Bramco

We've covered this before but if you have a ground mounted array, the angle is up to you. So start with PVGIS and try out different angles. From memory, it gives you the angle which generates the highest output in mid summer - but if you vary the angle, you can find a point where the total yearly output is the same but the highest output is less and output is pushed more into the shoulder months. So if your inverter would normally be clipping at the highest output, you'll get more out of the installation by finding that angle - for us it's about 45deg rather then the ~33deg (from memory) that gives highest level of output. We have 6.5kWp of solar and an 5kW inverter - yesterday at the peak we were generating 5.4kW from the solar, so only losing a bit due to the inverter clipping. From here on in, this will get closer and sometime in September we'll be generating much more than we would have been doing at 33deg and we'll be able to use all of it. So it's worth doing a bit of analysis to work out what the best orientation and angle will be over the full year.

You must have some serious south facing glass to have to cool for that long. We have overhangs on south facing glass as well as external blinds - this keeps the heat out. The great thing about the blinds is from the shoulder season through winter, they let in the heat. I think we've used our cooling for less than 10 days this year - and we are east midlands, so we've had every heat wave, although not as bad as further south.

Yes quick payback is battery and cheap rate charge. We have 6.5kWp of solar and batteries. This allows us to only import at the cheap rate overnight, so no standard rate, or very, very little. The only time we import at standard rate is if the family are home during the winter and we haven't enough battery, or solar to cover the hot water usage, cooking etc. Our Octopus bill last year was £150 for the whole year, that's for everything, heating, DHW, cooking etc. That's for a 250m2 all electric house with ASHP, MVHR etc.

Surely the easiest would be to simply cut the 15mm polypipe in the middle and with 2 straight through push fit connectors add in a length of 15mm polypipe to bring the tap up to the required height. That way you leave both connections as they are and you're much less likely to mess one up and start on a series of trips to the nearest big shed to get more bits. EDIT - it won't look like a bodge as you're going to cover it all in insulation 😉

You also need to take the roof into account. Especially if you are planning vaulted ceilings.

@Nickfromwales So your distribution boxes are hidden behind walls if I understand the diagram and the photos. Ours ended up being above the (lowered) plant room ceiling (daft fire concerns as there's no gas) But.... If you do need to clean each inlet and outlet connection through the semi rigid pipes, how do you do this? Or is it not considered necessary?

Hi, The edges of our patio and a raised planting area are finished with coloured concrete coping stones. Unfortunately these give off a coloured dust if you sit on them which given they are grey is a bit of a nuisance. Would be great if we could seal them somehow, so that they stop giving off the dust. Has anyone done this before? And if so what did you use? Otherwise, any ideas?

We imported 11,100kWh at a cost of £1009. So the princely sum of 9p/kWh on average. Exported £840 worth of kWh, so ran the house for £160 for the full year. (6.5kW Solar and 15kWh of battery, 9kW ASHP.) Given the standing charge is about 50p, the difference between import and export is about zero. We have no gas, so this is all our energy usage, heating, cooking, hot water etc. But this is for a 250 m2 timber frame house (almost passiv haus levels of insulation) with a UFH built into the insulated slab. All our heating is done by batch charging the slab at night on the cheap rate on Octopus Go with occasional daytime boosts when it's really cold. Our off peak usage is normally close to 100%. Trystan Lea at Open Energy Monitor has recently created a tool to show the co-benefits of solar, battery, HP and ev on the agile tariff makes interesting reading https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/what-are-the-co-benefits-of-solar-battery-hp-ev-tariff/30095

More than likely sloppy app design/programming. Hmmm I need a column where I can put the values for heating and cooling. I'll put cooling in blue at the bottom and heating at the top in orange. Now simply drop in the values... Net effect the interface code which is no doubt a package will display the elements in the stack, even if one is zero. Probably never tested in earnest and even if it was, it probably wasn't seen as something that a user might question. One test would be to hover over the sections in the column to see if the orange one displays zero? That's assuming they implemented that. The Octopus app is similar, in it's display of cheap rate and normal rate usage for an hour. There's always a normal rate block even though you haven't used anything.

Quick answer from our architects (he's our son, so needs to watch out on the inheritance front...) The go to organisation is -> The Metal Cladding and Roofing Manufacturers Association (MCRMA) Surprise, surprise. And the answer is mastic or butyl tape. See the attachments. (Anyone reading this in the future should probably check to see if the guidance has been updated.) GD19-MCRMA-sealants-guidance-document-1.pdf GD26-Aluminium-fabrications-executive-summary-1.pdf GD37-Sealing-of-end-laps-in-wall-cladding.pdf MCRMA-TP6-v1.pdf MCRMA-TP16-v1.pdf

I think our architect specified this as well - can't find the specs on this that he sent through to the roofer - I'll ask him if he can resend it to me. Also worth checking suppliers sites like Cladco, to see if they have any useful pointers.

We don't get clicks but we do get bangs as the metalwork heats up. But they aren't often and aren't that loud, more a boom than a bang. So it does't really worry us. The bangs and your case clicks can't surely be from expansion across the corrugations, so must be from expansion along the sheets. Our roof is screwed onto horizontal battens. So maybe there's play in the battens which takes up enough expansion to only occasionally have to jump and cause the bangs. Part of our build also has the walls clad in crinkly tin. Again the sheets are mounted vertically across horizontal battens. It would be a shame to have to demount what's already installed but the idea from @Spinny might be worth trying. If you do, do a test, then to really check things out, you'd have to do it with a sheet the same length as your roof and with a similar build up of at least the external part of the roof, otherwise you wouldn't be sure. Another thing to check might be the screws and washers - we used EJOT low profile screws. See the attachments. Hope you get things worked out. JT3_FR2_4_9_timber range.pdf JT3-FR3 range.pdf

I should have said ours was an MBC build. But we'd already decided we didn't like/trust the idea of a soil pipe through the roof structure. Getting the taping right on 2 membranes at an angle seemed like a recipe for future problems.

Building control actually came up with the solution!!

Would it be possible to run a soil stack up the side of the house? We did this to avoid having a penetration through the roof. All internal soil locations have air vents. The external one runs vertically parallel to a downpipe, so isn't too out of place. It connects to the sump where all the internal ones come together.