joth

@pocster is yours a RK door too? Mind sharing U-value and aprx cost? It looks lovely

Yes, I have some experience of a very simliar plot to what you're proposing, and we're able to park our car in the parallel-to-house position entering forward, reversing to get back out. Our car is about as long a production car as you can generally get in the UK (4.9m) so about the upper limit of what you'd need to consider. I'm not sure we may have a tad more width to swing in than the 3688 you are proposing, but there's a prickly hedge blocking part of it so we generally try and leave a clear margin around. I wouldn't choose this layout, especially if I was say doing the school run everyday (on a peak-time busy road) but for the occasional weekend trip we do it's fine Yes. Unless you have all-wheel steering (like Mercades added to their Vito vans to allow them to be used as black cabs) then the swing arc is very different forward vs back. We first tried reversing into the afore mentions spot and it simply doesn't work because the trailing swing arc neeeds to go through the party boundary hedge. Given the lenght of car, I'm extremely grateful I paid for reversing camera to get back out in reverse though. As it's reversing over a pedestrian footway with regular buggies and kids on bikes etc up and down it, and entirely blinded by two hedges, getting out of their single-handedly without a reverse camera would be quite dangerous. The planners may or may not care about this, given your case is a demolition and rebuild and I believe the limitations on reverse-out must already exist on it? I have no idea if they can/would enforce higher bar on parking reqs for a rebuild vs what's already there.

Excuse the ignorant question, but is the driver built into the unit pictured or is it a separate? Afaict the tridonic LEDs take 220V in so not sure what sort of driver you'd add. (Dimmer aside)

I hear that Virgin may refuse to use cable that they have not provided themselves. Of course, you could have them install N set-top boxes in one room and then move them to your own locations after they've gone, but still. What I did was request installation (on a rolling contract) and then one week later tried to cancel. This results in a call from a customer service agent fully incentivised to help retention. ? I explained I needed to do a pre-wire, and they arranged for an engineer to come around with plenty of spare cable which the gave me to pull through the walls during first fix. See

The motor in the fan is an inductive load and liable to damage a dimmer that is only designed for resistive or LED loads. In more practical terms, matching dimmers and LEDs is enough of a pain without making life harder adding more variables to the mix.

Err, are you saying the extractor fan is controlled by a dimmer switch? That's not a good idea at all

Not sure how much this was said in jest, but just FWIW achieving a good level of airtightness requires much more effort than choosing a build method and the crossing of the fingers.

The other thing to bear in mind is if you built enough generation to cover all your needs, you'll regularly have far too much excess you can't do anything useful with. At which point you'd perhaps want to install the grid connection anyway for export...

UKPN refused to allow a new supply head to go internally when I was getting quotes. They moved our meter to the garage in the end, as it was relocating an existing supply it could remain indoors, but if we'd gone for a new 3ph supply they said they'd only allow that to be fitted externally. (Probably would have gone down the GRP kiosk route)

Still planning on going with the quote we had on the Moralt, but haven't actually ordered it yet.

Thanks for sharing it. Quick comment that you appear to be using kW and kWh interchangeably, which makes the data hard to follow. Also of interest would be knowing the CoP achieved on the sample days, and the floor area of the space heated and target temperature the thermostat set to, to get an idea of the parameters it's working within.

At a rough approximation, if the mains supply pre-PV istall regularly hovers around 250V, would this likely be a warning sign for the PV inverter regularly hitting 253V and having to cut out? I only started logging voltage in the house a week ago, but I've not seen it drop to 240V at all, and it's regularly hitting 250V The DNO have approved 8kW G99, but I'm wondering if they saw this area is regularly overvoltage so figure there's no need to reinforce as the inverter will be regularly cutting out anyway.... I guess real question is what happens outside of winter. I see there's a really annoying failure mode here that if the inverter does cut out, it will stop dead any export meaning any dynamic loads (immersion divert or car charing) would also then cut out, which would allow the observed voltage to rise further. Whereas ideally you want to tackle the overvoltage by adding additional loads to pull it down and hence allow the inverter to re-engage.

Remember the PV won't generate much during the winter so you mac heating load calcs won't be much use for guiding how much solar to install. Presumably you don't have 3 phase mains supply? That gives you the option ofup to 12kW before needing the G99 application. If you are single phase and do make the application, put the max amount you might want to install on it (so 8kW), they are may come back saying only 6kW export is allowed or something in which case I'd probably aim for that. (while you can have more with an export limiting inverter, they cost more and will be another point of contention to resolve in the G99 application) If they grant 8kW you can always decide to install less than that. Not to mention the VAT savings?

