Radian

Not sure which satellites they use but it's not dependent on where abouts in the world you live, so probably out at geostationary orbit locations. Anyway, they say they use 'sophisticated prediction algorithms' so it must be good 😄

I've been using that to simulate a virtual array on my place since last year. Almost kidding myself it's actually generating (SWMBO is fed up with me giving her an update on how many watts wer're 'generating' now). Best I can do until the real thing turns up.

That might not sound like a lot but it is. Anything over 600 needs some serious engineering if it's to last. Have you considered a concrete footing and blockwork retaining wall? Faced with natural stone it can look wonderful. I'd choose stone over brick for durability and over rendered blockwork which is very difficult to get right and can look shabby in no time. 6 tons of cropped walling sandstone did about 30m2 for me at £150 a ton.

Seeing as there's absolutely zero prospect of resolving the question in the OP I'm staying firmly off-topic as well 😊 That's quite amusing to me. I've been around here all my life and have always appreciated the surroundings to the extent of making a conscious decision to stay put. I've travelled around and apart from a few exotic places overseas have never been tempted to move elsewhere. Many of my friends moved away during that youthful escape phase but seem to have a certain nostalgia for the area. In 1983 everyone had that hairstyle - including me 😛

Ages ago (maybe 1970's) a rep gave me some samples of micro-louvered plastic sheet. It was around 1.5mm thick and had vanishingly thin black stripes embedded in it at around 1mm spacing. Looked like magic. Totally Black a few 10's of degrees off axis, totally transparent on perpendicular axis. Never found a use for it but realize now that it would be amazing for retrofitting to glazing.

The number of times I thought I'd found a leak in a kitchen cupboard - only to find it was condensation forming on mains cold feed pipes. Doesn't seem to happen on cold from loft storage tank. Obviously I need more loft insulation.😖

Ok, so the door is flanked by two fixed glazing units and everywhere else the vents are in the cavity. Building Regs (Approved Document C) requires block and beam floors to have ventilation on two opposing external walls of no less than 1500mm² per metre run of external wall or 500mm² per metre² of floor area, whichever is the greater. If your other vents combined provide this then yes simply omit the awkward ones. The mm² ratings of each vent should be stamped on the plastic grilles. Typically you get around 7500mm² per single brick sized grille.

What makes you say that? I'd say it's absolutely the best way to bed them. If you used a 4:1 sharp sand/cement mix it would be more supportive and still 'point up' neatly. An important thing to do would be to brush a slurry of SBR/cement to the underside of the capping to ensure a good bond just before you lay them. In fact, what I'm describing is the best way to lay patio slabs. To address the wibbly masonry I'd twang a chalk line near the top and trim down with a diamond disc cutter to get a uniform bedding level.

That's the inside. I'm puzzled by the height they reach up to. It looks like the top of the telescopic vent tube would be virtually the same as your floor finish. If they're all like that then there's a whole lot of cold bridging going on!

In some ways yes, but the information displayed is otherwise very accurate - the meter reading and current/daily/monthly/yearly figures are verbatim digital copies of the data relayed to the supply company. Whatever, I still think it's incredibly sloppy... in other financial situations such looseness would not be tolerated. SSE were subsumed by OVO Energy in 2020

SSE Are going to be next according to my smart meter this morning. It says I'm still paying 11.98p/kWh Obviously it's not had an OTA update but I take exception to this kind of sloppiness. If that was a petrol pump or Taxi meter and it showed one measure of what I was buying - then I was actually charged twice as much when it came time to pay I would not just let it pass.

I'll happily have it in my 'back garden' (or at least a hill I can see from my back garden) Not many people living in Purbeck. Tyneham Village village is deserted. The ridgeway hill continues on to the West between Weymouth and Dorchester. Miles of lovely deserted hilltop.

I wonder what they would say now.

First you need to deport the the honourable member for the 18th century. Jacob Rees-Mogg (the Brexit opportunities minister 😖) suggested that we should return to fracking and firmly opposes land based wind turbines. He's now got Boris stressing that offshore is the only place for turbines just like their favourite tax havens.

'Slaps forehead' 👆 Pure Genius.

By immersion heater I assume you're talking about a DHW cylinder. Is the Solar iBoost really not powering this immersion? You say it doesn't, but it would seem odd if the Solar iBoost immersion control receiver unit had been wired to power the LG Electric Back up Heater.

Something's not adding up with that report. There seem to be some pockets of hard water nearby Chorley, maybe your getting your supply from one of those areas?

The elbow full of mineral deposits was in the recirculating side. This closed circuit was presumably filled originally from the same water supply that's constantly flowing fresh water through the other side of the PHE, heated to roughly the same temperature, so may well be be even more contaminated. It looks like extremely hard water to me. As I said earlier, a water softener would be one way to make this scheme work.

Inhibitor isn't really the issue - if that's on the recirculating side of the PHE then the open side would probably be worse as it's constantly being replenished with minerals from main supply water. A water softener would seem to be indicated.

