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A 7.4 kW charger is a 32 A load that runs for hours, not minutes. We instrumented one on an older consumer unit to see where thermal behaviour, voltage drop and diversity diverge from the installation paperwork.
Plug-in solar kits are being discussed as a simple route to domestic generation, but a British winter is a stern test. We instrumented an 800 W balcony kit for six months, logging yield, inverter behaviour and the arithmetic behind payback.
Four connected kettles, one dumb control and a calibrated power analyser: we measured real energy-to-boil, idle radio draw, keep-warm costs and whether a 70 °C setting actually reaches 70 °C. Some features earn their Wi-Fi. Most do not.
A SMETS2 electricity meter, its in-home display and a calibrated energy logger were logged side by side for 30 days. Daily totals agreed closely, but tariff boundaries and display rounding showed where a time-of-use household can misread its own data.
A week with plug-in monitors and a whole-house logger in a Sheffield semi quantifies what stays awake when the house is quiet. The always-on floor is larger than most smart-home advice assumes, and much of it cannot sensibly be switched off at all.
Solid walls, suspended timber floors and a bay window: the pre-1919 terrace is the hardest test in British retrofit. We built an instrumented rig to model one, ran it across a range of flow temperatures, and compared the measured results with the figures printed in manufacturer literature.