Carrerahill

You are trying to transpose the logic too linearly, you accused me of not comparing similar tech and now we are comparing Tesla batteries to computers & cars, but you, in your discussion found that it was a comparison worth making so at some level you believe that the principle of tech pricing is the same and it is. We could compare mobile phones to Tesla batteries, or central heating boilers or cordless power tools. There is a minimum price point of any product, that true price is often only known by a producer/manufacturer who controls the whole production/manufacturing process which is rare. For example, just how much is a barrel of crude oil, really, and I don't mean daily barrel price - about $55-60 today. We know that is just an average price, some oil, North Sea, is more expensive to extract that the Texas land oil fields using nodding donkeys. Gold extraction, again only really the operators who actually run that operation on their claim/lease will know what it actually costs them per oz. they will always suggest more. So all these manufacturers need "x" for their commodity or product and each has a minimum margin they need to make, so something like a car will never cost $10 - what Gate's would have been better providing is the % cost reduction and applying that to a car and actually it may be comparable given that in today's money the first car cost $95K. You probably couldn't cast the engine block for $10 - so there will always be a minimum price. A brick probably does only cost about a penny, a common is about 17p from my local merchant, but how much of that is profit margin and transport? You load them onto a wagon at the factory and they go to a depot, then another wagon takes them to a merchant, or B&Q and each time that brick moves, due to size and weight, it accrues more cost and transport for that type of load is expensive. How many people had a TV in their living room in say 1960? How many people have a TV in each lounge, bedroom and maybe kitchen and a few spare disused ones in the loft in 2019? The same will go for the Tesla battery, once every street in the UK has at least 1 Tesla battery, the price will fall. So the price will fall, and then it will be affordable and ROI's will be acceptable.

It is for a similar application I am looking to deploy this battery.

It is just the principle, I think all will agree, tech is tech - the costs always do the same thing. Pick anything from TV's, a TV was over a years average salary, or mobile "car" phones, SSD drives. I am not going to defend a product I was only mentioning and posting on the forum for discussions sake, I didn't make it, I didn't buy one and I think at the price point it is not going to be a particularly good investment or money saving device. Regarding the inverter I will ask the rep when I email him for the PDF literature, although I sure it will be in the tech spec. I am looking at this battery for a commercial project of ours where if it all adds up it will save our customer about £3K system costs for his needs.

All his beds seem to be against or very close to walls, I assumed they were just for indicative purposes and not necessarily final furniture layouts. I'd put the bed in the middle, headboard opposite the window so the bed was facing the window.

It does, but prices have to fall and the story will sound sweet again. Look at USB sticks, I remember it was over £100 for 64Mb. Now they give away 2Gb sticks for free and a good quality 64Gb stick is £15.00

Latest iteration I think - I wasn't fussed on what it was in all honesty, just how it worked, what was inside etc. I know, it doesn't really stack up does it! I think where it would be useful was for storing renewables and potentially allowing us to go off-grid. I think that is coming, centralised power generation is not going to be the norm going forward. More localised generation and storage will be the way forward, transmission is very expensive. My ROI would be terrible, I pay about 9p per kWh! I told him if he could do it for about £3K I would buy it!

Good point and one question I sadly neglected to ask at the time. I simply asked the Tesla rep about longevity - he just said the battery was guaranteed for 10 years and unlimited cycles, it was a bit of a machine-gun fire Q&A I threw as much at him as I could, including asking for a free sample battery! I have his details and I am to email him for full literature and electrical details, I will ask then. I also asked about bolting a huge firework to the side of a building, he remarked that only batteries in transportation situations had suffered from the infamous "Tesla battery fires".

Yes, typo! I will edit my post to save others the confusion! Fancy a job as my editor?

