SteamyTea

Was true in the private school educational system, but matron usually managed to remove them.

May be more of a case that getting older is unhealthy.

https://mechanicalbasics.com/reversed-carnot-cycle-process-cop-limitations/ Probably getting close in some circumstances. They can go higher than 5, but this is not really the way it should be described. They performance should be as a fraction of the Reverse Carnot Cycle. Similar to how wind turbine performance is expresses, as a fraction of Betz Limit. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/350074/is-there-some-theoretical-maximum-cop-for-heat-pumps-and-chillers Choice of gas is important, ideally you need to work close to either side of the critical temperature. I believe this is done in CO2 systems. Water would make a good refrigerant, except it would not work that well below 273k.

Will it work this time? https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/climate-emergency-gas-boilers-cop26-b1902658.html

https://checker.ofcom.org.uk/en-gb/mobile-coverage

I have not bothered to look into this much, but there is a CO2 equivalent with refrigerants. But not all of them will leak. Natural gas, by its very chemistry, will produce CO2 when burnt in air. Electricity can be very clean. There is also an infrastructure issue, we have one network that is multi use i.e heating, cooking, lighting, machinery and transport, and another that is just heating and cooling. There will be a carbon cost to that.

You will almost certainly have a hotspot router on your phone. Try that out first.

Now you are in a much milder climate (was it Kent before), you may find yours heating demand is lower.

Before considering SBB, have you tried your, or different, mobile phone 4 or 5G offerings?

Apart from capital cost, why do you think it is unsuitable? Same question?

This is a difficult one with a shed. Depends on the differences in humidity and temperature between inside and outside, if it is heated/cooled and how often people work in it. I put the vapour barrier on the outside of mine as it is unheated and I very really actually do any work in it. I also live in a place of high humidity. My thinking is that keeping moisture out would be most effective rather than the condensation risk. Worked well.

I once had the external waste downpipe freeze and back up into the toilet, was the winter of 86/7. No idea why it backed up in the first place and it thawed the next day and never happened again.

It is worth pointing out, that @Dave Jones, claims to have had an ASHP installed once than it failed to perform, He has never offered any evidence i.e. house heat load, size and make of system, age of system, running cost, an invoice to show installation cost, DHW flow rates etc. What he has done is pop up on just about every heat pump thread claiming the same faults will occur with all ASHPs, and the only solution is a gas combi, but never mentions what size combi would be suitable. He even claims that a gas combi is suitable for people that have stated that they have no gas. The mods, who are quick to delete some cheeky comments really need to do something about this.

The definition used to be more than 10% if household income, then it changed to 8% of free household spend. It is a total nonsense as there is nothing special about 10%, or 8%. What is important is stopping low income household getting into ongoing and permant debt, either by policy i.e cost of living rises, or lifestyle choices i.e addiction or lack of education. If we think it is expensive to bail out even the reckless, try the alternative of not bailing them out.

Why. I don't find flicking a light switch an arduous task, nor does my 93 year old mother. I never asked my 103 grand mother, when she was alive, but whenever I went around the lights where on if needed.

What is fuel poverty these days. The definition was changed a while back. But I tend to agree, any government that introduces a policy that directly hits people in the pockets is onto a looser. Suck a policy could be introduced gradually though, and hope it gets lost in general cost of living rises. I don't know what the alternative is though, subsidies skew the market too much, and generally benefit people that are already cash rich or wealthy. Legislation, along with taxation, is too blunt a tool. This week's comic has a bit about it, so may post it up later.

