Carrerahill

Ask for a price from some IDNO's as well. Not sure about domestic like this but we get prices from Energetics etc - often cheaper. That is commercial, including residential development certainly but not domestic like your application would be - you can also do the dig on your land yourself to save some £££'s - maybe even lay the cable too. It varies from operator to operator. Basically they don't want your generated electricity, it is a pest for them - shocking, pardon the pun, actually because they will be forced in the not too distant future to make it easier for microgeneration connectivitly. I would like to ditch grid connections altogether and suspect I will get there eventually.

In what context,? In general you can have as many as you want.

I still ended up with a 8-10" slab!!!

Like the time I needed 40 tons of hardcore for my garage!

Something most architects don't have unfortunately. One of our projects just now is an apartment complex, architects went and drew a stunning looking building as elevation drawings, some OK looking apartment layouts, but the building could not work, none of the drainage would line up, soil pipes would be dropping into lower floor bedrooms and things, these were no risers, when we told them we needed space for utilities, they said, oh can you not make it work through the fabric of the building... structural columns in the middle of livings rooms and kitchens, clearly didn't understand how a building goes together. Do not get me wrong, I know some brilliant architects, they produce wonderful buildings, but they could go onto a site and build it themselves, that makes the good ones, ones that understand just how materials work together and go together and the makeup of various details. Either they build their own projects at home, or have a house build of their own under their belt or they go to site a lot and pay close attention.

Left hand side of image, just me, or does that course look a bit bendy along the line?

For my self-build I bought I got some Leica kit for site levels, already had a Fluke laser measure (+-0.2mm up to 100m) and some other site marking kit. Or find a local topo company that you can use, build up a relationship with them and you will get a decent price.

Should be no flicker on a good constant voltage LED source as it dims by reducing voltage. Plenty of good 0Hz LED CV supplies.

Could work, however, some considerations: The sleepers sit flat on top of each other, the external wall, would be susceptible to rain sitting/passing in between them and will become quite draughty, it will get worse as they dry out and the gap opens, even sealing it on construction would not last. You need to think about a method to enable water run off - options may include asking a mill to cut the sleepers with a groove and raised "key" section with a diagonal cut to the joint to create a sort of tongue and groove affair. Check the treatment of sleepers, as this is not their intended use they tend to use treatments which are not great for we humans to breath in and touch, just make sure you are not creating a gas chamber for yourself. More of a note this one. How are you going to fix them together at a depth of 200mm - LONG coach bolts? I am sure there must be a cheaper option for you to achieve the same look - I did a fancy garden shed/log store with 100mm block up to 1200mm then a 2x3 frame on top of that, then clad the whole lot in breathable membrane, battens and timber with shoshugibon treatment. I went for vertical 100mm pieces but you could use 1x6 off saw treated for the external, I'd run the lengths through a table saw and cut the corner off to help make the water run out and drip down and out from the above board. Then inside you could buy a suitable internal wood and insulate the frame. Given the volume of timber in a sleeper, it would equate to about 5 pieces of board per sleeper.

Don't think freelance architect for self-builders is for you, with all due respect. A self-builder needs that hands on approach that so many of the veteran self-build architects give. Often they can be found on site, boots on, hard hat on, working with self-builder, contractors and builders alike and getting their hands a bit grubby, offering solutions, being part of it all. £5K - no. Now before you suspect I just think it is too high a price for a package or work and "don't know what goes into it" - I do all my own architectural design and CAD (I am a consulting engineer so in the right industry to self design and draw in CAD), most of what I/we (the firm) do, is make a building work after an architect has done the plans and elevations so I am well placed to pull together a Tender package - unless you are onto the big Grand Design style house, then I don't think there is 5K in the average self-build, unless you will include the SE calcs, drawings and details in that too.

I agree with this, as a consulting engineer I hate when you see "Sales Engineer" on a sales rep's email signature, or some random manufacturer who has trained an 18 year old how to quantify and quote roof coverings as a "design engineer". Everyone in the construction industry now is apparently an engineer. I had someone tell me about their son who was an electrical engineer, I asked who he worked for and didn't recognise the name, I asked where the office was and she oh he is just on sites, I discovered he was an electrician, there is nothing wrong with that, but he was not an electrical engineer.

Pretty much!

https://midsummerwholesale.co.uk/ Try these guys, there is even a array builder tool on the home page. I like these: https://midsummerwholesale.co.uk/buy/eurener/eurener-375w-mepv-zebra-ab-half-cut-mono they work out a good peak power for the ££££'s.

This is where a little EV would be good to consume the energy. Issue is my EV would be away from home during the main sunshine hours 3 days a week. I worked out I could get a little VW EUp on lease for the same money I spend on diesel a month, I considered it, but was put off when I realised I would not get rid of my diesel car, so I would end up paying out more albeit some of my motoring miles would be much cheaper.

I would read myself and @pocster 's post over here: Got some info that pertains to your question. I would give the grid nothing! In the grand scheme of things every solar panel generating electricity and adding it to the grid is a good thing, if we all gave 200W across the whole nation think how good even that would be, however, the system is a sham, the system, is designed, and this needs to be dealt with soon, that they are actively discouraging people from generating their own. My aunt in law gets 45p kWh from a historical tarriff, I would get 3p. My attitude it that why should I give them it!