I like it, only comments for me would be, however you did touch on this, to make the garage a little longer and make it a usable garage, with the space you have for a utility room and a sneak pantry I'd think you could turn over more space to the garage, for me a garage is more important, but then I have a classic car and work on it and have tools and whatnot that need a home. Why don't you put a small toilet into your office? Common thing to have a little private office loo, I know when I am working late, or sitting on this forum a little loo I could get to without going into the main body of the house would be advantageous, it also means if you are working from home etc. and your family are about the main house you can take yourself away to your own little empire. Make sure the wall between play and office areas are well soundproofed. Happy children is a great noise, but when happy children become happy screeching children it does distract from work! I like the master bedroom "suite" you have created. Well done - I like the presentation style too, your narration makes it all very easy to digest.

Watching it now, been away almost every night for last week and a half.

I was at a building and asset maintenance conference yesterday where Tesla had a stand with a Tesla battery, looks like a giant iPhone, fairly sleek white case about 1200mm tall, 1000mm wide and 200mm deep, this was a 13kWh battery complete with charger/inverter. Weighs about 120Kg and has a 10 year warranty with unlimited charge cycles. Cost currently was £7K however my discussion with the Tesla chap was that clearly this cost would fall within the next 3-5 years. Idea is to use on-site renewable to charge I assumed but this is not necessarily the only option and one that is foreign to me, having never had dual tariff electricity, is to use the battery to store electricity from low peak tariff then discharge during high peak tariff. Not sure how good the ROI would be on that to be honest but a local authority talking to me said she was getting 10K per battery to install them to save energy. Tesla's end game is actually using it as a means to attenuate power consumption on the network from EV charging. There is a gateway which hooks the battery up to the network and controls how it works depending on how it is commissioned, this gateway could allow for a lower current charge into the battery all day, then when you get home you can fast charge your car from the battery or it will supplement the grid power to ease loading.

Yes - the way to look at it is to think of the LED source on the small profile and the whole ceiling area as a luminaire in its own right. So work out the delivered lumens from the ceiling, which in this situation is the reflector. Reflectance of a smooth gypsum plaster painted matt white has a Rho (surface reflectance factor) of 80% - also reflectances are dependent on angle, a direct 0° light source will not reflect light directly back well, but as my ceiling is pitched I gain the benefit of a 30° pitch and therefore enter the better reflectance zone. If there was concern of delivered lumens then I would just increase the lumen package but I am fairly confident that I know what I need to throw at the ceiling to gain the necessary light level. I have several lighting details throughout the kitchen to provide a higher level of illuminance to task areas, and indeed to be independently switched to provide a low level evening ambient light. I'll maybe do a whole post all about how it was designed and calculated when I actually get it installed.

Well I shall certainly post it on the forum when it's all done. Still at plasterboard stage so a bit to go and I intend on having Christmas off. Got it all designed and ready to hit the go button, wiring is in, so I guess the lighting will be staged some before, some after the kitchen fit out (don't think the suspended element is a good idea to have in when the joinery is being done!).

To be fair, lighting calculations will be done using software - however, I don't think calcs are necessary here - it is a domestic setting. If I was to offer a lighting design service for a client, I would produce a full set of CAD drawings, with all the details, such as suspension heights or wall mounting heights, it would come with a full luminaire schedule outlining all the product, precise spec, colour temperatures etc. I would also provide some 3D renders and a concept board with imagery and sketches etc. it would be a proper lighting package. I would not probably run any calcs for a domestic property, only maybe to check we could achieve a decent illuminance in areas like a kitchen and to check the combination of lighting specified would work well to deliver a good ambient light level - it also then lets me show a client what it would loosely look like. I would not throw a set of lighting level calculations at you and expect you think you are sorted. Those are there for building design, to ensure lighting complies with the regs - what do they expect you to be able to tell, as an end user, from those calcs? It probably, with all due respect, means very little to most people. What a joke. In my kitchen I am having no down-lights, I am going to use recessed linear details hidden into sections of wall and bulkheads to largely have the lighting almost invisible, the kitchen will just glow with light. There will be a single suspended continuous linear LED product, very low profile, circa 30x7mm - but I will need to mock it up to get the size right in proportion to the rest of the space - and about 4m long, I want it powder-coated burgundy or royal blue or something so it standing out as an object, but not as a light, it will be indirect light only (i.e. uplight only) - this will wash the vaulted ceiling section with light which will provide reflected light and the general lighting to the space.

