Nick C

I'm mocking those who complain about spoiling the view on an uninteresting piece of open sea, because they just oppose them for the sake of it, which many do.

I'll agree they aren't exactly beautiful but don't see any objection to the majority of the sites used.

Generally the turbines aren't placed in areas that are perceived as of outstanding natural beauty.

 

Keith

The one that got me fuming was when people objected to, and managed to stop, the proposed wind farm at Bullington Cross - they played the 'unspoilt countryside' card despite the fact that it was 100 yards from the junction between two major trunk roads, and the noise card despite there only being one house within earshot - and that was the farm that was selling the land, so he was in favour!

The worst kind of 'anti-carbon' nutters tend to have like 6 kids, but claim the moral high ground cos they don't have a car.

Statistically the best thing you can do to reduce your environmental impact, by a huge margin, is to have one less child - 58.6 tonnes of co2-equivalent/year, compared with 2.4t/y for not driving a car...

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/children-carbon-footprint-climate-change-damage-having-kids-research-a7837961.html

Right now 0% of UK electricity is being generated by coal.

So it isn't - though demand is pretty low at the moment (33GW) - what will happen the first winter we don't have the coal plants available? Also the biggest share at the moment is Gas, which isn't much better from an environmental point of view...

Agreed . . . but some idiot will inevitably overstep the mark or simply push the wrong button and there could be serious consequences for the person who wrongly loses their supply, perhaps someone old and infirm who could freeze to death.

 

I believe that even having the capability of switching off the supply at the push of a key on a computer in some distant office is a very dangerous thing indeed.

 

John

Or more scarily - someone who relies on electrically-powered medical devices (not all are in hospitals) - you'd hope they'd have some kind of back-up, but I suspect many don't...

The whole concept that people will switch to using appliances when the power is cheaper is flawed anyway, as most people don't have a choice.

Take the washing machines mentioned above for example. We generally run ours on a Saturday morning, so we can then hang the washing out to dry all day (while we've still got reasonable weather!)

How is telling me to run it at a different time going to help? I can only run it when I'm going to be there to take the washing out when it's done! I'm not going to run it at 3am, only for the washing to sit there wet for several hours, at which point it will stink and will need washing again...

Similarly with the oven. I'm not going to cook my dinner at 3am, for the simple reason that I need it to be hot at dinner time! 

(Ok, so the dishwasher probably could run overnight, but even with that, quite a few things need to be removed as soon as it's finished to avoid tarnishing...)

We are going to have a massive shortage of electricity in the next 5-10 years time, as the existing coal plants come to the end of their lives, and nothing is being built to replace them. The industry has to do something to alleviate this, and we, the consumers, will be the losers...

Similarly, some of the supermarket own-brand wine is getting pretty good these days - Morrisons have won quite a few awards for theirs recently.

SWMBO used to work for an upmarket wine merchants, and we found that the mid-range stuff from Majestics/Morrisons/Sainsburys is generally better than the posh stuff with the fancy labels...

Where are you getting your electricity?

I pay 12p/kWh. 5p when they can be bothered to put the smart meter in.

Oops, I read the standing charge instead of the unit charge - so yeah, 12p/kWh gives 3p/mile, so £720 saving over the UK average 12k miles...

I think you'd probably be better off looking at action cameras - the gopro type mini camcorders designed for sports use. I've thought that the Sony Actioncam has quite a good form factor for such use - I think one would sit quite nicely in a well wagon for propelling round a layout, and the latest version is smaller, so would fit into a conventional wagon (or perhaps an auto-trailer or DMU cab...)

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/kona/103973/new-hyundai-kona-electric-2018-uk-review

 

 

 

That's a very significant development - 300 mile range ought to be enough to get rid of the range anxiety for most people. The one thing he didn't say was how that price compared with the I/C equivalent - looks like the Diesel one is about £20k and gets 67mpg - so at current prices around 9p/mile.

The article quotes a 64kWh battery, so allowing for losses you're probably looking at 80kWh/charge, at around 20p/kWh (assuming mains electricity) - £16 for 300 miles is roughly 5p/mile.

So assuming all other costs are the same (tyres, brakes etc), you're saving 4p/mile, or £480 over an average 12k/year. 

Whether the economics stack up really depends on how they depreciate (especially as most buyers will probably get them on PCP, the cost of which is based on the expected depreciation), and whether you've got solar panels to charge the EV... 

With going too far OT.

 

When the Air Passivity test is carried out all of the vents in the house are closed or taped as they are designed to allow free flow of air for ventilation, It's the holes that shouldn't be there we're looking for.

To overcome this we not only 'Joint' the brickwork on the outside but the inside as well, any electrical conduit is sealed, floor edges are sealed etc.

