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Is this the same foam that mortgage lenders wont lend against? I had no idea that this is an issue until the people buying our house had to remove it from their roof as nobody would grant a mortgage to their buyers.

I'll quickly patent that !

Indeed, there is too much pressure to get things finished because the product needs to steal a march on the competition. Consequently, things are more building block based and, in almost every way, that makes sense. In my day when I started, a complex project would take about three months to...

I started out with discrete components but was working for a silicon chip producer - admittedly, much of it DIL and quite a bit military grade. The chips were simple but the thought of having a 1000 transistors on something the size of a finger nail was revolutionary. I then moved to a big...

I used a load of arduino's - to be honest, it was a few years ago now and I can't remember that much about them! I think it was the ATMega328. In those days the sensors were all built from a kit of parts and the RF was done with plug in modules. At about that time I left the electronics...

Hi John, I built the system as a modified version of various offerings on Home | OpenEnergyMonitor . It was a few years ago now and I imagine that things have moved on in a big way. I calibrated the current sensors with known loads and got the whole thing reasonably accurate. It senses import...

I'd discounted a lot of these systems in the past because the financial outlay didn't stack up against the potential savings. A lot of them are starting to become attractive now that we are in this brave new energy world . I will certainly be reconsidering them when we move. In part, because...

I've avoided smart meters too Craig. Initially, I didn't trust the energy providers motivation. Later I discovered that most were not compatible with PV systems (which we have). I built a PV dump system to use some of the surplus generated PV to heat water in the water tank. Doing that didn't...

Much of it comes down to the difference between watts and watt-hour : All electrical items, even something like a battery wrist watch consume power if they are connected to a power source. The power source has a voltage potential between it's two terminals, in the UK, this is approximately 220v...

Your maths lines up with mine (albeit, I'm now stuck on a higher priced tariff than you are) - and we can almost wave to each other across the Surrey countryside!

No, it's 200w average power consumption - so, in five hours, that's a KwH - so the cost is approximately £413 per year (minus the time the items are physically being used). Even the pump in our modest fish pond is costing us about £100 a year to run now! Before these price hikes I didn't...

I've always left my desktop PC running as I couldn't be bothered to turn it off or hibernate it. I just got used to everything being virtually instantaneous when I wanted it. This thread got me to rethink what I was doing. I implemented hibernation and measured the time it takes to come out of...

It's certainly a possibility, although the pipe runs may prove to be a little problematic - but it could, theoretically, use the second coil on our tank - interesting! thanks

If and when we move (much more "when" rather than "if", thank goodness), the new place is about double the habitable area of our current house and has oil because there is no gas in the village. The current owners have removed all of the radiators and all but two rooms have wet underfloor...

The Police told me that she is being held 100% to blame and will probably end up on a driver awareness course. Luckily, I'd kept my bike insurance running and they promptly paid out (and funded a replacement bike). I have legal cover too and this has been a little slower: I'm just clocking up...

very fair point and strengthens the bodge argument further!

I've also just noticed that the glazing bars, where they attach to the construction adjoining the roof don't have much overlap. There's going to be quite a weight pressing down on a relatively small cross section of glazing bar. For comparison, look how much overlap there is above the garden...

Generally, glass can be any size you like provided it is structurally sound and can be manoeuvred into place and the support system can bear the weight. From your previous post it now, very much, looks like a bodge - probably because somebody didn't calculate the dimensions correctly. Adding...

Large panes of glass are pretty heavy, especially if the glazing units end up being toughened 6mm. At the garden end the weight acts directly down through the vertical supports of the wall of the conservatory. On the house wall side - were the frame bolted directly to the wall, all of the forces...

There's a massive weight difference between a polycarbonate and a glass roof on a conservatory - made all the worse because it would, otherwise, only have light structural support against a wall as in your situation. It's clearly part of the roofing system but it also seems like they've done a...