Carrerahill

Almost certain this was me.

Also, do not confuse generation capacity with network capacity.

What is this based on? What data? The longer term takes decades and £££ of investment.

Firing up and doing what? Heating a cylinder or radiators, both? Some boilers do exercises, some have a frost stat to protect from freezing, if this fails they can think it is colder than it is etc.

I agree with you 100% - I have alluded to this issue before only for people to try and shoot me down with random figures and stats plucked from random sources. People don't allow for the big picture. This week I put in an application to a DNO for a 100 bed carehome, fully electric: heating, laundy and kitchen - had to put in for a HV point of connection and a 500kVA supply. For what it is, that is ridiculous, the last gas home we did was on a 250kVA supply but we put in a 80kVA CHP so the load would probably never reach that - so as everything else goes electric and it will get worse as of next year, EV's are going to be much lower on the pecking order, which is also why they brought out the charge control times mandate! Too much electricity too soon. In the meantime we abandon reasonable energy sources like gas. The time will come, but it is not now. 30 years of infrastructure upgrades and we will be ready, but be prepared to pay even more for electricity. Also, the energy prices being so high, believe what you want, but its to curb use. DNO's are now reporting that their HV networks are stretched, that was only ever heard of in parts of London previously.

It's an odd one, I believe a common clay brick has a fire rating of about 4 hours, however, the FP sheeting may be for fire sealing (fire and smoke transfer) as much as anything else as the mortar might not be perfect. This looks like a can of worms question. First, why are the walls being considered as part of the warrant, had you left them alone would you have been allowed to leave them as is with hard plastered on top? You are going to need to re-plaster anyway, how were you going to do that, PB then skim? Build doesn't look too big, so do you just buy the FP board, get it skimmed and be done with it, nice smooth walls. Plastering hard onto brick will take more skilled labour to do from base coat then top, by the time you factor in material cost and reduced labour to throw up board, you will probably come out even. You can always ask your BCO, they don't bite.

I wouldn't count on that. BCO turned up at the end of my builds, have not shown up yet for my parents build (its just internal fit out to do now) and they are really only looking at a finished stages, there is plenty room for stuff to get fudged and the BCO would never know. I recently went to do the electrical snagging visit of a commercial building I did the design for, my colleague doing the mechanical where he found issues, this building had been signed off by a major cities BC department, things I pulled the contractor up on were, no interface units on door access control units with the fire alarm, so on alarm none of the doors automatically released, emergency lighting not working, it was even flashing the charge indicator red, missing covers on panel boards and DB's, no labelling and in some instances the ON-OFF stickers were reversed so it looked like things were in the off position when in fact they were on, fire exit signs missing or installed incorrectly, inadequate cable support or saddles on conduit - I will not list them all, however, my point is, you cannot count on BCO to check and snag your build.

If you do not have a good to excellent understanding of the building process and the industry - yes you are mad. BCO is not there to check your build goes to plan, they may not even show up till the end. They just look at compliance and will not really do what I think you think they may be doing. They might just see a concrete found and go, yup that looks fine (like a recent build of mine) but no check or rebar, depth, didn't even ask for a concrete delivery note to prove mix and volume. It could have been 50mm deep! Speaking to a consultant engineer(s) is a good idea, structural to start then M&E - agree X no. of 1/2 day visits and reports and I think you will be sorted.

Just what the board came with, its just the isolator rating, not an issue. Usually they are 80A and 63A or a combination of such, there is usually a bigger one for heavier loads. The issue you will also have is cascading, which RCD trips first?!? When the RCD goes, is it only ever the one at the supply and not the CU? This is why my garage is on a 50A SWA submain fed from an MCB in the house CU. So when I drop my extension cable in a bucket of water only the RCBO for that circuit in the garage goes and because I used RCBO's for each circuit, I still have lighting on in the garage to go reset the small power RBCO!

I think I would be looking at doing some upgrades and changes to this setup. That RCD's is protecting as entire, pretty bad way of doing it as you are finding. I cannot see from this image but the tails feed the little CU - then that must feed a cable which feeds the distant consumer unit, I can only assume that it's like this to protect a submain that needed protection under BS7671 but its a poor poor way of doing it. I would be getting rid of that RCD, running an armoured sub-main to the distant consumer unit, then think about having it rewired with a RCBO board ideally or split board if, and I will make the assumption, it doesn't have any RCD protection. Are the freezers in a garage? I would also be looking at getting those tails and things upgraded. Not sure what the "local circuits" are on the small lower CU but I am sure with a bit of thought this could all be revised and made quite a bit better. The BS88 fuse appears to be a 60 - I would be tempted to get rid of the Henley blocks and mess of old tails, run two new tails into a new 4-6 way CU - feed the local circuits from a RCBO, and feed the distant CU with an MCB - probably a 63A or 80A unit - single pole MCB's of that rating are not too easy to find but do exist. Run that out on SWA to the house distant house consumer unit. That then takes care of your submains and you can worry about the main house consumer unit at a later date. I can think of 2-3 other ways of doing this, but that is an option.

Plywood, cut in perfectly and neatly and paint. Centre line will not offend if done right. Or learn to skim or even tape and fill.

I do, I bang on about this one all the time and often tell the virtue signallers how they can help the world.

This is ridiculous - was this lifted from a primary school Eco project? There are some very arbitrary facts and figures being thrown about these days and a lot of them don't drill down deep enough to consider all the data. What we must understand, is where the energy comes from to run an ASHP or electric car. We cannot just randomly make statements about emissions if the power you actually use is from a coal fired plant, or a plant burning biomass from the pacific coast of Canada that was felled for no other reason to be burnt 4500miles away...

Generally I would say avoid it, however, if you need to, put in a services channel with a lip formed that you can then put a ply cover on. Alternatively, lay ducts with popups through the slab on big radiused bends.

