Bramco

Have a look at stone warehouse - basically AFAIK longstone quarry in Derbyshire. We've had black granite from them - not sure how small they go.

The guy building a couple of doors down says his architect will handle it. Given he's on his 3rd pretty picture architect, I strongly doubt it. I've tried to explain how it's easy to do and also the consequences of not doing it but.... Could be little windfall for the council coming up!

We used key clamp poles and joints. Simply whacked two lines of metre long poles into the ground, then built the frame from there, with a couple of bits for fastening other material to the poles - round clamp with a tail with a hole in it - between each pair of panels. Standard PV module clamps, can then be fixed through the holes. I found a commercial product on-line and simply used their plan. Great thing about this method, is you can set the angle of the panels to suit your needs. We set ours at 45deg which pvgis showed would give us about the same annual kW as a shallower angle but would give peak output in the spring and autumn and higher output in the winter. So output spread more over the year, rather than peaking in the summer. When the sun was shining yesterday we were getting 4.5kW from our 6.5kWp array.

Not sure if this is fixed already but try posting on the open energy monitor forum - there's a lot of discussion about Daikin's on there. More about getting them set up properly but there's a lot of experience.

Why not use white square section downpipe with the pipe inside and some lagging shoved in.

Our installers came out to re-do the outside insulation on the pipes - as in do it properly, instead of using cheap materials. They agreed to do a service while they were here - the plumber asked for some warm water. He then washed the outside of the case, checked the pressure dials and had a quick look inside - service done - glad i didn't pay £100 for that!! Talking to the supplier, when the unit has occasionally thrown an error, they said, just find a local ASHP installer, or look for an airco installer if the system needs recharging with gas.

Congrats - a bit faster then ours but that was a few years ago. I laughed about the 'need to sit down'. We were on a trip in the camper van in eastern Europe somewhere when ours came through - we were so nervous opening it. Had a weeks worth of celebration from there on in.

We used express bifold in Leeds -> https://www.expressbifolds.co.uk/our-products/sliding-doors/xp-glide/

Another interesting take on this is the date from the Electrification of Heat trial. The data has recently been published and Trystan Lea from the Open Energy Monitor crew who run the on-line HP comparison site has input the data into a parallel database so that the results can be analysed. Doesn't make good reading as the CoPs are very low, mainly down to poor installations and oversized systems - but I'll bet that the headline of 'poor CoPs' ends up being what drives any future legislation. More detail at -> https://community.openenergymonitor.org/t/electrification-of-heat-trial-data/27445 And the on-line data from running systems is at -> https://heatpumpmonitor.org/ some systems were also on the trial - the installed HPs on here do considerably better as, in the main, they have been adjusted to run well.

OK @SteamyTea, here's some data for you.... Not sure about the 28% line!! But this shows in general that a low draw in the inverter runs at about 20% loss, while a high draw runs at a much lower loss in the region of 6/7%. Quite low, the last line is still 11%. So given your maniacal focus on parasitic loads, batteries will never be for you!! 😄 Obviously, these need to be taken as a general rule of thumb, I don't think the data from the inverter on the grid is v accurate for example. Also apologies for the shift in the headings - this is as it came across from Excel. First 3 columns are what is what is being generated, next 3 columns are what is being consumed. Total Load less PV Battery Delivered Grid Load Grid Loss %age Battery to house 0 397 397 17 340 323 74 19% Battery to house + ASHP 735 2452 3187 18 2971 2953 234 7% PV to battery and house - low PV 1529 -1139 390 58 374 316 74 19% PV to battery and house -high PV 4237 -3862 375 55 325 270 105 28% PV to diverter with export 4747 -17 4730 -1107 3353 4460 270 6% PV to diverter low PV 932 -21 911 -49 759 808 103 11%

@Marvin We had them do the install and obviously the BUS application - this was in 2023 under the £5k scheme. If I'd known they would supply and then inspect and commission, I think we'd have gone down that route as well. We had a few issues but all in all v pleased (touch wood as it's winter!) with the HP.

Marvin, have you written this up - might be very useful for anyone just embarking on the ASHP/MCS BUS thing. I'm guessing it's not that widely known about.

Our house is similar size 250m2 - MCS insulated slab with UFH, timber frame, triple glazed, v good airtightness, MVHR, warm roof. All electric, it cost us £45/month last year for all electricity imported. That's hot water, heating, everything. But we do have 6.kWp of solar and 15kW of battery storage and we're on Oct Int G0, so try (successfully most of the time) to only use the 7p rate. We had the ASHP installed on the old BUS grant of £5k. It's a Cool Energy unit, similar to this one -> https://coolenergyshop.com/collections/air-source-heat-pumps/products/cool-energy-invertech-high-temp-air-source-heat-pump-ce-ivt9-evi so 9kW. Total cost to us, installed was £250 but we already had the cylinders in place for UFH buffer and DHW tank. We had a heat loss analysis from an M+E engineer and Cool Energy were more than happy to use this for the MCS calculations. Unless it's really cold outside, we only run the ASHP at night on the 7p rate - we don't use it for DHW, only for heating. This works fine and even on really cold days, if the sun shines (we get plenty of solar gain) then we don't need to boost the heating during the day. So 9kWs is fine for a house like ours and I'm guessing yours. Have a look at this deal -> https://coolenergyshop.com/collections/air-source-heat-pumps/products/free-heat-pump-kit-for-self-builds-renovations. You get all the kit for free if you qualify for the BUS grant. I wonder if you completed the heat loss spreadsheet that's on the forum and provided proof of the U values of your wall and windows etc, whether they would accept these in place of doing the heat loss calcs themselves - they're a small outfit, so it might be worth a try.

