Phil Himsworth

In the UK 290km^2 of land is used to grow wheat for biofuel; this is more than the total land used for solar PV (230km^2) but produces 1/100th of the energy from the same area. Another 70km^2 is used for sugar beet biofuel, which is a bit more energy dense, but still 1/50th that of solar. If concern about food security is the problem, we should be complaining about biofuels, not solar PV. (Or golf courses, which take up 1250km^2! Imagine how much energy would be generated if we installed solar panels on those 😜 )

I agree yesterday was fantastic, ours did more in one day than the whole week before it put together, the battery was full and we even exported something for the first time since November! Back to next to nothing today though 🙃

This sounds great all round, it doesn't affect normal use of the space and can keep vehicles underneath out of the sun too. I wonder how much more expensive it actually is? Normal ground mounted panels need a metal frame, is it just like that but with longer legs so doesn't actually cost much more?

I tried several times to contact a couple of local companies and had no response to calls or emails. I still see their advertising around the place, though, so do they want more work or not? Very strange. Vastly more land is used for biofuels than solar PV, at a much lower yield of energy per area. Nobody complains about that, though, because it still looks like a field. Giving farmers an extra income stream by letting them use a few fields for solar, which is more profitable than most forms of agriculture, is a far better way to secure farming in this country. Land used for solar PV is also better for biodiversity than crop fields, which in turn increases crop yields of surrounding land as well as just being a good thing anyway. We can - and should - put solar panels both on roofs and the ground.

I made my own out of cardboard; it still required brushing to get rid of the excess between the rails but it was very helpful in getting the shoulder the right shape and consistent along a whole length of track on both sides, I don't think I had to touch that at all. Making your own has the advantage that you can get the trailing edge to exactly match the track and the shape you want. I ended up making two, one for track on a cork bed and one without.

The last two houses we've had have both had extractor fans venting into the eaves of the roof space but not outside. I wonder how many houses are like this without the occupants knowing about it; I bet it's a lot...

The problem is not so much the fact that it is cold, but that warmer air from inside the house has been able to get to the cold bit and get stuck; it then cools and the water condenses out. The two ways to fix it are to stop the warm air getting there in the first place -seal any gaps in the ceiling, make sure extractor fans vent properly - or make sure that if any warm air does get up there it can escape before it cools down inside. Roof vents do this; I fitted some in our loft last year, just lap vents that simply push between the felt strips, and the problem went away. Stopping the air getting up there in the first place is better, but realistically you can't seal every single gap so the latter method is still a good idea. This problem often appears when improving the insulation between house and loft; with poor insulation the roof is warmer so damp air won't condense, but at the expense of losing heat through the roof much quicker.

Theoretically a colder house will lose less heat, so only heating it while you're there should use less energy and so be cheaper. I wonder though if you've got a boiler and control system that can modulate, keeping a constant low level of heat means the boiler can run much more efficiently than if it has to work at full tilt to reheat the house from cold, so using less energy overall. I don't understand it either to be honest; ours is not a modulating control system, relying only on any return temperature modulation that the boiler does, and I couldn't help notice that our house seemed to use more energy this weekend when we were not there; what was saved from turning it down seemed to be outweighed by the extra required turning it back up again. In this case maybe it was in part because it was a lot colder over the weekend, so it would probably have used more anyway, but I'm still not convinced that's all of it...

That's interesting; I've converted a couple of Hornby ringfield motors and the main negative I've found is that they don't have as much torque as they used to so slow down on tight corners. I wonder if all cd motors are the same...

Given it sounds like continuity of sound is a bigger problem than continuity of movement, can you get very small stayalive units that will fit in the smallest of locos which provide just enough power to keep the sound running but don't try to power anything else?

The company over the road from where I work in Telford seems to be doing a good trade in precast concrete sections for HS2, and a garage down the road always has a few HS2 trucks around it. Telford is far enough away that any knock on effects from the trains themselves must have knocked on a few times before they get here, but stuff like this all over the country must be doing far more good than any bank bailout ever could.

From my point of view, in 2020 I started building a new layout having not had anything to do with model railways for nearly 30 years. One of the things I really wanted was some way of having a train leave a terminus station, enter a two track roundy-roundy loop, then be able to return to the station without having to reverse, and all in as little space as possible. Crewlisle was one of the layouts I found online that had pulled something like this off; its multi-layer approach was a huge inspiration and is probably one of the main reasons I have the layout I have now and am very happy with it. I've poured over the track plan a lot since I started planning mine so would have loved to see the real thing. I've reused several other ideas I got from Crewlisle such as short removeable sections of track to allow reliable running over curves over baseboard joins. It has been very helpful.

I suppose it has been well above average temperature so far this winter, so I imagine most people have used less energy for heating than normal. Whether it would normally be 70% higher, that does sound an awful lot doesn't it...

Does it work with just one loco on the track? I had a similar situation with what I thought was an isolated section, but actually with two locos it could basically end up with the isolated section connecting the locos in series between two powered sections of opposite polarity, so both locos were powered even though each loco on its own was not. ie. "+" powered rail -> loco -> unpowered rail -> loco -> "-" powered rail

Just one of the running one, but it's not the best either: It was great to see the Hunslet and the 15xx running in the flesh! I'm very much looking forward to being able to do the same at home...