Try the SEG league table: https://www.solar-trade.org.uk/resource-centre/advice-tips-for-households/smart-export-guarantee/ The battery FAQ there is fairly comprehensive and says that while the SEG does not oblige suppliers to pay anything for non renewable energy sources, currently none are putting additional limits on if you have battery storage.

For £350 definitely keep it. You can always ask your supplier for a single phase meter even if the DNO has provided a 3phase cutout, so having 3 phase supply strictly increases your options and doesn't remove any.

Just an idle thought about this - I wonder if they require the solar to be an MCS installation? Or if they'd accept some evidence it meets the requirements of MCS I don't see it mentioned as a requirement on the website, only thing it says is you "have solar". And while MCS is a requirement for the smart export gaurantee, this isn't really that

Ultimately you can do whatever your building inspector will sign off... However we have already experienced they'll approve one thing on paper then change their mind after you've installed it, so better safe than sorry. Our plans put AVV in the loft and an external open vent from the drain routed from the end of the main drain, up the outside of the house to the eves next to a drain pipe. My own simplified interpretation is that the regs require all horizontal drains to have a free flow of air through them, but this doesn't necessarily have to be through a stack pipe used internally in the house (or otherwise).

Let me rephrase that for you: “a ring final (also widely but incorrectly called a ring main)”, though why we don't just call them “rings” or “ring circuits”, as we do with radials, escapes me; a house will likely only contain final circuits and maybe the odd sub-main. Right. I'd go as far as say they're universally called Ring Mains by Joe public, so I intentionally kept with that terminology as it what was used in the OP

One other thing to note that I don't see mentioned on the linked pages is you can't convert a ring main (also called a ring final) to radial simply by disconnecting the final connection back into the consumer unit. All cabling used throughout the circuit also needs increasing from 2.5 to 4mm2 https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/electrics-cabling-circuits-and-switches/ (unless the circuit breaker is down rated to 24A) It's the cost savings of using smaller cable that is the reason for popularity of the ring main.

So the personal allowance hasn't really changed in 30 years, correcting for inflation: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

Yeah if you're using solid core runs, the patch panel is the place to convert to stranded cables. Ideally the solid cores then will never have to be touched or moved again and can last decades. Analogous to why in a lighting circuit you have a ceiling rose rather than drop T&E to the pendant, say

Registered office - Symbio Energy Ltd, 103 Mansion House, BRE - Building Research Establishment, Bucknalls Lane, Watford, WD25 9XX So.... it's a spin off of the BRE, an old government department. You can't sign up with them if you have a smart meter, or want export payments. But their mission is dedicated to green energy. It's a funny old world.

Interesting question there is, imagining you were both on a metered plan, who's subscription would get billed for this data usage? You'd have thought it would be your own (as that's what your modem is logging in as) but somehow I doubt it's that simple either. (knowing how legacy billing systems were historically built around fixed line unbundling, not IETF derived protocols)

If you think that's bad, you should see our bill. Apparently we use 3000kWh or £500, per day. The wonders of having a "smart" meter replaced:

Small update: Last night I managed to retrofit an ESP-01 into a ZyAura ZGm053U sensor, and that's been running overnight. The initial numbers show it is pleasingly close to the MH-Z19B, which is good as if they were wildly out I'd really be needing to buy that third CO2 meter from @Jeremy Harris to cast the deciding vote between them! I t definitely helps that after a week (and 2 calibration cycles) the MH-Z19 has settled down to far more convincing readings. Not just in terms of zero offset, but the max readings are generally half what they were (1000-1500 overnight, rather than 3000+) Interestingly it does confirm what I already know - that it's actually the Temperature reading that's much further out of whack with the MH-Z19 -- consistently over-reading by 5°C. (The MH-Z19 is only reporting to 0 decimal places anyway, so not a very useful or pleasing graph at the best of times) (aside: at 6.30am I got up and rode the stationary trainer bike in the room next door -- you can actually make out a dip and then peak of CO2 from that excursion on both sensors.) The hack to get an ESP-01 into the ZyAura is a work of art in its own right; I'll post a photo and details when I've tidied it up a bit. Also, I'm finding ESPHome a continuing delight to tinker with like this.