Posted by: @transparent

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As for the bee-hives, they would seem to be wasted in the garden over winter.

Could you relocate the frames beneath your floorboards and benefit from underfloor heating? 😉 

Thanks for the tip on the cameras.

As for the bee suggestion, it would certainly bring a new perspective to "there's a weird buzzing sound coming from the heating system" 😆 

Oddly enough there's a lot of crossover between what the bees do over winter and the general aims of this forum, as their survival is based on them maintaining sufficient core heat within the colony whilst using resources (i.e. food stores) sparingly.  They minimise their numbers, relative to the peak of summer, and remain in a cluster with the queen kept in the middle of it, while the workers interchange around them as needed and they can temperature regulate using their wings.  Quite remarkable really, and not helped if someone lifts the roof of their house unnecessarily.

I took the photo below in the winter of 2023, and all the colonies in the photo successfully over-wintered that year (in general, it's sensible to plan for an 80% success rate) which I think captures the scale of the challenge they face pretty well.

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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Interesting new topic. Like you I tinkered with my cars from 18, lowering the shims on my allegro OHC to get it to breath better, yes it accelerated faster but couldn’t break the 95mph barrier (speed cameras didn’t arrive until much later)

I replaced it with a Fiesta which I fitted twin Webber carbs, and cracked 106mph in it. I had to use my own speedometer as the cars stopped at 90.

Fast forward to my last car, Jaguar XF; I took that to Germany a few times to test its road holding, and cracked 150mph barrier easily.

Now retired, I have a supercharded little Audi that can beat a Fiesta STD when the  numpty misses a gear change; his girlfriend was laughing so much I might have caused a relationship breakup. sigh

Much as I can admire your current situation, I've matured in a different way. I used to think "Cor, look at that acceleration!", but for a number of years now I've been tending towards "Cor, look at the boot space in that!".

The family (now grown up) certainly played a part in that; the rest you could probably blame on the attitude of drivers in the South East. Doesn't stop me from appreciating the mechanics of cars these days but my days of automotive tuning are well gone now. Ah, well....

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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Back to topic: I have the Trifecta of Eco; PV, ASHP, UFH, Battery and an EV for the summer 🙂

Ive fitted my own EV wall box; it’s not a charger! Thats built into the car. The wall box is just a 30A socket, that can negotiate with the car to allow charge to pass, sometime both ways.

Understood. I'll admit to being somewhat lazy in my terminology.

Our EV is certainly not just for the summer, though. We've two cars and the workhorse used to be our VW Sharan. Since getting the EV a little over a year ago, along with the fact both our kids have grown up and so the need for US to transport masses of stuff around has largely disappeared, we've clocked up about 11,000 miles per year in the EV and the Sharan has done no more than 1,000. The amount we've saved in running costs is obscene.

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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I’ve read many posts from people struggling to get room temperatures balanced. What I’d like to see is a heat loss measuring device. It would need to know the outside air temperature of course, and would measure the rate of heat loss from 21C to 18C.

This would allow you to work out the heat transfer you need from the heat emitter, usually radiators upstairs but I’ve seen baseboard heating advertised; would it work at HP temperatures.

How might you envisage a device like that working? I can see a practical solution of multiple sensors to measure heat energy in and ambient temperature for each room (with a known air volume) compared against the outside air temperature and prevailing wind speed/direction to identify the amount of energy necessary to balance the room's losses. However, that'd only work retrospectively - measure the heat loss after the emitters had already been installed.

I suppose it's not beyond the bounds of plausibility to put thermometers in all rooms of the house and then, on various days, turn the heating off and measure the rate at which each of those rooms dropped in temperature by a given amount. In fact, with the extra temperature sensors and a means to capture the data (e.g. - but not limited to - Home Assistant), that'd be a cinch for anyone who has a night-time setback. The maths for working out the relationship between temperature loss in the room and a varying outside temp (getting colder as the evening draws in) would be more complex but would surely still be feasible. @cathoderay and @jamespa are not strangers to that kind of calculation....

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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Id like to delve into Home Assistant, but I’m still renovating several parts of the property and super insulating every ceiling and wall void.

