What are we all investing in for the next 4yrs?

[AGT]

Just more insulation, away to open up a dormer soon and insulate that.
Making things easy maintenance as a plan for getting older, such as changing taps to lever taps, making O&M manuals for the house as lots of info in my head and not written down

[AE-NMidlands]

E- and S-facing in-roof pv, bigger batteries and new (bigger) inverter
Possible heat-pump to replace system boiler, and/or A2A for 2 rooms
Maybe properly engineered rainwater harvesting

[Colin Deng]

Gold, Money, spend more time with family with love
Guess i will also need to plan on purchase a Xiaomi su7 or xiaomi SUV in the future.
Anyway, keep on working, and supplying more good quality batteries to the whole world

[dan_b]

Unfortunately I'm going to be having to cash in my investments in the next 3 years as eldest has just started Uni and needs a roof over his head for some reason - ok so maybe I should reframe it as "i'm investing in his future"...

[Stinsy]

I put a half-pipe PVC gutter under a PV ground array of 6 panels that slopes into a food grade 25L water container.
It fills in no time with rain water any time we have a wet spell. It generally lasts about 2 weeks. I've never run out before the next shower.
I filter it through a cloth and store it in the dark to keep the algea down. I've been drinking it for 3 years now and still not dead. Tastes way better than the tap water which itself tastes waaaay better than city tap water. I sterilise the gubbins every third cycle and wash the contaminents off the panels when they accumulate.
There's not much in the way of big air polluters in my surrounding 100s of kms.

Mostly I started drinking it to avoid the fluorides, chlorine, PFAS, rusty pipes, pharmaceuticals and argricultural contaminents.

You need to do more than filter out the bigger particles!

A bit of bird poo or whatever landing on your panels will provide bacteria that could cause a nasty illness. You can add milton to the water to make it drinkable, or buy a submersible UV lamp or whatever. But pannel runoff should not be drunk without some method of sterilisation.

[resybaby]

I put a half-pipe PVC gutter under a PV ground array of 6 panels that slopes into a food grade 25L water container.
It fills in no time with rain water any time we have a wet spell. It generally lasts about 2 weeks. I've never run out before the next shower.
I filter it through a cloth and store it in the dark to keep the algea down. I've been drinking it for 3 years now and still not dead. Tastes way better than the tap water which itself tastes waaaay better than city tap water. I sterilise the gubbins every third cycle and wash the contaminents off the panels when they accumulate.
There's not much in the way of big air polluters in my surrounding 100s of kms.

Mostly I started drinking it to avoid the fluorides, chlorine, PFAS, rusty pipes, pharmaceuticals and argricultural contaminents.

You need to do more than filter out the bigger particles!

A bit of bird poo or whatever landing on your panels will provide bacteria that could cause a nasty illness. You can add milton to the water to make it drinkable, or buy a submersible UV lamp or whatever. But pannel runoff should not be drunk without some method of sterilisation.

Deffo agree, but the answer is quite simple. Reverse Osmosis systems. Will purify anything and kit can be obtained for all sorts of volume requirments. This one, as an example, is too much of a biggy for a single house, but shows how simple it is.
https://www.industrialwaterequipment.co ... ibc-range/

[Stinsy]

I put a half-pipe PVC gutter under a PV ground array of 6 panels that slopes into a food grade 25L water container.
It fills in no time with rain water any time we have a wet spell. It generally lasts about 2 weeks. I've never run out before the next shower.
I filter it through a cloth and store it in the dark to keep the algea down. I've been drinking it for 3 years now and still not dead. Tastes way better than the tap water which itself tastes waaaay better than city tap water. I sterilise the gubbins every third cycle and wash the contaminents off the panels when they accumulate.
There's not much in the way of big air polluters in my surrounding 100s of kms.

Mostly I started drinking it to avoid the fluorides, chlorine, PFAS, rusty pipes, pharmaceuticals and argricultural contaminents.

You need to do more than filter out the bigger particles!

A bit of bird poo or whatever landing on your panels will provide bacteria that could cause a nasty illness. You can add milton to the water to make it drinkable, or buy a submersible UV lamp or whatever. But pannel runoff should not be drunk without some method of sterilisation.

Deffo agree, but the answer is quite simple. Reverse Osmosis systems. Will purify anything and kit can be obtained for all sorts of volume requirments. This one, as an example, is too much of a biggy for a single house, but shows how simple it is.
https://www.industrialwaterequipment.co ... ibc-range/

I use RO water for my aquarium. I buy it from the local fish shop. You can buy RO filters to make your own but the received wisdom is that you shouldn't do that if you're on a water meter because a typical RO filter takes 3-4L of water in to make 1L of filtered water.

[Saladin]

Thanks for the advice gents but I'll pass. As I say 3 years and not dead. Humans survived for 10s of thousands of years drinking nature.
Not much bird poo on a ground mount because I can easily clean the glass and the rain does a lot to shift it before I stick the pail out.

I process the rainwater through a resonant vortex generator, with a low pressure take off being scrubbed passed two magnets of opposing polarities using a syphon opposed by variable outlet pressure.

One of those things I built more from intuition than hard science.

At some point I'll scale up and use a filtration system that's graded in microns and then plumb it into the polytunnel because plants absorb soft water much easier and fluorides are toxic. It'd be one of those things I'd advocate we changed if we lived in a democratic system. Call me a cynic but I reckon the true reason it's in there is as a way to dispose of harmful byproducts of aluminium smelting at the expense of taxpayers.

[AE-NMidlands]

At some point I'll scale up and use a filtration system that's graded in microns and then plumb it into the polytunnel because plants absorb soft water much easier and fluorides are toxic. It'd be one of those things I'd advocate we changed if we lived in a representative democratic system. Call me a cynic but I reckon the true reason it's in there is as a way to dispose of harmful byproducts of aluminium smelting at the expense of taxpayers.

I'm with you on using rainwater and not getting too hung up or obsessed about absolute purity, but I'm afraid the fluoride as waste from aluminium smelting is an urban myth. Given that it's a widely-distributed element I imagine the only thing that would stop you dtecting it somewhere would be the limit of detection of your analysis.

Fluorides do naturally pollute groundwater in some places, but the dose makes the poison and I guess we are OK as we are at the moment. I used to be cross about fluoridation of drinking water but am less concened now.

Fluorides are added to alumina as a flux and were undoubtedly a toxic emission at one point, so that the smelters had to buy out the adjacent farms that they had polluted. However I believe they they went on to using a deep bed of their incoming alumina in an absorber tower, so that a) they didn't emit it and b) didn't have to buy in so much to get the right concentration when they used it in the melt.