Interesting read - like lots of us on here, I'm always working out ways to reduce our usage and make the most of off peak electricity prices. Like @Marvin we're all electric, with PV, ASHP and in our case batteries not an EV. Now we're in the new year, I'm just working out what we've used this year. At one point in your analysis @SteamyTea, you say a 20% efficiency loss on batteries would be a best guess. This is one thing I was concerned after I'd installed our batteries. What I've noticed is that at low wattage the losses are higher. If this is the case, then there's probably a base loss due to the inverter being 'on' so to speak and then a %age of the actual wattage being delivered. An example from this morning, with a house load of 323W the inverter was actually drawing 397W from the battery, so 19% - which is about your best guess. Later in the morning with the ASHP drawing power, the house load was 2953W and the inverter was using 3187W from the battery (2452) and PV (735W), so about 7%. Unfortunately for all battery users the lowest loads will be the most common and higher loads more intermittent, so losses would be closer to the 20% than the 7%. I'll have to try to dump data from the inverter to get more data points, for example when the batteries are being charged, either from the grid or from the PV etc.

The open energy monitor guys do a kit -> https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/level-3-heat-pump-monitoring-bundle-emonhp/ And they have a site showing the data from people who have installed the kit and made their data public -> https://heatpumpmonitor.org/

I'd call them and speak to Dave. Hope you get sorted as their support is return to base and test in Grimsby until it fails again !!!!!

And if you don't fancy making something, try open energy monitor - they do a great bit of kit with up to 6 sensors that can be used to monitor the whole house and several appliance circuits as well as up to 6 temperature sensors -> https://openenergymonitor.org/ Their systems are all open source, based in Wales and doesn't rely on any cloud servers if you connect up to a local system. More data than you can shake a stick at as well of plenty of graphing options and apps to waste hours and hours of time on.

In our case, they both were ignorant of the actual legislation - or maybe they were pandering to the 'oooohhh, it's Green Belt, you can't build there!!' mob. But the legislation of course says otherwise for 5 specific cases of application. They should have been cognisant of this and directed the ctte appropriately, as our case, as the appeal proved met one of the criteria.

Solcast can also be useful for getting forecasts as well as I think for historical data -> https://www.solcast.com/ We use it for a dashboard done with the nodered ui tool - borrowed from another source And I know I need to fix it so the sidebar doesn't show.....

We did several times. And on our application spoke for the 3 minutes - which landed on deaf ears. The councillors were completely ignorant of the actual legislation for building in the Green Belt and got it totally wrong, as had planning in their advice to the committee. We took it to appeal and won - the appeal effectively said - 'you're numpties, the application is obviously within the specific clause for the Green Belt of 'infill within a village'. The whole thing was quite stressful. Given the borough has a lot of Green Belt, you would have expected planning in their advice to the ctte and the ctte to know what they are doing.

Agreed - which is why we did one! Unfortunately as we were doing it, a builder with options on a plot of land the village would not have prioritized for new housing found a planning department desperate for quick fixes to their housing shortage. So that was accepted into the Borough LPPt2 as allocated and therefore something we had to accept. A great way of saving land that locals don't think should be allocated, is to designate them as 'local green space' in the neighbourhood plan. This in effect makes planning apply the criteria for Green Belt to any decision. Our plan prioritised a number of small plots which added up to about the same as the large plot the Borough allocated. More than 5 years on, only one of these plots have been built on - a brown field site in the middle of the village - the old British Legion site. The large plot allocated by the Borough has only had some preliminary work done.

My understanding is that a Parish Council's view are treated as if they are a comment by a member of the public. And unless they actually bring up specific planning issues, then they are ignored, as are those from members of the public. Sensible Parish Councils won't object to applications unless there is a valid planning legislation point to be made. But there are a lot of NIMBYS around in Parish Councils.....

Think this was what we did too - if I remember correctly, some inverters have this capability some don't, so you have to choose carefully. The info is on the database, so just download the relevant doc. There are devices that to the limitation separately but ideally you'd have the inverter do it.

At a guess, the spike is maybe what it should be generating and there's a fault somewhere in the wiring which means it only comes through sometimes? I'm assuming the 2 arrays are on separate strings into the inverter? If so, you could try switching the arrays on the inverter - be careful to isolate the DC before you do. This would tell you if there is a fault in the inverter (which would seem unlikely) or in the wiring to the array. Did you do the wiring yourself? If so, it's worth checking each connector to make sure that the connectors are properly clicked into the outside housing. If they aren't, then making a joint can push the connector bit out of the housing causing a fault. EDIT - of course, the spike will be when you came back and slammed the front door in frustration - causing a tremor to run through the house and make the faulty connection work for a bit.

True - and you'd need a helluva'n inverter for this but it's worth knowing what typical usage would be, so adding up the ASHP, base load etc. and also getting into the habit, if you can, of only using high usage appliances serially rather than all together. That way, it will only occasionally mean that you are drawing power from the grid at the expensive rates.