Best Of

On an unrelated matter, is there some scam going on with Insurance Companies? Somebody scraped my car the other week, I have a deepish scartch and some denting along both doors and rear wing. I made a claim so I could get it fixed - really I just wanted to know if I had to take it to a trusted repairer for a quote - but they are saying my car is a write-off. Does it really cost £7500 to make some bodywork repairs to a VW Golf?

Cost of labour has gone through the roof.

Plus it is more the car companies. Better for them if they sell more cars, rather than panels.

But who makes the money? The insurance company buys a car off me at market value, paid for by all us mugs who buy insurance. Assuming it could be repaired for about £2k, who is pocketing the difference?

Anyway I will be getting a quote from the panel specialist locally, see how much and then maybe wonder about buying it back at scrap value. Can you still do that? (My Dad did, years ago).

Marc Seguin’s - inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge - famous bridge over the Rhone, now pedestrians only, with the renowned Hermitage vineyards on the hillside behind. Sadly, DFS doesn’t like wooden bridges where you can see water below between the planks, and does look rather terrified here.

Why did you name your dog after a sofa shop that has constantly got a sale running?

Crap sofas as well; we bought one years back, and had to dump it just a few years later. So we then invested in some handmade Ilford sofas, which are still going strong twenty years later…mind you, I rarely use them as sitting on the floor is way more healthy, especially for us older folks

The sofa in our lounge is one my parents' bought in the early 80s; I remember buying it, as we had to drive to Nottingham to order it, and I was worried we would not be back in time for "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". It is quite heavy, with a solid frame, and has been reupholstered at least once. Quality lasts.

We're still using the Ercol suite my parents got as a wedding present, getting on for sixty years ago. Which does feed back into the energy conversation. Something in the British psyche is really bad at processing "this is pricey upfront, but will save loads over decades."

If I may rant for a minute, we've had two appliances, a dishwasher and a washing machine, break irreparably in the last two yeas, just outside their warranties. One was Bosch, so should be reasonable quality. I'm generally a positive person, but it does sometimes feel like there's a general enshittification of consumer goods.

Whenever my dishwasher breaks down I dump her and pull a new one.

The hard part of achieving Net Zero will be decarbonising domestic heating. Do we go with air source heat pumps, or convert the gas network to hydrogen?

The former requires most folk to rip out their entire central heating system, and most likely freeze their bits off on the coldest winter days.

The latter has people shouting "Hindenberg!" and fleeing in terror. (The two proposed 'hydrogen village' projects were cancelled due to opposition from the residents.)

Unsurprisingly, the decision on what to do is not one that governments wish to take.

There's also the question of how much hydrogen will leak out of pipes, given how tiny the molecules are. So improving insulation and heat pumps it is.

And yes, it's going to cost upfront. Tough. Conservatives are meant to believe in the evil of borrowing resources, whether financial or ecological, from future generations. As our most scientifically literate PM said,

No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.

The current Conservative position on the tax/spend/borrow trilemma, and on the environment is "don't stop the party now, let out kids endure the hangover."

It's been that way for a while, but it simply isn't conservative.

There are a lot of old houses that cannot be practically insulated to make heat pumps effective. I've heard the plan in Basingstoke is for the council to buy up areas of old houses, flatten them, and replace with new housing. Given the national housing deficit it feels counterproductive to demolish lots of existing houses.

My favoured approach is to use excess - and effectively free - wind and solar energy to produce green methane (electrolysis and the Sabatier process - it isn't that efficient, but when you have a large excess of renewable energy that doesn't matter).

Then you can use your existing gas infrastructure for energy storage, home heating, even cooking if people want a gas stove. The final bit is to persuade people in rural areas who aren't on the gas grid to switch from oil heating to LPG

Hydrogen is a failed technology. It's too hard to store and transport. Methane has the additional advantage that we can keep our gas-fired power stations as a backup for the notorious two-week period each winter when it's calm and settled and there's no wind energy.

They one good use for CCS would be to capture the CO2 from those gas-fired plants, and then you have a carbon negative part of the electricity system.

There's what people say and what people do.

In reality, outside a committed few, no-one wants to strip out and totally retrofit their house with new radiators and new insulation, and change how moisture circulation works in their homes, just to make a heat pump effective. And they never will.

Heat pumps will only ever be effective in mass take-up when (a) you can do a direct swap with a gas boiler in an afternoon, and nothing else and (b) they are cheaper than gas.

We've recently moved into a house built in 2006 that had a (ground-source) heat pump when constructed, underfloor heating downstairs and normal-sized radiators upstairs.

Even at Britain's anaemic rate of house-building there could be a large number of houses with heat pumps if they'd been the dominant heating technology in new-builds for the last decade or so.

One technology doesn't need to suit every circumstance, but there's such a luddite attitude towards heat pumps from a lot of people which is baffling.

I hear a lot of criticism towards those who are sceptical of heat pumps, I've heard it and felt it myself, so people just keep their mouths shut instead and... don't buy heat pumps.

