SteamyTea

Won't we do the same to them. The British built the Hong Kong power system after all. The Americans have STUXNET and seem to know how to get it onto networks.

Why, reduces energy usage. Mainly because he has 3 properties and could well afford to do a simple and cheap loft upgrade. That fits in with your But they don't need more, they need to loose less. That is what we vote for though. All that information is already reported to the government. You can get the spreadsheet from the ONS if you want to. Not really, the utility value to the nation is very different. But we have seen that people will still travel when fuel prices double. So there is a lot of slack to be taken up there.

I know very little about them, Cornwall is not a target area. I am sure that there are top members that will have a transition plan though. Was chatting to the guy who owns net door. About 2003/4, he got a free loft insulation installed in all 3 of his properties. This strikes me as wrong. The easy way to do it is that gas can only be supplied if your property uses, based on meter readings, less than a fixed delivered amount i.e. 70 kWh.year-1.m-2 (or whatever). Then it is up to the home owner what to do i.e. sell up and move, upgrade.

Which people. Most cannot understand their electricity bill. I don't think unreliable is the right word. They perform as expected for the weather conditions. Were does the 'instantly' bit come from. It has never been about just swapping over one night.

Ketchup

Not essential, but could get installers out of a hole. This idea of limiting a heat pump via software is what Tesla (and other car makers) do. Reminds me of the Top Gear rant about cheese and Ferrari.

Seems that our government, as I predicted, has just about abandoned all the environmental proposals by issuing 100 new oil and gas extraction licences and is going to rely on carbon capture and storage. I think I shall get a wood burner as well.

I have often thought that modular design would be a good idea with heat pumps.

Yes. We have to stop burning carbon based fuels. Have you not seen the news this last month.

I just jumped though Today, from yesterday, was not Gove saying it, or Kevin McClot. There was a lot of stuff on the radio about housing and climate yesterday, so I am sure it is in there somewhere. I only picked up on it when they started talking about deaths from hypothermia, so missed part of the context.

Does any of it matter, I think this government is going to drop most of the 'green' policies. There was someone on the radio yesterday, Gove, I think, pointing out that more people die from the cold than the the heat, so a bit of global warming will be good for the UK. If we do have a really cold winter, we can always fill the empty seat on the Rwanda flights with pensioners.

That is a bugger.

Is this for your current place?

If heat pumps get stolen, and replaced with new units by the insurance companies, then that is a good thing. It means the insurance companies are helping to pay for installations. HPs are not like stolen cars, they are not used once and then burnt out.

The wiring is the most likely thing to start a fire and earthing does not always prevent that.

In a very rare alignment of electrical disasters you get a shock.

I think there may have been problems with some installers running the DC negative back to the consumer unit. So safer not to earth at all. I think the term 'earth' may be part of the problem. There is earthing, grounding and bonding, not sure what the electrical differences are. Ships have strange ways of running a wire to ground when they hook up in port, as do caravans I think.

Plastic fuel tanks are designed to deform in a collision. Steel ones used to split, and corrode after a relatively short time. Much safer now. Aviation kerosene is very hard to set alight unless atomised properly.

Sound reduction maybe.

I am not sure, I am not a social scientist. Motivation usually comes about by connecting one skill, in another field, to your interest. I would have thought that knowing how many people were likely to have x-syndrome would have been useful, knowing how much power an hand dryer takes is useful when putting PV on a cafe roof.

It can be made fireproof, as can polyurethanes. We had to send of 3 samples or any new foam that was moulded for fire testing. Could send 3 samples of the same batch and 2 would fail. With furniture, the biggest improvement was in the fabrics, not the foams. Oddly, back in the 80s, car seats did not have to be fire resistant. They may now.

Only because I work at it. Really comes down to how good the teaching is and how motivated the students are. One of my old colleagues could easily take renewable energy students from the number line to calculus in 4 months, so about 60 hours. He could not do that with the Social Science students.

I a modern design, shouldn't insulation be in an airtight cavity anyway, with firebreaks. As I said earlier, it is how you use materials, not really the material, that is important. Not as if we really want to go back to exclusively using only plant fibres and animal products to built houses. Many years ago British Steel designed houses that were bolted together. I think there may be a case for modular housing that can be relocated easily in the future. Maybe not in the UK, we have a very strange relationship with housing, but in the developing countries, which also happen to be at the real pointy end of climate change, certainly. I thought of this as I heard about some African women and children that were waking for 3 hours a day to get water from a well. Why not move the village to the well.

Only when the heat source is removed I think. Keeps pumping in the energy and it will burn, how bonfires work. Though if you have a cable (most likely thing to cause isolation to burn) at 200°C+, you have bigger problems. I picked polypropylene as it is one of the cheapest and long lasting plastics there is, and it is easily recyclable, just heat it up a bit and squeeze it though a nozzle. The point is, the embodied energy in building a house is probably equivalent to 5 years of running the household. We get very hung up on concrete for environmental reasons, mainly it accounting for 3 to 4% of global CO2e emissions, but when you think it can be there for 1000 years, the embodied energy/carbon is effetely zero. The main problem is that it is not often there for 1000 years. Purely as an aside, the worlds largest recycled material is asphalt. Nearly 100 million tons in the USA alone.