Heat in the home

[Cugel]

Should someone start a thread, "Al's and Cugel's comedy chat"?

PS - where's the fud in this thread?

You'll find plenty of hard info in many of my posts about our solar installation. You'll find some sort of facts in Al's posts too - alternative facts, if you like.

[Cugel]

But don't you have three gassy guzzlers - a Seat, a Ka and that Rusty thing?

Shouldn’t judge a man with his choice of cars.
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No? Doesn't that depend on the nature of the car and how its used?

It's certainly daft to go out to buy a top of the range BMW or similar just to impress the neighbours in some middle class ghetto - although many of them will be impressed, as they do look at badges, labels and logos in that world where everyone "is what they own".

However, if a car consumer goes and buys a great dirty and heavy gas guzzling SUV then drives it like a loon, especially at we cyclists, slow grannies children and even little puppies crossing the road, I feel we can use their car and car-habits to judge the creatures.

Al claims he is a clean drivin' fellow, despite all them cars he has. He may be but ..... why not just have one electric car that's an awful lot cleaner than three oil burners? I know - the cost. What about the cost to the planet and the biosphere? I know - the Chinese will have to give theirs up first, as we really need ours here in Blighty, all three each.

[Cugel]

, I think we finished now...... Dont want to bore people even more.

Al

That's right - run (I mean drive) away!

Cugel, just enjoying some harmless yah-booing.

[Cugel]

But don't you have three gassy guzzlers - a Seat, a Ka and that Rusty thing?

Shouldn’t judge a man with his choice of cars.
IMG_0294.jpeg

Don't many owners of flash and expensive cars want to be judged by their 'wheels'?

Well, I judge 'em! Yes, especially when cycling.

[Cugel]

Don’t know, I’m loyal to Skoda nothing else appeals.

I was once "loyal" to Seats, which are the same thing really. Mind, this was because the Seat garage was around the corner from the house so handy for any maintenance.

In those days, it was possible to shop and walk the dogs from the house, with no driving needed. I could walk or cycle to Lancaster (10 mile 'round trip) down the Lancaster Canal, a nice morning out. The car stood unused for weeks at a time.

Now we live in West Wales, where the population is so low and the roads so narrow that there's hardly any pavements and the footpaths across the fields have long disappeared through no-use. It's quite difficult to not use a car, although there is an e-bus every 2 hours past the door, to either Carmarthen or, in the other direction, Aberystwyth, via the larger villages.

If only they'd ban cars, there'd be more such buses, perhaps even to Fforest Brechfa for the daily dog walks and to Llandysul for the swimming & gyming. Those e-buses are very nice and quick, so they are.

[al_yrpal]

Yaaawn....

Edit....yesterdays top temp here was 28 deg C, indoors Georgian a/c limited it to a comfy 23.

Rusty, the Camper, has only done 622 miles since his last MOT in 2019, thus hes going...

Al

[francovendee]

Ah ha! ".... before double glazing ..." What about after double glazing?

It would be good if shutters could go on every house, particularly the new ones. Our windows open inwards so it might be possible to add those shutters to the outside - although they'd have to be rather large as the windows (double glazed) are vast. Still, every little helps.

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During the winter not so much, maybe 3 degrees.
In Summer back to a reduction of 5 to 8 degrees.
Keep the heat outside.
You know it makes more sense than trying to cool it down with those new leccy gizmos.

One doesn't just try to cool it down with the lecky gizmos - they work ever so well and do all sorts that not even the very bestest shutters can do.

Mind, a nice slatted wooden shutter or seven could look decorative. I could make them myself from timber scavenged from the building waste tossed out by Al as he attempts to keep his Georgian mansion from crumbling again (and again).

The air coolers cost under £5000 installed (for two, which do the whole house). I suspect that nice hardwood shutters on all the windows of our house would cost rather more if made and installed by a tradesman. And all they do is block out the sunlight!

Sunlight = heat.
What other strange things does your strange leccy gizmos do, apart from filtering those nasty Welsh particles from your sealed home.
Go on, make some nice wooden shutters from reclaimed wood. You know you have the skills.
Think of the electricity you'd be putting into the grid, every little helps even though you're not getting rewarded, to remove the need for fossil fuels.

[Biospace]

Cugel, you relentlessly mock others and their homes because they don’t follow your lead with renewable energy and insulation (although you appear to have a problem with excess heat), even when their CF sounds very small compared with most Brits.

Isn’t it satisfying to power the home into the night, using energy harvested yourself - we’ve done it for many years, but I don’t consider others to be engineering luddites if they don’t. Wouldn't it make sense to be certain of your own credentials before trying to ridicule other behaviour?

