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SteamyTea

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Everything posted by SteamyTea

  1. SteamyTea
    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'.
  2. SteamyTea
    It has to, C = PV/T tells us that.
  3. SteamyTea
    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.
  4. SteamyTea
    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.
  5. SteamyTea
    Is the concept behind condensing boilers really just flue heat recovery?
  6. SteamyTea
    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.
  7. SteamyTea
    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.
  8. SteamyTea
    With the proper words I hope.
  9. SteamyTea
    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.
  10. SteamyTea
    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.
  11. SteamyTea
    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.
  12. SteamyTea
    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.
  13. SteamyTea
    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.
  14. SteamyTea
    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.
  15. SteamyTea
    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.
  16. SteamyTea
    Best I have found is called Penwith
  17. SteamyTea
    Did you not see that Black Mirror episode with the 'dogs' in it. Metalhead.
  18. SteamyTea
    Save yourself 25 quid https://www.sportsdirect.com/dunlop-safety-iowa-mens-safety-shoes-181001?colcode=18100103&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9tiFwdKA2gIVECjTCh0WMw_KEAQYAiABEgKE8_D_BwE
  19. SteamyTea
    Part of an MCS installation involves a structural engineer signing off the roof structure. I think this was driven by the insurance companies.
  20. SteamyTea
    Just cleaning up a lump of DS does not stop the seals getting infected. Quite pitiful when you see a blind seal trying to survive.
  21. SteamyTea
    Having lived in Buckinghamshire where the water is actually just damp chalk, without a softener of some sort, the cylinder used to get split open within 5 years with all the rocks in the bottom. Trouble with a softener I find is that I feel I am constantly covered in soap after a shower. Down here, most places are on a meter. There are two standing charges, one for water at £54/year and one for sewage and surface water at £53/year, then the water is £1.92/m3, and sewage at £3.57/m3. There is a secondary charge of £3.15/m3 for highway. So before VAT, that is £107 + £8.64/m3. The reason our waste is so high is because we have to keep the beaches clean so that people can take their effing dogs down there to shit on it, usually after they have bitten me.
  22. SteamyTea
    We do have the most expensive water and sewage costs in the country though
  23. SteamyTea
    The way I see it is that you don't loose getting payment, but you never gain going down the DIY route. Ideally they should end up costing the same and the export part is inflation linked.
  24. SteamyTea
    This is the inside of the kettle. Was the one from work so boiled about 20 times a day and is probably 5 years old.
  25. SteamyTea
    Think so.
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