dnb

I used to like long camping holidays when I was young but the boss doesn't go for it for some reason... The Austerity mess on a Type 45 destroyer is as rough as it gets for me these days. Maybe... it is the sort of thing I describe as "character building" to my daughter. Now I am getting older I find I have sufficient character for the moment.

Thankfully not. We would have killed each other by now! I am hoping that the SIPS guys are happy with it. The 3mm is their requirement. It's an S1. I want it back on the road so it can be my daily driver for the remainder of the summer. Then I have to give it back to the boss because it is hers really.

It's been a while since anyone was on site but family. We've done a few jobs in the last couple of months but obviously made nothing like the progress we originally planned. (Management speak would be "rebaselining the programme"!) All the beam and block is installed and grouted. All the plinth blocks are installed and pointed, placed to an accuracy of 3mm in height and 5mm in the other directions. Hopefully... Waiting now for the SIPS people to mark my homework! All the building control paperwork for the foundation stage is completed We've finally settled on a landscaping plan for the site and implemented a little of it, mainly to get rid of a few tonnes of spare soil Then we spent a few hours tidying up the site. I estimate we've got 1/10th of the woodland "tamed". The tidy site awaiting scaffolding next week. The front of the house, looking at the louge. We weren't sure about landscaping levels until quite recently, so elected not to do too much with the exterior bricks and blocks until that question was answered. It makes the telescope vents more difficult but in theory it should be the lesser of the problems. Also note the mistake - some slips got missed in the section under the front door (and at the back too). Oh well, I suppose that's what you get when you foolishly try to race a global pandemic. At least it's not a difficult fix. Finally, I found a bit of spare time to put a new engine in the wife's Lotus. The old one (with 130k miles) became significantly past its best last year when it lost oil pressure with the inevitable result. Here's the remains of the old one. Pictures of the finished Lotus when it's been washed - sitting in the corner of a building site for ages has done it no good at all. With any luck, the scaffolding will be up by the end of the month and we will have a SIPS kit on site.

Probably not the toner cartridge. I suspect either the waste toner bottle is full or the black imager is leaking. The cyan imager in my Lexmark is doing this at the moment. Be careful taking the printer apart - toner isn't nice stuff to inhale and it likes to get everywhere.

You dream of being caught? Or just being in prison?

If only... I keep getting cross with the IET professional registration people over this very issue.

Nice job there. I was going with a home made hot wire cutter for mine when (if!) the time arrives for doing mine. So, own up, who here isn't an engineer??

Thanks. I used to this sort of thing to pay the bills so I hope I am not too rusty... That one is single phase. It just has 3 current transformers for monitoring the loads. All a bit unnecessary for the case where everything works but it is useful for fault indication and various monitoring schemes I am planning. The main current clamp is off board.

Hopefully got my concerns resolved... Yes, resolution down to 100mA is useful, so it is included, and yes, accurate frequency measurement is needed. So, can anyone tell me what this is going to be? Board dimensions are 80mm x 95mm. I think it packaged up nicely. Next steps are to double check the netlist and make sure the ground plane doesn't have too many holes poked in it. Then I can think about getting a prototype made assuming I can remember how to hand solder 0.8mm pitch TQFPs! Typically for an engineer, spec creep happened. So in addition to the usual energy metering it has: Current monitoring for all loads for the purposes of monitoring use and fault detection RS485 interface for control and reporting 20x4 LCD character display Lots of filtering and EMI suppression - sometimes I think half the components on a board don't do anything when all is working right... Capacity for 5 control switches (may not need to use all of them in the code)

This looks a fantastic project. I look forward to seeing it progress and would like to wish you the best of luck.

As ProDave says, a thermal store doesn't go all that well with an ASHP. On the DHW side you pull energy out of the thermal store by passing cold water through some kind of heat exchanger in it. A very crude 1st order approximation here: All the hot water you want in the house is probably 40deg C or hotter, so the minimum temperature your thermal store ends up at is around 35 to 40 degrees C on a daily basis in summer. So the ASHP can only take this up by 15 degrees or so to 55 deg C - it's a small percentage (approx 33%) of the total useful capacity of the store, so may not be worth the effort if it needs to be made up with yet another energy source if the stove is not running to avoid a dribbly tepid shower. Of course, it's a bit different in winter when you want heating - the store can be drawn to a lower temperature to provide useful heat output for the UFH. But at this point, the COP of the ASHP is reduced. I think the design is a good start, but depending on your requirements it could be refined - how do you want it to work seasonally? Perhaps some PV would prove more efficient overall in summer than the ASHP?

The subject of solar diverter design has come up a few times on here. I know I could buy one, but the ones that work properly cost rather too much for what they are, and the cheap ones don't do what I need... So I am making my own - it's a fun job that keeps my hand in with PCB design, layout, coding etc now that I don't get to do this any more at work. I have a design based on this one but with a "few" changes to add robustness, simplicity and a better display. I have a few considerations to review, and this site is pretty good for finding these things out. What do we think is the smallest input current we need to differentiate from zero? Is it smaller than 50mA, or is this sufficent resolution? How accurate does the microcontroller clock need to be? At 1% it gives a 0.5Hz accuracy for mains frequency measurement, and I think this needs to be better - 50ppm seems more reasonable - this gets to near to a perfect mains frequency measurement. Are 3 high current switched outputs enough? It's fine for my house plans now, but what else might I need?

