sgt_woulds

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...

CT1 really is 'The problem solver' I've used it for repairing and 'stretching' concrete roof tiles on my south-facing roof (10 years on and no issues) I've used it for sealing various external areas that need to be 100% waterproof for the life of the building, but a little bit of flex for expansion and contraction of differing materials. Internal or external makes no difference to performance as far as I can tell. We once made the mistake of using CT1 to seal a cable entry through a wall for a PV system. When the owner decided to extend their house, we came back to move the system. It took 5 hefty men in a tug-o-war on the cables to pull the plug of mastic out of the wall! I've hung a hook (with a wide base) from a ceiling beam that has held a 20kg bike in the air for 2 years now. We completed an emergency repair to a chimney flaunching in driving rain and a howling gale. Inspected it two days later when the rain had finally stopped, and it was rock solid. The homeowner decided not to have the pot re-bedded. To my knowledge, it has never been properly repaired, but I'd be 100% confident that the CT1 will still be perfect. We found that the clear CT1 flows better and has a slightly longer curing time, which is useful if you need to smooth it. It is also better for repairs that need to remain invisible. It's a bugger if you get it on bare skin, though! One trick for smoothing with fingers - lots of spit. It's disgusting, but human spit allows your skin to slide over the top of CT1 without sticking - if you try to do the same with water, you will just gunk your fingers. (Spit doesn't work as well on the coloured varieties for some reason - these just seem to be more sticky in general) I always keep a tube of CT1 in my toolbox, just in case. I've tried the Wickes BT1 alternative, but the grip doesn't seem as strong, it doesn't stick as well on damp surfaces, and the clear version goes yellow in the sun. It is about £1.80 cheaper than CT1 per tube, and is fine for indoor use, but I wouldn't hang a bike off it or make a long-term roof repair...

I'm an ex-solar installer - already got panels on the front roof and would happily add more 🙂 Unfortunately, there are structural issues with adding more panels to the dormer roof, even if I could afford it. Which I can't...

I'm looking for recommendations where the product is designed for EPDM, and any real life feedback. I've used reflective paint on felt, but never on EPDM. The results were mixed, and most started cracking within 2 years and needed re-applying. I suppose I could glue a load of CDs to the roof! 🙂

Unfortunately, the Covalba covatherm paint doesn't appear to be available in the UK. My roof is already a ventilated warm roof design (raised deck / ventilated airspace / woodfibre insulation / SIPs roof structure), so no benefit in adding an additional ventilated layer above the EPDM deck, even if it doesn't get blown away 🙂

I've tried asking this in the flat roof section, but I guess no one goes there! In other parts of the world, you can buy white EPDM to keep the summer temperatures down, but not in Blighty, so I had to use bog-standard black. I've done everything I can to mitigate the summer heat on our 55m2 dormer flat roof (ventilated deck, woodfibre insulation, careful airtightness detailing), and whilst these have helped over summer, it could be better. Does anyone have any recommendations for a reflective paint that works well on EPDM?

In other parts of the world, you can buy white EPDM to keep the summer temperatures down, but not in Blighty, so I had to use bog-standard black. I've done everything I can to mitigate the summer heat on our 55m2 dormer flat roof (ventilated deck, woodfibre insulation, careful airtightness detailing), and whilst these have helped over summer, it could be better. Does anyone have any recommendations for a reflective paint that works well on EPDM?

Guess I'll have to Google that. Every day is a school day 🙂

Ed Miliband was vilified in the press for proposing a regional pricing system that would have addressed some of these issues. The main issue is that it is cheap to build onshore wind in Scotland, so lots of private investment goes there, but those investors have no responsibility to pay for power transmission to the South, where the demand is. The answer is either to demand a dividend to fund new transmission cables, or allow zonal demand pricing that will make it more attractive for investors to build wind and solar in the South and pay for the additional planning costs and construction prices involved. The lower prices near to points of power generation would also encourage energy-intensive industries to move North, which would surely be a good way to spread wealth more evenly throughout the country. Electric smelting makes far more sense oop North, where lower power prices would make us more competitive with the rest of the world. Local zonal generation with small-scale storage suits the use case for grid-forming battery storage, which would allow us to shut down more polluting power stations (I'm including Drax in that description). Unfortunately, the only message the public received from clickbait tabloids was that electricity prices would go up in the South. I'm starting to think that the 'Green Revolution' we need in this country should look more like a Chinese dictatorship. Otherwise, nothing will ever change. 😞