One house we bought from a developer omitted a tray in a similar location between main house and side extension and within months of moving in, after a heavy rainstorm, we had water cascading down the interconnecting doorway in our living room. The developer had to fix it under NHBC guarantee and, I don't know why, took down the entire outer leaf to install a stepped tray. However, not wishing anyone to attempt to do anything suboptimal, I'm not sure BC will actually insist on a tray in all cases. Porosity of masonry materials, exposure of the elevation and condition of existing lintels/trays all play a part in whether or not there will be problems further down the line. Huge gamble though and even if BC don't insist it is definitely worth doing at the early stage of your build.

Without active balancing you will need to get lucky by swapping batteries and getting a better match between series pairs. Measuring the internal resistance of each battery would give you a better idea of what's going on. You can do that with your meter, a dummy load and Ohm's law. If you have a couple of 12V 50W halogen lamps lying around then you can use those as a dummy load. The more the better. I sometimes use three which totals around 12A but this method will work with just one. The only advantage of using more is that it makes the voltage drop easier to measure accurately. After separating all the batteries, for each battery individually: measure the open circuit battery voltage (~12V) apply the dummy load and measure the voltage directly at the battery terminals (~11.9V) measure the current going through the dummy load (~4A) apply Ohm's law to obtain internal resistance So if, as in the example above, you were to get 0.1V drop at the battery terminals when loaded with 4A that 0.1V is being dropped in the internal resistance of the battery. R = V/I = 0.1/4 = 0.025 Ohms i.e. 25 milliohms. It may not be highly accurate but using the exact same method on each battery will at least give you their relative characteristics.

Sure. There's a large elderly population in Dorset so the demands for that aspect may be greater. The costs of social care aren't met entirely from council tax though. Band G. For a 185m2 3 Bed house (OK, plus one boxroom) at time of banding. That's why we added a garden room to the house and workshop to garage to give us more space for hobbies. Thank goodness we don't have to pay extra Tax for the improvements. As a retired couple, with modest savings (most of which went into our recent building project) we're definitely in both fuel and Council Tax poverty brackets now. Obviously people could say "well, just sell-up and downsize". Anyone on BH who would say that might think twice however. Building a dream home and garden is not easy. It takes a lot of time and energy as well as money. Hopefully, we can get back the money. Unlike the other things that are far more valuable.

I think I must be balancing something out somewhere with a £4k Council Tax bill 😖 We're very little burden on the council. Our road is unadopted so we pay for our own maintenance and lighting. Even the main road nearby has no pavements so we keep the brambles down when we scramble up the banks to avoid traffic. Never seen a Policeman anywhere near here. Often get missed bin collections so don't rely on them at all. £11 per day for ???

Thought as much. Same reason compensating for the recommended air change of 1/3 room volume per hour doesn't result in complete bankruptcy without heat recovery. Even though it sounds like it ought to. Heating 63m3 of air from 10C to 20C in one hour: Specific heat capacity of air ~ 1 kJ/kg/K, density of air ~ 1.2 kg/m3. So 63 × 10 × 1.2 × 1 /3600 = 0.21 kWh Not much. But I can't visualise the dynamic nature of how it might play out in practice. The replenished outside air in the roofspace would need reheating. It may only have gotten to the high 20's after cooking all morning. The slate roof is a good re-radiator but how to quantify the energy transfer? It certainly would be easier and more accurate to try it but getting hold of a suitable fan isn't painless. I'm seeing something in the ballpark of £120 for something that would be suitable.

...Cold nights, frequently below 5C, occasionally below zero... Sunny days but with outdoor temps still pinned back. Consequently my unheated Woodworking Workshop (to left of garage, behind the entrance door in the brick alcove) hovers around 10C while the large empty roof storage space above the cars gets up to 25C. There's a lot of hot air up there. Every year I think about fanning the hot air above down to a vent in the woodshop to make some use of all that wasted energy. I never get around to it though because these conditions only persist for a month or so. Recently however we have a new set of rooms extending the garage/workshop and while the inhabited half of the roof warms nicely via the Velux roof windows and glazed doors in the gable, the downstairs room would remain around 10C without a little help from (currently) a 2kW convector. You can probably see what I'm thinking. To do a practical experiment I'd need to buy around 10m of ducting, an inline fan and bore a suitably large hole in the wall between the downstairs room and the central woodshop, and another from the woodshop up to the storeroom. This would all be fine if it worked and gave me some useful free heat energy part of the year but I'd rather do it as a desktop exercise first. My suspicion is that it would only give a marginal benefit - based on the observation that people don't seem to go around discussing this sort of thing. So how could I go about calculating the benefits? I know the approximate volume and temperature of the hot air available - if I was able to displace it into the target room, it would fill it about 1.5 times. I also know the loss in kW of the room per degree difference to outside. I feel that should tell me how it would pan out in a one-off air transfer but I'm hazy on how this would go on as the hot air was used up?