Some of us have been saying this for a couple of decades now. A quick look at the levelized wholesale costs of solar and wind shows that in 2019 solar cost £0.08/kWh and wind £0.05/kWh. (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?time=latest&country=~GBR). I am assuming that retail gas prices are at £0.03/kWh. If you double those wholesale numbers you get an idea of what retail prices are. So to level the playing field, to the same as the solar you would need to add £0.13p/kWh (ish) to gas. An average house gas usage, according to UK Power, is 12,000 kWh/year, so that would add £1560/year to a bill. This is the highest tax, to levelise it to wind would add £840. We could reduce the cost of wind power by 20% if we allowed onshore wind again, but I think this government is still against that (the new farm subsidies are going to be about not building on farm land). If we assume that because of the RE energy mix, we put a tax of £1000/year on average to peoples bills (£20/week or the same price as 8 Costa Coffees) it will change the thinking about fitting a heat pump. The people it will hurt most are the ones that already have a heat pump as they will just see a price increase. Another way to look at is, is how much RE generation would that £1000/year buy. Assuming that RE generation costs on average £500/kW, and there are 35 million households, then that is 2kW installed capacity per household, or 70MW of installed capacity each year. Assuming a capacity factor of 25% (which is very low) then that is 15 GWh extra each year of actual generation (10% extra each year). That seems pretty cheap to me as in less than a decade we would have 100% RE generation to cover domestic usage. This is not so far off from what this government has said anyway, and they are doing that without putting a huge tax burden on consumers. Road fuel prices have risen 30% in the last year, has not stopped people using cars (though last year was a little peculiar). An average UK driver does ~8000 miles a year, this is, at 50 MPG (5.6 litres/100 km) an increase of £215/year.

Quite simply there isn't a gas main within a mile of my entrance. (Feel like I am marking my old RE students homework. It is much easier seeing others typos than one owns)

Apart from The Islands of Scilly.

