Home energy saving tips /ideas...

[Mrs Pingu]

Are you still with us?

[quixoticgeek]

I heard a bang, but that could just be kids fucking about with fireworks...

J

[Mr Larrington]

Haven’t started yet.  Receiver box is a fair bit bigger than the old thermostat and thus won’t fit in the gap 'twixt door frame and wall.  So some carpentry is required.

[quixoticgeek]

I've talked in this thread about how most of the low hanging fruit has been found for reducing our electricity use. But this graph shows nicely how it's come down over time. Despite there being 1m battery electric vehicles on the roads in the UK. Our consumption has dropped by about a sixth over the last 10 years or so.

J

[Kim]

How much of that is the collapse / outsourcing of BRITISH industry, thobut?  It's not really an efficiency win if you're having the widgets made in China with coal power.

I'm also reminded of that line from A Handmaid's Tale about Gilead reducing their carbon emissions by 78% in three years...

[chopstick]

That's an excellent point.  Got me wondering where all the "cloud" servers are too.

[quixoticgeek]

That's an excellent point.  Got me wondering where all the "cloud" servers are too.

There are 517 datacentres in the UK. People get grumpy if a page doesn't load within a fraction of a second, so locating a DC further away is suboptimal. Thus DC's need to be close to people.

This represents about 10% of all the world's DC's

J

[Kim]

There are also legal considerations (eg. data protection, copyright, etc), to say nothing of tax breaks, which will affect where international organisations choose to put their infrastructure.  I believe Ireland is disproportionately popular on this basis, to the point where electricity supply is becoming an issue.

[rogerzilla]

That's an excellent point.  Got me wondering where all the "cloud" servers are too.

My experience of cloud-based applications is that they're all slow and shit, so my guess is that the servers are on Mars.

[HTFB]

How much of that is the collapse / outsourcing of BRITISH industry, thobut?  It's not really an efficiency win if you're having the widgets made in China with coal power.

Chart 5.1 in DUKES refers but I'm not persuading the magical cloud service to share a screen shot embeddably. UK Electricity consumption is down 19% since 2010 for both industrial and domestic sectors, and only 17% in the commercial sector. So there's some evidence of deindustrialisation but it's not the biggest thing going on.

[Cudzoziemiec]

So the DUKES chart would suggest the biggest single factor is domestic consumers turning down the thermostats and off the lights cos they can't pay the bills.

[HTFB]

That and an unusually mild winter. Hitherto unusually.

[FifeingEejit]

There are also legal considerations (eg. data protection, copyright, etc), to say nothing of tax breaks, which will affect where international organisations choose to put their infrastructure.  I believe Ireland is disproportionately popular on this basis, to the point where electricity supply is becoming an issue.

Yes, we absolutely cannot even consider data being hosted outwith the UK, Ireland was previously allowed but so was Belgium etc. Cos Breshit.



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[DaveReading]

That's an excellent point.  Got me wondering where all the "cloud" servers are too.

There are 517 datacentres in the UK. People get grumpy if a page doesn't load within a fraction of a second, so locating a DC further away is suboptimal. Thus DC's need to be close to people.

This represents about 10% of all the world's DC's

I'd be amazed if the world only had 5,000 or so datacentres.

[Tim Hall]

This link https://www.statista.com/statistics/1228433/data-centers-worldwide-by-country/ annoyingly doesn't give a total, so I deployed pencil, paper and calculator to come up with 9380 worldwide. 517 in the UK is around 5% of that.

[Tim Hall]

Meanwhile the IEA says

Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand.

Linky https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

[SoreTween]

I considered putting this in the vroom forum but there's so many EV threads it could get lost in I thought it better here.  Besides, it applies to all high load appliances not just EVs.

Chatting in the pub with a mate who is an electrician we somehow got onto cable sizes for showers & car chargers.  Possible I mentioned how annoyingly difficult it would be to upgrade the cable to my shower (10mm²) leaving me stuck with 8.5kW, aka pissy landlord spec.  As we chewed the fat on that he mentioned there'd been an article in the trade rag he gets about the cost of the electrical losses in cables where the installer fits the minimum size cable fit for the job, that can be as little as 4mm² for an EV.  He'd been surprised how fast the payback on bigger cables was.  Losses in cables (and the cost of) have always been known about wrt showers & immersions of course but now that we have high load car chargers running for hours and hours and electricity prices at record levels it is even more pertinent.  Said rag was still on his van so he lent it to me. 

The upshot of the article is if we have

• 32A car charger (7.3kW)
• running 4.5 hours a day 5 days a week
• 10m installed cable length
• 35p per kWh electricity cost

Then for these cable sizes the cost per year in energy lost in the cable is:

• 4mm² - £37.18
• 6mm² - £24.84
• 10mm² - £14.76

So by asking your fitter to use 6mm² cable instead of 4mm you save £12.34 per year.  The article then compares the cost of those cables and the payback time is just under a year.  I knew there would be a break even time but I did not expect it to be that fast.  If you request 10mm² instead of 4 you save £22.42 per year and the installation payback is 1.64 years.

What the article doesn't do is put that weekly charge duration into any real world context, how far would you be driving per week for that surprisingly fast payback rate to apply?  In the example above we are putting 32A * 230V * 4.5h * 5d / 1000 = 165.6kWh per week into the car.  Charging losses in the car can be as much as 13% so we get 144kWh of usable power in the car's battery.  Use your own miles per kWh to calculate how far you'd have to drive.

