Saving energy at home

There is much chatter about the increasing costs of energy, apparently Ofgem will announce a new price cap on Friday. The situation is epitomised by Martin Lewis’s video spitting bricks about the issue.

It’s clearly going to be a big issue for a lot of people. Something that puzzles me about this is that I recall power prices being pretty damn high in the past, and my recollection of current (post April, pre-end of this month) power prices is that I have seen this movie before. I remember power costs being high in the early to mid-2010s in real terms, it felt like they were higher. Some of this is because that was a period when I was trying to save money, firstly to load enough into the stock market to retire early, and secondly once I had retired to eke out the period before getting hold of my SIPP savings for as long as possible. However, I wasn’t shocked by the March changes, because I remember real prices being higher.

Undoubtedly projected costs are going to be higher in real terms than they were before, after all going to war generally damages the economy, plus there is the cleverness of Brexit, which seems to be dragging its feet on delivering the promise of making us all so much better off. In an attempt to substantiate this recollection, I inquired of the ONS, which sadly only goes back to 2015, with something called the energy price index.

Energy Price index, from those nice fellows at the ONS

Turns out gas is currently (up to the end of this month) still cheaper per unit than it was in 2015, in real terms. The dotted line is when the price cap mechanism was instigated. It is electricity that is much dearer than it used to be per unit.

This is deliberate – most of the green crap has been loaded on the cost of electricity. You are paying for other people’s solar panels (thankfully the subsidy on that has been dramatically reduced – if you think solar panels on a domestic basis is such a terrific idea then pay for this frippery yourself). I hate green crap subsidies with a rabid vengeance, because I don’t want to pay for middle-class homeowners’ virtue signalling. I have nothing against renewables – I invest in wind, solar and power storage, as well as oil, because I am shameless, but I think poncing about on a domestic level is bonkers. As David Kay says, every big helps.

Making the poor pay more for their power just so you can tell your middle-class rugrats that you are doing your bit is really rather ethically dubious. That is because ever since Thatcher raising income tax has become anathema, so these subsidies come from indirect taxation, raising other people’s electricity bills by 25%. Britain generates much of its electricity using gas, so there’s no good reason for the divergence between electricity and gas unit prices, this is the extra loading on electricity because it’s harder to live without electricity than gas, plus many households don’t have mains gas.

There’s an argument than I can afford to subsidise your green tossery, but I don’t want to. However, I can’t fight Government policy. I collect my share of my and other people’s bills via the renewables inducements to UKW and its ilk rather than on an itty-bitty scale, repossessing the subsidy loading on my power bills through the stock market, but it’s still a rum way to do policy. Resistance is futile, you have to join in. Unlike middle class eco-warriors limited by their south-facing roof area and domestic consumption, I can collect far more subsidy that I could on my own consumption. Your average solar installation costs £5-7k, you can invest a lot more than that if you are minded to.

IMO the reason there is more hullabaloo about heating costs now than seven years ago is because government policy has been immiserating the poor through a punitive approach to benefits on the bottom end. Higher power costs makes more difference now, because it’s a larger part of a smaller available income pie at the low end. And, quite frankly, it seems that the current wannabees don’t giveashit, and in 2019 it was clearly more important to more people to have some grandstanding and Get Brexit Done by an established liar than give a shit too. We are where we are because we wanted to believe in magic. Were you asked by the grandstander in chief whether power bills of £6000 p.a. were a price worth paying to stop Putin’s tanks? Me neither.

Under Johnson, the UK also appears to have taken a gamble on an almost complete break with Russia, at least so long as Vladimir Putin remains in power. There is nothing from London, as there is from Berlin and Paris, about keeping channels open to Russia, because Russia will still be there when the war is over.

At least BoJo acknowledged the issue in his valedictory grandstanding photo-op

Comparing the costs of Russia’s war, he said: “If we’re paying in our energy bills for the evils of Vladimir Putin, the people of Ukraine are paying in their blood.”

Neatly making this issue the next PMs problem. Never one to stick around and pick up the pieces, our Bozza, or to answer awkward questions. Contrast BoJo’s apparent inspiration, who had the cojones to front up the cost of war in his first address to Parliament

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

while observing sotto voce to his generals

Poor people, poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.

Not quite the same as have your cake and eat it, eh? Sometimes you do have to experience privation to defend something more important, but Putin isn’t shit for brains, and he is no doubt counting on resolve withering somewhat. General Winter has fought on the Russian side before, against Napoleon and Hitler, and now Putin is hoping he will fight against the decadent and softness of the West, even if they aren’t physically marching on Moscow. I don’t really know where I’d place my bets.

Given the level of inflation I am happy to take my chances in the stock markets on energy to defray the extra costs, though I am glad I made most of my push before July, I’m not able to work out if the bonkers mini-rally is in fact the £ falling down the toilet or the return of irrational exuberance. Perhaps it is the froth blowing off the top before the monster that has been rising from the deep finally breaks the surface.

You can do something about this

You could join the Don’t Pay campaign.

We are a movement against the rise in energy bills

Yeah, I take a principled position against poverty, war, dogshit in cities, and all sorts of things I don’t like. Doesn’t mean to say they don’t happen. You may as well be against the sun rising. Magical thinking at it’s best. Martin Lewis doesn’t officially approve.

Readers of this probably have too much to lose with don’t pay. It is surprising to me that suppliers are obligated not to pull the plug on non-payers, previous generations didn’t have such scruples 😉 However, they can send the heavies round.

More practically, you can try and use less. This is another example of the Sam Vimes Boots theory of socieoconomics, because the options open to homeowners, including those who don’t actually own their house but have a mortgage, are far wider than those who rent.

I managed to reduce my electricity consumption by 20%, and given the loading on electricity that punches well above its weight. It’s the financial equivalent of reducing gas consumption by ~40%, which would be a very noticeable detriment to lifestyle in winter and much harder to do.

The big picture

Most of the wins in domestic settings are to do with anything that is designed to change temperature. If you run an industrial process involving big changes in temperature, like a bakery or a cement works, then you are out of luck, because your product is about to get a lot dearer into a market that has less disposable income and you aren’t protected by the energy cap. I have no idea what to do about that, but at home you have options.

