Earth Notes: The Earth Notes Podcast @Home

Auto-updated 2025-04-19.

Listen to the Earth Notes occasional podcast on all things eco and green and efficient @Home! #eco #snackable #podcast

How to cut your carbon footprint at home without pain! All Earth Notes podcast episodes (audio-based articles) are listed here. Look out for the full transcripts.

Try the Podcast RSS feed.

(You may also like to try: the basic feed, site technicals, saving electricity and gas. Oh, and the EOU Mastodon feed.)

The podcast started in June 2019. The first two episodes were created to support a local naturalist who leads guided walks around our local council housing estate.

Episodes are typically:

'snackable' at just a few minutes long
on a green, or energy efficiency, or energy data topic
based at home

Some episodes are a little more tangential, such as listening to the temperature of your radiators for a whole year in one second.

Some episodes are longer. Watch out for video too!

There are also ambient and sonification episodes with little or no commentary.

Episodes

68 episodes, newest first:

2024-12-12: A Home-heat Carol (2024-12) 12 min a c
2024-07-01: MUSIC RSS Podcast Feed Efficiency Sonification 2 2 min a c
2024-06-28: Crows in the Cemetery on a Hot June Afternoon (2024-06) 6 min a c
2024-06-17: MUSIC RSS Podcast Feed Efficiency Sonification 1 2 min a c
2024-06-17: KEHS talk: The Truth About Heat Pumps (2024) 13 min a c
2024-05-23: KEHS talk: Why Do Solar? (2024) 20 min a c
2024-05-21: KEHS talk: Fresh Home Solar PV Install in Kingston (2024) 25 min a c
2024-05-19: KEHS talk: Draughts, Insulation, Ventilation (2024) 12 min a c
2024-03-28: Repair Café Kingston Report to Council and TTK AGM (2024) 6 min a c
2024-01-28: Diarycast - Year In Review (2023) 5 min a c
2023-09-10: 16WW Hot Noon Garden Ambient (2023-09) 7 min a c
2023-09-03: Paris Gard du Nord Train Station Afternoon Piano (2023-09) 5 min a c
2023-08-01: UK Home Heating Decarbonisation Seminar Presentation (2023-08) 17 min a c
2023-07-14: MUSIC Yearly Electricity Grid Flows Sonified 2 min a c
2023-04-10: MUSIC Water Music: In The House 1 min a c
2023-01-03: Diarycast - Year In Review, and One Weird Trick (2022) 7 min a c
2022-08-14: The Sound of Campsite (2022-08) 8 min a c
2022-08-11: Six Minutes of Med-ness (2022-08) 7 min a c
2022-07-04: TTK AGM Overview (2022) 7 min a c
2022-06-06: Statscast - Energy Storage Stats Special (2022-05) 8 min a c
2022-05-22: 16WW House Suburban Sparrows Ambient (2022-05) 11 min a c
2022-05-08: Hanwell Hootie Ambient (2022-05) 11 min a c
2021-12-29: Diarycast - End of Year Roundup (2021-12-28) 3 min a c
2021-11-14: Diarycast - June to November Roundup (2021-11-14) 6 min a c
2021-09-08: English River August Ambient (2021-08) 11 min a c
2021-09-05: Microbrewery Ambient (2021-09) 11 min a c
2021-08-28: Direycast - I'm All Right Jack (2021-08-28) 4 min a c
