sgt_woulds

Yes but a standardised form and tested for structural use - I believe they have BBA, so easier get BC than some other soil based solutions. Used for inner leaf of cavity walls. Presumably can also be used in a solid wall with external breathable insulation. We had an architect/builder who was interested in using our woodfibre EWI on an earth block wall using BETTABLOK last year. I really must ask how they got on...

Perhaps, but we should hive it off to a seperate conversation 🙂 I like @solid' too, but other construction methods can achieve that. I was lucky enough to experience many types of construction back when I started installing PV. Back then the average price for a 1kw system was £20k! Only the absolute eco warriers were willing to pay, and they were as varied a bunch of characters as the houses they built. Great days... I've experienced TF, Strawbale, Rammed Earth, Cob, Earth Bag, Earth Sheltered (Stone built), Underground Bunker, ICF, Mass Timber, Double skin Insulated Wattle & Daube, Container house. The best timberframes can match any 'solid' construction method with correct detailing and pumped cellolose or woodfibre insulation, but, like anything, it will depend upon the quality of the build. As far as concrete goes: One of our customers and his architect built two houses side by side using different methods; Dense (fly ash) concrete block solid wall with external insulation, & ICF. Both had the same notional U-values and apart from the walls, all finishing details were identical. Multiple sensors everywhere. I spoke to the architect a couple of years later and he reported that the blockwork house was performing slightly better. His suggestion was that the internal layer of insulation on the ICF was blocking some of the advantages of thermal storage but the difference was marginal. The concrete block wall was quicker and easier to build (ICF collapsed twice during pours, even with manufacturer supervision on the site) and had about half of the upfront carbon than the ICF. They had the advantage of a highly motivated and dedicated team of builders - probably the best I've ever known. Would a blockwork wall built by the typical Great British Builder have perfored as well as the ICF? Of course cost is a factor. If I'd had the money, I would have like to have built a TF with Woodfibre insulation throughout. SIPs with a thin layer of WF was (supposed to be!) a cheaper compromise for a higher performing build, balanced against up front emmissions. If I was doing it again with the same budget, I would probably build a hybrid cavity wall with STROCKS.

I'm an ex PV specifier / installer and roofer, so I'm aware of my options... none of which will provide significant shade for my roof unfortunately. 😞 But enough distraction from the OP - hopefully we convinced not to use SIPs, but I wouldn't go for CIF either! I've felt guilty enough about the amount of global warming my house will have contributed to with SIPs, there is no way we should be building monolithic concrete structures in this day and age. What are the percieved advantages of CIF that would push Mueller to use this method?

With the woodfibre over the SIPs needing to breath, we already have a hybrid warm roof. Construction from inside is: plasterboard on resiliant bars, 25mm woodfibre flex , VVCL, 270mm SIPs / 60mm wood fibre (wet process highest density) / breather membrane / 80mm ventilated zone / 18mm OSB deck / EPDM. The detritus stuck to the eaves ventilation slits attest to the strength of airflow accross the roof. Unfortunately with the roof span and margins for snow loading, there is no spare capacity to add PV panels, sedum, etc to provide any more buffering, so paint it will have to be

In most houses built since the 70's, enough times that it is leading to excess deaths in the elderly. Heat mortality monitoring report, England: 2024 - GOV.UK Even amongst the younger population, the lack of sleep caused by an overheated house in a nation where the majority of people cannot properly ventilate overnight (due to the threat of some scrote breaking in) is leading to inflamation and circulatory stress. At a minimum this leads to lower productivity during the day, and long-term will reduce healthy life expectancy. There have been various studies that show that excess heat increases the incidence of depression and angst in teenagers, etc, etc, etc. Heatwaves Linked to Rising Depression and Anxiety in Teenagers Heat stress will only increase in the coming years and I'd preffer to see grants for shade solutions and decrement delay rather than subsidised Air-con. Discounts for families to keep warm in winter and cool in summer - GOV.UK - so short sighted! Anyway, back to the OP question. For the love of god don't go with SIPs. Using SIPs is the single biggest mistake I've made in my build! Nevever mind the heat - essentialy I've built a giant drum, and no amount of high density stick on insulation can stop the noise transfers throughout the structure. That means internal noise (like my son playing with marbles upstairs) and external noise (I live near Luton, so aeroplane and traffic noise) is always 'felt', even when you can't hear it. I have 60mm of directly rendered woodfibre externaly, on 150mm of PUR SIPs, with 25mm woodfibre flex inside, battens, resiliant bars, plasterboard. Heat transfer through the walls is not too bad, but most of my new SIPs walls are North and East facing so not really exposed to the sun. 72m2 SIPs flat roof is the killer though. 60mm of woodfibre over this has not been enough to keep the internal temperatures comfortable. I'm now looking for reflective paint I can apply to the EPDM. In winter it is easy enough to keep warm. We invented clothing many thousands of years ago, and survived 1 1/2 iceages without central heating. Keeping cool is much harder, so really, given the pace of climate change, decrement delay is far more important than u-value in the grand scheme of things. If you are considering ICF, why not look at CobBauge too?

