If anyone wants something a little different to watch tonight, the women's Ironman World Championship race is starting soon from Kona, Hawaii.
This involves a 3.8km swim; a 180km (112 mile) bike, followed by a marathon run. Depending on conditions, the winner should finish in around eight and a half hours. Kona is notoriously hot and windy, and favours experienced athletes. Everyone lining up at the start line, whether age-grouper or professional, with have placed highly in an Ironman race over the last year, and so will be phenomenal athletes.
There are some British hopefuls: Lucy Charles-Barclay, who won at Kona in 2023 and who holds the course record, is perhaps favourite. Kat Matthews is another Brit who stands a good chance of winning, although her track record at Kona is patchy.
Trying to spoil the Brit's sunshine will be athletes like Laura Philip from Germany, the defending champion from Nice last year, the US's Chesea Sodaro, who has not had a good year but may be peaking at the right time, and Taylor Knibb, a phenomenal athlete who may not quite have the run to win. Norwegian Solveig Løvseth will be hoping to match the men's world championship result from a few weeks back, where Norway dominated the podium, She has, however, only two Ironman races under her belt, both wins, but both in wet and cold conditions. Frenchwoman Marjolaine Pierre burst onto the scene with a fourth place at last year's championship, and certainly has the capability to win.
There are a couple of other Brits I should mention: the fantastic India Lee, who on a rare good day can beat anyone - and whose victory would light up the sky, and Holly Lawrence, who returned to triathlon this year after giving birth last year; though she is inexperienced at this distance. Good luck to other Brits as well, such as Stephanie Clutterbuck and Rebecca Anderbury.
The great thing about this competition is that it is so unpredictable. Mermaid Lucy Charles-Barclay should be first out of the water, and her bike should keep her, if not at the front, in the front pack. Her run is not quite as good as some of the other ladies, so she has to hope to reach T2 with enough of a lead. If Kat Matthews or Løvseth are with her, I'd expect one of them to grab the win.
And my dream podium? For the Brits to match the Norwegian men and dominate the podium. India Lee first, Kat Matthews second, and Lucy Charles-Barclay third. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
A more realistic one would be from Lucy Chales-Barclay, Kat Matthews, Laura Philip, Taylor Knibb and Chelsea Sodaro. Pick any three...
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
Let's make it more relevant for our travel writers - what (if any) is the preferred model of heat pump in San Francisco?
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.
Yesterday, I suggested you watch the Mariners game. It was even better than I expected:
After Jorge Polanco singled to end the Mariners' 3-2 victory over the Tigers in 15 innings late Friday night, propelling Seattle to its first American League Championship Series since 2001, a full accounting and assessment could begin.
Four hours, 58 minutes. The two sides combined for 15 pitchers who threw 472 pitches, including two starters -- Logan Gilbert and Luis Castillo -- who made the first relief appearances of their careers. So many missed opportunities in extra innings, by both teams. So much emotion, fueled by a T-Mobile Park crowd of 47,025 that was relentless in its decibel generation.
Any political consequences? Two possible ones, that I can think of: The Seattle team's success might help incumbent Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Harrell
The Mariners have some great players who are immigrants.
The Mariners next opponent is the Toronto Blue Jays. The teams will be playing for the American League championship.
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
Let's make it more relevant for our travel writers - what (if any) is the preferred model of heat pump in San Francisco?
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.
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?
The response to heat pumps is just really weird, compared to the response to most other new technologies.
Greens are forever being accused of wanting to take people back to the stone age, but when they're enthusiastic about a new technology the same people insist on holding on to their old technology.
I know nothing about your house and I'm not going to advise you as to whether it's suitable for a heat pump. But it's an effective technology that can keep a lot of houses warm and you will be wasting a lot of money on gas if your house is so badly insulated that a heat pump wouldn't work.
I think it makes sense for new homes.
Retrofitting an existing (older) home is massive faff and expense.
It would disrupt every room in your house. With a young family very much living in it that's simply not an option.
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.
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.
How much more does it cost to add a ground-source heat pump and the associated items on a typical new-build, such as the ones that are being built around me? I'd expect it to be much less than retrofitting, but it also to add to the cost of a new build.
The air source heat pumps have improved by so much since this house was built that I wouldn't bother with a ground source heat pump today. The necessary groundworks and piping add a lot of expense for not much benefit.
