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This week saw the first UK showing of the powerful new movie – Mary and Martha. Written by Richard Curtis, it stars Brenda Blethyn and Hilary Swank as two mothers brought together by the personal tragedy of malaria who go on to fight an obscenity that still today kills more than half a million children every […]
Celebrating OneWorld’s 18th Birthday on 24th January 2013. And at the same time marking the stepping down of Anuradha Vittachi and Peter Armstrong as executive directors. The event kicked off with a video look-back – 18 years in 18 minutes – tracing OneWorld’s journey from the faltering earliest days of the fledgling Web to today’s […]
We had great fun ten years ago filming this powerful poem with family friend, Benjamin Zephaniah.
Our first attempt at growing more of our own vegetables got off to a great start when Anuradha organised four raised beds in the sunniest part of the garden. But although planting happened in the Spring and the rabbits were kept off with netting, we were defeated by the weeds. Now Franny and Adam have […]
Time to do the calculations again after almost 2 years of operation of the solar PV. We’ve written to our suppliers to ask why last year’s output (1.5Mw from the top 16 panels) is 20% down on what they projected/promised. What’s also puzzling, as you can see from this reading, is that even at noon […]
Of course, maintaining our pool at all (originally a water tank) is hardly green. But given that mixture of indulgence and health rationalisations, has the enclosure we’ve now put up made it greener or not? The enclosure came directly from the Czech Repubic in a giant Ikea-style flatpack. Phil put it together with a little […]
A demonstration at the Bletchley Park Computer Museum. This version of the original Domesday Project was put together with the BBC.
LEARNING POINTS Episode One Section 1: Breathe Don’t underestimate how very difficult it is to break the news. Make sure you do the training! The bereaved will remember every word you say, forever, so it is vital to get it right. You will need to be in as calm a place as you can be […]
If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that Ardenham Energy have generously agreed to replace our original solar inverter, since the shaded panels were pulling down the performance of the whole array of 16. So in the pouring rain the scaffolding was put up again – amazingly in only about 3 hours. Then the installers […]
We received an invitation from the energy company Segen to visit a wind turbine that has been installed near us. I was particularly interested to see it and get some practical information, with the idea that perhaps we could have a turbine in the clearing at the top of our wood, if it were on […]
We were so moved to come across this tiny piece of evidence that greening has its own power – in spite of everything. And reminded of the lines from Yeats: While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
As well as waiting for the new inverters, it’s clear that we can prevent a lot of shading by trimming a few of the trees. So our friendly tree surgeons came in and cutting a few laterals opened up a surprising amount of sky. We’ll start measuring the impact in conjunction with the new inverters […]
The first 3 days have been very sunny and have produced a total of 26 kWh. This seems disappointing and doesn’t suggest the system will achieve the promised results over the year. Clearly shading from the trees is a major factor. The attached montage shows the shadowing against the output (on the main inverter only […]
It seems all solar installation firms are very busy, and it was mid-May before Ardenham could find a slot. On day one scaffolding was erected on the whole length of the south side of the house. The plan was to put the 16 panels on the highest part of the mansard roof. The following day […]
We’ve been thinking about the economics of putting PV panels on the roof, particularly to offset the power requirments of the ground source heat pump, which takes 2.8 kW when it’s running. Although we are getting this electricity from Good Energy who use only renewable sources, it still costs a lot and anyway the capacity […]