SteamyTea

Yes Can get water filters for camping, then boil the water. Dig a hole and cover it over, after emptying the bucket. Definitely. Get a gasoline one, or 3. Diesel will be used for emergency vehicles when the shit hits the fan. Not many trucks and trains use gasoline. Get one with a back burner to do water as well, if you must. You can fit it outside and plumb it in in flexible. That way you don't need a chimney/flue or any certificates. And you can burn whatever you like i.e. tyres, plastic, witches, without filling the house with toxic fumes. You could also think about rearranging the house so that you can all huddle together in just one, warm room. Get some sleeping bags and air beds, amazingly comfortable and cosy (I do a bit of camping). Bicycles and kayaks. You can tow a kayak behind a bike, and I happen to have both going spare for a few quid. Shame I went up country 2 days ago or I could have brought them up.

When I lived in the USA, I popped into the local test centre to enquire about taking a test. Explained that I was driving as a visitor on my UK license. The examiner said 'well you can obviously drive, I can test you now'. He asked me a few questions and ticked them off on a form, got me to drive him around town in my Auto Pontiac Grand Am (the V6 one, basically a Vauxhall Calibra) and took my picture. Charged me $120 and issued me a Pennsylvania license that lasted 4 years. When I asked about driving a manual car, he looked perplexed. Eventually he realised I meant a stick shift, told me I could drive them as well, no difference. Could drive a small artic as well, but can't remember the tonnage. Pennsylvania is such a civilised state. He liked it that I had lived in Penn in England as well.

40 years ago, turbo chargers where a very rare thing on a car. 45 years ago, fuel injection was rare (why is British beer so warm, Lucas also makes fridges). In fact, 40 years ago, about the only diesel car you went in was a taxi. It takes a long time for people to change. The car I have just bought was £20,500 15 years ago. That is £1200 a year depreciation. About 30p/mile for the previous owner. My trip up to see my Mother a couple of days ago cost me £70 in fuel, that is 10p/mile. The only way to change behaviours is to up the price of energy to make it better reflect the true environmental costs. This would financially hurt me very badly, but it is the right thing to do (I was doing the same journey when fuel was £2/litre, rather than this rather cheap £1.51/litre. At the moment my vehicle depreciation is 83p/mile if I assume the vehicle has no value. Give it another 6 weeks and that number will be down to 40p/mile. Makes one think don't it.

I looked up the price of a second hand first generation Toyota Mirai. Was £0. I think Toyota bought them back when the hydrogen fuel points closed. Should be able to take the fuel cell out and fit a few batteries. Would make for a very heavy car as it was already heavier than a Model 3. Battery cars are heavy, but not as heavy as hydrogen ones, or much different than my Mondeo.

Basically a window cill made from sheet insulation.

How long have I been saying that. Is some asked you to push a tonne, 1 meter, every second, for an hour, don't think many would do it for 35p. That is just how cheap it is.

Yes, I think they can as well. Many people get hung up on loosing floor area with IWI. But realistically the area lost is not where it matters. Sitting an extra 125mm closer to a TV just means you can get a smaller TV. Yes they were already double glazed, just goes to show that an extra few mm of airgap does not make a huge difference. I have a porch that is unheated, I am sure that with the front door being there, a bit of clingfilm would worth just as well as my now triple glazed window. Adding the secondary glazing cured the small draughts from the old seals when it is vert windy, but the biggest comfort change was the reduced noise. That has been massively improved.

I have a light touch on the keyboard, or a heavy touch if I am thinking about other things. Can you add a layer of insulation around the inner frame. It does make me wonder if the energy saving benefits of new windows is oversold, would have to do some real research as much of it depends on the wall to window area. Both my neighbours had plastic windows fitted to save painting them, I just bought a £600 scaffold tower and can sort them in a couple of sunny days.

Is that because they are renting a local house, for years, while the build happens. If you put a crew of builders permanently into a town for 5 years, rather than 8 months, the local economy would improve. When it comes to productivity, self build is down there with Boots the Chemist i.e. takes 20 minutes to do a minutes work.

