Improvements in and around my home
I applied and paid for Building Control notification of my solar installs back in November 2023. Having already installed and commissioned my system, I was a little concerned that I would receive a telling off from the Building Control officer when he eventually came around to inspect the work in that I should have had…
Fitting an ‘Air to Water’ Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) may/may not save me anything on heating bills, I had an initial quote from Octopus Energy of £2,715.50, for one of their new ‘Cosy’ heat pumps, which includes a government grant of £7,500.00. I have 15mm heating pipes, so no ‘microbore’ to worry about, although…
This should be an interesting set of graphs as I commissioned my solar and battery system around the middle of the month, so can see the impact it has on the usage and costs. Additionally my peak electricity cost dropped from £0.3103/kWh to £0.2794/kWh, however the standing charge went up from £0.4201 to £0.4785 per…
All of the parts for the East-West array were ordered and delivered at the same time as the Office and Garage array parts, they have just been kept in storage until I was ready to use them. The first task was to cut 5 of the 3,550mm lengths of rail in half, this was a…
Having commissioned my Enphase solar and battery installation, I decided to get started on my East-West array that will be mounted on my pre-fabricated concrete double garage at the bottom of my garden. This is install will be 5 panels on each side of the garage, each in their own ‘string’. For these arrays I…
I have been generating yet more spreadsheets and graphs to track my energy usage in preparation for tracking the changes once I activate my solar and battery installation. This post is being written in April after I have already commissioned the installation and is therefore the last month without solar or batteries. This post will…
Prior to commissioning the system I needed to run through the inspection and testing for the solar sub panel. Many of the tests did not apply as the relevant wires are simply not present – the array cables are 2 core live/neutral (no earth conductor), so R1/R2 testing cannot be carried out. I could still…
I previously showed my design for a solar sub panel, that will be mounted on the roof between the batteries. This will be fed by a 2 core 16mm2 SWA cable and a separate 10mm2 earth conductor. The distribution board is in the cupboard under the stairs in my entrance hallway, which is directly below…
As previously mentioned I am using the Van Der Valk ValkPro+ P10 South mounting system. The parts were ordered from Plug-In Solar, along with the solar panels for this roof, my pre-fab garage roof and the associated mounting hardware for the pre-fab garage solar install (this will be covered in a separate post). The parts…
I came home from rowing Saturday and attempted to hire a Genie Lift, having left it too late to book one on Friday. The one I hired previously for attaching my projector to the ceiling was a GL10 that I had hired from HSS ‘Lift and Shift’ in Hayes, except that the hire price was…