Carrerahill

You don't read things properly, you make assumptions, you don't discuss, it is not really worth my effort replying. At present I have a fully standard grid-tie solar install. So apples for apples if you want to put it that way, you cannot play that card and try to walk away from this discussion. Equipment cost only, I haven't help pay for someone's MCS subscription or a sign written van or a jumped up salesman. If you cared to read my post properly, you would note I am "planning" on doing the off-grid element as an isolated project and at extra cost and alluded to the ROI etc. separately on that item. Several other forum members are now saying they have done as I have, so I am not alone doing something unfathomable, perhaps you need to step back from your position and see it from the point of view of someone who just wants a solar solution on the roof at the price it is worth and also enjoys doing this sort of thing, its a hobby of sorts.

No I wasn't a member but I did follow posts - good forum. You an ex/present Bio man?

https://www.bes.co.uk/25-mm-x-15-mm-22-mm-straight-universal-transition-fittings-polyfast-13544/ Then from that into your new pipe (with insert each end) then your 25mm wall plate and 3/4 tap base into it or just use a 25mm inline and leave one end open. https://www.buildandplumb.co.uk/plumbing-heating-c36/plumbing-brassware-valves-c322/garden-hose-taps-fittings-c326/build-plumb-25mm-mdpe-outside-garden-tap-kit-25mm-wall-plate-elbow-25mm-liner-3-4-bib-tap-thread-tape-p13107/s35959?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=build-amp-plumb-25mm-mdpe-outside-garden-tap-kit-25mm-wall-plate-elb-982687&utm_campaign=product%2Blisting%2Bads&cid=GBP&glCurrency=GBP&glCountry=GB&gclid=CjwKCAjwk_WVBhBZEiwAUHQCmTsPYRNPreeOzOlA6IBb0NxmtQc9o-XrjQ-kKsrRtl7ySRhPo4phAxoC7O0QAvD_BwE

You can get a copper to MDPE - or a universal transition joint, that gets you onto MDPE - see if you can blag a few meters of 25mm or something and just get a 25mm bib tap. Remember inserts for the 25mm pipe. That is it really.

I am glad of your anecdotal evidence that backs my point. Well done - those figures are good and about what I am seeing. What drove you down this route? Just a preparedness to go it alone?

Father in law is a retired civil engineer, just started his own extension, I was doing the CAD work for him but he realised I was too busy and went to the art shop and got a set of pens and pencils and dusted off his drawing board. A total work of art, beautiful plans. Just another option! Downsides, all I can say is it depends on your knowledge and skills pertaining to designing a building. 8K seems very very steep for an 18m² extension though... what are you getting for that?

I disagree with you. I am acutely aware of the commercial PV industry, upon which, I formed my opinions. How can you make a statement such as "...nor is it factual"? I do not want SEG payments, and I know of plenty of others who are not interested in SEG payments, what for anyway, they are peanuts. I would strongly advise, any technically minded person who likes a bit of DIY and doesn't get their knickers in a knot over doing things the unorthodox way, first investigates the cost of an array, an inverter and some isolators and a roll of cable and MC4 connectors and if it looks right to them, they get on with it. A variation of that is they do that but get some trades in to do the install and they get on with it. Then if you get someone who wants to do it all pukka through the books and pay someone's subscription for MCS accreditation then fine do that. Then of course there are those who are not able to do these things and just need a price to get it done, this is however a self-build forum, things tend to be skewed towards the DIYer! Horses or courses, but it is not for you to say one way is "right" and one way is "wrong". At the end of the day, it boils down to electrical design and physics. I have PV, my house more or less runs for free during the day now, I am exporting a bit but I don't care, I'll be taking the lighting loads, to start with, onto an off-grid setup with grid changeover for consecutive grey days, I will be doing this within the next couple of months and charging batteries to minimise export. So far I have saved about £240 on electricity and I still have another 1.2kW string to go on the roof (which is why I want the off-grid battery aspect) - at this rate I will have paid for the current spend in about 3 years. My aim is off-grid electrically within 3 years, albeit with more investment but my standing charge saving would pay for that within about 2.5 years as an isolated project. Some people also like to go to the main dealer to get their cars repaired and serviced some use a local indy. Depends who you speak to, they will tell you you must go and they are the best and they do it properly. You will also find the cowboy garage too. But there is a middle ground. Decades ago our family used a Land Rover master mechanic who went out on his own because he was fed up of working at the "creche" as he put it, it was him to 10 apprentices or something like that - they were damaging customer cars daily and he had to get out. Someone told us our cars would be damaged and the garage would not be right and we were taking a gamble, while he took his Range Rover to the main dealer, oil sump plug fell off on the A9 going on his family holiday. Once I have figures from the inverter I will post some of my own figures but I don't need to prove anything to anyone because the only person who would lose from me talking nonsense would be me, and you have to believe if I can save a pound, I will save a pound. So much so I am thinking about getting the Bio Diesel processor out of retirement.

You don't buy it through the rip off installers or PV specialists. Solar is cheap. Rip off installers make it expensive and put huge mark-ups on the equipment. I bought my panels, inverters, mounting systems all from separate suppliers, I've installed some of them myself and the big Canadian Solar panels for the main roof I am getting a roofer to install the panels. Not a lot of money has been spent here. The PV market is one of these industries which is being built up as a big cash cow and myths are being spread around by those who it benefits to make people think it is all terribly complicated and very technical. The truth of it is that it is more or less plug and play and very DIY friendly, even if you need to get a friendly spark to do the final hook up. The cheapest non DIY install I know of was £1600 for 2kW, roofer put the panels up for £150 - electrician put in the electrical system for £300 and the rest was parts. That will pay for itself within 6 years and that time scale is reducing each time the energy costs go up, by the end of the year it could be 4 years! It was like the insulation firms, £10,000 to insulate your house, save £££ - but when you did the maths it would take 30 years to pay for itself. If however, you went out and bought rolls of insulation for £2 as it was at the time, things were much more sensible.

