I recently had to complete a Health and Safety assessment at work. Now, for all the cries of ’elf ‘n’ safety gawn mad in the tabloid press I’m all for it – after all the majority of the advice is merely common sense (which Voltaire is claimed to have noted is actually not so common). However, the training sessions are mind-numbingly boring. Apparently, leaving exposed electric wires or toxic substances lying around is a health hazard. Who’d have thunk?
Amongst the other mundanities was a section on avoiding an accident whilst driving. This was all perfectly sensible stuff like not playing with a smartphone whilst driving or avoiding downing a bottle of champagne before setting off. However, the one item that they didn’t touch on is one of my bugbears – driving on a Friday. For some reason, Fridays seem to be national driving like a knob-head day.
There may be good reasons for this – certainly many people will be tired after a full week at work and there may be some who will have long journeys ahead of them after working away. However, I have noticed that even those that I would regard as professional drivers – HGV drivers or coach drivers – appear to be running with a screw loose. As for the bulk of the travelling public there is a kamikaze mentality amongst the legions of rep-mobiles: either mindlessly tailgating on the overtaking lane of the motorway or pointlessly lane swapping for no good reason.
Personally, I won’t play along with this game and I am happy enough to pootle along at HGV speed in lane one of the odd bits of motorway I use and more than happy to leave a big gap behind the car in front if it means avoiding some manic breaking later. On the face of this you would think that this would slow me down but it actually makes no difference whatsoever as the factors slowing down any decent progress are not the vehicles top speed but the number of cars queued up at the next junction or roundabout.
In some respects I long after the days when I could simply get the train or bus into work but I actually found that to be just as stressful. Aside from the bloody minded awfulness of other people one has to compete with the fact that public transport is usually run for the benefit of the public transport providers rather than the passengers. On some occasions I was even left with the likes of Scotrail asking for us to make alternative travel arrangements as they were incapable of running a Hornby OO train set let alone the real thing. I suppose that’s what it comes down to – do I want to worry about getting home in one piece or getting home at all?
Sunday, 27 April 2014
Sunday, 20 April 2014
Electrickery
When we first moved into our current house I projected our electricity bill to be in excess of 7,000 kWh for the year. This was in excess of the electricity bill for our old house which didn’t even benefit from a gas cooker. I’ve managed to bring it down, largely by replacing the incandescent lighting with fluorescent or LED lighting and replacing one or two appliances – notably our old CRT television. It may seem like tinkering at the edges but replacing our dining room incandescent lights with LEDs reduced the power consumption from 360W down to 32W. With the lights used for just 2 hours a day that equates to 239kWh of the annual bill alone.
However, for all my efforts to reduce the power usage on the house I have struggled to get the annual consumption below 4,000kWh which is still high for a house of this size. There are one or two things I could do to reduce that figure – we still have incandescent bulbs in the bedroom as this would involve a rewiring job on the dimmer switches and the number of electronic appliances keeps growing. But what are the big consumers? I have a meter plug which measures the power consumed and transient (and peak) power consumption. Over the last week I have been plugging this into various appliances to see what the big offenders are.
I started off in the kitchen. Traditionally, refrigeration is a major power drain. I can recall having a faulty fridge-freezer many years ago that caused my electricity bill to double in the months before it failed, leaving a wet puddle on the kitchen floor. Our current appliance, whilst large, is very new and was rated at A++ on the efficiency label. Over a day, it clocked up 0.76kWh – around 277kWh over the year. The other major kitchen appliance is the dishwasher. Due to the effort involved in moving this to install the meter plug I didn’t bother measuring it but I did check the model. It was launched in 2005 (we inherited it with the house) but was rated at AAA at the time. What this translates to is that it uses something in the region of 1kWh per cycle. However, we rarely use the standard 60°C cycle and find that the 50°C one suffices. The dishwasher does get used once per day so it will add up but I’ll work on the assumption that this is saving us on the hot water bill.
