SteamyTea

Or a Scott. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old cloaths which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old cloaths which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, cloaths, or lodging, as he has occasion. Adam Smith

By putting in UFH pipework, you can always run it off a Willis heater for very low capital cost. That way you can bake the clay floor. (I put earth flooring in the same category as lime concretes, we have improved alternatives now)

That's interesting... thanks. We haven't got too far down the A2A rabbit hole yet, but dry air is a concern.... plants & eyes! We used these. https://humiditysolutions.co.uk/?products=vapac-steam-room-generator for our steamrooms, reliable bit of kit. They make similar for HVAC.

I have lived in a number of places with forced air heating/cooling. It works well. It can be combined with the MVRH, and maybe an exhaust air recovery water heating as well. The two downsides are that it can be noisy, so needs to be sized properly, and not just thermally. The other, more serious problem, is cross talk between rooms via the ductwork. I know someone who was sitting in his kitchen bitching to his mate about his mental wife. She heard everything in the bedroom. He got his own bedroom after that, and eventually his own, smaller, house. You also get some ugly grills in the rooms. But it can be done and I think all the problems are easily overcome.

Thought that was showing the position for the new Uninterrupted Power Supply

Not really the way to look at it. If something is running inefficiently, more waste thermal energy is produced. This manifests itself in more wear, noise and less performance.

Most portable air conditioners suck – but there's an easy fix Efficiency ratings on portable air conditioners don’t give consumers the full picture, and one type of aircon unit is so inefficient that it should be banned, says Michael Le Page By Michael Le Page 19 June 2026 Single-hose air conditioners suck hot air in from outside Ton Hazewinkel/Getty Images Thinking of getting a portable air conditioner as sweltering heatwaves become more common? You will want to know that many, if not most, portable air conditioners have a serious design flaw – and that there is no label required to inform buyers of this. I had no idea about it when I bought a portable air conditioner. What’s most shocking is that there is an easy fix – and I think the law needs to be changed so that no portable air conditioners can be sold without it. First, let’s deal with the idea, especially common in the UK, that it is somehow wrong to buy an air conditioner. If you don’t need it where you are, great. But lots of us live in homes that get too hot during heatwaves, even when you do all the right things, like shutting blinds and windows during the day. And being too hot is bad for our health – sometimes, it is even deadly. It also makes it hard to work or do schoolwork. If it is OK to use energy to heat homes, I think it is also OK to use energy to stay cool – what’s the difference? The fact is that, as the world heats up, more and more of us will resort to air conditioning to stay cool. Reducing the energy used by all these extra air conditioners is really important to minimise extra carbon emissions that result in even more warming – and even more need for air conditioners. To understand the design flaw, you need to know how air conditioners work. The most efficient ones have a split system. There’s an outside unit, where a refrigerant is compressed to make it liquid, heating it up. It is then cooled by a heat exchanger over which outside air is blown. The refrigerant then goes through a narrow pipe to the inside unit, where it is turned into a gas, cooling it down. That goes through another heat exchanger over which the room air is blown, cooling that air by transferring its heat to the refrigerant. So the room air stays in the room, and only the heat is taken out. There is also less noise with split systems, because the compressor is outside. But they are almost all expensive, built-in systems – very few portable split systems are available, in part because, for upstairs rooms, there is usually nowhere to put the outside unit. Instead of an outside unit, some portable air conditioners bring air from outside into the room. There is a wide air intake hose that sucks in outside air, and the heated air is blown out of a similar hose. Dual-hose air conditioners, as they are known, are less efficient than split systems. The outlet hose transfers some heat to the room – you can reduce this by wrapping a blanket around it – and if the hose ends are too close, heated air can get sucked into the intake. But as with split systems, room air stays in the room. With single-hose portable air conditioners, however, there’s no air intake hose. Instead, room air is used to cool the hot refrigerant and then blown out of the single hose, which means hot outside air is continuously sucked into the room. If there’s a window open, hot air will come in through that. With the windows closed, the hot air will come via other parts of your home, warming them along the way. Either way, the air conditioner is constantly having to cool hot outside air, and so it has to use much more energy. It’s like adding mud to laundry detergent. What’s more, the efficiency of single-hose air conditioners falls rapidly as it gets hotter outside. They will fail to keep a room cool much sooner than a similarly powered dual-hose one. This is a huge design flaw, but in Europe, none of the labels tells you this. The specifications for an air conditioner state its cooling capacity in British thermal units, but this is simply a measure of heat transfer within a machine. It doesn’t take into account the fact that more heat has to be transferred if hot air is continuously sucked into a room. The same is true of the seasonal energy efficiency ratio, or SEER, numbers you might find. These are just the cooling capacity divided by the electricity consumed. By these measures, dual-hose air conditioners appear no better than single-hose ones that are easier to set up. “Consumers find dealing with the two ducts difficult and often don’t have the space to vent two ducts out of the room,” says Chris Michael at the cooling company Meaco. So it isn’t surprising that people choose single-hose units and that dual-hose ones are very hard to find in the UK. The US is doing better on the labelling front. It has introduced two measures that take into account hot air sucked into a room and heat coming off the air outlet hose. There’s the seasonally adjusted cooling capacity, or SACC, which is much lower than the unadjusted capacity number, typically by a third or more. Even more important is the combined energy efficiency ratio, or CEER. It’s here that you start to see how much more efficient dual-hose air conditioners are. But in my view, these numbers still don’t give buyers the full picture. Both the SACC and CEER measurements assume the outdoor temperature is 28°C (82.4°F) for 80 per cent of the time an air conditioner is running, and 35°C (95°F) for 20 per cent. I don’t need air conditioning at 28°C – it’s how an air conditioner performs when the thermometer hits 40°C (104°F) that’s most important to me. Now here’s the most ridiculous thing. Most single-hose air conditioners are essentially dual-hose units that come with only one hose. All you need to fix this flaw is another hose and an attachment. At least one manufacturer, GE, sells a conversion kit for some of its single-hose models – and advertises it as increasing cooling power by three times. Three times! Lots of people make DIY conversions, ranging from tape-and-cardboard affairs to 3D-printed parts, and every account I have read says it makes a big difference. That was my experience when I tried a crude conversion during the May heatwave in the UK, with the whole house feeling much cooler. So, in my view, at the very least, the labelling of portable air conditioners needs to be changed in the UK and the European Union to reflect their real-world performance during the hottest heatwaves. It is bizarre and misleading that single-hose air conditioners can have “A” ratings for efficiency. Better still would be a complete ban on the sale of single-hose air conditioners. All portable units should be sold as dual-hose, with the option to use them as single-hose when people really cannot have a dual-hose setup. Put another way, no single-hose air conditioner should be sold without a conversion kit. Michael says Meaco is considering introducing such a machine in 2027. I tried to find out who in the UK is responsible for regulating portable air conditioners, and hit a blank. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the Energy Saving Trust get back to me. But hopefully the right person might end up reading this. There’s an easy climate win to be achieved here.

