joth

Scratching my head - G98/99 and PV connection is managed by DNOs, not by "the" national grid ("National Energy System Operator"). But also National Grid is the name of one of many DNOs. So does this statement apply just in their DNO patch, or sloppy journalism actually meaning all "grid" DNOs, or has the definition of Nation Grid changed yet again while I was out? A link to the original source press release would no doubt help.

One question is your priority documenting if for quotation, construction, or post-completion maintenance purposes? My experience so far is: - For quotation a comprehensive schedule (Google Sheet) of fittings (type, room, wiring required) is sufficient, and indeed preferable to detailed drawings for the reason Dave lists. - For construction, drawings with plans and where relevant elevation show location of each fitting is necessary, but often sockets and lights gets moved about during 1st and even 2nd fix. - For maintenance, ideally one would also have drawings showing the hidden pipework and wire routing. Realistically this would HAVE to be done after 1st fix (but before walls closed) because I've never yet met a trade that will actually follow plans: often times unforeseen practicalities means they can't, but in all cases they will have their own habits and preference and just do it the way they think it should be done rather than how any plan says it is to be done. And in practice I've yet to see anyone actually create such plans: there's too much rush to get started on boarding. These days your best bet is some comprehensive photos (360degree camera is ideal) of every surface of every room. The exception to all the above is if you're literally doing it all yourself in which case you can control a lot more!

Plug PGSPDY2 requires tool TRCSPDY3 https://www.speedy-rj45.com/cat6a-shielded-feedthrough-plug Plug PGSPDY3 requires tool TBSPDY2 https://www.speedy-rj45.com/shielded-plug-for-xl-cable Well that's not confusing at all 🙄

I've typically bought from https://bownetcms.co.uk/ as they had fairly good pricing on CAT6(a) too, but I haven't comparison shopped this for a few years. Make sure you have the correct compatible crimping tool. And buy some spare blades while ordering ... And remember to use the little plastic carrier to arrange the cores correctly before pushing them through.

https://www.speedy-rj45.com/shielded-plug-for-xl-cable

Did they give a particular reason? Curious that a few suppliers suggested it, specifically for bathrooms. Guess because not needed for fire regs? But still curious if any reason for there aside some marginal cost-savings. I'd definitely go with opening, even though we rarely use ours for cooling much as we'd like to: too much street/train noise when the windows open, plus it lets a lot more dust in. (And smoke if neighbours have the coal fire going). Obviously that's all situational. We actually got the master ensuite with flyscreen pre-installed, thinking it would be useful for summer cooling, but in practice is still allows too much noise in but totally ineffective at cooling the bedroom. (Yet makes for an uncomfortably cold bathroom in the morning and makes the UFH in there work harder!) So anyway yeah we never use the opening on it aside for cleaning/maintenance, but I'd still want a stronger reason for not getting it. The next owner of our house maybe German and want their Lüften ritual.

If you buy one of these (first random example I found, not a specific recommendation), I'd wager the driver can be swapped out for a dimmable/CTT/smart one your choice. It comes with a 300mA CC driver and inline switch to select temperature: my expectation is cut the switch off, and there's three cores coming out the back of it that feeds two LED strips internally to the fitting, for warm and cool white.

That one was LED strip and appropriate driver. IIRC it was from DLD with an LTech driver https://www.darklightdesign.com/architectural-lighting/led-tape/112654/ https://www.ultraleds.co.uk/ltech-professional-24v-dali-constant-voltage-led-driver-36w-ip20

My experience is kitchen cabinet supplied light fittings are massively marked up rubbish. One project the customer paid hundreds per cabinet for them just to rip them out and replace with some quality Dali fittings (which also added CTT support). The pre fitted stuff was 12V non-dimmable inconsistent temperature, and random switch on latency. Essentially the cost just went into having the kitchen company route out channels and provide some glass bases for the cabinets. Can't really help with the OP other than say most slimline panel fittings are just an LED strip and a diffuser internally, so like the case i mentioned above you may get some mileage finding a quality fitting and pairing it to an appropriate constant current LED driver of your choice.

