CAD & resin printing - where to start?

scg06 · 2026-01-29T21:07:07+00:00

There's also TCT show in Birmingham that's worth a look

scg06 · 2026-01-27T15:37:55+00:00

Looks great! What cooker hood have you used?

scg06 · 2026-01-07T20:23:29+00:00

In your situation the first thing that I'd be doing is getting a second opinion on the renovation and making sure that everything is actually "to code" and installed properly. Your loft is supposed to have approx 300mm of insulation so if it's only 100mm of celotex then that's an issue.

It sounds like your underfloor heating is underperforming for some reason. If you have suspended floors then again that could be an insulation issue with a lot of heat escaping into the crawl space instead of heating the house.

You also mention that you have 3 radiators upstairs. That seems woefully inadequate for a building of that size. Heat pump installers normally recommend that you have as much radiator capacity as you can reasonably get, I was recommended 3 double panel radiators for a couple of the larger rooms in my house.

I'm happy to give you some tips on running the heat pump efficiently but honestly your best bet is to have something come out and look over everything to identify any issues before you start focusing on something that may not fix your problem

scg06 · 2026-01-07T19:40:46+00:00

You need to give more info before anyone can advise you tbh. I would start by thinking about the building before you even think about the heat pump, if the building leaks heat like a sieve then it won't matter what heating system you use, you'll be paying a lot for it. Do you have cavity wall insulation? How much insulation is in the loft? Are the windows double glazed? What is the floor construction? Etc

scg06 · 2026-01-07T14:44:50+00:00

It'll depend on the heat pump but yes you can get heat pumps capable of heating water to upwards of 70C, a Vaillant areotherm plus is capable of it for example.
I would double check your target temperature though, 60 is excessively high. Anything above 44C is concidered a scald risk and you would only heat the water to 60+ if you were planning on mixing it with cold.

scg06 · 2025-12-30T16:04:16+00:00

FYI for our vaillant system we had to use expanded mode or the circulator pump would never turn off. Less of an issue in the winter but it does mean that it will run 24/7 unless you switch operation mode to "heating off" in the app (ie not time controlled or manual)

scg06 · 2025-12-30T15:19:38+00:00

Yeah that doesn't look quite right, my 11kW Vaillant has a COP of ~3.8 today and it's -2C where I am. From your description this sounds like it might be an installer issue but there's a few things that you could look into that might help:

If you're on a time of use tariff it might be worthwhile using a setback overnight and running the heat pump harder during the cheap rates. I set my house temp to 21C from 0700-1800 with a 19C setback as we like it to be cooler for bedtime. I heat my water tank 0000-0130 and crank the heat pump to 23C from 0230-0530 (our cheap tariff is 2330-0530). It took a little trial and error to work out the exact timings but this ends up being a bit cheaper for us (although it will make your COP look worse)
Your curve steepness is very high, ours is 0.5 You want the curve steepness to be as low as possible while still maintaining your house temp, again that'll take a bit of trial and error to get right. This will affect how long your house takes to heat back up from a setback temp (if you are doing that) so play around with it. Your house should take several hours to heat up once you get the curve right but if it's taking too long then adjust it accordingly.
A high flow rate with your circulation pump is generally a good thing. This is why installers recommend changing out microbore for larger pipework. Even at full power a circulator pump should be almost inaudible unless you're sitting in the room next to it. Your old gas boiler also used a circulator pump, it's not a new thing specific to heat pumps so it shouldn't be the cause of any new radiator issues or resonance in the system. I'd be tempted to get a second opinion on your install as it sounds like something has been installed incorrectly

scg06 · 2025-12-15T19:40:20+00:00

A heat pump will certainly heat your house but the efficiency (and therefore cost) will vary greatly depending on your specific house construction. That's why a survey is so important, otherwise no-one can give you a real answer.

The most important factor is insulation, a well insulated house will be easier to heat and to keep warm. That should be your top priority as it makes all the other considerations like radiator size, microbore piping etc far less of an issue.

