Electricity meter question.

Could you not use the PV o/p to drive a large fan which is pointed at a small wind turbine which also qualifies for the subsidies?

OK, that's not how I understood it to work. I thought it was a two-way meter in your supply, and you were paid for "running it backwards"

So how do they meter that? Where's the in-house meter between your panels and your immersion heater? Do they indeed meter it, or do they just pay some calculated rate, based on the panel capacity?

Hmmm..... I've got a rig in the shed at the moment where a motor is driving a couple of home-brew wind turbine alternators. It's a lot easier to test them this way than doing it up the pole!

Pedal generator and feed-in tariff?

You can always run the tumble dryer.

Some washing machines have a delayed start timer as standard - I don't know if to make use of economy 7 type tarifs or something like that.

SteveW

And a lot of machines these days don't have mechanical 'on/off' switches, so I doubt that plug in timers would be effective.

There isn't a first click on ours. Select programme 1 to 12. Turn on main power. Nothing happens until a momentary-contact button is pressed. Common with a lot of modewrn machines.

crooks

Ours is an always on, push to start type, but it has the delayed start and as well as that, if you remove the power once started, it re-starts from the same place when power is re-applied, so you would be able to use an external timer anyway.

SteveW

useless for this type of application. Given it's an electric meter they could just use low power SRAM with a super cap backup supply.

MBQ

here

interesting

Too easily corrupted. Fe RAM has indefinite data retention after removal of power, better than 10^^15 write cycles, and a glitch during writing won't corrupt the rest of the data (According to the makers...)

Not according to what I've read. The existing system wasn't designed for suddenly-varying generation, which is what you get when a front crosses the UK and PV output suddenly rises, or drops to a fraction of what it was. (I'd guess at about 1%, based on measurements on admittedly-old solar 12 volt car battery trickle chargers).

Easily designed around.

You would struggle to "corrupt the rest of the data" with any technology.

MBQ

here

interesting

To use one example meter I know of, in what was an empty shop for three years, how would your idea cope with a couple of years of disconnection?

I must remember to tell the makers of my cameras that. They tell me under no circumstances must I take the batteries out while it's writing to the card, as that may render the card useless.

tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM

OK, so go back to using FRAM.

My point stands.

The warning, "may", is due to potential corruption of the card's file system that isn't designed to be robust enough to withstand corruption of a single critical memory location. The data is still there if you have the right tools to recover it.

MBQ

You never worked with bubble memory did you?