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.
Yes. And 'Natural Gas' was a significant change - people had to be sent round to adjust your cooker. Still don't think I understand though.
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.
Slight problem with that - they have to want to spend their life with me.
Good luck. I thought I’d never find one, but did eventually. We were both 37 when we got married a decade ago.
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.
AI: 9ppm is the maximum safe level. 800ppm is fatal.
With traditional house methods, the cross-ventilation etc was as much to manage humidity.
CO kills in a modern sealed house with little ventilation and a CO source. "Balanced flues" are about reducing the possibility of CO leaking into the room, as a safety measure, since both air intake and exhaust are to the outside.
Dear Old Mother MattW. Your boy has been causing trouble again with his AI.....
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.
There has been a considerable amount of discussion on PB in recent weeks, from many contributors - @JosiasJessop, @Nigelb, @Stuartinromford - regarding the role of heat pumps in domestic and commercial heating systems. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (2023), approximately 1.2% of UK homes currently use a heat pump as their primary heat source, compared to 5.7% in Sweden
As noted by @MattW, the principle behind a heat pump is relatively straightforward. It involves the transfer of heat energy from one location to another through the operation of a vapour-compression refrigeration cycle. Air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) and ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) differ mainly in the location of their heat exchangers. ASHPs generally achieve a seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) between 2.5 and 3.5, whereas GSHPs may reach between 3.8 and 4.5 under optimal soil conditions. These figures are influenced by factors such as outdoor air temperature, humidity, brine concentration, and compressor age. It is worth noting that the variance in SCOP between systems installed before 2016 and those installed after 2020 can exceed 0.4, a detail which some analysts have described as “not insignificant.”
Government incentives - yes, @TimS - have played a considerable role in determining adoption rates. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), launched in April 2022, offers grants of up to £7,500 toward installation costs, which typically range from £7,000 to £19,000 depending on system complexity. Uptake has been uneven: data from Ofgem (Q2 2024) show that 22,781 BUS vouchers were redeemed in England and Wales, representing a 7.3% increase year-on-year. Scotland’s equivalent programme achieved a slightly higher per capita rate, although precise comparative metrics are difficult due to differing reporting methodologies. It is generally agreed that public awareness remains limited, particularly among households with Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings below band C
In conclusion, heat pumps represent a technology of some promise, albeit with notable caveats regarding cost, efficiency, and suitability. Their future success will rely on continued refinement of compressor materials, enhanced refrigerant regulation (notably the phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons under EU Regulation 517/2014), and the ongoing engagement of stakeholders across the supply chain. That’s my amateur opinion, anyway
Your amateur option, or ChatGPTs?
Are you saying @Leon doesn't often begin paragraphs with "In conclusion,"
There was no shortage of AI "tells" in that wall of text, not least the way in which the conclusion sits firmly on the fence..
The length of the comment was the easier tell. Un-Leon, and I didn't have to bother reading it.
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.
It varied widely (even wildly) given the feadstock coal, the temperature of the gasification and other factors.
One of the big features of natural gas was consistency - pretty much plain methane with a smiggin of other things.
There is no greater luxury extant than wandering across the road for the matinee performance, back for dinner, and staggering back again for the evening play.
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.
Back in the days of smog, black buildings, and black lung.
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.
That doesn't stand up as a statement really, as the "incoming" hydrogen is part of the methane (CH4) molecule, which is the main component of Town Gas.
Hydrogen itself (H2) is difficult to use in the gas distribution system aiui because a hydrogen molecule is much smaller, so is more difficult to contain, in addition to explosion risks and other reasons.
When it's a component of the methane, it's a different chemical.
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.
There has been a considerable amount of discussion on PB in recent weeks, from many contributors - @JosiasJessop, @Nigelb, @Stuartinromford - regarding the role of heat pumps in domestic and commercial heating systems. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (2023), approximately 1.2% of UK homes currently use a heat pump as their primary heat source, compared to 5.7% in Sweden
As noted by @MattW, the principle behind a heat pump is relatively straightforward. It involves the transfer of heat energy from one location to another through the operation of a vapour-compression refrigeration cycle. Air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) and ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) differ mainly in the location of their heat exchangers. ASHPs generally achieve a seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) between 2.5 and 3.5, whereas GSHPs may reach between 3.8 and 4.5 under optimal soil conditions. These figures are influenced by factors such as outdoor air temperature, humidity, brine concentration, and compressor age. It is worth noting that the variance in SCOP between systems installed before 2016 and those installed after 2020 can exceed 0.4, a detail which some analysts have described as “not insignificant.”