2021-08-22: On Being a Hardware Developer (2021) 12 min a c
2021-08-01: Herne Bay Ambient (2021-07) 24 min a c
2021-06-27: Wren Loud and Bold Ambient (2021-06) 2 min a c
2021-06-14: Diarycast - March Warm, April Snow, June Xmas (2021-06-14) 3 min a c
2021-03-21: Diarycast - Smoke and Snow to Census Jab (2021-03-21) 4 min a c
2021-02-07: Soundscape - Going Postal in Audio 21 min a c
2021-01-14: Diarycast - Interview Snippets (2021-01-14) 4 min a c
2020-12-31: Statscast - Load Profile (2020-12) 4 min a c
2020-12-22: Soundscape - Solstice Exercise Mile Walk 20 min a c
2020-12-21: Diarycast - Solstice Lockdown Edition (2020-12-21) 8 min a c
2020-11-13: VIDEO Smart Radiator Valves Video 17 min a c
2020-10-10: Statscast - Baselines and Bats (2020-09) 9 min a c
2020-09-26: Weymouth Ambient (2020-08) 22 min a c
2020-09-25: Diarycast - Summer Catch-up (2020-09-25) 5 min a c
2020-09-21: Soundwalk - an hour on the Cambridge Road Estate (2020-09-12) 61 min a c
2020-09-18: Bats Around our Home aka 16WW 38 min a c
2020-07-26: Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping - Travel (2020-07-26) 9 min a c
2020-07-12: Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping (2020-07-12) 7 min a c
2020-07-05: Statscast - Normal-ish June, Heating Re-viewed (2020-06) 9 min a c
2020-06-10: Statscast - Lockdown Changes, Log Noises (2020-05) 11 min a c
2020-05-23: Diarycast - Urban Dawn Chorus (2020-05-23) 24 min a c
2020-05-13: Diarycast - Ambient Sound of a Graveyard (2020-05-13) 11 min a c
2020-05-10: Diarycast - Lockdown Patently Workable (2020-05-10) 4 min a c
2020-05-03: Statscast - PV Up, Travel Down, Weakly Weeklies (2020-04) 11 min a c
2020-04-22: Diarycast - Blue Skies PV High (2020-04-22) 3 min a c
2020-04-19: Metacast 2: Podcast Specs and Workflow (2020-04) 5 min a c
2020-04-13: Diarycast - Lockdown Lawnmowing Sadly Allowed (2020-04-13) 3 min a c
2020-04-10: Metacast 1: Blue Yeti, Shy Eurasian Footwear (2020-04) 4 min a c
2020-03-21: Coronacast for March 2020 2 min a c
2019-12-30: Sign-off for 2019, Hello 2020! 7 min a c
2019-11-09: VIDEO OpenTRV Movie Mashup 2 min a c
2019-10-29: Water Music: How Does Tap-water Temperature Sound in Time-lapse? 5 min a c
2019-10-28: The Green Existence of Adam Hart-Davis 6 min a c
2019-10-19: PV Sounds: How Does PV Grid-tie Generation Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min a c
2019-10-13: Battery Sounds: How Does a Battery Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min a c
2019-10-12: Rad Sounds II: Attempting a Higher-fi Home-heating Time-lapse 3 min a c
2019-09-22: Greener Travel: Why Cut Car-bon Miles? 4 min a c
2019-09-15: Rad Sounds: How Cool is your Home Heating in Time-lapse? 3 min a c
2019-08-28: Aircon On, Windows Open! (2019-08) 3 min a c
2019-06-21: About Our Greenish Home aka 16WW, with Bonus Bats and Sparrows 4 min a c
2019-06-15: Solar Panels in My Garden 2 min a c