You can get a device which some manufacturers call a export limitation system, it is basically a module which sits in before your DB and stops export, you buy it and wire it in and program in a dead stop, i.e. nothing. Each panel is made up of a quantity of PV cells, like a battery, the more you add the higher the output voltage and the more current they can generate, so in a panel you might already have say 80 PV's - when you connect 2 of this same panel together you have actually just linked 160PV cells together. Now if you block the light to 1 cell that cell then might fall below the threshold of incident light at which it generates, it becomes, like a battery, a dead cell and takes the whole connected string of cells with it down to it's level, which in a large string could mean 5 or 6 panels worth. There are options, optimisers and microinverters, optimisers take in each panels output, optimises the generation and adds it to the string, then the single inverter then does it's business as usual. If a panel stops generating due to a shadow or a dirty great crow sitting on it then the optimiser essentially ignores the panel and excludes it from the string. Then there are micro inverters, a box about the size of a VHS tape, maybe a bit smaller, and it has a + and - connection, panel goes directly into it and it has a AC output, you just wire them to a main AC bus or wire them all back to a terminal board etc. at that you can then have your solar monitoring module. The micro inverter is my preference because it makes each panel and MI become it's own little generation plant. A fault on one panel or inverter only takes out one panel. The ROI is getting closer now, my thinking is that we do ROI calcs using the present energy costs, we should be doing them with costs 1-2 years from now, had we all put in solar 2-3 years ago we might be laughing now, but then of course it was more expensive then. I think we might be at the tipping point.

I would pull it down, but that is me and I could rebuild it in block and bigger. I took down a 6m long 2.7m wide brick garage at our current house and replaced it with a much bigger block garage in a better position, it wasn't even worth trying to save. Depending on your funds and abilities it may make sense for you to pull the roof off, upgrade some of the structure and add a proper pitched roof and tile it, I looked at that option once for a Marley prefab like yours, years ago but reckoned I could do it for £500 in materials and a few weekends. People will buy a prefab like that. Buyer dismantles and collects.

Go for maximum generation capacity you can afford and feel you can benefit from - remember that a PV array could be done in increments. I use a little micro inverter so I can add 1 panel at a time and if I want to make 1 array different products from another or high peak output capacity panels I can simply add those by sizing the inverter accordingly. First solar panel is going on the shed, the next 5-7 on the garage and the following 5-7 on the house. Work starts ASAP really. I set it all up temporarily and generated 1.25A with one panel at 15:00 with some low winter sun! I will take that! You can stop export, if I am honest I would rather use my own generated power rather than export it given the rate I was offered, 3p v's the 23p I pay, so I am not planning on exporting, you can get inverters and controllers that know what to do with excess, 1 chap I know dumps it into huge hot water buffer tanks. If on a very sunny day when his buffer tanks were up to temp and all the laundry and what not was done then his system just does nothing. Might seem wasteful but he has never had this eventuality yet. He clearly sized his generation capacity to suit his use. Battery storage is the next option, not something I am currently even thinking of but would think about it when electric is 40p a unit and I am wasting it during the day. If you could afford to store all your solar, then go for that option. But size your system wisely and don't let a PV company size it because they are of course going to say you need more than you really need. But remember, you can always add!

Ask him for a detail or sketch and for fixing details and types.

You could always stick to standards then drop it on 45's more abruptly somewhere to stay within regs. With sinks, any solids should be very small and lightweight, say coffee grounds, so I don't see too great a fall being a huge issue, but there does remain the chance that solids will be left behind by fast flowing water abandoning its solid friends. The benefit of vertical falls is that yes it increases waste speed for a moment, but the water/solid velocity remains within spec on the horizontal (diagonal), with everything moving faster on the verticals together before continuing at a solid clearing rate.

Mike, something I have been thinking about of late, we do intend to move on from our current house probably within 5-6 years. The issue is that as soon as I "disconnect" my devices from the house and cancel the broadband, effectively the house just becomes a building with hardware in it. I have moved broadband once since I moved into this house and when we changed router I just renamed the SSID so all the devices seamlessly transitioned over, I could always stick in a cheap £25 router with the same SSID and leave it as the smart home router with instruction on how to connect it all up. One option was to make it a selling point, then leave really simply instruction as to how to adopt it, second was to put in a standalone controller of some sort or, keep quiet about it and remove all the hardware (I have wiring boxes setup that all I would have to do is remove devices and join light switches to the circuit rather than I/O terminals on controllers. The system would work standalone "dumb" but it means they would have basically lots of light switches switching relays rather than just having a light switch!

What a shame! That's sad!

So do you have a KNX system for control via HomeKit you want to interface to a 24V DC LED tape? Looks like you have an added stage of the DALI interface, so were you planning on going KNX-DALI Driver-LED Strip? You could do this so many ways. You could drop the DALI and go KNX or mains dimmable via KNX mains module to a 24VDC PSU and lose the added complexity. What is the power supply rating and how many meters of tape and what is the W/m? I tend to spec power supplies and drivers etc. with about 20% spare capacity to reduce load and hopefully heat, leading to a longer lifespan.

Sort of but you really should balance the phases better, but yes, I would put the inverter onto the phase with the most day time demand. I suppose domestically you could just pretend you are only on a single phase supply, and ignore balancing but it would be better if you could keep the phases as best balanced as you could, i.e. similar load on each.

He has no car.