Climate Crisis!!!!

[Pontius Navigator]

AK. Just illustrating that industry is self serving and you cannot get something for nothing.

We went shopping on Wednesday and took our single use plastic bags, used them about 10 times so far. In the store they have stopped using plastic and use a stout, single use paper bag with a transparent panel.

When we unpack our shopping we separate any waste into and extra strong plastic bin liner in our recycle bin. If we were really good we would wash tins and remove labels. This is mandatory in the People's Democratic Republic of North East Lincolnshire.

How much energy and water is wasted cleaning domestic waste? How many people sort the waste properly?

[Boac]

I had not realised that the 'Mobius loop' symbol had effectively been superceded, and this is a UK guide to symbology. https://www.recyclenow.com/recycling-kn ... -explained Sure enough when I started looking at our plastic stuff there were no 'Mobius loops' on any new stuff.

The 'Green Dot' and the 'Mobius loop' seem to be quite questionable, and the 'Recycle' symbol appears to be the most informative.

[AtomKraft]

Well, maybe I'm naughty for burning mine, but at least it never ends up in landfill, the sea, or being transported to some far flung desperate country.
I'm not a complete loony, eco-wise. Our central heating runs on wood pellets and we even have a heat pump.
But these things were not done for eco-reasons, just practical ones.

I would venture that if the plastic isn't going to be recycled, and clearly most of it isn't- better for it to get the chop here.

[Pontius Navigator]

But these things were not done for eco-reasons, just practical ones.

That is a truism.

Take solar panels, early adopters who could afford solar panels were paid large subsidies and feed in tariffs paid for by those of us who would not.

Same with EV, same with Heat Pumps.

'Government Subsidies' are just a way of using my taxes to pay some rich bastards subsidies.

Now I am of an age that there is not enough time to be assured of pay back.

Many years ago I enquired about solar hot water. The cost was £4,000. I had gas heating and hot water not even £400 per year.

[k3k3]

Twenty years ago in Germany I inquired about getting a ground source heat pump with a hole bored 100 metres straight down, installation was going to cost around €20,000, but the killer was the 1.8 kw pump to move the solution up and down had to run 24 hours a day, the cost of running the pump was more than my total electric and gas bills combined.

[Pontius Navigator]

Telegraph

Firefighters battle to bring a blaze under control at recycling centre in Stert, near Devizes in Wiltshire. The fire started shortly before midnight on Wednesday. The facility run by Grist Environmental had contained up to 300 tons of residual waste.

<font size="1" style="float:right">DWFRS / SWNS</font>

Not an isolated instance.

[Undried Plum]

Take solar panels, early adopters who could afford solar panels were paid large subsidies and feed in tariffs paid for by those of us who would not.

Same with EV, same with Heat Pumps.

'Government Subsidies' are just a way of using my taxes to pay some rich bastards subsidies.

Yup. The iniquitous Feed In Tariff was/is bonkers. My PV array paid for itself within two and a half years; the wonky wind turbine paid for itself within three and a half years; and the 222m m deep heat well paid for itself in five and a half years. Although the scheme has been scrapped, it still pays out for the guaranteed twenty years.

The scheme is not actually a government subsidy at all. The cost is shared between all the customers of the utility companies. Totally unfair and immensely profitable for people who signed up to have a 'green' installation. The subsidy was so huge that companies made a fortune by giving totally free installations in exchange for the customer signing over the subsidy to them. I still shake my head in disbelief when I see roofs without a pv array on them. Such a waste of free money.

One of the many crazy things about the FiT scheme was that the payout is not based on how much juice you feed in to the grid. It is based solely on the rated capacity of your system, so my wonky wind turbine which has never produced 15kW in its shaky life is earning me oodles of boodle on the basis of being a 15kW system. The solar PV system is rated at the Latitude of Madrid, but is physically located at 56°N. It is also rated at an OAT of 20°C but in winter in Scotland we never see such a high temperature and at typical temps around zeroC it produces a fraction of what the brochure says. Nevertheless, I still get paid for producing power which I never produce and very seldom actually sell to the grid.

It's one of the best investments I ever made. Hugely profitable and my leccie bills are trivial.

The electric car has also paid for itself several times over, though not by government subsidy. At the time I bought it I also bought TSLA shares which I reckoned would double or treble in value in the planned eight year lifetime of my ownership of the car if I ploughed all the dividends back into the portfolio. The dividends never happened but those fifty dollar shares are now worth over a thousand bucks apiece. The running costs of the car, other than tyres and insurance, are negligible as I charge the battery pack on home-made juice and I have free use of the Tesla Supercharger for the lifetime of my ownership of the car.