It shouldn't be any more expensive to have a heat pump than a gas boiler, unless Britain is building houses with insulation that would have been considered poor two decades ago. Are you really suggesting that Britain is such a poor country that it can't afford housing with averagely decent insulation?
Our house is only B3 rated, and if it didn't have a heat pump the BER would be a C. The insulation is not bad, but it's far from being what would be considered high-spec these days.
High temperate heat pumps are absolutely viable replacements for gas boilers in pretty well any house. They're still a bit expensive, but likely to be affordable long before hydrogen is a viable domestic supply (if it ever is).
And electricity is entirely agnostic of how it's generated.
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.
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
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.
CCGT power plants are just about the worst possible place to install CO2 capture. If you are spending the thick end of £1 billion on a capture plant, you want it to be operating based load, maximising the quantity of CO2 it is capturing. Sticking on the back of a CCGT with a load factor of 50% is halving the usefulness of the capture plant. Plus, it costs more to be able to capture efficiency during the frequent start-stop of a despatchable plant. Plus the flue gas of a CCGT has a relatively low CO2 content (and high oxygen content), also resulting in higher costs.
Best place for CO2 capture is, in my view, on Energy from Waste plants. They run at full load continuously, and produce power and heat, some of which can be supplied to meet the energy needs of the capture plant. Also, half the CO2 is biogenic, so they become net-negative and can offset emissions from hard to abate sectors and help us achieve net zero.
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.
War is the mother of innovation. The Ukrainians are very good at finding ways to just get it done.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a US fighter squadron in WWII. They were due to convert from their increasingly obsolete P-47s to the superior P-51 Mustangs, and while the new aircraft had arrived there'd been no time for flight training.
When the order came to escort a bomber raid into Germany the Colonel in charge decided to abandon the old P-47s and use the P-51s instead, only to be told that was impossible because the pilots hadn't been trained.
He responded "We'll learn to fly them on the way!"
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.
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?)
Heat pumps — whether they’re good or bad, or right or wrong for any particular home, and about what they represent in the broader conversation about how we heat our homes. It’s one of those topics that everyone seems to have an opinion on these days, and it’s interesting how much the discussion has evolved over the past few years.
When you start to look into it, the whole subject of domestic heating really opens up a world of complexity. There’s efficiency, of course, and cost, and installation, and government incentives, and then there’s the climate angle, which is never far away. But what really strikes me is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer — every house is different, every homeowner’s priorities are different, and what works brilliantly for one person might be a total non-starter for someone else.
I think we also have to consider the long-term picture. It’s not just about what’s cheapest or most efficient today, but about where things are heading in five, ten, even twenty years. Will the technology mature further? Almost certainly. Will prices come down? Probably, at least to some degree. But at the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that the whole energy landscape is shifting under our feet — and nobody can say for sure where it’ll all settle.
Then there’s the comfort factor. People talk a lot about kilowatts and coefficients of performance, but in the end, we all just want to feel warm in winter and not think too hard about how it’s happening. Some say heat pumps feel “different” — not worse, just not quite the same as traditional systems. And that’s an interesting point, because it’s not just about physics; it’s about perception, habit, and what we’re used to.
The thing is, I don’t think the conversation is really about the machinery at all. It’s about how we approach change — whether we embrace it cautiously, enthusiastically, or not at all. Heat pumps just happen to be the current symbol of that broader shift. Some will leap in early, some will hang back until the numbers look better, and some will probably never be persuaded. And maybe that’s fine.
At the end of the day, whether a heat pump is the right choice depends on so many variables that it’s almost impossible to generalise. But it’s certainly a topic worth keeping an eye on. If nothing else, it gets people thinking about their homes, their bills, and the future of energy — which can’t be a bad thing, really.
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.
CCGT power plants are just about the worst possible place to install CO2 capture. If you are spending the thick end of £1 billion on a capture plant, you want it to be operating based load, maximising the quantity of CO2 it is capturing. Sticking on the back of a CCGT with a load factor of 50% is halving the usefulness of the capture plant. Plus, it costs more to be able to capture efficiency during the frequent start-stop of a despatchable plant. Plus the flue gas of a CCGT has a relatively low CO2 content (and high oxygen content), also resulting in higher costs.