I suspect that the laundry bill is the biggest hit. The washing machine is used at least once per day (on average) although we do use the more efficient cycles. I measured our standard 40°C cottons cycle and it clocked in at 0.7KWh. What surprised me with this is that the bulk of that use came in the first 15-minutes. This is accounted for by the machine heating up the water and it does show that the very long (but relatively cool) cycles of modern machines are more efficient. It also makes the case for using 30°C or even cold cycles where possible. The next thing I tried was the dryer. We try to avoid using this when the weather will allow us to dry outside but our climate is not particularly forgiving in that respect. I dried the cotton load from the washer and it clocked in at a whopping 2.49kWh. This is probably a worst case scenario but it came in after I had cleaned out the condenser and filters. The dryer is getting old and excessively noisy and the efficiency of the latest generation of dryers has improved dramatically so this may well be something to save up for in the Autumn. The last part of this was the ironing which came in at 0.33kWh – of course not everything needs ironing but I find that some items need ironing when dried outside that don’t when done in the dryer. There is probably some crossover-point where it is more efficient to use the dryer – although not with our current unit.
I had to cut the grass and measured this. The mower used up 0.4kWh although as this was the first cut of the year it took a little longer. I probably use this somewhere between 20 to 25 times a year although last year was considerably less with the cold spring and dry summer. Other oddities around the house include things like the router and home network which ticks over at around 8W and although I didn’t measure the PC (which is quite a power hog) the new PC boots up quickly and uses hibernate effectively. I did measure my works laptop which I used from home and used a fairly reasonable 0.125kWh over the 9 hours I had it switched on. Possibly a bigger surprise was my son’s Android phone which only required 0.008kWh to charge up from flat – somehow I imagined that these were higher. I also noted that the charger didn’t register when left in unplugged which seems to be another myth-buster.
Home entertainment is a another power drain. Swapping the CRT TV for an LED unit helped to reduce this but part of the problem lies with standby modes. On our main living room setup none of the units (including the PVR) registered a standby drain with the exception of the Wii which came in at 1.25W. This is to be expected as they are mostly fairly new units and come under the latest EU legislation. Under use they do consume quite a bit but I have set the various eco-settings to minimize power use or switch off if unattended. What did surprise me was the bedroom TV equipment (including the old PVR and DVD player) this consumed 0.62kWh during a day and is only typically used for 1 to 2 hours in the evening. However, as the units are older ones the PVR manages 11W in standby (doing something useful) whereas the DVD player used 10W (doing nothing). As this is rarely used I unplugged it. The dining room HI-FI unit is so old it predates remote controls for the most part. The only bits with standby were the CD player and radio (which has not been used in years). These still managed 5W so I switched the unit off at the wall – a far simpler way of operating it. Lastly, I checked my son’s old CRT TV. This uses around 60W when in use and 6W on standby. However, to his credit, he switches this off at night and total use for a day came in at 0.195kWh.
There are other items that use power but I’m thinking that the tumble dryer is going to be the biggest gain. I’m still curious about the other items and particularly older entertainment units. I don’t believe in throwing things away just because they are old but there must be a cut-off point with some items whereby a new appliance will actually pay for itself quite quickly. The biggest part of my power bill is still the gas bill and this is tricky to reduce without major works on the house. I paid out extra to get the flat roof insulated when it blew off last year and this has paid dividends, if not in the gas bill then certainly that that part of the house is warmer – the bathroom in Winter is now bearable. I am now thinking that I may need to think that problem in reverse: rather than trying to stop heat escaping I may find it easier to prevent rooms from being over-heated in the first place. There are gadgets available which will allow rooms to have individual timed thermostats and that could well be the next best investment.
However, for all my efforts to reduce the power usage on the house I have struggled to get the annual consumption below 4,000kWh which is still high for a house of this size. There are one or two things I could do to reduce that figure – we still have incandescent bulbs in the bedroom as this would involve a rewiring job on the dimmer switches and the number of electronic appliances keeps growing. But what are the big consumers? I have a meter plug which measures the power consumed and transient (and peak) power consumption. Over the last week I have been plugging this into various appliances to see what the big offenders are.
