OT: grid upgrade?

[Tim Streater]

Talking up a storm about how "green" and "concerned" you are is the easy bit. Getting people to wire that into their lives is the hard bit.

[Jock]

Bullshit.

[Colin Bignell]

When they handed The Queen a bit of Plutonium, on a visit to Harwell in the 1950s, they went for thick plastic.

[alan_m]

There was/is a EU directive that equipment must have a standby mode of less than 1W. Any modern equipment should conform to this. Things such as washing machines automatically switch off if left on etc.

My older microwave sits there taking 3.5W when just plugged in (approx £9/year)

Where < 1W standby may not be so obvious is for under TV boxes. My PVR has two standby modes (standby and deep standby). As PVRs are normally operational 24/365 people may not realise that with a dual mode standby just putting it into standby may not save anything.

In standby most of my box's functions still work in the background such as the tuners and decoding still working to fetch the over the air EPG. Switching from standby to operation takes a second.

In deep standby most of the box's functions are shut down. Deep standby to full operational takes 60+ seconds. In deep standby a clock and associated circuits still work to wake up the box for a recording.

The difference in cost between configuring the box for standby or deep standby when not watching TV/recordings is around £40/year.

For the main TV and equipment under it (AV amp etc) I have one of those remote control plug in mains on/off switches which makes switching off everything (except the PVR) easy.

I have had one of those plug in power meters for some time (I think purchased from Maplins) and many years ago went around my house seeing if anything was taking excessive (or lower) amounts of energy when not in use.

I thing I did overlook was a dawn to dusk outside light used for both some security and to light access. It wasn't until the bulb blew that I substituted a low energy bulb.

On the local area social media at the moment are lots of people complaining about the cost of electricity and gas. Many, from the figures they are reporting, seem to be using 3x the amount of energy than Ofcom give for the average UK household of 2.4 people.

[alan_m]

A lot depends on how well the house is insulated and the type of heating system, such as under floor.

It could be a lot of properties are unsuitable for ASHP without some serious additional expenditure on insulations and modifications to the existing central heating system.

Spending this kind of money on extra insulation will make an existing system cheaper to run,

An acquaintance had ASHP installed just after the first lockdown. This was part of a house extension and architect designed with ASHP at the outset. The extension has under floor heating.

When asking about how well it worked the answer was in the positive (it's working well) but then....... parts of the original property need additional oil filled radiators in order to use them as a work space. The ASHP also appears to heat water and it seems that to get sensible water temperatures the CH has to be throttled back.

[RJH]

It's mix of 14th to early 20th century detached 6 bed house, with good windows and some wall insulation. Floors are an issue, but the biggest problem IMHO is the remaining uninsulated walls - thick stone things. About 50/50 underfloor and rads.

Yes, time will tell. The old gas boiler was taken out so fingers crossed I suppose . . .

[Andrew]

A common 'solution' to a damp basement, when all it needs is a bit of ventilation. If they really want to stop things going rusty or fusty then they should have it properly tanked and insulated, or investigate why it is 'damp'.

Or install some solar PV's and make sure all the output is used to keep the hot tank hot (with insulation) and the dehumidifier running during sunny days only.

My Ebac Homedry (circa 1986) is not very efficient electrically but it still works fine and is only used in late september to october when the summer humidity has been all through the house and a sudden cold snap is pending. If I don't the loft seems to collect too much moisture even though there is proper soffit and ridge ventilation.

[Andrew]

Does it really that that long ?. My Humax HD-FOXT2 takes just as long to bott up from cold as it does to boot up from standby. There are plenty of things you can do while you are waiting, like peruse the fridge or put the kettle on, or ...

Bin them and get LED bulbs !!!.

Define 'need' ?

Modern smart phones make much (?all) of that a pointless waste of leccy.

[Andrew]

You like a nice lay-in then !. For 30 years I was up at 5.45AM, listened to the Farming program then got shaved/dressed, walked 17 minutes to the local station, spent another 80+ minutes commuting to London, regularly had to fix problems with billing systems in the Caribbean (*) so got the last train home and got in the house at 11:45 PM. same again the next day.

Cough. Tell him to use the cloud !. How on earth did university students manage before the internet ?

[Andrew]

Define 'big', how much insulationm, and what size gas boiler would normally be required to heat it and provide hot water ?.

I suspect a lot of people have done careful calculations based on all those mythical 'tariffs' that used to be called economy 7 etc. This year all those tariffs are going to vanish.

Spare a thought for the folks on Sark who are paying 56p/unit and have been since 2008. Ouch.