Ahh, of course!

Do you use things like passive heat exchangers, or are they still too expensive for normal residential use? I've seen then on various YouTube things where people are building 'passivehaus' type buildings, but they generally have a lot more dosh than us mere mortals!

We've had an oscillating fan running in our bedroom during the hottest weather, it works very well. When I've been staying in hot countries I've found the slow-rotating ceiling fans to be the best way of keeping cool, as they're virtually silent, unlike AC which always seems very noisy...

 This is more to do with energy loss as leaky houses lose heat.

Though that's only one side of the issue - well ventilated houses don't get mouldy! 

Interesting driving dilemma seen this morning...

You're waiting at a set of traffic lights, on a box junction, entering a roundabout (This one, to be precise: https://goo.gl/maps/7NMWvaQztAL2). The lights change, traffic starts moving, but the lights on the next exit go red - so traffic stops. You, being the diligent law-abiding motorist, stop before entering the box, as your exit from it isn't clear - but you're already well past the solid white line and lights. The lights then change. As your exit clears, do you continue as you've already entered the junction, or wait for the next phase?

(I've seen people doing both, as well as others simply ignoring the yellow box completely, using the other lanes and forcing their way in, and all sorts of other stupidity...)

Well, it certainly is a good job that we kept all our polluting heavy industry and don't import any oil, gas, chemicals etc. GHG emissions are a global problem, it's not the same as emissions of local pollutants.

Which is why shifting the GHG emissions (and the local pollutants) elsewhere isn't the solution - we need to emit less here without increasing it elsewhere. 

The way to do that is to make, consume and dispose of less stuff, but that doesn't suit the mass-consumption society we have, and the obsession with constant growth. 

Electric cars aren't being promoted on the basis of cost though, they're being promoted as a means to reduce GHG emissions.

You mean "a means to shift GHG emissions to the places the batteries are made*, thus making the pollution somebody else's problem"?

*more importantly, the places the Lithium is mined...

Is it also now required to teach remaining stationary at the lights after they have been green for several seconds, with your head down apparently staring at something in your lap, then suddenly looking up and moving off with a guilty, slightly furtive air?  Difficult to find a logical explanation for this* but it seems to be increasingly popular.

 

Actually, the manoeuvre described by Tim Hall sounds like it might be meant to simulate parking on the opposite side of the road.  (Although Highway Code Rule 239 does advise against this, albeit not in very strong terms.)

 

* Actually it's not.

My journey home from work involves walking along the side of a fairly major road that often has quite a queue for a roundabout. I've taken to counting the number of cars I pass in which the driver is texting - it's usually around 3-4 out of 15-20 cars in the queue...

I'm fairly parsimonious with my electricity use and l can't for the life of me see how having one will lower my bills. I use what l need to use and then switch off.

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread yet, but research has shown that fitting a smart meter will reduce the average household annual electricity bill by somewhere in the region of £11 (yep - eleven pounds) - though by 2030 that is estimated to be around £47. 

Given that the cost of the scheme is reputed to now be around £20 billion, you're looking at around £700 per household, which the suppliers are adding to our bills...

Cleaning up old recordings can work very well providing it is sensitively done, but there was an obsession with compressing older recordings when remastering which sacrified dynamic range for noise and ruined many recordings.

A well known problem unfortunately - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - if you're buying older music, it's frequently better to look out for original versions rather than remasters...

It's the same with car park spaces - I was taught that you should always reverse into the space, for the simple reason that, to reverse in, you first drive past the space, and so can see that it is clear before you start the manouever - wheras to reverse out, you're effectively blind for the first part of the manouever (especially if you've got a van or 4x4 parked next to you, at which point, in most modern cars, you're nearly halfway out of the space by the time you have a clear view)

No-one has mentioned lead-free solder yet...

 

It's a total mystery to me that people  are allowed to cover fields with solar panels while we have so many suitable roofs and car parks not used for solar production.

 

and covering the roofs of industrial units in solar panels to power both them and nearby houses.

.

 

There's a guy here in Basingstoke who wants to cover the roofs of all the industrial units in solar panels - he's done the maths and worked out that it would prvide more than enough power for the entire town. His idea is that his company would own the panels, and rent the roof spaces from the unit owners. The local council said no...

Apparently the huge Sainsbury's distribution warehouse is powered by it's own rooftop solar panels though.

The visionaries think the future for powering domestic homes, is less binary than that.

They talk of a balanced and dynamic mix of electrical electrical energy; self generation from solar and wind turbines where practical, plus externally supplied power (the mains) that will come from a variety of sources that could largely be renewable.

Home batteries and so called smart power management are added in the mix.

 

It all sounds wonderful, but I don't know how easy it'll be to integrate all that into millions of properties, much of which are substandard in energy and environmental terms.

