Bramco

A while ago, on application, you could either connect a charger or and EV(by make and model). Now the interface asks for the make/model of the vehicle and doesn't allow for linking a charger even though you may not know the make/model of any vehicles that would use the charger, e.g. visitors, carers, children etc. You can still ask for them to link with a charger however, here's a page where you can do this (not sure if it still works of course) -> https://octopus.typeform.com/to/rK8at31n#account_number=xxxxx&email=xxxxx There was some discussion on the MyEnergi forum about which models of vehicle Octopus can connect with and someone on there suggested that if you wanted to go down the linking to a vehicle route, you simply chose a make/model that they couldn't connect with. I'll bet an AI can tell you which ones...

The suggestion was for after you've got the short grass you said you wanted somewhere up above. 😉

@Alan Ambrose We had ours installed over 3 years ago, so probably not worth comparing costs. We did look around for other suppliers but they either didn't do what we were looking for or were much more expensive. We didn't plan for maintenance.... But they've been in for a while now with no problems. I say no problems.... someone.... left one of the chairs on the patio under one of them and it wouldn't straighten by itself, so we got Hallmark out to fix it. They did explain how to rejig the tapes that do the up and downing by pushing buttons on the motors - although of course we've no idea now how to do that!! You can see the motors when the blinds are down by looking up into the housing. We didn't use cassettes but I did find some interesting lintels with cassettes built into them. Could probably still find these if you are interested. Ours are built into a slot above behind the timberwork for the cladding. You can see this from the photos on our architects web page -> https://lhc.net/projects/ashcroft-creating-a-low-energy-family-home/ If you zoom in to the photo with the chairs outside, you can see that the side channels were attached to stands that were screwed into the frame of the sliding doors. So they are proud of the sides of the opening. We are very pleased with them - they're great in the summer for reducing solar gain and from autumn to spring good at letting the solar gain in. Hallmark are only a small outfit but apart from a few niggles we were pleased with them. PS We used wired switches but in hindsight it might have been better to have a wireless system.

Maybe all cylinders - we've got a Newark that is pretty noisy..... I've always put it down to the coil being corrugated and trapping air - and we haven't got round to putting in anything to get rid of the air yet - next summers job.

Part ex that for a husqvarna robot mower and sit back of an evening with a cold drink and think of the poor bastards going up and down with the racket of a 2 stroke, having to stop every few rows to dump the grass out of the hopper thinking every time - that piles getting bigger, what the hell are w3 going to do with that....

+1 for that - there are quite a few of these dotted round Germany. We visited a couple on trips to Germany while we were still in the planning stage. We also visited a couple of turnkey companies that were doing business in the UK at the time (pre-Brexit). Schworer Haus in southern Germany was amazing. A tiny, very well off village with a massive factory - wood comes from within a few kilometres distance - they xray the raw planks and sell on any not quite to the right quality. There is a massive showroom for all the various finishes, internal and external as well as bathrooms kitchens etc. They also run the whole factory on biomass and export as much energy as they use. Wonder how many of the German turn-key cos are still in the UK market after Brexit?

If you do this, then through the autumn into spring on cloudy days, you'll never run the house on PV alone, so will be importing from the grid at peak rates, i.e. 30+p. We have 6.5kWp and on some days, only generate a couple of kWh - and our panels are at 45degrees to maximise solar gain in the winter.. If they were on a roof, we'd generate less.

Our Sunsynk inverter also allows you to set up charge, discharge and export times. I'm sure many of them do.

Electricity is like water, so flows around any system, so you'd have to somehow separate the house from the PV. I'm sure someone will be along soon with an answer to that. But why don't you simply wire things up normally, so the house will use whatever is available from the batteries or the PV, or the grid. Then set things up, so that you dump what's left in the batteries at the end of the day before the cheap rate - this gets you the 15p export and if you've had any excess PV during the day, over and above house use, then you'll have had 15p for that. Then in the cheap rate simply fill you boots (batteries) before you start the cycle again. This is what we do and it's sort of self regulating. Your only issue is working out when to start dumping (exporting) the excess from the batteries to the grid if you start too early then you'll be using the grid before the cheap rate for the house and if you start too late then you'll be missing out on your 15ps worth of export. We worked out roughly how much time it took to dump 1% of the batteries to the grid. IIRC it was about 2.5 minutes. So we have an algorithm that starts checking the SoC of the batteries at 8:30 and checks every 2.5 minutes. When the SoC is larger than the amount of time left to discharge it, we start discharging and keep checking every 2.5 minutes until the start of the cheap rate. We very rarely use any standard rate units and export the maximum we can. Also, it would it be worth getting on to the Intelligent OG which is 7.5p?

No. Except delete the words 'most likely in the 1st sentence of the 2nd para.

I'm pretty sure this was how ours were done - the join then site behind any cladding. Do make sure that you get them 'permanently' fixed. We had one bit that wasn't that well fastened up and in time started to vibrate in high winds (albeit from a very specific direction) but it took a while to work out what the heck was going on.

Pretty sure it's not that. If I look at the graphs on the TADO app, you can see periods where there is a lost connection - and these can be from a few minutes to a few hours. And it's only one thermostat that's lost the connection, the others are fine. So it's almost certainly the individual thermostat connection to the RF hub. Not the hub connection to the interweb.

@SteamyTea - I've realised that it's actually an RF system to the TADO hub - so my original post should have said that. Apologies for anyone thrown off track by that. So any wifi fix wouldn't really help - the TADO hub has to be wired into an internet switch, or physically into a router. We can't move our TADO hub, so hopefully the Speedfit solution will work.

Agree - keep it as simple as possible.

@-rick- thanks for the clarification... I might actually try the speedfit wired controller (I should have said our 3 thermostats are wired) -> https://www.johnguest.com/gb/en/products/jg-underfloor/heating-controls/wired-heating-controls/240v-wired-programmable-room-thermostat This should be a drop in replacement for the TADO thermostats we have. It looks like the 'smarts' can be turned off and each thermostat can be linked with the Speedfit app, i.e. it has wifi (2.4GHz) built in. So no RF to gateways etc. £60 from screwfix in black so worth a punt. PS @SimonD EDF do, do a black RF unit but it looks like you have to pair it with one of their programmable 4 zone controllers, or an RF manifold controller, so quite an outlay to see if it works. And it's still RF which I think is the issue with the TADOs we have.