Bramco

Same here 😞 Unless you go down the @SteamyTea route of unplugging everything, then the key to lower costs, now there is no FiT, is to make sure you use as little normal rate lekky as possible. The PV for 2/3 of the year for DHW is a good start. If you add a diverter that can schedule a nightly cheap rate boost of the DHW then there's a saving there. Doing the DHW at night with an ASHP reduces that again. Installing say about 15kW of batteries also allows you to shift your daytime use to the night time tariff. All of this can be done on Octopus Go which is cheap rate for 4 hours at night. Moving to Octopus Go Intelligent (you need the right kind of EV point for this) get's you onto 7.5p for 6 hours at night as well as 15p for export. So there's longer for battery charging etc. at night and from about now, for 6 months, you should be exporting enough to cover what you've imported and on good days, also the daily standing charge. There are ways to self install the PV and get onto Octopus Go to avoid the MCS surcharge. And you don't really need to own an EV to get onto the Intelligent version of Octopus Go. All you need to do is to connect an EV to get the charger recognised. So if you haven't got one, borrow a friends for 30 minutes. You can do all of the above in stages, we did. Last week, we didn't cover the standing charge but we did earn enough on the export to cover all of our usage. We're all electric, so that's all the house energy needs, heating (yes, it's still on a bit), cooking, washing, dishwashing, hot water etc. Moving onto Octopus Agile should better what you can do on OG Intelligent but it's another level of complexity in terms of controlling when things should charge etc. Simon

No - call one of the suppliers, I'll bet they'll tell you monoblocs are what they sell most of. Worrying about the size of the holes in the wall is also daft. There are ducts to handle either system. Probably the main question is - do you want the compressor running at night in the house? If you're hard of hearing it may be OK but for everyone else, it's a non starter. There's a long thread on here somewhere about the noise from a split system which drove the OP mad. And you need a refrigerant engineer to install a split system - whereas with a monbloc it's just normal plumbing. Our monbloc is against the outside wall under the stairs - you can't hear it in the bedrooms but if I have a wander at night, you can hear it at the bottom of the stairs - that would be 10x as bad with a monobloc. I'm sure the experts will be along before long but from a user perspective monbloc is the way to go. Simon PS - and if you believe plumbers, then ..... ours insisted that all he had to do with ASHPs was ripping them out and installing gas boilers - and that was 3 years ago when there weren't many ASHPs installed. He's probably now working for Octopus installing ASHPs....

Ours is similar. We laid a 4 core armoured cable for DC in a trench, as @SteamyTea says at least half a metre deep. Use 4 core, so you can have your array in 2 halves, into separate MPPT connections on the inverter. If you aren't going to install it immediately, get the sparky to install a spur to where you expect the inverter to installed and get that on the electrical certificate labelled 'solar PV'. This allowed us to do a self install and produce the electrical cert to national grid which they were happy enough with to give us the all clear on the installation. Once National Grid were happy, Octopus were also happy to put us on one of their smart tariffs. That way you avoid the dreaded MCS tax... Simon

Thanks for the replies guys. Anyone tried the foam? Simon

Hi, We're putting some panels in the garden and came across the expanding foam post fixing stuff. Obviously a lot lighter for karting around and maybe makes the posts less prone to rot? But I read some reviews saying that the foam shrank back from the posts making them loose which obviously wouldn't happen with postcrete. Anyone used the foam? Would you recommend it? Simon

What make of diverter is it? If it's a Myenergi Eddi, you can check the app to see if it's been running. But i guess if it is, then you'll already have done that. Another way to check would be to get a power monitor with a current clamp. Install it on the live to the diverter and monitor the usage. Simon

In fact you could invert those figures and use them for the cooling you might require.. Simon

As above, probably not on the ASHP but surely the 'feels like' temperature, often windchill but sometimes just a clear sky at night, must make a difference to the heat required by the house. We've been monitoring the 'feels like' temperature recently and on some nights it can be at least 5C below the actual OAT. You can see this on the graph below. So the question then becomes, should you, in the spreadsheet use an OAT which is 5C or so below what the met office tell you is the lowest OAT? Which would mean a bigger heat pump than the spreadsheet would normally indicate. We're going to use the data to create some kind of 'heat required index' for our build and use that to set how long the ASHP runs for. Simon If you look at the 10th and 14th you can see the feels like temperature drops by about 5C from the outside temperature. Green and Yellow lines. The data is from openweathermap.

For us the rainwater went to the dyke anyway, so there was effectively no change. There are 3 houses beyond ours on the dyke which then ends up alongside the village sewage treatment works (don't worry it's quite a way to that). That sewage works dumped sewage into the dyke on 6000 occasions last year - so you might say we're helping to water it down - that's if there's any real flow in the dyke. Fortunately we're upstream from the treatment works 😄 ........ This eventually ends up in the Trent, so don't swim downstream..... Simon

No idea - but I wouldn't rely on Google.....