 

 

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In this case, I think the visionaries are right - The only way we can survive, if we want to continue using energy as much as we do now, is by diversifying and decentralising our energy production as much as possible. You'll see some people who say "We need to build Solar" or "We need to build wind", but anyone who actually knows about it will tell you that we need to build a mixture, and spread it around.

The great thing about a lot of renewable energy generation is that it can be done on a much smaller scale, which makes it much easier to distribute, instead of having to have large, centralised power stations (as we do with coal) - this massively reduces the distribution cost, and improves resiliance, and thus reliability. Look towards seeing more things like CHP (combined heat and power - burning something like biomass for electricity and using the waste heat to heat homes) and covering the roofs of industrial units in solar panels to power both them and nearby houses. The government should also be looking to build a few molten-salt fission reactors to provide baseload power, but they won't, as everyone is scared of the 'n' word. (by design they use the leftover Uranium from conventional reactors, and produce virtually no waste. They also fail-safe in the event of a power failure or breach.)

This might change when fusion comes on-stream, but that won't happen until someone actually puts some proper money into it - the latest experimental reactors would have been energy-positive (i.e. get more out than they put in), but their budgets got slashed...

Our other car is a 2.2 litre diesel (150bhp), the hybrid is about 10mpg better around town but about 5mpg worse on a motorway run (50 vs 55).

That's prretty much expected isn't it - around town you get the benefit of the regenerative braking, which obviously you don't get on a motorway. 

The thing I don't get about most hybrids is that, as far as I know, they all still use a conventional drivetrain, supplemented by an electric motor/generator - wheras surely it'd be more logical to use the I/C engine as a generator, so it could run at peak torque regardless of road speed (like in a DEMU...). I believe they may do that in the "range extender" EVs?

I personally wouldn't buy a non-plug-in hybrid, as I don't think it would suit the sort of journeys I do - I'd be quite happy to have a plug-in though, when they get cheap enough, as the 30-50 mile electic range would cover most of my journeys, with the IC engine to deal with longer ones...

2. If 50% of all cars are electric and need charging could our supply sustain the power needed?

From what I understand, it's not the generation supply that will cause a problem, but the "last mile" distribution - it's not designed to cope with multiple large power draws at the same time. Each substation supplies a number of houses, but they were specced on the assumption that very few, if any, of the houses would be drawing max current at any one time...

50mph road too.  The rear-ender still had his foot on the gas when he mounted the sports car. 

White Lion antiques at Hartley Wintney - one of the guys in my local Classic Car club was there at the time and saw it happen...

Yes, and I have barred the number on the phone (I can do this with a maximum of 30 numbers, but seem to need more); but despite this the number has continued to call me three more times since the bar was implemented. (I don't get a call but the phone still registers the number has tried to ring). 

 

These people are a real menace and yet I am registered with the TPS; but overseas companies do not come under UK law so can do as they like, even using false uk numbers in order to appear local to the recipient. 

It's probably worth calling the real Natwest fraud department, especially if you have a recording of the spoof call from your answerphone - it might help them in their investigations (even if it's just keeping track of the number of such attempts)

The number listed on their website is 0800 161 5154

I narrowly avoided a very nasty one yesterday - a woman in a black 4x4 pulled out on me, from a stop, on a dual carriageway - given that I was doing nearly 60 at the time, with another car passing me in lane two, I had to do an emergency stop to avoid going into the back of her. 

Unfortunately I was in my Triumph 1500 - which is 45 years old, doesn't have ABS etc, and doesn't currently have a dashcam, so I don't have any evidence... 

Any motorsport event using the public highway has to be authorised by the Motor Sports Association, which has a representative in each county who checks the route before authorising it, to make sure it doesn't go past any dangerous places, that the roads don't get over-used (thus upsetting/inconveniencing the residents), etc. This, to me, seems pretty sensible.

A similar scheme was suggested for cycle events shortly after the olympics, when there was a huge glut of bike races almost every weekend in some places (such as Box Hill in Surrey) - there was massive uproar from the cycling community as it was "infringing their rights" - no consideration whatsoever for the residents of the roads and villages on their routes.

I think that pretty much sums up the attitiudes of a lot of (and I'm sure it's not all) the lycra brigade...

In this case I think the cyclist who hit the horse should be prosecuted - if a car driver or motorcyclist hit a horse they would be jailed, the cyclist should be treated the same - after all, if the horse had bolted, it would almost certainly have killed or seriously injured the rider, and probably several of the other cyclists. You may, as a cyclist*, have the right to use the road, but that comes with the responsibility to use it safely.

*or indeed as a horse rider, pedestrian, motorist, or any other kind of road user