ProDave

The ones I use as "outriggers" are some leftovers that only have an intact peg on one end, so can't be used as a proper brace. I kept them when I sold most of the scaffold and use them like that with the "dud" end in the ground.

Someone else said one brace per level possibly two. for me it was a case of how many have I got? and spread them about evenly. No the toe boards are not about rigidity but safety. And on the working platforms, you should have two handrails, one on the lower set of pegs as well, another thing I did after I took the photo.

Do these things run at variable powers like an ASHP or are they "all or nothing" I think what I am getting at, is should you be expecting variable speed inverter drive? It does not say.

It just shows how some councils like to waste YOUR money on "ologists" We had none of that up here, in spite of the fact I know bats are around, it is common to see them at dusk. I guess some councils would want all sorts of impact studies and schemes because we are a riparian site.

I am not convinced solar PV actually makes a house more attractive to the average buyer. In fact I know of one sale where the buyer (against my advice) pulled out of the purchase because of the solar PV. When we were trying to sell the old house those viewing were completely disinterested in the fact it had solar PV and was paying the FIT for another 20 years. So no hope of a buyer being at all interested if there is not even the FIT to entice them with. But then again the average buyer is not the least bit interested in the EPC rating and the annual fuel bills.

Above 3.68Kw you need prior permission from the DNO BEFORE you connect it. they may or may not give permission and they may or may not make a charge if they have to upgrade the network to accommodate the size of the generation. I don't think from the DNO's point of view there is any difference who fits it.

That incentive where they were selling derelict houses for £1 a while ago, would have been a prime candidate to flatten the lot and rebuild rather than try and get people to patch up rows and rows of derelict old houses.

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion if we are ever to seriously reduce energy consumption on heating, then there needs to be a modern equivalent of slum clearance and replace old houses with energy eficcient ones en-mass. Of course that needs mass market house builders who really understand how to make low energy houses, and I don't believe we have that yet.

Which company is it that has just gone bust in this case?

The RHI scheme is supposed to get a "measure" of how much energy your house will use with it's new renewable energy system and pay you a subsidy based on that. So yes if your house is old and needs a lot of heating you will get a bigger payment than a modern well insulated house. But you will be paying higher fuel bills than that modern house. When someone starts talking about telling the RHI energy assessor how poor the house is to get a low EPC, and then goes and builds the house to a better standard, then that is just simple fraud.

Perimiter of 40M is not that great, at a guess (I bet is is not a 10M per side square) that would be 6 lengths along 2 sides and 3 lengths on the other 2, so 18 bays of scaffold. I had 5 bays along the front and back and 3 bays along the sides though not as high perhaps. I would just buy enough and re sell at the end. Though I did choose to keep some, what is in my picture above is almost all that I have left now though I do have a lot more boards than I used for that.

Rout out a recessed area in the back of the board so the clip sits up into a recess? Put the clip on the inside of the chords, and that funny sticky out bit that would then be outside, grind it off.

Standard length of each section is 2.4M (8ft) though you can get 6ft (whatever that is in metric) lengths as well though less common. Standard width is 5 boards which is 1.2M / 4ft but you can get narrow 3 board wide transoms handy if you have to scaffold in a narrow gap. Make sure you get enough diagonal braces I put a "bracing tower" to stabilise a tall lift. The big question is will your builders work on "your" scaffold. In my case the answer was yes. As it happened I did not have enough so 3 sides of the house were done with my own, and the 4th with the builders (cuplock) scaffold. I got back just about what I paid. I did lose some planks as they rotted due to bad storage. Yes it is heavy. It can be hard work putting it up, take your time, This was a days work for the pair of us: Toe boards are to stop stuff rolling off and falling on someone, obviously in this photo they have not been fitted yet.