The loss costs above do work out pro rata on meters cable length so if you'd need a 12 meter cable just multiply the loss costs by 1.2.  The payback time will not change .

The article is online here https://professional-electrician.com/magazines/november-2023/ - page 55.

For my Leaf which seems to be averaging out around 4.5 miles per kWh year round (~4.1-4.2 now, was ~4.8-4.9 in the summer) 144kWh used is 648 miles.  I don't do that a month in my EV but that's partly because I have a dino burner for the long distance stuff and tip runs.  My payback would be closer to a decade.  However, I would ask for 10mm² or even 16mm² ignoring the up front cost.  Why?  Not because my usage pattern could increase in future shortening the payback rate.  It's more because 7.2kW is state of the art in home chargers today but what if 10kW home charging becomes available tomorrow?  Or 15kW?  That's not an outrageous possibility, showers have increased in capacity over time and now max out at 10.3kW.  If better home chargers become available in the future getting the cable changed will cost one hell of a lot more than the cost differential of the cable today.

[De Sisti]

My boiler (a 14 year-old Worcester Bosch 30si) was serviced today by British Gas man.
Before he commenced his duties, he noticed my Campag-adorned Spa Audax (which was
still in the house) and started to ask if I cycled a lot.

I told him I did lots of 3 - 4 - 5 hour and sometimes longer rides. He then told me of his past exploits riding sportives (which he no longer does) and riding on the continent. It was a good
10 minutes or so before he started on the boiler.

He duly checked it out (as per his schedule), cleaned the magna filter and opened the packaging on the carbon monoxide detector that I had recently bought. He said he had recently installed a boiler similar to mine* and spoke very highly of the brand. My boiler is ready for the rest of the winter.

* Was he telling the truth?

[grams]

The upshot of the article is if we have

• 32A car charger (7.3kW)
• running 4.5 hours a day 5 days a week
• 10m installed cable length
• 35p per kWh electricity cost

This person is spending £2989/year charging their car, and driving maybe 30,000 miles/year.

There's more money to be saved by not doing that.

(or at least switching to a more suitable tariff)

[Diver300]

Then for these cable sizes the cost per year in energy lost in the cable is:

• 4mm² - £37.18
• 6mm² - £24.84
• 10mm² - £14.76

The other interesting point is how fast the optimum charge rate is to minimise losses. Halving the rate quarters the power losses due to resistive heating, but the car is turned on for longer. Many of the car's systems power up when charging is happening, so the longer that goes on, the more the losses. Mine peaks at around 500 W when waiting to charge, but I really don't know what is the average amount of power needed.

I suspect that both losses are pretty tiny compared to what the car uses.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Our oil tank is nearly empty.

Came back from christmas to a low oil tank. MrsC is in charge of ordering, but put it off for a few days. Ordered - they normally deliver within 2-3 days, this time they said within a fortnight .  .  .

So we are on week 2 of trying to keep oil use down. Thermostat at 10C overnight, 14 mornings and up to 15.5 evening.

Making good use of the peat stove in the evening, so we have a toasty warm room to sit in.

I'm finding fairly rapid adaption, quite comfortable working in a 15-16C room with a T shirt and jumper. MrsC making use of a fan heater in whatever room she is sat.

Honestly, if it were just me, I'd probably stick to these temperature settings.

[robgul]

Our oil tank is nearly empty.

Came back from christmas to a low oil tank. MrsC is in charge of ordering, but put it off for a few days. Ordered - they normally deliver within 2-3 days, this time they said within a fortnight .  .  .

So we are on week 2 of trying to keep oil use down. Thermostat at 10C overnight, 14 mornings and up to 15.5 evening.

Making good use of the peat stove in the evening, so we have a toasty warm room to sit in.

I'm finding fairly rapid adaption, quite comfortable working in a 15-16C room with a T shirt and jumper. MrsC making use of a fan heater in whatever room she is sat.

Honestly, if it were just me, I'd probably stick to these temperature settings.

When we moved house from an oil-fired one we were perilously close to running out of oil as we approached completion - the tank, as it should, had a slight tilt away from the outlet (as it should, to catch any condensaton that turns to water and would thus be under the oil) - so we jacked up the back of the tank to eke out the supply - we made it!

Might be worth a try? -I just used a car jack.

[mrcharly-YHT]

That wouldn't be a good idea; the outlet pipe is a rigid connection. Any movement of the tank would risk creating a leak.

We've already had the oil company refuse delivery because they smelled diesel and suspected a leak (the tank is smelly, it has been there decades, and there was a spill when the filter was cleaned).

[Wowbagger]

I see that Tyne & Wear Solar are advertising a "COMPLETE SOLAR SYSTEM" for £8545 +0% VAT.

That doesn't say whether it comes with a Pluto and a full set of asteroids.

[HTFB]

Just to report, before winter ends, that after our first six weeks living with a heat pump we are wonderfully warm and snug, the hot water is hot, and our all-in COP is above 4.5. So we are saving money daily relative to a gas boiler, even before covering a third of the electricity with solar PV.

Admittedly the house is now so well insulated and draughtproofed that we stay entirely ignorant of the temperature outside until we open a door -- the windows never need to open because of the MVHR -- so it's not a very hard test of the ASHP.

We started the project in the brief window between Putin and Truss when energy was expensive enough, and mortgages cheap enough, that it would cover its costs. Alas that didn't last, though in the long run we are happy to bet on gas getting pricier. Still, we're saving a huge amount of energy.