Best place for CO2 capture is, in my view, on Energy from Waste plants. They run at full load continuously, and produce power and heat, some of which can be supplied to meet the energy needs of the capture plant. Also, half the CO2 is biogenic, so they become net-negative and can offset emissions from hard to abate sectors and help us achieve net zero.
So we want Carbon Capture on baseload plants that operate at high load?
Well, we need them on our new nuclear plants then...
Heat pumps — whether they’re good or bad, or right or wrong for any particular home, and about what they represent in the broader conversation about how we heat our homes. It’s one of those topics that everyone seems to have an opinion on these days, and it’s interesting how much the discussion has evolved over the past few years.
When you start to look into it, the whole subject of domestic heating really opens up a world of complexity. There’s efficiency, of course, and cost, and installation, and government incentives, and then there’s the climate angle, which is never far away. But what really strikes me is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer — every house is different, every homeowner’s priorities are different, and what works brilliantly for one person might be a total non-starter for someone else.
I think we also have to consider the long-term picture. It’s not just about what’s cheapest or most efficient today, but about where things are heading in five, ten, even twenty years. Will the technology mature further? Almost certainly. Will prices come down? Probably, at least to some degree. But at the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that the whole energy landscape is shifting under our feet — and nobody can say for sure where it’ll all settle.
Then there’s the comfort factor. People talk a lot about kilowatts and coefficients of performance, but in the end, we all just want to feel warm in winter and not think too hard about how it’s happening. Some say heat pumps feel “different” — not worse, just not quite the same as traditional systems. And that’s an interesting point, because it’s not just about physics; it’s about perception, habit, and what we’re used to.
The thing is, I don’t think the conversation is really about the machinery at all. It’s about how we approach change — whether we embrace it cautiously, enthusiastically, or not at all. Heat pumps just happen to be the current symbol of that broader shift. Some will leap in early, some will hang back until the numbers look better, and some will probably never be persuaded. And maybe that’s fine.
At the end of the day, whether a heat pump is the right choice depends on so many variables that it’s almost impossible to generalise. But it’s certainly a topic worth keeping an eye on. If nothing else, it gets people thinking about their homes, their bills, and the future of energy — which can’t be a bad thing, really.
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.
Ukraine are doing an awesome job with the F-16 and the young men that are flying them. One interesting fact is that they’re giving the F-16s to the new graduates from flying school, because they’re so different in operation to the Soviet-era jets they were flying before the war.
Heat pumps — whether they’re good or bad, or right or wrong for any particular home, and about what they represent in the broader conversation about how we heat our homes. It’s one of those topics that everyone seems to have an opinion on these days, and it’s interesting how much the discussion has evolved over the past few years.
When you start to look into it, the whole subject of domestic heating really opens up a world of complexity. There’s efficiency, of course, and cost, and installation, and government incentives, and then there’s the climate angle, which is never far away. But what really strikes me is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer — every house is different, every homeowner’s priorities are different, and what works brilliantly for one person might be a total non-starter for someone else.
I think we also have to consider the long-term picture. It’s not just about what’s cheapest or most efficient today, but about where things are heading in five, ten, even twenty years. Will the technology mature further? Almost certainly. Will prices come down? Probably, at least to some degree. But at the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that the whole energy landscape is shifting under our feet — and nobody can say for sure where it’ll all settle.
Then there’s the comfort factor. People talk a lot about kilowatts and coefficients of performance, but in the end, we all just want to feel warm in winter and not think too hard about how it’s happening. Some say heat pumps feel “different” — not worse, just not quite the same as traditional systems. And that’s an interesting point, because it’s not just about physics; it’s about perception, habit, and what we’re used to.
The thing is, I don’t think the conversation is really about the machinery at all. It’s about how we approach change — whether we embrace it cautiously, enthusiastically, or not at all. Heat pumps just happen to be the current symbol of that broader shift. Some will leap in early, some will hang back until the numbers look better, and some will probably never be persuaded. And maybe that’s fine.
At the end of the day, whether a heat pump is the right choice depends on so many variables that it’s almost impossible to generalise. But it’s certainly a topic worth keeping an eye on. If nothing else, it gets people thinking about their homes, their bills, and the future of energy — which can’t be a bad thing, really.
My house uses approx 12 MwH of energy (gas) to heat it to approx 17.5C all year round. Obviously it's weighted to more energy in the winter etc. The simple question is, what would a heat pump use and what would it cost, the problem is noone seems to know so obviously people are reluctant to install them.