I started off in the kitchen. Traditionally, refrigeration is a major power drain. I can recall having a faulty fridge-freezer many years ago that caused my electricity bill to double in the months before it failed, leaving a wet puddle on the kitchen floor. Our current appliance, whilst large, is very new and was rated at A++ on the efficiency label. Over a day, it clocked up 0.76kWh – around 277kWh over the year. The other major kitchen appliance is the dishwasher. Due to the effort involved in moving this to install the meter plug I didn’t bother measuring it but I did check the model. It was launched in 2005 (we inherited it with the house) but was rated at AAA at the time. What this translates to is that it uses something in the region of 1kWh per cycle. However, we rarely use the standard 60°C cycle and find that the 50°C one suffices. The dishwasher does get used once per day so it will add up but I’ll work on the assumption that this is saving us on the hot water bill.
I suspect that the laundry bill is the biggest hit. The washing machine is used at least once per day (on average) although we do use the more efficient cycles. I measured our standard 40°C cottons cycle and it clocked in at 0.7KWh. What surprised me with this is that the bulk of that use came in the first 15-minutes. This is accounted for by the machine heating up the water and it does show that the very long (but relatively cool) cycles of modern machines are more efficient. It also makes the case for using 30°C or even cold cycles where possible. The next thing I tried was the dryer. We try to avoid using this when the weather will allow us to dry outside but our climate is not particularly forgiving in that respect. I dried the cotton load from the washer and it clocked in at a whopping 2.49kWh. This is probably a worst case scenario but it came in after I had cleaned out the condenser and filters. The dryer is getting old and excessively noisy and the efficiency of the latest generation of dryers has improved dramatically so this may well be something to save up for in the Autumn. The last part of this was the ironing which came in at 0.33kWh – of course not everything needs ironing but I find that some items need ironing when dried outside that don’t when done in the dryer. There is probably some crossover-point where it is more efficient to use the dryer – although not with our current unit.
I had to cut the grass and measured this. The mower used up 0.4kWh although as this was the first cut of the year it took a little longer. I probably use this somewhere between 20 to 25 times a year although last year was considerably less with the cold spring and dry summer. Other oddities around the house include things like the router and home network which ticks over at around 8W and although I didn’t measure the PC (which is quite a power hog) the new PC boots up quickly and uses hibernate effectively. I did measure my works laptop which I used from home and used a fairly reasonable 0.125kWh over the 9 hours I had it switched on. Possibly a bigger surprise was my son’s Android phone which only required 0.008kWh to charge up from flat – somehow I imagined that these were higher. I also noted that the charger didn’t register when left in unplugged which seems to be another myth-buster.
Home entertainment is a another power drain. Swapping the CRT TV for an LED unit helped to reduce this but part of the problem lies with standby modes. On our main living room setup none of the units (including the PVR) registered a standby drain with the exception of the Wii which came in at 1.25W. This is to be expected as they are mostly fairly new units and come under the latest EU legislation. Under use they do consume quite a bit but I have set the various eco-settings to minimize power use or switch off if unattended. What did surprise me was the bedroom TV equipment (including the old PVR and DVD player) this consumed 0.62kWh during a day and is only typically used for 1 to 2 hours in the evening. However, as the units are older ones the PVR manages 11W in standby (doing something useful) whereas the DVD player used 10W (doing nothing). As this is rarely used I unplugged it. The dining room HI-FI unit is so old it predates remote controls for the most part. The only bits with standby were the CD player and radio (which has not been used in years). These still managed 5W so I switched the unit off at the wall – a far simpler way of operating it. Lastly, I checked my son’s old CRT TV. This uses around 60W when in use and 6W on standby. However, to his credit, he switches this off at night and total use for a day came in at 0.195kWh.
