Energy Matters Global and Domestic

[NewcastleFalcon]

Personal heaters in a variety of colours.

Regards Neil

[myglaren]

More advances on Nukular Fusion

Only thirty years away now.

[bobins]

More advances on Nukular Fusion

Only thirty years away now.

Is that a different 30 years away now, or is it the same 30 years that it's always been for the last 30 years or so ?

[myglaren]

Still the same thirty years. I saw in an article a few days ago that despite the fact that every experiment costing billions of dollars, funding is decreasing.

[Peter.N.]

I remember reading about 'Free electricity' in the '50s so we must be nearly there.

Peter

[mickthemaverick]

An interesting thing occurred this morning when I was preparing some ebay items for posting. Working in the dining room I felt a bit of a chill on my hands which struck me as odd since it appeared the heating had gone off. The dining room has our 'permanently on' radiator so at this time of year it is very odd for it to feel chilly. I turned to the remote thermostat/programmer for the heating and immediately realised the problem. SWMBO had decided to use my abscence as a chance to give our mango wood furniture one of its bi-annual treatments, and having completed the unit on which the programmer lives she had put it back in the wrong place such that it was sitting in direct sunlight and showing a room temperature of 31.4°C. Hence it had turned off the heating!!!
A simple cure, I moved it back to its correct permanently shaded positon and it gradually dropped the reading down to 16°C, switching on the heating at the 20°C point as the programmed temperature is 21°C. I'll have to wait for the right moment to point out that error in order to avoid a reference to common sense!!

[Peter.N.]

Logical when you get there. I wonder who else has such unexplained phenomena. I could tell you a few stories about TVs I attended many many years again which exhibited the apparently unexplainable.

Peter

[Dormouse]

I've added in the last 4 years for general comparison and all things being equal I will endeavour to keep this going!!

I did a quick comparison of this last week for Central Heating and Hot Water to the beginning of October when it was mostly mild. Our gas hob figures in both but I don't have a way of separating cooking from heating yet.
Here are the graphs

October 14th was nippy cold here so you get a fair comparison.

[Dormouse]

The average gas consumption last week was 7.25 units.
Before we added all our updates to the house, our highest winter average ever was 13.3 units and we have not had it this cold before.
That is close to halving our use of gas.
Our electricity average was 13 Kwh/day 2 years ago during the winter.
This last week our peak use was 11 kwh on the 15th and our average is 10 Kwh for the week.

[mickthemaverick]

An update of my usage graph with this month's cold spell included:

Energy usage for last four years

[NewcastleFalcon]

Robert Murray Smith and his DIY sand battery demo with a £5 kettle element...



Regards Neil

[myglaren]

Just had an email from Scottish Power to say that they are reducing my payments
And I was just about to increase them

And:

Hydrogen is not likely to be practically and economically viable for mass use in the short and medium term for heating homes or fueling passenger cars, a report from UK Members of Parliament has concluded

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels.

[Dormouse]

Robert Murray-Smith re-iterates the gelatin method of cleaning cooking oil. He doesn't highlight post treatment filtration like so many others also don't mention.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Robert Murray-Smith re-iterates the gelatin method of cleaning cooking oil. He doesn't highlight post treatment filtration like so many others also don't mention.

I watched that one today as well. I have grown to like his style and humour always interesting, informative and entertaining. At the end of the day not much chemistry involved. Paraffin at a price/litre higher than regular diesel, and unless you can be bothered to source old cooking oil, ordinary cooking oil more expensive than diesel too.

Some years since I ran a diesel so I'll not be replicating that experiment.

Regards Neil

[Dormouse]

When cooking oil was half the price of diesel I used to mix it 50:50 with road fuel in our Passat 1.9. Only drawback was the "chip shop" aroma LOML noticed. Otherwise it worked perfectly well. I never got to trying out Full Cooking Oil in the Passat but I had tried 90:10 oil / paraffin in our Maestro Perkins diesel van and it seemed to work fine. The Perkins Prima wasn't maybe the best testbed as far as refinement goes.