Ah right, I knew it was one or other way round.

We have to use a dehumidifier to combat daily condensation and mould. It's on most of the time.

That sounds interesting.
Was it vac glass or VIG as it's also called?

If it was, I'd really like to get in touch with them.

Check damp with a Hygrometer

A cheap one

Digital LCD Thermometer Hygrometer Humidity Meter Room Indoor Temperature Clock

A thread on another site was discussing similar and caused me to creat this, which I thought some of you might find interesting.

We have a Tesla M3, a myenergi Zappi charger for it, 2 SolarEdge 9.7Kwh batteries hooked to a SolarEdge 8Kwh hybrid inverter, the Inverter is also fed with 22 Trina 390Kw solar panels.

Electricity supplier is Octopus on the Intelligent Octopus tariff, 41p outside cheap rate and 7.5p from 23:30 to 05:30, and 51p/day standing charge, we switched to Octopus 2 weeks before they put up the EV/off peak rate to the current 10p/Kwh. We only get the SEG payment for export power at 4.3p/Kwh.

So this is how we use our system.

Winter mid Oct to mid March

The Solaredge batteries charge to full every night during off peak, and so does the Tesla if it is below 90%. The 19.4Kwh from the batteries on most winter days Dec, Jan and March gets us through the peak charging period, without out any grid import for the house. Beer in mind our house is totally electric, NO gas supply, we have a 9Kw Air Source Heat Pump for heating and hot water and all cooking is electric. In days when it goes down to 0- 5C then we can expect to import during peak charge rate around 0-5Kwh, and if down below 0c the 5-10Kwh.

Summer mid March to mis Oct

As we get more sunshine, and it does not mean blue skies days, but brighter days, so for example today, last night we only imported 10.54 kWh at cheap rate to charge the Solaredge batteries to full, today is overcast but we have so far generated 6.02 kWh and exported 450 Wh, so this is either being use by the house or topping up the batteries, the batteries at 9:15 had dropped to 64.5% capacity and now are at 68.8%. Based on yesterdays electricity usage(and current temperatures) by 23:30 I would expect the batteries to drop no lower than 50%.

For those interested, our daily heating profile is 5:45 to 9:00 - 20.5C, 9:00 to 16:00 21:30 - 21C and 21:30 to 5:45 - 17.5C. if the temperature drops 0.5C below the lowest setting at any time it will cut in and return it to the temperature set. For example yesterday our heating was on for 7hrs 44mins, with two pre-heats period one at 4:02 slowly raising the temperature from 19C to 20C and the second pre-heat from 15:00 to 16:00 raise the temperature to the 2C set at 16:00. The pre-heat is down by the system and it determines the necessary power on time based on outside and indoor temperatures for it to see the set requirements. it can be modified as you wish, but it self learns and optimises the systems to minimise power usage.

I recently found a very useful software modelling tool from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory(NREL in USA) called System Advisor Model(SAM), and it is FREE. SAM is very sophisticated you can select the actual inverter(s), solar panels, batteries that is in your system, or planned, enter the exact electricity rates for export and import down to half hourly, and import the actual solar radiance figures captured for where you live. I used the SOLCAST data which is an EU solar monitoring organisation, and downloaded the data for the our grid reference for the past 20 years into SAM. You can also enter costs for the hardware and a host of other data. The data for manufacturers kit gives all the operational AC/DC Voltage ratings, Kwh ratings, maximum/minimum power, losses due to temperature impact and other stuff.

What was very interesting is I plugged in everything for our system and ran the simulation and the figures are within a £50 electricity cost of what the system is doing for its first year of operation, I did my own estimates and am pleased that I was within £100. If you look at the electricity cost it shows $703, (substitute £ for $), £180 of this is the standing charge, so the SAM modelled electricity cost is £523 for the year. Based on our bills to date I believe we may be slightly below this, around £450.

Immediately below are the SAM figures and graphs for predicted usage and below them is the actual usage from our SolarEdge system. As you can see our actual figures are very close the SAM model figures.

So if any are interested in Solar/Batteries, costs/savings you can model it and get a very good idea of how it may work for you. One word of advise, to maximise benefit you need to understand what your average peak usage is in a day in the middle of winter, this will give you a base to work from. So for example if you use 20Kwh in a day then it would be sensible to have the ability to store that amount, but also you need to establish what the maximum you can capture is, this will be determined by number of solar panels, which way they face and what the total watt rating is. You can plug the basics into SAM and then play around to get the best you can for your needs. I hope some might find this useful.

We bought all our curtains as blackout curtains (with a black liner). If you don't, you'll regret it when you need to darken the room with bright sunlight outside (worst, of course, in bedrooms). I think the heavier the better for both heat and sound insulation.

Always amazes me when I see a radiator under a window.

If you have two, shut that one off and use the other one.