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.
So would I. My 3 year old boiler says it's "hydrogen ready"
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.
If I remember correctly, methane (CH4) molecules are much bigger than hydrogen ones (H2), and one cannot simply repurpose a set of pipes with certain tolerances to store something which is significantly harder to contain.
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.
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.
If I remember correctly, methane (CH4) molecules are much bigger than hydrogen ones (H2), and one cannot simply repurpose a set of pipes with certain tolerances to store something which is significantly harder to contain.
War is the mother of innovation. The Ukrainians are very good at finding ways to just get it done.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a US fighter squadron in WWII. They were due to convert from their increasingly obsolete P-47s to the superior P-51 Mustangs, and while the new aircraft had arrived there'd been no time for flight training.
When the order came to escort a bomber raid into Germany the Colonel in charge decided to abandon the old P-47s and use the P-51s instead, only to be told that was impossible because the pilots hadn't been trained.
He responded "We'll learn to fly them on the way!"
The P47 wasn’t obsolete. In fact, in some ways more advanced than the P51.
The range on the standard models of P47 was less, but the P47N (for the pacific) had more range than the P51.
The radial engine and the huge turbo supercharger system was tougher than the Merlin in the P51. When the Korean War broke out, the front line squadrons wanted to change back to the P47 for ground attack
The problem was cost/man hours to build. The P51 was a lot cheaper.
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.
As an aside, the (very real) improvements in San Francisco are largely the simple consequence of getting a decent Mayor in.
Daniel Laurie was elected last year, on a platform of dealing with petty crime and homelessness. The biggest element has been a very simple 'move along' policy. If you're hanging out on a street corner (particularly in the center, financial or tourist districts), the police will simply move you on. You can no longer pitch a tent and be ignored by the police.
This has been combined with creating 1,500 new beds for homeless people... away from the City itelf. Get fed and a bed... but you won't be near Union Square.
Laurie also had a policy of avoiding conflict with Washington. The people of San Francisco wanted their city back, not political statements.
The San Franciscans seem to be pretty happy with him: his 75% approval rating has to be among the highest of Mayors in the US.
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
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,"
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.
Lots of things work in Scandinavia, like high taxes, perhaps we could try it here.
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.
The gas distribution networks face an existential threat. If the networks aren't converted to hydrogen, and we are all forced to have h*** p***s, they are out of business. So they are at the forefront of the hydrogen heating gang.
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.
The gas distribution networks face an existential threat. If the networks aren't converted to hydrogen, and we are all forced to have h*** p***s, they are out of business. So they are at the forefront of the hydrogen heating gang.
It is highly possible that the gas distribution networks will simply find themselves out of business.
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,"
It's the lack of mention of heat pumps in Andean ayahuasca caffs that gives rise to a certain suspicion.
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.
San Francisco has had some incredible changes in just nine months. It really is like a different city.
My sister and her family left about a year ago so I’m putting SF’s improvement down to that. I’m not going to tell her I wrote that though, she’s fierce, will probably lace my food with fentanyl when I next see them.
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.
Storage heaters. It baffles me no-one seems to be pursuing this obvious solution. It needs just three simple updates to the basic 1960s models:
A variable tariff that offers electricity at essentially no cost when supply outstrips demand. Which also solves the nations energy storage problem - excess energy is stored as heat in storage heaters.
Decent lagging on the heaters so they can last out the period of peak demand.
App to control the storage and release of energy according to prices, weather and temperature in the room.
That's pretty much what domestic batteries, smart meters and funky power companies do. Whilst batteries are more expensive than storage heaters, the energy is much more useful stored as battery charge than as heat. (Once you turn energy into heat, you're not efficiently getting it back to do anything else with it.)
Fair enough but battery storage isn't particularly promoted either. Energy efficiency is nearly irrelevant with storage heaters as the whole point is to transfer heat into the room. You just want to control it better than you could do previously and have moderately good insulation to ensure that control.
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! I assume this is now enforced for controversial subjects during the training process, as I seem to recall some of the early ones had a tendency to cause red faces to their owners by coming down firmly on "unfashonable" sides of the argument...
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.
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,"
It's the lack of mention of heat pumps in Andean ayahuasca caffs that gives rise to a certain suspicion.
