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billt

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Everything posted by billt

  1. billt
    I've just made one of these. You need pi-zero £4.65 from pi-hut https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-store/products/raspberry-pi-zero a microSD card, I bought an 8GB one from pi-hut because it was convenient - 4GB would be more than enough. a network adapter, I bought a micro usb to RJ45 adapter from ebay for £4. You will also need a micro USB power supply of some sort and a means of attaching the microSD card to a computer for writing the OS to it.
  2. billt
    Presumably that's meant to be a joke, but it looks suspiciously as though you are being gratuitously offensive.
  3. billt
    The general rule is that estate agents include attached conservatories and other non-living space, such as garages, in their highly optimistic internal area calculations. The better ones will itemise the areas separately. Their justification is that attached garages have the potential to be converted into living accommodation. It's sometimes worth looking at the EPC for floor area as it is sometimes more realistic than the estate agents version.
  4. billt
    It needs to be about 4 times the area to harvest similar amounts of power. If you want to use the electricity as well as heat water it needs to be bigger than that, so enormous is a reasonable comment. Of course neither of them produce much heat energy when you really need it, in the winter! No, I wouldn't install solar thermal now either.
  5. billt
    The ascendancy of PV over solar thermal is a very recent phenomenon. Before about 2014 the idea of using PV to heat water was economic nonsense; the FIT subsidies distorted the solar thermal market. There is still a case to be made for solar thermal if you have a small area available for collectors and your priority is heating water. If you have an enormous PV array, of course there is no case for solar thermal.
  6. billt
    We've just had a first viewing arranged before the photographs have been taken and the EPC done! I suspect that ours will take a while to sell as it's fairly pricey for the area, somewhat unusual and isn't in a property hotspot. We're using a local estate agent who's charging 0.75% (+ VAT) with no additions apart from the EPC. Did consider PurpleBricks; apart from the horrible name and the horrible design of the signs I wasn't convinced that it would be suitable for our house. There are quite a few properties round here that are on with Purplebricks and haven't sold for months - probably due to the fact that the asking prices are somewhat optimistic. This agent seems to be pretty effective, on the ball and didn't overvalue the house. Hopefully they'll do the donkey work of filtering out unsuitable buyers.
  7. billt
    That's an interesting chicken and egg situation. We are going to move; maintaining our house and land is going to get too much in the not too distant future, but it's an idyllic location and we aren't going to move to any old rubbish house (95% of those on the market fit that description!) So we wanted to find a suitable house to buy before we put ours on the market and have run into this issue, estate agents are unwilling to accept an offer until you've sold your house. So now we are putting our house on the market. Of course, if we get a buyer but can't find a suitable house there will be one very annoyed buyer when we don't sell it to him. No, we aren't going to self build - no suitable plots available at a reasonable price, don't fancy all the bureaucratic aggro and it seems to be cheaper to buy a second hand house than build one (round here anyway).
  8. billt
    On the basis that very few people have a clue, or interest, in how things work and how they are made, I have considerable difficulty with that statement. They also, by and large, have a very limited choice of houses, which makes selecting a well built house even more of a challenge. Of course, all the developers will crow about how Eco-friendly and low energy their houses are so, even if house purchaser have an interest in the subject, they will be misled by the promotional material. Simply not reasonable to blame the house buying public
  9. billt
    I'm surprised that you're surprised! Are you sure that they use the same software? I had an EPC done a few years ago (though not lodged) and the results were somewhat worse than the full Stroma software calculated. The assessor (who seemed competent to me) said that the rd(reduced data)SAP restricted their inputs. In my case, as we have a log boiler the rdSAP only allows for a fixed 55% efficient boiler where the reality is over 80% and the full software lets you use declared efficiencies. Of course GIGO applies.
  10. billt
    And the property is NOT in a special area, e.g. conservation area, AONB, National Park etc.
  11. billt
    I too like Multi-Panel, mainly because the large, smooth , unbroken surface is easy to clean and dry - no grout to grow black mould. However, what is the point of using a panel that looks like tile? You get the worst of both worlds. Ours is a sort of glitter effect, doesn't pretend to be anything other than a decorative panel. I don't think it looks anything like a park home - it's about 4 times the size apart from anything else, but opinions differ.
  12. billt
    Well, it certainly isn't that, so I guessed that you didn't understand it.