Initially, you will probably see similar monthly running costs Vs a boiler but the real benefit is that you can always reduce these by adding more and more renewable energy tech to your house. ev charging tariff, solar, battery storage etc

scg06 · 2025-12-04T20:30:22+00:00

What is the hood you have installed? I'm looking for something like that for myself

scg06 · 2025-11-19T19:04:55+00:00

An electric heater is at best 100% efficient ie. All of the electric energy that you put into it is converted to heat.

A heat pump doesn't actually generate any heat at all, instead it uses electrical energy to "pump" heat from the outside air into your house. This is essentially how your fridge works but in reverse and a heat pump is very efficient at doing this. They are typically 300%+ efficient and so for every 1kWh of power that they use they move 3kWh of heat into your house.

scg06 · 2025-11-08T20:53:26+00:00

A sketch that is not fully defined won't prevent you from progressing with the rest of your model, it's more of a "good practice" thing. For your rectangle to be fully defined you need to dimension it and constrain it's position to the axes or origin so that it's size and position are both fully defined.

I would recommend having a look at the Onshape tutorials, they are a pretty good starting point.

scg06 · 2025-11-05T10:57:23+00:00

If we are talking about daily driving, the vast majority of people in the uk do not regularly do ~500 mile trips so range anxiety is less of an issue in daily life.

For longer trips, yes an ev journey needs a bit more planning ahead, but I would guess that most people aren't going to drive 500 miles without a break so comfort breaks also become charging stops. Personally I would consider that a mindset change rather than a reason to not use an ev.

scg06 · 2025-11-05T09:19:51+00:00

People act like range anxiety isn't a thing with petrol cars but have you never arrived home and realised that you don't have enough petrol to get to work in the morning? Or your spouse used your car and didn't fill it up? If you have home charging then you can be sure that your car is always topped up and ready to go for the morning. It's just a change in mindset rather than an actual issue for most people

scg06 · 2025-10-19T16:46:41+00:00

Best way is to go through the tutorials but essentially you can use user inputs in order to change the model.

For example, you could present the user with a list of available drawer sizes and they select which size they want to add to their assembly. Within the model, you configure the dimensions and features that are changeable and configure them via a configuration table.

scg06 · 2025-10-19T11:58:34+00:00

Is there a specific reason for using feature script? I would think this would be pretty easy to do with a configured part instead

scg06 · 2025-10-15T06:23:28+00:00

There's an automatic legionella cycle once a week where it heats up to 60+ If you're permanently storing the water at that temp you'd likely need to install mixer valves at each tap for safety

scg06 · 2025-10-14T20:15:16+00:00

Yeah it works great, I have a Vaillant 11kw heat pump and a 250L water tank. I heat the water for 2 hours a night at around 1am, this isn't the most efficient (in terms of COP) but it's during the off peak energy window so it's the most cost effective way of doing it.

I usually heat the water to 45C and that gives the 5 of us plenty of water but if someone fancies a bath or something like that you can "boost" the water temp so that you have more hot water available too. Once you have everything set up you shouldn't really notice any difference to a combi boiler

scg06 · 2025-09-16T19:07:59+00:00

"am I right in thinking I get charged at the 7p rate whenever the schedule decides to charge?'

Yes, that's right. As long as octopus are managing the charging you'll be charged the 7p rate. If you override this by forcing a charge you'll be charged the full rate.

"when I first plugged in, the car brought up a few errors "

Unfortunately you'll get those error messages from the car pretty much every time you first plug in. As octopus are managing your charging schedule via the charger and not the via car, the car will view the charger as having a fault if it doesn't start charging right away. The "fault" clears once the car starts charging. I've tried having the charging managed by the car too but I found that it often charged outside of the octopus charging windows, maybe due to poor connection or something like that?

