Random Renewables Thread

I for one would be well up for a battery building party 😂

I think it was about 4.55 or so. I see a spike in the grid frequency where it jumped up around that time too.

EirGrid Group plc - Smart Grid Dashboard - has a transmission map but not sure if it zooms in that local

Got the card earlier this morning, not sure if it is activated yet though.

If his COP is anything like mine at the moment then it's terrible 😭

Okay it's probably not all doom and gloom but unfortunately the backup heater will have to kick in the odd time during the cold snap which really hurts performance

The guys to made the open energy monitor were also making a heat pump monitoring kit which can measure SCOP, must see if they made any progress with it as I'd like to do some proper data collection on mine

I somehow did some rough estimation years ago and the overall COP was fairly close to the 4 the manufacturer was advertising, but they do suffer a bit in cold snaps when they're specced for our normally mild climate

Have you a BMS? Discharging is fine, but I wouldn't charge LiFePO4 at just 1C

Then you have nothing to worry about. The BMS will have built in low temp protection (cut off)

I think we blew past that a couple of days ago, looks like it's going to go even higher this evening

For heating in kWh per day we’re using a total of 35-40kWh daily in the last month. That’s the lowest we can get it without being cold in the house. But it’s v. comfortable now with the setup we have. Higher than I expected but never measured it before. No heatpump, no battery, no fireplace / stove, no DHW tank used for showers. Very small but v. leaky gaff with a bad BER and single glaze windows in places. Insulation is on the list when I find the money tree 😊. Shout if you've seen it recently

Per hour:

• Uses ~7kWH of gas heating per hour. That’s on the lowest boiler setting and with TVRs not at max. 15 year oil boiler so I’m afraid to know what efficiency it is. But still works perfect so we’ll run it until it dies
• And about 1.5kWh of electric rads per hour (when they are running). So the 7kWh for the gas boiler is high compared to the downstairs of the house only needing ~1/4 of that (and of course there’s close to no efficiency losses from electric rads compared to the gas boiler). And that's the gas boiler on the really low setting, not pumping out heat

Per day:

• Split is 22kWh from gas heating (am trying to minimise gas usage). Gas heating on for a max of 3 hours per weekday. Longer at weekends though.
• 15+kWh electric (2-3 oil rads). And for the electric rads, that’s going up a little each day as the shell of the house remains cold with the weather like it is.

Downstairs is at least 19C in the sitting room from morning to bed time. Might seem a waste but it’s a single room in middle of the house and the heat goes upstairs or into the walls and not (much) outside. Have a setback temp in sitting room for night of 16C to keep those walls warm – never did that before so trying it this year. Walls are concrete so are our only (poor mans) thermal-mass and wall temps sit as low as 15C at external wall to 20C but just immediately around where the rad is. Warmer walls means a low watt electric rad can heat the room as doesn’t need to go from 13C to 19C in the morning. As walls aren’t ‘radiating’ cold into the room.

Sitting room is 5x5m (and leaky) and a 1.5kW electric heater can heat the room. Which is impressive. But rad needs to run a lot of the day (on a thermometer so it knocks off when gets to temp), and need to have the door closed. If temp drops more than a few degrees, it can’t re-heat the room. Not powerful enough on its own. It’s on 24*7 and turns on based on thermostat.

Hall and upstairs could be as low as 14C when not heated. Which is grand when we’re not in those spaces. External walls (inside the house) could be as low as 12C in places. Gas heating comes in at morning, when kids get home from school and evening before bed. Just need to vent the rooms once each morning to remove condensation to stop damp – so I watch that. 

Did a quick check there and we're using about 20kWh more electricity compared to September when the heating was off

That's almost all down to the heat pump, house is A3 rated and thermostats are set the same as yours

(at least when I can stop my wife messing with them 😂)

Reckon in terms of energy it's cheaper, problem is that electricity during the day is really expensive

Can't wait for my solar panels and battery to be installed so I can shift some of that over to night rates. It'll be end of February for installation though so weather will be warming up anyway

I don't know what to make of this. Lots of speculation as to why micro hydro might be bad and damage the environment but nothing concrete, yet they wish to persist in promoting the idea that it's bad. This probably stems from a much greater "all human activity = bad" school of thought or else "damn those feckers living in the hills with their free power while we pay 66c/kw". The focus appears to be on coming up with any reason as to why it might be bad and using that reason in isolation not to build, not if it's an improvement on burning coal.

Must be sickening for those involved in building these micro hydro plants. You try to do everything right and you still have desk jockeys from a far away place trying to impede your progress

Yeah unfortunately damming a river can be detrimental to people downriver, so there can be pretty fraught negotiations when it comes to building one

Look at the Aral sea (or rather the desert where it was) or the water wars in California.

On a side note, I love Americans. If the city of LA turns out to be stealing their lake then instead of protesting or taking them to court they just bought some dynamite from the local shop and blew up the aqueduct

But in general it seems like smaller hydro projects are probably less of an impact to the environment than massive dams like Three Gorges which displace entire villages