I was particularly interested in seeing "Crewlisle", as it was a major inspiration for my own layout, but there was a conspicuous space where it should have been... I hope it was for benign reasons and that everything is okay with its owner / operator(s).

Good idea; we parked at the NEC and was a total farce, enormous queues past empty car parks only to be sent into a car park that was full! We and everyone else went all over the place before finally finding somewhere to park. You'd think the NEC would have parking sorted by now... Thoroughly enjoyed the show though. Some amazing layouts, lots of variety, dispelled any lingering doubts that maybe I should have gone for N instead of OO as while you can pack a lot in and it's great to look at it's just too fiddly 🙂

A problem with suppliers buying in advance is that they had to buy lots of energy at really high prices a couple of months back, when nobody knew whether there would actually be enough, so until that passes through the system we're stuck with high prices to pay for it even though energy prices now are much lower. Being on a renewable tariff doesn't help either, as even much cheaper renewable energy is pegged to the price of electricity from gas until the powers that be get round to fixing the energy market that is pegged to the price of the most expensive energy source. A lot of this money will be returned to the government as part of the CFD arrangements if the energy sold is above the "strike price" of the particular energy project - I don't know how much the government has got from this but I'd like to know... We're with Octopus too; for us their estimates have been better than some other companies - EDF in particular were useless, their estimates were always way over what we actually used, and we were with them for a few years - but at least they let you change the DD yourself and even withdraw money if you're in credit. The idea of not being able to set your own DD these days is just crackers.

I don't think there is an "OTT" when it comes to the number of panels. Once you've got the fixed costs of inverter, battery, installation etcetera additional panels are cheap, but the more panels you have the more days you'll generate enough to be self sufficient when the days are darker. We've got 22 panels on our roof totalling 8kwp and a 9.5kwh battery and while we've only had it a few weeks I have no regrets from getting as many panels as would fit. It will be enormously over the top in summer but the idea is to get the most out of it in winter; we seem to have had a sunny October but since the 6th we've only had one day when we didn't generate enough to cover our daily use (4.8kwh of 6-7kwh). All other days have been between 9 and 30kwh, We've seen it generating enough to run the house and put a bit in the battery even when it's been chucking it down. It remains to be seen how it does when winter really starts and we get some proper dreary dark days. Using the PVGIS tool I think I worked out that our array should cover our daily usage on 83% of days, and the battery should increase that number further when carrying over a bit from the day before is enough. We will see. The only thing I would have preferred from our system was the newer givenergy inverter that can do 3.6kw from the battery instead of the 2.6kw that ours can; the only time we've imported peak rate electricity so far is when cooking, when 2.6kw doesn't go very far when using an electric oven and hob. Admittedly it makes very little difference really - it might import 1/4 - 1/2kwh or so if we've got the oven and several rings going at once, as it's normally not for long until they get up to temperature - but it's still painful seeing that "grid export" number become "grid import" instead...

I've got a few Adafruit servo controllers; I like them because they work on the i2c bus so you can daisy chain them together to keep them close to the servos they control. Strangely enough though the only servos I've had issues with interference were the ones on the shortest wires closest to the controller. No idea why...

I have a Heljan class 27 that didn't like the inside line of a curved point in a second radius corner; the bogies could not turn enough due to details hanging down from the loco body. I have fixed it by committing the crime of trimming those hanging details slightly so it worked. (Then I removed the offending point completely, mind, as I had another loco that wouldn't go round it at all either)

Our battery won't help much during a power cut. As mentioned above it does have a "emergency power supply" output which is wired into a double socket below the inverter, but that's it at the moment; being in the garage this isn't really very useful. I keep wondering about asking a sparky to look at putting the house lighting circuits onto this output, so they'll run as normal when the power is on but will run from the battery if the power goes off. The complicated bit is making sure it is still earthed; during a power cut you cannot rely on the incoming earth, so your system must have its own. This probably makes it more complicated and costly than is really worth it.

Our installation was finally finished today. It's been a long road; ordered in April, panels installed in July, battery delivered but not installed in August, inverter installed last week, then everything finally commissioned today. The givenergy dashboards are super for data nerds and it's great to see the meter reading zero ever since the battery finished calibrating. The fun bit will be working out how much to charge the battery with off-peak power so as not to run out but not to waste the solar. Here's hoping for a sunny morning tomorrow 🙂

If the pi was set to get an address automatically but failed to do so it would end up with an address starting with 169.254 so it's not that. It sounds like it's been set to use a particular address but it's not right for this network. Configuration of things like this on a pi is normally fairly straightforward; look in the menus for a "Raspberry pi configuration" app or something like that, and have a rummage if it's got any settings about network interfaces. You shouldn't need to go delving into config files or command line stuff.

Conversely the biggest "pro" for us has been the ability for them to enable off-peak pricing; we've had this for years, and being able to charge an EV and run household appliances with the highest consumption (washer, dishwasher, tumble drier etc) on very cheap electricity has saved us an absolute fortune over that time. Just over half of our consumption is off-peak, which generally used to be about a third of the price of "normal" electricity, but more recently the gap has widened even further. This reduces our electricity bill by about 40%.