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And we decided that we needed a dump truck to move the sand around. Another couple of hundred pounds, and I’m not sure in this case it will do that much better than the wheelbarrow, since it has to be filled and emptied pretty much by hand.
Day 3. Digging only brought the first tench half way back to the house. 5 tons of sand delivered, estimated by ICE as what we will need for the first trench. Another few hundred pounds, but apparently vital to protect the pipe from flints and improve heat transfer.
Finally at the end of day 2 we reach the turning point for the first pipe and start heading back. So the digging alone is going to take around 8 days, even without the sand, pipe laying and testing and backfilling. All in all it’s just as well that we agreed a fixed contract of […]
Day 2. Trying to avoid cutting the mains water again, Richard asks for some wire because he uses dowsing to find underground pipes. It seems to work and he marks the grass. See if you believe it – video clip. But half a day later we end up by hitting the pipe again anyway. More […]
We knew about one pipe and managed to avoid it. But then we fractured the tiny oil feed pipe (perhaps a good symbol) and later cut through the mains water supply that was snaking strangely through the woods. That meant no water in the house for half the day and time wasted mending the pipe. […]
At last we are underway with our heat pump system. The instruction manual says: dig trench, lay pipe, pressure test and backfill. But it ain’t that easy. We’ve got excellent JCB drivers, Diddy and Richard, working with our long-time builder, John. We plan a route across the lawn and through the wood that gives us […]
We were surprised and delighted when we got to Hertz in San Francisco to find they had allocated us a Prius for our three days driving to meetings around Silicon Valley. This was a great way to see what it was like to drive a hybrid in case we could ever afford one (£20K in […]
Interesting piece in the Guardian about a new mini wind turbine made in Scotland by Windsave. It’s said to produce 1kW in a 12 m/s wind. In our case it would only contribute a little, but at only £750 it’s worth it if only to experiment with and offset a little of the increased electricity […]
The Boston branch of the family have come up with a great quote this morning from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: “If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you […]
The Observer reported yesterday that BP claims to have a practical solution to disposing of CO2 by pumping it under the bed of the North Sea. They claim that the Miller field could absorb 5 million tons a year of liquefied CO2 which would be pumped from the Peterhead power station into the porous rock […]
Went up to Eynsham to visit Ice Energy. I thought their name was an acronymn until I asked how they had drilled a bore hole in an industrial park to get their heat energy. They hadn’t. Instead they heated the offices from a block of ice in a tank wrapped in the heat transfer pipes […]
Franny tells me that low-energy light bulbs just start dim but then brighten up. She’s right, but I’m still not convinced that they are quite as bright even then.
Delighted to receive an email today from Key Travel, who specialise in working with charities, announcing their carbon calculator. This is just what we need to offset the irreduceable flying that we have to do. So for my upcoming flight to Nairobi and Lusaka, they report that I will be producing 4 tons of CO2. […]
I went to a Solarsavers seminar yesterday in High Wycombe to discuss energy options with a number of suppliers. I had expected to be most interested in the solar water heating options. There were some good nuggets in the presentations: “the 19th was the century of coal, the 20th of oil and the 21st will […]
We’ve just got back the ‘home energy check’ results from Thames Valley Efficiency Advice Centre. This was a good idea and free of cost, but in our case the advice they’ve sent is pretty general – insulation and more low energy lights. More surprising is that they rated our present oil-fired boiler as ‘good’. It […]