In general drive down waste before making any capex. In the UK that means loft insulation and draughtproofing. The good news is that the materials are relatively cheap and this is an entirely unskilled DIY job that any reasonably able person can do. It’s an unpleasant job – fibreglass insulation is irritating to handle and work with, though it has the advantage of not catching fire and apparently not being particularly attractive as rat nesting material. You can use other materials, mainly made out of plastic, but remember a lot of wiring is up there and plastic fumes are nasty 😉 This used to be subsidised, I recall paying less than £2 a 5m roll when I last did that job in the old house, but these days it looks like B&Q will hit you up for £25 a roll, which bites. It’s not the greatest fun you will have of a weekend, but apart from a large crawlboard and a big pair of scissors there’s no specialised equipment or hard to learn skills. JFDI

If you have cavity walls and for some bizarre reason there is no insulation in the cavity then that’s the next step, though it is a professional job it will pay a return in a reasonable time. Double glazing which also addresses most draughtproofing is another professional install that has a reasonable payback, after that you are in the wilderness, because insulation gets difficult for solid walls, it’s probably easier to move 😉

The next thing to understand is that the unit price on electricity is much higher than that of gas. So focus on anything that reduces electricity consumption, and favour heating with gas. If you heat with gas, you will use more energy in kWh, because heating is the biggest annualised load, but you may pay more for electricity. As an example, over the last year I used half the energy kWh in electricity as I did in the kWh form of gas, but paid twice as much for that electricity, near enough. Before Putin’s antics I investigated the feasibility of generating electrical power with gas as well as considering changing over to cooking with gas, basically to cut off the government-attached hangers-on. I concluded the risk wasn’t worth the reward, but it would have paid back in the medium term, given the boundary conditions at the time 😉 The antithesis of that is, of course, the heat pump, which does a heating job using electricity that can perfectly well be done with gas.

Heat pumps? Eh?

In order to save 75% of electricity energy that costs three times as much you get to make a big capital expenditure and change your radiators. On the upside, in some rare cases¹ you may get air conditioning, and of course the warm fuzzy feeling of being a greenie doing your bit. On the downside, that 75% efficiency doesn’t hold at the coldest time, you’re paying three times as much for the energy and you are potentially carrying a lot of poor people’s bills on your back. I could see the sense if you used bottle gas or oil for heating, but against mains gas this sucks. Electricity is a highly concentrated form of energy and is best used for what it does well.

I struggle to see heating as falling into that category, in a country that generates a third of its electricity using gas, losing 50% (roughly estimated from the heat -> mechanical power of the steam turbine and distribution losses) of the calorific value in the process it seems a little bit mad, though I can see that some things may make sense in where we want to be in future. But don’t be an early adopter unless you have a specific reason to carry the baggage. Not all countries have this disparate taxation in electricity and gas costs, a heat pump may be a perfectly reasonable proposition under a different cost regime or generation mix. If you don’t believe me, take a look at what Her Majesty’s Government have to say under five reasons to get a heat pump

Moving to a heat pump means you can avoid the volatile prices associated with gas and oil. If you are using oil, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) or electric heating, you could see a reduction to your energy bill if you move to a heat pump.

They are very careful to avoid saying you can save running costs compared to mains gas, because it’s not true in the UK 😉

There is one specific exception to heat with gas. Even if you have a gas cooker, use an electric kettle for your tea, because the close coupling of the heating element with the water, and, with a glass or plastic electric kettle, the better insulation, all tend to beat out the losses to the air, heating up the metal gas kettle notwithstanding the gas energy cost advantage of a third of electricity.

An Ermine’s journey to reducing electricity consumption

It’s a little bit embarrassing² that the inspiration for this, other than high electricity prices, is an American. OVO energy have a listing of average household usage across selected countries³.

Not everybody in the US is that profligate. Mr Money Mustache has got his power drain down to 300kWh a month, which is about the same as mine, though I note he doesn’t mention cooking, and the furnace blower (as opposed to the furnace⁴ itself) as an itemised load implies to me that he heats with something other than electricity; if it’s gas I presume he cooks with that rather than electricity. In a followup in 2015, MMM says he used 2MWh over 15 months, coming out at 133 kWh pcm. That is less than half my power drain, and a serious source of embarrassment to the Ermine fur. It should be noted that I cook with electricity, so some of the difference is due to that.

MMM’s followup is more succinct than this ramble. This is more a walk-through of my journey, which may help walk some folk through what you need to do. Go to MMM for the short-form version 😉 I worked as an electronics engineer for a couple of decades before moving to IT. Although electrical engineering is a different discipline, the electronics background has many of the concepts in common. Everybody’s energy usage is different, but so far I managed to reduce my electricity usage by 20%, and I haven’t finished the job yet.

You have to be able to see what you are doing – knowledge is power

I commissioned an efergy engage whole house system, reusing some components from my old Efergy elite monitor⁵, that died of causes unknown but wasn’t obviously fixable when I took it apart.

I loathe software as a service and subscriptions with a vengeance, but sucked it up in this case because the price of entry is the hardware rather than a subscription, and in the end this is a service I can live without OK if efergy does bust or decide to do a hive. Some folk will say why not just take a smart meter, but with my old-skool rotating disc meter they will have to bash on the door and look me in the eye to cut me off, rather than some oik in a call centre going clickety-clack. That’s worth paying £70 to do the smart monitoring job myself. If they teach me how to save £70 worth of power by the time Efergy goes titsup then I am in the black, power saving is a gift that keeps on giving. If you do have a smart meter, knock yourself out and save £70 if it offers you the charting thing with a resolution down to 1 minute.

Go for the big wins first – anything that heats

I installed Efergy early in March. And got to see this

The second ratty lump at 6pm around 2.5kW is roasting a chicken in the old electric cooker. But look at the shower hit in the morning, oy vey. Now this sort of monitor needs to have a decent time resolution, arguably that was something the old Efergy Elite Adobe Air software didn’t offer. A stupendous load of 10kW needs a finer time resolution than the oven at 2.5kW, because it matters four times as much. In many ways the summarised kWh split by hour display is more useful to me.

Same thing, aggregated into hourly boxcars by kWh

Which shows the shower takes about 2.1kWh, whereas the roast chicken takes 4.78kWh. The difference is, however, that we roast a chicken once a week, not every day. Having the oven on at 200 for an hour and a half is a shade over twice as much energy consumption⁶ as the shower. And it’s pretty obvious that roasting a chicken is going to take a shedload of power, because the kitchen gets warmer. In March that’s not such a terrible thing, though in a July heatwave not so much. So guess what, we didn’t use the oven in the heatwave. Simples.