He is brilliant, recently saw a video where he took a house on twin 30kW boilers down to a single and reconfigured the system, which now comfortably runs on 1 and the second is for backup or DHW only or something. I would be raging if I put in a twin system only to have someone come along and make it work on a single unit! Smart guy - should ditch the tools and become a consultant engineer!

30kW! What is the heat-loss of the area? What is the insulation level like? I helped with a garage conversion for a friend last year and their intention was to have 6kW of electric interior space heating, I did a fag packet calc based on 75W per m³ (rough heating requirement based on a medium insulation level) of area and it came in at about 2.9kW - I talked them into a single 3kW panel with provision for a second and promised them they would never need it. So unless your planning on throwing heat into a totally uninsulated, draughty building, or its a massive garage, I cannot see the heating requirements being anything like even 8kW let along 24 or 30! This is the issue a lot of gas fitters, they just think bigger is better and end up with boilers that modulate to lower output all the time, or in days gone by constant short-cycling. Try a 3kW Willis heater and a pump!

I am sort of doing a similar project, I am taking loads off-grid. When I wired the house I split things up a lot more than normal, so for example, my comm's cupboard is on one radial, other rooms are on radials, fridge is on an essential supply etc. the idea being I can start pulling certain loads or areas off grid by connecting them up via battery/PV inveters. By next summer I hope to be running all the background loads totally off-grid (with grid backup link) and my external and internal lgt. circuits off-grid too. The house will still have its grid tied PV system, which will help whittle down the grid demand, but it will really only then be running variable loads during the day and we will import the remainder. By 2025 I hope to be off-grid albeit with grid backup via the inverters, with a plan to have the electricity disconnected by 2026. I am going 24V system for the small inverters, I will go 48V when I start going to the bigger inverters. I am using Victron Smartsolar chargers and not made a call on the inverters yet.

When it goes down, what can you not do? I am going to assume monitoring and reporting. I assume the unit will do its primary job autonomously?

Is the Luxpower a hybrid islanding inverter? If you set your inverter to some sort of "backup" mode (which I would be interested to know just exactly what it does in this mode) then with the power out, your inverter would be back feeding your house and the rest of the local grid, so it would need to sit between the grid and the house to work. If not, then It would fall flat because your inverter would also be trying to pickup the load of anyone else connected to the same, isolated due to power cut, grid infrastructure as you. That could be a whole village or street in a city. If your inverter just connects to your consumer unit via one of the outgoing MCB's then it cannot work as a hybrid, well at least not safely. How inverters that can allow this off grid operation work is that they have an AC output, and an AC input, on failure of the AC input it still allows the output to work via solar and usually stored power in batteries. But this is designed so that none of the locally generated power can be sent out onto the grid and zap a linesman. All grid-tied inverters sold in the UK must shutdown immediately after they lose grid connection - within about 0.02s which is 1 cycle enough for it to monitor the dropout in one cycle of the AC. It is possible to create a reference voltage within your house when isolated from the grid, to get the inverter to work, I know someone who does this with a generator. He kills the main isolator into his house, fires up a diesel generator which runs his essentials, but it also allows his inverter to restart and the PV and generator will run the house.

Those three appliances certainly get hot, however, not as hot as an oven which we regularly jam into a kitchen cabinet, yes they have over top cooling fans to keep them cooled but they still get pretty hot. If you opened a cupboard and made toast, being such a short period of time involved I would imagine you would make the toast with the door open, I cannot see it being shut when in use. Once made, shut the door on it. I just do not see a significant heat build up or particular risk from any of these as long as sufficient room is left around them all. I would cut about 80% of the top panel out and replace with a 500 x 500mm metal grille or louvre type affair if I was getting heat issues.

Fire sealing around cables is very common, there are different versions but the most common, is fire rated expanding foam. Yes, it will de-rate the cable locally and yes, it could cause problems, however, the chances are, that realistically it wont. Having recently bought some standard expanding foam, I can also state, that according to the can, it can be used on PVC cables. The old plasticiser leaching issues is pretty much a thing of the past unless working with old materials. Give me an example of a couple of the cables you are talking about and I will let you know. Cable type, cross section, MCB/RCBO rating and connected load or typical loads. If it was me, I would put in pieces of 25mm uPVC conduit, foam that in, then run cable(s) though the conduit(s) - you can then use a cable sealing silicone at each end, that means it is also easier to change things around in the future without digging through the foam.

Grade F7-F9 filters. We commonly specify filter packs capable of removing down to PM1.0 (arrestance is not as high as for larger particulate but it works).

An air handling unit of some sort, with relevant filters on the intake. Common on new flatted developments, student accommodation, hotels, etc. etc. particularly in London. You don't need to buy a "system" you could buy a filter chamber on say 125mm duct inlet/outlets. Then couple with an inline fan and duct it out to the rooms, this would, at the most simple level bring in filtered air. The issue here would be that you would pressurise the space and drive out warm air, so you probably want to incorporate heat recovery on an extract system. If the WB smoke is heavy I would be asking why and looking to see if this could be addressed too - properly seasoned wood and properly run WB's should not emit heavy smoke - are you rural?

The thing is, you should not be drinking tank water anyway, your kitchen tap, at least, should be on the rising main, i.e. fresh mains water.

You could do this with a steel support structure(s) that takes the loads the stack currently takes. That in itself will need supported but will let you proceed without taking your house apart. Looking at the joists on the left hand side, I would imagine they could be caught with a steel running approximately where the stack sits, and if suitable, sit on the walls of the room that the stack is on - left hand side. Another steel or part of the same system will then need to pickup that bearer that keys into the stack on the right hand side. Go and find a friendly local structural engineer and set him to work.