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Not to me. The images show double insulated tails not single insulated cables.

He is definitely at the high/craftsman end of the market and I bet charges for it as well.

Saw something on efixx the other day along this lines. It's an argument that has been used by some installers but IIRC there is push back possibly with a recent clarification to say no.

Sure and agree. I tend to think that we should not have rules in place we don't expect many to follow hence why I don't think registration should be required. However, I think we've already covered how as long as these things meet regs then registration is just bureaucracy not a safety matter. Preventing non-compliant devices should be dealt with by focusing on ensuring the retaillers don't sell them.

Yep. Agree. Though you are assuming these plants would provide 100% of energy during the cold periods. Far from it. It would be there to augment existing supply not sure by how much but it will be a big difference. It would also be spread over many plants and the production side is relatively easier than LNG (as it's slow, not needing to compress at the speed that LNG plants do). But storage is a huge issue. For that reason I wonder if we do end up going down this sort of route we end up converting hydrogen to methane before liquifying it. Horrendously inefficient but also if done as a way to use summer excess (on massively overbuilt solar so that the deficit during winter is smaller) then might still make sense especially if it means existing natural gas users can switch to this supply too without retooling. To be clear its not a valid option for wide scale use but for some niche usecases where electric heating is not an option it might make sense. We imported 25% of our gas via LNG in 2024, this contingency capacity would less than 25% of our existing gas usage.

This and long term this is where hydrogen can be useful. Use excess solar during the summer to make hydrogen, store it for peaker use in winter. All done in one site, no need to pipe it anywhere. Other note is that batteries can fill all the short term responsive capacity that peaker/stored hyrdo used to do. The only thing batteries can't really do is longer duration peaker load. ie, those 1-2week super cold winter periods.

Possible, there is so much private capital / startups persuing fusion right now, feels like we are on the edge of major progress. (A lot of the hard bits have been done already, still plenty left though) But I think this bet is more that green hydrogen boilers, etc, are unlikely to happen at any scale at all. Other technologies are a better option.

Have a look at Scolmore click. Not sure it does what you want but there is a lot of interchangability there. Swapping a switch module you like into different faceplates. Not used them. Just looked at them to see if their range solved the retractive switch issue and it looked like they might (with compromises). Screwless adds a extra level of difficulty. 3-way retractive (on-off-on) is rare enough as it is.

Not sure but am pretty sure that they are just replacing older less efficient ones with fewer more efficient and cleaner ones + a unfathomable quantity of solar, wind, nuclear, etc (to our eyes).

Just because you ditch notification doesn't mean the products don't have to comply with standards. Go after retaillers selling non-compliant systems (it will only be the Amazon/ebay/aliexpress type stuff anyway and those will be a problem whatever you do with notification)

If multiple systems became a problem it would be possible to introduce technical measures for one inverter to detect others and shutdown if found. I doubt it would be necessary thought (and of course would only be present in new compliant systems anyway)

That's not quite right is it? I thought they couldn't refuse G98. So within current regs every household can install 16A of solar with just a notification which is not refusable. The grid has to cope and if it can't the co's have to make changes. G99 can be refused but the basis G98 is just notification. Also, inverters will shut off if the voltage gets too high (before the voltage gets dangerously high) so installing too much capacity will self regulate to a degree with each user generating less than they would otherwise expect. I believe the 800W limit comes from keeping it to a size where things are easily absorbed by the grid. Whatever update to the rules they make I would expect them to be such that you are not allowed to install more than 800W capacity using this scheme. Any more than that and you need normal G98 and electrician install. Less than that and maybe technically G98/some form of registration required but if it doesn't happen it's not going to cause problems.

To summarise: We should want to reduce dependence on imported fuels. Given our current situation and available resources by far the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to do this is to build more solar, wind and battery storage. Everything else is more expensive and slower.

And this is the thing to fix. As said earlier, you fix the root cause, don't apply regulations on top based on the assumption that you are too weak to fix the cause. Not sure what you mean by physical check. You won't be able to tell much by physically looking at products. (product depending, egregious things more obvious but lots of subtlties no) By checking the certificates what I mean is communicating with the labs who supposedly issued them to check they are geniune and confirm they relate to the product in front of you. Historically most of the China Export stuff hasn't even bothered to go to the stage of faking these certificates. They just put some general (not product specific) certificates up and call it a day. Amazon should be checking this stuff on things on their store. They don't and offload the responsibility to the seller (not sure that legally holds up in the first place but if it doesn't the law can be changed). Going after Amazon (and aliexpress, etc) would stop a lot of the crap stuff getting in. High street retaillers, etc, are already pretty good.

Other countries have made big progress by having customs and/or trading standards equivalent go pick up stuff off the shelves and verify it and then penalise the importers if the right certifications don't exist. You are never going to zero but dodgy imports can be reduced significantly with a bit of enforcement effort. With a lot of electronics (depending on what it is) there are 3rd party testing requirements that have to be done by licensed labs so if those certifications aren't available it's pretty easy to stop. Rules are less strict on other things so it would be harder to stop fake 'CE' imports of toys, etc.