I switched back to the gravity-fed shower, heated by gas. This will mean using a little more gas, particularly as I don’t have an instant-on boiler.

energy usage in monthly boxcars

March is a little bit short (because Efergy wasn’t tracking through the whole month) but April is representative of previous months on the old Efergy system, so pulling the shower saves me 26 kWh a month. Assuming this holds across the year that is £88 (at 0.283 p/kWh), which isn’t bad for an hour’s work with a spanner and a capex of 50 sods for a new showerhead and hose. The cost recovery time will be shorter if the price cap raises electricity prices again at the end of this month, which seems to be expected. It will be offset by the gas consumption going up a little. I will look for that on a year on year basis.

The next upgrade was to get a modern cooker with an induction hob, rather than this old-skool sort of hob element.

the sort of previous hob elements

Photo copied off some auction site, it’s not my old cooker. You need to book a temperature change two minutes before wanting it, usability sucks.

Mrs Ermine uses an antediluvian piece of kit called a Moka pot that makes coffee which can do double duty as battery acid, and this involved heating up the old hob and filling the chamber with boiling water from the kettle, then waiting for it all to rise with a menacing sound. A barbarian way of making really harsh coffee IMO, but each to their own.

Mrs Ermine’s Moka pot

The classic Italian Moka pot design is an aluminium casting which isn’t going to work on an induction hob but Mrs Ermine had a purge on aluminium cooking equipment a few years ago, so her Moka pot was induction capable from the get go.

Efergy told me in early April with the old cooker doing this with kettle plus hob rocks in at about 1kWh, though I should knock off the static load which was 0.28kWh just before. That now shows at maybe 0.6, less again nearly .3 static. There’s no need to boil the kettle first, and overall the coffee happens much faster, as the induction hob heats the metal in this thing directly. The same applies with pretty much everything – the power control on an induction hob is much closer to the response time of gas. Usability is greater, and efficiency improved, because you don’t have to heat up a great big lump of steel hotplate. The induction process heats the pan, standing on a ceramic insulating surface, so the lag is the same as gas, which also heats the pan in an insulating medium (air).

How does that do with the chicken? This is an electric fan oven, but it is the same basic tech as the old cooker – resistive elements in some ceramic thing on the sides and a blower fan to circulate the air. However, in an electric oven you can gain efficiency by sealing the container better.

Comparing this against the old oven, bearing in mind it looks more dramatic because the mahoosive heave-ho of the shower is absent in the morning and the chart auto scales, there’s more wait in the heat up, wait, heat, wait, heat. The peaks after 19:00 are the dishwasher. Apart from the peak load being lower, looking at the corresponding hour block chart the total used to roast a chicken is 2.44kWh, half the previous amount and a shade over the erstwhile shower. This isn’t surprising, since the kitchen gets less warm, and indeed when you open up the oven to baste the chicken or finish up, you get a serious faceful of uncomfortably hot air that steams up your glasses, and I have become used to opening the door and leaning away to let that rise. This translates to more efficiency through not letting the heat out into the kitchen for most of the 90 minutes or so.

A gas oven can’t do that, or at least no domestic gas oven I have seen. That’s because there is a burner in the back and you can’t starve that of oxygen and recirculate the hot air, so by definition there has to be a steady leak. Apparently you do get fan-assisted gas ovens, but for most domestic usage a gas fan oven is a gas hob with an electric fan oven unless you go seriously upmarket. I did consider switching to gas for the cooker, which I did in the previous house, but it would have needed some awkward civil works. If we had redone the kitchen that may have been the way to go, but that’s a big outlay. An induction hob is a much better way of doing the hob thing electrically that the old style hotplates IMO. But yeah, in an ideal world, don’t heat with electricity. The Guardian, in their usual hissy fit about air quality have a down of cooking with gas, but I confess I didn’t notice the difference in the last house. The Ermine presumably has a coarse constitution about this sort of thing, whereas Guardianistas are delicate vegans who get a fit of the vapours when Tesco waxes their lemons, so I will treat their prognostications with skepticism.

Then start to hit things that cool

Fridges have improved over the years, and it’s easy to wreck them through cack-handed defrosting, in a previous version of this movie, I had a Zanussi fridge freezer that consumed more than 4kWh/day. A fridge freezer shouldn’t do that. I think I knackered the thermostat defrosting the ice with a blunt knife, so that’s not Zanussi’s fault. Commenter Jam had this problem too, though in all fairness that freezer was 31 years old so it doesn’t owe them anything, nor were knives misused as far as I know – they can just get ratty of old age.

The replacement is still in service, though the magnetic seal lost its potency over time. A bunch of 1mm thin neodymium flat magnets from your favourite auction house can fix that for you.

Neodymium magnets fix a weak fridge seal

Don’t use too many, about five or six will do, else you will unseal the other side of the magnetic strip that should remain attached to the door. Geeks can get suitable magnets from the actuator of old hard drives. I have tested its power consumption and it isn’t anything untoward.

Into the long grass – background power drain

These are the big wins, the next target is background power drain. Success is probably easier for adults than for a house full of children. In the past I have used standalone energy monitors, but they are tiresome to work with, and certainly the ones I have used were particularly poor at low power drains, which makes it hard to see what you are doing. Many modern devices have a time varying power drain, pulse charging batteries for instance. I suspect older meters didn’t sample loads often enough meaning you miss useful detail.

Brennenstuhl power meter

They are also poor at low power drains with a bad power factor, like lightly loaded transformers and induction motors – domestic customers aren’t charged for poor power factor, only real power used. These tend to over-read with a bad power factor. I was somewhat cynical about the value of chasing low power drains, until I did the arithmetic. David MacKay is on the money when it comes to power generation – every BIG helps, which is why I am cynical about microgeneration, unless you really are off grid. When if comes to the power load in your house, however, it’s not just the whoppers that matter. The vampires add up because they are small but numerous and they keep coming night and day.

Take the electric shower that incensed me so much in March. You are charged for energy, not power, so a static load of 2100/24 = 88W drawn all the time would be just as bad as the shower’s 2.1kWh a day. Turns out that getting rid of 88W of background load is hard. Canning the electric shower was easy – an hour with a spanner and job done. Arguably the cooker will also save me a fair amount of power, though that’s hard to quantify, except in the case of the chicken, but I suspect the bigger saving will be in the hob. Again, that’s simply the question of finding the £700 and getting someone to install. The next savings are tough, because of the sly and diffuse nature of the enemy.

