Kelvin

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…

I wonder if he ever bought it. I love our standing seam roof. It looks perfect with the cladding. I do worry about the longevity of it and the fact that it’s not easy to repair certainly compared to tiles. It’s not particularly noisy in the rain. I decided not to fit the PV panels to it for a variety of reasons. Not convinced I’d use it again though.

I dug a 23m trench for our electrical cable by hand. I ought to have hired a digger but I only decided that at the half way point so decided to keep digging. It’s why I have a concrete breaker. I powered it from our electric car parked on the verge of the field with a long extension lead.

Undo what you’ve done and pull it through. Once it’s done it’ll be done for good. The hockey sticks are quite thick plastic (well the black 38mm one is) so would be hard to cut its length and then get the cable in. It would likely take as long as just doing it properly. If it’s any consolation I spent a day digging a trench and laying some duct to pull an Ethernet cable through. Very pleased with myself but it was hard work as I needed to use my concrete breaker to get through some large stones. All for nothing as the PV and battery storage didn’t need any CT clamps at the meter.

That’s exactly how I did ours. A bit more cabling and a slightly bigger CU.