Post Grenfell I can't see that happening here, for larger blocks anyway. Maybe below 11m.

This is a known problem with existing solar/battery/etc installs. The electrical regs were relatively conservative, preferring the new generation to cut out early and delay reconnection. Since new generation got bigger these limits started becoming problematic. There's more noise on the line than 0.2v, also you might lose several volts on the connection from the grid to the inverter in local cabling. Having a window of 2-3v might help. (Each inverter choosing a value at random within that range every 24 hrs or similar). Yeh, that's the long term solution, making new energy inverters be grid forming not grid following. I believe this is already happening to a degree, though maybe this will never happen in residential solar, only commercial scale for the reasons of making sure grid workers aren't exposed to unexpectedly live cables. (Having said that they work on live cables an awful lot as it is so maybe worth evaluating exactly where the line should be drawn). It's a key signalling mechanism that is used by modern inverters too, so frequency modification is not going to go away. Victron inverters can vary the frequency of their output to control 3rd party inverters connected downstream. (I think this only works when they are working in a UPS mode, ie, not connected to mains).

Not watched it, but just skimmed the wiki page. Backing away now ............ 🫥

Cost of that Mac will pay for 5 years of Codex pro which I'm hearing is much much more efficient than Claude Opus 4.6 so could get an awful lot done with it plus can always move subscription if something better comes along. As someone who has traditionally loved playing with hardware seeing what Alex Zsikind* and others are doing is making me envious. But then I think 'What would I actually do with any of this stuff?' and the answer is just play around and not much more.

Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512G when it's announced? That's a mighty big hole in your pocket!

Sure that's been the problem for ages and what is trying to be addressed AFAIK.

The excuse before we left the EU was that it was EU rules preventing us from doing anything. Now we've left we could have done whatever, but the government/officials were all too busy dealing with brexit. We'd be further forward with addressing this issue if we'd stayed in the EU.

The big brands offering things like this cost a more than that. If the regs say that to legally sell this product it 'MUST' ensure that the pins are not live unless a mains signal has been seen within the last 20ms then either the product complies and is safe (ie, wont kill anyone even if they touch live pins) or it doesn't comply and is therefore defective. That should be the end of it. Really not sure what you are getting at here. The number of things that have to happen to produce mains output from a solar panel these days is huge. The computers involved in generating the waveforms are far far more powerful than desktop computers from the early/mid 2000s. It's not a case that the waveform will be produced unless blocked by a safety system, it's more that the system can't produce a waveform unless a long list of conditions are met. This is technical but heres a reference design from TI for a microinverter. Not suggesting you take anything from it other than it's not a simple system that will just continue working in a fault condition (the document doesn't touch on the safety side unfortunately). https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/tiduf63a/tiduf63a.pdf?ts=1774517354380 The MCU (brain) they use to do the control is this : https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tms320f280039c.pdf?ts=1774508361987 Again not really an accessible document, but you'll note that it supports various functional safety standards. Those are some pretty rigorous standards and if you design a product to meet them then you can make guarantees about the behavior. ie, make it fail safe. Edit: I'm not saying this is currently part of the regs for this, seems a little OTT for the situation, but it's certainly something that could be added to regs if a need is identified.

Sure, but that is a separate issue. We as a country need to start actually fixing the issues rather than trying to work around them by banning things outright. (Which still doesn't solve the problem because people will still get and use them anyway). Other countries manage this much better than we do. I haven't read the regs but I very much doubt that the regs allow for a plug to become live without an active current for anything more than a fraction of a second (and only then if there was a signal immediately prior that disappeared - eg power cut or socket pulled from wall). Either case I don't see how you could be in that situation while at the same time holding the plug. Others have raised the possibility of two systems plugged in sensing the other as 'mains' and hence continuing to work. I don't know how possible this is for systems designed with the current regs but it's certainly something that I think can be designed out and even in this situation the live pins will be actively buried in the socket, not in human contact. Electronic inverters can assess the mains waveforms thousands of times a second and with each sample detect a wide range of issues so any of these safety issues should be addressable if they havent already been (I suspect they already have been). Edit to add: A standard RCD cuts the current within 30ms of a leak to earth being detected. This is deemed sufficient to save someones life who touches live conductors. An inverter should be able to switch off much quicker than this if it detects any unusual conditions. It would be relatively unimpactful to efficiency to set the cut off conditions much tighter than RCDs as a cut off for a couple of cycles would not be noticed by anyone using the system (given the system should only ever operate when the mains is live).

I agree. Though again, I don't think we should be making decisions about what is allowed based on people doing things that are explicitly not allowed. UK based sellers are required to ensure the products they sell meet UK standards*. If you buy an electrical product from a UK seller that doesn't meet regs they are liable. We shouldn't set regs based on the possibility of gray/black market imports. As I've said I think the requirements we have already discussed are sufficient to avoid serious harm. Compliant products are unlikely to cause deaths. These products have been available and legal in Germany for a while so we should have good data to see if there are any gaps that need adjusting in regs for here (though we will tend to follow EU regs anyway) and so long as decision makers are taking this evidence into account and setting standards based on them then I doubt they would have liability either. * If you import yourself then you are liable to check compliance.