SteamyTea

I find the "coffee culture" a bit odd. I work with someone that says he refuses to have a coffee from a chain place. This seems to be based on one experience of ordering the wrong thing. He actually won't go to any chain place because he thinks that they have killed local traders, this suggests that he has already made up his mind about quality. A few years back I asked someone where was a good place to get a coffee in Penzance. Was told that the Cornish Hen was the best place to go because it was 'organic' (I think the coffee was Illy, which should be called Iffy). Was dreadful, truly dreadful. If they had put boiling water on a teaspoon of Happy Shopper instant it would have been better. And they charged me nearly 3 quid. The staff were standoffish. For an interesting take on food, listen to this. Was on last week. Highlights the snobbery of food. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07gz0j1

Had anyone say down and worked out the price of buying and running a coffee machine. I go out for a coffee most days, cost me somewhere between £1.90 and £2.75 a day, usually about £2.40 (local Costa). Seems a lot, but is it really. They do the washing up for that and I get to read the newspapers, steal their internet, look at, and get annoyed with youngsters, occasionally have an interesting conversation...

Except you could store the PV energy as thermal energy, then just draw on it when needed. A lot of the time you would not be pulling the maximum 3kW. Remember that you only start importing energy once the load is greater than your PV is supplying. It is not 'either or '

The alternative is to have large investment into renewable generation, then, apart from commuter congestion, we can live just about were we like. There would be no environmental penalty for using energy (kind off, ish). I think that we will probably have a similar mix of housing that we have at the moment. One area that does need sorting, and sorting fast, is energy intensive industries i.e. concrete, steel, plastic, food manufacturing. We cannot just export this this and then claim virtue.

Almost a week later, but it is sunny and I want to go out. So after a week, my 7 sensor RPi has used 90.6 Wh, it has run for 165 hours, so that is 0.56W. With my E7 tariff that works out at about 0.3p/day. Or about £1/year.

If it is just housing, then large scale blocks of flats. They have small footprints, so leaves lots of land for other things, low energy usage, centralised management, good local infrastructure i.e. work, retail, leisure facilities, transport. Probably not the utopia future we imagined for our retirement.

Welcome First thing to do is to set a baseline for your energy usage. Then you can measure what any improvements are actually doing.

Can we play 'Spot the Safe'. For anyone under 40, that is what we did before the Lottery came along, though it was called 'Spot the Ball'

Bit of a worrying statement on their website. I thought it was 1.6180..... ♦ 1:1 Gold Ratio The unit and water tank are matched with a gold ratio to eliminate the phenomenon of disharmony, so that it is more energy-saving and professional.

"Police are hunting thieves who stole an entire cobbled street in Liverpool." Back in the 80's my Girlfriend's parents lived in Aintree. One Sunday afternoon they were sitting in the back garden and heard a noise in the house. Her Father went to investigate and there was some bloke carrying out their TV. When confronted with "What you doing", the thief said "taking your TV". The thief then walked out, put it in a van and drove off. Liverpool was great in the 80's. Now what happened to Derek Hatton.

I use all wired sensors on my collection of RPis. Have run some DHTs and DS18B20 at the end of 10m cables. The DHTs are not that great for reliability anyway, but not that many missed readings in the scheme of things. The 1-Wire stuff is very good, but as soon as you attach more than about 7 to the same cable, problems happen. I just reduced the Ohms of the resistor to up the cable voltage. That seemed to sort it. Have played with some ESP8266 as remote sensors. I really must have a play again. I got stuck on sending the data securely, but that was my lack of microPython skills rather than anything wrong with the ESP8266. After decades of only liking wired stuff (my mechanical engineering background), I like the idea of wireless more and more these days. My CurrentCost Optisense on my electric meter has been chugging along for about 7 years now, not changed the battery yet. Shame the CurrentCost are not about anymore. I am not worried about EMF, not enough energy in it to worry about.

Me too. If all energy was sold by the joule, it would be easy to compare. Even food has the kJ on it. But when I asked the local WeightWatchers woman what it meant, she had no idea.