‘Forgotten’ pollutants cause 15 per cent of global warming So-called indirect greenhouse gases, including carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, aren’t covered by climate policies even though they heat the planet By Alec Luhn 11 June 2026 The burning of grasslands and forests for agriculture can release carbon monoxide and black carbon, which contribute to global warming Jonas Gratzer/Jonas Gratzer Carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds don’t just poison the air we breathe. They also fuel chemical reactions in the atmosphere that heat the planet. Of all the global warming that has happened since the pre-industrial era, about 15 per cent has been caused by emissions other than greenhouse gases, mainly carbon monoxide and VOCs. That is double the contribution of nitrous oxide, the third-most-common greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane. But few countries include these common “indirect greenhouse gases” in their emissions reduction targets. “There is a set of forgotten climate pollutants that are strongly contributing to today’s warming and could considerably slow down the rate of warming in the future if we start including them in our climate policies,” says Ilissa Ocko at Spark Climate Solutions, a non-profit organisation based in California, who co-authored a study calling for more attention on these gases. Carbon monoxide and VOCs, which are released in part by fossil fuel use, react with other compounds in the atmosphere to form ozone. While naturally occurring ozone in the upper stratosphere filters harmful ultraviolet rays, ozone formed in the lower atmosphere traps heat that would otherwise radiate to space. Indirect greenhouse gases also warm the planet by reacting with hydroxyl radicals, a highly reactive “detergent” that scrubs the atmosphere clean of a wide variety of pollutants, including methane. If more hydroxyl reacts with carbon monoxide and VOCs, then less is available to break down methane, which, in the near-term, traps 80 times more heat than CO2. Together with black carbon or soot – another pollutant that isn’t included in climate plans and national emissions data – indirect greenhouse gases have caused 0.3°C of warming. A fraction of that has been compensated for by sun-blocking aerosols like sulphur dioxide, and also by nitrogen oxides. The latter make up a group of indirect greenhouse gases that, in some places, may warm Earth by creating low-level ozone, but is thought to have a net cooling effect overall because it generates hydroxyl radicals. While CO2 lasts for centuries in the atmosphere and methane survives for decades, indirect greenhouse gases break down within hours or, at most, a few years. That means the warming effect of these gases would quickly vanish if their emissions were reduced. “If we are heading for things like a [climate] tipping point or something like that, then this is the low-hanging fruit to prevent catastrophic change,” says Alex Archibald at the University of Cambridge. Carbon monoxide is emitted by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, largely in appliances like gas boilers and stoves, as well as in older vehicles. Another source is the burning of grasslands and forests for agriculture in places like the Amazon. VOCs include a variety of hydrocarbons that evaporate from fossil fuels or from paint and cleaning solvents. Air pollution regulations in countries like the UK have reduced indirect greenhouse gases by adopting emissions standards for vehicles, appliances and industry, and limiting the VOC content in paints and varnishes. But many countries have looser rules, and they are focused on reducing exposure at ground level rather than throughout the atmosphere. In January, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a regulation that scientists say will weaken controls on emissions of nitrogen oxides by gas power plants. Countries should start mentioning indirect greenhouse gases in the action plans they submit to the United Nations climate body under the Paris Agreement, and eventually set targets to reduce them, says Ocko. Otherwise, decarbonisation efforts could perpetuate or even increase some indirect greenhouse gas emissions, according to Alastair Lewis at the University of York, UK. As the smallest molecule, hydrogen often leaks and is sometimes vented by manufacturers into the atmosphere, where it consumes hydroxyl radicals and forms ozone and water vapour. If countries achieve their most expansive plans to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen in industrial processes like steel-making and fertiliser manufacture, the venting and leakage of this gas could heat the globe by an additional 0.1°C by 2100, for instance. Burning hydrogen or synthetic aviation fuels in aircraft also produces nitrogen oxides and water vapour. “If you burn a low-carbon fuel rather than use a battery, it may well be – from your carbon-accounting perspective – there’s no difference, but from an air pollution and indirect [greenhouse gas] point of view, it may be that there’s a big difference,” says Lewis. Journal reference: Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aee5790