A thousand cuts – the myriad of small gadgets and gizmos

Modern houses contain far more electronic doodads than your grandparents’ house did, ever since China started making lots of handy this and thats at low prices. At the same time you started to get soft switches appearing, to save money. These didn’t isolate the incoming mains, but switched the low voltage side of the equipment leaving the power supply connected and wasting some power. Soon after that, the power supply migrated out of the equipment box into wall warts made by generic manufacturers, which saved the equipment maker all the mains safety testing and UL certification by outsourcing it. The problem, however, is there’s no economic way the power switch on the gizmo can switch off⁷ mains power at the wall wart, so it’s on all the time, even if the load is in standby. Centrica recently claimed you could nut a fifth or more of your power usage by canning these vampire loads. There was some pushback on Centrica’s assertion of the possible win, because of the EU. Centrica had used an American study.

One of the things that the terrible EUSSR did when Britannia was chained under its oppressive yoke was mandate some energy efficiency standards, including that functionally switched off electronic gizmos draw no more than 1W⁸. Clearly energy efficiency is a terrible thing, and these directives caused upset in Blighty because we are hard men and want to spaff energy as much as we like, because it makes us feel all macho inside. Energy efficiency is only something milquetoast Remainiacs worry about, Real Men drive V8s and if they deign to run a vacuum cleaner, they bloody well want them to draw more than 1.6kW,⁹ because, well, more power, mo ‘betta.

Getting the parasitic background load of one of these wall wart power supplies to less than 1W is a remarkable achievement, and wouldn’t have happened without such dirigisme. I have noticed that more recent ones do get less warm on and off load, so those Eurocrats seems to be doing something right. I will scrap some of the older though functional ones. One of the devices I pulled was a small transformer for a long deceased Numark DJ mixer, doing ‘owt.

Numark mixer wall wart, doing nothing for half an hour, up to 41C on a roughly 23C ambient

Vampire loads are tough to get under control

There are a lot of them, none is that huge, and let’s hope that you got these electronic doodads because they do something useful for you. If not, well, listen to MMM on the subject of video game consoles and toss the sucker out.

The first weapon in the fight against these is the overall switched power strip/dis board.

Overall switched distribution board/power strip, your ally in the fight against vampire loads, better than garlic and a wooden stake

There’s much to be said for the humble switched dis board. You get ones with individual switches and ones like this which pulls the lot with one switch. Each have their uses. I have an individually switched one for the chargers, because you don’t usually want to charge all of the things all of the time. But the Ermine award for power saving excellence goes to the one switch to rule ’em all type. The advantage of the one switch is that you can isolate all downstream gubbins with that one switch. UK socket outlets often have a switch, but bizarrely, unlike Europeans or Americans who tend to put outlets at waist height, we put them down near the floor in easy reach of toddlers so they can poke things in without standing on a chair, which means adults have to bend down to switch ’em off. I am with Technology Connections here, the socket switch isn’t that useful in practice. Nudge theory says you need to make this easy as pie, so get the switch at hand level and in yer face, like on a power strip on top of the computer table. The advantage of using a switched power strip is a lot of nasty static load is IT gear, and it’s tiresome to switch off 10 things. Ice the lot at once.

For my computer I have a dis board that senses when the computer is on, only bringing up the other sockets with the monitor, audio system and USB hard drives when the main unit is drawing power¹⁰. That works OK for me in that position, but elsewhere I use the standalone switched power strip/dis board. For instance in the lab the light, the soldering iron, the audio gear and the radio are all on one switched dis board. If I’m not there, I don’t need any of this gear, so throwing the switch means no static drain from any of it. If the light is still on, that’s a handy reminder I have forgotten to switch it all off. I fit a 5A fuse in the plug on the power strip cable that goes into the wall socket, because I take the line that if IT gear is drawing > 1kW then some part of it is on fire, I’m not mining bitcoins. If it’s on fire, I don’t mind an unscheduled shutdown 😉

When I was at work, plugging dis boards into other dis boards was frowned on, you got a serious bollocking from the safety office for doing that. The reason is that the accumulated fanout load could end up more than 13A. But if the first in line fuse is 5A, and the plug is labelled as such, I don’t see there is a problem¹¹, and IT gear tends towards dis boards off dis boards because you never have enough sockets.

I’m not a fan of smart power strips or mains sockets with USB outlets. The trick to getting vampire loads down is to be intentional, if you want a USB 5V power supply then plug one in where you want it rather than put 20 of ’em of random quality around your house drawing vampire power all the time, to mitigate the terrible problem that you might have to get off your butt and find the charger where you last left it. Seriously, just how hard is it to find a USB charger and plug it in the wall? They also make it slightly more of a pain in the arse for your electrician to do an insulation test. You’re also making yourself a hostage to fortune¹², because you change your mains sockets a lot less often than they change the USB power delivery standard, leaving you stuck on overnight charging when the new kids on the block charge their phones in fifteen minutes. You can get power strips with USB charging ports, but really, just how hard is it to plug a USB charger into one of the sockets FFS? There’s much to be said for the Unix philosophy in this area. Do one thing and do it well. I know the smartphone has made us favour the jack of all trades and master of none philosophy, but USB chargers belong in the socket, not next to the socket IMO.

Similarly with smart power strips, an honest old-skool mechanical switch will definitely isolate all the downstream crap and not add a vampire load. However, I do see the point of wifi remote control sometimes, and once again, DOTADIW. Somebody recently introduced me to this fine Chinese product.

Wifi remote switch/power meter (amazon link)

Which converts any dumb power strip into a smart one. You still don’t need more than two or three of these in any one house, because the solution to vampire loads isn’t to add loads more of them, but they have their uses.

Ignoring the Alexa connected home side of things, and acknowledging that this has the same problem as Efergy engage in that it is a data leak even without Alexa on the job, what these things seem to also be good at is measuring low power drains reasonably accurately and reasonably often. Reasonable – the manual is silent on accuracy, probably being +/- 50% at < 5W and reasonably often being twice a second or so, presenting the result via wifi to an android app. You don’t get a chart like Efergy. Yeah, I know, a violation of DOTADIW. There’s a smartphone involved. These things pollute everything with their filthy Jack of all-trades mentality.

Screen on

and screen off. I had to be snappy about opening the flap and getting this picture before the next sampling period, which was tough

It is sensitive enough to spot the power drain of my tablet through a charger and some other odds and sods. That goes up from 4W with the flap closed and display off to 6W with the screen on, but it also integrates the power drain, and the app shows you the cumulative power used over a day as well as the current power consumption. It is not sensitive enough to tell me how much that wall wart was drawing that got up to 41C, but an unloaded transformer is probably very inductive so the power factor was likely crap.

