In message , Andy Hall writes
Of course, those of us who use gas central heating could be a bit buggered without a workable replacement infrastructure when e.g. Russia goes into a serious strop or starts using gas prices as a more serious political weapon
Indeed. Here are my predictions:
Within the next few months the Litvinenko affair will be silently dropped and more deals will be done with Gazprom and others. Medium term President Obama will be meeting with President Medvedev as will Prime Minister Cameron. At the same time, Prime Minister Cameron will be streamlining planning processes for nuclear generation sites and facilitating industry discussions with Areva to rebuild a nuclear generating capacity. Green generation will be "given a chance" but will never become significant as a source of generation in the larger populated industrial nations.
Eventually there will be a market for drop in replacement boilers that will go in place of an existing gas one and drive a wet central heating system. In a lot of properties, the 10-15kW needed for space heating will be achievable from an existing supply. That would also be reasonable for re-heating HW cylinders. Properties with instant HW systems would need 3 phase which would be a challenge on a large scale.
I've got both so let me think......... umm. Dishes can be cleaned by hand. Clothes can't be dried by hand and clotheslines don't work outside of summer.
I'd say get a condensing tumble dryer. I use mine during winter when drying outside just doesn't happen. We used to have masses of damp washing hanging around the house on drying frames and radiators. Quite often the heating would have to be run far more than needed to try and get things dry with the resulting moisture turning the DBG windows into waterfalls.
Drying clothes in winter is a nightmare. The condensing dryer keeps the heat that it generates inside the house contributing to the heating of the house. My electricity is sourced from Good Energy so no C02 emmissions and during summer I use the big free dryer in the sky.
Oh, my dishwasher uses less water to wash a load than I do when using bowls of water.
You've got the wrong clothes then. My British made Doubletwo shirts dry on a cloth hanger, in the airing cupboard as does my British made trousers.
The proble I do have is with the china manufactured towels. But thats only once a week and there is useally a rainless day each week.
We have both and are considering getting rid of the condensing dryer (I agree though that condensers are vastly superior - the energy consumption figures are misleading - you tend to use them when it's cold anyway and the heat is retained in the house.
Anyway - we've used our drier about three times this year and we've got two grubby kids. The dishwasher gets used roughly daily.
We dry on one of those old slats-on-a-pulley things in the stairwell with an old deskfan screwed to the ceiling to provide an indoor breeze if it's taking too long to dry. Dries a full load in about four hours, so we tend to hang the washing out overnight.
Isn't the bath more suitable? ;-)
No, we often use the dishwasher roughly. It loves it really and is only pretending when it screams.
I'm afraid I tend to use the washer/drier all the time. I dismantled the outside washing line a long time ago when I kept strangling myself on it.
I'm sure that if I got one of those whirlygig 'lines', its socket would snag the lawnmower and get chewed to bits.
You should be more sympathetic with it :-)
How's the RH in the house? If you can open a landing window I suppose you can dispel a lot of the water vapour.
Those old pulley-type things were fine in older houses when there were lots of chimneys (and other gaps!) to ventilate the place.
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