We used one of those plastic ketter maxi stores for our laundry room. We could just fit both machines side by side with 70mm of insulation glued on all round (inc doors + 100mm on the floor with 12mm OSB over) with a tubular heater (at the back near the incoming water pipes) to deal with frost. I also injected spray foam into every cavity and crevise. I didn't bother with a vcl as the whole set up was impossible to make airtight (plus we popped the top up when the machines were running), but for your shed I would ali-tape the PIR board joints to keep moisture away from he wood. Our 'temporary' solution was used for 4 years... Biggest issue was with the supply and drainage outside the shed; even with heavy lagging, the drainage pipe could freeze up, so I wired in a 12v pizza heating wire under the pipe insulation. Everything inside was fine, but the bottom of the machines got a bit rusty, so an extract fan is probably more important than keeping the heat in. I got both machines, and all of the insulation free from the side of the road. Total cost was £199 for the shed and £6 for a replacement bearing get the tumble drier working, and £10 for the tubular heater heater. 🙂

This is where my understanding of the magic that happens inside inverters ends 🙂 When TL inverters were introduced, SMA and Mastervolt told us that there was no conventional galvanic seperation, that's all I can remember. We had endless tripping problems with DC leakage until we changed to type B RCDs. Agreed, array earth is not designed to be an LPS! But earthing the panel means that you have now created a path inside the house, where previously a strike on the building would more likely flow external to ground via the Faraday effect. The essance of the lightning study I read back then, was that earthing an array increases the chances of a lightning 'return stroke' forming when a storm is negatively charging the air above the building. Having an inverter that is not Galvanically isolated can't help things, so you are making it doubly likely to occur, and then you are directing the surge nicely into the consumer unit too. [I remember learning that lightning starts on the ground in GCSE science a billion years ago....]

When I began installing solar panels (twenty odd years ago) we did not earth the panels unless they could be touched from an open window on a roof, or were ground mounted, or there was an LPS within 10m of the array. There was a (Swiss?) study at the time that said earthing panels increased the risk of lightning strikes. All inverters back then had big iron core transformers so there was no ground path to 'attract' the heavens wrath. The first time I ever earthed a panel was when IKEA introduced their PV systems using (god awful) CIGs panels. We questioned the manufacturer repeatedly if this was a good idea. I remember those panels gave us lots of static shocks during install which we'd never experienced before. Dodgy stuff, as were most of the IKEA installs at that time, but I digress... Around this time, transformerless inverters were introduced, and without the robust physical seperation array earthing became more common, (but we always had to check manufacturers recommendations). With the introduction of micro inverters that extended the EPZ onto the roof, SPD's became common and array earthing became standard. I've not seen any recent studies that compare earthed systems to unearthed for lightning risk, but I'd be happier not introducing ground path inside my house. I never liked transformerless inverters; even though they are (slightly) more efficient and easier to carry, they are not as rugged. I know of a customer who's SB700 has been going strong for 23 years, but the transformerless inverters in the same building have already required replacement after 10 years. Of course, this may be due to the cheaper electronics and PCB used today; those old SB's had good old seperate circuit components.

You need to find a company that has experience with commercial installs where standing seem is more common. Unfortunately it is rare to find a commercial installer who will aslo do domestic as they are generally flat out with commercial installs and have no spare capacity or inclination to fit in small domestic jobs. The company I used to work for could possibly still do this, depending upon location and install capacity - assuming I'm allowed to whisper their name here. But last time I spoke to them they had a six month wait for a survey, let alone an install...

I woke up one morning with Vestibular Neuritis and the world was my personal rollercoaster for 48 hours. Sitting still it felt like I was leaning at 45 degrees to the left and lying backward. If I moved everything spun!

Sorry, I missed a word in my sentance: 'We installed maybe 10 pergolas accross the country and never had any issues with gaining PLANNING permission...' PD for ground mounted or wall mounted PV didn't exist back then, had to go for PP each time. Should be much easier today. PD is obviously the cheapest option, but having to get PP shouldn't cause issues unless you are in a conservation area, listed property, or have to get PP from West Oxfordshire Council!

Yes! Application of common sense is required... 🙂 Properly designed and nicely planted they can form an attractive addition to any garden. We actually had problems with people who wanted to close the pergola sides in, as they then required more ballast to prevent uplift. Generally a couple of extra concrete slabs in the trough bases before adding soil was enough. Wind uplift is easy enough to calculate. We had a structural engineer create a calculator for us that took account of average wind speeds accross the country + a margin of error for the 100 year storms that seem to happen every year now! You can find similar calsulators free on the interwebs now. When calculating the ballast, we used concrete slabs as the main ballast, with the soil (dry weight, not wet) as our margin of error. + Pergola, PV rails, Inverter(s), water, plants, worms etc. they ain't goin' knowhere! Plus you can easily take the array with you if you move house. This was 15 to 20 years ago when PD for solar panels was still being worked out. We installed maybe 10 pergolas accross the country and never had any issues with gaining permission, except with West Oxfordshire Council, which was seemingly staffed by the sort of NIMBY's that make 'normal' NIMBY's groan and look away. We had problems with every PV system we installed in their remit, ground or roof mounted! Their objection to the pergola, (with lovely green oak frame and surrounded on all sides by hedges and garden walls) was that it could be seen by someone looking out from the top of the church tower at the edge of the village...

Not necessarily. We used to build them with planters / ballast boxes at the base. Fill with soil and plants (or gravel for that pub ashtray look!) and they won't go anywhere. Pergola and frame still needs to be strong enough to keep the panels attached, but properly bolted 4x2 is more than man enough. If mounting microinverters under the pergola remember they can get very hot - keep out of reach of curious fingers

If adding to an existing sytem you will need to add them as a seperate string, due to the different orientation to your roof panels. You 'should' tell your DNO, yes. But if it is just one or two panels on an existing inverter and the extra panels don't significantly increase your export potential, then you'll have to ask if they'd ever know?

Ah, and there's me believing what the man in the store said. Explains a lot 🙂 I won't be using it to re-enact the 'Solvite' adverts anyway! With CT1, you could probably have hung an elephant under the helicopter...