Have you actually done the sums. My glazing is 1980s, I changed just the glass units, was, at the time, about £16 a window. So £208. I think the glass for the door was a lot more as it was toughened, £60. I went from 6mm to 16mm gaps. So a 0.4 W.m-2.K-1 difference. With a total glazed area of ~8m2, that is an improvement of 3.2 W.K-1 Assuming that the mean temperature difference is 10 K, for most of the year the savings are 28 kWh. Now that at current prices is ~£4.50/year. Call it a fiver with the door. So it could be argued that changing windows will never make much of a difference. Now that is just the glazing, if I changed the frames from timber to plastic as well. The timber frames have a U-Value of ~2 W.m-2.K-1, so over the year the losses are, for the 2.34m2 of pine frames is 175 kWh/year. Now I have had no luck searching for a U-Value (or R or k for that matter) for a PVC frame profile (maybe @Craig has a list). But lets be generous and say it is half the timber frame, so a saving of 87.5 kWh/year, or £14/year (at my 16p/kWh). I measured my frame are and my neighbours frame area (she as PVC windows). This will reduce the total glazed area by 2.6m2. That translates to a further saving of 1.04 W.K-1 or 9.1 kWh/year or £1.45/year. Add that lot up and the saving is around £20/year. Now I realise that you are not going to get new, top class windows for £2000 (payback 10 years). I I only have a small house with only 8m2 of glazing, you have a much greater area, so will work out cheaper per square metre to replace them. Worth doing the sums. I did and fitting some secondary internal glazing (making it in effect triple glazing) made a difference (about £150 but could have done it cheaper if I had bought full size sheets of polystyrene rather than half size sheet). One thing I allowed me to do was reduce the time the heating is on (from a mean of 10°C OAT to 9°C OAT, which is about a month in time terms).

Yes. It is why I don't feel too bad having regular baths. They also help the aches and pains from years of youthful exuberance. Do you really need a shower that can deliver 17 litres a minute?

On a similar argument, I have no children, so saving the planet that way. I think the government should give me free cash because of my goodness in not inflicting generations of wasteful emissions. And I don't inflict the little shits on anyone else.

Here is a picture before the blood, seat and tears are removed.

I do. My Mondeo Econotec easily does 800 miles on a tankful. Now I must go and open the car windows so the seat can dry out, I have washed the trousers.

I did it after spending £2500 on it in a year. It could have been repaired for probably £500, but as it was suffering from nearly quarter of a million miles on the suspension and steering, I drew the line. I let the garage that had done a good job of keeping it going have it for a few quid under the scrap value. They may strip it for spares (it had a new clutch, water pump, auxiliary pully bearing and bracket, new suspension arm, and two new tyres back in October). The really painful bit though is that it had almost £100 of diesel in it, and without dropping the tank or punching a hole in it, there is no way to syphon the fuel out. Was a good car and lasted me eight and a half years and 210k miles, so not really complaining. Hope this one can do the same mileage. By then I will have worked out what the 26 buttons and switched that are on the steering wheel or clustered at round it do. Then I can tackle the option on the radio. It did get the bluetooth to connect to my phone, so can talk to people, just need to find out which 'directory' I need to fill with data to play podcasts. And find out why I have lost the nagging woman on Google Maps.

Not sure. The case I was talking about was a small cottage in Newlyn, that had a 60A supply and it was being upgraded to a 100A. The electrician I was chatting to asked why they were putting in a 3P supply, "EC charging and HP loads" was the answer. There is no practical parking and hardly any room for an HP where that cottage is. The easy way would be to ask the local DNO what the criteria is, and what sort of upgrade is done. All speculation otherwise.

Don't know. Was chatting to an electrician about it, but never asked about the metering. It would make sense to fit a 3 phase meter as the marginal costs are tiny compared to a meter swap.

Your old car may still be useful to someone else, my latest 'new' car is 15 years old, the one it replaced was 17 years old. The difference is the mileage the 'new' one had done 63k, the old one 245k (did not beat my Peugeot 309 that I sold at 360k and saw it being driven about with a 80k on the clock). So it does not really matter if, from a CO2e emission point of view how many miles you do, it is how many miles the vehicle does in total, and how long it lasts in years.