Nailed it - see my post above...

Sorry, that is truly awful. Ansell are a commercial lighting importer who import low quality far eastern product, they have designed your house like a cheap block of student accommodation, I see spec's like this every week for care homes and student accommodation where the contractor has gone for the cheapest solution (but I bet they will multiply the price of these fittings by a factor of 4 for you) - most of those fittings can be bought for under £20 - I know the Eclipse MultiLED can be had for £16. These are surface mounted LED bulkheads I wouldn't even put in an outhouse frankly - you would cry if you saw your house with these installed. I throw Ansell product off spec's all the time and that is not even my money. If you want a lighting design, then employ a lighting designer, either an independent lighting design consultancy or the bigger consultancies have the specialist lighting design discipline. Electrical wholesalers are totally clueless, I bet you they would not light their house with commercial product. I am not being funny, but as said in my discussion re. lighting design above on this thread, manufacturers (unless aimed at high end domestic market), wholesalers, contractors, electricians and these lighting suppliers like Pagazzi are just totally lacking and wouldn't know how to light something well if their lives depended on it - I speak from experience of seeing their specs and designs and I am not just making a bold statement. Sure, you will find the odd designer within that camp who will have the skill and experience, but they are few and far between. As an example of the sort of people I would be talking to: https://www.slld.lighting/private-residence-edinburgh - https://www.johncullenlighting.com/projects/residential-lighting/ - https://ksld.com/interior - http://www.spatial-lighting.co.uk/11

No, but I quite like the idea.

So are we talking 6 pieces of MDF cut from a sheet(s)? Presumably plunge saw and guide rail type stuff? As an amateur working in my garage, I'd cut them with the Fes plunge-saw in about an hour I'd of thought including fully measuring & noting each window, then laying it out and cutting it and setting up the extension cable, dust vac and saw! If I could do it on my table saw - run them all to the same width then use the sliding mitre-saw to cut to length I reckon maybe 30minutes! I'd probably screw together 2 pre-made liners in 15-20 minutes. Are you paying them an hourly rate? I'd be keeping an eye on them and pulling them up, or simply throw them off the job if you can. If a job price then leave them to it. They might blitz things on the last day. Are they working for a firm?

Sounds like your "lighting designer" is a typical production line style designer who just churns out soulless lighting designs using their employers product, this is generally bad for the end client because it's tailored to their range, not a range that suits your build. As an electrical engineer one of my specialities was lighting design, I don't do much of it now, but for a period in my career I did more architectural lighting design than electrical design - I really enjoyed being creative with light with nice and clever products. I can say very confidently, that I am almost certain, that each and every one of you on this forum will have been in a building I have done a lighting design for (electrical too). There are lighting designers and there are lighting designers, @SteamyTea you make a comment about lighting designers bringing you "ideas" for quotation, possibly this is more geared at luminaire design than actual light, as in light incident on a surface design! But you are right, people will come up with "ideas" that are supposed to be the next great thing and their authority to come up with something such as this may be as simple as they run lighting calcs for a living and decided that they know how to better design a product, then of course there are those of us (I will say us as I was/am a lighting designer - most electrical engineers do lighting too, it's electrical!) who do actually have an authority to innovate lighting product. Some of my friends are Fellows lighting designers, this, like a chartered engineer, however, it is the highest engineering council status you can have bestowed upon you.. I know a couple of lighting designers who sit on the lighting council, they write the lighting regs, the regs that every commercial building of all types are designed too. I work with several lighting design consultancies who work on some of the most prestigious building in the world, lighting we will all be familiar with (I did a lot of the artificial lighting and natural daylighting for parts of the V&A in London and some of the V&A in Dundee) These guys are lighting designers, I also know of young guys, sitting in manufactures offices up and down the country who are basically trained to run lighting calcs - these people are often not lighting designers, they don't design, they simply run calcs and pick product and move it about until the parameters meet with the CIBSE guidelines! However, I also know of some very highly experienced and knowledgeable lighting designers who work for manufacturers so you need to be careful as you can find some gems; typically ask to see some of their work, if they show you offices, schools and student accommodation blocks, walk away. If they use lot of down-lights or are highly repetitive, walk away, if they use all products from one manufacturer question this and have them justify their choices and ask if they have only chosen this because that is what is within their range. If the design is free, then it is a manufacturer looking for a sale - the design could be excellent, it could be trash. If you want, please PM me a copy or a link to your design and I will view it from a professional perspective and tell you if it basically is even a good design, compliant with recommended lighting levels - yes there are even recommended levels for domestic properties, but no one needs to follow them because domestic lighting is not regulated.

