Ferdinand

I'm on Oh Bugger AVRO Went Bankrupt ! Just pv panels and a house - no Car or Battery. So the potential gain for me is to do either a divert device and water tank with a feed of pre-warmed water into the Combi, or export at full price. Or potentially a house battery, but they are on lead times and I may not need it. My current challenge is to avoid using gas for heating this winter.

Grant Shapps is hopefully about to be kicked out of the window on the tenth floor by his miserable, self-serving, unethical arse. (Opinionated - moi?) He has abused his position as Minister of Transport to use the Civil Service to support sectional interests he supports, and cannot be trusted. Such an individual is not fit for a junior position, never mind a senior one.

I'm already with Octopus on another tariff.

I am now moving onto Octopus Agile Outgoing, which gives me a wholesale price for exports, and to keep my existing tariff for imports. Which at present seems a one way bet.

UK gas power stations are also being run as it is beneficial to generate electricity here as an extra to supply the continent through the network of interconnectors - an alternative to shipping gas though the extra pipelines that don't exist. At the moment, we are exporting 3GW to France for example - which is about 10% of everything we are generating. Whilst their current demand is 40 GW (presumably including exports), so their net demand will be ~45 GW. Interesting - they have 2-3GW coming in from each of UK, DE and SP, and have maxed out exports to CH, and some to IT. Perhaps that is Switzerland turning its hydropower down like Norway? F

Are they? I track diesel, and locally it is now back down from a peak of just under £2.00 per litre to £1.79. Some way to go, but it has started. One interesting observation I have seen wrt Liz Truss is that because fuel went up by 75% ish in 12 months ago to now, that is actually a lot to begin dropping out of the annual inflation index very soon. Diesel and petrol have a 3.8% weighting in CPI. On Energy Charges, the going-bust peak was summer / autumn 2021 - so standing charge may go some way back down.

I'm not sure if I posted it here, but Exeter has car parks with panels for the roof, and here is a recent Amazon warehouse in Tilbury with a 4.83MWp install. That's 11,500 solar panels. My local one seem to have some, too:

Under FIT it was an investment in a long term cashflow, plus some PR, for businesses. Not it has to pay off, of course. Since 2021 demand has shot up, looking at a few industry sources. 2022 is going to be a very big year, now that energy bills will be high for some time. I'm not sure we have the legal structure correct, though; what it probably needs is LLs investing and charging Ts for the energy at a competitive rate, but that leaves risk with LL. Yes - who gets the cashflow is an issue. The FIT setup was good for that - I know even residential LLs who put in multiple installs on rental properties back in 2011 or so.

Unattainable aspirations are an interesting concept. My ambition is never to grow up 🙃. @James travers there is some good advice between the childish games so far here. One question not asked - what is the timing? Has this developed during the current hot spell (!), or have you noticed this before? Heatwaves can cause these things to develop or become more prominent - in London it could be something with the ground moving if clay, or trees sucking up water and drying it out even more. Your thoughts on that? Does the crack reach right to the ground? Ferdinand

Take care not to get your backside burnt. It's easy to do 😀. On topic, I think that a lower priced steel one may be a better option - someone here may know of a smaller or more wholesale supplier. TBH I'm not sure if a wooden door liner will cut it, unless you have that explicitly from the person who regulates it Ferdinand * I'll edit that title in a minute.

I like the way of thinking of the Grid as a seasonal storage battery - that is export in the summer, import in the winter - is quite a useful tool. That can then = if desired - be included in a wider emissions analysis (since we know the carbon intensity of our grid electricity) and if really desired extended to a lifecycle analysis.

Poisson Distribution is what chip shops and Grimsby are for. I fear I may have missed the point...

To wrap up, the electric meter is telling me that I have imported 83 kWh and exported 283kWh in the same 3.5 weeks. I am switching to Octopus Outgoing Agile tariff, as I will make some more export payments.

