sgt_woulds

Exactly my point. You just assume nothing bad is happening because you cant see it. Yet...! Which is down to dumb luck. This kind of ignorance is exactly what will be applied to PIS. There are plenty of examples to be found with an interweb search, and plenty more if you talk to an electrician. The point is that this is not just about what you plug in, it is about the state of your home wiring too - the stuff you cant see. It doesn't have to be dodgy DIY wiring, it can be simple wear and tear in the system (e.g. neutrals working lose over time) or lower quality or counterfeit materials used unknowingly and hidden behind the walls. Even the bits you can see (like modern electrical sockets), can hide dangers until too late; charging an EV pushes the the plug and outlet right to the very limit of its capability. To quote Jerremy Harris, the normal sequence goes something like this: 1. The plug gets warmer than normal, after a long period of running at high load. 2. Heat is conducted down the line pin, and transferred to the hard brass contacts in the socket. 3. Over time, the brass contacts fatigue from the heat, lose some of their springiness and so no longer make such a good contact with the plug pin. 4. This increased contact resistance causes the socket contacts and the plug pin to get hotter, as now there are two heat sources. 5. The build up of heat further reduces the socket contact spring pressure, increasing contact resistance still further and making things even hotter. 6. If left uncontrolled, then the area around the line pin will break down and char, and there may be enough heat transferred to the thermoplastic that many plugs are made from to cause it to distort, perhaps even catch fire. For years, plugs were all made from thermoset plastics, and this gave two big advantages. The obvious one is that they don't melt and distort when they get hot, the less obvious one is that they provide an early warning when they get hot, as most of them give off a pretty strong fishy smell when really hot. Modern sockets are now made with thermoplastics that are more brittle and don't give off any warning smells. By the time you see scorching of the plastics, hidden damage has already happened internaly. Why granny chargers are dangerous and fatalities will occur before they’re banned - Norwich Electricians Granny charger fire warning | General Chat Forum | MGEVs.com MG EVs Community EV charging cables: how safe are aftermarket leads? | What Car?

The market is driven by cost not quality. People searching for the lowest price know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Exactly. There are lots of sockets in a house = I can plug in as many panels as I like. The uninitiated will think 'hmmm, AC panels are cheap' = 'I can take my house offgrid' (= 999 !!! 😞). Are plug-in solar users expected to understand how electricity works?

OPSS has reported some cheap chinese chargers that have been found without fuses fitted. A proper granny charger plug should have a fuse and a thermister to limit plug heat, but again, what you order off TEMU might only look fine on the surface. Granny chargers already cause scorching damage to sockets (which are not rated for 10a continous loads for 8 hours plus). What if the P-I-S was plugged into a double socket with the car? (I'm sure you can think of other examples! Nothing exceeds mankinds seemingly boundless capacity for stupidity) Think of this another way. What if its a long ring circuit, with lots of high load items (plug in stove oven, microwave, kettle, car charger, porn server, etc, etc), all switched on at the same time. Each load is cumulative even if they are only drawing less than 10 amps each. Without P-I-S that high cumulative draw will be detected by the mcb. With P-I-S it could be be 'situation normal' whilst the cables burn out in the walls.

Not necessarily. The trouble with this type of product is that it encourages a race to the bottom with consumers used to buying the cheapest offer on Amazon for a no-name panel and inverter combo. Back in 2012 I installed some supposedly compliant (G83/2) Chinese Renasolar Micro inverters on a couple of old panels on my garage. Renasolar, even back then, was not some fly-by-night chinese company. I was literally shocked to discover that, when I isolated the mains to change a lighting circuit, the little barstools kept generating for a good 5 to 10 minutes after the mains was switched off. More of a UPS than full islanding, but certainly not compliant with any regulations then or now. Any changes to the rules would need to put the onus on the 'installer' to use MCS certified - and tested - equipment. This is one of the reasons why a dedicated install by an electrician is important - no Sparky will allow a dangerous installation if it means that he might be fined or lose certification. Most houses in Europe use radial supplies using (I believe), heavier section cables to fewer outlets. In the UK we use ring circuits that split the ampage load over two paths, reduces the cable sizes required, and allows more sockets per circuit. This is important with plug in solar. Imagine the situation as explained to me by one of our sparkies: Plug-in solar is fitted in a socket right next to an outlet with an EV plugged in on a faulty granny charger for 8 hours, (or some faulty high load device is plugged in nearby). The PV panels will be supplying power to the nearest local load, which in this scenario could be near or above the 2.5mm cable rating for a sustained period. Would the the MCB in the consumer unit trip? What about a house that still has rewirable fuses? Do you think home insurers would pay out for a fire that was caused—or allowed to be caused—by the operation of a plug‑in solar array? Where would the onus of fault lie?

what happened to all the ridge line turbines we were promised?