I'm more suspicious that we haven't had the opinion of an Albanian taxi driver.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
As an aside, I think one of the reasons that @Leon is in SF is that the city is promoting the extent that it's changed, and is desperate to get journalists in, so they can report on the extent to which the streets are no longer full of homeless meth addicts staggering around like zombies, and where (once regular) human faeces are basically unknown.
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?
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
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.
The gas distribution networks face an existential threat. If the networks aren't converted to hydrogen, and we are all forced to have h*** p***s, they are out of business. So they are at the forefront of the hydrogen heating gang.
It is highly possible that the gas distribution networks will simply find themselves out of business.
Only if one of two things happens:
a) The government enforces a ban on gas boilers by some means or other (mostly likely a ban on sales of new ones, even for fitting to existing systems).
b) Electric prices drop sufficiently relative to gas for heat pumps to be economically viable.
I've rubbed my crystal ball fairly hard, and I can't realistically see either of these things in it. A ban on gas boilers in new builds, possibly, but too many hard cases in the existing housing stock. Iirc there should already be a ban in place for new builds, but the last government kicked the can on when they realised what it would do to the already low rate of house building.
Meanwhile government policy over the last fifteen years appears to have been to make electricity as expensive as humanly possible, whilst claiming it's suddenly going to magically become much cheaper. I'm not holding my breath.
The most plausible contenders for the next government are probably Reform and then the Tories, both of which have junking Net Zero as stated policy - and given that Starmer's main solution to his crashing polling has been to try to become Farage-lite, I wouldn't rule out it getting cancelled (officially deferred to 2100?) before the next election.
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?
Where do you think he got the dog from?
Pound world.
If it were a dachshund it would have come from Poundstretcher.
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.
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.
Whoa! A sofa thread. Nice one. My tip, is buy one with washable covers. Ours is 20+ yrs old, and still going strong, but the covers have been thro the washing machine several times. Essential with cats and kids.
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?
Where do you think he got the dog from?
Pound world.
If it were a dachshund it would have come from Poundstretcher.
It the dog was female he could have called her Rose and got middle class ladies all aquiver in the park by shouting “Wait Rose”.
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.
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."
War is the mother of innovation. The Ukrainians are very good at finding ways to just get it done.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a US fighter squadron in WWII. They were due to convert from their increasingly obsolete P-47s to the superior P-51 Mustangs, and while the new aircraft had arrived there'd been no time for flight training.
When the order came to escort a bomber raid into Germany the Colonel in charge decided to abandon the old P-47s and use the P-51s instead, only to be told that was impossible because the pilots hadn't been trained.
He responded "We'll learn to fly them on the way!"
The P47 wasn’t obsolete. In fact, in some ways more advanced than the P51.
The range on the standard models of P47 was less, but the P47N (for the pacific) had more range than the P51.
The radial engine and the huge turbo supercharger system was tougher than the Merlin in the P51. When the Korean War broke out, the front line squadrons wanted to change back to the P47 for ground attack
The problem was cost/man hours to build. The P51 was a lot cheaper.
At the point in the war this event was supposed to have occurred US fighters in Europe were mostly doing bomber escort. The P-47 did not have the range to escort bombers deep into Germany, and it was not a match for the FW-190 in close combat. For escort work I don't think 'obsolete' is too strong a term.
But I do agree if I were a US pilot doing ground attack I would prefer to have that chunky radial between me and incoming fire...
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 gas was heavily contaminated with gunge, at least in the old coal gas days, which acted as a sealant, I would have thought.
This gunge disappeared with the introduction of North Sea gas - but then so too did the hydrogen.
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:
Wikipedia seems to suggest a much higher CO element ("burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume"). Your mix seems much more likely to me though.
Anyway the hydrogen component doesn't care about whatever else is there and would have escaped. So hydrogen is therefore plausible as a piped gas.
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.
War is the mother of innovation. The Ukrainians are very good at finding ways to just get it done.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a US fighter squadron in WWII. They were due to convert from their increasingly obsolete P-47s to the superior P-51 Mustangs, and while the new aircraft had arrived there'd been no time for flight training.
When the order came to escort a bomber raid into Germany the Colonel in charge decided to abandon the old P-47s and use the P-51s instead, only to be told that was impossible because the pilots hadn't been trained.