  13. billt
    Ikea appliances are made by Whirlpool who don't have the best reputation for quality. We have 2 Bejublad ovens, a Bejublad microwave and a Bejublad hob (we wanted white appliances). The main element in one of the ovens failed within about 18 months - not a complete disaster because you could use the other elements. The guarantee worked, apart from the difficulty of actually finding the right person to speak to! The hob's brilliant - powerful and controllable with understandable controls. The ovens are OK, but the controls are not very comprehensible; poor ideograms and a bad instruction book. The microwave is a textbook case in how to design a virtually unusable interface.
  14. billt
    Do you know what the scientific method is?
  15. billt
    That's man made global warming out then!
  16. billt
    The Greeks knew that the world was a sphere well before anyone sailed round it. Whilst truth is always liable to modification, it's not a democratic function.
  17. billt
    Well he's 100%, unequivocally right on the second phrase - presumably you missed something off the first bit!
  18. billt
    I do it because I can and I find it interesting. It's a very expensive hobby!
  19. billt
    Spoken with the advantage of 20:20 hindsight. There was no sign of even a small reduction in prices when the FIT scheme was introduced; if there had been I wouldn't have spent an eye-watering amount of money on a system which was wholly unaffordable without the FIT. 3 years later prices plummeted in an unforeseeable way. Can't say I'm a fan of subsidies either; all the green subsidies have been ill-conceived and most subsidies benefit the relatively well off.
  20. billt
    The "government" isn't paying you anything. The subsidy comes from other electricity consumers via the electricity companies.
  21. billt
    Tracking systems have the panels fitted to a moveable mount so that the panels are always perpendicular to th esun; they follow the sun through the course of the day. A tracker system will give about 30% more output for a given array than a fixed system. Against that you need an extremely robust tracking mechanism which is going to be expensive. If you have the room it's generally cheaper to have a bigger array than a tracking system. Placement just means that you put your panels in a place that has the most clear view of the sun with no shadows from trees or buildings. Shading reduces PV output enormously.
  22. billt
    Maybe I wouldn't do it like that today, but maybe I would. This was installed the best part of 30 years ago and was an update to a much older system; a pressurised system was a remote possibility, but they were very rare in domestic circumstances, very expensive, potentially unreliable and very difficult to research. Also, mains power was much more unreliable then and could go off for a day or more (it still does very occasionally) - we don't want to be without water for several days thank you. But my point was simply that not all mains pressure systems are good and that not all gravity systems are bad; either can be done badly. .
  23. billt
    Not entirely. As well as the pipe run delay you have the delay of the boiler getting to temperature. (Yes, I know you can get combis with an internal store, but that is getting over complicated for me. The supply is gravity fed from a spring into a 1000l tank in the garage; that is my "accumulator". Flow into the garage tank is both low pressure and low volume. The loft tank is intermittently filled from the garage tank by a pump operated by float switches. It runs every 2-3 days. I suppose that depends on what you want in terms of pressure; the flow at all outlets is entirely adequate. We don't want 10 bar pressure at our taps; the 1 bar in the kitchen is more than ample, and the .3 bar in the bathroom is enough to fill a bath quite fast enough. Obviously if you're into gigantic baths and high pressure - blast you from all angles - showers it wouldn't be adequate but if that was the case you would use a different solution.
  24. billt
    We've just been staying in a relatives house with a modern water supply system (no storage tank) and marveled at just how absolutely awful it is! Turn on a second tap and the flow in the first reduces, turn on a cold tap and the flow from the hot reduces. Takes ages for the hot water to flow (combi boiler), then, if someone turns on a cold tap the water gets hotter. Every house I've been in with a combi boiler has had similar issues. When I redid our system (with 400l storage in the loft) I made sure that there was no interaction between the taps and the hot water doesn't change temperature when another tap is turned on. And the flow rate and pressure at each tap is adequate and equal for both hot and cold. Our water supply is private, the mains electricity is not completely reliable, so it was eminently sensible to have loft storage which holds enough for at least 2 days and doesn't need power to pressurise the system. These days, if there was a decent mains water supply I would probably do it differently, but bad performance isn't a reason to condemn gravity stored systems.
  25. billt
    But you still need the nuclear power stations to cope with the 50% of the time when PV isn't generating anything. I'll believe the practicality of other storage systems when there's 10GWhr in reliable operation; I won't hold my breath. Of course, the costs and time scales are completely distorted by the totally irrational attitude to nuclear power.
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