Government incentives - yes, @TimS - have played a considerable role in determining adoption rates. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), launched in April 2022, offers grants of up to £7,500 toward installation costs, which typically range from £7,000 to £19,000 depending on system complexity. Uptake has been uneven: data from Ofgem (Q2 2024) show that 22,781 BUS vouchers were redeemed in England and Wales, representing a 7.3% increase year-on-year. Scotland’s equivalent programme achieved a slightly higher per capita rate, although precise comparative metrics are difficult due to differing reporting methodologies. It is generally agreed that public awareness remains limited, particularly among households with Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings below band C
In conclusion, heat pumps represent a technology of some promise, albeit with notable caveats regarding cost, efficiency, and suitability. Their future success will rely on continued refinement of compressor materials, enhanced refrigerant regulation (notably the phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons under EU Regulation 517/2014), and the ongoing engagement of stakeholders across the supply chain. That’s my amateur opinion, anyway
Your amateur option, or ChatGPTs?
Are you saying @Leon doesn't often begin paragraphs with "In conclusion,"
There was no shortage of AI "tells" in that wall of text, not least the way in which the conclusion sits firmly on the fence..
The length of the comment was the easier tell. Un-Leon, and I didn't have to bother reading it.
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.
There has been a considerable amount of discussion on PB in recent weeks, from many contributors - @JosiasJessop, @Nigelb, @Stuartinromford - regarding the role of heat pumps in domestic and commercial heating systems. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (2023), approximately 1.2% of UK homes currently use a heat pump as their primary heat source, compared to 5.7% in Sweden
As noted by @MattW, the principle behind a heat pump is relatively straightforward. It involves the transfer of heat energy from one location to another through the operation of a vapour-compression refrigeration cycle. Air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) and ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) differ mainly in the location of their heat exchangers. ASHPs generally achieve a seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) between 2.5 and 3.5, whereas GSHPs may reach between 3.8 and 4.5 under optimal soil conditions. These figures are influenced by factors such as outdoor air temperature, humidity, brine concentration, and compressor age. It is worth noting that the variance in SCOP between systems installed before 2016 and those installed after 2020 can exceed 0.4, a detail which some analysts have described as “not insignificant.”
Government incentives - yes, @TimS - have played a considerable role in determining adoption rates. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), launched in April 2022, offers grants of up to £7,500 toward installation costs, which typically range from £7,000 to £19,000 depending on system complexity. Uptake has been uneven: data from Ofgem (Q2 2024) show that 22,781 BUS vouchers were redeemed in England and Wales, representing a 7.3% increase year-on-year. Scotland’s equivalent programme achieved a slightly higher per capita rate, although precise comparative metrics are difficult due to differing reporting methodologies. It is generally agreed that public awareness remains limited, particularly among households with Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings below band C
In conclusion, heat pumps represent a technology of some promise, albeit with notable caveats regarding cost, efficiency, and suitability. Their future success will rely on continued refinement of compressor materials, enhanced refrigerant regulation (notably the phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons under EU Regulation 517/2014), and the ongoing engagement of stakeholders across the supply chain. That’s my amateur opinion, anyway
Your amateur option, or ChatGPTs?
Are you saying @Leon doesn't often begin paragraphs with "In conclusion,"
There was no shortage of AI "tells" in that wall of text, not least the way in which the conclusion sits firmly on the fence..
The length of the comment was the easier tell. Un-Leon, and I didn't have to bother reading it.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
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...
The problem isn't usually the availability of the parts, it's the labour costs to fit them.
I've maintained my own home appliances for years, it's actually dirt cheap if you have the tools and skillset. The exception is fridge-freezers, usually if domestic ones go bang it's terminal.