You can set timers, and there is a switch on the side to override them. It will use some power itself, natch. This is where I am grateful to the Eurocrats who saddled us all with this damned energy efficiency claptrap, because it uses a bistable relay¹³ and doesn’t get warm, on a package like that I conclude it probably uses less than 2W, I can’t see it on an old-skool power monitor. Unlike your mechanical timer, it sets the clock from the Internet with NTP, so it handles power cuts with aplomb¹⁴ if you set it to come back on the last state.

I chased a few other static loads, and turned off the hifi and Humax Foxsat PVR, still in service after 10 years, barring the hiatus when I didn’t have a TV licence. Turning that off is a bad move if I am going to record something, but that’s not so often, so I can accept the slight grunt of waiting for it to power up.

Efergy Engage has the resolution to show you how you are doing, but the SmartHome gizmo and power meters helps zero in on them. I have one smarthome thing in the lab in the garage and another in the Ermine den. The one in the lab lets me pull the soldering iron if I have left the bugger on, as well as monitoring general load, the one in the den I use to charge all my gizmos, and that is set to a timer 8-11, so nothing is charged when I am asleep. Which is cool.

TV tribulations

Something that caught me out was my Philips TV, which is recent enough to have been restrained by those pusillanimous Eurocrats with their pesky power-saving poncey proposals. And yet this dang thing was drawing 17W on standby, which is half of the power I had saved by retiring stacks of wall-warts consolidating them onto my CCTV power supply of which more later. WTAF?

I suppose the TV knows it is in the UK, so it may have switched onto the national preference that we are Real Men who don’t giveashit about namby-pamby power saving, so it has shunted a resistor across the mains input to reward us for Taking Back Control and being able to waste power without interference from Brussels. I went into the setup menu and selected ECO settings to max, which was off before. I suspect this impairs the picture to reduce power usage, or perhaps to fudge figures on test in a dieselgate sort of thing. I only use this a couple of times a week, and I don’t really give a toss if it uses 100w or 200W, or what the hell, go full Jeremy Clarkson/Daily Fail and draw 500W for all I care, a movie is only two hours long! What I would like eco mode to do is reduce the power drain while I am not using it, preferably to Eurocrat <1W standards, as I must admit, I simply assumed was the case. Surely the manual was not speaking with forked tongue when it quoth this

consumes very little, eh? We’ll see about that. Trust but verify fail on my part

Which is somewhat at variance with this

Brennenstuhl say Mr Philips’ Piotr speak with forked tongue. This TV is has been on standby, max ECO mode for three hours now, and the firmware is up to date

If that is true, then my assumption that this TV was drawing Eurocrat-mandated <1W in standby has cost me £40 over two years at historical power rates. That’s not a lot of money, but it’s a needless waste.

Geek Alert. Electricity is dangerous. It can kill you¹⁵. You shouldn’t really let it into the house. Be very afraid. It can make your children grow two heads. Take off rings, watches and jewellery. Keep one hand in your pocket. Wear rubber boots. Leave anything to do with exposed mains terminals to a qualified electrician. You will know if you are qualified because it will have cost you a load of money to get your sparky ticket. Do not do this at home. Lock up the dog in another room, send the kids to Grandma’s and put the cat out. I am not recommending you do anything like this. Do as I say, not do as I do.

OTOH the ermine has been messing around with electricity including mains since I was 7 (surreptitiously when I was an ankle biter, though my Grandad showing me how to a modify a mains gizmo started the rot). And since you’re reading this, I survived the dodgy practices and learned something. But really, don’t do this at home 😉 For the record, I am a chartered engineer, not a qualified electrician, so really, don’t listen to me, particularly if you are thinking of inviting m’learned friends if the electricity you let into your house kills you doing anything like I did. Geddit? I am NOT a qualified electrician so I know jack shit, it’s a wonder I survived to retirement age 😉

It’s possible Brennenstuhl is lying to me and Philips is really sipping < 1W power as Brussels ordered them to, and for some reason Brennenstuhl is getting confuzzled. I first tried a Fluke current clamp meter attachment, but this is designed for 20A full-scale, which would be 4.8kW before the fuse failed. I am looking for a signal 1/200th of that, and couldn’t see anything useful, advantage Philips. I have multimeter envy on MMM’s clamp meter, which is no longer to be had, although you can get a noname equivalent for £12. What you have to ask yourself, however, is given the one CPC sells for this usage is £50, whether you can rely on the results. MMM has an easier task because American 110V systems mean currents are twice as large for a given power. The trouble with current measurement is you have to break the circuit or at least get a loop of just live or neutral for a clamp meter. Which isn’t helpful chasing small vampire loads, so I chose to break the circuit. The whole reason you buy a power meter like the Brennenstuhl PM230 I used is so you can break the circuit in a relatively safe way. But I need a second opinion. Here be dragons, read the geek alert, don’t try this at home…

So I broke out the series lamp limiter. This is a trick from your grandfather’s TV repairman’s days – back when we used to fix TVs when they broke rather than throw them away. In a TV repair shop, a commonly encountered fault was sets going short due to the main smoothing caps going phut, which blew the fuse or set the workshop on fire, which jarred the boss off. A series lamp limiter stops that. If the lamp lights brightly, the set is a short. I used this because my DMM is only rated at 3A, and TVs tend to have a heavy inrush current for a few seconds, nowadays from the switchmode power supply rather than degaussing the CRT. As indeed was confirmed with this TV, where the lamp lit medium, flashed five times then glowed dull orange and Brennenstuhl reckoned it was drawing 30W, dropping after a minute to 19W, at which point I was unable to see any glow from the lamp. I measured the AC current directly, because the fuse in UK plugs makes that easy to get at, obviously provided you have taken the precautions regarding locking up the dog, kids and cat in another room, and are prepared to poke things into mains sockets like your parents told you not to. The trick here is to use a dis board as the socket, and only plug it into the mains after you have finished setup and poking into places you ought not to. A nightlight on the power strip to remind you this thing is hot would be a nice touch.

do NOT do this. Anyway, the TV is drawing 63.5mA after a few minutes. In standby. Advantage Brennenstuhl This is an UNSAFE way to use mains power!

