Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Wow, this thread has been busy and flowing with venom from both sides of the house it seems to me.

Time to lighten it up a bit and take a look at the medals table in the Olympics: It seems that the left wing communist states and totalitarian countries are not very successful compared to the Free Liberal/Conservative Countries even at sport.

Come to think of it I cannot see JC in Lycra heading down the tracks expecting anything more than heading for a monumental crash, if he even dare give it a go (which I doubt he has the balls for), much like as would occur if his party were elected I guess.

swanse quake . bristol my niece was in the shower. alas the ground dosn't move
for me anymore, old age ? B B

You should take some of Manuel's Vit B.

why would i take any vitamin supplement?
i may be tired of fred and his silliness, but vitamin b would certainly not cure that

What is the world coming to when you can't get some KFC when you feel like being naughty!

You might feel better Fred1new if you keep taking those Sildenafil tablets that made you feel like Fred1new, as you must have wished you could get one over and one up on the other Liberal posters for a long time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43139077

Borrowing down - Would you let a marxist regime run riot with the economy, and elect the looney left to run the country?

M , this is no laughing matter. People in Swansea haven't eaten for days.

This article was posted up across the road by MT, sorry no link.

Not sure how they will solve this one, as both sides are complicit in setting the whole student loan scam up.




The ticking time bomb of Student Debt in a rising interest rate environment!


Circa £57,000 for 30 years @ 6.8%=£435,000, at which point the taxpayer has to pay this bill for every student who never earns enough to repay any of their loan.

Fact: Less than half of graduates repay their loan, and six times more EU students do a runner from their UK student debts than UK students.

In 10 years the total outstanding debt will exceed a trillion pounds. In 20-30 years it will dwarf the entire UK sovereign debt.

The pretence is that this debt is owed by individuals, not the government, but the government is liable for it.

Money markets act as they believe the situation warrants. Do we really think that when the student debt mountain and the official sovereign debt of the UK exceeds 200% of our entire gross national product, that this will have no effect on our currency value? Dream on!

The clueless treasury will be under enormous pressure to prevent the need for much higher interest rates to persuade the money markets not to mark sterling down, because in effect this is monetisation by the back door.

Huge cuts in other areas would be needed to prevent the student debt mountain getting even bigger. The UK student loans system is effectively a giant national Ponzi scheme.

Universities go on selling degrees many of which are effectively worthless in the jobs market, whilst the government lends the money to pay for them to students, who then never earn enough to pay their loans off.

And eventually the scale of this lending will outstrip the ability of the economy to support it through taxation at which point the brown stuff will hit the extractor, and the only option will be an emergency closure programme.

Vice chancellors can add up. They know this is a ticking timebomb that will destroy their institutions. But their snouts are firmly in the student loan trough receiving huge salaries whilst they squeeze their staff to take the last applicant to maximise revenue.

This is a disgrace, senior management in universities are betraying their institutions, their staff, their students and the nation. They should come out and condemn this Ponzi scheme and demand a sustainable funding regime, which if that means drastically cutting the number of students, then so be it.

Government needs to urgently sort out the underlying reason why the majority of young people and their parents feel they need a degree.

Vocational education in the UK is a total mess with thousands of different qualifications few of which are respected or understood.

We need to look at the German model of a very small number of qualifications offering high grade training and employers need to treat these as being on a par with degrees in terms of pay, promotion and status.

You cannot blame young people for going to university when employers demand degrees for the jobs they hope to get, but you can blame government for failing to operate an effective affordable and practical vocational training sector and ensuring that employers accept those with vocational qualifications.

A salesman wants to sell me a battery to store my solar panel generated electricity.

The battery size is 1.2kWh

The cost of the battery is £1,500

The average cost of a unit of electricity in the UK is, for the purposes of any calculation, circa 14p

Assuming I will definitely use the battery's stored electricity during the course of one evening (since my plasma TV alone uses 325 watts per hour) I am wondering if it's worth buying such a battery.

Q. What do you think?

Here is my calculation on it:

1.2 kWh/.325 kWh = 3.69 hrs (x £0.14 = £0.52 per 'battery TV evening').

= 340 days (ie. 365 less holidays) x £0.52 = £176.80 per annum

£1500 / £176.80 = pay back time of 8.48 years.

Payback time of 8.48 years = a return of 11.79 %

Hmmm? Should I take a flyer and get two batteries?
Hmmm? Can I burn 2 kWh of electricity per day? Possibly....? Surely...?

