notes

The balcony of a flat in Largs around 2014. Broad views over the Firth of Clyde. Across the water to the west stands Mount Stuart, home of the Marquess of Bute. An earlier marquess, John Patrick Crichton Stuart was one of the richest men in the British empire. Another of his homes was Cardiff Castle. He owned much of South Wales, built Cardiff docks and made much of his fortune from coal. Mount Stuart The balcony rail had a thin coating of black dust from Hunterston Quay, a few mile down the coast, where ships unloaded their cargoes of coal to be taken away by rail. Now the last coal ship has long gone and the cranes have been dismantled. If the port has a future it is as a graveyard for dismantling redundant oil rigs and a site for making undersea power cables and loading them onto cable-laying ships. Hunterston Quay Hunterston tells the history of energy. At least one oil rig was built there and now it is to be where they come to die. Experimental wind turbines have ...

We built a new house six years ago and it would have been hypocritical to do anything other than go down the eco route. So here's a brief account plus more detail at the end for those who want specifics. How it started We had been living in a house we converted from a cowshed back in 1980 and we had about a hectare of land including a small wood we had planted. We were able to get planning permission to adapt and extend an outbuilding to create a single-storey two-bedroom house with a footprint of 100 sq.m. The build took just over six months from bringing in the digger to shifting our belongings in September 2015. We sold our old house with most of the land, keeping the woodland and felling a few trees to create a garden area. The house is approximately 40% conversion of the original brick outbuildings and 60% new build exension using timber frame, insulated to well above minimum Building Regulation requirements and designed from the start to be energy efficient and ...

"Heat pumps don't provide as much heat as boilers." "If you get a heat pump you'll need bigger radiators." "Heat pumps are too expensive." You have probably seen and heard comments like these lately from people who know something about home heating, and what they say has some truth to it, but there's telling the truth and there's telling the whole truth. Boilers do have a bigger heat output than heat pumps. Boilers are typically from 25kW up while heat pumps may be 5-15kW. But how much heat do you need. A modest size well-insulated house might only lose around 2kW even when it's well below freezing outside, and even most bigger, older homes are unlikely to need more than 10kW. Let's take a heat load of 5kW in the coldest weather for a typical house. Over 24 hours this is 120kWh of energy. A 25kW boiler can provide this amount of energy in less than five hours and can circulate very hot water round the radiator...