• Mocking “magic” shutters is something no-one with a basic grasp of RE and CF would do, they’d be shouting from the rooftops how daft people are to waste electricity pumping heat out of a room while the sun is fiercely heating it through unprotected windows.

• Similarly for lithium batteries. I can only guess that with such a large battery, you store electricity to power the heating and hot water. This is eco-madness, given the batteries have LCE of the order of 20x that of heat stores.

• You also mock old houses with high thermal mass, higher ceilings and sash windows, which work superbly to buffer the vagaries of our climate. We would be sitting in a cool 21C or 22C when the sun was bleaching the paving stones and air temperatures rose over 30C, yet cosy and warm in winter, given a modicum of understanding of the house’s thermal behaviour.

• A rudimentary understanding of carbon footprints would take every step to use solar power efficiently since the Grid makes up the shortfall - by burning gas, most of the time. You appear to only conceive of these things in monetary terms -

  " It's the cost of use that matters. Aircon driven entirely by solar costs nothing to use"

Do you pay your neighbours gas bills and fill their cars with petrol? If so, I salute your splendid community spirit.

Yes, that has happened with electricity from our solar PVs, but of what relevance is this? It’s never occurred to me to mention it.

You've made it impossible to ignore your professed eco-awareness yet the reality falls short, even if your subsidies don't. For sure you don't travel far by car (does you family come to you?) and don't fly off twice a year, but plenty don’t.

Watching someone throw insults when they themselves have their facts confused was growing increasingly awkward.

[Cugel]

Cugel, you relentlessly mock others and their homes because they don’t follow your lead with renewable energy and insulation (although you appear to have a problem with excess heat), even when their CF sounds very small compared with most Brits.

Isn’t it satisfying to power the home into the night, using energy harvested yourself - we’ve done it for many years, but I don’t consider others to be engineering luddites if they don’t. Wouldn't it make sense to be certain of your own credentials before trying to ridicule other behaviour?

• Mocking “magic” shutters is something no-one with a basic grasp of RE and CF would do, they’d be shouting from the rooftops how daft people are to waste electricity pumping heat out of a room while the sun is fiercely heating it through unprotected windows.

• Similarly for lithium batteries. I can only guess that with such a large battery, you store electricity to power the heating and hot water. This is eco-madness, given the batteries have LCE of the order of 20x that of heat stores.

• You also mock old houses with high thermal mass, higher ceilings and sash windows, which work superbly to buffer the vagaries of our climate. We would be sitting in a cool 21C or 22C when the sun was bleaching the paving stones and air temperatures rose over 30C, yet cosy and warm in winter, given a modicum of understanding of the house’s thermal behaviour.

• A rudimentary understanding of carbon footprints would take every step to use solar power efficiently since the Grid makes up the shortfall - by burning gas, most of the time. You appear to only conceive of these things in monetary terms -

  " It's the cost of use that matters. Aircon driven entirely by solar costs nothing to use"

Do you pay your neighbours gas bills and fill their cars with petrol? If so, I salute your splendid community spirit.

Yes, that has happened with electricity from our solar PVs, but of what relevance is this? It’s never occurred to me to mention it.

You've made it impossible to ignore your professed eco-awareness yet the reality falls short, even if your subsidies don't. For sure you don't travel far by car (does you family come to you?) and don't fly off twice a year, but plenty don’t.

Watching someone throw insults when they themselves have their facts confused was growing increasingly awkward.

When one is accused of being a money-grubbing fool for attempting to not only save money but be green in one's energy use, one tends to revert to replies that are equally disrespectful. But even though the rhetorical style can be rather jocular (for this is the intent of my light mocks - it's a Geordie thing) there is a fact-based discussion going on beneath those exchanges.

I can give you (and have done) hard data concerning the costs, productions, savings and "green" effects of our solar installation.

You in return have given me some theoretical stuff about shutters and Georgian building techniques that seem less than robust because there is little or no hard data, measured accurately and objectively. And your suggestions for cooling with these methods don't apply in any practical way to most British houses.

One other poster has made a case for shutters that includes some data of his own estimation - he does make a persuasive case - for those who can practically install shutters (very few) and can afford them. But what you yourself say on the matter often has the characteristic of hearsay or even myth.

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I find your accusations of somehow encouraging gas and oil burning by grid power sources bizarre. We produce an excess of around 1000 - 1500kwh per year from our solar panels over what we use. 4500 - 5000 kwh go to the grid each year, mostly in the longer days of the year; we download overnight into the batteries from the grid in some of the shorter days. Any way you look at it, we do our utmost to be a net and green producer of electricity, not a consumer.

It would be good if that downloaded grid electricity we store then use from the batteries in winter was all wind and solar produced by the grid-connected power stations. There's nothing I can personally do to bring that about. Your suggestion that I should not use the solar electricity we produce ourselves to run aircon because you have some hard & fast beliefs about shutters and Georgian houses (we don't live in one, by the way) seems rather peculiar, to put it nicely.