The Cosy6 is coping a lot better 1 year on to heat the property when OAT is about 2C, several rooms have both rafters and joists insulation. I’d like more information from Cosy6 about how it’s performing, the phone App only shows temperatures, no flow rates or flow/return temperatures

Learning more about Home Assistant and other alternative home automation hubs is not, I suspect, a problem. We've already enough experience here on the forum to treat this topic in a similar way to getting people familiar with the way heat pumps work i.e. a fairly standard learning journey. Learning how to apply that knowledge to your own situation is a separate question and precisely the kind of thing I've started this thread for. It's not so much learning the tool as visualising what to do with it. Incorporating your Cosy6 into some form of home monitoring and automation setup is a prime example, and it'd be interesting to go through that exercise in practice.

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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@majordennisbloodnok 

Yup, that's what I've got right now. An arrow on a coiled bimetallic strip, so no electrical or digital output.

Having had another thought, I might yet go for one of these

connected to something like this

which is then connected to an ESP32 board. All put together, I'd estimate all in at about £15. We'll see.

Posted by: @agentgeorge

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Ive fitted my own EV wall box; it’s not a charger! Thats built into the car. The wall box is just a 30A socket, that can negotiate with the car to allow charge to pass, sometime both ways

Me too.

The type of charge-point I'd like would be V2G for a car with CCS connector...
... which isn't yet available.

But it was worthwhile running the supply cable from the consumer unit before I installed wet UFH 😊 

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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@majordennisbloodnok There's a certain irony reading this topic that I feel myself drawn to it, precisely because I've been sucked into the rabbit hole of increased experimenting with / analysing of the heat pump's output via reading yours, and to a lesser extent others, contributions to this forum.  I now seem to gaze at Home Assistant screens with a puzzled look in the way that I used to do with Excel when searching for a solution to something that didn't quite work properly.

Oh, it's not ironic at all, @sheriff-fatman. Your journey into uncharted territory and the buzz you got of getting it working is one of the prime examples that prompted me to start this thread. The fact you were asking "I wonder if..." questions got me realising that the forum might be missing somewhere for people to actively dive down exploratory rabbit holes. It also made me realise that if people have somewhere to ask entirely speculative questions, we might well have the combined knowledge to come up with solutions no-one's put together before.

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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Unlike you, I'm very much a 'settings' tinkerer and will shy away from doing too much requiring 'practical' skills, which I acknowledge I generally lack.  Adding the CN105 dongle was a leap of faith for me, albeit more complicated because of the physical location of the unit, so it felt like a DIY task as it required balancing precariously on steps, etc to overcome the physical constraints of the job.  In general, I like the comfort of knowing that I can easily switch something back to the previous settings as a safety net. 

Actually, I'm far more risk-averse than you might think. I agonised for quite some time about making a physical wired connection to my inverter (for talking modbus) and only did so when I was absolutely certain two new wires wouldn't short-circuit something or carry the potential for stopping the inverter working. In essence, I'm happy to roll my sleeves up but only when I really fully understand what's going on. With the CN105 dongle, it's just that I already understood a lot more about what was going on because of my IT background, so I was far more relaxed than many might; in effect, my comfort zone might well be uncomfortable for some others but conversely I can squirm in what others would view as home territory.

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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Looking at your questions, on the tariff query I can't see that there's a better alternative to Octopus Intelligent Go for minimising our overall costs, and the extent to which I balance the usage is to hammer the overnight tariff as much as possible, other than for the heat pump's heating operation, where it's proving to be less practical to do so.  I'm encouraged so far that the blended unit rate of electricity on my latest bill is a little over 11p/kWh, despite the increased peak rate usage from the heat pump.

I've certainly hammered out my own answers to the tariff issue and, for me, the ideal is a matter of Octopus Agile import and Octopus Outgoing (non-agile) as the tariffs and Home Assistant managing the big ticket items centrally. Automations are my friend. If I had a bigger battery or a more predictable car charging schedule, I might switch tariffs but I'd still stay with managing the whole from within Home Assistant.