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.
I am astonished by this. But it seems you are about right. 10-20% carbon monoxide and the rest hydrogen and methane. Mist of the carbon monoxide turned to dioxide when the gas was burnt. But enough remained thst about 3000 people a year died from it, both from accidents and suicide. North Sea Gas caused a big fall in the suicide rate
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.
That doesn't stand up as a statement really, as the "incoming" hydrogen is part of the methane (CH4) molecule, which is the main component of Town Gas.
Hydrogen itself (H2) is difficult to use in the gas distribution system aiui because a hydrogen molecule is much smaller, so is more difficult to contain, in addition to explosion risks and other reasons.
When it's a component of the methane, it's a different chemical.
Come along. I was hardly suggesting that the CO component came as oxygen and diamond dust.
It appears to be the case that Town gas had a big hydrogen component as in H2.
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.
Back in the days of smog, black buildings, and black lung.
Ha, I read that as “black puddings” and typed the below.
Now that’s a proper cooked breakfast. Non of those woke eggs and bacon.
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.
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.
“Lad working in the butchers got sacked for putting his dick in the bacon slicer”
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.
Oh, wow, thanks for this reminder of my first stay in France on a school exchange in 1956. The school was in Tournon, and the following year I stayed at the gendarmerie in Tain-l'Hermitage. The passerelle is well remembered along with the graffiti daubed on the stone banks of the Rhone saying "Libérez Dreyfus"
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
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.
AI: 9ppm is the maximum safe level. 800ppm is fatal.
With traditional house methods, the cross-ventilation etc was as much to manage humidity.
CO kills in a modern sealed house with little ventilation and a CO source. "Balanced flues" are about reducing the possibility of CO leaking into the room, as a safety measure, since both air intake and exhaust are to the outside.
Dear Old Mother MattW. Your boy has been causing trouble again with his AI.....
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.
Years.
Yes, I made a typo on my mobile, I apologise. I reckon 100% of the readers of the post understood what was meant without your correction.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
Is London in the grip of a crime wave? It’s not so simple Perception of runaway crime partly blamed for ‘driving away the super-rich’ but in reality some high-profile offences such as watch theft are falling
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.
"You'll never stop me from loving you Wherever you may go I will follow you You'll never stop me from loving you" - Sonia, 1989.
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."
My parents still have a Kenwood Chef, a Dualit toaster, and a Le Creuset pot, all of which were given to them as wedding presents in 1976.
Good stuff is worth buying, and it lasts forever.
My Dualit toaster is more than 20 years old, and is still in perfect working order.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
CO2 can asphyxiate by denying you oxygen. That could happen if you sleep on the floor near a profuse source such as an open fire in a room with closed windows. CO2 is heavier than other atmospheric gases
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
Cracker of a story here. Colin Beattie - SNP treasurer when Sturgeon and Murrell in charge - offered his Musselburgh branch £20k, but only ‘if he is selected as candidate in the fullness of time'. He was selected.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
CO2 can asphyxiate by denying you oxygen. That could happen if you sleep on the floor near a profuse source such as an open fire in a room with closed windows. CO2 is heavier than other atmospheric gases
to add, when carboniferous material is incompletely oxidised it burns with a blue flame producing carbon monoxide . A yellow flame indicates complete oxidation, generating CO2 which is safe to breathe in small quantities. When burning logs in a sauna, especially a smoke sauna which has no chimney, it is important to ensure there is no blue flame in the fire or embers
Came across this and had a mild LOL myself. @Leon 's fellow travel writer.
I don’t really consider myself a travel writer, but Substack does, and the industry is LOL. Taking paid for trips is the norm and I just don’t understand how that’s not absurdly corrupt https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1976810792248131867
Leon’s stalker is on Twitter extolling the virtues of San Fransisco at the moment. Ignore the homeless and the crime and the violent protests, it’s a lovely place really.
... it kinda of is, for American standards. The places with antifa terrorist uprisings tend to have relatively low crime rates. Sorry to pop the bubble:
San Fran: 7 per 100,000 (murder rate) St Louis: 88 New Orleans: 52 Memphis: 48 Chicago: 29 Portland: 13
Sadiq Khan's London: 1
When you stop recording crime, recorded crime goes down.