I left this lot to stew for a quarter of an hour, so that nice Mr Philips’s control computer thinks to itself this TV has been off for 15 minutes, I am instructed to go FULL ECO mode, let’s go – power down all the things. Brennenstuhl now tells me I am running 15.5W and the DMM tells me I am drawing 63.6mA, which as any A-level physics student kno means P=I x V so 15.3 W in my case. Advantage Brennenstuhl¹⁶, epic fail Philips. It is possible current is out of phase with voltage, for instance if there were one of these bad boys across the mains, in which case I wouldn’t be charged for that 63mA, but I recall those damned Eurocrats had something to say about requiring power factor/harmonic correction in switched mode power supplies > 75W. If this thing is really drawing a Eurocratic 1W and pulling 19VA then it has a power factor of 0.07 which is a bit shit.

I’m at least an order of magnitude off where this should be. I have no idea if Philips chose to whistle a dancing tune and just sign¹⁷ that they met EU regulations or if there is a fault here, which does not manifest itself in any other function of the TV or even an honest burning smell, but ECO mode saves me ‘owt of the vampire drain, so I will switch it back off in case it impairs the picture when the set is running. What to do, eh, a static load of 15W costs me £37 a year at current prices and is about 131kWh, the equivalent of a horse on a treadmill running flat out 24/7 for a week. I don’t get anything for that money, I’d rather spend it on red wine. The Carbon Trust tells us the UK grid electricity runs at 0.233kgCO2e/kWh so this is a needless 31kg of CO2 discharged. While I don’t feel strongly about this it’s a little bit rude to do that for no good reason.

I know. You shouldn’t, but it’s such an elegant fix to the dismal failure of Philips to fit a proper power switch

I can’t exactly work out how this fine Chinese gizmo made in Shenzen contravenes the IET Wiring regulations BS7671, but the fact ISO9001 suppliers like Farnell don’t sell something that useful implies something is considered dodgy. There seems to be danger money in companies associated with Brits flogging these things for £21 rather than £6. But you can’t argue with the power of a mechanical switch. So I got them to put two of them on the slow boat from China for me.

I wish I’d known this before putting the cable in trunking, because I would have put the inline switch in myself, but I can’t face pulling that out now.

The scrag end – the background load problem

Scraping the bottom of the barrel, I asked what is the background load, ie when we are on holiday? Sometime, soon after I got Efergy engage in March, this was the story.

Static load about 250w. After isolating a bunch of parasitic loads I got it down to

Static load about 150-200W.

Easier to take the daily energy use qualifying chart

Where I am running about 3.77 kWh background load a day. At 28.41p /kWh engage displays the cost at about £1.10 a day for electricity. Tragically, that’s not the whole story. I have to carry the load of bailing out all those Bulb customers and their ilk who played the game on cheap power tariffs and found their suppliers went titsup when as Warren Buffett would say, the tide went out and they were swimming naked. They should have lost their direct debit outstanding amounts, lined up at the back of the queue like other creditors and started again Hello World on the standard variable rate or whatever some other firm would give them. That’s the normal answer when a private company goes bust – the customers get to line up at the back of the creditors’ queue and lose their money. That’s the free market for you. Ain’t capitalism’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost a beautiful thing? No? Somehow we have ended up with a bastard child of the free market running off with the profits and dumping the losses on the taxpayer. See water for another worked example. Well done us.

Plus all the green crap, to subsidise middle class punters ¹⁸ to stick solar panels on their roof to tell their kids they’re all right and saving the planet. That is 51p per day, so half the cost of my deadweight power usage, so I am getting into the long grass of diminishing returns here.

The oddball chuntering you see in the static load is the fridge freezer cutting in and out intermingled with the freezer (a separate box) tripping in and out, and from 8 to 9 the heating pump coming on to heat the water (with the gas boiler, which isn’t shown here in kWh). It’s tiresome to live without refrigeration, so some of this I have to suck up.

There appears to be about 150W of load underneath all that, I am still thinking about whether I can pull more of that. The obvious way to reduce is to turn some of these off, but I start to get more inconvenience for that.

I suspect this is IT gear – I have a 24-way network switch, a Synology NAS, a couple of Raspberry Pi servers and other odds and sods. I can probably shut down some of this clobber for 8 hours a day, which could drop my aggregate static load by 50W. I have three Raspberry Pi servers – one is a sensor network, one a radio APRS decoder and one is a music server, which also uses a Synology NAS. I am beginning to warm to the idea of the humble CD, which you can switch on when you want to play it, as opposed to eating a 24/7 load, because running a server-based system can easily eat a good part of the 88W standing load. I’m not doing Spotify or anything using a mobile phone, because I don’t do ads, I don’t do lossy compression and I don’t do subscriptions. However, the common file storage on the LAN and being able to locally encrypt before using cloud backup keeps that NAS worth having for now.

One way to reduce that background without losing functionality – consolidate power supplies.

Any wall wart consumes some deadweight power running itself, as well as some losses proportional to power delivered. These days most gadgets settle on DC power supplies of 12V and 5V, though there are many exceptions. Most DC barrel plugs are 5.5 by 2.1mm or 2.5mm, again with exceptions¹⁹, and the great majority but not all are wired with the centre pin +ve. In an ideal world we would have settled on 2.5mm for 5V and 2.1 for 12V because you can’t plug a 2.1mm DC barrel plug (which is sort of female…) into a 2.5 mm socket (which is sort of male…) and the insulation on the end has some chance of keeping the +12v out of the appliance. But it didn’t happen that way. I managed to wreck a 3V battery charger putting 12V into it, but otherwise I have avoided grief here.

With 12V you can get a CCTV power supply, which in my case provides nine 12V outlets each limited to 2A, and I have done what this fellow did, for much the same reasons. Mine came with the IEC socket, and uses PTC current limiting rather than fuses, but does the same job as his. 2A is enough for most IT gadgets, where 1A isn’t, the BT HomeHub wall wart is rated at 1.5A for instance. My CCTV supply runs the Synology NAS, a few sensors, a network switch and a CCTV DVR and some cameras, along with the broadband hub. The previous incarnation was an array of wall-warts.

Wall-wart power supply information panel

You can read the specs here – the figure circled in yellow is the output voltage, which MUST MATCH for any items you are going to share off one power unit. This is 12V, so I can power this BT Home Hub off the 12V CCTV power supply.  If you are in any doubt whatsoever, don’t share the gizmo or power supply, as using the wrong voltage or polarity can wreck the gadget, and overloading a wall wart can cause serious problems since the scummy cheap end often doesn’t have overload protection.

One of the pros of the CCTV power supply is the overload protection on each barrel outlet, so if the 12V gizmo does fail short, the CCTV supply won’t try and set the gadget or itself on fire gamely trying to maintain 12V in the face of overwhelming odds.