I have been saying for decades that for every rule we have that says we must6 do something, we have another rule that says we cannot do it.

I think it is about 13% urbanisation, of which 3% is housing. Most of the UK is green. Even zooming it on the busy bit shows a lot of green. And zooming in on my bit shows that there is more rock than houses. Cornwall could have 1 million houses built on it and it would not change the physical character of the place.

Didn't Manchester have huge developments of 1 and 2 bed city homes that stayed empty for ages. It is impossible to design a town really. Towns grew to take advantage of local resources i.e. rivers, agriculture, mines. Apart from agriculture, which is low labour these days, most of our industry and commerce is 'mobile'. We don't have the same need for towns and cities anymore.

I lived in Milton Keynes for a few months. It was a great place. I lived in Basildon when I was a kid, never thought that it was a bad place. I also lived on the outskirts of Canterbury, nice place. Witney was alright to, though I was a couple of miles out. Penn was dreadful, but I was a late teen then, so everything was terrible. Bournemouth was great, but I was a student. Aylesbury was very run down when I moved there, but had everything I needed at the time. Abbots Langley was good, for a small place. Now I live in a dreadfully run down place, but have been here longer than anywhere else. While my house is pretty shit, the A30 is only 2 minutes away and that means I can get to places quickly. The sea is only 4 minutes drive away, or half hour walk. I struggle to know what I want when it comes to knowing where to live. I like the idea of some isolation, but I want convenience and culture of larger towns. The one thing that is pushing me more to rural is, oddly enough, cars. As we electrify transport, I will need a decent drive/garage. These only come at a premium price in towns.

Nearly half the yearly production though, so effectively doubling the installed price. Left is South facing and right is North facing.

Make your mind up what units to use. 400,000 [£] / 372 [m2] = £1,075/m2 which is pretty cheap.

So put up expensive panels that have lower efficiency, facing away from the sun for 9 months of the year. Just offer to pay a quid per kWh for your electricity. There are much easier cash savings to be made.

Why do you want PV? I very much suspect that stick on flexible panels will be cost effective.

Just make sure the jug is out of shot

Apparently there is a difference depending on relative surface areas, so an aluminium rivet in SS is bad, but a SS screw into aluminium is not so bad. Chlorine generation from electrolysis is the biggest problem. Would be interesting to look at the mountings on the Marina Drive property that is less than 50m from the sea and is frequently battered by sea spray. The PV has been there about 15 years.

Have to be the correct grade of stainless steel fixings. A4, 316 grade is recommended. Then comes the Screws or Bolts debate. It's bolts that need to be used.

I can't, they are the optimum size to fill my roof up. Sounds like a salesman, would not make any difference. That would be my worry. Seems odd, but could make the most sense.

Well I just rebooted the ESP and it has all stopped working. Job for a rainy day.

Well it logged all night and seemed to do what I wanted it to do.

Slight confession, I have been playing with an ESP32 tonight. Got it to log some text over my network. Something I have been meaning to do your years. I did ask ChatGPT to write the Python scripts. The RPi one was good, almost, the uPython was bollocks, but got it sorted the old fashioned way: traditional web search and 20 fags.

Which is what I was taught to do in the early 1980s. Does it recognise flow diagrams, assuming they are done correctly? Once saw a comment in a database that said "this is shit code"

I hate coding, even though I do appreciate what can be achieved with it. But as computer coding is a logical processes, is AI not showing up it's weakness but not being able to write some scripts easily? Or is it that most programming languages are so full of contradictions that the whole industry needs to have a word with itself.