On 11 Oct 2006 19:11:00 -0700 someone who may be snipped-for-privacy@care2.com wrote this:-
Do people generally value their time when tending the garden and other DIY tasks? I suspect not. Note that vegetables can be grown mixed in with flowers. Traditional vegetable patches with not a bit of mud out of place are not the only way to grow vegetables.
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 09:09:43 +0100, David Hansen wrote:
You're right but it was set up by the provider. The householder was 82 at the time, compos mentis but not given to struggling with the logic necessary to get the best from the system. As I said the thing actually functioned well if the gas was switched off with only one occupant in the house, I suspect with three in the house the gas would have been needed occasionally even in the summer. For this to best optimise the solar input dhw heating needed to assist only in the evening after the panel was out of sun (early afternoon in this case as it is on a SE facing roof, I thought the SW facing roof was more appropriate as I guess more dhw is required in the early evening than morning). However the central heating controller was simple and dhw was set enabled twice a day. This meant the dhw tank was heated by gas from early morning and so by the time the solar panel functioned the dhw had already been satisfied. Now this could easily have been mitigated by having the gas heated coil near the top of the cylinder, heating only enough water for a bath perhaps, the solar heating would have then provided the bottom part of the tank with hot water. As it was because the gas coil and solar coil were at the bottom of the tank the gas heated near enough the full tank. To my mind it costs nothing to store gas but there is a heat loss in storing hot water, set against this a 25kW(t) gas boiler cannot supply a decent shower or water for a bath on demand, so a small volume of stratified gas heated water at the top of the tank on top of warm solar heated water looks most sensible.
I'm sure I'll come across one ex demolition fairly soon, my current dhw cylinder is a tall thin, insulated 45litre, the new one will need to be 1 floor below and under the stairs and then run in tandem.
AJH
The question is simply, I wonder why you are so studiously avoiding it.
Where it is to be installed the average wind speed is below 2m/s. How much electricity will it generate?
It's not the way I grow them! My vegetable growing time is minimal - they do it for themselves. It's a lot quicker than shopping - which I hate :-(
I started making bread forty odd years ago because it was quicker than getting five sets of mittens, wellies, bonnets and coats on protesting children, walking down the street and back again. Never looked back!
I wonder how much is charged for watching television ... which most people seem to do daily.
Mary
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:54:42 +0100 someone who may be Peter Parry wrote this:-
Ah, so all of a sudden we are going from a generic discussion to one about a particular wind turbine in a particular place. I note the swerve.
A pity you did not notice the straight line in three consecutive posts - linking the selling of the device to the gentleman in question to its general uselessness. Nor did you notice that the selling of these devices is linked with a DTI calculator which consistently and reliably overstates the wind at roof height _in urban areas_ by a factor of about 3.
Here is the question you won't answer, in its original form as first posted. Will there be further avoiding action?
"I was talking this morning with someone who is going to put a B&Q windmill on his roof. He has been told it will generate up to a kilowatt at a time, be silent, have no vibration and will safely mount on his house wall. He has been told it will save 30% of his electricity bill.
I've been measuring wind speed at roof level here for a few months now. The average is just over 1m/s. The windmill will certainly be silent and generate no vibration because it will rarely move, never mind generate electricity. This is fortunate as his wall wouldn't stand the vibration and the neighbours the noise if it did.
When I asked him how fast the wind had to be blowing to generate all this electricity he said he was told it was "officially classed as a breeze".
Now the latter is true - sort of. The generator produces its full output at 12.5m/s, a "strong breeze" on the Beaufort scale. When I asked him what 12m/s wind was in MPH he said "If its a breeze - I suppose 5 or 6 MPH". He was a bit put out to discover it's nearly
30MPH and almost never experienced here.He is still going to buy his useless windmill because it is "doing something", he has caught the new religion. Some people put a little metal fish on a car to advertise their religion, some now have a windmill on their roof instead.
Could anyone explain to me just what the "something" he is doing is and how it will save the planet?"
I notice incidentally in the news today that the greenwash propaganda machine has worked well. HMG is now subsidising windmills on roofs by taking they money from the pot used to pay for far more effective insulation. A noted victory for "do something no matter how ineffective it is" brigade.
Thank you Peter.
At last another sane response.
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:50:25 +0100 someone who may be Peter Parry wrote this:-
I have already answered various bits of your original posting which I felt were worth answering. If you want me to state the obvious then, if the facts for that particular turbine are as you say then there are better ways for him to spend his money.
Something that has undoubtedly been criticised by the groups you seek to complain about.
