Battery Vehicle Society

No grants worth having this end of the country , only £400 was up for grabs - unless you're on the dole/pensioner/incapacity benefit etc.

As usual government talks a good job , but just full of hot air when it comes to practical assistance or incentives.

To qualify for the £400 I would have had to remove the floor in my loft and replace with 27cm depth of loft insulation!
Not financially worth it.

We have gone down the road of replacing all the light bulbs, cavity wall insulation,composter etc. The solar system was the final step - don't think we can realistically go any further.

Didn't realise the grant system wasn't the same for everyone. I thought anyone could do the same as us.

That sucks.

booboo wrote:We have gone down the road of replacing all the light bulbs, cavity wall insulation,composter etc. The solar system was the final step - don't think we can realistically go any further.

Anything in the house that can run on batteries does and they're recharged from a solar panel that also powers my garage. Most of my posts here are from a laptop that I also charge from the same PV setup. Maybe worth considering since I see chris is selling some panels at a nice price.

Here's my setup - it took under an hour to install

Floydster

Click on the picture to open the album

Cheers floydster, you've restored my faith in human nature ! Might have to take another look at that idea.

Previously I was really put off the whole "PV" thing by the extortionate prices I was being quoted, how does £12000 grab you?.......I simply gave up on the idea of solar electricity .

None of the quotes for solar water heating systems came in below £3500 , the cheapest systems were quite old technology (copper strip) as opposed to the next generation chemical coated tube stuff.

I was aware I was paying a premium rate for my system, but then it is a good system (10 year guarantee etc). High prices are one of the joys of living in south-east England I guess .

Dont get me started on property prices, garage labour rates etc

floydster wrote:
Anything in the house that can run on batteries does and they're recharged from a solar panel that also powers my garage. Most of my posts here are from a laptop that I also charge from the same PV setup. ]

Superb! I've been thinking quite some time now that most items in a house could run of much lower voltages as pretty much everything nowadays has a transformer in it to step down to usually between 5 and 12 volts so why do we need 240volt sockets other than for the washing machine cooker and imersion heaters ?

Surely a 12v ring main through a house could work quite well? When I was a kid we lived in a house that did actually have two supplies in each room one with a very small round pinned plug the other with the conventional 3 pin 240v plugs

A 12V ring main would run into difficulties with the amount of current drawn and voltage drops in the wiring. If you have a 12V source somewhere in the house, and then measure the voltage at the "far end" of the wiring run, it'll be less than 12V, possibly quite a bit less. That loss represents wasted energy. You'd need thicker copper in the wiring to compensate.

But, a 12V system might be practical for low-power applications. It's hard to say exactly how much power one could draw in a practical manner, though. For instance, it might be nice to run a laptop off the 12V system, but a typical laptop might need 19V at 6 or 7 amps.

Don't get me started on how power-hungry (power-waseful) modern computers are!

qdos wrote: When I was a kid we lived in a house that did actually have two supplies in each room one with a very small round pinned plug the other with the conventional 3 pin 240v plugs

Ah your talking about the old 5 amp round pin stuff they were normally designed and put in for running table lights and where wired from the lighting circuit. These quite often where also either switched with the main light in the room or seperately switched or live all the time.

Then you had the old 15 amp round pin sockets that where generally wired as a radial circuit in those days.
Many people would just change the 15 amp sockets for 13 amp ones.

A low voltage or 12volt house supply is a good idea in theory but you can start running in to all sorts of issues with volt drop and cable sizing very quickly as the load builds up.

ChrisB

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I think that using battery based PV systems and 12v circuits is all well and good if you are either off the grid because it is not available (very few people in the UK) or if you have some idealistic drive to be "independent" but please remember that (as all ev people know) batteries are always the weak point in a system and involve various amounts of nasty chemicals etc. Most solar PV energy systems in the UK are now grid linked with the attendant advantages

All the power generated is used by someone, once a battery system is full thats it, all the potential power generated goes to waste.

Its cheaper and has no ongoing maintenance

It eliminates separate wiring sytems and high current, low voltage inverters

The technology for grid linked systems is now pretty mature and with the exceptions mentioned above is realy the only choice for most people. Renewable technologies must be easy to use not seen as a tinkerers game for a few, not that there is anything wrong with the DIY approach but most people dont want to be checking battery water etc every month or so.

I have just come home today from comissioning 4 off 1.3kW grid linked PV sytems on a group of social houses for rent, which would not have been installed by the housing association if they had involved all the hassle of batteries.

So theres my perspective as an engineer in the industry (the company I work for will be supplying over 1MW of PV in the next 12 months, mostly for grid linked systems)

Hope Ive not been too outspoken

Woooh excellent NickJ Can I have some of your shop soiled ones

Sadly (or fortunately depending on perspective!) we have very few modules damaged...and when they are it is usually "carrier disease" caught by throwing a glass object hard into the back of a van!

but on a positive note prices are falling and the UK is finally starting to wake up to the potential of PV. Its just we are about a decade behind Germany.

I think we may be straying off topic in this thread though!

N