(no subject)

[ewt]

Figured out mostly how all the heating stuff works here.


Still haven't figured out how to have hot water without heat; either you just turn all the radiators off (this doesn't seem to wnat to work with the ones in mstevens' bedroom), or one of the switches that says "DO NOT TOUCH" is lying. We have options for constant heating, heating according to the mechanical timeclock, or no heating at all. At the moment it's on the timeclock. It's set to come on rather early at 6am (later than that and I have huge troulbe getting out of bed at 6.30, which I have to do often enough it's important), and then goes off again by 9am. It comes on again for 18.00 and then is off by 22.00; I have no idea whether this is 'normal' use of heating or not but it seems to leave the house tolerably warm for the times when people are in it (I don't mind the heating being off when I'm at home by myself in the day, I can always move around or use a hot water bottle or a fan heater or even switch it to constant for a few hours if I'm not coping at all - and my housemate is usually out all day at work), and we usually have enough hot water to do everything we need to do as long as washing people happens before washing laundry.

Figured out that the thermostat on the wall in the living room does do something after all - it regulates the temperature at which the pump comes on. With the pump off the house will still be heated some, because the hot water will all try to go up, but the pump means we can make lots of warm fast if necessary. So far it seems like the pump works pretty well, in that if it is left at a certain temperature the living room does indeed mostly stay at that temperature.

I've set it to 18C because I'm not feeling so ill with that nasty cold any more and though I'm having a hard time staying warm this year, I'd rather wear two sweaters than turn the heating up. All this talk of gas shortages and some of my students still insist on having their houses at 22C when there are no old/ill people around. Grah. I know an awful lot of gas is used for electricity generation and I know a lot of it is for industrial purposes but it doesn't help to have every household heating the great outdoors, does it? And with insulation what it is in this country, that's probably what happens most of the time.

So, the insulation to-do list, not necessarily in order:
-find where the draught in the loft is coming from and make it stop being a draught. It's probably the same place that bird got in a few weeks ago.
-make fleece curtains for the windows, lower priority goes to the ones in the porch and the loft (the porch has the inside door, and the loft window is double-glazed) than to all the others which are generally wooden sash windows with multiple panes of glass in each window
-draught excluder for the kitchen door
-shiny stuff to go behind radiators
-find various draughts in the kitchen and see if they can be stopped sensibly
-curtains for outside walls, like what shevek did in Bath? I'm not sure of this. We don't have any outside walls that don't already have lots of windows. Getting the windows sorted is definitely more important.

There's already draught excluder on the front door and the loft is insulated.



Warm Front is a UK government program offering grants to households trying to increase their heating efficiency. They offer everything from energy-efficient lightbulbs and hot water tank jackets to financial help with installing things like condensing boilers, loft insulation and cavity wall insulation.

Bear in mind that even if heating costs don't go up dramatically in the next year or so, improving the energy efficiency of your house adds value to your property.

Comments

[redcountess]

We plan to get solar heating put in when we buy our own place.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

The stuff with the evacuated tubes is supposed to work down to stupidly low temperatures (well below 0C), sounds like a winner.

[juliet]

as long as washing people happens before washing laundry

Does your washing machine have both hot & cold inputs, then? This is actually quite unusual these days - most are cold-only & heat the water as required (which is more efficient).

The council is about to put cavity wall insulation in for us, which is nice. Mostly the house is pretty damn warm, as we have communal heating & get a lot of heat from the flats upstairs/next door (last year we only turned the radiators on for about a fortnight in mid-January, & then only in the living-room). I do need to get a draught excluder for the front door, though, as the downstairs is colder than the upstairs.

Strenuous Agreement here about the correct temperature for thermostats!

Unfortunately, although my *house* is nice & warm, my *office* is unheated (they forgot to put the heating in when they redid it, apparently). I use an electric radiator to stop from freezing, but it's a bit bloody irritating. I am considering bringing a blanket in for my knees...

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I think the washing machine has hot and cold inputs. I'd sortof assumed it did because it's the same as the chicken lady's one, which does, and she always says, 'Run the hot tap first otherwise it tries to heat up the water and it's more expensive to do this with the electricity of the washer than with the gas of the boiler.' I haven't actually looked. I mostly use a lukewarm setting for laundry anyway but like to do sheets and towels at 90C once in a while.

Blankets are wonderful things of which I approve. I think every workplace should have them. The views of management may vary.

[juliet]

It may be the case - might be worth investigating, though. When we were buying one when we moved house last year, pretty much all of them only had one sort of input (we were intending to get a one-of-each machine because of the centralised water heating), & ISTR that environmentally this is a Better Thing these days because they're really pretty efficient at it. Especially for the 40deg washes, which with modern laundry powder should be fine for almost everything (I do sheets & towels at 60deg as a compromise between power-saving & boil-wash).

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

If the boiler is making hot water anyway doesn't it make sense to use it rather than let it heat up the water tank jacket?

I'll have a look next time I'm running around under the kitchen sink; it should be pretty obvious.

I tend to do sheets and towels at 40C most of the time but will do them at 90C every few months or after I've been ill.

[juliet]

Surely the point of the jacket is to keep the heat *in*? (though I'm aware it's imperfect!) If the water was already made & no more was going to be made/needed, then fair enough; but if it's on, then as you use the water, more will be warmed, & I'm pretty sure that it takes more energy to warm fresh water from a couple of degrees than it does to keep already-warmed water warm... But then you're comparing that with the warming of the same amount of water by the washing-machine, of course.

