joth

All SMETSv2 polyphase smart meters should use net metering regardless of manufacturer, as this is mandated in the SMETSv2 specification. I bet if you search this forum for "polyphase" you'll see citations and a few positive confirmations of this

Thanks! I doubt it's worth calling them. Notice 708 section 13.9 is pretty darn clear ceiling speakers are excluded, I was mostly posting on the off chance I'd missed some other section cancelling out that exclusion if used for security or accessibility or anything. with all the eyes on it here no one is aware of such a counter rule so that's good enough for me. It's just a bit annoying for a smart home installer to have to apportion the materials and charge different vat when the vast majority is zero rated. One might ask if design, install, commissioning and programming should all be apportioned too. I'd be curious how many installers bother.

You mean Loxone Tree cable? 5 core 1.5mm2 flex has all five cores the same diameter. So good for power delivery (or Dali lighting) Tree has 2 cores at 1.5mm2 and 4 skinny wires wrapped up as twisted pairs. So mix of power and data only wires.

Any correctly wired cat5+ cable will be as normal (non gigabit) ethernet only uses 2 pairs (4 wires unused) it's not uncommon to find patch cords etc that have faults with the unused cores, or simply (non compliantly) omitted them, and then PoE confusingly doesn't work....

No, their value is really not relevant, actually. I didn't ask "can I get away with it", which seems to be what you're answering. I asked which rule takes precedence and the answer would seem to be ceiling speakers are excluded regardless of their purpose or value. So whether it's a £1 or £10,000 speaker and even if it's only used for a doorbell or a nightclub grade party, they're all going to treated the same: full VAT. And that's a fine answer. I'm not trying to argue against it, just wanted confirmation of it which you already gave in your first response, and I thank you for that. (Elsewhere in notice 708 it gives clear examples that the cost of the item is irrelevant to whether it is considered "usually installed" or not, giving examples around fancy taps)

12 speakers at £90 each, but it's not really relevant to the OP as I wasn't asking for help with simple additive mathematics, I was asking for clarification if "exclusion" or "inclusion" examples take precedents when an item qualifies for both.

Most modern doorbells (Ring Nest etc) make a noise externally, but not internally to the building, so do need some sort of noise generation device. It could be shown at point of completion the speakers are ONLY used for alarm/bell sounder. Function is software defined, so what the occupiers chose to do with it the day after that is another matter.... The VAT on materials alone will be nearer £200 than a coupler of tenners, but agree it's not worth it for the financial gain. The motivation is more about simplifying administrative work: giving the option to put an entire smart controls contract on one VAT rate rather than having to itemize the design/supply/install/commissioning work by equipment/function.

Yes. These savings sessions really penalize anyone that does this by habit, which is counter productive. For example if I program my house to always automatically reduce energy use during 4pm-6pm, then my 6 week average will be naturally lower then and there's really no incentive for high effort low reward schemes like this, but I get no bonus for doing it 365 days a year. Really I think they need to encourage habitual or automated solutions as even for the highly motivated, saving the odd pound or 2 for a bulk of effort and potential family strife just isn't worth it.

Notice 708 section 13.9 specifically excludes ceiling speakers from 0% VAT on elidable new dwellings. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/buildings-and-construction-vat-notice-708#section13 However, burglar alarms, smoke detectors and (one assumes) doorbells are 0% VAT. If the ceiling speakers are used as the sounder for those items, would the inclusion criteria override the exclusion criteria? Interestingly wiring for the ceiling speakers is 0% VAT and one assumes a fire and accoustic hood for it also is (as that's no electrical equipment) so it's just the speaker itself (and installation of?) that's at question.

Turning stuff off is easy, I have a button in Loxone for price surges. Made no difference though as the battery still at 40% from good PV around midday so not importing anyway. Given the news I could have put the battery into export, if there was a financial incentive rather than penalty for doing so!

Exactly, this is the problem

The problem is that heating system design work appears to require trudging about in mud and rain on a building site. My architect, structural engineer, lighting designer and MVHR designer some how all sat in comfy warm offices and did a perfectly good job. But my ASHP heating engineer, despite having the exact schematic I wanted supplied to him by the manufacturer *and* by me in my tender pack, still turned up with a bag of different parts, spent a while trying to convince me the design in his head was better than what they tendered, struggled to even read a plumbing schematic, didn't have couplers for the parts being installed, installed some parts upside down and other things like pumps in completely the wrong place, installed a mid position valve rather than 2 zone valves, required 6 returns to site to debug it all into working, etc etc etc the list goes on. So for me the issue is not that the installer wasn't smart enough to do the design: I'd already paid the smart people to do the design. The issue is that the installer is attempting to be smarter than they really are by doing redesign work on the hoof rather than meticulously follow the design given to them. It's like a builder deciding to alter foundation depths and move some supporting beams or change insulation thickness on the fly. Bad practices that used to be the norm but are being slowly pushed out the industry. My hunch is the scalable central design will only be financially viable if coupled with a monitoring and maintenance contract, probably with capital outlay financing rolled in. It's not impossible, but will take some major players to make it happen. Octopus are closest now, but BG HomeCare + Hive surely has to be planning how to pivot into this

Nah, not really. It's an emotional starting point.We don't want to be off-grid, but we'd like to not need it. So with 22kW you might covering your average use in December, but there will guarantees still be days you need to import energy unless you put down 6 figures on battery storage (and even then, you might only achieve 99percentile cover). For the emotional goal, how about starting with covering your average usage across the year rather than the darkest month? A 10kWp system should generate 8MWh or more a year which would cover your annual demand. On 3ph you can install 12kWp without requesting DNO permission

To be fair I probably trust ChatGPTs sources more than a horoscope writer's, and people make pretty major decisions off that.

