ProDave

Octopus have told me my standard variable rate will rise to 20.24p in October. Are they REALLY saying north of Scotland Octopus Go will be rising to 24.6855p? Bang goes any saving switching to GO? Good job I have not yet requested a smart meter.

At the back of our sun room, not visible from inside. I might make a cupboard around them some time.

Anything you burn sends CO2 up your chimney. The atmosphere does not differentiate between new CO2 and millions of years old CO2. It does the same regardless. From the planets point of view the best thing you can do is make something from your wood rather than burn it. If you want to pretend that burning recently grown wood is carbon neutral then go ahead, after all that is what they believe with DRAX but the rest of us won't be convinced. P.s I do burn wood mostly from our own trees but I have never claimed it is carbon neutral, I know it is NOT. Wood burning is a useful source of secondary heat, particularly if you have the trees to collect it from and it all comes as part of normal management of the trees, but please don't kid yourself you are helping to save the planet by burning some of it.

Re the Graff. I would probably buy a free standing caravan porta poti and use that with the appropriate chemicals and take it to a public toilet to empty it until you get power. The cost and noise of running a generator 24/7 would drive me insane.

My take would be you still owe them £5000. Make it clear to them that if they try and pursue this e.g. through the small claims court, that you will counter claim all the additional expenses you have incurred due to their delays, mistakes and incompetence, and your counter claim will be for more than their final bill.

How much power do you need? Typically a static caravan will have a gas fire, a gas water heater and a gas cooker. So your electricity usage in the short term will be pretty low. I would be looking at a few rechargable LED camping lights and then run the generator for only a couple of hours at a time condensing all your "needs electricity" activity into one time slot.

Yes, just be aware of what might be in the wall before drilling holes in it.

So by strapping the collector to the back of the PV panels, he has turned his water to water heat pump, into an air to water heat pump.

Lets do my usual sum. This allows you to store and use 5kWh of your free solar PV that would otherwise get exported. At typically 18p per kWh that would save you 90p per day. Now you won't have that much surplus every day, lets say you have that much surplus on average 180 days per year. So this battery could save you about £162 per year. So just under 8 years payback. by which time the batteries will have done 1400 charge / discharge cycles or more. Getting closer, but still not there yet for me.

I suspect it will disappoint. A bit like vertical axis wind turbines look an attractive idea until you look at the details and they are not as efficient as a conventional turbine.

I am just north of Alness. We did have another member building up your way but he has not been on for some time. I would be very surprised if you could truck material in from England any cheaper, that sounds rather dodgy to me. A 7.5t licence is very handy, we used it for the house move up from England and again when I hired a 7.5t flatbed to collect a load of scaffold.

You FIT contract is at a set price (depending when the panels were installed) so there would be no benefit to you whatsoever moving the FIT to another provider. So just keep it where it is and keep providing the meter readings.

I doubt there are many people who waste much. I am constantly looking for ways to reduce our usage but have failed, because nothing is on that is not on for a purpose. I guess I could watch less television in the evening. Wear my clothes for longer before putting them in the wash so fewer washes. Shower only once a week? But none of those options are attractive. Bear in mind less than half of our energy use is heating the house and hot water. You would think there was scope for some non heating use savings but I can't find them. Re solar PV, I self use probably 95% of what we generate without batteries so I have concluded at the moment battery storage is really only viable if you have substantially more than 4kWp

Yes, my designer initially wanted extra foundations to support sleeper walls for intermediate support of the downstairs joists. I said no. the first floor joists can span that gap without intermediate support so the ground floor joists can as well.

The build cost will be similar to an empty plot, but you will have to add demolition cost of the prefab which will certainly contain a lot of asbestos. So if you budget £2K per square metre for the build that will be an outlay of about £800K. What would the finished property be worth?

In the village we lived in down south, when someone had a skip it was a means to exchange your "waste". Overnight a lot of the stuff in the skip would be removed by someone wanting to re use it, and be replaced by a different set of waste.

I learned that lesson in an industrial unit. I was there to change the hand dryer in the gents toilet. So I switch off the MCB labelled "Gents toilet" and heard a groan from the end of the corridor where I had just turned off an office full of people using computers.

The usual reason for joining 2 apparently separate lighting circuits is when you find a borrowed neutral. It is found most on landing lights where the light may have got it's L from the downstairs light circuit and N from the upstairs light circuit. If you reduce the image to a smaller size (in Kb not necessarily pixels) you can upload it to the forum. I find the latest version of PhotoScape is good at producing very efficient size photos.