Even the murder rates are suspect in the US, with many being classified as overdoses, accidents, or suicides.
It’s the low-level crime that really defines a city though, the petty theft and muggings.
You’re right that recorded crime can fall if you stop recording it.
But there are independent ways to check whether crime is actually falling. I.e., we can look at different (ideally non-government) sets of stats, and see if they tell a similar story or a contradictory one.
The first is the US's equivalent of the BCS - the National Crime Victimization Survey. It interviews about 240,000 people every year and asks if they’ve been victims, whether they went to the police or not. It shows about 22 violent victimizations per 1,000 people in 2023, roughly the same as 2022 and far below the early 1990s. About 40 percent of victims report to police, and that share hasn’t changed much. So even allowing for underreporting, the overall trend really has improved.
Then there’s insurance data. Now, I'm an auto insurance industry CEO, so these numbers are near and dear to my heart. Car crime is falling (while unfortunately medical costs are soaring). Last year we paid out a record low percentage of premium on car crime. Now, some of this is technology (albeit my customers are poor and don't tend to have immobilisers), but the drops are really significant. And out insustry body - the National Insurance Crime Bureau - says vehicle thefts fell 17 percent in 2024.
There's also Police Union data. Remember that the US police are heavily unionized, and like to use attacks on officers as a reason for pay rises. Well, assaults on officers rose during 2020 and 2021 (Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, George Floyd, etc), then eased off again in 2023 and 2024. They are currently - in terms of percentage of officers being assaulted - almost back down to 2019 levels. And this is from a group that likes to highlight risk to police officers, not hide it.
There are softer indicators too. Public transport use in cities like New York and Chicago have bounced back to near pre-pandemic levels. The restaurant booking data tells an even starker story: OpenTable publishes really good data (there's a really good API) , which probably gives you about as good an idea of where people feel safe. (Of course, the percentage of bookings through OpenTable will have risen, so you can't just assume it is 100% accurate. But it's still an important data point.)
Simply: people don’t crowd trains and book dinners if they think they’ll get mugged.
So yes, recording practices matter. But when surveys, insurers, police unions, and everyday behaviour all tell the same story, it’s hard to argue that falling crime is just a statistical illusion.
All true, but what’s actually happening on the ground is that supermarkets have stopped theft by locking up everything worth more than a dollar. It’s not difficult to think that the area around a store that has to lock up bags of crisps chips might not be a nice place to live.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
CO2 can asphyxiate by denying you oxygen. That could happen if you sleep on the floor near a profuse source such as an open fire in a room with closed windows. CO2 is heavier than other atmospheric gases
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
This person needs the joke explained, I'm afraid.
The problem wasn’t the soup itself, the waiter had forgotten to bring the spoon so instead of just asking for a spoon the teller of the story went through a difficult way of getting to the point.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
CO2 can asphyxiate by denying you oxygen. That could happen if you sleep on the floor near a profuse source such as an open fire in a room with closed windows. CO2 is heavier than other atmospheric gases
So what's so different from Nitrogen then?
It's lighter than oxygen so floats above it. You can breathe that too but you're not going to breathe enough to deny you oxygen unless you're a mountaineer
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
This person needs the joke explained, I'm afraid.
The problem wasn’t the soup itself, the waiter had forgotten to bring the spoon so instead of just asking for a spoon the teller of the story went through a difficult way of getting to the point.
Thank you. I was so confused I think I Liked my own post when I saw others were puzzled too.
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.
Yep. I was going to comment as well as I was aware, but didn't because it is a mixture of a number of gases and more complicated than that and I thought that might make a difference, although it seems unlikely. Anyway I looked up the mix. It is:
Really interesting and I can't work out quite how all that Carbon Monoxide was dealt with. I guess when you burn CO and Hydrogen/CH4 with CO then the CO finishes up as CO2 - is that right?
That's right: carbon monoxide burns and becomes CO2.
