On 14/11/16 16:13, Andrew wrote:
On 12/11/2016 11:08, dennis@home wrote:
On 12/11/2016 10:38, Simon Mason wrote:
On Saturday, 12 November 2016 10:32:20 UTC, Brian Gaff wrote:
As I read it, you have to have both Gas and Electric from them and
have to have a certain type of smart meter, and not have any of the
economy tariffs like economy 7. In this case they can read your
meter, but I still understood you have to have a direct debit set
up as any power used before this is priced at the standard default
rate wh until that is actual up and running.

I have an old fashioned rotating disc electricity meter and there is
no way they can remotely read it. The only way they can charge me is
if a bloke turns up with a torch and clipboard, but I haven't seen
one of those for several years.


Your free electricity will only start once they have installed your
smart meter. They use the smart meter to give the free electricity.
Anything else is charged at the normal rate.


are there any storage heaters that could store enough heat during the
weekend to last the other five days ?.

Yes. but not that are easy to make.

I estimated that a well insulated swimming pool full of boiling hot
water under a house would be enough to heat it for many days.

If you do the sums, lets say you need 50W/sq meter to heat a house.,
(which is actually a LOT) and you have a meter depth of (insulated) hot
water under it... so a cubic meter of water or a metric toinne...at say
80°C that you will allow to go down to say 50°C before its 'exhausted'
in terms of heating...well that's 30x1000x1000x1000 calories or 30,000
kcalories

30,000 kilocalories is about 35 kwh Since we only need 50W, that is
around 700 hours. Around about a *month* of heat.

To run a CH off that is easy. Just put the CH primary in a big coil in
the heat bank and pump it round. Or even just have selective removal of
bits of insulation to allow the heat to rise.

In practice the way you would make this is to cut a huge pit, line it
with a lot of polystyrene, cast a base on it, then build up the
foundation of the house as blockwork with polystyrene outside it and
then backfill to keep the styrene in place. An insulated block and beam
floor over the top completes the construction. You would need so make
some of the construction more waterproof than is traditional of course.


It is an interesting fact that of all the ways to store energy, if all
you want at the end of it is low garde heat, bloody great lumps of
stone concrete or water are in fact cheap and effective.

What doesn't work is a few cinder blocks in a storage heater though.

The mass required has to be build into the house somehow. What you are
really looking for is cheap well insulated mass. Water is perhaps the
easiest, but concrete, stone or masonry would work too. But by volume
they are not as good as water.



--
Karl Marx said religion is the opium of the people.
But Marxism is the crack cocaine.