Free electric on saturdays with smartmeters

[The Other Mike]

No doubt some parasite will be building big fans to blow at wind turbines.

Or sun lamps to shine at roofs

[Dave Liquorice]

It certainly has the whiff of the marketing department about it. Odd they should release this information the day after they said prices are likely to go up this winter. Trying to mask the bad news that will happened with some good (FSVO "good") that might...

It'll only be available to customers on smart meters. I bet the T&C's will have a "download limit"...

And BG will have a useage history. Significantly more use, on average, will be easy to spot. Yes people might move their wash 'n dry day to Saturday but that means they won't be doing it on another day of the week, their actual average use will remain the same.

Even charging a bank of 24 500 AH batteries won't show in the average use, as you'll just use less for the first day or two day, as that is about how long that sort of storeage will last. And the charging load isn't that high either, about 1.5 kW to take into acount losses. However it could wake up the useage pattern monitoring, pre free lecky Saturday 24 hr period base load 200 W to 1 kW, post free lecky base load 1.7 to 2.5 kW.

[The Natural Philosopher]

we know which one it will be.

[Bill Wright]

Used ones are very variable; not worth the bother. Maltby Auto Electric have good quality 110Ah ones for £75. I know they're OK because they last a long time.

Bill

[Andy Burns]

Fit a 1000 litre heatbank, a 3kW immersion will raise the temperature by

61 degrees in 24 hours, should be good for a fair few showers during the week.

[whisky-dave]

What car battery a friend of mine has brought one of those hybrids and teh battery and I thought that was about 15KWh, but I doubt yuo could use it very effecively as a home UPS .

Laptop battereis the lithium-ion aren't bad.

I guess you could always melt salt.

[Dave Liquorice]

That's about 70 kWhr of energy so I can see what you are thinking, electric shower is 10 kW for 10 mins is 1.7 kWhr so 40 odd showers...

Trouble is 10 kW assumes mains at 15 C, shower at 45 C and paltry 5 l/min. A good hot shower, 10 l/min, 15 to 50 C, is 24 kW = 4 kWhr =

17 showers.

But when your store gets below much below 55 C you haven't the temperature differential between the store and shower water to shove that sort of energy across the interface, so your shower runs cooler and cooler. Also note you have a 60 odd C rise in the store, you won't get anything but a tepid shower with the store at 40 C ...

You'd get better perfomance with a 2000 l store and a 30 C rise from

60 C to 90 C. Bear in mind that's two cubic metres of volume plus some good thick insulation around it and two tonnes plus tank plus insulation in weight...

[alan]

In the winter just heat your whole house 24/7 at the weekend using electric heaters rather than using gas central heating that's on a timer/thermostat.

They must have thought this through and there will probably be a "fair use policy"

[Tim+]

Methinks you misunderstand the phrase "24/7". ;-)

Tim

[Dave Liquorice]

And thinks a weekend is just Saturday. B-)

[Vir Campestris]

OK, so how about this: Great big heatbank, and a heatpump.

On saturday heat the bank as hot as possible. Use the heatpump the rest of the week. At first it will find life really easy, and as the bank cools it will have to work harder - but probably not as hard as if it was sucking from the air or the ground.

Andy

[The Other Mike]

60 A connection at 230v for 24 hours = 331kWh or about 40 quids worth of electricity, or 2000 quids worth per annum.

Does cannabis tolerate a 1 day lit / 6 days in the dark cycle?

Maybe time to build an induction furnace and start melting copper ?

[Matty F]

I'm thinking I'd like to do that, except that I would use sunlight to heat the heatbank, since we don't have free power here but we do have sunlight.

[Vir Campestris]

Then use a ground-source heat pump, and bury the cold end under the lawn. If you have enough sunny acres it'll be fine.

Andy