Idiot's guide to a self build battery

[Oldgreybeard]

You must be that clever guy I was speaking about, nicely done and an excellent set of figures for longterm reference. Very cool OGB, cheers!

Trust me when I say I'm not clever, and I went up a hell of a steep learning curve when designing this house! I committed to build it in 2010, when I retired, thinking it would be a million times easier than it was. I spent over 2 years, working around 12 hours or so a day, every day, learning and researching about everything from architectural design to the intricacies of passive house design. Massively more difficult than I anticipated, but by then we were committed and I had no choice but to learn a lot of stuff that will most probably never be of use to me again.

[Joeboy]

Can't say I appreciate your yeah yeah attitude or your negativity.

I suddenly had an image of Joeboy as Donald Sutherland laid back sipping red wine.

My view was simply that the thermal mass in a dwelling and its heat storage is difficult to quantify, let alone where the heat comes from; solar gain, hot bodies, wood stoves etc.

An electric powered storage heater is more straightforward.

I just fell over! I was actually thinking about a glass of red and I am also fully reclined watching Billions. I didn't know remote viewing had come on so far, impressive!

Agree on difficult to quantify yet its there and working. It was only a thought from a morning cuppa. We'll see how it shakes out.

Not only remote viewing, also precognitive! Holy jamoley!!

[Oldgreybeard]

Not only remote viewing, also precognitive! Holy jamoley!!

Is that because of the "elephant in the room"? (on the cushion). Elephants are said to have a long memory, perhaps it sent a subliminal signal that a glass of red was required at this time of day . . .

[Joeboy]

You must be that clever guy I was speaking about, nicely done and an excellent set of figures for longterm reference. Very cool OGB, cheers!

Trust me when I say I'm not clever, and I went up a hell of a steep learning curve when designing this house! I committed to build it in 2010, when I retired, thinking it would be a million times easier than it was. I spent over 2 years, working around 12 hours or so a day, every day, learning and researching about everything from architectural design to the intricacies of passive house design. Massively more difficult than I anticipated, but by then we were committed and I had no choice but to learn a lot of stuff that will most probably never be of use to me again.

Aye? Fair enough, yet you put in all the hours and are freely giving the distillation of that effort here. I genuinely applaud you and hope to buy you a pint sometime. In my random moments I like to imagine that we leave this trail behind us and it will help multitudes of folk on a long enough timeline.
No politicians, no Bullshit, no agendas other than to help and entertain ourselves, sounds good eh?

[Joeboy]

Not only remote viewing, also precognitive! Holy jamoley!!

Is that because of the "elephant in the room"? (on the cushion). Elephants are said to have a long memory, perhaps it sent a subliminal signal that a glass of red was required at this time of day . . .

Indeed, an ongoing theme throughout the home.

[Oldgreybeard]

Hopefully it's easier for someone coming along now to learn this stuff than it was back then. The only place I found that had one or two people that knew a bit about passive house design and construction was the old AECB forum (now pretty much dead after it turned into a "closed shop"). Most of the information on the web was in German, so I spent ages trying to translate German design stuff into English and then comparing our building regulations to theirs to see what I needed to change. In the end I found that the best source of a lot of information was discussion groups in Canada, where building well-insulated and airtight houses is a lot more advanced than here in the UK.

[nowty]

I've done a trawl of the site for a couple of hours and will provide an update soon. Its facilitated the adding of more members to my list, 96 members now out of the total membership of 249.

Batteries will all be lumped together and shown as gross because if I attempt to do a useable alteration, I'll have to keep doing maths and it will get complicated as folk alter their systems. I will also not include any EV battery storage, maybe I'll add that as a separate category some day.

Hot water and thermal storage data collection will be patchy and understated as not many add it to their sig or specify how much of it they have. Had a similar issue with Solar Thermal in the past as there is a lot of it out there, but few know how much it generates, so the info is less meaningful.

[Countrypaul]

...

I then wanted to know how much sensible heat the internal structure of the house could store. For example, every sheet of plasterboard stores about 22kJ of heat (about 6Wh) for a 1°C temperature difference, so if the plasterboard warms up during the day (from solar gain) then each sheet (and there are hundreds of them) can store heat to give out during the night when the temperature starts to drop. 100 sheets of plasterboard could provide about 600Wh of useful heat for every 1°C increase in its temperature above room temperature.

Just wondered, how many sheets of PB would acually warm up due to solar gain and by how much (direction of window, size etc all make this more interesting), since as soon as the PB is warmer than the air in the room it will start to lose heat, don't they drop back to room temp well before night? - obviously they will incerase the thermal mass of the room so keeping it warmer for longer into the night though. How much difference does wall colour make? In our case, SWMBO decided all walls & ceiling were to be white (or at least so close as makes no difference), the PB does not feel to warm up, but anything dark left in front of a window certainly does. Since our windows are double/triple glazed heat it supposed to be retained eather than reflected out.

Just out of curiosity, how big is the house? Ours is 225m2 and I only used 300 sheets of PB (250 x 12.5mm 2.4 x 1.2 standard 25kg each, and 50 soundbloc same size but 38kg each) that included the ground floor ceiling being double boarded where there was a room above (100m2).

[Krill]

Burning wood is RE, click, throw.

Yeah yeah, if you have your own land that you coppice I'd buy that but in general, no chance, and for a list like this? Sure, save the data, it doesn't mean much. It's like when nurses way peoples faeces to check how much food has been absorbed for people with eating disorders, why does anyone really want to have that data?

Can't say I appreciate your yeah yeah attitude or your negativity. Also it's weigh not way and I didn't know that was a thing. Each to their own though.

I'm sorry for the spelling mistake, I can see how upsetting that is to you.

It doesn't change the point that creating a list of all the known values (such as UFH on a known volume of concrete) is going to be more accurate than including in that list unknown volume of bricks.

[nowty]

Actually I am going to include EV storage but keep it as a separate category. We have impressive amounts of storage between us and the cars are relatively easy to work out their capacities even if they are not specified.