Home energy saving tips /ideas...

[Mrs Pingu]

According to this Octopus are about to buy a heat pump manufacturer.
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4048180/octopus-energy-swoops-heat-pump-manufacturer-red-multi-million-pound-deal

In other news I *finally* got a quote for underfloor insulation, £710. Shame they didn't also for the CWI I also asked for...

[nmcgann]

According to this Octopus are about to buy a heat pump manufacturer.
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4048180/octopus-energy-swoops-heat-pump-manufacturer-red-multi-million-pound-deal

In other news I *finally* got a quote for underfloor insulation, £710. Shame they didn't also for the CWI I also asked for...

Interesting. Red are very high-end/exclusive at the moment, so I wonder what products they are planning for the mass market.

[Kim]

According to this Octopus are about to buy a heat pump manufacturer.
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4048180/octopus-energy-swoops-heat-pump-manufacturer-red-multi-million-pound-deal

In other news I *finally* got a quote for underfloor insulation, £710. Shame they didn't also for the CWI I also asked for...

Interesting. Red are very high-end/exclusive at the moment, so I wonder what products they are planning for the mass market.

I saw a video (Fully Charged or something, I expect) where they explained that they (Octuopus) are trying to work out how to make heat pump installations as modular and standardised as possible, with a view to installing millions of them.  Which is as much about the learning curve for the installers as it is the systems themselves.  Seems like a good idea.

[pcolbeck]

I'm waiting for my heating engineer to give me a quote for solar water heating panels.

[Mrs Pingu]

Finally I have a quote for both underfloor and cavity wall insulation.
Go on the Home Energy Scotland site. My login doesn't work and my request for a new password results in no email.
I email HES only to get an autoreply saying their systems were down for a week and they are catching up on the backlog.
The saga continues.

[De Sisti]

Double-glazed window replacements. This will get rid of the draughts I can feel through the
current ones. Expected installation by end of May this year.

[Quisling]

Good to see that energy monitoring smart plugs have come down in price a good deal over the last year or so and I've just ordered some more so I can permanently monitor the fridge/freezer which has an unhelpfully located plug socket. 

I have also permanently unplugged the DVD player (1.5W standby load - about £4.33 a year at 33p/kWh) and will only plug in as required. 
That freed up a space on a 4 way extension lead (plugged into a smart plug) to add in the Youview box which has a whopping 8W standby load.  That is now scheduled, along with the TV and PS4, to go off between midnight and 7am.

Using a temporary plug in power monitor, it appears that the BT smart hub discs use about 5.7W constantly.  There are 4 here to get the broadband signal adequately to the dark corners of Quisling Towers - annual running cost therefore is about £65!  These are a bit trickier to switch off at night due to scheduled firmware updates, but I've shifted the schedule and will be knocking at least a couple of these off at night now too.

This small stuff really adds up.

[Wombat]

Eek, 1.5W is quite a standby load for a DVD player, which basically isn't doing anything at all!  My Sony HD recorder claims 0.1W, obviously the HD on it is only powered up when its doing something.  The blu ray player is only powered up when needed, switched with the home cinema amp, and the Sonos box.

I now have one BT disc thingy, but it doesn't seem to improve things by a significant amount, so I'll only power it up if I'm keen to do something serious right up that end of the house, or just outside.  I must measure the BT Smart hub 2 itself, but the previous Smart hub 1 claimed less than one watt.  I notice that on this one, when I select to dim the blue light ring on it, instead of dimming it, it switches half of it off, so I've got two bright sectors, instead of a dim circle.

[slope]

I recently measured my combination of BT Smart Hub 2, the Openreach ONT box and a BT phone that's always plugged in - it recorded 0.349 kW in 24 hours. So at current fixed rate leccy until December, that's ~£25 a year.

[Wombat]

It was the wifi repeater disc thingies that were the culprits, rather than the Smart Hub 2 router or ONS/T/whatever box.  I've not measured mine, but will do so soon.

[Quisling]

I now have one BT disc thingy, but it doesn't seem to improve things by a significant amount, so I'll only power it up if I'm keen to do something serious right up that end of the house, or just outside.  I must measure the BT Smart hub 2 itself, but the previous Smart hub 1 claimed less than one watt.  I notice that on this one, when I select to dim the blue light ring on it, instead of dimming it, it switches half of it off, so I've got two bright sectors, instead of a dim circle.

I measured my BT disc thingy with the LED on high/medium/low/off and it made no difference within the measurement capability of my plug in power monitor, so <0.1W-ish.

I've also measured my upright freezer - averages 50W over 48 hours of monitoring, running at 59W with the compressor running, ergo it must be running steadily a good deal of the time, costing about £145 a year to run at current tariff.   The fridge/freezer by comparison seems to cycle on/off about every half an hour, going from around 85W to zero and back.  Will monitor that over a longer period when the new smart plugs arrive.

[Kim]

Starting to get some useful fridge data:



Interesting that it's averaging almost exactly one Pirate-Ninja kWh/day.

Suspect that power consumption graph will be more interesting over a year...


(Work in progress is to combine the temperature and door monitoring gubbins with some power monitoring gubbins and compressor-switching gubbins in a single dedicated unit.  Then I can muck about with better algorithms for temperature control, potentially taking into account kitchen habits and the wholesale price of electricity.)

[chrisbainbridge]

Anybody got views or experience of ripple energy which seems to be a co-op for erecting wind farms.
If the Co-op owns the wind farm are they responsible for repairs? Is it like owning a flat where you have to pay for any repairs? How long do wind farms last?
The website looks interesting but lacking substance.

https://rippleenergy.com/

[Kim]

I signed up for Ripple, because it's one of the few things we can actually do as Generation Rent.