So how was the CO2 flushed out? Do you know? It's not as nasty as CO, but it'll kill you nonetheless.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
CO2 can asphyxiate by denying you oxygen. That could happen if you sleep on the floor near a profuse source such as an open fire in a room with closed windows. CO2 is heavier than other atmospheric gases
to add, when carboniferous material is incompletely oxidised it burns with a blue flame producing carbon monoxide . A yellow flame indicates complete oxidation, generating CO2 which is safe to breathe in small quantities. When burning logs in a sauna, especially a smoke sauna which has no chimney, it is important to ensure there is no blue flame in the fire or embers
Carbonaceous surely ... Carboniferous would include limestone, fireclay, sandstone, fossils, etc. etc. as well as coal. Not all well known for burning (as opposed to being burned ... vide my discovery, in the middle of rebuilding a garden wall, that the local collieries had burned fireclay into two different dimensions of brick ...)
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
Steve Guttenberg in Short Circuit:
"OK. Listen closely. There's a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. They're out playing golf. They're deciding how much to give to charity. The priest says "We'll draw a circle on the ground, throw the money in the air, and whatever lands inside the circle, we'll give to charity." The minister says "No, we'll draw a circle on the ground, throw the money in the air, and whatever lands outside of the circle, that's what we'll give to charity." The rabbi says "No no no. We'll throw the money way up in the air, and whatever God wants, he keeps!""
Reports of numerous clashes along the Durand Line, the long border between Pakistan and Afghanistan named after an 18th century British diplomat and a border Afghanistan has never accepted. First major Pak-Afghan fighting since Return of Taliban.
Cracker of a story here. Colin Beattie - SNP treasurer when Sturgeon and Murrell in charge - offered his Musselburgh branch £20k, but only ‘if he is selected as candidate in the fullness of time'. He was selected.
He is SNP candidate in Midlothian North again in 2026. He's 71, and not one of the 38 MSPs so far standing down from Holyrood. Been through a fair bit with the Branch form carry on
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
This person needs the joke explained, I'm afraid.
Isn't proper Jewish chicken soup thick as can be? Proper 'stick to the ribs' stuff as I remember. And delicious.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Read my posts. I said no such thing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
"we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police
You know what, I’m going to go with my interpretation: you said that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police.
I gave the police as an example of cutting the Government payroll having an adverse effect. It probably wasn't the best example, someone else suggested cutting immigration officers which has a particularly interesting outcome.
At no point did I say "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You have made that extrapolation on my behalf.
Let’s make it simple for you:
“Sack … civil servants … THAT MEANS things like fewer police”
“that means” is equivalent to “that equals”. There is no conditionality.
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
If Norway beat Estonia they are through, no way are Italy making that goal difference back up. Hopefully all of Norway's group opponents from their last WC appearance (France 98) can make it through
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Read my posts. I said no such thing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
"we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police
You know what, I’m going to go with my interpretation: you said that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police.
I gave the police as an example of cutting the Government payroll having an adverse effect. It probably wasn't the best example, someone else suggested cutting immigration officers which has a particularly interesting outcome.
At no point did I say "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You have made that extrapolation on my behalf.
Let’s make it simple for you:
“Sack … civil servants … THAT MEANS things like fewer police”
“that means” is equivalent to “that equals”. There is no conditionality.
I still don't understand where I claimed "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". The next Conservative Government can sack everyone working at HMRC, the DVLA and Companies House and yet still increase police numbers, even an ill educated serf like me understands that.
Anyway you are not going to concede so let's work on the premise that I meant to write whatever you believe I wrote.
I see Haaland has done his bit to support the World Cup boycott of Israel by scoring a hat trick against them.
Israel contributed two own goals.
Classic Jewish guilt.
The absolute best Jewish joke (because whatever you think of them they have a mean line in humour) is the one they use in “Coming to America”.
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
This person needs the joke explained, I'm afraid.
Isn't proper Jewish chicken soup thick as can be? Proper 'stick to the ribs' stuff as I remember. And delicious.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Read my posts. I said no such thing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
"we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police
You know what, I’m going to go with my interpretation: you said that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police.
I gave the police as an example of cutting the Government payroll having an adverse effect. It probably wasn't the best example, someone else suggested cutting immigration officers which has a particularly interesting outcome.
