openspaceman

BTW Aberdeenshire will benefit from longer summer daylight but considerable worse outside temperature. Often when people find heat pumps expensive it is because of poor installation. A heat pump benefits from being able to utilise very low (~30C) flow temperature. Underfloor heating is ideal. Where radiators are used often there is not enough heat exchange surface, so return flow is not cold enough and hence the heat pump has to boost to a higher temperature, reducing COP ( the amount of heat you get out per kWh put in). Ideal for new build but tricky for retrofit.

Big capital builds, like HS2, Nuclear power stations, offshore wind farms as well as petroleum/natural gas exploitation favour big business, in the form of corporatocracy, a sort of monopoly caused by the limited number of organisations with the ability to fund and organise the work with government collusion, whereas an individual can make the decision to buy electricity storage, PV panels, even possibly a wind turbine and get a return on investment. Okay so the Chinese firms that make the equipment are big businesses but because there is competition the prices are reasonable. We know from HS2 where costs are not controlled by competition leading to massive price over running. Yes it is a dreadful shame that British companies could not compete in the market because Thatcher felt we could live off the backs of our finacial sector, big mistake IMO. We had been in general decline since 1918 and paying for loans from america in the war years was the clincher. We never developed a business philosophy to replace the colonial era. My system paid for itself in 10 years and because of the FIT subsequent payments have paid for the battery £3400) and additional 1.8kW PV (800) but I did a lot of the mounting myself with salvaged material. I buy 450kWh from the grid in winter but self sufficient mid March to mid October. I heat with a lot of "free" wood. My daughter's system is more typical, 2 strings one SE one SW giving 6kW installed power running into a 5kWhybrid inverter and 10kWh LiPo battery plus a Zappi car charger cost £12k, I think the firm made about £3k profit over cost of equipment, scaffolding and 3 man days installation by a very competent roofer and similar electrician.. Yesterday produced 32kWh and no grid electricity bought since March, including charging the car. If she can use all the predicted 5MWh of electricity it will produce that is worth £1750, else she will receive 15p/kWh for export which will reduce the return somewhat. Current production is exceeding prediction. If she plays the game she can make far more out of the battery by dumping it to the grid between 16:00 and 19:00 then recharging at off peak if necessary for a margin of 32p/kWh. Which can make the battery more sense than PV panels. Where it gets interesting is when you combine a (bigger) battery with an electric heating system and a low off peak tariff. I'll be sticking with wood for my heating.

Strange, I don't depend on it but do check the forecast coupled with the rain radar if I need a clear spell to do something outside and don't have problems. It is good at predicting wind in the context of wind turbines which is why they called for consumption reductions 22 times in the last winter, as well a just testing the concept.

As expected from a right wing rag it was an article pointing out the need for storage of electricity made from renewables and extolling nuclear power as the solution, because that benefits large corporations, when in fact as you and I know for personal use for the summer and most of spring and autumn one day's storage suffices. For PV the hungry gap in November to January is what needs addressing, wind less so. In the meanwhile better weather forecasting means that our biggest traditional generators can be scheduled to come on stream when needed, coupled with current pumped storage. And yes we must remain dependent on natural gas for a fair while yet and will have to pay for under utilising their capacity when not needed, in just the same way we pay to curtail wind power currently because the national grid has not the capacity needed. For the last few weeks I have been curtailing my solar PV production because it is capable of producing more than I use or can export. This is because it is sized to produce what I need in the shoulder months before I have to import in deep winter.

If it is a roll pin it may have snapped flush both sides so the OP is looking at the hole in the middle

I told them their wee scissors wouldn't cut through the layers of ballistic in my trousers and to take them off. I almost cried when the scissors cut them no bother 😉

Yes this can be awkward depending on the owner. Having faced this when someone threw a brick through my mother's garage roof the solution that had lasted over 20 years was to gently clean round the area and then apply a torch on high performance felt.

Yes a lot of variables. Here in the SE where it is warmer and dryer than most of UK I reckon to dry any wood split for my stove in a summer season, May to Beginning of October, to below 20%. A "normal" log is 10-12" long and I can pick it up with one hand by the cross section face. Most species dry below 15% but it depends on keeping them dry and having sufficient airflow.