How the fossil fuel era ends – and four possibilities for what follows Ever cheaper wind and solar power means the decline of coal, oil and gas is unstoppable. The trillion-dollar question is how, and how quickly, their demise comes about ENVIRONMENT 4 August 2021 By Graham Lawton David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images When will the fossil fuel era end? While we don’t know exactly how the energy transition will pan out, the fossil fuel age is ending as it began, as we learn to exploit a vast, cheap, easy-to-use energy resource that is self-evidently superior to the existing options. Now, it is wind and solar power. “The peak of the fossil fuel era is here or hereabouts,” says Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at energy think tank Carbon Tracker. “The plateau is going to last a bit, but then go off a cliff.” How high the cliff is and what is at the bottom depends on which of the scenarios available to us we choose. For the various fossil fuels, however, it will be first in, first out. “Coal is finished,” says Andreas Goldthau at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Regulatory pressure, changing economies and the competitiveness of renewables are doing for old king coal. Energy special How we can transform our energy system to achieve net-zero emissions Fatih Birol interview: Using energy isn’t evil – creating emissions is How to understand world energy use – in 10 graphs Even where governments have tried to prop up or revive coal, as in Poland and the US under President Trump, they have failed. “The question is not how coal ends,” says Goldthau. “It’s more about how we manage the transition to give workers and mining communities a smooth landing.” That’s especially relevant in China, India and Indonesia, the biggest remaining coal-burners. According to a road map by the International Energy Agency (IEA), often seen in the past as an apologist for fossil fuels, old-fashioned, dirty coal power should account for 1 per cent of global energy output at most by mid-century if we are to hit net zero. Oil will stick around for longer. “The reality is, the world is going to need oil for decades to come,” said Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub at the Climate Science and Investment Conference in New York in May. “There’s still going to be an oil market in 2050,” says Goldthau. “But it’s going to be much smaller.” The IEA forecasts a decline from 90 million barrels a day in 2019 to 24 million barrels a day in 2050, mostly driven by a switch to electric transport. This residual use of oil – to power some trucks, ships, planes and hard-to-decarbonise heavy industries, and to make petrochemicals and plastics – will be compatible with net-zero carbon emissions as long as we use carbon capture technology, says Goldthau. But even these uses will fall into the arms of the sun and air. “Slowly but surely, they are going to find alternatives to fossil fuels, though airplanes are going to be a massive headache and I think the last man standing is the plastics industry,” he says. Natural gas, now used extensively for domestic cooking and heating, electricity generation and in heavy industry, will follow the same declining trajectory as oil, albeit with a timeline that keeps it in the mix for even longer. According to the IEA road map, between now and 2050 gas demand will fall by just 55 per cent to 1750 billion cubic metres a day, replaced either by clean electricity or piped hydrogen gas. Exactly how and when the last drop of oil or whiff of gas is extracted is unknowable. But Carbon Tracker recently totted up the global potential of solar and wind and found that there is 100 times more renewable energy available than the world actually needs. Some 60 per cent of it can already be exploited economically, with that proportion rising to 100 per cent by 2030. Even big oil companies accept that their industry is slowly dying: Shell predicts an expiry date around 2070. Bond sees a day when people visit former oil refineries at the weekend, much as we now sip cappuccinos next to the gentrified canals and warehouses of a bygone industrial age. “Even the IEA, the great defender of the fossil fuel incumbency, is saying no new stuff, peak fossil fuel in 2019, decline from here on down,” he says. “If that isn’t the end of the fossil fuel era, I don’t know what is.” FOUR ENERGY FUTURES In 2019, Goldthau and his colleagues suggested four ways the energy transition could play out geopolitically – though, as ever, no one can say for certain which way things will go. 1. Big green deal A global consensus on the need for the energy transition leads to international agreement and close cooperation between nations. Clear policy signals encourage investors to take their money away from fossil fuels and put it in low-carbon technologies. Green finance deals help lower-income nations and petrostates with the transitions they need to make. This is the only scenario that hits net zero by 2050, the team concludes. 2. Dirty nationalism National energy security wins out over tackling climate change. Nations develop inward-looking policies that favour renewable energy sources where they are cheaply available, but also exploit whatever fossil-fuel resources there are. Global markets fragment, breaking the momentum towards a global green energy transition. Efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C fail. 3. Technology breakthrough There is significant progress towards net zero as wind and solar keep getting cheaper, aided by further breakthroughs in battery and grid technologies. But the two tech leaders, China and the US, increasingly vie for global supremacy through green tech. They refuse to share technology and key resources such as rare earth metals, dividing the world into blocs. Europe and Russia become increasingly marginalised. 4. Muddling through A lack of cooperation and planning mean the world fails to limit warming to 1.5°C. However, renewables do get cheaper and grow fast enough to bankrupt many big fossil fuel companies, causing financial chaos. Different parts of the world, such as the EU, the US and China, increasingly follow their own agendas, with existing economic, geopolitical and energy imbalances reinforced. Ash from fossil fuel burning seeps into waste water at a thermal power station in Belchatów, Poland Kacper Kowalski/Panos Pictures EFFICIENCY’S THE WORD The more that can be done to limit the amount of energy we use, the more feasible the task of converting the world’s energy systems to meet a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 will be. The International Energy Agency’s recent report on how to reach net zero envisages overall global energy use falling 8 per cent by 2050, despite serving a global economy twice as big and 2 billion more people than today. Achieving this will require a string of measures to improve efficiency and check demand. This means everything from insulating houses better, to reduce energy requirements during cold winters when there is less solar power available, to making appliances more efficient and encouraging people to drive less even if they have electric cars. The danger is that big increases in energy demand from some sectors, such as video streaming, cryptocurrencies, gaming and private jet flights, could cancel out any gains. Many companies justify using more energy because they get it from renewable sources. But if increased energy demand is met using existing renewable energy sources that could otherwise be displacing fossil fuel generation, it doesn’t get us any closer to net zero. To make progress, companies must build additional wind or solar projects. A few, such as Apple, are now doing this.

Energy and Power are different things. You may well get enough energy to run most of your home from a 2kWp system, but you will not very often get enough power from it to run much more than a few light loads. Storing as DHW is a cheap and obvious method, but you will still be importing electricity at the same time. Just that the unit cost will, in effect, be lower. Using timers is a bit tricky. Sod's Law says that the times you do draw a higher load i.e. washing machine, are the times it clouds over.

