SteamyTea

Been busy at work, it had been a strange year

Can you not fit the floor yourself?

First thing to look at is your time series usage. Then you know what you can easily shift (temporally), store and finally, but most importantly, change behaviour. As for PV v Batteries payback, this is a difficult way to look at it and very easy to introduce bias into the calculations. And it is kW and kWh, not kw or kwh.

Make one up. Failing that, who was the project manager and who were their insurer.

Yes, but there is a small business scheme where you pay just 12% VAT if your turnover is low. That is a (expletive deleted)ing nonsense as if you go a quid over it, you pay the full 20% and get a telling off (it is a bit more complicated than that, but we got caught a few years back)

Just had a look at the nominal value of retail sales, in May 2026, they were £9.6bn per week. If 0.01% of that did not go though the till, then that is £96m a week, or about £5bn a year (spring and summer sales are higher, so multiplied by 48 weeks). Now many people in the UK fell for BJs £350m/week on the NHS. So there is near enough a third of it just by people who think they are getting a bargain.

Then it becomes fraud. Whenever you see one of those signs in a small business 'We love Cash' often followed by reasons like 'we get to keep all of it' or 'No charges to the bank'. The trader is probably fiddling us all out of revenue. It is now cheaper to use card payments than any other method (we currently pay 1.6% per transaction value). To pay in cash at the bank costs us 3% and all the hassle of counting cash each night, checking the till float, putting right mistakes, storing a weeks takings safely and then taking it to the bank, which is realistically a 2 hour trip. Forgot to mention the 11% charge on getting change. If you run a small business these days and you do not use a card machine HMRC investigates you in a lot more detail. We had our first cashless night last month.

They could start with income tax and NI. Flat rate on every £ that passes though your hands, then the argument just becomes the rate and not the principle. They could abolish Corporation Tax, the clever companies don't pay it, it is hard to enforce, just stick it on Income Tax. Then have a Sin Tax to discourage some purchases. That could cover anything from Carbon to Crypto Currencies.

I did a quick search, would probably need a lot of unpicking to get to a £/TJ price which would be easier to understand.

That is just all the possible taxes added together. Ring Fence Corporation Tax 30% (temporary to support household) Supplementary Charge 10% (on ring fenced profits) Energy Profit Levy 38% (Temporary Levy on excess profits) Petroleum Revenue Tax 0% (For older fields) Then they give money back in tax relief and incentives. Estimated at £10bn.

I can understand the ends being different to an RJ, but if the cabling is normal POE CATxx then if the manufacturers wire it differently, they are just being twats. Why have international standards and then modify them. Makes more work for everyone.

Thanks, I had forgotten that this was happening. ETS has been quietly plodding along in the background and does not seem to have affected costs too badly.

Carbon intensity per $GDP is a key indicator and should maybe used more when imposing tariffs. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity USA 0.26kg/$ UK 0.12kg/$ France 0.11kg/$ Germany 0.17kg/$ Japan 0.22kg/$ China 0.43kg/$ India 0.27kg/$ Australia 0.29kg/$

A friend of mine is an American and she worked for a large architectural company. She had never heard the sayings 'as safe as houses' and 'put your money into bricks and mortar'. They do teardown and rebuild a lot more than we do, use fractures to produce structures, don't piss about on site, generally have a more relaxed view in planning, and I think the codes they work to are easier to understand. As for the sizes of the houses, the UK has disgustingly small houses. We should be ashamed of our housing, and of the industry I general.

That is part of the issue, the weather regimes are very different.

And no vapour control layers, insulation, ventilation control. Many then had a large gas boiler fitted that was run on a timer, this caused condensation issues. (I had a 1910 terrace and it was awful, but if I had known in 1984 what I know now, I could have improved it no end)

Like most things it hits a fundamental physical limit. I think one of the problems in engineering is we all got duped by Moore's Law. While this held true for micro electronics, it was not true for engineering in general. Moore's Law was really an engineering/manufacturing/quality challenge, not something fundamental about silicone. (Someone on here described building a chip as akin to making a pinhead sized working replica of a Spitfire, but only using normal hand tools)

Yes, this is how I set up check lists at work. One can usually find the person who has forgotten all about it.

Which will enshittify the world even more. What amazes me about these scams is that the creators have a flair for marketing/advertising/promotion/sales, and then take a risk by selling total crap. They could use the exact same skills they have and sell viable goods, and probably at a higher markup. I used to work at one of the largest jewelry retailers in Europe. The markup was about 10 times the wholesale price. It is never worth stealing jewellery, you may, at best, get 20% of the wholesale value. Not really worth it.

I agree. May have mentioned this before but someone I knew was banging on about the high cost if heating his mother's flat. Was heated by electrical panel heaters. I suggested an A2AHP, but he decided that portable oil filled electric 'radiators' where better. A few weeks later he told me that his mother's bills had been greatly reduced. I pointed out that it was now spring and a lot warmer (∆T now 5K rater than 25K). No, it was the new heaters. He kept quiet about it this winter. Some people think buying something new will always be an improvement.

Can't we not put rare earth magnets on a fan blades? It works to soften water, improve fuel consumption, cure headaches and rheumatism, it just has to cool air.

Not sure, but I seem to remember that forced induction engines follow a different cycle. Not that it really matters in the above cases.

Yes.

I think we would be better off slashing education budgets and reducing the checks on online sales. Let the 'hard working family' loose their money, it is theirs to loose.

Efficiency = 1-Tcold/Thot So like any reciprocating engine, it is going to be pretty poor.