Happy to say I've not touched the Smartrhings in years (decades?), but Home Assistant very much is a single point of failure. Which was the point I was making there: aside KNX anything that doesn't depend on an in-home SPoF is probably depending on a cloud one instead (even just for authentication /ownership management) - which is probably worse of two evils. And even KNX doesn't really count as to do any interesting automation you need a PLC server which of course is itself the SPoF. Home Assistant certainly is all local easy to change owner at an administrative level. But handing over an entire installation as part of a home sale is a brave idea and I'd love to hear actual case studies of anyone attempting let alone succeeding it. My experience is Either HA is doing purely "nice to have functionality" (ovens and lawn mowers) in which case no compelling reason to leave it in the house. Or it's running the BMS - lighting and heating - in which case really hope the new home owner is keen on being sysadmin

The problem with all the consumer smart home stuff I know if is what happens when you come to sell the house? Does the new owner need to re-pair every individual lightbulb, blind and heating actuator into their own cloud account? (Or more often, multitude of accounts). Not to mention what happens when the cloud provider gets bored and shuts it down. Centralised systems are only marginally better for succession rights, but for the most part they offer some glimmer of hope. It still requires the seller to transfer ownership (e.g. hand over the admin password or project file) for a smooth transition. But at least I can point to examples of this working out. ... Put another way - an "non-centralised" solution is worse than useless if it exchanges an in-house single point of failure for a cloud-based one.

The pump (UPS 3) is not setup to modulate, it's running on speed three (maximum, also factory default). I don't have anything at all in the system intentionally reducing flow rate. As i say without the monobloc in line it happily circulates at 24 so yeah, agree it was never great even when first commissioned. and now it's barely operational

So thanks to @SimonD I have the correct length flexis and looks a lot neater, definitely not kinked now. But still... Flow rate remains stubbornly sat at the minimum 5l/min. And gave another L-9 error earlier this month (typically enough, it happened we were away and had a guest staying to mind the house). So I've done a bit more experimentation. Having water bypass the monobloc, so connecting the external flexis directly together through a M-M coupler, suddenly the flow rate jumps to 24l/min. So there's no problem in principle with the pump or pipework. It something about the heat exchanger. Pushing mains water (from the outdoor hose) through the monobloc it seems to run freely and clear. For shits and giggles, I reversed the flow direction through the heat-pump (so AFAIK pumping the primary water in through outlet connection...) the flow rate is a wee bit better, 7-8 rather than 5. I'm still at bit of a loss. The heat exchanger seems a fairly simple passive device, can't see what could have failed in it to restrict flow. There's no other components in the monobloc that would seem to affect the water flow rate. And again, it was over 15 l/min when first commissioned so it's definitely declined with time. I'll try again to see if I can an authorised service rep in , but so far no one has returned my calls.

According to City Plumbing: The updated safety standards are covered by BS7671 18th edition Amendment 4 G98 notification will still be required, within 28 days of connection Surely only a minority will actually bother with the G98 for plug-in. It feels to me like requiring purchase of a CB license in the 80s: technically a legal requirement but fat chance of enforcement, so long as one doesn't egregiously flout the regulations. That'd be my guess.

Beggars belief that gigabit broadband is in the building regs yet you have to go through such a pointless game to get it installed, even when doing all the hard work ones self. I'm in a similar situation, put in my own ducting 5 years ago as part of a major renovation, still can't get them to pull fibre through it as Computer Says No ducting present, even though their engineers very happily pulled a replacement copper line in through that very duct. Looks like WhyFibre may finally be launching in our area so lets see how they compare. They've already got the fibre blow tubes down our street

Same as existing hard-wired inverters really: they have anti-islanding tech that only activates the inverter after it senses stable grid waveform on the plug. How it deals with 2 or more inverters all on the same circuit being islanded together, I'm not sure.

That and people panic buying PV because energy prices are going up. (Same way as SUV sales make a distinct drop whenever fuel prices increase). Plus today's news that balcony solar will be legalised in the UK is only going to add to the short term spike in demand here.