All this talk of people being safe makes me sick. At least branch could have caught one of you in the nads, just as a social comment

I got a PDF for nothing. Bit of googling finds everything.

I have just read C P Snow's Science and Government lecture. Still valid even though it is almost 60 years since he delivered it. Last week was Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. Not valid and basic premise was wrong, and still is wrong. Now back to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. If you want to learn a lesson about bad science and selective evidence, this is the book to read.

Yes, but a bath is my luxury, and it gets my body moving properly.

Get a copy of this book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Energy-Beginners-Guide-Guides/dp/1786071339 It is pretty good and I got it electronically from my local library. Also there is the classic https://www.withouthotair.com/download.html free download Then the OU books that the renewable courses use. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Energy-Systems-Sustainability-Sustainable-Future/dp/0199593744 https://www.amazon.co.uk/RENEWABLE-ENERGY-SUSTAINABLE-GODFREY-PAPERBACK/dp/0199681279 I would say that the first two are compulsory reading and the second two are good for referencing.

I planted 2, one seems to have died. I have been expecting rain, but looks like ti will start on the weekend, just as the school holidays start.

I forgot you are on E7 now. I really must have a look at my electricity costs. For me EDF were always been the cheapest (far end of the power cable), without exception, but they don't seem too competitive at the moment. Trouble is, there is only £40-60/year difference on my usage. I can easily save that by putting an inch less bath water in. If I had a spare £10k, I would drill a borehole for my water and get a small HP to heat it up. But as that is about 15 years worth of energy, hardly seems worthwhile. It is like planting a tree, should have done it 15 years ago.

Don't you get the deemed export and the actually generation payment, tax free?

What Solver is for, or do it the easy way and just work out the hour by hour means, then add in the incidentals. Then hit F9. I think because I don't draw anything from the grid 60% of the time, I should get a discount.

I could sit down and work out an estimate for the ACH based on HDDs, but it would only be a rough estimate. Apart from a bit of extra insulation in my loft, changing the glazing from 3-8-3 to 3-16-3, making sure the old frames fitted correctly and a bit of extra draft-proofing around the back door, I have done nothing to the house. When I first moved in, and having been used to an old Victorian house, but with a gas combi boiler, I was a bit fooling with energy. My first years usage was almost 12 MWh, now it is about 3.8 to 4 MWh. So about a third of the usage. A large part of this was DHW, then I saw just how much I was being charged for water, so cut back drastically. It is also a testament to just how good timber frame houses can be. Mine is one of the first 6 of this design in Cornwall, then they build hundreds of them, if not thousands. Apart from when I went away a couple of Autumns back for a month and did not leave any windows open, I have had no issues with condensation. Condensation may be a concern if having a low air temperature inside the house and the ventilation is not idea. No amount of FIR is going to solve that. It would be an interesting area to study. Something I had to do as a first year degree student. Seem to remember the hard part was making the spreedsheet look pretty, rather than the actual calculations. We were given the temperature and ACH to work from, which made life easy. Was possibly that assignment that made me interested in thermodynamics more than any other, probably because it was a real world problem, unlike what I did for my 3rd Year project, which was, in a way, similar, but a lot of equations and calculus to prove it.

Happened in the Health and Leisure industry. A few suppliers created an organisation basically to keep some suppliers out of the industry. That all changed when Local Authorities had to go to competitive tendering. I don't think the Fitness Industry Association in the UK is about anymore, possibly because it was started by a serial bankrupt and his mistress.

I often think it is because we use the word heat to mean temperature. Must be time for our favourite song.

Why not. It only takes 1 joule to raise 1 g of air by 1°C I have 1.2 tonnes of air in my house and 48600000 j a day to use. So if there were no losses at all, then I could raise that 1.2 tonnes of air by 40.5°C. Heating air is easy, though it does take more energy to heat than granite [SHC of air is 1 J.g-1.K-1, granite is 0.8 j.g-1.K-1]