Categories
Everything on the site by subject: heat pumps, solar PV, batteries, standards and the paperwork around an installation.
Basics
The vocabulary, the units and the bills. The things everything else on the site assumes you already know.
- Does inflation help the case for solar and heat pumps?
- What wears out, and when
- Reading your electricity bill
- What a kilowatt-hour is
4 pages
Heat pumps
How they work, how they are sized, and what makes one cheap or expensive to run.
- Heat pump grant applications hit a record
- Which refrigerant a heat pump uses, and whether it matters
- Do you need a smart meter for a heat pump?
- Keeping a heat pump running well
- What to sort out before a heat pump
- Should I get a heat pump?
- Heat pumps: common questions
- Why a heat pump runs all the time
- Flow temperature, radiators, and the Heat Emitter Guide
- Sizing a heat pump: heat loss and design temperatures
- Hot water with a heat pump
- COP and SCOP: heat pump's efficiency figures
- How a heat pump heats a house
- Ground source or air source
- Reading a heat loss calculation
15 pages, 6 calculators
Solar PV
What a roof will generate, how that figure is arrived at, and what happens to the electricity.
- Getting the most from solar panels
- What to sort out before solar
- Should you wait for better panels?
- Plug-in balcony solar is now legal in the UK
- Should I get solar panels?
- Solar panels: common questions
- How the output of a solar PV system is estimated
- Shading, and why it costs more than it looks
- Why two quotations for the same roof give different generation figures
9 pages, 3 calculators
Batteries
What storage does for a house that already generates.
- Self-consumption, export, and batteries
- Batteries: common questions
- Solar, batteries and power cuts
- Is silicon-carbon suited to home batteries?
4 pages, 1 calculator
MCS and standards
What an MCS certificate says about an installer, and the standards it is based on.
- Installers and certification: common questions
- What MCS certification covers
- The MCS Customer Commitment
- What a quotation should contain
4 pages
Paperwork and permissions
Planning, building control, the network operator, and the documents an installation should leave behind.
- The Warm Homes Loan Scheme
- Telling the network operator: G98 and G99
- The Boiler Upgrade Scheme
- Heat pump noise and the 37 decibel rule
- Answering the hard questions honestly
- Comparing quotes that look nothing alike
- Planning and paperwork: common questions
- Questions to ask before you sign
- What a good quote looks like
- What customers now expect to hear
- What the customer wants from you on site
- What to leave behind
- What an MCS installation should leave behind
13 pages, 1 calculator