Just having looked at my Octopus, it says I am using between 2 and 5 kWh of leccy per day. Family of one. 200 sqm house. 10kWp solar, which faces 80% E 20% W and is filthy. Away for night of 6/7 Aug, and less sun the last few days. 1 shower per day, usually gas. The Smart Meter app has not detected the gas yet, but I read the meter just for you and it says I have used 1.714 m3 in 3 weeks, which is around 0.7 kWh per day. It was installed and zeroed on July 25th (says the label).

You need one of Blart Versenwald III's off-switches for children. With apologies to the ghost of Douglas Adams. He was supposed to design a race of fanatical superwarriors, and got bored.

This thread is quite an interesting conversation. I'd like to explore what we think "Eco house" means, in the context of the riverside house posted up by @CharlieKLP. There's a separate issue about woodburning being sustainable, which I'll do on a separate post if I pursue it. Basics first. The house posted up is called Backwater, and is fronting a 'lagoon' at Wroxham. Address: Backwater, Beech Road, NORWICH, NR12 8TP. Linky. I'm happy putting that there as it is off their own holiday rental website. The Planning App is here, but the buggers at the local council have taken the docs off the web, and it would take an FOI to get them. (Update: double bugger, the session expires.) This is the site before the development, from the records on Rightmove. It is the one with the boat. They bungalow-gobbled the site for £342k in 2012, which seems a fandabidozi buy. It is 142.1 sqm floor area. The EPC is here, and it is recorded as GFCH so I just don't believe the new one is off grid for gas or electric without direct evidence, based on likelihood (open to correction). It's architect calls it "in a largely off grid area". I hope to God it is the EPC for the old one, as it is an F - and I can find no published info for the new one (was an EPC required to be lodged in ~2015?). And this is afterwards. I'd punt on it now being about ~250 sqm due to partial 2 storey and the rather fatter footprint (which looks like a normal 'you can increase it by X%' rule). Eco-House? 1 - I think Eco House is the most wiffly-waffly term of all of them, which is why it gets used in windy virtue signalling. ISTM that it must mean something different from what it meant a decade ago, and now I think an Eco House should at least be carbon positive and able to demonstrate that in N years it will have recaptured all the emissions used in building it, and be significantly energy efficient to run in ongoing terms (if you like call that an EPC of >100). 2 - This house is 7-8 years old, so I would not expect it to meet that. In addition it has a honking great woodstove and apparently no self-owned local wood supply. I have no data on the heating / cooling systems, and the EPC value. 3 - The absence of solar PV suggests to me that it is not *that* sustainable in my terms above. 4 - Yes, it is beautiful, but imo that has nothing to do with whether it should be called an Eco House. And I think I would love to stay there, but at a couple of K a week I would take the full 8 people. 5 - I think two aspects of Eco House we have not addressed are: a) What about space usage - can a house that uses say double the average UK floor space per person be called Eco or Efficient? b) I question whether a second house for a family can *ever* be Eco or Sustainable on the basis that no one ever *really* needs more than one? Surely Eco is also a lifestyle rule of modesty and simplicity? What do you guys think? Ferdinand

And that if you look if it still exists, you can get a trial version of the SAP software and do your own EPC calculation.

You missed out the Buildhub Scrapheap Challenge Expert Jeremy Heat Loss Modelling spreadsheet. One line summary: very straightforward and seems to get the results roughly in the right ballpark.

One other option for the slope is traditional (coloured?) concrete with metal transverse ribs.

That's interesting, and perhaps where a designer needs to listen to the client - who is the judge and the jury ultimately, whilst the designer is more like the Clerk of the Court advising from a knowledge- and experience-base. Perhaps the client doesn't find a visible drawn curtain offensive, and would rather spend the remedial 5 or 10k on something else, such as a boathouse, Sage-glass, or a row of mature trees.

-3.5k and he will accept the Walk on Glazing.

Octopus Outgoing applied for, and I found the email from my installer confirming that the DNO had confirmed the install. Watch this space.

If you demagnetise Gandalf, you will not be forgiven.

Does CAT6 imply that you have successfully dealt with 45 lives?

Oh fook - get your Knauf products quickly... is it possible to have a powder explosion in a plaster factory? Here's hoping.