Grid broken!

[dan_b]

Who broke the National Grid then?

[Oldgreybeard]

Maybe us, we've been unavoidably exporting loads for the past hour or so. Car's charged, hot water's charged, batteries charged, washing machine's finished, dishwasher is still on after lunch. Can't even put the heating on to store some heat in the floor slab as the house is already a bit toasty, at 22.5°C. . .

[AE-NMidlands]

yes, a big data loss somewhere...

[Moxi]

Wasn't me we only managed 2kWh of solar gain today, mind you no fear of a water shortage around here for a few months! and if it keeps up being this wet then at some point there has got to be a new stream appear at the side of the cottage so I can do hydro

Moxi

[Oldgreybeard]

Wasn't me we only managed 2kWh of solar gain today, mind you no fear of a water shortage around here for a few months! and if it keeps up being this wet then at some point there has got to be a new stream appear at the side of the cottage so I can do hydro

Moxi

We have a fast-flowing stream alongside our place. Tried to see if I could divert part of it at the upstream end, run it down to a low head turbine at the other end and then back to join the stream. Got a very, very firm "NO" from the Environment Agency. They also said no when I asked if I could use the stream as a collector for a heat pump. Really weird thing is that they immediately (as in within hours) said yes to us discharging treated sewage effluent into the stream.

[openspaceman]

They probably saved you from making an unwise investment, did you do a calculation on how much of that half m v squared you might get out.

[Oldgreybeard]

They probably saved you from making an unwise investment, did you do a calculation on how much of that half m v squared you might get out.

Yes, it was enough to cover our base load, so would have pretty much allowed us to go off-grid, in combination with the PV. Our baseload is high, as we have to run a pump for the treatment plant and a UV disinfection unit for the water 24/7, so just offsetting that would have made it worth doing. The cost would have been modest, as we were already committed to removing around 1,000 tonnes of soil from the site anyway, so maybe a day of extra work and the cost of some pipe would have been pretty much lost in the noise of the total ground works bill.

[openspaceman]

My understanding about hydro is that the high head low flow (like Kris Harbour although his isn't very high) needs far less infrastructure than low head high flow, so the investment in installation is higher per installed kW capacity.

I'm not knocking it if it covers the winter gap when PV just cannot manage.

[Oldgreybeard]

To put some numbers into this, 200W to 400W would have been great, it would more than cover our baseload, with a bit left over to top up batteries overnight. Not hard to make a fairly simple low head hydro system that will deliver that sort of power. The head I could get was about 1.4m, so not a lot, but the flow rate is always above 1m²/s, more like double that in winter. The stream used to be a mill leat, running an undershot wheel about 100m or so downstream from us. That corn mill operated for several hundred years, from Anglo Saxon times, shutting down around 250 years ago, I think (the mill building still stands and is now a house). Not sure how much power it would have made, probably somewhere around 1kW I think. Restoring the old mill would make more sense, as the leat still runs past it, more or less in the original channel, would just be a matter of reinstating the wheel etc.

[ecogeorge]

[/quote]

Got a very, very firm "NO" from the Environment Agency. They also said no when I asked if I could use the stream as a collector for a heat pump. Really weird thing is that they immediately (as in within hours) said yes to us discharging treated sewage effluent into the stream.
[/quote]
That's your problem, you let someone else decide what you can do on your land ....... why on earth did you ask ? you can never do it now.............
George