Kelvin

Yes it’s permanently in place in that it’s part of SSEN’s cabling system. The earth rod is there for when the house goes off grid and you lose the DNO earth in case you have a fault in the house. Interestingly there was an urgent notice from Sigenenery to their installers about the correct earthing requirements for the system. Some installers weren’t connecting an earth rod at all and some were but not cabling it correctly in the gateway. There maybe is a multiple fault scenario where neither of these are sufficient but what would need to happen for that?

I had hoped to do similar to you and install it in my kiosk as it’s close to the road where their cable is so that doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Yes we used their earth bonding. I added the earth rod when we installed the batteries and backup gateway. This wasn’t a temporary supply. I asked both SSEN and our electrician about an Earth rod and they both said it wasn’t necessary. The important thing is to think about what you plan on installing eventually and where it’s all going to go and then making sure you plan in suitable ducting and space keeping in mind that different systems require different cable layout and space requirements. I thought I did a decent job of this but got caught out by not fitting a big enough kiosk despite fitting a 3ph kiosk for a single phase supply I hadn’t realised how big the isolator was. Consequently when the Zappi was installed the small CU it needed couldn’t fit in the kiosk so I had to fit another kiosk.

That’s what I did. SSEN connected to my kiosk (which was effectively just in a field at that point) and it was 10 months later before I had the meter installed.

You don’t need an earth rod for car chargers nowadays as they have their own fault protection. However if you plan on batteries and a gateway you will need an earth rod so worth thinking about all that now. In my case I banged the earth rod in beside the garage and the cable runs back to the house where the gateway is. Fortunately I had worked on the principle of n+1 ducts so had a spare duct for cabling. My gateway powers the whole house. I couldn’t see the point of adding another CU for just critical loads. The car charger is wired at the meter side so the inverter doesn’t see it as a load. It is possible to connect high loads (like an ASHP) to a ‘smart’ port on the gateway so that it can be shutdown if you have a power cut and running low on battery storage. If this is stuff that you plan on doing then I’d put in a fully off-grid system and running it like that until the grid is connected then switch over.

I have one and I rarely use it. If you want to see graphs of run time then it can show you that. Once you set your system up then there’s not much to change. I don’t access the heating remotely. It’s also quite dear for what it is. I bought mine second hand on FB marketplace for £35 just because it popped up locally. I wouldn’t have bought one new.

I know. I said a few posts ago I’ve calibrated them. One of the first things I did was calibrate the various sensors so they all measured much the same. I bought the Ruuvi for its humidity sensor as it comes calibrated and you can calibrate it yourself.

I have umpteen ways of measuring the temperature in the room and they more or less all correlate whereas the Neostat tends to read higher although not all of them do it.

Short answer no. Although there is a manual integration for it into Home Assistant. I don’t have Agile. It seems a bit complicated to use unless the battery system has an integration for it and can automate everything. Cosy is likely more straightforward. We have Intelligent Go so it’s even easier. Battery charges at the cheap rate and discharges throughout the day supported by whatever the PV can generate. In the generating season then it’s supplying the house and exporting the excess. I run our system in an AI mode so it works out when to start discharging (exporting) whatever is left in the battery until 11:30 when the cheap tariff starts and it starts charging the battery back up to 100%. I don’t bother doing anything with the ASHP it heats the house and water whenever there’s demand. So far the battery is getting us through the day so we haven’t drawn from the grid at peak rate since it was installed but we’re not in the peak heating season yet.

And if next week comes and goes then what? I’d call council now. It’s likely they won’t be interested but calling them now will rule that course of action in or out. Legal action is long drawn out and dear. Your plan B should be you arrange for it to be collected and dumped on his drive or yard if he has one and send him the bill. Tell him that’s your plan if it isn’t removed.

Congratulations looks a beautiful site. Look forward to seeing how it develops.

I cooked steak last night. We eat very little red meat so it had been a while since I cooked steak. I had the Neff downdraught recirculating fan on full and had the kitchen door open. There wasn’t much visual evidence of the steak frying in the room. Here’s the air quality plot. The sensor is in a room off the kitchen. PM2.5 and 10 were almost off the scale.

I fitted our SVP in the detached garage that’s 6m from the house. There’s an AAV off the upstairs bathroom in the roof void. No penetrations through our roof. Works perfectly.

As above possibly intending to collect it all in one go. If so out of order not asking you although they likely assumed you’d say no. Do you owe them any money? A roofer swept the back of his van out onto my parking area. He hadn’t spotted the camera. He was due back a few months later to finish off so I collected it in a bag and kept it and emptied into his passenger footwell after he had finished. He was about to explode but recognised some of the rubbish as his so said nothing. The thing is had he asked for a site bag I’d have given him one and even took it to the dump since I went once a week anyway.

I calibrated them all but I stopped using the thermostats per room to manage everything a while ago.

I noticed the temperature over reading not long after we powered everything up. I have Loxone touch switches in each of the rooms with a Neostat and there’s a 0.7°C - 1°C degree difference between the Loxone reading and the Neostat reading with it being higher. I also have a Ruuvi sensor and it matches the Loxone sensor.

We’ve got no heating upstairs apart from electric UFH and heated towel rail in the bathroom. Current temperature in the upstairs is 18.5°C and the coldest it’s been is around 16°C but that was before we moved in. I cabled for electric wall panel heaters just in case we felt the upstairs got too cold. Keeping the upstairs cool in the warmer months is a bigger issue and you could use the UFH to help there but there are other ways to do that.

I have a load of it down outside the front door to the retaining wall and I whacked it down. Been down 7 weeks and no sign of rutting. We don’t tend to turn on the driveway bit as we drive in reverse out or vice versa. Where it will rut and move about is the parking area beside the house for visitors and delivery vans. I might end up using that plastic interlocking stuff to hold the gravel in place but that’s a next year problem.

Pointing done and fence using leftover cladding boards. It should end up matching the house. I’ve a stair off the patio and down the slope to build which will wait until I’ve worked out how best to do it.

That’s all water use including the water softener which uses an enormous amount of water as part of its regeneration cycle. I delved into the settings and it can regenerate on demand so have set it to that rather than the every 5 days the installer had set it to. Our water use has dropped to about 140 litres per day for the whole house. 100 litres per day per person is significantly below the average in the UK. In England it’s 140 litres per day per person and in Scotland it’s 180 litres per day. Interestingly Denmark’s average is just below 100 litre per day per person.

When we ordered it way back in the early days it was shipped from the US. I was surprised at how fast and well organised it all was.

I’ve got both the festoon lights and the tripod lights. The festoon lights are definitely better as you hang them above you so don’t create shadows over the bit you’re working on. You’re forever moving the tripod lights around the work area to avoid creating shadows. However the tripod lights are more portable so I used them more outside or if I had to do stuff in the workshop before the lighting went on.

Nothing but I’m in and out of the workshop with stuff all day so having an electric door is less hassle and I don’t like leaving the door open and having a door that disappears up into the roof is more practical.

I also used one Touch Flex for all the open plan area lights. It’s even more stupidly expensive however it makes life easier for the folk I live with. As above though for most rooms/areas it’s all controlled by the motion sensors.

They do have a click feedback when you touch them so it feels more like a switch. But it’s not haptic like a phone. Guests can find them a little awkward to use at first I’ve noticed. The cheaper plastic Touch switches are a little cheap looking and feeling. The glass Touch Pure switches are much nicer but stupidly dear. I used them in the main areas of the house. They also have an integrated night light.