But that problem only impacted the motorist (and his Butler), EV's will impact everyone, driver or not, because of their demand on the electricity network. We have been sitting on the knife edge of being able to keep the lights on or not. The tipping point is here. This whole thing is driving me to an autonomous system using PV.

Alternative is to do as a neighbour of mine did, on my advice, he built an EV charger for about, £180 I think it was, including the charge cable & plug.

You can disable it. They just need to come, "out of the box" that they limit load at peak times. This is the beginning of the problems of the electric future rearing there ugly heads.

If a patio is built properly, with the ground prepped and then build up with compacted hardcore, and a sand/cement bedding, there should be no weeds getting through anywhere.

Odd one. In fairness there are people who you would not typically want to issue DWG's too. Your not high on the list of unfavourables! As a consultant engineer myself, I know what it is like to create drawings knowing that they might be poached but at the same time I would be kidding myself on if I really thought by withholding DWG files I was protected. On the whole we will provide DWG's unless we clearly know they will be used for nefarious purposes. Within this industry CAD drawings are just the norm, we use architects drawings every day and getting them is just automatic as soon as we start a project, be it a 3 room school extension or 13 storey office block, complete with elevations, sections, details, the works. You can import PDF drawings into CAD anyway and 99% of the time you can scale it correctly and then convert the PDF xref to DWG and bind and essentially end up with a CAD drawing which apart from the layers sometimes being a bit crazy, is as good as the original for most purposes. Interestingly architects should be the very DWG's that are released because they create the GA's from which everything else is usually drawn upon, just contact them and tell them you have an M&E engineer who is doing some designs and wants the GA's, elevations and sections as a CAD package. I would first look at what I signed up to, maybe they clearly state no DWG's, secondly I would speak to them and explain as a self builder you want them for your use, thirdly, if you need to use them for measuring, ask them for the CAD's or alternatively tell them to dimension their drawings better. To be honest, they sound a bit childish. What are you going to do, run off with some pretty standard details and your house drawings and sell them on eBay?

You will be glad to hear you are not unique. Basically all you need now are your insurances. PI and liability.

I had this issue too, the issue is it needs to be UV rated, most normal membranes are only good for 6-8 months sun exposure. I think I got this in the end: https://www.insulationsuperstore.co.uk/product/powerlon-uv-120-breathable-facade-membrane-15m-x-50m.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwzeqVBhAoEiwAOrEmzT_5sr9YFdkMhINvuCB9ID9Yc0ZX5fzyyREICT_M3SS4bJig4y1erBoCG64QAvD_BwE

Sort of but both further down away from the house, that little short link would be better a bit longer to keep fall/velocities etc. consistent.

I would expect them to be sort of M5/M6 machine screws or something. If it is just a modest oven it could also just be in with self-tappers into plastic or metal.

I'd move A down a bit, then put a new chamber into the clay near the house, I would then also catch the waste from the run from the door directly into this chamber so that A only collects waste from the 3 outlets shown top of your plan. Then run A over to the new chamber on a branch. Just lay it out well so that everything is always trying to flow away, try not to have things running across your site is never good.

Keep emailing his solicitor, it will cost him when they reply to you or possibly even read your correspondence, to make things worse, print and post it all. Then they have to scan it to send to your client or indeed copy it verbatim if they want to quote you, all costing money. Your neighbour might get fed up paying solicitors fees because until you do anything, there is little that will or can happen.

Up to 16A you only need to give them notification, it has become apparent that most solar installers have not being doing this properly and the DNO's reaction has been zero. The installer does the MCS cert, the utility company accepts that as part of the SEG application and that is the end of it. DNO never gets told. Over 16A you need approval to go over 16A and then the DNO really only wants to know so they ensure the upstream network can handle the export, which for now will not be an issue but if you had 20 houses on a tranny phase protected by say a 600A BS88 - then if each house generated & exported 7.2kW then that would arguably be sitting right on the LV network design capacity. If you want SEG then you need to go through the proper channels, if you just want some solar and plan to self-consume/store, maybe export a little bit, then I would just crack on and do it.

I am going to wire my inverter/charger into the grid via input terminals, so if there is no PV coming in and no battery capacity, it just draws on the grid and comes straight out the output side into my consumer unit. Technically it is "off-grid" but fully connected too, I can of course simply isolate this supply if I want to go truly off-gird. If I do my sums right and the sun works, I should never actually go over to grid.

Not true.

If no one can see them I wouldn't bother. I have put them on my garage and your meant to have PP for that but no one can really see my roof.

Yes you could have an off-grid portion and take for example all your lighting and other light loads off the main board and be semi-off-grid which is something I am looking at doing. I am going to start small by taking the garage and outside lighting off-grid, my plan is to install a 6 way consumer unit next to the main consumer unit and start moving circuits as and when capacity permits, I will always allow for another means of AC input (generator or grid) via the charger/inverter so on a grey winters week, I can still pull those circuits onto the grid. I also contemplated making my loft conversion an off-grid space. My plan long term is to come off grid 100% but I want to go through a period of discovery and learning first.

Is there no other way whatsoever of getting into your garden without going via his. When people try things like this with me, I do my best to find another way or to do something totally unorthodox just out of badness. Could you remove a wall or fence anywhere, even if it meant paying a neighbour and having the wall or fence reinstated. Airlift the materials in? Can you not come through your house? Crane the stuff in from the street... This would allow you to totally cease all communication with your neighbour and their solicitor and simply go and do your own thing which would be highly satisfying. Of course, if you can prove right of way over this bit of ground then that would be highly satisfying too.