There are other items that use power but I’m thinking that the tumble dryer is going to be the biggest gain. I’m still curious about the other items and particularly older entertainment units. I don’t believe in throwing things away just because they are old but there must be a cut-off point with some items whereby a new appliance will actually pay for itself quite quickly. The biggest part of my power bill is still the gas bill and this is tricky to reduce without major works on the house. I paid out extra to get the flat roof insulated when it blew off last year and this has paid dividends, if not in the gas bill then certainly that that part of the house is warmer – the bathroom in Winter is now bearable. I am now thinking that I may need to think that problem in reverse: rather than trying to stop heat escaping I may find it easier to prevent rooms from being over-heated in the first place. There are gadgets available which will allow rooms to have individual timed thermostats and that could well be the next best investment.
Sunday, 13 April 2014
Fresh Air
I came across motoring oddity this week after checking the tyre pressures on my car before a long journey. The pressures on the fuel cap sticker for the car are in Bar and my trusty pressure gauge (a Lidl special from about 10 years ago) is only in PSI – or at least it is without some magical button pressing for which the documentation disappeared several years ago. As I result I check the pressures online.
When I checked the tyres they all seemed to be quite a bit below the 36PSI recommended. I thought this was a bit odd and checked the manual again and it is actually recommended as 29PSI for the standard Golf – the 36PSI is for the Bluemotion model due to its “special low rolling resistance tyres”. Fair enough, but what are these special tyres, I wondered.
As it happens, one of my neighbours has the Bluemotion model so I checked what tyres it has fitted. It turns out that it has exactly the same tyres as mine: Goodyear Excellence. I did check to see if there was a special variant available and they do have a VW specification which does indeed have slightly lower rolling resistance but these are what I have fitted.
Of course the Bluemotion tyres will have a lower rolling resistance then the standard ones but this is nothing to do the wonders of material science but simply due to gas laws – they have pumped up the tyres to a higher pressure and this will have led to the reduction in fuel consumption – and presumably a slightly harsher ride. I think the Bluemotion models do have other tweaks to them but the wheels will be one of the major enhancements. Rather than spending several hundred pounds on a vehicle upgrade the same effect could be achieved with five minutes and a foot pump.
When I checked the tyres they all seemed to be quite a bit below the 36PSI recommended. I thought this was a bit odd and checked the manual again and it is actually recommended as 29PSI for the standard Golf – the 36PSI is for the Bluemotion model due to its “special low rolling resistance tyres”. Fair enough, but what are these special tyres, I wondered.
As it happens, one of my neighbours has the Bluemotion model so I checked what tyres it has fitted. It turns out that it has exactly the same tyres as mine: Goodyear Excellence. I did check to see if there was a special variant available and they do have a VW specification which does indeed have slightly lower rolling resistance but these are what I have fitted.
Of course the Bluemotion tyres will have a lower rolling resistance then the standard ones but this is nothing to do the wonders of material science but simply due to gas laws – they have pumped up the tyres to a higher pressure and this will have led to the reduction in fuel consumption – and presumably a slightly harsher ride. I think the Bluemotion models do have other tweaks to them but the wheels will be one of the major enhancements. Rather than spending several hundred pounds on a vehicle upgrade the same effect could be achieved with five minutes and a foot pump.
Saturday, 5 April 2014
Bin Day
Our local Council, Falkirk, have announced that they are going to reduce our non-recyclable bin collections from a 2 weekly to 3 weekly cycle. Some people are up in arms about this. Others, myself included, are rather shrugging and wondering what all the fuss is about. Apparently our locality is going to be the pilot area but so far I haven’t seen the collection calendar which is meant to start from this May – so they had better get their act together.
Falkirk’s waste and recycling collection is actually pretty good. We have a blue bin for paper, metal and most types of plastic which is collected fortnightly; a food waste bin (possibly better described as “kitchen waste”) which is collected every week; a brown garden waste bin which is collected fortnightly from March through to November; and a black box which is for small electrical items, glass bottles and jars which is collected fortnightly (although I usually just drop any bottles off at the bottle-bank at the end of the road). There is also meant to be a fabrics collection but I tend to drop any old clothes off with the Strathcarron Hospice shop or in the Salvation Army collection bins.