The horizontal bar with a dotted line underneath like a dodgy = sign tells you this is a DC output, if it is a twiddle ~ then it is AC and cannot be substituted or shared. These are rare nowadays because the Eurocrats banned the tech with their 1W standby requirements. The figure circled in red is the maximum output current, which may be either in A or, like in this case in mA, in which case divide by 1000 to get 1.5A. You can power the attached device with a power supply offering more A, but not less – this is how I know my 2A output CCTV power supply connection can run this, and that a 1A CCTV PSU would probably not.

Finally the symbol circled in green tells you the DC barrel connector polarity is wired with positive to the centre, which is the most common. If this is the other way round, DO NOT SHARE that supply or the attached gadget with anything else. Voltage and polarity you can easily measure with a digital multimeter which Amazon will sell you for less than a tenner.

You can do similar with USB chargers – a 6-way charger with six things in it will usually draw less power than six individual USB chargers. A six-way with one thing it it will normally draw more than a single-outlet charger, so you need to colocate these USB loads to get the most use of it. You can also get splitter leads that break out one USB outlet to two devices, though watch these with mobile phones and tablets with USB OtG ports, else when you turn the charger off you can find your mobile phone powering the other device and running the phone battery down. A multiport charger shouldn’t do that between its ports, even when off.

It’s a hard slog getting anywhere with this, but it did save me 40W which is 350 kWh p.a. This is only £98 a year saved, but there is the added benefit of reducing the fire hazard of the array of plug in supplies. The CCTV power supply is a frame power supply inside a metal box and with a local fuse appropriate to the power supply. I have had a few wall warts fail in service, generally they failed open circuit rather than catch fire, but the quality of these low-end Chinese products is variable. I retired this little lot.

Warty warty – one supply to rule ’em all. Not all these are 12V, I had a few old ones before the exercise

Chasing vampire loads is tough – by far the most effort and time in this operation has gone into the tail end of the power drain, probably less that 80W static in total. It gets harder and harder as you go down the rabbit hole, because the background noise of the fridge/freezer cutting in and out gets more distracting. It’s best to do this when nobody else is in the house, because the loads should be lower, and you aren’t going to get earache for pulling the broadband. My ultimate aim is to get my background load (excluding refrigeration) down to 100W. That will cost me £250 a year at current rates, but to be honest, it’s nice having broadband all the time, share files and have the music on the NAS and interesting to monitor the sensor networks and the APRS amateur radio stuff, so I will suck up the cost. It’s OK to pay for something if I have asked myself the question is this worth it, it’s the casual useless drain like the electric shower and the Philips TV standby that needed to get chased out.

overnight consumption now has a background minimum of 130W

The cooling loads are superimposed on that 130W minimum bringing the lot up to about 150W. There’s still an opportunity to hit more of this, but I am running out of easy targets and out of the 80:20 zone.

My 12-year skint younger self fought down a static power drain of about 6MWh pa down to 3MWh pa. My original drain this year was ~4.3MWh and it is now down to 3.9MWh annualised, but I haven’t captured a month’s data after having shot some of the static power drain recently. The Ipswich house had a lower electricity usage because cooking was entirely gas, whereas here it is entirely electric. For a baseline, OVO energy tell me bungalows and detached houses draw about 4.1MWh pa on average. So I have managed to shift myself from being a slight power hog to being a teeny bit of a greenie relative to my peers. The difference of 400 kWh pa is about £113 at current electricity rates, useful, but not earth-shattering. I haven’t quite finished the fight yet, however.

OVO show how the UK compares internationally. The USA is the 600lb gorilla in power drain after Saudi Arabia, which is an outlier probably generating power using flares from the abundant oil 😉 Slate magazine were left scratching their heads about why Europeans don’t touch air conditioning domestically

Just one in 10 households in Europe has A/C, far below the rates in China, Japan, or the United States, where 90 percent of households have a cooling system. Why have some of the world’s wealthiest countries been so slow to adopt hot-weather climate control? It’s a question that’s top of mind once again as another heat wave bakes Western Europe this week.

Summat to do with a less hostile climate – most of Western Europe is closer to the sea and at a higher latitude that America’s aircon aficionados, though God knows what people south of the Mason-Dixon line do in summer, become snowbirds I guess. At least LA is a dessicating dry heat, I have never been anywhere near summer in Florida, which is close to my idea of hell. I once landed in LAX, getting there about 10pm in July. Being a thirty-something cheapskate I had booked a cheap motel. In the 1990s a lot of US aircon was domestically produced by the likes of General Electric, and these crude behemoths made a stupendous racket compared to the Japanese kit I’ve seen in the States more recently.

I got into bed and thought I can’t get to sleep with this earache, so I turned the bugger off. An hour and a half later I wake up sweating like a pig and think to myself I will take the earache and no sleep over being roasted in a slow cooker. For sure, the recent UK heatwaves were nasty, but they were nothing like LA in July, and there, Mr Slate, is your answer – less need, and also much higher electricity prices. Plus at the moment that fact that Vladimir Putin has his hands round Western Europe’s nutsack as far as power prices are concerned. It’s more important to us to use the limited gas reserves to heat in winter than cool in summer.

Do your bit for the war effort, the environment and your wallet. Flay wasted power like you flay fees on your index funds.