Can't remember the number of crates but the total cost with excavation, earth disposal, crates and labour was about £20k total, i.e. not just the cost of the crates - although these seem expensive when you think what they are. Simon

We contracted a builder, so costs are higher than true self build. But it's over 250m2, almost passivehaus, triple glazing etc. At the end of the day we ended up about £2.5k/m2. Simon

Agreed - we've got a mix of wifi and zigbee. Isn't the supply for POE a bit 'juicy'? I wonder how these compare to a Loxone system? Simon

So very roughly speaking around 5kWh per day. We're about the same. With solar PV, batteries and a tariff like Octopus Go intelligent (7.5p for 6 hours at night and 15p export), the marginal 6.5p we could earn by turning everything off is perhaps not worth the effort. One thing we could do is to turn off all lighting circuits during the daytime - we have a number of smart devices to turn things on at dusk and off later on - but these only use a few of those background watts. There's probably one out there but a way to manage this would be to have a wifi controlled circuit switch/RCD in the CU. That way we'd have just 3 or 4 of those loads rather than 10. But again, is it worth the hassle. Simon

Not so sure about that - very roughly speaking our TF was about £100k and the total build about £600k. So a 5% reduction in timber costs doesn't have such a big impact - and don't forget while prices always rise quickly, they're always very slow to come back down again. Things tend to ratchet up. So any reduction in timber prices may not be reflected in your TF quote. Also even if the building trade is in slowdown, most timber is imported and those prices are not impacted by the slowdown. The slowdown is more likely to bring the costs other than the TF down. Simon

@NailBiter and anyone else trying to register on Solcast, the site is quite confusing. The registration page has 3 boxes with text in them for each type user user. Inside each box, there is a hyperlink but this link takes you to an information page about the service for that type of user. So you end up in a loop. You need to click anywhere in the box for the different user types - it's not obvious that the box itself is a hyperlink. I've suggested to them that this is a little confusing. Simon PS @NailBiter thanks for your offer to help by DM

Nope, still doesn't work - I've emailed support, maybe there's an issue with their systems. Simon

How did you register for Solcast? If I go on their website, and select Home User, I get switched between 2 web pages and can't register. Frustrating..... Simon

@LnP We used Hallmark blinds -> https://www.hallmarkblinds.co.uk/ . There are other members that have used them as well. I think they are manufactured in eastern Europe, Poland? It's about 3 years ago now that we were looking, so things may have changed a bit but back then, there didn't seem to be many (UK) suppliers. External blinds are common on the continent but here, they seem to be only used on commercial premises. Some of the companies we identified had UK websites but didn't seem to have any suppliers. Our criteria were size, we've got some pretty big apertures we needed to cover and price. I don't think there's a great deal of difference between different makes when it comes down to the slats etc. They all seem to use Somfy for the controllers. Ours are all on sliding doors, so if you want to, you can open the door a bit to get some through breeze in the summer, although the downstairs overhangs on our build mean that in the summer, the sun doesn't shine into the rooms if we have the blinds up. Hope that helps Simon

Which is a Home Assistant front - and while they may be best practices, not everyone wants to go down the HA route. I've tried it several times and found it to be a massive overkill for what we want to do and massively time consuming to configure. I just need simple access to some of the dashboards that we use when at home. I've used DuckDNS in the past but we now have a double router system, so NordVPN Mesh looks like it might do the trick. Simon

Don't think so. But it wasn't something I was taking note of at the time. There's an installation guide you could check. But like I said, you can manage it all from within your firewall if you want to. Takes a bit of effort of course. If you do set things up that way, you can't access the device when you're away from home. Which can be useful if it throws some error. Or if you just want to check on what's happening. We find remote access quite useful. Simon

We have a Sunsynk inverter which can be connected to their cloud through a wifi dongle or an ethernet connection. You can also attach a modbus interface - I've done this because their app which accesses the cloud data only updates every 5 minutes, so doesn't really give real time data. So you could simply disconnect the wifi dongle and not connect a LAN connection and just use the local modbus interface - of course you won't be able to use their app but while that is comprehensive it ain't brilliant... Ours btw is still connected to the Sunsynk cloud whiel we're still tinkering. For modbus I've half-inched a nodered set of flows -> https://powerforum.co.za/topic/8451-sunsynk-inverter-monitoring/ to read the data and feed it through to a local open energy monitor server -> https://openenergymonitor.org/. The flows are very comprehensive and also include setting parameters and there's a pretty amazing nodered dashboard . I reckon if any other inverter has a modbus interface, you could use a lot of the flows with only a bit of adjustment. Not massively pretty but below is a dashboard from an openergymonitor server on a Pi Zero 2 which we're using at the moment as we get used to the new batteries and inverter. PV and house load are fetched every 5 seconds and the more slowly moving things every minute. The diverter data is from our Eddi.

Our vaulted bedrooms have the vents on the walls, while the vaulted living room/dining room/kitchen have them on the ceiling. Can't say we've noticed any difference. The issue with the ones in the living space was more to do with ensuring the battens for the ceiling were deep enough to take the pipes and the vents. Simon

Thanks - the architect is our son - we think he's done us proud! That's about what ours looks like - I think there were 3 coats on the stairs, not sure about the floor though. Simon

Which solar forecast do you use? Tried to get on one that I think is based in Australia but covers the world - but their web site kept taking me round in circles. Found a European one but the forecasts were crap. I use Openweathermap in Nodered to track the high, low, current and wind chill temperatures - I guess I should try to pick out the cloud cover forecast if it's in there. Simon