At no point did I say "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You have made that extrapolation on my behalf.
Let’s make it simple for you:
“Sack … civil servants … THAT MEANS things like fewer police”
“that means” is equivalent to “that equals”. There is no conditionality.
I still don't understand where I claimed "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". The next Conservative Government can sack everyone working at HMRC, the DVLA and Companies House and yet still increase police numbers, even an ill educated serf like me understands that.
Anyway you are not going to concede so let's work on the premise that I meant to write whatever you believe I wrote.
Don’t be ridiculous. Your first sentence refers to you “things like the police”. HMRC, DVLA and Companies House are all “things like” the police. Nowhere did I claim that you explicitly said “the police” only
Face: you’ve been caught out and you are trying to wriggle your way out of it rather than admit that you have been speaking crap.
Its a great piece by Moon Rabbit and highlights some big issues the party has. Can I offer up another example? Farming.
Badenoch made a play of opposing Labour's farm tax - an idiotic tax that is easy to oppose. Farmers have been traditionally Tory voting and Eurosceptic, and Tories rightly believed their vote was in the bag.
From what Farmers are telling us, that isn't the case any longer. Farmers were promised that the oven-ready Brexit deal would replace EU subsidies with British subsidies. But a few transitory environmental ones aside, the money dried up.
Local Tories are still assuming Farmers will vote for them, and being given very short shrift by angry Farmers who feel lied to and betrayed.
For me one of the major problems the Tory party faces is a disconnect with reality. And its the same on policy after policy - thinking x because we think it so our base must think it, without realising the former base now thinks y. Labour have suffered the same delusions in the past, but its really bad now for the Tories.
The Tories biggest tax and spend policy is primarily that they are offering welcome tax cuts without offsetting these with unwelcome tax rises.
The offset is instead one of "we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police means greater crime. There is always a trade off.
I was in the Bridgend Council depot which is now essentially a Portakabin. Ten years ago it was a huge 1930s built series of two commercial vehicle workshops with offices, both now razed to the ground. So vehicle maintenance is farmed out to the commercial sector and the cost per unit repair is probably a lot more expensive but the cost overhead has been lost, so a win on paper. So what of all those office staff running road gangs for hedge and verge management, pot hole repair and litter picking. Well the big stuff is farmed out to contractors whilst your hedges, verges, potholes an litter are just not trimmed, filled or picked anymore.
My biggest criticism of 21st century Tories (and Reformers) is they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Just to understand, if cutting civil service numbers means cutting the police, why didn’t the increase in civil service numbers mean an increase in police numbers?
Bravo.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the police are not civil servants, and therefore aren't included in the CS headcount. If anybody wants to actually know, rather than guess, about the Civil Service, this is invaluable:
I can't help thinking that the very large numbers in the DWP is not unrelated to the increase in claimants for various sorts of benefits. I'm less sure why there are so many in the MoJ.
That was kind of my point… @Mexicanpete wqs claiming that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police
Read my posts. I said no such thing.
I used the police as an example of a cohort on the Government payroll having numbers cut and there being a negative impact.
Others have used perhaps a better example of immigration staff cuts leading to longer asylum claim lead times and thus the need for asylum hotels and the associated expense of that.
Tell me I'm talking bollocks by all means but please don't make the false accusation that "@Mexicanpete was claiming that it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police".
"we are going to sack a million wasteful civil servants" and that sounds great on paper but that means things like fewer police
You know what, I’m going to go with my interpretation: you said that it wasn’t possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police.
I gave the police as an example of cutting the Government payroll having an adverse effect. It probably wasn't the best example, someone else suggested cutting immigration officers which has a particularly interesting outcome.
At no point did I say "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You have made that extrapolation on my behalf.
Let’s make it simple for you:
“Sack … civil servants … THAT MEANS things like fewer police”
“that means” is equivalent to “that equals”. There is no conditionality.
I still don't understand where I claimed "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". The next Conservative Government can sack everyone working at HMRC, the DVLA and Companies House and yet still increase police numbers, even an ill educated serf like me understands that.
Anyway you are not going to concede so let's work on the premise that I meant to write whatever you believe I wrote.