Have any of you seen this? https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-heating-systems/radiant-heating I am tempted to try a section of it in a wall in my extension, if it fails I'll unplumb it!

Is the splay going to be on your land, if so and it's yours and your neighbours then you can probably just get on with it. Often you will note a kerbstone at a intersection of land which is sunk fully into the ground, seems weird, why is there this kerbstone that has been sunk flush with the running surfaces? Well, this is so that the local authority or land owner on one side can do what they want and not impact the running surface on the other side. So it may be you can simply have it done, clear anything in the way, take your access up to the current road surface and have them seal the joint with tar and or have a concrete section laid or get the council to do only this section. I would also not worry too much about it, my thinking is you will probably have utilities coming into your site, bung the guys a bit extra and when they are digging things up anyway have them incorporate the splay, clear any bits etc. Of course, everything above may be useless if you don't actually own the piece of land this is going onto!

I think the whole ground floor could be better designed to give larger feeling rooms. Do you desperately want the utility room, could an under stair utility cupboard work for washer/drier for example - or a cupboard off the hall using some of the space currently occupied by the utility? Or a cupboard upstairs for laundry. You could then push the kitchen cabinets further back into the utility space and make the study/bedroom bigger. Id's also be tempted to have kitchen/dining and then open up the family and lounge area into a big front to back lounge while maintaining a good space in the kitchen/dining. I also think you could possibly do a straight stair, possibly from the dining/kitchen - incorporate kitchen cabinets into the void beneath and use the space in the hall to have a smaller utility for example. You could re-plan this floor all day I suppose. I don't know what you want, you may love it. I'd also consider carefully your lounge door position and check it isn't going to open directly into an area you may want a couch etc.

Does anyone know the CO2 generation from making a sheet of PIR and transporting it? Or indeed generation of any other nasties? If I had heaps of solar power, or wind etc. and therefore didn't give a stuff about burning power I would just invest in generation capacity, I would not insulate much I don't think - so there will become a tipping point that clean generation returns us to just pumping lots of heat into our homes and not worrying too much about it. Every time I cut a PIR sheet it stinks and off-gasses, it really makes me wonder. I'd love to have the time to fully research this, I may get the chance next year to do a paper on it but it depends.

Well it depends how you heat your home - it costs me about £60 in gas a year and maybe 2 weekends, a couple of litres of petrol and a lot of sweat to process fire wood, so if I insulate my home it takes quite a long time to get a return from my investment. However, if I heated from gas 100% I reckon my gas bill would be about £1000 a year - then it would make more sense certainly, but also, I suppose future proofing and all that! So it is all interlinked, I am not good at U values and thermal calcs and what not, I hope people on here will help me when I do need this done, but I know that 20mm is not going to save you much relatively but if your buy cost is £600 then it is probably affordable enough (if funds are still OK of course) just to do it and have benefit of knowing it is there. I have just added 25mm sheets of PIR to the underside of my rafters (vaulted ceilings), it is not a lot 25mm, but knowing it is there, fully taped makes me feel better about it and it only cost another £400 or something. The "main" insulation was already in between the rafters - but this fully sealed layer seems good in my eyes! It will help a bit, but I am not expecting to see a saving on energy.

It depends how you will heat your home! Have a look at the specification for the product you are planning and you will see the difference in R value, it will probably be about 2.27m2K/W vs 3.18m2K/W.