The drainage field is now 15 years old. Pump failure has been at random times. The first one lasted 7 years (that was the original expensive Itallian one) the second one lasted 5 years, that was a cheap one and a post mortem dismantling revealed the steel casing of the motor had rusted through letting water in. The next one failed after a year but upon removal it was found to have fallen over onto it's side so we suspected that was the cause, the float switch would not have turned off and the motor ran until it expired. It is really only the recent failure at 1 year old that has been unexplained, but of course this blockage would explain that as it would have been working hard not moving much, until it expired. If the rain stops I will be going to try roding with the PEX pipe and hose "lance"

A heat pump is exactly that, the workings of a fridge. Just as your freezer extracts heat from the freezer compartment at -15 so does a heat pump. Up here in the Highlands a few weeks each winter when it's -10 at night and not above 0 in the day is usual and my air source heat pump has kept the house warm admirably, and heated the hot water.

The trouble with solar PV is the amount it generates is dependant on how much the sin shines, and that varies from day to day and season to season. A system that produces "just enough" on a bright sunny day, will produce a lot less on a dull day. So you might want to just install as much as you have room for or can afford, so on the dull days it can produce a useful amount. Any surplus between what is generated and what is used, gets exported to the grid. That is not bad if you are getting paid for it, but feels "wrong" if you are not. The normal thing to soak up excess generation is a device to send excess power to an immersion heater. you can buy them ready made or do as I have just done, and build your own for a fraction of the cost.

Yes plug the computer in to read out the data. The last one I had a set of commands you could sent and it would respond by streaming a load of data. It is powered independant of the USB port so runs fine without that connected. I just need to do a small mod (via a jumper) to stop the board resetting each time you open the serial port (the jumper is so you can re enable that function for program upload) Yes I guess a dead reckoning clock will do, after all it does not need to be accurate, just a way to start accumulating the dumped power to the next days register. So in the same way I count 3600 seconds before writing data to EEPROM, I can count 86,400 seconds then advance to the next day. As long as the mod works and I can connect / disconnect the serial port without issue it should work.

Now that idea I DO like. I have some left over PEX from the UFH that I am sure is long enough and with the hose attached I will give it a go.

Not without some serious work and finding yet more large pipe fittings.

We are having a similar orangery but on the south side of the house.We are not putting any heating in as it will be a seasonal room which may end up too cold in winter and too hot in summer. If you want this to be an all year extension, why have so much glass? Why not make it a proper extension?

So it all seems to be working okay. Yesterday was dull with mot much generation, but I did get my export meter connected. Today was a better day. Nice sunny (but still slightly hazy) morning. As we were both out not much to use the power ourselves so the dump controller sent about 3KWh to the immersion. This afternoon turned dull again and the WM and stuff has been busy so not much going spare. As of just now generation for the day 7.7KWh 3KW of that has gone to the immersion, and my export meter is reporting 0.6KWh has been exported. So I guess "house stuff" has used about 4KWh. So the dump controller is letting a little escape, so I might tweak the scaling a little, it looks like it is slightly under measuring the generation output. The next software tweak is to log daily power sent to the immersion as well as total. Any bright ideas how to do that as there is no RTC to tell me when tomorrow has started?

So another day and nothing definitive. Yesterday my big fat 50mm mdpe pipe couplers arrived so I have just been and enlarged the hole near the bottom and cut the pipe. I sent my drain rods up it snd they met no resistance. I have 10 metres of rods which was not enough to reach the end, but it would have been well past "the sump" and half way up the hill to the highest point. As a sanity check I tried turning the pump on with the pipe cut and got a good high flow fountain, so definitely know it's not the pump or the pipework up to that first inspection point. I am now torn between buy some more drain rods so I can really rod the whole length from the bottom, or open up a big pit at the top and cut into the pipe there and rod it down.

I did this in our first house. the shower tray got bigger than the original plans and when I was jig sawing the hole in the floor, it took a few seconds to realise just what the pretty fountain of water was coming from.

That's £1352 for the panels, there is a guy on ebay selling the same Tranergy inverter I have, new for £300 so £1650 for a 4Kw system. By the time you have added mounting rails, switches and hardware you should still be under £2K

That coil looks to be at the bottom suggesting it is a heat input coil in an ordinary indirect tank. A heat output coil in a thermal store would be at the top of the tank.