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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I'm very likely to invest soon in a Thermal Imaging camera (one of those that attaches to your phone).  Part of the justification for this is heating system related, but this wouldn't be sufficient, but I've been intrigued for a while as to whether such a device would also provide useful data for the beehives that I keep in the garden, specifically in being able to assess the health of colonies over the winter period where you typically leave them alone unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise (e.g. emergency feeding).  With a dual purpose for it's use, I can more easily justify spending £140 or so on one.  Oddly, beekeeping related tasks are ones to which I'm much better at finding improvised solutions/fixes when needed, and is where I have to use my limited practical skills most often in practice.

We do have a thermal imaging camera and, interestingly, my wife is seriously considering getting some bees. I used to help my mother with her bees way back when I was still a teenager, so it's not entirely unfamiliar territory but that's a long time ago and I've forgotten a lot.

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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As for the wifi situation, I'm currently pondering whether replacing the existing Eero mesh system with a Wifi7 one would be a worthwhile thing to do, but the cost to do so is a big barrier to overcome.  There is a Deco (TP-Link) system available for around £250 which is by far the most cost-effective option I've seen for this, but that's still a lot to consider spending on something that isn't fundamentally broken.

I'm unashamedly biased here. Although I'm well aware it's often a cost effective solution for plenty of people, I don't generally like mesh setups. I far prefer just a couple of good access points to half a dozen mesh units dotted about, and if the quality of access point is good enough it might be for a lot of smaller homes that just one will suffice. However, I also prefer the idea of using a wired network for anything that doesn't have to be portable and that's a whole separate topic.

From your point of view, though, I'd certainly want to understand what your current mesh setup isn't doing that would spur you to consider an upgrade. As you say, if it ain't broke....

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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Oddly enough there's a lot of crossover between what the bees do over winter and the general aims of this forum,

I too have bees here.
They're black Cornish queens - not a prolific yield, but very placid.

I've loaned the area at the bottom of the garden to an apiarist who lacked a suitable location.

That means I get to collect the swarms (when they occur), and get paid in honey.

Posted by: @sheriff-fatman

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Posted by: @agentgeorge

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@sheriff-fatman just saw the wifi7 post. It’s only worth doing if you have receiving equipment wifi7 compliant

my current phone is wifi5, as soon as it logs on the wifi, it pulls everything down to that level.

think of it like a load of Ferraris on a country road following a tractor, speed will be limited to the tractor, which btw could be a Lamborghini, yes the company made tractors in the 50’s 🙂

Thanks.  The main driver for looking into this is that a newly added PS5 in the conservatory fails to get sufficient speed to stream any games, rather than requiring them to be downloaded, and it's returning a consistent 'insufficient speed' message despite the Virgin Broadband reportedly delivering 350MB/s to the house according to the Eero app.  I'll have to check whether or not this would meet the criteria for improvement, but I suspect not.

Oh, b*gger.

I saw this after finishing my last post, and this might just be the driver for you to consider a wired network - or at least running a network cable into the conservatory. Here be monsters (albeit fun ones).

Just for context, my broadband is full fibre to the house and provides 1000 mbps both ways to/from the router. The computer I'm typing this on is using a wired connection and so is getting a consistent 850-950 mbps at the same time as my wife is videoconferencing alongside all the other network activity that's going on.

Posted by: @transparent

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As for the bee-hives, they would seem to be wasted in the garden over winter.

Could you relocate the frames beneath your floorboards and benefit from underfloor heating?

I now have a vision for a judiciously placed trapdoor for harvesting honey only when needed and leaving the rest in situ. Not worked out the means for keeping the bees on the South side, though....

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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Not worked out the means for keeping the bees on the South side, though....

Well, you'll only need to keep one bee on the south side of course.

Pheromones will soon sort out the others!

@transparent … and a ready supply of beeswax polish for those floorboards? (Sorry)

Posted by: @transparent

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Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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Not worked out the means for keeping the bees on the South side, though....

Well, you'll only need to keep one bee on the south side of course.

Pheromones will soon sort out the others!

In general, yes, but I was wondering about the rather more specific case of individual bees' reactions to their door being opened. Not sure my wife'd like a smoke-filled house every time we wanted some honey on our Scotch pancakes. 😆