ProDave

Wholesale gas price hit a record of an astonishing 508p per therm today, 13 times it's price a year ago.

So I rest my case, switching to an electric combi will definitely increase the amount of gas being burned.

My first house was a developer new build. Not long after moving it, it became clear that there was a strip of land about 5ft wide beyond the back fence that was ours, so I wanted to move the fence (an extra 5ft of garden is a lot when your garden is only 30ft long) It was a terraced house and all the houses in the row owned their bit of this extra strip. So collectively we submitted one planning application to move the fence of all the properties (it needed planning as it was >1M tall and adjoined a highway) Planning was granted and over a weekend we collectively relocated the fence.

That wasn't what I was asking. Say you burned 1000kWh of gas in a year. You replace your gas boiler with an electric combi, and use the same amount of heat. The electricity you use gets generated by a gas powered power station (all the greener / cheaper alternatives are already at capacity) How many extra kWh of gas will the gas powered station consume to supply your electric combi boiler?

Yes is seems okay. The weakness I would say is the bits screw in. From past experience years ago that tended to corrode to the point you could not unscrew the bit. This is Something like my 5th or 6th soldering iron, the old Weller was definitely the longest lasting, but near to falling apart now and obsolete so unable to buy parts.

I would love someone to work out the round circuit efficiency of burning gas in a gas powered power station to generate electricity to heat your house with an electric boiler. My instinct says it will burn MORE gas as well as costing you a lot more. People seem to make such suggestions thinking somehow we can get any amount of clean electricity we want. While I agree we have to reduce fossil fuel usage, energy security is a more urgent issue. Do we still have any coal powered stations still in a state they could be re started? As unpalatable as that may be to the environmentalists, as a short term alternative to Russian gas, it has to be considered?

1480 kWh of electric used to heat my house for the last 12 months, at 21p per kWh that's £310 It was under £200 when we first moved in before prices went up and will be more like £400 next year. But on the subject of "in the lead" I was called to the local gun club to work out why 1 months electricity was nearly £1000 That was caused by a 3kW panel heater that had been turned on with the thermostat down at it's minimum frost protection setting. Only the thermostat is broken so that was a 3kW heater running 24/7 using 72kWh per day or 2232kWh in a month. There are going to be a LOT of people staring at their energy bills in disbelief.

Just bought one of these from the middle of Lidl to replace my vintage weller soldering station that is falling apart https://www.lidl.co.uk/p/diy-projects/parkside-soldering-station/p50335

I make in 0.003 m-2.K-1 better But on a .032 m-2.K-1 product, that is an improvement of about 9% so more than you might think.

My inverter is in a shed and connected to the shed CU which is a submain direct from the meter box CU. My generation meter is in the shed next to the inverter. There was an odd comment when getting the home report done for our last house. The assessor made some comment that he could only take the solar PV into account when calculating the EPC if he could see the generation meter next to the main meter. I think that was just the assessor being silly. The EPC (full SAP) for our new build was done without anyone visiting and so there was nobody to be bothered about where the meters were located. I agree than MCS is pointless unless you have a very large PV array and there is no way you will self use all of it.

Also, if you are building a well insulated, airtight house to close to passive house standards, you will probably find you don't need any heating upstairs. We have no heating in the bedrooms and just a small area of UFH in the bathrooms to avoid "cold feet"

If you are having a larder definitely not under there. I found no point whatsoever in a hall or landing in a modern house, they get plenty of heat from surrounding rooms and almost never turned on.

I bet her hands are like leather.

I guess he means these https://www.gasandwaterpipelines.co.uk/ Can't find an address anywhere on that website, that I would find worrying.

Jeremy has not been on the forum for a while now, and the EU made him surrender that domain name after Brexit.

Don't go putting an MCB at both ends, they are not directional. Do you not want a generation meter so you can see how much you generate? I have one for my own interest. Agreed now the supplier is only interested in export now we have the smart export thing. BUT to claim the smart export payment you must have an MCS install so all notions of you designing it and choosing how to do it go out of the window.

Click mode is my favourite for cheap but good sockets. Tool station well them

That would make sense. I originally bought this Pi in about 2012 so one of the early ones, initially intending to use it for my solar PV dump controller but decided an Arduino would be a simpler device for that job. It was only about 2 years ago I blew the dust of this old Pi and put it into use.

Mine stayed connected for almost 24 hours until the morning reboot timer turned it off, so I have removed the reboot timer and see how long it keeps going

That will be a cold roof so you have to leave some space for ventilating the outer surface particularly on the sloping bits. Attention to detail when doing this is what makes it good or bad. I would certainly make a loft hatch up into the roof space if there is not one already and have a look at what is there. You might be able to look down into the sloping areas to see what is in there and how thick the rafters are, The floor level eaves spaces should be made accessible with a trap door if not already and you can see what you can do there to improve things. Detail is everything.

So this flat is basically the roof space of the block if it is all like that. Do you own it (leasehold?) or rent it? There is nothing in principle stopping you insulating that properly but the work to do so is massive basically strip all the plasterboard off, insulate the frame / structure properly, replace plasterboard skim and paint. Why would anything in the leasehold stop you doing that? Do you have access to the small loft space above or is that not included in the lease? This sort of issue with no or poor insulation affects a huge proportion of the UK housing stock and is harder to deal with in a leasehold property. In all honesty, it might just b easier to move, and look carefully at the EPC when buying, and if you can avoid leasehold.

Mine usually works for a few hours before losing connection. If it lasts to the end of today then I will remove the "morning re boot" timer and see how long it holds up.

Interesting suggestion. I have implemented that on my Music box, I will let you know if it keeps a connection any longer.

This is just something you get used to up here. You have to grit your teeth and choose a different supplier. You try explaining to someone south of Manchester that the "Black Isle" is NOT a remote Scottish island, it is art of the main land. The trouble is not with the supplier, but the couriers. A lot of suppliers have negotiated deals with just one courier to get the best rate they can and some couriers do indeed charge more to go further than the central belt, and if that is the only courier they have a deal with, they either pay that couriers surcharge, or pay full price for a different courier. I am not defending them, just explaining why it is the case. When you do find a supplier that does not charge more, expect it to take longer than stated. Often the final leg of the journey gets subcontracted to one of a couple of local couriers and that's an extra day on the delivery, and any on line tracking out of the window.

I can't help directly, but I have a Pi dedicated to running Pi Music box mostly to stream internet radio. This is a hard ethernet connection not wifi. It barely manages to stream something for 12 hours without stopping. Sometimes you can log into it's user interface and re start the stream, other times it needs a re boot. I already have it on a timer to give it a hard re boot every morning. I don't know if the root of my problem is slow and sometimes flakey broadband, or just buggy software.