petereastern.bsky.social
Technologist responding to climate emergency. Heat pump installer and founder of conga.uk. Co-founder and non-exec director itoworld.com. Computer scientist. 316ppm.
222 posts
459 followers
99 following
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And 3 of them have just shown up on my notifications tab, even though I never look at his tweets.
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Here’s a map showing legal situation across Europe where main difference is the maximum speed. Uk is the outlier en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoriz...
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No, these numbers are misleading when they're quoted out of context. Last month UK generated around £600,000,000 of wind power, well over 90% utilised, saving gas imports.
UK is one of the best in the world at building wind power, despite lots of people who seem to want to knock it at the moment.
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What’s your current annual energy consumption in kWh gas or litres oil?
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In my experience every old cylinder we have retained can achieve flow of 1000l/h. And.. since modern r290 units can generate flow temps of 70°C they will always be able to heat old cylinders, even ones with the smallest coils. Cops of some 3.5 can normally be achieved using old cylinder.
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Where about do you live?
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The only change in the airing cupboard was to replace the pipe to the heating expansion tank in loft with air release and fill loop in airing cupboard (and add expansion vessel in garage)
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If you have a cylinder already and it works well for you then you almost never need to replace it. Here’s a recent install where we retained an original 25 yo vented cylinder. Payback time for replacement high gain cylinder would have been >40 years!
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A 5kW Vaillant heat pump, which works just fine on 22mm. The phe unit is for the hot water (which we use with direct cylinder in place of indirect one with coil) as this allows us to keep size of cylinder down, 150L in this case. We use our own cunning control algorithm to optimise reheat time.
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And one from last November with microbore throughout which is working beautifully. We’ve done 3 microbore systems in last three months and all are working fine.
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And here’s one we completed last week of jan with 25L volumiser in series because we also replaced 11 rads in the house with fan convectors (to provide cooling in summer) which greatly reduced the system volume
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Apologies, their new ‘Industrial Strategy Correspondent’
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He can’t but he’d love to sell it at an appropriate price to someone who can.
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Err.. where does it say that they will legalise ‘wheeling’, ie e-scooters and electric unicycles? Or should we still only use those on private property with owners permission? And if so ‘wheeling’ is not the right term to use.
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Agreed, not a big deal really — 2L per hour is only 33ml per minute which is trivial, as long as it isn’t dumped onto an impervious surface. FYI, when I measured the condensate from a defrost cycle yesterday it came to only 1.1L, but at a rate of 500ml per min.
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I did! During feb 24 my Vaillant 7kW peaked at about 2.5L condensate per hour and averaged 1L per hour over the entire month.
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Will then then be allowed to bollard off the parking necessary spot outside their house to ensure it will be available when they return for work, or will be just shout at their neighbour when the space is taken? Not simple.
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Many thanks. And.. can you confirm that the little board you are using can drive PWM outputs from hardware, with the software setting the frequency and the duty? (We use this to drive PWM controlled computer fans. )
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Can I ask whereabouts you are talking about? And.. When you say ‘dry’, do you mean ‘not raining but high relative humidity (like British winter!) ’ or do you mean bone dry air?
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Your dad was absolute right. The problem is we very rarely get much below -2, hence my reaching out to you! The physics suggests air moisture drops by only 40% between 4°C and -3°C and then by only another 40% down to -10 and then by a big 60% to -20. This matches your observations. Thanks!
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I can confirm that I can indeed stop the noise by holding both the pipes firmly thereby stopping the fittings rattling, and in the morning I will figure out how to fix them firmly in place. You are a star Mike!
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For some reason the brass pipe fittings are loose in the case of the heat pump. Within the unit fittings are connected to rubber hoses so are free to move. Depending on exactly how the external pipes are connected there is a risk that the fittings will rattle in the case.
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But definitely worth ensuring that there is no rattling on those two joints.
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The bendy stainless pipes you describe are official Vaillant ones so should be fine. I’m at a bit of a loss about the internal pipe noise in your house to be honest.
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Yes, I’m familiar with the internal hoses in the Vaillant unit. FYI, these days we normally hard pipe to the property, which could in certain circumstances create the perfect conditions for rattling! Thanks so much for the tip.
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The weird thing is that after installing the unit almost a year ago it made the noise for the first time yesterday, so I’m not sure if it will ever do it again! What was off was that this happened shortly after Lewis has contacted me cos his one was making a nasty noise.
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Ok, so an update. It doesn’t now appear to be anything to do with the fan or ice directly. The suggestion now is that it is being caused by the pipe joints that Vaillant leave loose at the back of the unit. Here it one of them moving.
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I don’t think so, I still think that is hydraulic noise originating
in the compressor but worth bearing in mind.
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Arhhh. Yes. That makes much more sense. Weird that this noise has only happened during the cold snap, but that is a great theory. Possibly things have moved around a bit in the cold or just that the compressor is running harder. Many thanks. I’ll follow that idea up.
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I think I was wrong about ice unbalancing the blades. My system does indeed have an intermittent raspy noise at present, but I’m now pretty confident it isn’t anything to do with the blades. Still trying to understand what it is.
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Yes, it’s a pipe to dispose of the melted ice from the fins of the unit.
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Thanks. On further investigation I’ve realised it’s wasn’t to do with ice and fan blades, but am no closer to figuring out what it was causing the noise. It’s thawed here now and it’s quiet atm so I can’t do more tests.
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Apologies, but I’ve now determined that it’s nothing to do with ice on the fan blades! Still trying to understand where it is coming from.
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Can the government also produce clear usable regulations allowing the use of appropriate e-scooters and e-wheels in the U.K. These devices are hugely valuable additions to urban mobility portfolio but are currently in legal limbo.
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Ok, so now I am confused. The rasp has come back but there is no visible ice on the blades. I’m still on the case and am making some other tweeks to try to track it down.
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Primarily a noise issue I suggest. And… it should be possible for the unit to detect the lack of balance and to completely clear the ice off the blades using a slightly longer defrost from time to time.
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Sure, but it does concern me that ice can unbalance a fan blade to the extent that it makes that much noise. In a location where it stays below freezing for months the annoyance could be massive. The unit should be able to do it own blade de-ice though, and should be able to detect ice buildup.