He responded "We'll learn to fly them on the way!"
The P47 wasn’t obsolete. In fact, in some ways more advanced than the P51.
The range on the standard models of P47 was less, but the P47N (for the pacific) had more range than the P51.
The radial engine and the huge turbo supercharger system was tougher than the Merlin in the P51. When the Korean War broke out, the front line squadrons wanted to change back to the P47 for ground attack
The problem was cost/man hours to build. The P51 was a lot cheaper.
Almost equal numbers built however:
Number of P-47s built: 15,636 Number of P-51s built: 15,768
We establish the recent emergence of many of these seep features, based on their discovery in areas routinely surveyed for decades with no previous seep presence.
Every time I leave this site for a while, like half a day or more, when I come back I find that you are discussing heat pumps
At first I thought it was just coincidence, now I realise that I am literally the only thing preventing PB from becoming an eternal and limitless debate about heat pumps
Something to think about there, in between heat-pump chats
You need a heat pump in the garage you probably do not have.
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.
The mix would be less flammable the pure hydrogen, but I’d also want to see the statistics of house fires from the time when ‘town gas’ was extant.
I’m going to take a guess of at least one order of magnitude more than we see today. A gas explosion today makes the national news, in the ‘50s and ‘60s it probably made the local paper.
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:
Wikipedia seems to suggest a much higher CO element ("burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume"). Your mix seems much more likely to me though.
Anyway the hydrogen component doesn't care about whatever else is there and would have escaped. So hydrogen is therefore plausible as a piped gas.
I wouldn't rely on my figures. I did just do a quick search on the internet and the 1 - 3% for carbon monoxide seems a bit low to me considering putting your head in the oven was a favourite way of topping yourself in those days and none of the other gases are poisonous. Having said that I don't know how much you need to do so, so maybe it is a lethal dose.
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
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,"
I'll know it's not you when your second paragraph does not begin with "Now...."
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:
Wikipedia seems to suggest a much higher CO element ("burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume"). Your mix seems much more likely to me though.
Anyway the hydrogen component doesn't care about whatever else is there and would have escaped. So hydrogen is therefore plausible as a piped gas.
I wouldn't rely on my figures. I did just do a quick search on the internet and the 1 - 3% for carbon monoxide seems a bit low to me considering putting your head in the oven was a favourite way of topping yourself in those days and none of the other gases are poisonous. Having said that I don't know how much you need to do so, so maybe it is a lethal dose.
Carbon monoxide is very poisonous. So not that much. But I'm very unsure now that all these figures seem to not agree.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
Slight problem with that - they have to want to spend their life with me.
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.
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.
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.
Being described as 'some wise person' has made my day!
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.
Yesterday, I suggested you watch the Mariners game. It was even better than I expected:
After Jorge Polanco singled to end the Mariners' 3-2 victory over the Tigers in 15 innings late Friday night, propelling Seattle to its first American League Championship Series since 2001, a full accounting and assessment could begin.
Four hours, 58 minutes. The two sides combined for 15 pitchers who threw 472 pitches, including two starters -- Logan Gilbert and Luis Castillo -- who made the first relief appearances of their careers. So many missed opportunities in extra innings, by both teams. So much emotion, fueled by a T-Mobile Park crowd of 47,025 that was relentless in its decibel generation.
Any political consequences? Two possible ones, that I can think of: The Seattle team's success might help incumbent Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Harrell
The Mariners have some great players who are immigrants.
The Mariners next opponent is the Toronto Blue Jays. The teams will be playing for the American League championship.
Mariners against Tigers. Isn’t that the Grimsby/ Hull Humberside derby?
An "interesting" (!) rabbit hole that may be of interest to a few (!), illustrating one problem with the USA Evangelical mind, and their tendency to confuse categories.
Here, they have taken some very specific "myths" (in a British view, stories with a point, from a couple of more incomprehensible Bible books - Daniel, Revelation) and turned it into an analytical framework of how history will end with the "Rapture", then made it important enough that they spend huge amounts of energy arguing about slightly different versions over decades.
Which is why you hear them talking about "what happens when the rapture comes?".
Here nearly all would call it "counting angels on pinheads", and put the whole thing down to being something minor not worth wasting time on.