My heatwell is also hugely profitable. I went to the drilling contractor and asked them how deep a well could they drill for twelve thousand Pounds (+VAT). They cocked up their quote and said the well would be 222m deep for that money. I gave the the go-ahead on that basis. In this part of the world there's a lot of whinstone (Dolerite) which is notoriously hard and abrasive stuff. They estimated they'd have to go through 6m of whin, but actually the reef they encountered was more like 70 metres thick. It took them five days longer than they had planned as the percussion drilling is a dreadfully slow process. The other formations are very soft glacial till and coal which the rotary drill goes through like cheese. They lost a fortune on my contract, but they picked up at least three other jobs in the local area on my recommendation and they quoted sensible prices on those contracts and so, overall, they just about broke even. I've never told my near neighbours how little I paid for my well or how much their wells effectively subsidised my one. For an input of 2kW of mostly home-made leccie, I get a gross output of 9kW of heat. There are not many investments which give that good a rate of return for so little risk.

Including the cost of occasionally buying 16 tonne batches of wood waste for one of the Froling boilers from a local firm which has thirty or forty HGVs which travel all over the country hauling that stuff, my total heating and motoring costs are well under a thousand quid a year. That's down from more than five thousand twenty years ago before I went 'green'.

The car; the heat well; the PV array; and the wonky wind turbine have all cost me less than zero.

[PHXPhlyer]

Talked to a PV installation company displaying at the farmer's market last weekend.
They are proposing an oversized system to help with producing excess power back into the grid and also for possible pool heating.
The kicker is that because I had a new roof installed last year, they claim that I will be able to get a tax write-off from the reroof as part of the solar installation.
I am going to call my tax guy to verify this. I was also able to get a tax credit for installing SolaTubes with a night light function installed (an LED with a small solar panel with two AA sized rechargeable batteries).
The only problem is that I have to get things done before the end of the year for the tax write-off.

PP

[Pontius Navigator]

PHX, am I missing a trick in UK. I have 3 external solar LED. Two are on continually after dark and bright up with a PIR. The have been running for 3 years. My energy supplier should pay me

[PHXPhlyer]

This is SolaTube.
Tubular Skylights

https://solatube.com/

Ridiculous that a $10-20 night light qualifies for such a big tax credit, but I'm not complaining.

PP

[Pontius Navigator]

PP, we looked a house 3 years ago. The upper floor had a galleried landing with 4 bedrooms and a bathroom off. With all doors closed there was no natural light and it screamed 'fit a light tube'.

[PHXPhlyer]

I installed three. One in each bathroom and one in the L of the hallway.
The solar recharged nightlights are adequate for navigating at night, but they are a little iffy on charging and/or battery life.

PP

[OFSO]

LeRoy Merlin sells a two solar light pack for €10.95. Fitted outside on south-facing window sills on bathrooms, corriders, etc. they give more than enough light to navigate the house at night.

[AtomKraft]

Hey Plum
Good for you cashing in on the FiT subsidies- I'd have done the same, but I sure feel sorry for the desperately poor folk forced to provide better off types like yourself with a sweaty discount. These poor blighters cannot afford that.

A lot of people don't know where the money for these green subsidies comes from, but as usual it's paid by all of us, for the benefit of the better off.

On the subject of Solar powered outside lights, one of the best applications we have is a solar charged pir floodlight. Cracking bit of kit, and not connected to the grid.

[Undried Plum]

Yes, the FiT scheme was profoundly regressive. For a wind turbine you need to own enough land to site the thing more than 200m from any inhabited house. The majority of people don't have a garden or other land big enough to do that.

I was fortunate to be able to buy this place when land was dirt cheap. The very old house needed a lot of work to bring it into the 20th century and the heating arrangement had to be 're-imagined' from scratch.

It was built in 1747/8 by the Laird, who had commanded a cavalry regiment on the German side of the '45 Rebellion. He was somehow able to monetize his military success, presumably by dispossessing Jacobite supporters and plundering their estates. He built this house to last. The walls are two feet thick heavy igneous stone, uninsulated of course. There was a fireplace in every room, fuelled by coal. Running eight fireplaces was a fulltime job for one of the housemaids in the days when labour was dirt cheap. Not very practical in the 1980s!

