Living without electricity

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 16:01:26 on Tue, 3 Sep 2013, Roger Chapman remarked:

Does the latter have electrickery?

[RobertL]

Paraffin as in pressure or wick? Gas lanterns give a better light than a wick oil lamp and are less smelly unless you use an (expensive) refined lamp oil.

'Aladdin lamps' use a (circular) wick and ordinary paraffin but have a mantle. No smell, no noise and a good light. i sued them when I lived without electricity on a boat.

Robert

[Roger Chapman]

Yes. I followed the road on streetview to the end and there are 2 wooden poles in view carrying a single phase. I was wrong in that what I thought was a single farm turns out to be a cluster of buildings with a large house and a cottage the far side of Erray House. The small cottage seems to be directly under the final span of the single phase line. I can just make out part of the penultimate span but not the next pole down the line which is hidden by Erray House itself. Back down the road and just past Erray house's private access the supply line can be seen again, this time HV with a pole transformer for a little cluster of cottages so the HV line must terminate somewhere out of view behind Erray House.

[tony sayer]

In article , charles scribeth thus

Generally yes, they the power distribution company pay wayleave's for the rights to have their cables cross someone else's land...

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[polygonum]

During the three day week my school decided to show films during cuts. They could do this because they could feed a very long cable from a building which happened to be in the next-door block and on a different schedule for cuts. Voltage drop addressed by a simple variable transformer which fed the projector with an adequate voltage.

[charles]

I know power companies do. I read the suggestion as "run your own cable".

[Windmill]

Or you could burn peat - someone has I think tried that.

The batteries are the problem. It's said that the old NiFe cells are almost indestructible if the electrolyte is replenished properly (only at long intervals), but you only get back about half of the power you put in, the voltage is only 1.1 volts so you need more cells, and last time I looked, large NiFe cells were only obtainable from China, and only in large quantities.

[Huge]

Not been to Mull, have you?

[happy zombie jebus on the cros]

nope. been to scotland once and that was to just outside of peebles where my friend is a laird.

--

mhm x v i x i i i

[Tim Watts]

On Tuesday 03 September 2013 23:22 happy zombie jebus on the cross wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Your friend is Edmund Blackadder?

[Tim Lamb]

Is that *averaged* to take account of fuel tax used for transport/heating etc.?

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[John Williamson]

Some boatyards average the VAT and duty according to an approved formula, others don't. I didn't bother asking, as I had an unknown quantity of fuel in the tank, and needed at least 4 hours cruising reserve.

[edgariredale]

Before thinking about electricity I'd want to know more about the sea and tides there. It looks very near sea level. I believe Tobermory has had tidal flooding in recent years.

Edgar

[tony sayer]

In article , charles scribeth thus

Yes but running your own is quite an undertaking over that distance. Be interesting to see the power companies take on doing that as we needed power at a site and we had a quote for £8 big 'uns to add in another supply very close to two others both hardly used either, we only needed around 30 bl^^dy watts!.

But regs are regs and if they couldn't supply IIRC us with 80 or 100 amps then no go...

[News]

In message , Steve Firth writes

That, I think, is the crux of it. However, it has been an entertaining and educational discussion. Thanks, all :-)