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SteamyTea

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Everything posted by SteamyTea

  1. The strip reduces the airflow to almost zero, so no convection happens. The rest of the heat is insulated, so little is lost (they are warm to the touch, but not hot. So a small strip can reduce the overnight heating. Assuming that storage heaters are not faulty, they work incredibly well. As an aside, check your parents water heater. There are two elements usually, one at the top and one at the bottom. If the top one is switched on it can heat water anytime of the day or night. This gets expensive. Ideally just the bottom heater should be on as this is the Economy 7 one. It heats the water during the night and even if you only use water during the day, it does not get thermally recharged until the next night (usually between midnight and 7 AM, though this can be different in different areas). If you can read the meter, post up the numbers and that gives a fair bit of information. There should be 3 readings t= total, 1=day and 2=night. If you can also see the date the meter was installed (often just crayoned on the meter) then that is also useful. Some more modern and key meters give more information, but it should be fairly clear what is what.
  2. Not surprised the tenant left with a bog like that. I bought a house in a very hard water area (Aylesbury). The bog was like that when I moved in. I bit the bullet, put on rubber gloves, got a kitchen scourer and a bottle of Toilet Duck or similar, and just started scrubbing. Not the worse job I have had to to (that was cleaning out the spa bath filter from the YMCA Sheffield, I have no idea what those young men got up to). There were a few really sticky bits that needed to be sanded away with a pumice stone (which also got rid of the greeny blue streak on the bath a treat). Friends and family were well impressed with how clean I got everything. But they never shook hands with me again.
  3. Energized just means it is getting electrical power. The power for night storage heaters is from a separate circuit and is switched on and off by a radio signal receiver in the main meter. There are some very old systems that still have mechanical timers, but not many left now.
  4. I am not @ProDave but I use storage heaters and Economy 7 The type of tariff that you use does not change your energy use, it just allows you to time shift your usage to a time when the electricity is cheaper. This is why storage heaters are used. They store the energy for later, controlled release. If you took the bricks out of a storage heater, you would be left with a normal panel heater. Now imaging that this is a 1 kW panel heater and you need it on permanently. This would use 24 kWh of electricity and deliver 24 kWh of thermal energy into the room. At a normal electricity tariff of say 16p/kWh, that would be £3.84/day Now imagine if you can store the same amount of energy and still release it at a steady state of 1 kW. You still need 24 kWh/day, but you only get a 7 hours window to use it in. That mean you have to charge up at a higher rate, in this case 3.4 kW. A typical night rate for Economy 7 is 9p/kWh, so now that same energy is costing £2.16/day. The down side to this is that rather than having a day rate at 16p/kWh, it is charged at 22p/kWh. This is why, if on Economy 7, supplementary electric heaters are used during the day, the price seems very high. Getting the storage heaters working correctly is quite important when it comes to price. Storage heaters and Economy 7 have had a bad rap over the years, which I think is unfair. If they are used incorrectly i.e. flap always open, then they are in effect just a convecting panel heater and will cool off quite quickly. Once cool, supplementary heating is required and if that is during the day, then the price is high. It is why we hear stories of the house being hot in the morning and cold in the evening, and very high bills. One way to check what the balance between day and night usage is, is to look at the electricity bills or meter. If the day readings are similar to the night readings, then the heaters need setting correctly. As an example, nearly 90% of my electrical usage is during the night period. I have low bills and a warm house.
  5. I thought Goop was Gwyneth Paltrow's website that catered for the idiotic worried well. I have purposely uncoupled myself from her. Does this goop uncouple too?
  6. Downers work a treat.
  7. https://news.sky.com/story/alabama-man-fed-meth-to-caged-attack-squirrel-11744502
  8. I have basic storage heater and they are pretty simple inside. Spares are not always cheap, so shop around for them. You could look in the local paper for secondhand ones. They usually go for nothing (3 in the street in PZ last week, nothing wrong with them). Don't go for oil filled heaters, these don't store energy, they are just convection heaters. If heat is needed in an emergency, get some cheap fan heaters. They warm a place up very fast, are easy to move, and the noise is a reminder that they are on.
  9. Scuba divers spit into their masks, finger it around, then rinse off. It works but I have no idea why. Do my shiny acrylic replacement lenses that were put in as replacements for my old cataracted ones count as safety lenses. Driving is safer now.
  10. Is it covered in this: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/518193/Guidance_on_Firearms_Licensing_Law_April_2016_v20.pdf Personally I would just make them all legal. If you want to catch squirrels, a trap is probably better.
  11. The radiator manufacture should have a data sheet on what the power output is for different temperatures. Good place to start.
  12. Not unusual for a development company to rapidly increases sales just before a sell off. It is how venture capitalists make money.
  13. There is a reason that shipping containers are not used to make many houses. Foundations is not one of them.
  14. Not as simple as that. Generally a heat pump works at a lower temperature than an ordinary boiler. That is why the radiators have a larger surface area. If the installation was gas or oil and the radiators were sized correctly, then new ones, with a larger area, would still be needed.
  15. Doubling the breadth does not make much difference. But probably be enough for your needs. Calculate it if in doubt. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/beams-fixed-both-ends-support-loads-deflection-d_809.html
  16. My local library used to get in any of the standards I wanted when I was researching. Not sure if they still do. May be worth asking there. They used to charge for photocopying, but at a reduced rate as I was a student. They never checked I was a student. I was in my 40s at the time.
  17. Plastics have been recycled for decades. We used to have large containers outside the factory for the vac formed off cuts and scrap. Prices varied by the type and colour, but it was always worth doing, and that was nearly 40 years ago. Really need a bit more information.
  18. Judging by your picture, it looked like you bathed in it. Are you auditioning for a part in Chernobyl.
  19. Quite the opposite, I did my BSc final year project in solar thermal. Since then, the world has moved on and in my opinion, PV is the way forward for domestic use.
  20. Post them up for us, just like the EDXCEL exams.
  21. followed by 10 lines of text about how complicated it is. It is not just control systems, there are accumulators, pressure valves, safety cutouts, replacing fluids. When a car boils over, you can just fill it with some water, but you really need to fill it with anti-freeze as well, and find out why it has overheated, which could be, in no particular order: broken hose faulty waterpump faulty thermostat internally blocked radiator externally blocked radiator failed head gasket broken fan broken fan motor broken fan belt and a few more things. The above are some of the reasons I think PV is a lot simpler and reliable.
  22. @Ed Davies using FF 67.0.2 the lastest update as of this afternoon. Brave is based on Chromium and has an opt-in for their advertising system. I have not opted in. The main problem with Brave is that it is not a true portable app. Passwords are stored on PC. One thing I like about it is that it has TOR built in (just click on the user icon and pick from list).
  23. This is just a quick, one sample, snapshot of a problem with Firefox Browser. This has come about from a conversation with @Ed Davies on Zoots topic about a slow computer. I have the latest version of FF and it is still memory hungry. The screenshot is of Task Manger showing memory usage. Brave has been open for an hour or so and has the forum loaded. FF is just opened up with nothing loaded.
  24. That name rings a bell. They had one at the university I taught at.. It was meant to be for testing and training. Just after they got it, the company went pop, so no idea if it is still about. I liked the simplicity of the system as it was basically a panel and a pump, differential temperature controller and a pressure relieve valve.
  25. If using ET on a drainback system, is there not a problem with the longevity of the ETs. The only Drainback system I have seen up close is the one that had an acrylic cover (it was formed into 3 large 'bubbles'). I think the company that made them went bankrupt a few years back (about the time FiTs started).
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