Different meters behave differently. At our last house the red light would flash when exporting power, but not count it on it's display. I believe even the basic dumb meters have an export register but you can't read it on the display but you can read it via the IR port. Our present meter goes solid red when exporting. And now the display alternates between the reading and RED (Reverse Energy Detected) which was intended as a function to detect if you have been tampering with the metering. I know my diverter is doing a good job, i have installed my own export meter, and it so far in 3 years has clocked up a total of 275kWh of export, which is mostly when the surplus is more than the immersion can absorb, or when away and not using hot water and the HW tank temperature has maxed out. I built a crude data logging function into my diverter. I know when the immersion is on, it draws 2.8kWh so simply counting each on period and a simple summation tells me last time I checked, that about 1/3 of what we generate ends up in the immersion heater.

Thanks @Bramco My PV diverter is partly my own design based on another design I saw published some time ago. My works on a half second time slice, on the basis that at full power a 3kW immersion will deliver 1Wh in just under a second, so at half second time slicing I should remain comfortably under 1Wh regardless of how much power is going to the immersion heater. In that half second interval the immersion can be at anything from 0% to 100% power in 2% increments. I have not looked at how the OpenEnergyMonitor one works but I guess it's a similar principle. With mine I only read the import and export power once every half second and update the immersion power percentage to be applied to the next half second. And my time slicing is synchronised to the grid, I have an ac input rectified but not smoothed and read by a digital input to give me 100 time events per second at close to zero crossing of the ac waveform. I know it works correctly with the present standard electricity meter. There are times when the PV surplus is more than the immersion heater can absorb (in practice I find mine consumes 2.8kW at full power) so I also turn on a radio controlled remote switched socket when it is getting close to 100% and in the shoulder months I have a 700W electric convection heater plugged into that. In the summer such surplus just gets exported. Good to know a smart meter does appear to work on a similar measurement principle to a standard meter.

Make two stud wall frames interleaved so the outer wall cladding is on one frame and the inner wall cladding on the other. It will make the wall thicker but there will be no direct contact between inner and outer.

Yes I am sure it was Jeremy that came up with the energy bucket description. I suspect there are not any issues with a smart meter as there are a lot of them installed now and conventional solar PV diverters were not working with them, we would have heard a lot of chatter about it by now.

The energy bucket idea I think is just a way someone explained it when explaining how a PV diverter works. It might measure the power at rapid intervals but the register does not clock up any usage until 1 watt hour has been measured. To this allows the PV diverter to burst fire a 3kW immersion heater for short bursts. So imagine your solar PV is generating 1kW of excess power. As long as the immersion heater on time is 1/3 of the off time between bursts, then the net result is the immersion heater is using the same power as the excess PV and nothing is metered either way. Now if a smart meter registers the power used in a different way or a smaller energy bucket than 1 watt hour, the solar PV diverter as we now it would not work. We would instead have to switch to a phase angle firing or something similar which is more complicated and likely to have EMC issues if not done properly.

It really is my dislike of the smart meters that is holding me back from going ahead with this. Another question to anyone with a smart meter and uses a solar PV diversion device to dump excess solar PV into an immersion heater. Are there any issues using these devices, that usually work on burst firing the immersion heater with a smart meter? The reason I ask is I was at a customers house the other day where one was fitted so I decided to have a play with the buttons and see what it was capable of showing on it's screen. Scrolling through all the options of different displays, I came across one that was displaying the total registered power to several decimal places and the decimal places were updating very quickly. Now I have always understood the standard with conventional meters was they worked on an "energy bucket" and the reading clocked up each tome 1 watt hour had passed. The solar pv diverters work on the principle of short bursts of higher power but never enough to exceed 1 watt hour in each burst, so think of the bucket partly filling when the immersion is on and then emptying when the immersion stops due to solar pv export. I got the impression due to the very fast display update that the smart meter might be working on a different measurment principle or a much smaller energy bucket. What I don't want is to swap to a smart meter to save a few ££ on my electricity usage, only to find a solar PV diverter does not work. Yes I am probably over thinking it.

If the image was not so big I could paste it here. 9.1MB it does not need to be that high resolution. There was probably a reason the two separate circuits have been put as one now, perhaps they were always linked? Or more likely a borrowed neutral situation.