circuit, not a big job but maybe one that the installer doesn't want. Oh, and if the shit really hits the fan with Putin, this system is unlikely to really help. But emergency backup would be good for less extreme emergencies. Putin is like all bullies, take as much as he can until he gets real push back then he'll stop. He was talking to Xi about living to 150, someone who has that ambition isn't going to commit suicide.

Get good quality LEDs (be picky, look for high CRI). Electricity isn't cheap and you can find LED imitation of pretty much any type of bulb these days. Also, if you have a well insulated house the amount of heat these things will put out may make the room uncomfortable.