Stick to the Laws of Thermodynamics and you cannot go wrong. It is why they are Scientific Laws.

I don't think they are shown. But crop burning and deforestation accounts for 7.7%. You can make an estimate if you know the area and type of growth there.

How to understand world energy use – in 10 graphs How fast is renewable energy rising and fossil fuel use declining? Who’s using how much energy – and for what? Find out in our quick graphical guide to the world energy scene ENVIRONMENT 4 August 2021 By New Scientist FEDERICO GAMBARINI/DPA/AFP via Getty Images Energy special How we can transform our energy system to achieve net-zero emissions Fatih Birol interview: Using energy isn’t evil – creating emissions is How the fossil fuel era ends – and four possibilities for what follows How is energy use changing? To limit global warming to a nominally safe level of 1.5°C as laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, we must replace fossil fuels with practically inexhaustible, clean, renewable alternatives, primarily derived from sun, wind and water. The aim is to hit net-zero carbon emissions – pumping no more carbon dioxide into the Earth system than it can absorb – by mid-century. A lot of changes will be needed before we get there. Our demand for energy is still rising year-on-year. Discounting the burning of traditional biomass such as wood, fossil fuels cover almost 85 per cent of “primary” energy demand, namely energy in its raw form, before conversion into heat, electricity or transport fuels. Of the big three fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – only demand for coal is falling. More of the increase in primary energy consumption in 2019 was covered by fossil fuels than by renewable resources. What do we use energy for? Broadly, our demand for energy can be split into three main sectors, each accounting for roughly a third of energy demand. First, there is the energy used in the buildings in which we live, work and spend our leisure time. About 77 per cent of this goes on heating (and to a lesser extent cooling). Just 10 per cent of that energy comes from modern renewable sources, which excludes things such as biomass and wood used for heating. The remaining 23 per cent of buildings-related energy use is electricity for lighting and appliances. Modern renewables supply about 26 per cent of that, with this proportion rising rapidly year-on-year. The second broad sector is industry and agriculture. About 75 per cent of energy used here is for heat, for example in making steam to power industrial processes and for drying and refrigeration; the rest is for electricity for purposes such as operating machinery and lighting. Some of the most energy-intensive industries, for instance making steel and cement, have the lowest shares of renewable energy. Paper-making, meanwhile, covers 46 per cent of its energy needs with renewable energy. In the third sector, transport, fossil fuels – chiefly oil – account for almost 97 per cent of all demand, principally to fuel cars and aeroplanes. Encouraging walking and cycling rather than car use can help, as can replacing petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles, and using biofuels and hydrogen as alternative fuels – if these can be made greener. Who is using what energy? Three major developed economies dominate the league table of energy use per capita: Canada, the US and Australia. High car and aeroplane use, spread-out suburbs with large average home size, and high energy use for cooling and heating are all contributing factors. Countries also acquire their energy in different ways. Australia, for instance, burns far more coal per capita than Canada or the US, with only South Africa and China coming close to this out of the larger economies. Sweden, like Canada an affluent country with long, cold winters, covers most of its energy needs with low-carbon nuclear and hydropower. Along with France, Sweden is unusual in still having a significant amount of nuclear power in its energy mix. Electricity generation Renewable electricity generating capacity, especially of solar panels, has boomed in recent years – but so has demand for electricity, meaning fossil generation is still rising too. Nuclear power has also declined, so although renewables now account for 75 per cent of newly installed global electricity generating capacity, the proportion of low-carbon electricity has only increased from 35.2 per cent in 2000 to 36.7 per cent in 2020. Getting to net-zero requires this number to be much closer to 100 per cent. This will need huge investment, not just in wind turbines and solar panels, but in transmission infrastructure, smart grids and batteries to smooth over the natural variability in electricity supply, over days and seasons, from most renewable sources.

Would not facts be better?