Radian

Insulation is often retrofitable. Airtightness, not so much. My understanding here, which may be wrong, is that when we're talking about airtightness we're not really talking about drafts which are relatively easy to prevent. But of all the things that sap energy (that's costly to replace) air change is thankfully the least in significance due to it's relatively low specific heat capacity. Heating a given volume of air by a given amount requires a lot less energy than the equivalent amount of some other medium such as masonry. I said "thankfully" above because, in my opinion, airtightness is probably the most difficult thing to achieve and can only really be achieved during a new build or complete renovation. And even then, it's not something you can employ a non-specialist to do for you so often becomes the preserve of the fully hands-on self builder. So is it worth chasing airtightness beyond the easily accessible stuff like gaps around doors, windows and wall junctions?

My last project was laying over 500 slabs for our paths and patios over a variety of different bases. On new areas bordering a couple of building extensions I used 100mm of type 1 on top of broken-up hardcore left over from the building work because the clay had been considerably disturbed. On areas that were original patios, just laid laid on a uniform bed of sand, I carefully lifted the old slabs, whackered it and replaced with the new slabs on a full 30mm mortar bed. The old patio had been down for over 20 years on sand and not misbehaved at all so I figured the ground below was good enough. As a point not often mentioned, it helps if there's lateral restraint i.e. a kerb set in concrete or wall. This contains the ground below and stops it spreading. If it has no where to go, the patio can't go anywhere except for up and down. If the ground was well compacted or not disturbed then it's down to moisture content. Good surface drainage then becomes important with the aim being to maintain constant conditions beneath the patio.

That would be my choice but with equal door and sidelight width (~600mm) and in pitch pine 😁

Now that's curiously low. Unlike @SteamyTea I bet you don't eat baked beans straight from the tin every day and use candles to read at night 😉 Cooking with COP1 electric every day could easily gobble up half that 5kWh so I'm guessing DHW must use the other half which doesn't leave much for baseload: do you know roughly how many Watts that is?

Do you have a handle on the daily energy consumption of the pool?

And you once accused me of over-thinking things (I seem to recall) 🤣

And have the government use our taxes to buy out the shareholders? If they didn't come up with a fair price you can wave goodbye to what little wealth this nation might be expected to create in the future. If they did pay a fair price, then as taxpayers we'd probably be worse off overall.

Yes, I kind of avoided discussing this topic but tend to agree with Robert.Wall that they probably operate on the assumption of a smaller buffer zone with a bias towards export to avoid even the tiniest bit of unnecessary import. The marketing would have you believe that you're using every last drop of self generation but in reality, due to necessity of having a "one-size-fits-all" product that can cater for different utility meters, they are nowhere near as efficient at doing their job as they could be with proper matching (tuning).

Beat me to it!

I thought it amusing when I asked for a critique of my homebrew pv router on the open energy forums and someone suggested using these: stephenstephen krywenko 23 Jun as critique - i would use surface mount triac. easier fixing when it fail at some point and better heat dissipation. just use push on connectors instead of soldering them on They do crop up in commercial designs so worth checking first if anyone gets a problem with their diverter.

That type of connector (Lucar) is prone to failure. Read this for a good rant about them.

I'm not so sure. With no strings attached, a government even as daft as the ones we always end up with might be able to do the analysis and steer things rationally towards an outcome. But they continue to operate as puppets of the private sector and their shareholders. The actions they take are carefully crafted to look as though they're responding to the situation while in practice they're maintaining some kind of status quo. Choosing between cock-up or conspiracy is a false dichotomy anyway. What we always end up with is a conspiratorial cock-up.

I know that pressure and the look that goes with it 😀 It really messes up the calculations when you look at the numbers, although I always used to say something along the lines of "you can get an awful lot of energy for £x" but that's no longer necessarily true. It makes the one year statutory guarantee absolutely useless when considering how something needs a good few years operational lifespan to pay you back. But this solar PV->immersion divert business is ripe for some disruption. Looking at the price trend over the last few years it looks to me as though divert manufacturers are price gouging due to the energy crisis. At a guess, the parts needed to build something like my home brew design could be bought for under £50. The main thing stopping me putting into production through the manufacturing service I use for my commercial stuff is the red tape associated with the EMC directive. That and the fact that I have no marketing branch that hangs over the home energy sector. On the other hand, items sold as kits are an altogether different proposition. My head tells me not to get involved but my heart feels for those faced with this dilemma. One possible approach is that, without looking, I would expect a chinese rip-off eddi to exist with a ticket price of a shade under £100. It'd be awful and might start a fire but could be a starting point for a conversion kit. Anyone spotted anything like this?

