markocosic

Set a laser that shines on your rake and rake at night. Avoids tripping on the string. 😉 If it feels "smooth" with a 3' wide rake it'll feel smooth for mowing or running around on.

Gravel? Ha! Chucked straight into claggy wet clay. Looked absolutely perfect when excavated for the water meter installation though. Historically I suspect you'd never know if the electricity neutral in this area failed. Huge buried cooper network between the houses until they started fitting meters.

Not always. e.g. 1970s built council housing in Cambridge has 1/2" copper running from brass stop tap in the street all the way under the floor and up through the slab. 1/2" copper the whole way.

Quote edited for relevance. The UK is in the suppression part of the cycle where working hard is rewarded with the fruits of your labour being seized and squandered. Public opinion shifts the other way once the economic wheels of "communism" finally fall off.

A2W monoblocs for the european market @sharpener is spot on. All the gubbins are machine made on production lines. Usually by others and bought in by the heat pump vendor. Some bean tin pressing and assembly processes are automated. Final assembly of all the electrical spaghetti etc is by humans. What you're NOT shown on videos.like these says a lot: Water to water units can be even more low volume and manual. I was at the Thermia factory a few years ago and virtually nothing was robots at their volumes.

Heat pumps aren't made in the volumes to justify huge automation. They'll be made in the eastern bloc more for the attitude of folks towards working than the wages. Productivity is the issue facing the UK rather than wages.

I suspect it's because they're selling your PV onwards as "green" electricity and want plausible deniability that it's green. Battery only? That's not green. You're reselling what's already been claimed as green when it was sold to you. PV only? Great that's green. PV and battery? Perfect. We'll claim that all export is green because we say that you should only export your own generation but we know full well that you're "electricity laundering" by importing electricity and the re-exporting it with a plausibly green tag attached. I suspect. On the basis of PV being necessary rather than just a battery. Octopus never had the decency to answer me when I asked why MCS was necessary given that government explicitly says that it's their decision what to require for the SEG.

Duration of the load. Electric showers are unlikely to run for hours at a time all at the same time. In aggregate they're "meh" at the substation; and it's the in aggregate part that matters. Unlike PV export or EV import. EVs at 7.2 kW apiece are going to be a swine for them. Won't take many to jeopardize substations. Lots.of illegal installations (strictly speaking notification and express consent is required for new equipment over 16A/phase; and as you say they've no clue where it's installed... probably no visibility over meter data either...) PV is next up at 3.6 kW apiece. Heat pumps at (typically) less than 3.6 kW apiece are the least concerning of the "new age" equipment being connected.

Good to know; thanks! Unclear why either are required of course; but a duopoly is preferable to a monopoly.

Which effectively means you cannot justify any meaningful investment without MCS. Yes you can pay a little extra planning taxa and not get grant for heat pumps. Unreasonable but probably not a deal breaker. Preventing receipt of export payments by ANY measure (not even the option of paying a small planning tax to legitimise the install somehow) is a proper swindle. (I have a sub £1000 DNO notified but non MCS install FWIW, and spill the excess. I'd be happy to "waste money" on more PV beyond the very basic if there were some option for economic recovery; but it's not viable without export and MCS installers fees have become too juicy since the Ukraine invasion to justify the hired in labour)

Nope - you're excluded from ALL export payments if it wasn't installed by an MCS union member - by their buddies over in the energy retail sector. Unlike electrical wiring in the house there's no option for paying building control to inspect and sign off an existing installation either. All of which fudges up the economics of the installation. To be fair the PV installation economics have reached the point were the PV itself is a loss leader and they're seeking to make up the margins on the batteries. My brother accidentally secured a negotiating position by asking for 10 kWh with 10 kW charge/discharge rates alongside 10 kW(p) worth of panels. The monkeys quoted for 10 kWh; rocked up with the GivEnergy Shenzhen specials; and were invited to pop them back in the van as they were only rated for a 3.7 kW charge/discharge rate. A reasonable offer of "Install what you priced or scratch the battery off the quote and call it quits" was made. Turns out not so reasonable as there was literally zero margin applied to the PV element of the installation. I do wonder if Octopus et al will make similar decisions in heat pumps. Get them a heat pump on a finance / rental scheme; do all the donkey work up front at an attractive cost; and hope that they're perpetually too broke to buy out the installation or quit the lease at the earliest opportunity and hook up their own unit...