He bought three neighbouring estates and somehow took over five others from Jacobites. One of them had a walk-in family coalmine. A single tunnel in a hillside, following a 7' thick coal seam which had a downward dip angle of about 5°. It produced enough coal to fuel the household and to supply servants and farmworkers with free coal. None of the coal was ever sold.

When coal was nationalised in the 1940s the NCB took over ownership but did not want to be bothering with such a pissy wee thing when the Lothians and Fife were covered with massive coalworkings. Heavy steel gates were installed and sealed with a lead seal which was inspected a coupla times a year. The locals broke in anyway and stole the coal for their own use. I visited the tunnel many years before I bought the place. It was about a quarter of a mile long and unventilated. Serious hazard of both 'black damp' (Carbon Monoxide) and 'fire damp' (Methane). I used a scuba set to breathe. There was an amazing optical illusion at the coalface end of the tunnel which was part flooded. I appeared that the pool of water was standing up and sloping about 5° upwards. An extraordinary sight to see water apparently sloping. Of course the illusion was caused by the floor of the tunnel sloping downwards, but the illusion was very convincing.

When renovating the house I chose radiant ceiling heating. No piped gas in the countryside hereabouts, but a good three-phase supply with oodles of spare capacity as it had been used in the adjacent barn to power a threshing mill. The mill was originally human powered, then a coal-fired static steam engine was installed in the 19th century and later an electrical supply was run from an early coal mine. A local village was one of the first places in Scotland to have electric street lights in Victorian times. They were powered, pro-bono, by a proper coalmine which didn't need the power at night but wanted to keep the steam genny going 24 hrs a day. Now we have three-phase from the grid which can theoretically produce up to 600 Amps

The Laird also built a lade and waterwheel-powered flax ("lint") mill down by the river. He was two hundred years ahead of his time: fully energy self-sufficient!

He grew flax which his labourers processed into linen which was woven into finished articles and sold to Edinburgh. When the railway was built through his land he had an Act of Parliament passed which required a platform on his land and a stone bridge to be built across the line for his personal use. Until the 1960s when the line was shut down by the Dr Beeching madness, the farm sent 200 eggs and half a dozen milk churns to Edinburgh every day on the train. The farm grew flax; oats; barley; cattle; sheep and chickens. It was a thriving business which supported about 40 employees and kept the Laird in great comfort. Now, farming in this part of the world is buggered.

The radiant ceiling heating was a great success, but horribly expensive to run. I needed to generate my own power somehow. The lade has gone, along with its weir. The steam engine was scrapped in the 1930s and replaced by an electric motor. The place had become energy poor instead of energy rich. That's why I installed the wind turbine and the solar array and the two self-stoking wood-burning boilers. One uses wood chips and the other uses split logs. The chips are cheap as, err, chips and the logs cost me nothing more than hard sweat and toil and petrol/oil for the engine and chain oil for the chainsaw.

The system is not quite energy self-sufficient as sun and wind are unreliable. Worse: until quite recently power cuts were very frequent. For safety reasons, things like PV arrays and wind turbines have to have automatic cutouts in the event of a power cut from the public supply. Don't want to nip the powerline repair crews, do we. The first Tesla Powerwall also had to self-isolate in the event of a power cut. Just when you need it most: it's not there. A bit like the police.

The second Powerwall is on a different circuit and is exempt from the shutdown requirement. It powers LED lighting and the circulation pump of the heat well and central heating radiators, for a very small number of hours but can be outlasted by power cuts, especially in winter storms when the power cuts can be eight or nine hours long.

One and two hundred years ago this place was totally energy self-sufficient and produced enough food to feed a coupla hundred people and enough linen and wool to clothe them too. Now look at it. Heavily dependent on the outside world for almost everything. In some ways our 'modern' technology is going backwards.

[AtomKraft]

Very interesting Plum
It's funny to think that your place has gone from being so flush with energy, and employing a bunch of people, to requiring subsidies from the descendants of those same people...

I think it's called 'Progress'.

[AtomKraft]

To John Hill

Do you think this guy is crazy too? He's one of the founders of Greenpeace- he seems to me, to talk a lot of sense.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Get back in the air. Do something you know about!

[Undried Plum]

[media]https://www.channel4.com/programmes/how ... /72915-001[/media]

[John Hill]

To John Hill

Do you think this guy is crazy too? He's one of the founders of Greenpeace- he seems to me, to talk a lot of sense.

If you recommend him that is all I need to know to ignore him.