SteamyTea

There is you problem, it will cost you nothing on here to ask questions.

I suspect those words will come back to haunt you, especially if you buy into one of his price plans, buy some kit to take advantage of the ToU, then find he pulls the deal at very short notice.

If you prefer the better pictures that are on radio, then this was on earlier, it is about dynamic pricing in general, though does have someone from Octopus on it. Octopus spend a lot on this sort of soft selling. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qthh

As Starlink can be used directly from a phone now (|Direct to Cell), has anyone tried that? I know it is only available foe r a few 'select apps, but if it can compete with 5G on quality and price, that could be a good way to go in the near future.

Sunny here at moment, there is always some sunshine, somewhere. Why we need the EU Supergrid to get a move on. It is probably 60% done. The link to Morroco could make the biggest potential difference. Last year they produced 1.59 TWh. The UK did 19.32 TWh. So there is a massive opportunity for exports. I bet they don't get bogged down in planning for a decade.

What is the Green Parties and the Lib Dem's policy on these. They don't seem to get much radio coverage at the moment. A properly costed carbon tax is probably the best way to control fossil fuel/combustion usage.

Yes it is, but I think I read it is not part of the auction as it is considered 'base load'. I may be wrong though. If it is part of the auction clearing system, then, as you say, they will be buying it at almost twice the current price. Red Diesel was 77p/litre, so about 8p/kWh, yesterday. So it would be possible to generate electricity at about 25p/kWh, and, at the same time, get a kWh of thermal energy out of it. Not as cheap as a large PV array, but on a par with grid connected.

I have just spent a few minutes trying to find some interconnect price, only one I found was from 2021, was around 19euro/MWh. Current prices can been seen here. https://grid.iamkate.com/ No idea how good Kate's site is, but I think her father used to lecture in RE at Plymouth.

Isn't that more reason to deploy more, non thermal, generation capacity and storage. It is also amazing how fast a government can make financial changes, just look wheat they have done with student loans.

This is about energy prices, not council tax. If you want to get things changed, go into politics.

Average domestic household energy bills (~£1750) are still around 5% of average household earnings (~£36,700).

Correlation is not causation. Electricity prices are set by the highest priced, deliverable, energy, that is part of the half hour auctions. This is called the marginal price (I know you know all this). The high price is caused by this marginal pricing system. It would be much better if, for any given half hour period, that the mean auction price, based of weighted averages, was paid. That would get rid of those ridiculous price spikes, and reduce the potential losses at the lower end, I think. May try and model it later.

Was about making your house warm, rather than why it is not warm. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qrkc

Already Done https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09fb6n5/episodes/player

Cast Iron has a thermal conductivity (k) of around 52 W.m-1.K-1. Mild Steel is similar. So it just comes down to the thickness really. if they have the same mass for a similar surface area, they they will perform, near enough, the same. (it is a bit more complicated than that as fins, and fluid to surface area ratio can make a difference, but you get the idea)

His sidekick GROK will sort out the pertinent number, so I think we have lost the battle on this one. Has anyone tried using the TOR network with Starlink, some providers can block it I believe.

It is easy, if named after someone i.e. Mr Watt, then in is capital W. Only use lower case capital, w, when using the full word watt, unless it is Mr Watt, or at the begining of a sentence.

Could that be designed a bit differently with one dealing with the majority of the space heating i.e. lower temp output, and the other predominantly for DHW and occasional higher temperature input to the space heating.

Sorted.

What a brilliant idea, be like The A Team, or Jules in Pulp Fiction after his epiphany.

Called 're-planning". Mine has been spent.just not by me. Live like a student, I have been doing that for decades, why I do jobs that are well below me. When I do that, the posts get edited, as of by magic. You can lay it on me.

Re your overheating 1%, is that really an issue, 4 days a year. Also by how much will it overheat, there is a difference between 24.5°C and 30°C. Did they take into account the reduced solar gain in the roof area because of the PV, it will take out the worse 20% of the energy at the sunniest times. Finally, where in the country are you, there is a difference in climate between coastal, rural and urban.

Japan is on a par with us according to this https://www.japanlivingguide.com/expatinfo/money/utility-prices/ Electric is between 14 and 20p/kWh. Gas between 5p and 7p a kWh. And they have no natural resources, which is why they broke the 1973 energy crisis embargo. As you are a similar age to me, you must remember that we had higher income tax rates until the early 1980s. If you are now claiming a pension, you would have had an income tax band contribution towards it, but now you will only pay a lower rate, by at least 10% on that income. While we did have tax relief on our mortgages, we did pay higher interest. Council tax was considered high, so the poll tax was introduced (did not end well). It is really hard to compare between countries and between histories without taking everything into account. So even taking purchasing price parity into account i.e. how many hours do you need to work to by a similar product is not a good comparison i.e say it takes ten hours work to pay your monthly electric bill, but only 3 hours work to pay your gas bill, another country (or time in history) may have that as 9 hours and 5 hours, or 12 hours and 2 hours. You need to find some figures that show the who thing, not cherry pick to suit an argument. Exceptions are not the rule.