That's some good ivy there! From my limited working at heights training from work, it seems the best way of doing it is to find a way to not have to work at a height. I like scottishjohn's approach of removing the ivy roots and stems. It works for me. But it doesn't deal with dead wood in the trees. This does involve heights, and I wouldn't like to do it from a ladder because trees move a lot when their centre of gravity changes as branches are removed. I don't like working at heights at the best of times, so I tend to be very cautious with it, unlike some of my friends at work who are quite happy to be atop a 30m Bronto in free space. The last dead wood and tree removal I did involved a cherry picker on my driveway. It was easier to do this than rope and climb 8 trees in a day.

Price is really important to me. Anything built in to the house generally has to be cost effective since I'm a badly paid engineer. Unless one of the following applies: The job is a fun one. I want to learn about the technology or thing in question Someone has told me that I can't do it.

And when batteries are priced sensibly with a decent lifetime, I will implement it that way. Right now, this will cost more than just using grid electricity... Hence the need for an "interim" solution of using local excess energy on demand. If it were implemented in a mass produced product it would cost pence. Way cheaper than batteries all ways up, but it does require a standard interface for doing it - and this is where the sticking point is... (And it will be more efficient than battery charging)

All true from what I've seen too. I have been looking at home automation things too, and there is nothing on the market that I think I want. (BTW my degree is in electrical and electronics too, but I've mostly worked as a radar systems engineer). Vendor support and obsolescence are big worries for me given standard interfaces haven't been widely adopted yet, and the available products seem very biased towards selling things and collecting data. They actually do very little for my own requirements. I don't need an internet enabled kettle. I don't need an internet enabled fridge that tries to order milk from Tesco direct when it thinks I've run out. What I do need is say a dish washer that can be told to run a programme when there's an excess of power from the solar panels, and if there isn't then make sure it is done by 5pm... Joth's reply overtook mine... I too looked at Loxone, but I can't see their DIY support improving so they've ruled themselves out of the running for me. I was thinking a Loxone DMX interface for dimming lights, but now I think I will need to look at other things to control it. At least it's a known standard. I agree that there is little point in automated socket switching. It's the devices that are plugged in that I want to tell to do things.

Thanks. Will do!

I've nothing to add about wall boards, but I will be following the results with interest. @Robert Clark are you throwing the old shower mixer and head etc away? It looks very much like the one in my old house that needs some attention. There might be some salvagable parts so I can put off a bathroom job I don't have time or desire to do right now.

Spot on. No expert on this either, but it's what my SIPS people have told me to do.

Make the perimiter foam taller, on the assumption there's a (battened) service void on the inside of the SIPS. This will minimise the cold bridge at the sole plate. You could of course opt to use something other than dense concrete, but then you need to be careful on anchor bolt selections.

They had away with a lot of my PD rights too. I had to do a load of bat boxes too - I enjoyed making those and I like seeing the bats flying at dusk.

Good luck with the next stages. Hope you didn't get hit with too many conditions.

They've indicated that there's quite a lot of PV already on "my" bit of wire, so I might not get the full 16A worth. (I won't know until I get the results of my application). They only seemed concerned with the export, not the total size. In reality, they aren't going to ever see any of it in the first place - it will be directed to local use of some kind for all but the most extreme circumstances. I too might be in this position. The house is specified to have full A/C - it's always good for soaking up a bit of spare power. Can always open a window to make it work harder...

Exactly this. But they seem to be getting more common these days according to this: Single phase inverter, apparently with G100 export limit I applied for an "in principle" grid connection with SSEN recently using one of the above as my export limit, and they seemed happy. We'll see if that is still the case now the real application is ticking through the system. Admittedly I am only looking at 6kW or so of panel, but my export limit is likely to be in the region of 3kW.

In the middle of a build now. It's been pretty horrible really, but not all of it is covid 19 related. You might have a bit more luck than me. PP - no idea since mine was all done beforehand, however building control are snowed under looking at photographs and currently won't attend site in enclosed spaces unless it's a final inspection. This will depend largely on your local authority. No idea on mortgages since C19 either. Some materials are nearly impossible to get. This is regional as far as I can tell, but could well be coloured by being on an island. Other things are easy. Trades do seem to be working fairly normally where materials are available for them. For instance, plaster is impossible here unless you're willing to pay 5x over the odds. Kitchen worktops are in short supply too, so I'm told. I was fairly fortunate here in that I had bought most of the materials I needed to get to sole plate level a couple of days before lockdown. The worst one for me is that my SIPS panel contractors can't be accomodated locally, can't easily subsist and can't commute. So the house can't meaningfully progress upwards until the B&B world opens up a bit more.