SteamyTea

Most do, just does not get reported that often.

Can home batteries help save the climate and save you money? Growing numbers of homeowners are installing batteries that store electricity when it is cheap, which helps balance the grid and cuts emissions, and cheaper plug-in batteries will soon let more people do the same By Alec Luhn 25 June 2026 Home batteries can charge up when electricity is cheap and sell energy back to the grid at peak times Mischa Keijser/Westend61/Getty Images Think of climate solutions in homes and you will probably think of solar panels on the roof. But a suitcase-sized battery in the closet can be a cheaper way to save money and the environment. Although rooftop solar has been expanding, battery storage is now the world’s fastest-growing power technology, according to the International Energy Agency, including home batteries that can power the house and sell leftover energy to the grid. Most of these are paired with rooftop solar, but as energy prices rise, more and more homeowners have been buying just the battery. Now, countries are starting to allow home batteries that can simply be plugged in, rather than professionally installed. “That could be the game changer… that I think suddenly opens it up to a lot more people,” says Iain Staffell at Imperial College London. “Low-cost plug-in batteries could be the next rooftop solar.” More than 40,000 homes and small businesses installed battery systems in the UK last year with or without solar, nearly doubling the record from 2024. Installations of both home solar and battery systems by Octopus Energy doubled from February to March after the Iran war began disrupting energy supplies, and they have remained higher than pre-war levels as Britain’s energy regulator announced it would raise the state cap on energy prices. In the US, home battery installations were up 75 per cent in 2025, even as rooftop solar growth slowed. The technology is also expanding rapidly in places like China and Australia, while in Germany, 1 in 6 homeowners have a home battery, making more than 2 million in total. On a variable tariff, a battery can charge up in the early afternoon or at night, when electricity costs as little as 5 pence per kilowatt-hour in Britain. Then it can power the home when demand peaks from 4 to 7 pm, and a kilowatt-hour can cost 40 pence. Air conditioning and fan use during the current heatwave has driven that price up to nearly 50 pence. While homeowners in the UK currently spend an average of £9400 on a battery system, Octopus’s forthcoming plug-in option will cost less than £300. The size of a shoebox, it will only store 2 kilowatt-hours, enough to run a fridge for one to two days, but it will allow renters to get in on the game once approved for consumer use, which is expected to be in 2027. “You’re going to get return on investment in two to three years,” says Phil Steele at Octopus. “That should make it a no-brainer.” Home batteries also cut greenhouse gas emissions by reducing consumption during peak times, so power companies don’t need to burn as much gas to supplement low-carbon sources of energy. On those windy, sunny, low-demand days when Britain’s grid briefly runs on almost 100 per cent zero-carbon sources, storing energy in a home battery can help the climate even more than generating unneeded energy with home solar. Last year, the UK paid wind farms £379 million to shut down when the grid couldn’t handle that energy, a surplus that could have been partly stored in batteries. If half the homes in Britain had a 5-kilowatt-hour home battery, that would meet the government’s 2030 goal for battery storage, most of which is expected to be delivered by grid-scale batteries. As the average share of solar and wind in the energy generation mix increases, home batteries will be even more crucial to balance the grid and even better for the climate, according to Staffell. “Probably solar is better at the moment, but fast-forward five years, the batteries would be more important then,” he says. However, the manufacturing process could lessen home batteries’ climate benefit, according to Aritra Ghosh at the University of Exeter, UK. There’s also currently no infrastructure to recycle millions of home batteries at the end of their lifespan, which Octopus expects to be at least 12 years. A recent study found that producing a lithium-ion battery emitted about 150 to 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour of capacity, about as much as driving a petrol car 1000 kilometres. This could be greatly decreased if hubs like China were able to decarbonise heavy industry, but “currently we are not even close to that scenario”, says Ghosh.

Or a flat.