Why sleep quality is so important – and so difficult to measure Sleeping a solid 8 hours isn't the whole story and the quality of your sleep might matter more. But what does sleep quality mean and how can we measure it? By Sophie Bushwick 20 January 2025 Steven Puetzer/Getty Images How did you sleep last night? Your response might depend on how long you were in bed, how much of that time you spent tossing and turning or whether you feel rested. But it might also depend on whether you exercised today, what your wearable device says, or when you are being asked. This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here. “Everyone has their own definition of sleep quality – and that is the problem,” says sleep researcher Nicole Tang at the University of Warwick, UK. Though sleep quality and what defines it is a puzzle scientists are still figuring out, we do know that a good night’s rest involves a series of sleep cycles, the distinct succession of phases of brain activity we experience during sleep (see diagram below). And for most of us, each stage of those cycles is necessary to wake up feeling refreshed. The average person experiences four to five complete cycles during a night and disrupting these can come with health consequences, both in the short and long term. “Poor sleep quality is associated with many adverse physical health outcomes,” says Jean-Philippe Chaput at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Similar to what you can expect from not sleeping enough (see “Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need”), these include a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and weight gain. Although there is no definitive consensus on what defines sleep quality, researchers and doctors frequently analyse sleep with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tracks brain activity during sleep cycles, or using actigraphy, where body movement is monitored throughout the night as a measure of wakefulness. Such measurements show that the factors with the greatest impact on what scientists would broadly call sleep quality include how long it takes to doze off, how often you wake up and sleep efficiency – the percentage of time in bed that is actually spent in slumber. “Usually, the case is that not just one parameter predicts sleep quality – it’s a bunch of different parameters added up together,” says Tang. Read more Snoring isn't just a nuisance, it's dangerous. Why can't we treat it? But how those parameters stack up doesn’t always tally with subjective experience. For example, a 2023 study of 100 people grouped them by sleep quality using EEG measurements, finding that poor sleepers spent less time in the deeper phase of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep compared with better sleepers. However, self-reported measures of sleep quality didn’t match the EEG-based ones. A 2024 analysis of EEG data from more than 250 people over seven nights found that subjective sleep ratings were only moderately related to objective metrics, with sleep efficiency the most important variable in determining whether participants reported better-quality sleep. What that means is that your EEG or actigraphy measurement can reflect what looks like a stellar night’s rest, and yet you would still rate your sleep quality as poor, and vice versa. Exactly why that can be the case isn’t entirely clear, but other research backs up the idea that what happens in bed isn’t the only way we determine the quality of the sleep we have had. In a 2022 study, Tang and her colleagues found that participants’ perception of how they slept was influenced by factors experienced the following day, such as their current mood or their level of physical activity. “What you do during the day could affect your evaluation of the sleep the night before,” says Tang. This frustrating situation led a panel of sleep experts who reviewed the evidence for physiological markers of the “elusive, amorphous, and multi-dimensional construct of sleep quality” to conclude that “ultimately, the determination of ‘quality sleep’ remains largely subjective and inconsistently quantifiable by current measures”. That sleep quality is so difficult to assess objectively should give us pause when considering data from wearables that provide a sleep quality score. Many of these are based on measurements, such as heart rate or movement that can accurately determine whether you are asleep, but the makers of these gadgets typically don’t explain how these factors are weighted to determine the final output. Some experts caution against giving too much importance to these scores, as they can be unreliable and increase anxiety around sleep. How to get a better night's sleep by hacking your brainwaves Wearable technology that stimulates the brain to make you sleep more deeply promises to revolutionise your slumber – can it really lead to a better night’s rest? Even if we can’t always accurately assess our sleep quality, there are things we can do to attempt to get a better night’s sleep – for example, not drinking. Alcohol may help you nod off and increase the amount of deep NREM sleep in the first half of the night, but it triggers wakefulness in the second half and impairs rapid eye movement sleep. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule and good sleep hygiene habits will also help. Of course, some sleep fragmentation is unavoidable – tending to a crying baby, nighttime visits to the toilet – and circumstances change over your lifetime. So avoid fretting about one night’s interrupted sleep: precisely because sleep quality is so subjective, if you start feeling anxious about it, you may wake up thinking your night went even worse than it did. This article is part of a special series investigating key questions about sleep. Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need The surprising relationship between your microbiome and sleeping well How best to catch up on rest and pay off your sleep debt How to shift your circadian clock to beat your jet lag What nine sleep researchers do to get their best night’s rest Topics: mental health/ sleep/ health/ sleep loss

The darkest hour is right before the dawn. I got up the crack of dawn once, after going up a lane.