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Disappointingly our local organic fruit and veg company in Thame has closed down. Apparently there just wasn’t enough demand for their box delivery service. Such a pity – I’m sure demand will increase as the food miles message reaches these parts. So it’s back to the vegetable patch with some great help from the family. […]
October marked the end of the first year with the heat pump and the other energy saving measures we have put in place. The results are very interesting and to some extent surprising. We can look at them in a number of different ways. Our baseline was 2004 when our heating oil cost £2,431 and […]
A fun evening at the LSE. It was an open meeting to hear Sir Nicholas present his report and answer questions. But it proved so popular that half an hour before hundreds of people were turned away. Luckily I was offered a press place and was able to film the whole event. We can watch […]
A full year after we first enquired about getting a wind turbine for Hedgerley Wood from Windsave the man finally arrived to survey the site. His first conclusion was that there was no way we would get enough wind speed, given how the house is surrounded by trees. He said that the predominent wind direction […]
I’ve been recommended an alternative company for offsets – Climate Care. It certainly works very cleanly and efficiently and apppears to have an excellent rosta of projects that the money goes to. The only oddity I still find is the ludicrously low price of carbon. I was forced to take a flight to Amsterdam last […]
Now after ten months of operation and a lot of adjustments, we are getting a clearer idea of the running costs in terms of increased electricity. The base case, before the heat pump started running on October 12th 2005, was that the house was using an average of 20 units (kWhs) of high cost plus […]
Before next winter we want to try and improve the performance, and cost, of the ground heat pump system. So one clear step was to put in more insulation. Because of the strange way the house was built in the 30s, this means taking off the clapboard and fitting insultation between the timbers. We’ll see […]
David Heath, OneWorld CMS expert, has just sent me a delightful and very useful online widget he’s developed. It’s for the democracy site, TheyWorkForYou, and it lets you see which MPs have used which words or phrases in the last five years – and how many times. Brilliant.
Has anyone thought of putting medium size wind turbines on electricity pylons? Obvious advantages: – the most expensive bit is already there – objections to the tower being there can’t be raised – the wiring could presumably be easily be modified to move the electricity. Disadvantage: – could only carry medium sized turbines because of […]
I was discussing with Franny whether it was practical to think of building a wind turbine at the top of the wood in Hedgerley. The problem is that is would have to be really high to clear the trees – or we would have to clear a lot of trees, which we don’t want to […]
Two new gadgets are proving very useful. The Cent-a-meter which we bought from Electrisave is a way to monitor our total electricity use in real time. The sensor clips onto a cable in the meter box and a read-out in a nearby room shows how much current is being used at any moment. The display […]
A very interesting meeting organisaed by COIN in Oxford Town Hall on April 4th. I particularly liked the emergent way the meeting was organised with themes and leadership emerging from the participants. I learned a lot about the importance of commitments being made by many local councils. Many have signed the Nottingham Declaration. Woking has […]
It’s become clear from monitoring electricity use over the 3 months that the heat pump has been running that it is using far too much current. Today Dave Greenwood, who first introduced me to the idea of heat pumps, came out to find out what was wrong with the set-up. The main issues turned out […]
A really graphic chart of the comparative figures on CO2 emissions from the different UK sources from the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory. It doesn’t include air transport, but does show the huge effect of road transport, as well as the fact that domestic has declined much less than industrial combustion since 1980 and is now […]
Saturday 3rd December 2005 saw the biggest demos yet around the world on climate change. In London around 8,000 people marched to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square under the shadow of the American Eagle. Here’s how it looked on my mobile phone. Click to play this clip and all the extracts from speeches: https://youtube.com/watch?v=N8T7DLlnbQY […]