SteamyTea

I think you have actually hit the nail on the head. Except that population is used as a catchall as the problem, not the solution. I was talking to a St. Agnes resident yesterday about the latest sewage spill. The problem, according to them, is the increase in housing, and associated people. I pointed out that, as we were outside of a holiday period, the population was as low as it goes, so that can't be the problem. I then pointed out that over August Bank holiday, the same thing happened (actually told a well known actor to take his family to another beach). I also pointed out that the existing sewage system is no 'listed' and could be improved. So population, time of year is NOT the problem, it is inadequate infrastructure. Infrastructure is a political issue (may be local or national, but it is a human decision). Infrastructure costs often seem out of proportion to the local benefits. Ask each resident of St. Agnes to pay £1000 each to improve the sewage system and you will get a flat 'No Way'. They think it is the SW Water's job to do it. They think that SW Water should 'just get on with it'. So a £10m pound project, that would improve the environment, needs to have the load spread across many people paying, which requires people, lots of people, each paying a little. If you go back to historical times, villages, small towns and cities were highly polluted and horrible places to live (people moved out in the summer), but by spreading the load nationally, these places became nicer. So reducing population will only lead to lack of facilities, not better ones. It is all to do with distribution, there are no lack of resources.

The principles apply, but the surface area to volume does not scale in a linear fashion. Except it is wrong.

Yes, humidity can be a problem, but a much more manageable one. You can leave a notch around the trickle vents, it is only plastic and wood than needs shaping.

You are right, except you are totally wrong. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) Club of Rome (1968) Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) They are just the well known ones, and they have all been proved wrong. Now distribution of resources is a totally different matter, and this is what you are probably on about, without realising it. Just done a quick calculation, which may be wrong somewhere. But if we say that a m2 of land can produce constant 3W of power, and each person on Earth has access to a mean of 3 kW (currently about 2 kW), then we need an area of 1000 km2 to produce that for a population of 9bn people. So an area the size of France and Spain combined will do it. But it would, of course, need to be distributed around the globe. But it is not a huge amount of land and it does not have to be used exclusively for energy production, unlike nuclear and thermal combustion, and to a certain extent hydro.

I think the term you’re looking for here is greenwashing as those statements are neither linked nor relevant. Not sure you are right as the title is; Heat Pump vs Gas Boiler: Relative Climate Impact The link is climate impact.

So would I.

The main roof does not look that large, roof area is your friend with solar. Shading, of any sort, is your enemy.

Yes, and the same as 2,862 kWh of natural gas, gasoline, timber or coal. A kWh (not kwh) is derived from SI units for distance, mass and time. The real unit of energy is the joule [J] and is very small, the force needed to move a kilogram 1 metre. If you move that mass and distance in 1 second, then it is known as a watt [J/s] If you carry on doing that work for 1 hour, then that is a Wh. It is often easier to think of energy as gasoline or diesel in your fuel tank, and the engines power is the rate that you use up that fuel.

Write, not send.

COP 27 is not going to be of any interest to you then.

That may be true, and quite good for time of year. Not what your screenshot is showing. kW is power, kWh is energy, they are not, on their own, interchangable.

I think it is a west country thing, took solicitors 5 months to sort it out for me. An acquaintance has recently had a similar wait.

Small, achievable steps. It will soon start snowballing.

Thermal or moisture expansion and contraction maybe?

So halve the loads and hope for the best. What we usually did. I am not sure how elastic PU foams are, when I say elastic, I actually mean work evenly within the theoretical elastic limits. I think by the time you get to the nasty end of Young's Modulus, the point of no return has been reach and the material will fail rapidly. You only got to bend, or shock a sheet to see how easily it can snap. I don't know much about expanded and extruded polystyrenes, had to make some tooling for some once, but never even say the production process. They feel more compressible than expanded PU, but fingertips can easily be tricked by a softer feeling material.

So altitude as well.

Not that I know of. A couple of people on here have made their own. Basically a largish car radiator cooling fan, a speed controller and a manometer, which is just a pipe with two clear ends and some coloured water.

Spend 100 quid and make yourself a blower. Make your life easy as you go along.

So the humidity in the air had fused, then solidified. Which bit she in? This time a few years back the OAT went from 24⁰C to -7°C overnight, in Halifax.

I think you are right. Water can be 'enter' into brickwork and render just through wind driven rain, leaky downpipes and guttering, standing water etc. To my mind it does not make much difference to drying out what the render is made from when it comes to drying out. So treat internal humidity and external dampness as separate problems. Then, anything that is between the two will sort itself out in time. @darkrabbit Good luck getting an old house airtight enough to take advantage of MVHR

As usual, there is misunderstandings around heat pumps. Sized correctly, and run as intended, they are compatible to gas heating on cost. With any system that uses UFH, plenty of insulation has to be fitted under the pipework. You would not put your radiators outside on the wall, so why would you, in effect, do the same with UFH.

Don't they usually put the VCL on the outside in most of Canada? Different climate from ours in a lot of it. Most of habitual Canada is south of even me at Lat 50⁰.

There possibly are problems there. Usually they use 'aged' foams, which have already shrunk quite a bit. It may also be hard to tell if a slab has shrunken or dipped a few millimetres over a decade or two. Buildings do that anyway. A good SE should have designed for shrinkages I would have thought ( @Gus Potter, @saveasteading). What most likely happens is that the shrinkage is uneven, so some parts will pull away from the slab, other parts will be compressed a bit more. hard to tell without sawing a slab open, but would be fun to find out.

We used to work on 3% shrinkage when moulding polyurethanes. Some mixes where better than others. If you have ever wondered why new furniture has cushions that seem tightly fitted, and old furniture seems loose on the bench part, this is down to long term shrinkage. In the late 1980s, melamine powders where introduced into the mix to help with fire retardancy. This caused mixing problems (wear on mixing head and the pumps), this could make the curing inconsistent. An inconsistent mix causes uneven curing, adhesion failure and excess heat spots, all things that need to be avoided with sprayed products. When foam is moulded, or sprayed, there is an initial rapid expansion. As curing takes place, there is then a rapid contraction as the blowing agent (a gas) is released and thermal contraction takes place. Then a slow contraction takes place over time, usually months. One material we used carried on contracting at about 0.5% a year, for a decade at least. Long term contact with moisture, or even just high humidity causes polymers to break down. Excess temperature can cause initial softening, then brittleness. As much as I like polyurethane polymers, and there are literally hundreds on the market, I would be reluctant to use them as insulation. Great initially, long term they absorb about 10% of their mass in water, then, with thermal cycling, disintegrate. I have a feeling that a polyurethane is not allowed in aeroplanes as a structural element (skinned wings), though may be wrong on that.

It is always lunchtime somewhere.