I'm totally in agreement but fwiw a friend who swore by raspberry pis for everything had a good solution of making them all netboot and use tempfs+overlayfs to customise their images so no SD card required. (Maybe each node had one in write protect mode i don't recall). That was 6 or so years back, I'd assume cluster management of the things has become more common since but i can't see any references for a clear how-to I like your new approach more. First thing I do with every NUC is install proxmox

Because if I'm not onsite it's easy for the local contractor to say "oh yes, the heating and floor loop is working, the problem must be with {insert excuse here: poor insulation, high heat losses, bad room sensor}." if I can show the floor screed itself is not getting hot, it's much easier to save myself a call out. Not saying this is how it should be, just how I've found it to be in practice. Also, somewhat counterintuitively, floor sensors are in many ways easier to install as they happen much earlier in the programme. A room air sensor needs to be sympathetic to aesthetics, and coordinated with plastering and decoration, and that sometimes results in them being significantly delayed or even omitted, so functionally useless when the heating is being commissioned. FWIW when I've specified floor temperature probes I think they ended up being direct buried without the install tubes, yet I've had 0% failure rate. That's not a recommendation, just observation. This is with Dallas type encapsulated 1-wire probes.

As others say, the main use is for nerdy stat collection. I also use mine to protect the bamboo floor finishes when I'm overdriving the flow temp during cheap rate (to maximise energy delivery) but that's really just because I can, not something I'd design into a system. TBH the single biggest use I have for them in other installs I'm involved in is it gives me some independent data on whether the heat pump is working, and whether individual loops have issues. When I'm working remotely it doesn't matter how many times the local plumber says it's all working, if I can see the floor in a room is not warming up I know there's an issue on the hydronic side (probably air trap or the flow balancing valve screwed down too tight) and I can feed this back without an extra visit to site to confirm as much. Without the temperature probe expect a bit more time staring at the floor with a thermal camera while debugging the system. But in normal operation, it's not needed.

An alternative is to have automatic switch over to backup power, but with a long (multiple seconds) blackout period on grid loss before reenergising from backup. This way most heavy power users will automatically stop and not restart on power restore thereby shedding most the excess loads. All modern, digital controlled ones would; Certainly my ovens, microwave, washing machine and dishwasher, heat pump and hob all do. The immersion is the exception if hard powered on, but if on a PV diverter it's also taken care of. Even power tools probably power off too (as operator would have chance to release the trigger before the backup returns)

I just ordered 4x 6000mAh Li-ion batteries from AliExpress -- £5 each! They claim to be genuine Makita, of course they would wouldn't they, but I've had pretty good results from bulky NiCads I previously bought there so thought worth a punt Been really enjoying the pruning chainsaw I bought recently.

Interesting - even knowing this, i can't find any references to it whatsoever. (I don't do YouTube videos willingly though) The Apollo msr2 is the same thing going (has an optional temp sensor, but totally unreliable) and I've struggled with the same issue in devices I've built professionally in the past so i sympathise with their struggle. It's annoying some projects we struggle to get one temperature sensor per floor, others we have 4 per room 😂. Like London buses eh

Looks like they have a Pro edition in the works with PoE, which is nice to see. Odd they don't have Temperature + humidity in an "everything" sensor. That, plus and a nice flush-mount recessed housing, it'd start to look like a good solution for install throughout a build. Also, funny story: late last year I mis-remembered this thread, saw a discount on Apollo MSR2. Bought 2 and guess what? They're just as useless as the mmWave board I built myself (as using the exact same LD2450 as I was. I should have double checked what you wrote here before ordering LOL. Also interesting the Everything One/Pro also use the troublesome LD2450 , but coupled with PIR and another longer range mmWave SEN0609. Sounds hacky but I guess don't knock it if it works. Anyway I'll certainly stay clear of their Lite as it's LD2450 only and I now know for sure that's a disappointing result, exactly as you said here 12 months ago. Have you put custom ESPHome firmware on the Everything One? That is one thing Apollo got right - very easy to take control of it. I specifically wanted to adapt it to make HTTP request (or send UDP) to my server on every state change, to avoid polling state or having to use the HomeAssistant API. That'd be a nice thing to have built into the stock firmware like Shelly do (aka Webhooks)

My Starlink works fine at ground level so long as it has clear view of sky, although since then I've now mounted it on the roof of the campervan. I also setup a dedicated VPN from the campervan router to my home router, so there's minimal Starlink / USAian involvement in the datapath. I'd now much rather not be sending money with that man or his empire, but we are where we are - at least I can minimise the visibility of my traffic as it passes through his patch.