That encapsulates the problem perfectly. Short of being in a communist style command economy, Government interventions are often unable to have their intended effects due to the adaptations made by the free market economy.

That's not good then. These things ought to be able to last for decades. It would take some serious corner-cutting to get them to the point of near-failure (the point where most low-end products are designed to operate at). Would love to see a teardown analysis. Don't suppose you've peeked to see what failed or still have one I could buy off you?

You say you have an internal foil like layer but what about the EWI? Has that also got a foil layer or two? And your glazing - low E? The coating is metallic. All this makes a superb Faraday cage. Get a WiFi signal checker app on your phone and wander outside with it.

"Used Once" Yup.

That's interesting, where can I read about that?

Oh there's another factor to consider now. Most manufacturers have two model heights to choose from with the standard being for countertops roughly 800mm and higher (measured between floor and underside) and a XXL model for countertops with 865mm height available underneath. My countertop has 870mm available underneath. Well, at the front at least. 😬 The extra volume might get around the reduction in space due to the upper cutlery tray which now seems to be standard across all makes. Unfortunately XXL models seem to be thin on the ground at the moment. Miele do one that's relatively more available but also relatively less affordable.

No problem. Depending on the relationship between voltage and current, the output of the clamp can be used to determine the direction of power flow through the cable. That's really useful stuff to know if you have multiple sources of power like solar, battery and the grid. Consequently if you rotate the clamp by 180o it makes it look like the power is going in the opposite direction.

Great update! So the lid did close on the CU 😬 phew. If the CT's are all marked for current direction, can the device report the direction of power flow on all channels?

A while, but the first part any cycle I've seen with our old machine is a rinse for which the heater isn't switched on. Sounds like a very reasonable choice there. A 5yr guarantee is impressive!

Cutlery tray sounds borderline with our 28cm plates and tall glasses. Would be nice to have the option... What make was it if you don't mind me asking? The big debate going on here now is the temperature of the water supply. Given the price of electricity, a hot water feed is looking like a no-brainer to me. With a gas system boiler and 160L HW cylinder, it should be at least three times less expensive than heating the water with direct electric. In the summer, the PV divert to HW might provide enough energy for the cycle without touching the gas if the timing is right. Of course, In the summer the PV could also power the dishwasher heater for the cycle if the cold feed was used but not in the winter. Now to find which machines can accept a hot feed.

Fridgy Mc. fridgeface has been impressing us with its tricks all day now. Chief among these is drawing less than 1/4 the power of the old one while still managing to chill stuff down really fast. Supercool mode is actually super cool. But the one thing that delights me the most is the interior lighting... Not one but three areas of LEDs with columns up both sides. The cherry on the cake is it goes with my movement sensitive kitchen Lighting theme by dimming up slowly rather than switching straight on when the door is opened. Will post up some power plots after it's had a full 24h without me opening it to tweak a hinge or add a bit of trim. On that matter, the installation instructions were (as everyone likes to point out on the internet) totally crap. Once you worked out that any picture accompanied by a giant * meant "you might not need to do this bit" it got a little bit easier but they really should have spelt this out somewhere. Other bits and pieces did need adding at times that seemed wrong, hence having to get back in and add them afterwards. Thanks to everyone who contributed to our eventual decision. It was a big investment but the energy savings look like it will have been worth it. Oddly, the 2022 replacement model for this fridge has a worse annual kWh figure. The only other difference I could see is a touchscreen LCD which would not be something I'd want in a kitchen appliance expected to last over 10 years.

We're now in the market for a new dishwasher after the old one blew up a whole day before the new fridge arrived 🙄 Some of the good old Bosch/Neff/Siemens/Gaggenau models are offering this thing called Zeolith Colour me intruiged. Can't seem to find much info about it, like if it's a consumable vital to the operation of the appliance and how much energy it saves etc. Also, all dishwashers seem to go for this additional cutlery tray on the top now. I'm wondering what that does for the maximum height of plates on the bottom rack. We've got 28cm dinner plates and from previous experience know that not all dishwashers have sufficient height. A pretty important parameter but not one that's widely publicised. And it seems like a bit of a faff laying dirty cutlery in a tray as apposed to dropping it in a basket. Anyone care to share some user experience here?