I made one a few years back. Just used it on the bathroom, it worked. The efficiency was not to good, about 70% if I remember right. Most of that was down to using a couple of Manrose bathroom fans. They are terrible. Big fans are needed, area is everything when it comes to shifting air.

What figures has your air leakage test given. That is your starting point.

I am going to have to get back later as we are opening early, and finishing late today. Something to do with a game. But just to say that reductionism works very well. When the unexpected happens, it is generally found what caused it by reducing the components even more.

Quite hard to answer that. I suppose critical thinking, and lots of reading about the subject, and the topic authors/institutions is all I can easily suggest at this stage. Yes and no. At the level of climate change, which is based on basic physics i.e. laws of thermodynamics, chemistry, atomic states, there is no need to get too deep into the philosophy. If you can imagine, experiment, observe/measure and test, most of the mystique is removed. No need to confuse it with Latin.

You really are showing your ignorance now. He was highlighting the difference between real science (physics in his case) and social science, which tries to use scientific terms and techniques to give it credibility, but is not a science, it is opinions.

I think it does. It was not until my third year that we covered Philosophy of Science, even though we had it drummed into us that the data shows the results, even if you don't like them for the previous 2 years. Those two years were really leading up to how to design and manage good experiments that left little opportunity for error and ambiguity. All the theory, mathematics and statistics, previous research and, sometimes, unrelated topics (for a broader view) were just there to make our lives easier, though it did not seem it at the time. There are bad scientists, but they tend to be caught out early on, and very really get published. The ones that do slip though get caught out later. When it comes to Climate Change Science, the old trope about the planet going into a new Ice Age is usually dragged out from the coffin. What happened there is that rather than a binary, or absolute figure, bring out on an outcome, a number of scenarios are modelled, each scenario has a probability factor attached to it. The extremes, i.e. ice age, 12°C extra warming had very low probabilities, about 2.5% each, of happening. What then happens is that those extremes are highlighted as an example of science being fundamentally corrupt. The people that want to go along with that are called (expletive deleted).

@Spinny You really do not understand the scientific method do you. Have you thought of going to university and studying it for several years?

Yes they did, and for very good reasons. Basically India and China are going to burn less coal than original thought. Unlike your opinions, scientist change their minds as new evidence appears.

@Spinny I am surprised at our comments considering the article came from the DMGT stable.

That's odd, anyone else have that problem?

Not sure, but down here, on 24/06/2026, the temperature was at its peak at 33.7°C (very good for here), the air pressure was 1017.71 hPa, which is not exceptionally high. It was about the same the week before, but the temperature was 10°C lower (18.6°C peak).

No, to save any grey areas, confusion and builders/supplier being chancers, I am suggesting all materials used have to meet a set level of thermal/structural/failure safety standard. There should e no opportunities for people to wriggle out of their civic duty. I suspect this is what will happen when people start to get prosecuted for the Grenfell tragedy. It every one knows some simple rules, then they are easy to follow.

If one assumed that a window is at 10m, then the fall time is 1.43 seconds. The velocity will be around 14 m/s (50 kmph). An 80 kg (12.5 stone) person will impart 7845 J on impact, which is a force of 1.12 kN. One could argue that the height should be lower. It would be easier to draft legislation that says all building materials are non combustible (and fumes must be taken into account as well) and must still be rated at 150% of the elements designed capabilities after 2 hours of temperatures above 320°C. That way, any material can be used, just that it has to be designed better. I am a great believer that safety legislation can improve quality and reduce costs. Industry has never liked 'being told what to do', but they always step up and have creative solutions in the end.

