SteamyTea

You will be amazed how fast things dry on a line in a force 9 (8 is the usual). It can even stand the odd spot of rain and still dry. And as you have probably found out, it can be raining on one corner of your garden and not on the opposite one.

This is the important thing, but even with figures it is hard to know what to do. One day, when I break a hip again, I shall sit down and work it out. I think on my usage, and lack of opportunity to add a decent amount of PV, I am better off minimising my day usage and hunting around for a better overall E7 deal. Of just swap my baths for a shower. Minimising usage is really the easy way.

Just remembered to ask my Mother what softener she has. Will have to wait till Friday as I will be caller her on her 90th Birthday then.

My standing charge is 18.9p/day, so £70/year once rounded up. That does not seem to change with different payment methods. The unit price does. The cheapest is 22.54p/kWh day, 8.46p/kWh night on the cheapest and 24.12p/kWh day and 9.07p/kWh night on the most expensive. So not a dreadful difference really. But I have always found EDF clear and reasonable. Yes I know I could shop about and save a penny or two somewhere, but that is all really, hard to find a very large discounts.

I started off monitoring my usage in detail, several years ago, to answer just that question. I am still not sure. Much of it depends on your total usage. If I was forced to have only standard rate, I would probably change the DHW to a large instantaneous water heater to reduce storage losses (these are about 2.5 kwh/day on a normal 200lt cylinder). I think the best way to model your energy usage is to pick an ideal scenario and see if the different rates can fit in with it, rather than look at the times the rates change and see if you can fit your kit to work within those bounds.

Is that just the depreciation cost though. E7 night rate is now about 9p/kWh and the day rate is about 24p/kWh. For the last two days I have used less than 0.5 kWh during the day rate period (since I have got my new DHW cyclinder). So I would be better off getting a couple of kWh of storage as the unit cost would be 17p/kWh. Having said that I cam currently using about 25 kWh/day, so I have a bit of tinkering to do on the DHW temperature and heat losses, and the one night storage heater I am using to get my usage back down to my target of no more than 10 kWh/day. I have been a bit lazy about this, this year. The secondary cylinder lagging is going back in place today.

You not read your Tolkien then.

Is it as satisfying as punching out a politician. There should be a day set aside for that, April 1st is coming up.

I also do the cleaning, cooking, shopping, gardening, DIY, the lot in fact. But, 30+ years ago I worked at a really horrible company with a bunch of bigoted wankers who assumed that because I lived on my own I must be gay (though I was called a b*mmer then). I think it was Max Planck that said something along the same lines. "New ideas take hold when the old guard die off".

Well worth it. This is what it is like now I have fixed my water heater

Pressure times Volume divided by Temperature is a constant. So if you cool the exhaust gas down to ambient, you cannot do any work, and as the old song says 'work is heat and heat is work, repeat after me'.

It has to, C = PV/T tells us that.

I can imagine there are problems with a large family. I also have the advantage that I am at home during the day and can always bring washing in quickly when it rains. When the weather is bad, like it has been since November, I put my damp clothes on hangers, then hand them from the curtain rail. I find the windows being open a crack deals nicely with the condensation.

Just about everything is done at 40°C, talking 99 out of 100 washes. Not used the dryer (condensing one) on the machine for almost 2 years. My best energy saving device was a 2 quid washing line, and I have half of it left.

Is the concept behind condensing boilers really just flue heat recovery?

I got this all up my legs from the Bedford LC spa bath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_tub_folliculitis If anyone remembers The Brittas Empire, they were usually referring back to his time at Bedford. There was a reason for that.

Led my first climb in a 50MPH wind, was cold as well. Realised that a 'walky-talky' headset is not just a toy for posers. I was shouting for ages before my mate started up the climb.

With the proper words I hope.

There have been studies done on the embodied energy and CO2 for PV modules. I can't remember the figures, but it is pretty low. http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/what-energy-and-carbon-payback-time-pv-panels-uk/ That report seems to say that it is about the same time as I have taken to grow those twigs.

The worse job I ever did was cleaning out the spa bath filter at the Sheffield YMCA, I have do idea what those young men got up to in it. Real adult content and 1970's language. But this is the cleaner version.

All I have really done is grown enough for a bit of coppicing in 5 years. And to root ball probably accounts for half the mass (can't ever check now as I went to the woods and planted them to see what happens in their natural environment). I think the point is that a mature tree has greater environmental benefit alive than burnt.

Some of the longer standing members may remember that I got into a debate about how useless biomass was as a fuel. There is a bloke over an the other places that decided that Dr. David MacKay was talking total rubbish and that the UK could be run from a few grass clippings, and another bloke that claimed that he had fitted a domestic biodigester that could run a house off a few poos, food waste and anything else that could be digested. I was not alone in thinking that all this did not add up, so I planned an experiment. I found a very small sycamore sapling in my garden, put it in a pot and let it grow for a year. Then every year of 5 years I pulled it out the pot, leaned up the roots and weighed it. I also measured the height and diameter. I also did the same with a second sapling starting a year later. So that gives me 3 full years worth of data, but on a small sample and not grown in ideal conditions. I am not worried by this as it would take whatever magic was in Jack's bean to get to a decent mass to be worth burning. So here are the mean masses for 2015, 2016, 2017,2018. 41, 88, 193, 330. They are grams not kilograms. Now at the moment I don't know what the dry mass will be, but if it is 20%, that gives me 66gm to burn. If it has a specific energy content of 5 kWh/kg (quite optimistic that is), then I have grown, in 5 years, 1/3rd of a kWh, and it has taken up a couple of square metres of my garden. So that is about 20,000 kWh of insolation to get a whopping 0.33 kWh back at winter time. That is a conversion rate of 1.65%, which oddly enough, is pretty high for a plant (but I have not included leaf fall, but have included the root). So if anyone thinks that it is best to grow timber for fuel, it just isn't. PV is better by a factor of 10. And if you want to store PV in a battery, you don't need a very large one to store 0.165 kWh.m-2.

S1 and S3, thought they were Audis. I had no idea that there are different categories of safety shoes. Probably best not to step on any loose planks.

Just remember that as soon as you walk into SportsDirect you are treated as a shoplifter. It really is one of the worse places I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penwith My Mother has had the same water softener for about 20 years, I shall ask her if she know what make it is. It is just one you put salt into and it backwashes at night.