I don't know the timetable @JamesPa The country may need to go truly broke (cashflow broke not just balance sheet broke) before reality sets in. This could be a fun event for those wishing to stir the pot FWIW: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/heat-pumps-the-1st-million-a-participant-led-conference-1stmillionhp-tickets-529436196917

Are you at all surprised that the union is writing itself into being mandatory everywhere? Pigs at the trough; with big corporate friends helping them design the schemes to fill it with the help of government. I doubt anybody else will step in because: - the level of scrutiny for a new scheme will exceed that of the MCS (you'll be tasked with proving yourself; whereas the failure that is MCS is deemed to deliver good results / it's use isn't in question) - in the long term the scheme is dead anyway (market forces will kill it off as an unnecessary overhead just as soon as the government grant gravy train/pig trough runs dry) - manufacturers won't want to get involved with running their own scheme as they have too many real assets to lose (whereas it isn't worth rinsing the "charitable" MCS because through the courts as it has no asset to speak of) Shortages of supply shouldn't be an issue. This particular scheme is an indirect "boiler tax" that impacts the cost of selling a boiler into the domestic market. So long as there are vendors that only do heat pumps they'll not be incentivised to divert supply to the union installers.

YouTube? It used to be the case that you needed to go to college to find people to teach you things. There's now an astonishing amount of decent content online and free of charge; such that you don't necessarily need local college. (in amongst the facepalm, instashame, and tittok type garbage) Certain manufacturer provided training is also very good and often available free of charge. They lack the structure of an apprenticeship though; so you probably need a job as a lackey for somebody decent to look and learn whilst also getting paid and watching YouTube in the spare time. This is good for trades I think. Where it falls down is engineering technicians to run CNC machine tools or layup composite components or run a pharma lab. Some of the larger companies do hire apprentices and pay the "apprenticeship tax" indirectly of having to jump through hoops. The rest hire graduates from a "university" that screams "I ought to have gone to the local polytechnic but it doesn't exist anymore so I've wasted 3 years and £150k to highlight that I'd be a trainable hire as an apprentice engineering technician" etc. Which is a tragic waste for them. Those companies also pay the "apprenticeship tax" for not dealing with the BS of the apprenticeship system and paying somebody like Blair to tick all the boxes for them such that they can claim the scheme as a legit tax deductible thing. A tragic waste for them too.

Really? Blair junior is doing very well indeed by offering box ticking as a service service at multiverse. I'd say those making up the rules knew exactly what they were doing. 😉

I graduated 2008 (engineer) Every single teacher that graduated alongside me has quit the profession or gone private. Couldn't stand licking the backsides of their (union) heads.

I didn't suggest preventing anybody from doing this. I do however suggest that there isn't athe army of well suited individuals that you seem to suggest there is within the domestic plumbing sector; and that the reason for this is that job attracted the wrong skillset/mindset to be doing anything new that involves much thinking. Target those who will bring best bank for the buck. Smarter. Younger. Hungrier. Others are welcome to retrain but don't build into your plan the assumption that blue van man will be the ones to save the day.