I haven't heard of Motorwind for a while! They always seemed like a noisy gimick to me, although I was intrigued by the idea at the time. The only one I ever came accross was on a PV survey in Brighton, (early to mid 200's?). The chap had ordered some to mount them along his garden wall - would that be you DamonHD? Are they still working? Being made of (ABS?) plastic they looked prone to high wear and UV exposure.

It is about time we raised ourselves above the quotidian calibre of interweb badinage 🙂

Its an ARCO panel. Pre-production / hand assembled. A real chunky monkey for back in the day - 42w! Still putting out 16+volts. I guess the modern foil quality has dropped, or, more likely, the larger panel sizes flex more and put more stress on all componants. The old 980x1650 formats with chunky frames, thick glass, and long-edge only clamping zones probably will last longer.

I don't know where this fear of foil backed panels comes from. As long as you buy tier 1 panels (the most important thing when buying any solar panel), and don't mount them upside down (to collect the reflected light? 🙂) then there isn't much that will damage them. I have a foil backed panel from 1982 mounted to my shed that is still perfectly fine and still producing its rated output. But to answer the OP question, no they are not all the same. You need to look for vertically integrated (tier 1) manufacturers, who make their own cells and assemble the panels themselves. e.g. Tier 1 Solar Panels List 2025: Updated Manufacturers & Rankings – RENVU Although I imagine it is rare now, I remember installing an early batch of no-name chinese panels that were so poorly made that the cells moved around behind the glass as we installed them.

Just use some mud. It was used as mortar for thousands of years before cement was invented. Dig a hole and take the subsoil, mix with some sand, possibly add some fibres (wool?!) and experiment with the ratios until you get a pliable but firm mix. It will be resistant to sheep and less expensive to repair when the combine inevitably knocks it down again

Useful advice can also be found in the following links: Rethinking IWI with Natural Fibre Insulation Insulation and retrofit - Finding the sweet spot - The Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (asbp.org.uk) The-use-of-natural-insulation-materials-in-retrofit.pdf (stbauk.org)

Ah darnit, I've done this before as well! Copying and pasting from a standard e-mail response which says 'a high level of insulation' then changed it to U-value and forget to change it to say low U-value! It's an age thing sonny... 🙂

If your builder hasn't used woodfibre before (and it's great that he is open to trying) make sure he has the correct tools for cutting the boards as they are much denser than the materials he will be used to. Assuming a preference for power tools: For flexible woodfibre batts - a jig-saw or sabre-saw with fibre insulation blades (you can also use an insulation hand saw but this tends to rip the back of the insulation batt) For dense boards - a table saw or circular saw with a large blade and 'bastard teeth' (few teeth with large gaps between) and the best extraction they can get as woodfibre is very good at gumming up the works, in particular the safety guards. (You can get circular saw blades specifically for woodfibre, but these tend to be only available in Europe and for eyewatering prices) At home I have an ancient (1970's) open frame circular saw (no safety of any kind!) that works brilliantly, but only has a 50mm cut, so for deeper boards I have to turn them over and cut twice...

Just to pull up @Redbeard slightly, although I agree with his preference for woodfibre (I work for a woodfibre manufacturer so that's a given 🙂), this is a situation where a membrane may still be required. The best advice here is for you to have your external walls assessed via hygrothermal software - such as WUFI - which will take all of the site variables into account. Internal wall insulation is more complicated than external insulation due to the way it moves the dew point within the construction. Standard U-value calculations (Glaser) will not correctly account for the sorption properties of wood fibres nor their ability to pass on liquid water through capillary action. WUFI purely considers moisture issues and how the various elements of the building fabric will deal with the volumes based on site-specific conditions. More specifically, where you have an external finish that restricts 'breathability' you need to be really careful to reduce the amount of internal moisture that can get behind the insulation layer. Woodfibre will handle this better than Unnatural insulations, but it needs careful assessment. With woodfibre, it may be more appropriate to incorporate a framed system (with flexible insulation batts between) as this allows the addition of a moisture-vapour variable (VVCL) membrane such as STEICOmulti renova or SIGA Majrex® or PRO CLIMA intello plus . These membranes will limit the amount of water vapour that enters the fabric, but allow breathability back to the inside during warmer periods. Correct installation of the membrane and connections to all surrounding elements is the critical factor to get right with this approach, but it is less risky than it would be with unnatural insulations such as PIR. Woodfibre, actively transports moisture due to the sorbative fibres (I've seen studies that have shown the addition of woodfibre drawing moisture out of wet structures) whereas somthing like the Kingspan boards would trap it behind the insulation. It is nearly imposible to assure that any VCL (or taped PIR boards) are 100% perfect. That is without building trades or future homeowners unknowingly driving screws or causing other penetrations through the membranes after completion.. It is important to note that we do not generally recommend achieving high U-values with IWI due to the condensation risk to the structure. There is, generally, a sweet spot between 40-100mm of woodfibre that balances the energy savings, cost, and condensation risk. Part L of the Building Regulations for England offers flexibility when retrofitting existing walls, roofs and floors; an improved U-value of 0.30 W/(m2·K) is the target but a ‘threshold’ level of up to 0.70 W/(m2·K) is sufficient, as long as the approach can achieve a payback not exceeding 15 years and is ‘technically and functionally feasible’. It is worth discussing with your local authority / BCO; for an older building, most BCOs are now sympathetic to the argument that breathability is more important than the insulation value. Back to Earth offers WUFI, and I think Mike Wye & EWI pro / EWI store do too if you ask.

