SteamyTea

The UK mainland is tilting about 3mm/year because of the last ice age, which pushed Scotland downwards. Then add in sea level rise because of ocean thermal expansion of about 3mm/year.

It is rising at about 6mm a year asl. I am sinking at about the same rate. It is not so much the mean sea level, more to do with storm surges. We had one a few years back, it was quite interesting to watch it, the harbour visibly filled up (smashed boats too because of waves).

Small, terraced house, fairly airthtight, mild climate in Cornwall. The technology is just old Creda storage heaters, but I do limit the E7 window to the last 4 hours. The heaters are generally fully charged after 3 hours. So that is 4.5 kW x 3 hours = 13.5 kWh.day-1 13.5 kWh.day-1 / 48 m2 = 0.28 kWh.m-2.day-1 0.28 kWh.m-2.day-1 / 24 hours = 0.0117 kW.m-2 0.0117 kW.m-2 / 1000 = 12 W.

I may just take a chance and get the ones that work on an Arduino, can get a couple of them delivered for under a tenner. Cheers anyway.

If you could and see if they work with an RPi, I then may get some as part of my Silly Sunday Experiment, which is now over a year old.

There is a little truth in that, and it does depend on what sort of boiler is used. Water is easy to move about though, easier than air if you want control. This is a big problem. I am not so bothered about temperature per sec, but I hate draughts, unless they are warm ones. I grew up in the Far East, so got used to hot and very humid, then had a spell in Holland and Essex, so cold and dry. Then France and West Indies, so used to hot dry winds, and much prefer them. One of the best places to judge comfort temperature is workplaces, there are a few studies on these. The big advantage of studying in the workplace is that people are already mentally occupied with work and productivity is easy to measure. Though there have been some bad studies, on on light levels springs to mind. Because of this we have highly illuminated offices and badly illuminated factories.

Purely as an academic exercise, has anyone every rigged one of these up to a RPi: https://www.melexis.com/en/product/MLX90615/Digital-Plug-Play-Infrared-Thermometer-Ultra-Small-TO-Can# They do a few different ones, including an IC2 one for about 3 quid.

For little things I bought these. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/7-in-1-4-30V-LCD-USB-Current-Voltage-Energy-Detector-Power-Capacity-Tester-Meter/273639126870

Well come the school summer holidays you will be able to start. Then you have, apart from 6 good weeks in September and October, 8 months to do them. When I moved into my house, the first week was really sunny, then it rained, every day, for 66 days.

Just as an aside, when I first started monitoring energy, I used an old desktop computer, it was drawing about 200W. I have some little USB energy monitors now, so shall plug on in and see what my Raspberry Pi Zero is drawing. It is reading 7 1Wire temp sensors every minute and logging the data. Seems to be about 0.55W (4.9V and 0.2A). If someone reminds me, I shall look at the Wh reading next week to get a better idea of what is happening. 12:15 PM 14/07/2019

I had a fridge that was consistently freezing stuff. Within a year it was running constantly but not cooling. I picked the extra electrical usage up on my energy monitor, so was only 3 days of wasted electricity and milk. So could be something as simple as a refrigerant gas leak. Might be worth putting a temp sensor on the back of the fridge (or where it dispels the energy) and seeing what is happening there. I noticed, in hindsight, that it was not warm.

@joe90 says he is 90% finished, so 90% left to go.

No, pretty standard 1987 timber frame. Temperature is kept at a steady 20°C, plus or minus a degree. Heated by a couple of storage heaters (from 1987). It must have some, even a cardboard box has insulating properties. It would not be hard to set up a room for testing and comparing different heating systems. Just a case of putting in all the kit. would cost a bit, but that is the nature of developing new products. For two winters I experimented with just heating the house with a 1 kW fan heater rather than the storage heaters. It worked just as well, used the same amount of energy, but cost more as I was using E7 and running the fan heater during the day. I did this to see if it was worth me changing my heating system. Decided it wasn't. That is the beauty of data collection. It is easy and cheap to collect electrical power and temperature data these days.

Scratching my head a bit here. That works out at 60W/m-2 I heat my house with 12W.m-2 I think you may be getting installed capacity and mean power delivery a bit muddled. This also seems a bit odd and adds to my suspicions.

May be worth remembering what Richard Feynman has to say about this sort of thing:

Think it is more a case of comparing it to E7/E10 heating systems, which are very controllable now.

I am not sure that is strictly true. We have capillaries that carry blood to our skin surface, as well as sweat glands, to control kin temperature. Also, there are many organs that are that close to out skin surface (unless one is covered in blubber. Just been to Redruth and people look like seal pups there), so if FIR really can penetrate over an inch, then we would not be able to stand outside for very long. Also, the thermal conductivity of water, which is around 0.6W.m-1.K-1, or near enough the same as brick, plaster, soil, is not really relevant when it comes to efficiency. Thermal Inertia, which is what I think you are on about, is the product of specific heat capacity, density and conductivity, also plays no part in working out the efficiency in this scenario. If it was important, then efficiency ratio calculations would be quite complicated. Now who said about a microwave and a convection oven. There really is not much difference. It does depend on the shape of what is being cooked, but they both work by thermal conduction. Microwaves don't really cook 'from the inside'. They just jiggle water molecules effectively, starting off a convection process.

Have you read all this: http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=125&page=1#Item_0 Makes @onoff bathroom an afternoon project

Not that multifoil insulation sellers would do anything like that.

I was waiting for this. What you seem to be saying here is that you can be in a room that has cold air in it, but as long as you are bathed in some far infrared radiation, you won't feel cold. This is not how one measures efficiency. I can make my car more fuel efficient, over a set period of time, by not driving it much. Not really the point though is it. One possible problem with having a house that is colder than necessary, is that condensation can be an issue. I hope you have done a risk assessment on this aspect.

Not sure what to make of that.

Probably twist the picture frame.

A hinged bucket on wheels then. Now, I lived in France and was joined by my Belgium cousin for a few days. He was always amazed how well I got on with the local girls and wanted to know my secret. I said it was simple, I just put a potato down my Speedos. The next day, he came up to me and said that he had been trying the potato trick but he was just laughed at. I said 'You need to put the potato in the front of your Speedos'.

There is another way to look at efficiency, and that is comparing the surface areas of the emitter and the receiver. This is something that bugs me about radiative heating. If the object to be heated has an exposed area of 1m2, and the emitter covers 10m2, then that is a simple 10% conversion, with 90% not heating the object. This ratio cannot be reduced by increasing the temperature of the emitter, or reducing the distance between the emitter and the receiver. That just changes the temperatures reached. Also, when keeping people warm, the claim that the local air temperature is unimportant just seems odd to me. As we breath in and out, we move air about. If we breath in cold air, we have to heat that up, using energy. As we breath out, that warm air is expelled, loosing some of the energy that we have used in heating it. There is also the enthrapy losses from the change in humidity. It is much easier, cheaper and more efficient to just heat the air that we live in.

Took me ages to find out the difference between an oral and anal thermometer. It is the taste! Jeremy is going to post up something really serious and sciency about efficiencies soon, hope I have not put people off.