There are always exceptions. They're probably already in the space. The are NOT however, en masse, as useful a set of people for this task as your initial gut instinct suggested. Target the training at higher calibre, younger, folks to lead on this. Let the odd boiler basher who knows more than how to unblock a sink and bash a combi in the wall join them. Don't go out of your way to *change* people when you can just *train* people though. You then have two sets of installers available. People with a clue to design systems. Old boys and girls to clean the van and fit the pipes where they're told to. Matey that fitted by business partners heat pump used to be a high end kitchen fitter for example. More of the fun thinking design part and less of the fussy karen housewife in heat pumps though and good money so... switch he went...with an old boy plumber as his lackey. Leave British Gas keep their thickos in their blue vans waxing lyrical about the hydrogen future whilst sticking gas safety labels on old boilers for landlords and pensioners. They're out of the way there. They can sit there and rot until retirement or redundancy whichever comes first. You want better people to do the new jobs in the new economy etc.

I would say the same. For the most part the type of person that went into that job back then is not the type of person it's worth training up on heating system design. They weren't numerate. They had the practical skills to do same old same old though. Ditto the calibre of the kids that British Gas et al hire. Let's be clear. HR's aim here is stupid enough and unambitious enough to stay for life on a low wage; yet just trainable enough to do servicing and maintenance. Go further back though (the folks about to retire) and you'll have a higher calibre of installer. Back then you did need to do some design work and understand sizing, range rating, etc. Eastern europeans are a curve ball. Many of high calibre but prepared to work low wages historically. That's unwinding rapidly though. Commercial work is also a different league. We're taking once a domestic plumber always a domestic plumber for your middle aged army. For doing next new designs that involve some math and multi-trade in the sense of elec/plumb/building fabric you want to hire/train a different mentality and a different mental capacity than the type of kid who decided to do domestic plumbing back then. Does it make sense why some old.dogs are likely to be unteachable; or at least uneconomic to teach when there alternative is teaching a keen youngster from scratch; if.ypu think about who actually went into that job back then?

Yes. Installs must be safe. Regulate for that. As per any other trade. MCS as a condition of permitted development is the ridiculous one. It should be a simple objective technical requirement to obtain planning. As per any other trade. Rather than making it conditional that a member of that particular union installs the unit in order for the nose rating on the certificate/noise calculation to be valid.

The continental Europeans don't treat Irish travellers the same way the UK does. Hence you CAN park £5k outside the door and expect it to be there when you return. UK...not something I'd advertise?

That's also happening - e.g that Heat Geek lot are the poster children for BEIS. Spend £0.20 subsidising courses for installers (virtually free to attend/complete yet hard enough work to actually finish the course that you wouldn't do it as an excuse to get out of work) and bring a few hundred installers up a level. Installers busy ever day of the week, making good money, and installs consistently in the sCOP 3.5-4 range. The big boys (OVO, E.ON, Octopus, et al) are dead against it though.

Often designers are subbed out in the MCS model. Prime contractor subs out both design and install. Or they are the designer and they do carry all risks so it's a cookie cutter turnkey everything install or take a hike. They're rarely insured for professional indemnity. Consumers don't ask. If anything goes very wrong the models appear to be that the very small limited company disappears (having dragged this out long enough to extract profits) OR the nationwide installer relies on having more lawyers and more patience than you to exhaust your appetite for risk etc by bringing it out of small claims and into real cost where you're risking costs and having to counter their experts etc.

Exactly Not always/ entirely. If coming coincides with PV generation; and heating season coincides with little renewable electrical generation potential; then it makes sense to design houses that need more cooling than heating. (i.e. to overheat) You do need to book them during the surplus period though; not at night; for that to work. Similarly using local cooling as a dump for excess (grid overloading in an overbuilt PV scenario) PV isn't daft.

...that they run flat out or, at least run hard, when producing DHW. Compressors leak internally. Hitting higher temperatures for DHW needs high pressures. High pressures leak too much internally if you run the compressor slowly. So you run it hard to avoid operating in the inefficient part of the compressor envelope. Perhaps dialling back a notch if the tank can't take that amount of power without the flow temp rising too much; but running hard nevertheless. They'll be at minimum output cycling for space heating.