Dream on El.

1.2kw wont take you across the road in a normal house.


How much have they quoted you for the solar panels?

Doc,

We have issues with some of our rural properties in the south of France because they're not on the elastrickery grid, and we have to generate our own.

The two things you're discounting in your calculations are:

1) The rebate that you're currently getting from the electricity that you are putting into the grid.
2) The lifespan of the batteries, because they don't last that long before they need replacing.

They're also pretty big jobbies!

Biggest joke is that most of today's degree courses could easily be done in 2 years instead of 3.

There's a 33% saving for starters without touching anything else.

I've already got a solar panel installation with an Enphase Microinverter on each panel.

(Panels generate DC. Joining up all the outlet cables and feeding them into one big inverter (this changes DC to AC) is one way of doing things. If that one inverter fails you lose ALL your generation (obviously).

By having a microinverter for each panel, then if one microinverter fails then you only lose the generated electricity from that one panel.

Enphase Microinverters have a little gadget on them that sends its own generation signals to an Enphase Envoy reader. This reader is connected to the Internet. You can then use your PC and an Enphase App to monitor the whole system's individual and total panel generation. You can check your generation data during the day, after the day, after 7 days, after 1 month, after 1 year, since the day of first installation - all for each solar panel and also for the whole installation.

Neat, eh? If anything goes down, particularly like a microinverter or a solar panel, then you can see this immediately you use your App. If you look at the App and all is OK then it tells you:"All Normal". If you lose one panel from a lump of ice dropping on it from a plane or whatever, then you can see which panel failed, etc, etc, etc. ie. Your system is being 'Monitored' and can be readily 'Maintained' too.

The installer can also use an App to see if ALL of his own installed systems is working OK. eg. He will be able to look at, say all 357 of them.

Enphase can also use an App to see if all their, say 983 Bn systems out there on the planet are all working OK too - and also how reliable their stuff is. Their stuff is actually really good stuff and is 99.8% reliable.

My installer went bust back in Jan 2017. Thus I've no one to call on should anything go wrong with any of my system. I reckon the bottom dropped out of the solar panel market some time ago and tons of installers went bust.

Anyway meanwhile, Enphase have developed an AC Battery. These things are pretty new. If you were to have one installed with your system then the monitoring requirement would now be different too. Users might want to know how much value they are getting from the battery and also how big a battery system could best be fitted. You now need a new type of Enphase Envoy gadget and with new software.

Your system is wired up for you to use all that you personally generate. any spare goes to the Grid. I have a Generation Meter which tells me how much I generate. It would be nice too, if I still got all of the same payments but could store some of my spare electricity in a battery and use this on a cloudy day or during the evening.

Hence why I am considering buying an Enphase Battery - and also a new Enphase Envoy to handle my potential new, now modified monitoring requirements. Since my original installer went bust, I also perhaps need to set up a 'maintenance relationship' with an Enphase agent.

It is only the science courses that require 3 or even 4 years. My son is doing an integrated Master's in Physics and his girlfriend is doing philosophy. She doesn't get a lecture every day. Just has a few essays to write now and then. Thus is at a Russell Group uni. She pays full rate as does my son. He gets several lectures a day with lab work on top with assignments due every couple of days. His course is good value, hers should cost less than half.

Must admit that I have my south side roof covered in solar panels. Look terrible but good for my eco credentials. They only heat my swimming pool. My dogs insisted on them since they are the most regular users. I get the installers down from Leeds every couple of years to service the system although last time, the guy changed the fluid but said he couldn't go up on the roof to check the insulation for 'elf and safety reasons. I must insist on a Pole next time or a long pole with a mirror.

Dil - 21 Feb 2018 15:56 - 80199 of 80208
M , this is no laughing matter. People in Swansea haven't eaten for days.

That's funny Dil but probably true in several places !!

Elon Musk announced last year that he is producing roof tiles that are solar panels. They will look similar to conventional tiles. He will be offering them for a price that is the same as normal ones. There will be a control unit including battery storage.

I greatly admire Elon Musk as I'm sure lots of people do.

His space rockets are wiping the floor with old technology. The video clip of his two long slim SpaceX Falcon Heavy Side Rocket Boosters coming back down to earth and landing side by side on their landing pads, both at the same time, has to be seen to be believed. It is utterly incredible, totally insane and a wonder to behold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0-pfzKbh2k

"The falcons have landed!"