Don’t be ridiculous. Your first sentence refers to you “things like the police”. HMRC, DVLA and Companies House are all “things like” the police. Nowhere did I claim that you explicitly said “the police” only
Face: you’ve been caught out and you are trying to wriggle your way out of it rather than admit that you have been speaking crap.
Don't you ever give up? I even conceded so you would finally call it a day.
So being as you couldn't bring yourself to move on, I will reiterate I did not write or even intimate "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You wrote that.
It's is a start and she needs to keep in the media more
However a long way to go but 4 years is more than that in politics
How many conservatives who defected will sometime in the future return to the conservatives and away from Farage's toxic right wing views ??
I think she has, maybe, one year to turn things around. I'm not sure that's enough when so many in her own ranks would probably rather be Reform (albeit maybe in a Conservative-Reform pact than a Reform-Tory one).
Cracker of a story here. Colin Beattie - SNP treasurer when Sturgeon and Murrell in charge - offered his Musselburgh branch £20k, but only ‘if he is selected as candidate in the fullness of time'. He was selected.
Seems like an awful lot just to remain selected as an MSP. But then I believe the SNP don't take peerages, so they cannot buy one of those like regular politicians/donors?
Cracker of a story here. Colin Beattie - SNP treasurer when Sturgeon and Murrell in charge - offered his Musselburgh branch £20k, but only ‘if he is selected as candidate in the fullness of time'. He was selected.
Seems like an awful lot just to remain selected as an MSP. But then I believe the SNP don't take peerages, so they cannot buy one of those like regular politicians/donors?
They get thrown out if they accept peerages. The Scottish *Government* does award/recommend honours of other types, under the SNP as others, but I can't say whether it has recommended peerages even for non-political matters.
And yet most British politicians, certainly most British PMs, would kill for ratings as good as that.
They may be idiots, possibly nasty idiots, but you have to admire to loyalty of Trump supporters.
Alternatively, he’s doing a good job, so he’s not suffering like almost all democratic leaders elsewhere
Got a hold on the borders, cracking down on crime, deporting riff raff, not starting wars and instead ending them. And the tariffs make sense, in game theory, from a selfish American perspective. He reckons most countries will back down - and they do
He’s a pretty good president, possibly a great one
Comments
We were both 37 when we got married a decade ago.
One of the big features of natural gas was consistency - pretty much plain methane with a smiggin of other things.
And then nightcap and bed.
Hydrogen itself (H2) is difficult to use in the gas distribution system aiui because a hydrogen molecule is much smaller, so is more difficult to contain, in addition to explosion risks and other reasons.
When it's a component of the methane, it's a different chemical.
https://www.wwutilities.co.uk/media/5331/lessons-learnt-from-the-past.pdf
I've maintained my own home appliances for years, it's actually dirt cheap if you have the tools and skillset. The exception is fridge-freezers, usually if domestic ones go bang it's terminal.
It appears to be the case that Town gas had a big hydrogen component as in H2.
Singer Ian Watkins killed in attack in prison
https://news.sky.com/story/lostprophets-singer-ian-watkins-dies-after-attack-in-prison-13448665
Not the one from Steps.
Ha, I read that as “black puddings” and typed the below.
Now that’s a proper cooked breakfast. Non of those woke eggs and bacon.
“What did the butcher do with the bacon slicer?”
“Sacked her as well!”
Our gasworks became an ASDA in the 1970s.
Perception of runaway crime partly blamed for ‘driving away the super-rich’ but in reality some high-profile offences such as watch theft are falling
‘Snatch theft’: the unstoppable rise of phone theft
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/11/is-london-in-the-grip-of-a-wave-its-not-so-simple
While we are discussing SF, don't forget London where crime is... (tbh I've not read it yet).
Wherever you may go I will follow you
You'll never stop me from loving you" - Sonia, 1989.
Oh wait, wrong Ian Watkins.
This is weird. I simply don't understand the gases of the past!