[Andrew]

Indeed. Md dad used to work for BP and as a pensioner he got a regular supply of glossy magazines full of technical stuff. North Sea Oil is far better for specialist refining, whereas Saudi Oil is very high in Sulphur, so I believe very little of the latter comes to Europe.

It is however extremely cheap to extract. The problem is, only the Saudis know how much is left, and they might want to keep that a secret now that they have floated a propertion of ?Aramco on the global stock markets.

[Alan J. Wylie]

In the mid 70's, someone from Windscale/Calder Hall/Sellafield brought an uranium fuel rod to our physics class. It was wrapped in clear plastic a couple of mm thick. I can still remember it being very heavy and slightly warm.

I can also remember the beautiful blue glow of Cherenkov radiation in the cooling ponds when we went on a school trip there.

[Martin Brown]

And don't have damp air. We had air source heat pump heating when we lived in Japan (strictly it was designed as summer air conditioning but it could be run in reverse in winter and would easily hold the apartment to a comfortable for Westerners 20C but not warm enough for native Japanese 25C. So they had amazing high tech paraffin heaters for the couple of truly cold winter months (when it sometimes snowed).

I'd say locally the ones I know of the results are mixed.

One air sourced into a highly insulated relatively new build home is very pleased with it indeed and thinks that it is great.

The other a retired couple with ground source heating and an incredibly expensive installation (just about everything replaced) have given up on it because of the high maintenance and running costs. Now back on oil...

It needs to be very well insulated (which I presume it must be to qualify for the £10k grant) before the heat pump stands a chance.

It should always be better than an electric fan heater except when the external heat exchanger ices up completely (which in our damp foggy winter climate seems a distinct possibility mid winter).

It worked fine in Japan where the sun is 10 degrees higher in the sky and the winters are uncomfortably dry continental ones.

[Paul]

There are a lot of decay chains which are dirty as hell.

Originally, fusion marketing assumed just one fuel mixture, but the input temperature required to get that one to run, is well out of reach of current attempts.

The substitute reactions, each one has a dirty decay chain, and there is a web page detailing the chains involved. In some cases, it's the walls of the containment which become "hot".

*******

For fission, Thorium isn't your friend, if this is going to run in your living room. The magazine story is pretty amusing.

"When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom?s house, David decided that he had ?too much radioactive stuff in one place? and began to disassemble the reactor."

And as you would expect, his experiments didn't kill him. Something else did. But at least the story is encouraging, as it appears his pile was breeding and the output was growing with time.

Paul

[Steve Walker]

On the other hand, if you get to see where they remove the fuel pins from the canisters that are inside a fuel rod, you see it happen behind lead glass - very good quality lead glass, as it appears to be about 6 inches thick, but is actually over 6 feet!

[Paul]

Not all BEV vehicles "regenerate" the same way.

Some BEVs regenerate "to zero miles per hour". These are quite efficient, and recover all the energy from travel up and down hills.

There are synchronous motors, induction motors, DC motors with neodymium magnets, all sorts of stuff. To reduce dependency on scarce materials, not all the motors used in BEVs can be the good ones. Some of the motors would have "pathetic" regeneration, others are head-snapping wonderful.

Some of the energy does not come back. Rolling resistance. Drag coefficient air resistance (fourth power of speed). And so on. At some driving speed, it takes 20HP to counteract the drag from the air. Both ICE and BEV suffer those losses, and they don't come back.

*******

"Fortunately, a number of Tesla drivers have reported back energy contribution data using different data tracking apps. Model S drivers have reported recapturing as much as 32% of their total energy use while driving up and then back downhill. This would effectively increase a 100 mile car?s range to 132 miles, for example.

A Model S P85D owner reported approximately 28% energy recapture (forum in Danish) and still others have reported recapturing between 15-20% of their total kWh usage on average during normal trips."

There's no such thing as a "normal trip" in a car, as some cities have excessively hilly city streets, where regeneration plays more of a role.

What you don't really want to own, is vehicles which make a virtue of wasting energy. Because you might have to sit there and recharge, is why :-) It's not necessarily the cost, but the opportunity cost of your time.

Paul

[Jock]

Only a fool would do that for 30 years.

FAR less conveniently.

[newshound]

Heavy, yes. Warm, no. You would not have been able to detect that in an unused fuel element. (You would not want to be touching a used one).

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

The Natural Philosopher laid this down on his screen :

+1

[Chris Hogg]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2022 13:05:46 +0100, The Natural Philosopher [e-mail] wrote: <snip>

I see Boris' lot has just announced the new energy strategy - lots more off-shore windmills, a few more on-shore ones, and _UP_TO_ eight nuclear power stations. The last probably means one or two, and they're probably the ones already in the pipeline.