You could use something like this to control it: Single Axis LCD Solar Panel Tracking Sun Tracker Controller W/ Wind Speed Sensor | eBay UK

Fair enough 🙂 Our customer was an Econutter who was eeking out every last watt. Eventually, even he only adjusted his array twice a year. End of October and end of April from memory. In the first year he changed it daily; his panels faced slightly east of East of South, if he laid them back in the late afternoon he captured a few more rays before the sun set. Like I said, 'Econutter'. You can afford to play if you are retired I guess! These days an automated single axis tracker would be easy to set up, though

You could always look at a design that allows the array to tilt at different angels for summer / winter. We did this for a customer many years ago and it made quite a difference to his outputs - he kept daily records, and after 2 years had worked out the optimal time of year to adjust the angles which was a 30 minute job with spanners twice a year. I can't remeber the details of the frame we used but I can see it could work well with scaffold tubes as it would be easy to create a pivote around the poles.

Assuming 5x1 row then no! 5 x 1134 = 5.67m without considering the clamps (assuming approx 25mm width for each clamp that would add an additional 150mm) Best get 2 lengths at 6m. You need to make sure that you add enough support to the unistrut rails with the scaffold poles - a proposal sketch would be useful. If you have large overhangs with unsuported unistrut then use 41 x 41mm unistrut instead of 21 x 41 mm.

I like those scaffold/panel clamps - not seen them before but I've been out of the game a while. Bloody expensive though! Before MCS was introduced to extort money out of the system suppliers and legacy installers, we used unistrut for everything. My vote would be for galvanised unistrut as it will last longer than mankind. Having said that, if you don't mind a bit of surface rust after a few years then BZP will be fine. We used to get ours from CEF (2 x 21 x 41 mm). I'd use aluminium T-clamps and mount them to the strut with with short-sprung unistrut channel nuts. (the springs are a luxury but it makes locating the bolts easier). Be aware of the clamping zones for your panels - clamping outside the zones can induce stress and create microfractures in the cells. In extreme cases it can cause 'rapid, unplanned dissassembly' in strong winds...

At least if they use robots with set programs there would be less of the Great British Builders attitude of 'good enough for a Friday / Match day / customer who doesn't know better'...

Unfortunately, FACIT has just closed it's doors as there were not enough self builders who wanted to use their system and the mass housebuilders wouldn't even consider it.

Unistrut. Mechano for big boys... 🙂 Scaffold poles are harder to cut, not as easy to fit together, and you will still need a way of mounting the panels. However, if the tubes and labour are free...

Talking of screwpiles reminds of another GSHP project in London; They were using a machine to fit a vertical deep-bore heat pipe. TFL arrived and asked them to stop - less than politely but for very obvious reasons -when it was pointed out that their back garden was directly above part of the Norhern line...

I've not been able to check your calculator yet Steamy - no computer at home at the moment. Could it include occupancy levels and biogenic heat sources? I read this recently: The small passive house problem - a solution? - passivehouseplus.ie To my mind, most PH builds have been massivly oversized because it works better on paper. It would be nice to have a tool that advocates for sufficiency.

I guess my thinking was, if you have a digger in anyway, just dig a few trenches for GSHP as well. All points taken on board, and I do think GSHP has had its day. I vaguely remember reading in (I think) Green Building Magazine (great magazine sorely missed now that the deathly boring PH+ has replaced it) that someone had built a heat store under the foundations, using a tarmac drive with pipes to heat it up. Maybe it was a school - it was a looong time ago. Back then we had a lot more people willling to experiment. Back when I was installing solar (when the average system was £25000 for 1.5kw), we worked with a some fantastic experimenters and early adopters. One chap - who lived in a Walter Segal designed, and self built house - dug out his entire back garden to shoulder depth using nothing but a shovel and wheel barrow to bury his GS pipes. He was powered by Rum and Wacky Backy and was older than I am now when he started! The soil was removed by barrow to skips at the end of the lane, stored offsite, and then returned for the reverse process. Unbelivably he finished it all in a couple of months. Then he realised there was a leak and had to repeat the process...