Kelvin

I’m thinking about using some suspended panels to heat the desk space in my garage. It’s only occasionally used though and I only need heating in the depth of winter so a bit unconvinced it’s worth the cost to buy and run.

The forum is publicly searchable so I’d remove that post given the direction this could be going in. If the post is locked ask a moderator to remove it. The fact is that the manufacturer of the joists has given you a comprehensive list of what’s wrong and highlighted some of the joists may need replacing. Your SE is also going to write you a summary of the issues. You can also demonstrate that the as built doesn’t match the as designed. This can happen with building sometimes but the solutions need to be carefully thought through and considered. This hasn’t happened. Consequently you are now in this position. The builder can argue that there are mitigating reasons for this but ultimately they have done the work which isn’t to an acceptable standard or even potentially safe. Given all of that it’s unlikely the quality of the rest of the job will be acceptable. Trust has gone. This isn’t a good position for you to be in for the rest of the build. I fired two of the trades that we were using. Wasn’t easy but the quality wasn’t good enough and they weren’t capable of doing any better. I didn’t have a contract with either of them though so your situation is slightly harder.

It can be done for far less too but our hole is particularly deep. Some systems have relatively shallow holes, loads of water and no treatment needed.

Can be expensive. Our hole (147m) cost £18,000 just to drill the hole (seller of the plot paid for it not me) The plant equipment cost £8500 (I paid for that) No regulation. We had to send a sample of the water away for analysis to determine what treatment was necessary.

25kWh today. Max has been 35kWh so far. Lowest 10kWh.

Apart from charging the EV we are effectively self-sustaining power wise at the moment. That will change in the winter of course but the batteries are big enough that charging them overnight will massively reduce our grid demand to a relatively small amount. The bigger issue I have is with water. This long dry spell of months is definitely a worry. But a different topic.

Socket behind each appliance fused switch above the worktop. The utility room is wired back to the CU. In fact nearly all our rooms are wired individually back to the CU. To confuse the future owner of our house the fridge in the open plan kitchen has its socket behind it and the fused switch is in the utility room.

Looks stunning and I saw it when it was an overgrown old steading so can see how much effort and care has gone into this.

I didn’t say the DNO wouldn’t be involved I said the suppliers would be managing the chargers. We already have one example of that with the Octopus V2G offer. The DNOs aren’t set up to implement that. There’s a reason the Octopus Intelligent Go tariff often charges your car outside of the cheap window. On the second point. We are saying the same things so I agree. It’s a niche group of people that will do any of this for some time to come. In a generation or two of EV development they’ll likely nearly all be bi-directional capable. Bi-directional chargers will increasingly become more available at a similar price point to current chargers.

B&Q sell the cheap copies. I got some for free and didn’t like them so have stuck Wago.

Good stuff. Progress and plan is emerging. Everything keeps moving forward when you take action.

We do a lot of Munro climbing and carry all our stuff for those trips. However we also like to go from place to place and always have our two dogs with us and bikes so the car is necessary. Other half would like a campervan but I can’t justify the cost and we’d need to flog one or other of the cars.

We like camping the fact you can run all the electrics from it rather than packing gas stoves etc is an added bonus.

Exactly. If you look at how Intelligent Go works you plug the car in and Octopus charge it when it suits them and I’ve been surprised at how frequently that’s outside of the cheap window. Today, for example, it added 20kWh this afternoon. I expect V2G to operate much the same way.

Yes but it’s a scale thing. While the number of home batteries being installed is at a record high there are still relatively few out there and of them not everyone is dumping the charge to the grid so the impact is small. Scale that up significantly and it could start to be more of an issue. There will also be far more electric cars in UK households than home storage batteries so the long term potential is for millions of EVs with V2G capability. However that’s a long way away too I think. It’s unlikely the DNO will take control of the chargers. It will be the suppliers.

Becoming more common for EVs to do vehicle to load. We have an Ioniq 5 which can output 3.6kW which is at the higher end of what is available just now. It has a 3 pin plug inside and an adapter for outside. We powered some things in the house from the car for a while too. If also saved two days of building when there was a power cut and the guys building the wall had an electric mixer. It’s been handy camping as we have a portable induction hob and electric kettle.

The problem with this is if the purpose is to help balance the grid then allowing users to dump energy back to the grid whenever it suits them will make that much harder to manage as people are likely to want to do that at similar times. It might be fine when it’s niche and not many are doing it but less so at scale.

That’s how I expect it will work for V2G. A bit like Intelligent Octopus Go where Octopus takes over the charging of your car and charges it when it suits them although you can specify when you need it charged by and how much energy to put into the car. The user will need to have some control over export limits too.

I was rather hoping they’d add the Sigenergy AC charger to their Intelligent Go tariff but no joy so went with the Zappi. I like that it has a screen so you have some idea what it’s doing without having to mess about with your phone. The slightly annoying thing about the Octopus site and chargers is they’ve gone to the trouble of listing just about every charger available rather than just listing the ones that work with Intelligent Octopus Go.

That must be a recent change as they installed my Zappi last month.

This was covered in the opening post of this thread by @JohnMo

As has been discussed on here before your average Joe/Joanne doesn’t care about the EPC. The certificate says it must be displayed in the dwelling. Why? (Although I have stuck ours up on the plant room 😂)

I just got my as built SAP EPC report. A 114. Could be 125 if we spent up to £25,000 on a wind turbine!

Yep. It will need some mitigation. You’ll need to do that anyway. Personally I think there’s too much glass just from an aesthetic perspective.

The first thing that springs to mind is overheating…