Mastodawn

Just Tom... 🐁4d ago

@ChrisMayLA6
Living in the sticks and being on LPG for heating cooking and hot water, I have dialled everything back to eke out the supply I have in the tank. Fortunately I had a refill just as Trump launched his Ill-advised war. The chilblains are an unwelcome consequence 😢

Helena 4d ago

@tompearce49 @ChrisMayLA6 If it is in your budget, an electric steamer &/or an induction hob (you can get plug in ones) could help you to cook without using LPG? Might make a small amount of difference.

Mandelbroccoli 4d ago

@ChrisMayLA6 unfortunately, the green revolution won’t come to fertiliser production in that time - a lot of staple foods could get very expensive rather soon, and no amount of electric cars or solar panels will help with that. We really are pretty screwed I think

@mandelbroccoli @ChrisMayLA6 there are ways to farm more sustainably than covering the ground in often plastic coated pellets. Its done for cost reasons way more than yields. We will have to change soon anyway as we are running out of minerals to strip mine and poison rivers with when it runs off

GhostOnTheHalfShell 4d ago

@etchedpixels @mandelbroccoli @ChrisMayLA6

Yes, totally agree on this. I’ve seen a couple of studies now in an area that researchers all acknowledge needs a lot more, but intercrop farming, which a specific version of multi crop farming is demonstrably more productive per unit land, because mixing different species together actually improves soil micro biome, and better utilizes acreage.

Permaculture has been demonstrated to match commercial farm productivity and probably beats it..

GhostOnTheHalfShell 4d ago

@etchedpixels @mandelbroccoli @ChrisMayLA6

The consequences to these different practices is the elimination of inputs, vastly reducing cost and debt risk.

The difference is intensive industrial farming, maximizes a yield of a particular crop, but demands a lot of expensive inputs, alternative farming techniques, work best on small scales and locally.

Exposure to global supply chains is an increasingly precarious risk

Steve Loughran 4d ago

@ChrisMayLA6 govt giving planning permission to put in heat pumps into older urban buildings would help too. Bristol council said "no" to us as it'd be too noisy. That's ignoring the little detail that in winter -unlike in summer with A/C- neighbours will close their windows as it is cold enough to need central heating.

Maybe when costs of installing come down and energy go up the advantage becomes so significant that people will put them in illegally

@stevel @ChrisMayLA6 you can just self install 'portable' air/air equipment thereby making them appliances so outside planning. Bit less efficient but an option that works well with solar/battery. Its how we heat our G2 listed building as it avoided changing the historic fabric

@ChrisMayLA6 scaling gets you. UK home battery lead times have jumped 30-60 days already since this kicked off. The lack of plug in solar/battery and DIY mini splits for heating also means we can't scale installers to meet existing vague targets let alone a crisis.
Needs Milliband to sort this. So many illegal installs they've lost the argument already.

Emeritus Prof Christopher May 4d ago

@etchedpixels

yes, the illegal installs could be seen as a form of civil disobedience?

Peter Brown 4d ago

@ChrisMayLA6 @etchedpixels I feel I need to more know more about these illegal instals ;)

@peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6 So properly you are supposed to have an electrician fit you a separate connection between the consumer unit and any generation equipment, along with a bidirectional RCBO, isolator and correct single line diagram and labelling. You then wire up to 3.68kW of type approved equipment to it and fill in a G98 form and you are done.

In practice people buy stuff like the Ecoflow Stream kit, put a plug on the end of the cable and plug it into the wall and maybe do the G98

@peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6 There are risks to that because you are sharing a ring main so could overload it, and the protection (RCBO or whatever) is not bidirectional so could get damaged.

Almost entirely theoretical but if a million people install them 1 in a million things start to matter.

Ecoflow originally provided kit with a plug, got told off and changed to a plug lead marked "do not use" 😀 and a lead ready for "wiring in" cut for a plug!

New kit just has a wire cut for a plug

@peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6 The other actually legal approach is to get non grid tie but grid chargeable kit, plug your solar into it, set it to charge on cheap overnight power as well and plug a bunch of appliances into it (often via extension cable spaghetti)

This is legal but arguably even more dangerous. It can be useful though in an apartment or if you've got some steady reliable power consumers (eg small air/air heatpumps) so you can make good use of the power without spaghetti

@peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6 Finally the techie folks just run a separate 12v or 48v circuit round the house completely immune to all the part P building reg annoyances, and more efficient and run all the lighting and USB and other lower power stuff off the DC circuit as if it was a US RV. That combined with the batteries being near bigger appliances covers a lot of load in many buildings.

Peter Brown 4d ago

@etchedpixels @ChrisMayLA6 I quite like the idea of the resilience provided by the standalone DC version.

@peterbrown @etchedpixels @ChrisMayLA6

For lower-powered stuff, 12/24/48 VDC is a lot better than using an inverter to replicate mains power too. It doesn't make sense to go from 12/24/48 VDC, to 120/240 VAC, and then back to 12/24/48 VDC for use with the whatever-it-is. If you go with a 12 VDC system, you can also use any car battery if your main batteries have gone dead and you're in a stupendously tight squeeze.

Tim Panton 4d ago

@kilroy_was_here @peterbrown @etchedpixels @ChrisMayLA6 In small spaces you are right - but over anything more than a few 10s of metres the losses over thin copper wires start to out weigh the conversion inefficiencies.

@steely_glint @peterbrown @etchedpixels @ChrisMayLA6

Right. I was talking about an installation in a house where the wire lengths would be kept short-ish.

@etchedpixels @peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6

"It can be useful though in an apartment"

I think this is a part of the renewable conversation which almost always gets overlooked. What about people who live in apartments? Even if they have the money to install solar (or even some wind too), good luck getting permission from the landlord to put it in. There need to be more systems that cover the territory between "no solar" and "full system permanently installed on and in your house that you own."

@etchedpixels @peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6

This is part of the EV conversation too. It seems to me that there is an unwritten assumption that the EV buyer has their own house that they can install a fast-charger in. The only home-charging option for most people living in apartments is slow-charging with a cord running out a window. Either EV batteries have to get better, to where they can be charged away from home as fast as filling up a fuel tank, or landlords have to install fast-chargers.

@kilroy_was_here @peterbrown @ChrisMayLA6 Solar will require that the balcony solar rules don't allow landlords or freeholders to get in the way. That has been done in some countries. For batteries it's less of a problem providing there's a safe location for them.

Not at all clear you need fast chargers everywhere, a lot of home charging is 13A or 16A - no hurry overnight.

For flats you need chargers in the parking, but for urban density really you need ebikes in most cases not cars.