Yeah totally agree neutral switching feels weird. I considered this just for some of the equipment inside my control cabinet: for efficiency it's nice to power down the DMX dimmer modules when not in use. They have a combined L terminal to power the dimmer and passthru to the lights being dimmed, but the N terminal is only required to power the module's internal logic (the light fitting's N line returns straight back to the RCBO, not via the dimmer module). So for simplicity it felt nice to just switch the N line on the dimmer module to power it down, as this way the switched load is only about 2W per dimmer, not the sum of all light fittings. I didn't do this in the end, even though the switched N line is purely internal to the cabinet and not out to the fitting. (In fact ultimately I replaced the cheap AlieExpress dimmers with Whitewing ones with much lower standby current per channel, and so now I just leave them permanently powered) (Full disclaimer: I haven't really followed the rest of your recent posts - it all seems technically possible but adds so practical overhead for something hopefully never needed, it is very far from the philosophy I followed I don't have much to add.)

This is a fake dichotomy just like the Blake Lemoine sentient AI debacle. Even if an AI is 10x more intelligent and superior at solving a given problem than a human, that does not automatically impart human civil laws, rights and responsibilities onto it. An easy test is, if a super human intelligence alien landed in the UK, would they automatically be entitled to a driving licence? Sit university exams? Claim state benefits? Our laws of civilisation broadly exist to further the project of humanity, in a given country, on earth; we are not obliged to automatically give those rights to other species (super human aliens or robots) based purely on an excellent IQ test results. This is a ethical and legal debate just starting that continue long after we're all gone.

That seems crazy amount of cable to pull. In the before case I see 4x T&E per light fitting. That's on top of a data bus If you have smart switches (knx or Loxone tree). In my build we did one switch line T&E per light fitting, direct from the lighting cabinet to the light, plus the control bus linking up switches. I can still convert this to more or less conventional if ever needed by replacing the lighting cabinet with a bank of 24V to mains relays. Your other 3 T&E seem overkill

I have a couple of questions (I'm learning): Why 24VDC rather than 48VDC? Where do you get your bulbs? I have seen lots of 24VDC strips, but not bulbs Bulb fittings, I would like to use standard bayonet or threaded bulb fittings 1. LED strips only (?) come in 12V or 24V versions, with 24V the far superior. This is most of the low-voltage lighting, using constant-voltage dimmers. The other items are some accent / marker lights; these are constant current and only have about 3V forward voltage on the diodes so 24V vs 48V is moot (unless putting a LOT of them on one dimmer channel). 2. Yes. 24V CV LED strips, and various 300mA and similar constant current LEDs is small low-level wall marker lights and such like. 3. Good luck!

Fwiw I imagine a huge amount of the detail was lost in the newspaper editorial process. Our house went to The Times and the result that was published bore very little relationship to the facts I quoted to the reporter. For example: Me: annual heat energy demand has been reduced by 90% Press: household energy bill reduced by 90% Etc

Yes there will always be some amount of hysteresis. You can also set the target temp a bit lower to allow for this 🙂

Have you confirmed the controller is not setup to think there is one, ever since the factory reset last year? This was an issue on my install at one point.

@Fonyt do you have a buffer tank? It could be the controller is configured to expect one but there isn't one. So it keeps the pump running trying to get a non existent buffer up to setpoint+5° or something like that, that it will never achieve

It's fine that they're including IR panels in their experiments, but this stuck out: Two competing heating systems are being tested inside: an electric-based system utilising infrared panels, some of which are disguised as ceiling coving, as well as a water-based system that uses heated skirting boards combined with an air source heat pump. “As we put these really warm coats on to our homes, we don’t need as much energy to heat them,” says Novakovic. “So the big question we’re asking is, do we do it with heat pumps and hot water or with electricity?” Aside from the fact that both ASHP and IR panels are "doing it with electricity", it seems ridiculous to bill this as the big question that justifies the £16M project... Once again the main story about fabric first build quality has been lost in the debate around which bit of fancy tech we can add on top to heat an already low enery demand building.

Plug it into a trailing socket lead? Edit: sometimes the US or EU version of the transformer is much slimmer profile, so hooking one of those into a trailing socket has been a trick I used on occasion

Fairly common to pay something to the supplier as well as the DNO, nominally for early termination of a fixed term contract, or a fee for them to retrieve their meter. I.e. made up costs, just because they can.