I think part of the comparison is that boilers are set to >40deg, so you have to use a bit of that hotter water & then cool it down by mixing it (i.e. wasting energy by the extra unneeded heat in the water), whereas the washing-machine will heat it to exactly the right temperature. But I am not sure. Certainly it seems more or less impossible to get a dual-input one at the prices we were looking at (not bottom-end, but not expensive), & they all had A or AA ratings (i.e. if it *is* more energy-efficient to use dual-input, it can't be by much).

I am now resisting the urge to go look up about washing machine efficiency on tinternet because we *do* have one now & are not about to buy another one! :-)

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

But I usually do my laundry sometime before going out for the day and after the boiler has been switched off for the daytime. So if the hot water stays in the hot water tank it will heat, um, the tank jacket and maybe the air in the loft, and nobody will be home to use it and it won't be circulating through the radiators.

In a situation where the boiler is going to keep making water hot, or if you have a flash boiler, it's almost definitely going to be more efficient to flash-heat the water to 40C in the washing machine itself. That isn't usually the case when I do my laundry.

[scalarparty.livejournal.com]

my roomates ar against using any more coal-fired electricity than absolutely necessary... so the house is a crisp 16 degrees(!). It's not all that bad, really, I also have an energy-star creamic heater in my room and for abut 20 minutes a day (from wake to shower) it's able to heat up my little room in a flash.

we do have a fireplace and use it infrequently. but what we have been tinkering with is seeing if we can use the same chimney for a gasifying pellet stove instead. They now cost roughly what it cost (normal) people to heat a home for a year and a half.

these ones from Delpoint Technologies (http://www.pelletstove.ca) cost abut 1000 pounds stirling and is so efficient (98%) that you don't need a chimney at all--- just a dryer outlet will do!

oh and they burn the pellets at 1800 F (kinda warmer than my chill zone) but hey, in ONtario we're used to chilly weather, we don't have a gulf-stream keeping us heated :p

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

You can buy devices to make logs out of old newspapers - would this be an option for you? Also I'm sure I read about a Canadian family that used wooden packing pallets as firewood, they would have been thrown out otherwise and the construction company would have had to pay for their disposal so heating with them was a good solution for all concerned, it might be worth looking into this. If I had an open fireplace, I would try that, but I haven't. I don't have even a dryer vent, because, um, we don't have a dryer. The heating is gas-fired rather than coal-fired, at least, it's still a supply concern and a global warming concern but the pollution isn't quite so bad.

I have a small fan heater I might consider running if I'm going to be mostly in one room and don't want to turn the proper heating on. I've used the gas fireplace once this year, mostly to see whether it works. It's odd to think I might end up using that for heating if the electricity goes, even though our boiler is a gas boiler the timer and switch and stuff are controlled by electricity so if the electricity goes out we lose heat. Of course if the electricity goes it will probably be because of a natural gas shortage - a good portion of electricity production in this country is done with natural gas now.

If at some point I stop being unhealthy and start being able to keep myself warm, I might turn the thermostat down some more for the hours when the heating runs, but for now I think 18C is about as low as is going to work. It does get colder than that at night and during the day when the heating isn't on at all, and as it gets colder this will increase.

I grew up on the prairies, mostly, and know a thing or two about the cold myself. Sometimes I feel like it would be better if it went down to -20C here, it would feel properly cold instead of just miserable. But given that most houses here don't have loft insulation or cavity wall insulation, it would be disastrous in terms of energy consumption.

[scalarparty.livejournal.com]

in previous years that was what happened here... pallets and found/scavenged wood. And sometimes i by those JavaLogs (made from coffee grinds) but the thing is the Carbon released when burning. Even wood and newspapers.. it seems wasteful to use an inefficient fireplace to heat and then be spewing all that carbon and soor and particulates into the atmosphere... i did like the coffee grounds, and they smell nice too!

but until we get the pellet stove, it's long underwear, extra sweaters, and puppy piles!

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

The wood, newsprint, whatever will release exactly the same amount of carbon if you leave it to disintegrate into compost somewhere. If burning wood releases carbon, so does rotting wood. It releases it over a greater amount of time but it's still the same overall amount of carbon per log.

If the newspaper would otherwise be recycled then that is probably a better use for it than incineration for heat.

Fireplaces are inherently inefficient, yes, and you'll get a much better heat-to-emissions ratio with a pellet stove, but do think about where the stuff you're burning would go if you didn't burn it. If the stuff would be thrown away to rot anyway, are you actually contributing to any problems by using it to heat your home?

[scalarparty.livejournal.com]

true, the wood that we scavenged, if we were to leave it go to landfill woudl end up producing methane (eventually). But as for newspapers, they would all otherwise get recycled, so carbon-wise i guess i would have to assess how much diesle woudl be that paper's share asit gets hauled off in teh recycling truck to the recycling centre,then add in all the coal burnttoenergize the plant as it goes from conveyor belt through all the sorters, mashers and finally the balers... then lastly add in the energy used atthe place where they turn the post consumer waste back into paper or whatever.. perhaps there would be less emissions just burning them... i do like the coffee ones, and that's better then landfilling it (though now landfills collect their methane and turn it back into electricity... ) oh sometimes its almost a vicious cycle...

[oban23.livejournal.com]

18C? I would freeze to death.