Oh yes, one of church members has caught this too and wants us to include solar panels in our renovation scheme to show the world that we care about the environment. My response, that 40 of us gathering in a
2000ft2 building (solid walls, single stained-glass windows, uninsulated roof, 25 ft high) was a clear statement to the community that we really don't care wasn't greeted with applause. Truth be said, we do care, but also know any significant change to the buildings would mean a major fight with the planners.Just to add to my previous post, I have just received a newsletter pointing me to this gem:
This does not mean that these technologies should be ignored. A wind turbine in a churchyard or PV cell installation on a church roof can make an iconic statement and be a visible symbol of the Church?s commitment to adapting to climate change."
I blame David Cameron ...
Thank you. Of course there are - but who is telling him that? He has done his own research and contacted various eco-bodies who have told him he will save 30% of his electricity bill (pretty smart in itself as no one asked him what his electricity bill actually was). He has universally been told this is a "good thing" and that he will be setting a trend for the neighbourhood. Soon we will see serried ranks of idle windmills and hear the rustling of banknotes in the sellers pockets - but what will be saved?
Where the windmill is going, even if the DTI estimator is correct (which it isn't) the average windmill output will be 50W, not 1,000 as advertised. No one seems to care - it's the symbology that matters.
This whole nonsense is being sold on lies and deceit, and the leading deceit is the greenwash coming from the proponents of these ideas and supposedly "independent" groups of propagandists.
For example
"How much does a micro wind turbine cost and how cost effective are they?
A 2.5kW wind turbine will cost around £11,000 to £12,500 to purchase and install. It should generate enough electricity to power a house, saving £250 - £500 per year. If the turbine is grid connected, money can be earned for exporting excess electricity, although the rate at which energy companies buy exported electricity is lower than the rate at which they sell electricity."
(Energy Saving Trust)
Apart from the obvious nonsense that a 2.5kW device can power a house I doubt if there is a single household urban site in the UK where these figures could be achieved.
"A 1.5kW turbine will produce an average 3,942kWh per year, saving
3,390 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year."(British Wind Energy Association) (who do at least point out that urban windmills are useless but only if you delve deeply enough and go to the page on building your own generator where Hugh Piggott from Scoraig, an expert on the subject and a rare beacon of honesty amongst the ecoslime, says "Most people think they live in a windy place, but in fact most residential locations are not suitable for windpower."
Now an annual saving of 3,390 tonnes of CO2 by a windmill on a house is indeed amazing. That's about 700 cars worth of annual CO2 production and indicative of the care taken over the production of these figures.
The power generated is itself calculated using the formula - Electricity produced = B x 0.3 x 8760 where B is the windmill max output, 0.3 is a frig factor and 8760 is the days in a year. Wind speed doesn't seem to matter.
I seem to have missed it.
Why not replace the pews with exercise bicycles linked to dynamos?
Listen to the sermon, get fit, help the environment.
A win, win, win scenario, and not a single combi-boiler.
Owain
The ethical approach here would be to obtain a broken, second-hand PV panel and mount it on the roof. There you have an iconic symbol, obtained at low cost, and reused in an environmentally friendly manner (no landfill, no recycling, no contamination).
Yet another of those win win thingies.
Owain
I certainly do, and time and energy are of value to all of us, whether we value them or not.
No, not by a long way. But its difficult to come up with any system that actually pays its worth. Food and things in gneral are just so cheap nowadays that all sorts of once practical activities are no longer worth doing.
NT
Hi Peter long year ;-)
This business about average windspeed and capacity factor seem very misleading, does anywhere publish a graph of actual power output versus time? It would be good to see this in real time because the nature of windpower being the cube of the windspeed must make it very peaky.
AJH
lol, lovely :)
NT
The message from Peter Parry contains these words:
The 0.3 frig factor is the load factor claimed for full size wind turbines situated in a favourable locations.
The one they never actually achieve you mean? :-) Whatever its merits may be for big windmills it is utterly inappropriate when estimating the capability of small turbines in urban environments which will rarely get moving, much less approach producing their rated power.
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:36:09 +0100 someone who may be AJH wrote this:-
Suppliers are good bad and indifferent. I don't defend the bad. Adjusting existing controls is certainly part of the instructions for Solartwin installers and I imagine it is for all of them.
Probably, though it would depend on how well the system was sized and used. There comes a point where the occasional top-up is better (by whatever criteria one uses) than more solar panel area and a larger cylinder.
This becomes a discussion of how far the installer of something new should modify the existing system. It is usually a difficult question.
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:39:12 +0100 someone who may be Peter Parry wrote this:-
That rather depends on whether they were giving generic or specific advice. The latter is obviously expensive. Wind turbines can produce all the electricity a location uses, as demonstrated by some off-grid installations, in some cases. It would be wrong to claim that can be achieved in all cases, but a figure of 30% sounds reasonable to me as a UK average (though I have not looked into the figures).
That does not mean it has not been made.
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