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1. I think to get aircon out of a heat pump you have to make like an American and use forced air heating (and therefore cooling) in an air to air heat pump which is extremely rare in the UK – I have never seen a domestic forced air heating system in the UK though they are common as muck in the States. For a small flat they are fine or a new build where you can accommodate ducting the EST says The ducts used by installers are designed to allow large volumes of air to be moved around the house through pipes that are slim enough to be hidden inside the ceiling voids. All that is visible inside each room is two grills mounted in the ceiling, one for flow in and one for flow out of the room. You ain’t gonna retrofit that to your Barratt house. So in practice the aircon capability of a heat pump is a chimera for Brits unless you live in a flat or a house that hasn’t been built yet. ↩
2. It’s even more embarrassing because I vaguely recall giving MMM a hard time about his profligate power usage back in the early days, though I can’t find the reference. Now I get to eat his dust >:-0 ↩
3. I have eliminated the outlier Saudi Arabia, because as the world’s biggest oil producer they probably have free energy for all I know. ↩
4. I believe that in America what we would call the boiler is called the furnace, I saw a lot of forced air duct heating over there rather than the UK penchant for hot water as the heat carrying medium, over there they apparently used steam back in the day for their steam radiators You can still sign up to ConEd steam service in NYC and this old system is why you see steam blowing from NYC streets in winter movie scenes ↩
5. That did allow you to get usage graphs from locally stored information, but the process was painful, and involved a program using Adobe Air, because it had been written by Apple MacHeads. I just don’t like Adobe, in the same way as I detest Apple, overpriced but pretty and with evil controlfreakery built in – hello CreativeCloud which is the software equivalent of the World Economics Forum’s “in the future you will own nothing”. ↩
6. Energy is what you are charged for, measured in kWh. Power (in Watts of kiloWatts) is what makes the dial on your meter turn faster. If that’s 1kW for one hour or ten watts for 100 hours it costs you the same ↩
7. The tougher challenge here is how to get the controlled device to switch the mains back on the wall wart from an unpowered state, else you will get a Minsky useless machine whose sole focus is to power itself off ;) ↩
8. Since you asked, that’s Commission Regulation (EC) No 1275/2008 of 17 December 2008 implementing Directive 2005/32/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council with regard to ecodesign requirements for standby and off mode, and networked standby, electric power consumption of electrical and electronic household and office equipment. In particular Annex II. Since we did tell the EU to F*ck right off and get out of our way I guess it would be impolitic to moan that in the English-speaking world we use a period . for the decimal point rather than a comma , because nobody in the EU speaks English any more to my knowledge. Whatevs. ↩
9. Let’s put this into perspective. I have an e-bike which has a 250W motor, which is capable of pulling my ass up a 1:5 hill and allows me to laugh in the face of an 11mph headwind, which was the point when I used to abandon ideas of cycling to work for 7 miles each way. Readers wound up by the Daily Fail want six and a half times that much power in their vacuum cleaners, else the EUSSR was depriving them of their yuman rites to suck bigly. WTF? Are they the Pink Panther or something? 900 watts is enough for a vacuum cleaner, and if it isn’t you are doing something wrong. It’s still more than three times the power required to haul my tail up that hill, and more that the output of one British Standard Horse was good for. Get a grip, FFS. You’re one hell of a mucky pup if your hoover needs more than a horse inside it. ↩
10. Usefully, it isolates the non-computer sockets when I put the PC into sleep mode, which is easier to live with over the day, and saves me a stack of background drain ↩
11. You do run the risk of increasing the earth impedance which should be < 0.35 ohm for the common TN-C-S domestic configuration. I am of the view that the 5A fuse rather than the 13A will clear a Live to Earth fault in the presence of a higher earth impedance, but maybe stop at two series dis boards after your switched one. If you are actually running a bitcoin mining data centre, then obviously get a sparky to install it properly rather than run it all from a single 13A socket in the bedroom. ↩
12. The USB-C PD standard permits charging at 240W, whereas your typically 1A rating of USB wall outlets limits you to 5W. Other things being equal, the whizzy new plug in USB-PD adapter will charge your i-wotsit nearly 50 times faster, and as an added bonus will stop drawing power when you switch it off at the wall. ↩
13. A relay is an electrically activated switch, cheap as chips made in their millions and been around for donkey’s years. You can get them to latch by using the relay to switch itself on. The catch, of course, is in electrically operated switch and the vagaries of deriving a low voltage from 240VAC, many of which are a bit wasteful. That’s how you get electronic timers that draw less power than a mechanical motor-driven timer when they are off, but a lot more when they are on. Stick one of those on an infrequently used Eurocrat vampire of less than 1W standby and you could end up with more background load than you started with. A bistable relay is a relay whose state is electrically changed but draws no power to stay on or off. They are dearer, so manufacturers would never have gone that way if the Eurocrats hadn’t made them. ↩
14. Years ago a colleague had oh-so-cleverly set his hot tub to come on night rate electricity with motor-driven timers, and was scratching his head why his power bill started to get off the scale. He was overhead fed and suffered power cuts more often than usual and the mechanical timers lost time directly proportional to the length of the power cut without him spotting it until I asked him what happened in a power cut – because I’d been had by that before. They had drifted out of the night rate zone! ↩
15. I found it hard to determine how many Brits get killed per year in the home due to electrocution. It’s not many – it seems like it’s in the tens – 7 in 2017 in domestic settings. The thing you should really be frightened of with electricity is fire, half of house fires are electrical in origin, about 14,000 a year. ESF want to have a particular word wiv da yoof charging their phones with cheap anonymous Amazon specials, and since they know da yoof knows itself to be invincible they try and scare them with the damage to their phones rather than the risk to life and limb. Electrical Safety First asserts 70 people a year are electrocuted  (worldwide perhaps?) and their advice for DIYers is straight between the eyes. “If you need to look online for a tutorial, you shouldn’t be doing it yourself”. Allllriiiight – yes, Sir! ↩
16. I moaned that these inline power meters were a bit crap at low power drains, but to be honest, I can’t really complain about a 1.3% error in a 15-year old power meter ↩
17. Those Eurocrats requires SMPS of more than 75W which applies here to meet IEC EN-61000-3-2 and Piotr Olechowski, Quality Manager in Poland, has signed on the dotted line asserting that this product conforms to that EU standard, among others. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Brits, so I can go spin on that as far as pressing my case that this product does not meet specification. ↩
18. it pleases me that the feed-in-tariff boondoggle was canned in 2019. I don’t have any objection to the SEG nor indeed the 0% VAT on capex. Domestic solar should be able to stand on its own two feet. Personally I can’t be arsed with that, it’s easy enough to invest in large scale renewables. Domestic scale is pissing in the wind IMO, there was nothing that looked quite as barking mad/stupid as David Cameron’s yacht wind generator on his London home where the TV aerial would have been. Domestic urban wind is virtue signalling – turbulence at low urban settings, wind energy proportion to speed cubed, wind speed proportional to height to the power of 1/7 so need for height and scale, Dave? It’s hardly like Central London is an off-grid island site where they have to bring your grid connection over 10 miles of empty moorland, eh? Buy shares in INRG or UK Wind or their ilk FFS, go big or go home. DIYInvestor has masses of ideas if you feel strongly about this sort of thing. ↩
19. Telephony gear seems to be one of those exceptions. A BTHomeHub runs off 12V so I soldered a 5.5×2.5mm barrel plug to the end of the wire, only to find that this is a bastard 3.0×6.3mm plug which I had to order specially. I then got to do this again on a Gigaset N300 VOIP to DECT gadget. What the world really doesn’t need is yet another DC barrel plug format. ↩

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