I'd need to be convinced it'd keep my family warm in Winter, and not disrupt my home, as well as save me money. Since I've never have that assurance, I haven't taken it any further.

Why would I do otherwise?

Your house would be turned into a building site while your existing perfectly good central heating system is ripped out and replaced with new that can cope with the Luke warm water provided by an air source heat pump.

Then you will be freezing cold in winter because, funnily enough, air at -5C isn't a great source of heat.

More than you might think, which is why they work in Scandinavia.

The relevant way to think about the temperature isn't -5C, it's 268 K.

Sandy is talking his book .

I'd rather have a hydrogen boiler than an air source heat pump. This is true.

Do you get hydrogen pumped directly into your home? (Or at least hydrogen unencumbered with oxygen atoms?)

If the gas network gets repurposed as a hydrogen network, then we all will.

Where did the hydrogen idea come from?

There’s absolutely no way you can pipe hydrogen into houses, it’s a horrible gas to contain and it’s bloody flammable. Every pipe would need to be certified every few years, and almost none of the existing pipe infrastructure would be good enough.

Now I would have said that too until this morning when some wise person pointed out that 'town gas' was hydrogen and carbon monoxide. I really didn't know that - I assumed methane or something.

So apparently, historically, we've pumped hydrogen into houses successfully in the past.

A carbon monoxide/hydrogen mix is going to be a lot less explosive than straight up hydrogen.

Also, I suspect we had a rather grater tolerance to death and injury in that era then we do now.

Also, the design of houses then was to make sure they were well ventilated. Between air flowing under the floor boards (around the pipes) and fireplaces in every room - the high rate of leakage was swept out of the rooms and into the fireplaces. Generally before it got to the stage of going bang. Generally.

This is quite weird.

Surely the composition of 'town gas' is an easily ascertained fact. Seems not though.

So it really couldn't have been 50% Carbon Monoxide in my view. Tiny parts per million numbers are now viewed as deadly.

‘Town gas’ would have been slightly different in each town, or at least each region, as it was sourced locally.

Marc Seguin’s - inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge - famous bridge over the Rhone, now pedestrians only, with the renowned Hermitage vineyards on the hillside behind. Sadly, DFS doesn’t like wooden bridges where you can see water below between the planks, and does look rather terrified here.

Why did you name your dog after a sofa shop that has constantly got a sale running?

Crap sofas as well; we bought one years back, and had to dump it just a few years later. So we then invested in some handmade Ilford sofas, which are still going strong twenty years later…mind you, I rarely use them as sitting on the floor is way more healthy, especially for us older folks

The sofa in our lounge is one my parents' bought in the early 80s; I remember buying it, as we had to drive to Nottingham to order it, and I was worried we would not be back in time for "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". It is quite heavy, with a solid frame, and has been reupholstered at least once. Quality lasts.

We're still using the Ercol suite my parents got as a wedding present, getting on for sixty years ago. Which does feed back into the energy conversation. Something in the British psyche is really bad at processing "this is pricey upfront, but will save loads over decades."

If I may rant for a minute, we've had two appliances, a dishwasher and a washing machine, break irreparably in the last two yeas, just outside their warranties. One was Bosch, so should be reasonable quality. I'm generally a positive person, but it does sometimes feel like there's a general enshittification of consumer goods.

Whenever my dishwasher breaks down I dump her and pull a new one.

But eventually you need to pick one for life.

Marc Seguin’s - inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge - famous bridge over the Rhone, now pedestrians only, with the renowned Hermitage vineyards on the hillside behind. Sadly, DFS doesn’t like wooden bridges where you can see water below between the planks, and does look rather terrified here.

Why did you name your dog after a sofa shop that has constantly got a sale running?

Crap sofas as well; we bought one years back, and had to dump it just a few years later. So we then invested in some handmade Ilford sofas, which are still going strong twenty years later…mind you, I rarely use them as sitting on the floor is way more healthy, especially for us older folks

The sofa in our lounge is one my parents' bought in the early 80s; I remember buying it, as we had to drive to Nottingham to order it, and I was worried we would not be back in time for "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". It is quite heavy, with a solid frame, and has been reupholstered at least once. Quality lasts.

We're still using the Ercol suite my parents got as a wedding present, getting on for sixty years ago. Which does feed back into the energy conversation. Something in the British psyche is really bad at processing "this is pricey upfront, but will save loads over decades."

If I may rant for a minute, we've had two appliances, a dishwasher and a washing machine, break irreparably in the last two yeas, just outside their warranties. One was Bosch, so should be reasonable quality. I'm generally a positive person, but it does sometimes feel like there's a general enshittification of consumer goods.

Preach Brother, Preach.

Also- taps. Why have we allowed a world where the active part is one of a thousand non-compatible cartridges, so that when they start to drip and dribble, the most practicable solution is to replace the whole thing...