Environment Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever The current temperatures in western and central Europe would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago, and unprecedented humidity levels make this heatwave especially dangerous Alec Luhn26 June 2026, updated 29 June 2026 Extreme heat was felt across much of Europe on 24 June Sylvie HUSSON/AFP via Getty Images This week’s heatwave is the hottest ever recorded in Europe, as well as the most humid, and it is likely to cause thousands of deaths. Although a potential “super El Niño” is forming in the Pacific Ocean, this didn’t play a role in the heatwave, a study by the World Weather Attribution network of scientists has found. Instead, global warming is clearly to blame. The study analysed how likely the average daily maximum temperature projected for 26 to 28 June in western and central Europe would have been in the cooler climates of 1976 and of 2003. While the weather pattern – a low-pressure heat dome that is trapping hot air from the south – isn’t unusual, the temperatures are. Fifty years ago, a typical June heatwave would have been about 3.5°C cooler, and the temperatures seen over the next three days would have been a less-than-one-in-10,000-year occurrence. Daytime temperatures have exceeded 44°C (111°F) in one French town, and nighttime temperatures have remained above 30°C (86°F) in parts of Spain. “This event would not have been possible in June without climate change,” Theodore Keeping at Imperial College London said at a media briefing on 25 June. “The three-day nighttime temperatures would not have been possible at any time of year without climate change.” The humidity has also been unprecedented, reaching more than 50 per cent in many British cities. Dew-point temperatures have been in the low 20s, as compared to the single digits during the July 2022 heatwave that set the UK’s temperature record. The wet-bulb globe temperature, which measures not just air temperature but also humidity, heat radiation and air movement, has broken or is expected to break records in almost half of European cities, the study found. Humidity amplifies health risks because it slows evaporation, making sweating less effective. While older people or those who have a chronic illness are in particular danger, so are migrants and people experiencing homelessness. “What we see very clearly… is how unequal the effects of this heatwave are and how that really demonstrates the inequality that widens due to climate change,” said Friederike Otto, also at Imperial College London. “Because it’s of course people who are particularly vulnerable who are most likely to lose their lives.” While it is too soon to look at excess mortality, a previous study found a smaller heatwave in June and July 2025 killed 2300 people in London and 11 other European cities. “The health impacts of this heatwave are likely to be extremely high across large parts of northern and central Europe,” said Keeping. Heatwaves will become even more intense and frequent unless we rapidly cut fossil fuel emissions, the researchers stressed. And Europe, the fastest warming continent, is not ready, as it has an ageing, urban population living in cities built for a cooler era. In the UK, only 5 per cent of homes have air conditioning. Besides AC, Europe should invest in passive cooling like building insulation, ventilation, green roofs and walls and trees along streets, they said. It should also expand its heat response to include oft-forgotten groups like people with mental health conditions and those who are pregnant, said Carolina Pereira Marghidan at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “Europe has heat action plans, but research has also shown that sometimes they do not cover all the groups that may be vulnerable,” she said.

Can be used to take a lot of the guess work out of it. Could also be useful for controlling UFH in cooling mode, especially when you consider the statistical nature of thermodynamics.

Whenever we get extreme weather, the same questions come up. So to answer them, I have created a calculator that works out the dewpoint temperatures and absolute humidity from air temperature and relative humidity. You should be able to change the relevant cells, though I cannot check this as I do not have Excel (only Calc). There is a text box giving instructions. I have also added some of my local weather data as a time series. This is as an example only and can be deleted, or replaced with your own data. I hope it is useful. Dewpoint and Absolute Humidity Calculator(Excel).xlsx

Have I lost the plot a bit here. I seem to remember that you wanted to automate the toilet light. Now you are creating an alternative universe. I have a tree in the garden that sways in the wind, and the shadows are in the right place (over my neighbours garden). I left a light in and went to work, came back several hours later, light was still on. 3W x 13h = 39 Wh.

I have a camping stove. But in 21 years I have only used it once. The power was out for 4 hours. A lot of gas 'stuff' still needs mains power to run. Over the last year and a bit, I have worked with 12 different chefs. The only ones that hated induction technology fell into two categories. The ignorant The (expletive deleted)

Do they show a black beard? Or Seaman Stanes.

You have read this haven't you.