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I suppose that there's a lot of ideological posturing in even these matters. I'll certainly admit to following an ideology (if you can give it such a grand name) based on the notion that we shouldn't use tech that continuously produces very bad pollution and causes the climate to change in ways that will cause immense damages to not just we humans but the whole biosphere.

You seem to be stuck with an "ideology" that demands we all rebuild our houses like the Georgians and make sure we have shutters on the windows, to reduce modern aircon tech even though it would be "green" if driven by solar panels. Frankly, your attitude is more dogma than ideology.

Perhaps the cases can be reduced to this:

Ability (and cost) to rebuild one's house to have Georgian-style cooling

compared to

Ability (and cost) to install solar panels and an air source heat pump .

Which is going to prove the most practical, the least costly and the most effective?

[Biospace]

When one is accused...

I've only got what you've written to go on. Nobody is suggesting it's not a good thing to install RE or that you're not to be applauded for doing so, but the mocking of others and denial of what most of those who are eco-minded accept without question does grate.

[Cugel]

When one is accused...

I've only got what you've written to go on. Nobody is suggesting it's not a good thing to install RE or that you're not to be applauded for doing so, but the mocking of others and denial of what most of those who are eco-minded accept without question does grate.

I don't want applause - I detest mutual admiration clubs. I'm interested in promulgating information from personal experience about practical ways to improve the generation and use of energy to give personal beneficial effects to anyone's finances whilst greatly reducing their personal generation of greenhouse gases and pollutants associated with traditional energy usages.

You seem intent on pooh-poohing what I offer in favour of more or less data-free and impractical theories about passive heating and cooling, whilst accusing me of seeking praise and being a fool for not following your own preferences.

I don't reject the notion of architecture and techniques of its use to achieve passive heating and cooling. But you really need to come up with something better than a couple of anecdotes to demonstrate how it works; and to say how it can be acquired by the average British householder rather than just Georgian house occupants..

[Biospace]

I don't reject the notion of architecture and techniques of its use to achieve passive heating and cooling. But you really need to come up with something better than a couple of anecdotes to demonstrate how it works; and to say how it can be acquired by the average British householder rather than just Georgian house occupants..

You may not reject them, but you do mock them.

I don't need to "come up with something better" regarding external shutters to improve buildings' thermal performance, they are proven to work, which is why countries in hotter climates than ours use them extensively.

If you really don't see that switching on air conditioning to counter the sun's heat blazing through your large windows is wasteful, then so be it.

The future is going to be one largely without FF, which implies a significant reduction in our consumption of energy. EROI for oil has been as high as 30:1, whereas PV electricity stored in lithium batteries is considered to be between 3:1 and 7:1.

[Jdsk]

The shadow energy secretary today:
"I think it’s really, really important to say to people, this is about the future and it’s about tackling the cost-of-living crisis that people are facing.
"I think most people who’ve been offered the chance to buy a zero-bills home would say, ‘where’s the catch?’.
"Well, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a catch and that’s because the combination of battery technology, heat pump technology and solar panels in a new-build home, can get you to a zero-bills home.
"Now, obviously, when it comes to the future home standard, we’re going to look, if we get into government, at the details of that and so that will require thorough examination.
"But I think what’s clear is we should have a future home standard and that’s the right thing for the environment, but crucially, it’s the right thing for tackling the cost-of-living crisis because year on year on year of lower bills or zero bills is something I think we’d all want to see."

Jonathan

[Cugel]

I don't reject the notion of architecture and techniques of its use to achieve passive heating and cooling. But you really need to come up with something better than a couple of anecdotes to demonstrate how it works; and to say how it can be acquired by the average British householder rather than just Georgian house occupants..

You may not reject them, but you do mock them.

I don't need to "come up with something better" regarding external shutters to improve buildings' thermal performance, they are proven to work, which is why countries in hotter climates than ours use them extensively.

If you really don't see that switching on air conditioning to counter the sun's heat blazing through your large windows is wasteful, then so be it.

The future is going to be one largely without FF, which implies a significant reduction in our consumption of energy. EROI for oil has been as high as 30:1, whereas PV electricity stored in lithium batteries is considered to be between 3:1 and 7:1.

Too many acronyms.

[al_yrpal]

30.3 garden shade air temperature

26.1 sitting room temperature with Georgian a/c

22.6 annexe temperature with Georgian a/c

No clanking whirring eye wateringly expensive panels or electrical machinery needed!

If it gets hotter turn on your tower tangential fan if needed.... Uses very little current. In the meantime gentle fresh breeze wafting in via window......

Al