The end result of this is that our green “landfill” collection bin doesn’t get very full – typically only a quarter full per fortnight. I can see how individual circumstances may affect this. For example, anyone using disposable nappies will know that these take up quite a bit of space and emptying a cat’s litter tray will fill the bin up as well. There are various other circumstances which will lead to household producing a large amount of waste and large green bins are available for anyone whose circumstances differ but the council suspects that the majority of those who overfill their green bins are simply too lazy or too stupid to dispose of waste correctly.
The switch to 3 weekly collections is dressed up as an environmental policy but the real reason is actually financial. Cutting collections down to 3 weeks will reduce the number of crews dedicated to collecting these bins and, more importantly, they are currently paying out an estimated £2.5 million extra annually in landfill tax which is quite a staggering amount simply to throw otherwise reclaimable materials into the ground. Judging from the figures posted outside what most people still call “the rubbish tip” they are managing to reclaim 80% of all materials and this figure has been steadily increasing for some time so it is not unreasonable to think that the household waste recycling figure could increase from its current level of around 55%.
I’m curious to see how the pilot goes. For the most part people just get on with these things and as long as the information is coherently communicated and the facilities are provided everything should go smoothly. Some people will no doubt be too stupid or too lazy to get things sorted and will presumably be a right royal pain in the backside as they are at the moment. However, if there is one element that I think will cause problems it is the frequency of collections. At the moment, the recycling bins are collected one week and the landfill the next. With a 3 weekly collection it will mean that the landfill collection will be collected either on its own or in the same week as the recycling bins. Without constantly looking at the calendars it’s quite difficult to remember what is going out and when. Out of sheer simplicity it would make more sense to have 4 weekly bin collections. It’s probably only a matter of time until we do.
Falkirk’s waste and recycling collection is actually pretty good. We have a blue bin for paper, metal and most types of plastic which is collected fortnightly; a food waste bin (possibly better described as “kitchen waste”) which is collected every week; a brown garden waste bin which is collected fortnightly from March through to November; and a black box which is for small electrical items, glass bottles and jars which is collected fortnightly (although I usually just drop any bottles off at the bottle-bank at the end of the road). There is also meant to be a fabrics collection but I tend to drop any old clothes off with the Strathcarron Hospice shop or in the Salvation Army collection bins.
The end result of this is that our green “landfill” collection bin doesn’t get very full – typically only a quarter full per fortnight. I can see how individual circumstances may affect this. For example, anyone using disposable nappies will know that these take up quite a bit of space and emptying a cat’s litter tray will fill the bin up as well. There are various other circumstances which will lead to household producing a large amount of waste and large green bins are available for anyone whose circumstances differ but the council suspects that the majority of those who overfill their green bins are simply too lazy or too stupid to dispose of waste correctly.
The switch to 3 weekly collections is dressed up as an environmental policy but the real reason is actually financial. Cutting collections down to 3 weeks will reduce the number of crews dedicated to collecting these bins and, more importantly, they are currently paying out an estimated £2.5 million extra annually in landfill tax which is quite a staggering amount simply to throw otherwise reclaimable materials into the ground. Judging from the figures posted outside what most people still call “the rubbish tip” they are managing to reclaim 80% of all materials and this figure has been steadily increasing for some time so it is not unreasonable to think that the household waste recycling figure could increase from its current level of around 55%.
I’m curious to see how the pilot goes. For the most part people just get on with these things and as long as the information is coherently communicated and the facilities are provided everything should go smoothly. Some people will no doubt be too stupid or too lazy to get things sorted and will presumably be a right royal pain in the backside as they are at the moment. However, if there is one element that I think will cause problems it is the frequency of collections. At the moment, the recycling bins are collected one week and the landfill the next. With a 3 weekly collection it will mean that the landfill collection will be collected either on its own or in the same week as the recycling bins. Without constantly looking at the calendars it’s quite difficult to remember what is going out and when. Out of sheer simplicity it would make more sense to have 4 weekly bin collections. It’s probably only a matter of time until we do.
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