...and you can still vote for whoever you like once you get there

That's right; when felling in production forestry there is inevitably grit blown up in the bark on sandy soils, whereas in peaty soils you can run all day without sharpening.

Here we have a food waste bin, I only use it for bones in the summer, and the waste can be in ordinary plastic bags. It goes to an anaerobic digestion plant which, with the addition of a lot of maize silage, produces methane, burned in an engine to make electricity. I often wonder how they separate the plastic from the digestate. Maybe it just get dried with the waste heat and thence incinerated. The green waste is something different and gets composted, I would prefer to see it pyrolysed. I have no problem with dog walkers putting bagged dog faeces into my black bin, better in there than bagging it and then throwing it when out of sight.

Not necessarily as the effect of thermal buoyancy is not great, so does not need much power to overcome, in winter when the stove is on the fan only draws about 100W. The thing I discovered is it is not worth moving warm room air, I need to move air direct from the stove and ,in my case, blow 40C air into the next room. It's not ideal because of the mild fan noise and it becomes necessary to blank off most of the stove from the room it is in to control the temperature. The single 4kW stove copes down to zero outside but burns a lot of wood up to 16 hours a day. Even on those few days which went lower we managed with no other heating.

Many of us get our wood for the sake of a bit of labour, in my case it means my utility bills are only £600/annum plus about £200 for water because of wood burning. I have nothing against back boilers but as @difflock I found the economics of providing hot water didn't add up on a retrofit because the DHW for the winter months was so low. I did decide to distribute hot air on our ground floor by ducting it from the stove and heat rises to the upper rooms. Yours seems less conventional.

Did you break that down into cost for DHW and cost for heating? I have never plumbed in my wood stove but it provides me with all the space heating for a small house 6 months of the year. I burn £100 a year for gas to provide DHW for the winter 6 months. What I am getting at, and someone else asked earlier in the thread, is it not cheaper to install a second woodburner without worrying about DHW heating?

Didn't affect me internally but the dose of ringworm didn't succumb to the tar based ointment the old school doctor prescribed, luckily his understudy prescribed a systemic drug taken orally and that cured it. I only lost the hair on my arms but the boss ended up with half a brazilian.

I should have said that I don't remember ever drinking it but the cans are by far the greatest number I collect when out litter picking so I suspect it is mostly drunk by younger teens. I probably get too much caffeine in my diet from the coffee and tea I drink.

No that's those that buy the stuff

The insurance is good to have for your own jobs but likely irrelevant when subbing.

A bit late now but if you place a new ring in the bore and square it up by pushing the piston against it you can measure the ring gap in several places to check bore wear. You could probably judge how bad a gouge is by seeing how much light passes by the ring with a dental mirror.

There are some niggles though, they have to be married or civil partnership and cohabiting the same residence is my understanding, if they own two homes it's a bit different.

That's a better idea than buying the proper mower part too. I'll have to look some out as I am building a bittza honda engined mower, with the rusted out deck replaced by one from a mountfield battery electric with a defunct control circuit. Battery being repurposed into a Halford jump start pack, replacing the dead gel cell.

I think that is the same engine that we had in the Heizohack, never did seem to run cleanly and expensive to have Hatz UK deal with. I never did get to see it running properly before I got the push.

I don't understand this bit

When the log is grabbed the rod side is dumped to tank. As the rotator has cross line relief it also is dumping to tank the leak from the now open rod side hose may be just an artifact of the back pressure in the system being higher than atmospheric pressure rather than a failure in the rotator. Solve one problem at a time, oil is leaking past the grab ram piston seal.

Just disconnect the hose from the rod side of the ram at the valve and put it back into the tank. Then run the machine and grab a log, if hydraulic oil continues to run then a seal is leaking. With a continuous rotator there can be internal leaks between services There are no seals or O rings between services in a spool, it is just a good fit and will wear prematurely if the oil gets hot or filtration fails,