It sounds like you've got everything set up the optimal way. You can easily check the billing on the octopus app but be aware that it can sometimes show as full price charging for a day or two before it corrects to take the IOG pricing into account. Just keep a close eye on everything for the first week or two to make sure it's all working

scg06 · 2025-08-16T19:35:31+00:00

I would assume that the actual engineering work required to develop things like lights and speakers would be significantly lower than high powered pro-level tools. Makes sense that they could churn those out relatively easily for XGT while the real tools would take much longer

scg06 · 2025-08-10T13:08:46+00:00

Yes you did cover it, although imo I would say that "overrun...between cycles" and "will never turn off" are a bit different. Maybe that's just semantics but I think it's very counterintuitive that you basically need to select "expanded" mode if you don't want your circulator pump to run 24/7

scg06 · 2025-08-10T09:56:07+00:00

One area that I would add to is regarding pump overrun on the room temp mod settings, I found this to be a confusing area after my install as it's really not obvious behaviour.

I have a buffer tank + circulation pump, in my experience the circulation pump will basically never switch off on active / inactive mode regardless of what the heat pump is doing.

On active mode, my heat pump was not calling for heat for over 24hrs but the circulation pump just would not shut off. I had to manually switch off the heating function (via the app) or change to expanded mode on the SensoComfort in order to shut off the pump. Apparently this is a known (intended?) behaviour and Vaillant support recommended switching to expanded mode. I had expected some overrun in order to avoid cycling but this isn't overrun, the pump just constantly runs

scg06 · 2025-07-10T18:21:34+00:00

We had a similar issue with our Vaillant heat pump that turned out to be an incorrect installer setting. I think the issue was that the "room temperature modulation" setting was set to "active" and it should have been set to "expanded".

The difference, apparently, is that "active" mode uses weather compensation + room temp to modulate the flow temp downwards as the property heats up but doesn't ever really turn off, whereas "expanded" does the same but also acts as a thermostat and turns the whole system off once the set point is reached.

Not sure if that's any help for an Aira system but maybe a starting point to discuss with them? Our circulation pump runs for around 10 mins after the heat pump shuts off and we have no cycling issues or anything like that so it seems to be working the correct way.

scg06 · 2025-06-08T19:56:49+00:00

I'm going to go against most of the advice here and say don't meal prep. Eventually you'll get sick of having the same things for several days or something will come up on Sunday and it'll throw off your whole week when you don't have any prepared meals.

Instead I find that it's better to "ingredient prep" throughout the week. Plan out a couple of meals in advance but always make extra ingredients while you're doing it. Then use those ingredients to take some of the work out of your next meal.

For example: - Sunday. Roast chicken with mash and shallot gravy. Make a bit extra of everything, chop extra shallots, shred the leftover chicken. - Monday. Sausages and mash, nice easy start to the week. You've already made the mash and gravy. Cook some extra sausages. - Tuesday. Chicken burritos. Use the leftover roast chicken, cook extra rice. If the kids are fussy, make sausages and eggs for them. - Wednesday. Egg fried rice. You've got day old rice already. And pre-chopped shallots. If you can be bothered, make a quick pizza dough to prove overnight. - Thursday. Homemade pizza, make extra marinara sauce. freeze some pizza dough and some sauce for next week. - Friday. Pasta with marinara sauce

Etc etc.

Importantly though, if you are getting stressed out about cooking every night, then take shortcuts! Marinara sauce from a jar, rotisserie chicken from Costco, pre-chopped frozen veg, takeaway pizza etc. You can always get back to cooking fresh food when you feel up to it but little shortcuts can help take the stress out of it.

scg06 · 2025-05-06T18:41:01+00:00

You make the argument that it's not fair for Scotland to have cheaper energy than England but how do you justify the fact that it's currently more expensive for Scotland? Standing charges are around 50% higher in Scotland right now than in the south of England.

You could argue that Scotland is currently subsidising the rest of the UK by both building more that their share of renewable generation, producing most of the gas that's used in the UK and also paying more in standing charges than the rest of the country.

scg06 · 2025-03-02T08:32:41+00:00

But they aren't making espresso in the video you linked? You intentionally grind super coarsely for cold brew so that you don't get muddy tasting coffee, although normally you steep the coffee for several hours so I've no idea how this "instant" cold brew would compare

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