The shares pay for the construction of the wind farm,  its expected life is 25 years (but it may last longer, in which case more cheap electricity).  It's insured against the unexpected (by which I assume things like freak tornadoes and BEAR attack, rather than shoddy turbines or government policy).  At the end of life they'd expect to have to replace the turbines ("re-powering") or retire the wind farm (eg. because technology has moved on, and it's now uneconomical compared to offshore wind or superconducting solar from the Sahara or cold fusion or something).

The information is there, but mostly in videos.  This is what happens when Young People try to market something subtle and unintuitive.

[Mrs Pingu]

I need to poke Home Energy Scotland as they've never replied to the email I've sent them but...

It's been a mostly nice day today, not boiling but ok. My office (south facing 1st floor) is boiling while the living room (N facing, ground floor) is still baltic (thermometer said 15 this arvo and I'm wearing 2 fleece blankets and a cat).
Seems to me like I'm missing a trick piping the heat from my office (not used at weekends) to the loafing area. Do such things (not whole house ducting or anything like that) exist that don't require a major project?
I've seen the term 'heat shifter' used on Australian website but not so much here...

[felstedrider]

The information is there, but mostly in videos.  This is what happens when Young People try to market something subtle and unintuitive.

I see this a lot.   There are at least 10 start ups planning to 'reinvent the industry'.   Problem is a lot of them don't understand how it works now......

[ian]

...

The information is there, but mostly in videos.  This is what happens when Young People try to market something subtle and unintuitive.

I get loads of these – companies planning to reinvent what I'm going to do, here's an 18-minute video that will explain it (and probably ate up 95% of their borrowed capital to produce). Yeah, I'm going to spend the next several minutes watching a video from randoms in my inbox (that doesn't promise extreme tractor action). Try explaining it in a sentence or two with actual words.

[felstedrider]

...

The information is there, but mostly in videos.  This is what happens when Young People try to market something subtle and unintuitive.

I get loads of these – companies planning to reinvent what I'm going to do, here's an 18-minute video that will explain it (and probably ate up 95% of their borrowed capital to produce). Yeah, I'm going to spend the next several minutes watching a video from randoms in my inbox (that doesn't promise extreme tractor action). Try explaining it in a sentence or two with actual words.

Blockchain, AI, machine learning in the cloud including a peer-to-peer exchange.

[rogerzilla]

I hate YouTube "how to" videos.  Once you've got through the long title sequence, it's invariably some twat who spins it out as long as possible, and you can rarely see the bit you weren't sure about. One assembly video for a SRAM T3 had a mystery washer that just disappeared from the sequence, and all I wanted to know was where to put it.  It's only on skme hubs as an undocumented change, and the exploded diagrams don't show it.

SO tried to follow some YouTube instructions for replacing basin taps.  The muppet on the video didn't mention the need for fibre washers between the tap and the connector (they probably re-used the old ones, which rarely works well).  So I was called out at 8pm to sort it.  Luckily I had some washers.

[ian]

Blockchain is definitely the best solution to all the problems no one actually has.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I need to poke Home Energy Scotland as they've never replied to the email I've sent them but...

It's been a mostly nice day today, not boiling but ok. My office (south facing 1st floor) is boiling while the living room (N facing, ground floor) is still baltic (thermometer said 15 this arvo and I'm wearing 2 fleece blankets and a cat).
Seems to me like I'm missing a trick piping the heat from my office (not used at weekends) to the loafing area. Do such things (not whole house ducting or anything like that) exist that don't require a major project?
I've seen the term 'heat shifter' used on Australian website but not so much here...

These are usually fan-powered (but can also just be free-flowing) ducts from a lower room to an upper room.

Australian houses are built for hot temperatures - and increasingly they are seeing winters with daytime temps in the low teens, dropping to 5C or lower at night.

No central heating, no effective insulation; that is actually pretty cold.

So in houses where there is heating in one room, it makes sense to have ducts in the ceiling into upstairs bedrooms.

[Kim]

Our Mk 1 Victorian Terrace (and others we've lived in before it) has an almost permanent temperature differential between upstairs and downstairs, and I've often wondered about the practicalities of moving the heat from one to the other.

The closest I've seen to a commercial product are the reversible split-unit air conditioning systems which support multiple room units.  Some of them can heat one room while cooling the other by switching appropriate valves in the refrigerant circuit.  When they're doing this, it can effectively pump heat from one room to the other.

[Mrs Pingu]

I did wonder about just putting a fan on the landing ceiling...

[felstedrider]

Blockchain is definitely the best solution to all the problems no one actually has.

Bit OT but here's some examples of the 'disruption' to come in the energy sector.

https://www.urbanchain.co.uk/
https://www.tesseractenergy.xyz/
https://www.tem.energy/

[PhilO]

Anybody got views or experience of ripple energy which seems to be a co-op for erecting wind farms.
If the Co-op owns the wind farm are they responsible for repairs? Is it like owning a flat where you have to pay for any repairs? How long do wind farms last?
The website looks interesting but lacking substance.

https://rippleenergy.com/

I came across a report/interview on this on Fully Charged last week (although the video dates back several months): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OV_diBtXC4

Not sure if it tells you anything more than can be gleaned from the website, and certainly isn't short and pithy.

I also note that there's another one, which is more recent than that but which I haven't watched yet:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65rlHr6ey4I

It's certainly an interesting idea, and one to which I'll be dedicating a bit more thought...