Ironically, the whole thing started with very modern speculations from less than 200 years ago. The vid is a survey of what different denominations believe. Anyone who gets beyond 5 or 10 minutes of it deserves a medal.
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.
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.
Comments
Then you will be freezing cold in winter because, funnily enough, air at -5C isn't a great source of heat.
(The game began at 5 PM, Pacific Daylight Time.)
Any political consequences? Two possible ones, that I can think of: The Seattle team's success might help incumbent Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Harrell
The Mariners have some great players who are immigrants.
The Mariners next opponent is the Toronto Blue Jays. The teams will be playing for the American League championship.
The relevant way to think about the temperature isn't -5C, it's 268 K.
Retrofitting an existing (older) home is massive faff and expense.
It would disrupt every room in your house. With a young family very much living in it that's simply not an option.
But they've not landed yet at a market price.
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
Best place for CO2 capture is, in my view, on Energy from Waste plants. They run at full load continuously, and produce power and heat, some of which can be supplied to meet the energy needs of the capture plant. Also, half the CO2 is biogenic, so they become net-negative and can offset emissions from hard to abate sectors and help us achieve net zero.
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.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) tale of a US fighter squadron in WWII. They were due to convert from their increasingly obsolete P-47s to the superior P-51 Mustangs, and while the new aircraft had arrived there'd been no time for flight training.
When the order came to escort a bomber raid into Germany the Colonel in charge decided to abandon the old P-47s and use the P-51s instead, only to be told that was impossible because the pilots hadn't been trained.
He responded "We'll learn to fly them on the way!"
When you start to look into it, the whole subject of domestic heating really opens up a world of complexity. There’s efficiency, of course, and cost, and installation, and government incentives, and then there’s the climate angle, which is never far away. But what really strikes me is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer — every house is different, every homeowner’s priorities are different, and what works brilliantly for one person might be a total non-starter for someone else.
I think we also have to consider the long-term picture. It’s not just about what’s cheapest or most efficient today, but about where things are heading in five, ten, even twenty years. Will the technology mature further? Almost certainly. Will prices come down? Probably, at least to some degree. But at the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that the whole energy landscape is shifting under our feet — and nobody can say for sure where it’ll all settle.
Then there’s the comfort factor. People talk a lot about kilowatts and coefficients of performance, but in the end, we all just want to feel warm in winter and not think too hard about how it’s happening. Some say heat pumps feel “different” — not worse, just not quite the same as traditional systems. And that’s an interesting point, because it’s not just about physics; it’s about perception, habit, and what we’re used to.
The thing is, I don’t think the conversation is really about the machinery at all. It’s about how we approach change — whether we embrace it cautiously, enthusiastically, or not at all. Heat pumps just happen to be the current symbol of that broader shift. Some will leap in early, some will hang back until the numbers look better, and some will probably never be persuaded. And maybe that’s fine.
At the end of the day, whether a heat pump is the right choice depends on so many variables that it’s almost impossible to generalise. But it’s certainly a topic worth keeping an eye on. If nothing else, it gets people thinking about their homes, their bills, and the future of energy — which can’t be a bad thing, really.
Well, we need them on our new nuclear plants then...
Belgium are about to start receiving their new F-35s, and they’ll be sending their old F-16s to Ukraine too. https://x.com/visionergeo/status/1976992343074259137
The simple question is, what would a heat pump use and what would it cost, the problem is noone seems to know so obviously people are reluctant to install them.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/01/18/ive-seen-it-all-geary-cvs-stores-lock-up-chips-and-drinks-now/
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.
https://www.northerngasnetworks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/H21-Executive-Summary-Interactive-PDF-July-2016-V2.pdf
The range on the standard models of P47 was less, but the P47N (for the pacific) had more range than the P51.
The radial engine and the huge turbo supercharger system was tougher than the Merlin in the P51. When the Korean War broke out, the front line squadrons wanted to change back to the P47 for ground attack
The problem was cost/man hours to build. The P51 was a lot cheaper.
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.
Daniel Laurie was elected last year, on a platform of dealing with petty crime and homelessness. The biggest element has been a very simple 'move along' policy. If you're hanging out on a street corner (particularly in the center, financial or tourist districts), the police will simply move you on. You can no longer pitch a tent and be ignored by the police.
This has been combined with creating 1,500 new beds for homeless people... away from the City itelf. Get fed and a bed... but you won't be near Union Square.