Recently we have had a few people talking about domestic hot water (DHW) and how large the storage cylinder should be, and how long it will take to reheat. So in the best tradition of the scientific methods, I got a 2 litre jug, a thermometer and started the stopwatch on my phone. Then I measured the flow rate from my tap. Now I have a combined tap that mixes the hot and cold. As it is an old fashion one, it does not a thermostatic mixer, I put my hand in the water and see if it sensible temperature. Today I actually measured it at 38°C. A bit colder than I like (once my feet have got used to it), but perfectly good for a relatively quick morning bath. My two litre jug filled up in 8 seconds, so a flow rate of 15 litres per minute. After 3.5 minutes the bath was half full, which is fine for a quick morning bath, so it took 52.5 litres, which is actually less than I thought. I also measured the temperature of my incoming water, 9°C. The energy needed 4.18 [kJ.kg-1.K-1] x 52.5 [kg] x (38 - 9) [ΔT, temperature difference] = 6,364.05 kJ, or, 1.77 kWh So allowing for standing losses from the cylinder, that can be called 2 kWh. As I have not check the flow rate of my shower since I fitted it nearly 20 years ago, and I checked it when it did not have a shower head fitted, I thought I would do it again, properly. 8 litres per minute. Now this does not seem very high, but to be honest, it is better than most showers I have used recently, so I have no complaints. Now when I get home from work and want to wash the blood, sweat and tears off, I usually spend about 3 minutes in the shower. It actually runs for about 4 minutes to get the cold water out the pipes, and gives me a chance to get my buff body out of my clothes. So that is 32 litres of water. The energy needed 4.18 [kJ.kg-1.K-1] x 32 [kg] x (38 - 9) [ΔT, temperature difference] = 3,879.04 kJ, or, 1.08 kWh That is 1 kWh less, another 3 minutes and it is the same as a bath. To reheat with my bog standard Economy 7 2.8 kW heating element takes 1.77 [kWh] / 2.8 kW = 0.63 h or 38 minutes for the bath 1.08 [kWh] / 2.8 [kW] = 0.39 h or 23.2 minutes. As I have E7, I obviously have to wait until the early morning for heating. I currently pay about 16p/kWh so a bath costs me 28p. Now to take a stab at how large a cylinder is needed. My cylinder is 200 litres, but the top temperature is generally 48°C and the bottom temperature is 20°C (about house ambient temperature). That gives the top 100 litres, which is two bath fulls, a mean temperature of 42°. That is enough for 2 baths, or 3 showers. You could probably squeeze an extra shower out of that without raising the temperature, or raise the temperature and easily get 3 baths and 5 showers. The reheat times will obviously go up, but not drastically. To heat 150 litres of water 4.18 [kJ.kg-1.K-1] x 150 [kg] x (38 - 9) [ΔT, temperature difference] = 18,183 kJ, or, 5.05 kWh Reheating at 2.8 kW 5.05 [kWh] / 2.8 [kW] =1.8 hours or 108 minutes.

Nation Grid, which used to be Western Power are fitting 3 Phase as standard, even on an upgrade.

A lot of batteries are being repurposed into static storage, and anyway, it is not as if vehicles batteries are being dumped into landfill, most will be stored for later recycling. I think the disposal problem is greater in other area. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CDP-2022-0216/CDP-2022-0216.pdf

Welcome I have a saying: Beware of builders

Does not need to be used in the latest generation of batteries.

He tried that, got a stiff neck and a dislocated hip.

Most ICEs are pretty quiet these days, why people get run over in car parks. We have them, they are unenforceable. If it is a carbon based eFuel, it produces the same as any other carbon based fuel. Ammonia, when burnt, produces NOX, but not CO2. Well we have solutions, just need to start implementing them. Hydrogen as a transport fuel has basically failed, only a handful of filling points left, even James May has sold his second Toyota Mirai, and he was an evangelist for hydrogen. Basically yes, and driving up there every couple of weeks has burnt though (literally) several thousand quid, more than enough to buy a decent second hand EV. But then I did not expect, back in October 2021, that I would still have a Mother (in a care home that costs more than a Model S every year).