I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought me my soup. I called him back and said, Waiter there’s something wrong with my soup. The waiter said, “it’s chicken broth like you ordered sir” and I said no, it’s wrong. The waiter said, “sir your soup is perfectly fine and what you ordered” I said no, you are wrong. So the waiter said “ok sir, pass me a spoon” and I said “ah-ha”.
Cracker of a story here. Colin Beattie - SNP treasurer when Sturgeon and Murrell in charge - offered his Musselburgh branch £20k, but only ‘if he is selected as candidate in the fullness of time'. He was selected.
https://x.com/DalgetySusan/status/1977084207135703134
And India Lee is in third! Go India!
But still a long way to go.
(I know I'm cursing her by saying this, but I really hope she gets on the podium.)
https://x.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1977086803003015589?t=hWKlXXmEN50PCl5_3CBnyw&s=19
https://x.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1977086803003015589/photo/1
So maybe it's actually the case that autism causes vaccines.
I saw her having dinner in one of my local Italian restaurants a couple of years ago.
#PBpedantry
"OK. Listen closely. There's a priest, a minister, and a rabbi. They're out playing golf. They're deciding how much to give to charity. The priest says "We'll draw a circle on the ground, throw the money in the air, and whatever lands inside the circle, we'll give to charity." The minister says "No, we'll draw a circle on the ground, throw the money in the air, and whatever lands outside of the circle, that's what we'll give to charity." The rabbi says "No no no. We'll throw the money way up in the air, and whatever God wants, he keeps!""
I hope your second post is less controversial. Edit, no it wasn't.
🚨The latest Opinium @ObserverUK polling 🚨
Early signs of a Kemi boost? Badenoch’s net approval rating rises by 8 points in a week after #cpc25.
Her score of net -14 is the highest she’s had at any point in 2025.
https://x.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1977094349533200622
Reports of numerous clashes along the Durand Line, the long border between Pakistan and Afghanistan named after an 18th century British diplomat and a border Afghanistan has never accepted. First major Pak-Afghan fighting since Return of Taliban.
However a long way to go but 4 years is more than that in politics
How many conservatives who defected will sometime in the future return to the conservatives and away from Farage's toxic right wing views ??
Manhattan is one of the great films.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhs0pr
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107507/
"Middle-aged New York married couple Larry and Carol Lipton suspect foul play when their neighbor Paul House's wife Lillian suddenly drops dead."
Now I want proper chicken soup.
“Sack … civil servants … THAT MEANS things like fewer police”
“that means” is equivalent to “that equals”. There is no conditionality.
Anyway you are not going to concede so let's work on the premise that I meant to write whatever you believe I wrote.
@jonfavs
Trump got a Covid booster from his doctor and then fired dozens of doctors and scientists who were working to keep the rest of us healthy and alive
https://x.com/jonfavs/status/1976849945799147864
Face: you’ve been caught out and you are trying to wriggle your way out of it rather than admit that you have been speaking crap.
So being as you couldn't bring yourself to move on, I will reiterate I did not write or even intimate "it wasn't possible to cut civil service numbers without cutting things like the police". You wrote that.
Some of you get weekends off. Not me
Great actress RIP.
The Lincoln Project
@ProjectLincoln
Trump's approval rating is now -16%. If you're dissatisfied, you're not alone.
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln
EXC: Russia is suspected of being behind the cyber attack that forced Jaguar Land Rover to halt production.
The scale of the attack and the economic damage inflicted have raised suspicions the hackers were acting for the Kremlin.
All 800 of the computer systems used by JLR were knocked out, per government insiders familiar with the case.
It stopped plants across the world for more than a month, impacted an estimated 200,000 jobs and led the Government to underwrite a £1.5bn loan.
Teams from GCHQ and the National Crime Agency were sent in to investigate.
@Telegraph
understands the possibility of the Russian state being behind the attack is an active line of inquiry. No final assessment has been made.
https://x.com/benrileysmith/status/1977124286700617981
They may be idiots, possibly nasty idiots, but you have to admire to loyalty of Trump supporters.
Got a hold on the borders, cracking down on crime, deporting riff raff, not starting wars and instead ending them. And the tariffs make sense, in game theory, from a selfish American perspective. He reckons most countries will back down - and they do
He’s a pretty good president, possibly a great one