sagraiasolar's activity

.... have a go at the cool floor thing.... mop the floors with liberal ammounts of water.... when nearly dry open doors and windows long enough to blow out the saturated air.... remove shoes and enjoy

Just got back from a bit of camping near Grossetto to find your messages and sorry to see comms are problematic. I'm happy to be contacted directly on heatingitaly@gmail.com The web site has also had problems but I'm hoping to get it back to www.heatingitaly.com very soon.... the trouble was something we all suffer from here... can't buy an English speaking web service from an Italian address coz the postcode is not UK'ish enough.... so I've re-registered the site to an Australian host.

When you look around and see new houses going up they often have one theme in common. They are usually characterless boxes without even a nod to charming traditional features like arches and balconies. Worst of all they are often a bright bile yellow and on this point I think I prove my theory. It's all about drawing packages which have become so much easier to use that even an untrained person - some might say Geometra - can knock up a passable looking boxy drawing complete with impressive trees and passers by. The best colour to show of the drawing is this bright yellow and this imprints itself so firmly in the clients mind that when it comes to choosing a colour it's yellow that jumps to mind straight away. Architects are the ones that are trained in vernacular, balance , ratios etc - give them the job I say.

The payback on solar is not always as good as one might imagine so it has to be cheap to justify doing it. Here we pay €1,200 for 5mq of plain vanilla panels and then http://www.thesolarshop.eu/acatalog/Pump_Stations_from_Tiemme.html will get you a pump station and controller for £342.72 inc VAT.....fluid will be €80 odd.... all you need then is some insulated 16mm copper tube (22mm is too big and too expensive) and a trench dug in the garden (or a roof fixing kit). For buried tubes put them in those big red plastic tubes and squirt foam around them to make really sure there is no water conducting away the heat N.B. don't forget the sensor wire - 0.75mm twin flex will be fine. So the cost is under €2,000 and a bit more for help to fit it up. You don't need professional pressure filling - just pump in the fluid with a garden sprayer.. they can make 3 bar easily enough. Don't cast a concrete pad to put them on... precast kerb slabs chucked on the ground will do or we have done concrete filled plastic drain pipes too. A final word - don't chase efficiency with fancy panels... THE SUN IS FREE.

Steve, Presumably the salsa furnace heats a tank already, so maybe an external immersion heater would do the trick... the cost is trivial (to install - not too bad to run just for summer either) and they work on a simple gravity circuit on your existing tank. On the same principle you can add solar power to an existing tank that was not originally designed for the job.

The best in your area - with exceptional taste and experience - is probably Penny Radford who works alongside a couple of excellent local architects. I have PM'd you with a list of tried and tested suppliers on your patch who have shown, over many jobs, to be up to the mark.

Badger - sorry to hear you have been suffering... I have just had exactly the same experience of abcess type pains from infected tooth and no time to get it sorted for a week. My local dentist was away on holiday but as soon as I saw him he gave anti-Bs and followed by root canal treatment of the one root molar. I timed the root canal work from start to finish..... 12 minutes including the jabs. I have to go back next week for the finale which he says will take ten minutes.  My UK dentist was talking about £800 worth of crown and an operation in the jaw!  From now on I'm sticking to my Italian dentist.

The next cheapest energy source after wood is electricity - as long as it's driving a heat pump that is... so have a word with Badger about fitting a neat box of tricks outside your property... just a couple of pipes and a wire and 'Robert's your fathers' brother'

yes the reason for 30 degrees being best is that summer sun is so much better than winter sun that to get the best overall production (ie PV panel income) you need the flatter angles. The steep winter angle you mentioned is really good for wet panels if you have lots of them - say up to 10mq - as you can mitigate the summer peaks in favour of fatter shoulder months.  Have a look at the model on the web site as it has a lovely graph for you to experiment with.  One important thing to always bear in mind with wet panels is that they are cheap and so we are not really bothered with efficiency we just want to build a production curve that suits our needs .. eg fat enough shoulder months for pool heating and maybe not so much in mid summer when there is virtually no demand for hot water.

.. every case is slightly different. As you say you will definitely have PV panels - as opposed to the wet ones - your train of thought might go like this. An array of 6kWp would match your probable power rating on the supply. This would often put out 2kW + in the winter - enough to run a small 7kW'ish heat pump. Wood backing this up. So no need for gas at all. Summer hot water costs would be so minimal that you won't be able to justify wet solar panels either, unless pool heating is involved.  If you take free electricity and multiply it up with a heat pump there is not much that can compete. I hear what you say on the insulating... good in principle especially in the roof and floors. I personally think that doing the walls straightens them up so much that you will feel you've built a Barratt home. Part of the joy of these old houses is the character of the rough old walls with mysterious niches, beams etc. There's lots of heating chat on old mails here.. I suggest you go back over it as most here have had it all before. Check out Badger's mails as he is the heat pump man and on your patch too.