Laurie also had a policy of avoiding conflict with Washington. The people of San Francisco wanted their city back, not political statements.
The San Franciscans seem to be pretty happy with him: his 75% approval rating has to be among the highest of Mayors in the US.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is my motto.
My gas boiler ain't broke.
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.
So apparently, historically, we've pumped hydrogen into houses successfully in the past.
I wish Daniel Laurie was the Los Angeles mayor.
Fair play if they have genuinely cleaned it up, and not just moved the problem elsewhere out of sight of the tourists.
a) The government enforces a ban on gas boilers by some means or other (mostly likely a ban on sales of new ones, even for fitting to existing systems).
b) Electric prices drop sufficiently relative to gas for heat pumps to be economically viable.
I've rubbed my crystal ball fairly hard, and I can't realistically see either of these things in it. A ban on gas boilers in new builds, possibly, but too many hard cases in the existing housing stock. Iirc there should already be a ban in place for new builds, but the last government kicked the can on when they realised what it would do to the already low rate of house building.
Meanwhile government policy over the last fifteen years appears to have been to make electricity as expensive as humanly possible, whilst claiming it's suddenly going to magically become much cheaper. I'm not holding my breath.
The most plausible contenders for the next government are probably Reform and then the Tories, both of which have junking Net Zero as stated policy - and given that Starmer's main solution to his crashing polling has been to try to become Farage-lite, I wouldn't rule out it getting cancelled (officially deferred to 2100?) before the next election.
Are you going to wander along the road for a pint in the Dirty Duck?
Hydrogen 46 - 52%
Methane 28 - 36%
Carbon Dioxide 16 - 20% (Useless)
Carbon Monoxide 1 - 3% (Poisonous but useful)
Nitrogen/Oxygen 0 - 3% (Useless)
My tip, is buy one with washable covers. Ours is 20+ yrs old, and still going strong, but the covers have been thro the washing machine several times. Essential with cats and kids.
Also, I suspect we had a rather grater tolerance to death and injury in that era then we do now.
But I do agree if I were a US pilot doing ground attack I would prefer to have that chunky radial between me and incoming fire...
One of the most potent greenhouse gas emissions has been discovered seeping out of cracks of the Antarctic seafloor, researchers announced.
Methane has been measured escaping from crevices in the seabed at a high rate
https://abcnews.go.com/International/researchers-find-methane-leaking-cracks-antarctic-seabed/story?id=126413559
This gunge disappeared with the introduction of North Sea gas - but then so too did the hydrogen.
Anyway the hydrogen component doesn't care about whatever else is there and would have escaped. So hydrogen is therefore plausible as a piped gas.
Number of P-47s built: 15,636
Number of P-51s built: 15,768
Paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins dies in prison attack
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2d2me0eljo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2523997p9o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lurie
(I wonder whether he was partly inspired by this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fransicko )
We establish the recent emergence of many of these seep features, based on their discovery in areas routinely surveyed for decades with no previous seep presence.
I’m going to take a guess of at least one order of magnitude more than we see today. A gas explosion today makes the national news, in the ‘50s and ‘60s it probably made the local paper.
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...
Good stuff is worth buying, and it lasts forever.
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.
(The game began at 5 PM, Pacific Daylight Time.)
Any political consequences? Two possible ones, that I can think of: The Seattle team's success might help incumbent Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Harrell
The Mariners have some great players who are immigrants.
The Mariners next opponent is the Toronto Blue Jays. The teams will be playing for the American League championship.
Mariners against Tigers. Isn’t that the Grimsby/ Hull Humberside derby?
Here, they have taken some very specific "myths" (in a British view, stories with a point, from a couple of more incomprehensible Bible books - Daniel, Revelation) and turned it into an analytical framework of how history will end with the "Rapture", then made it important enough that they spend huge amounts of energy arguing about slightly different versions over decades.
Which is why you hear them talking about "what happens when the rapture comes?".
Here nearly all would call it "counting angels on pinheads", and put the whole thing down to being something minor not worth wasting time on.
Ironically, the whole thing started with very modern speculations from less than 200 years ago. The vid is a survey of what different denominations believe. Anyone who gets beyond 5 or 10 minutes of it deserves a medal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CslNVE-jP5g
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.
Un-Leon, and I didn't have to bother reading it.