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Hastings

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  • About Me
    First time self-build, off-grid, airtight, low energy renovation.
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    Argyll

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  1. The requirement for a recent calibration certificate is in the 'Domestic Ventilation Compliance Guide' along with a commissioning procedure checklist. I based my own commissioning report on this in because I couldn't risk the additional cost implications of a rejection. I will never know if the BCO ever looked at my DIY report (see attachment). The hire of the calibrated (and on an approved list of models) anemometer was £150 including shipping both ways, still leaving me a saving of about £650 over the best quote I could get for having someone else do it for me. MVHR-commissioning-blank.xlsx
  2. Be aware there is no real tech support with Victron stuff. You post your problem on a forum and wait/hope for a response from the community.
  3. It just depends on the particular design and the loading. There are no rules. My two storey timber frame build inside an old stone-walled building had noggins (at mid height) in the ground floor walls but not in the upstairs walls. BUT that is probably because the roof structure rests entirely on the the existing stone outer walls. The mid-floor joists rest on top of the ground floor timber frame stud walls so those needed to be much stronger. Both upper and lower level stud walls had a single 11mm OSB sheet for racking and to retain the wood fibre insulation. I'm talking about the outer walls only here - not the internal partitions walls. I'm no engineer but I'm pretty sure that plywood is there to prevent racking and noggins are there to support the vertical studs from buckling under compression. The ply will also help stop the verticals failing but only to a limited extent but that might be enough, depending on the particular overall design. I had one contractor who helped a bit with the work refuse to do some ceiling insulation in a lean'to a particular way (no SE drawings to refer to, just my own past experience) and so I had to tell him to leave it to me to do.
  4. I don't know but I have read somewhere that they're considering doing so. As well as rodent damage, plastic pipes have been known to soften or go brittle when in contact with some sealants, and fire block mastics. Wiring can suffer the same way when in contact with incompatible materials. But apparently it's errors in assembly of push-fit plastic connectors that causes most leaks.
  5. More than in any other type of build, you have to make sure they don't! Metal, concrete/cement render outer shell might work for a while. Plast ic pipework may be cheaper to install but then make a house more expensive to insure, due to the high prevalence of leak insurance claims from houses with it.
  6. Rodents can and do eat through anything but copper pipe. That's the reason plumbers I know don't like to use it where pipework is hidden.
  7. Looks like the sheep wool kind that I have recently used for noise isolation of my MVHR unit where it hangs on a roof truss. Also used it for general pipe insulation where the foam stuff can't go round tight corners etc.
  8. Pretty sure it is a regulation in Scotland, similar to the rest of UK. My first (Gas Safe) plumber put insulation on all his hot and cold water pipes (there is no wet central heating piping) and labelled them. It means leaving a good amount of spacing between. My second plumber didn't know the regulation and made it impossible for me to follow with pipe insulation where crossing pipes almost touched. As @Iceverge shows, there is little point to it in terms of saving energy. That grey foam insulation isn't a close enough airtight fit to work anyway, even on straight sections of pipe, never mind the clips and tight elbows. The only place it DOES make some sense to me is all pipes 1m connected to the hot water cylinder. But only if carefully taped and airtight to the pipe. Maybe the reason for requiring it is for frost protection in the event of the house heating system failing completely, long power cuts in freezing weather like I remember in the 70s.
  9. Ah, that explains my puzzlement, thank you. Have been off grid for the whole 5-6 year build and loving it. Would have preferred to have less power and fewer mod cons but building standards and public health dept (private water supply police) of the local authority stood in the way of that ideal home.
  10. Still none the wiser, sorry, but the 2000W challenge is right up my street.
  11. I am going into my first fully off-grid winter in southern Scotland (Glasgow latitude) so I can't yet be definitive (and even then it would be just the one year) but looking at the data I am finding that my PV production is quite a bit less than the estimate obtained from online tools like PVGIS. Two days ago my 1.9kW PV array produced 270Wh on a grey drizzly day. That's not enough to power the constant background load of charger/inverter (30W), UV water filter (30W), MVHR (15W) and system losses.
  12. Small wind turbines are only really best suited to houses where there is no affordable grid connection - which from a commercial perspective is probably not enough places in UK. PV in northern latitude winters produce little output in many places so a turbine is a good option compared to getting grid connected (I was quoted £250,000 for a 2 mile installation). My 1.9kW PV array (same latitude as Glasgow) does the job in summer but produced only 270Wh today and we're not even in Dec/Jan yet.
  13. I chose to install a 240V inverter with my off grid 2-storey house refurb due to the considerable extra cost of heavy gauge DC wiring that is needed to run wires further than a few metres. Even 48V, which is my battery bank system voltage, can only be run the length of an artic lorry using fairly standard cable. 12V works cost-effectively around a car etc.
  14. 150L tank of water started at 41C and finished at 55C. Incoming air temp: 12C Outgoing air temp: 5C Here's the data from my Victron EasySolar 48V 4kVA for the last 30 days: Bear in mind that these figures are for an off-grid system in which power is only generated when there is demand. Very different numbers to a system connected to and feeding the grid (effectively 'maxed' out), which is probably 99.9% of systems posting to the pvoutput.org website (either way, you need to know which). Day 7: the system shutdown due to low voltage. Caused by me being too hasty with the newly installed air source water heater. Days with zero time in Absorb or Float denote that the batteries are not fully charged.
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