a = episode artwork, c = WebVTT captions/transcript

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Lite

'Lite'/mobile pages play smaller, mono versions of the audio files where available. Smaller files help save your mobile data allowance and a tiny carbon toeprint for you and for me. A smaller version may be served automatically if you have data saving mode (Save-Data: on) enabled in your browser.

Diary

Diary of some EOU HQ and notable and personal events/stats, for a future diarycast!

2025-04-17: fifth Enphase ACB installed today, at around noon.
2025-04-10: sunny morning, watching an exact apparent match of the dishwasher consuming 2.3kWh with the PV generation the same, with both the battery and grid connection idle...
2025-04-08: for the first time in many months, I was able to do a full orbit of the sunny cemetery today, with the flooded path by the north (Bonner Hill Road) fence and the brambles overgrowing the path at the east boundary both under control.
2025-04-03: today I went to Solar and Storage Live at Excel London, and learned that £1k/kWh is probably still a reasonable installed price for home AC-coupled storage, with the typical range in prices being maybe 40% with FoxESS at the budget end (~£200/kWh wholesale). And a ~450Wp mid range solar panel wholesales for £50–£100 so it really is the labour and other installation costs that matter! Oh and a big packaged battery system for about 1 month of winter consumption for us at 16WW towers (~300kWh) from Prime Batteries for ~EUR80k (~4t, ~9m^3)!
2025-04-02: at just this time of year (and a mirror couple of weeks in the Autumn) the sun rises directly over the houses outside our bedroom window and blinds me while I set in bed unless I pull the curtains!
2025-03-31: Enphase ACB, DHW cylinder, Thermino heat battery and the off-grid battery were all full by just after solar noon (13:51 BST)!
2025-03-30: did not quite fill up all the energy stores today: Enphase and DHW cylinder both were full, Thermino estimated <1kWh capacity left.
2025-03-29: a partial solar eclipse landed ~10:00 to ~12:00 here with blue/hazy skies, so obviously also the perfect time to run (possibly the first) 'intense' (65°C) dishwasher maintenance wash of the year while avoiding importing from the grid! GB grid solar generation seemed to dip ~16GW/~15% at ~11:00, looking at Sheffield Solar. This also seems like a good day to stop taking vitamin D until autumn; I have been intermittent the last few days.
2025-03-25: assuming that I can resolve my current long-running dispute with Enphase about read-only local access to my data, eg battery SoC, I am contemplating adding 1 or 2 more ACB units to improve self-consumption outside winter.
2025-03-19: we are due a pasteurisation cycle, so PV diversion priority has automagically been set to the DHW cylinder. And because the grid carbon intensity in the wee hours was too high to do it that way, PV diversion is being hoped for, and indeed is much preferred. Reader, it all worked: ~3kWh to the DHW cylinder and ~1.4kWh to the Thermino.
2025-03-18: blue skies (though chilly outside); Enphase and Thermino (ie electric and heat batteries) both charging well before noon, and my laptop is being powered off-grid. ~5kWh each into the Enphase and Thermino by EOD. At ~21:00 we turned off the space heating and the OpenTRV unit; the pipe-freeze protection means that the pump and compressor will still run at low settings when outside is cold (~≤6°C). The bathroom MHRV fan was also turned off to save ~2W.
2025-03-16: 53 minutes of grid-response by the Eddi today (~27% of active)! By mid-evening for March so far our PV generation was almost identical to consumption (including diversion) at ~170kWh, though ~43kWh was still imported and ~26kWh exported. About one third of consumption (a bit under 4kWh/d) passed through the Enphase ACB.
2025-03-15: we are contemplating turning heating off in the middle of next week when daily temperatures seem set to stay at or about 12°C.
2025-03-14: last of my set of four favourite 'tulip' wine glasses died today — I noticed a big L-shaped crack as I was pouring red wine. Three of them died within a few months and the set was maybe at least a decade old...
2025-03-13: I just manually scheduled my dishwasher run water-heating demand around a 30:1 (3366W peak down to 111W trough in 7 minutes) swing in PV generation — blue sky direct sun to hail and then slowly back — 'flexible demand' and 'self consumption' for the win ...
2025-03-12: I am using up in porch Radbot 4o a couple of pairs of old AA alkaline cells of unknown remaining capacity, for recycling after, as a break from the usual parade of NiMHs.
2025-03-11: SVN repo version to 62008 before this comment committed!
2025-03-10: we seem to be booking a full family holiday this year, woven around various other dates such as GCSE results and degree retake dates...
2025-03-08: daytime outside temperatures in these sunny early days in March are high enough (over 15°C) to turn off the space heating entirely for the duration, except the circulation pump when the OpenTRV boiler controller calls for heat. In April turning that base unit off alongside space heating would save maybe ~20W. (I managed a little shirt-off sunbathing in the garden this afternoon, and I am giving the house an airing.)
2025-03-03: a pasteurisation cycle ran overnight for the DHW tank, and then some diversion to the Thermino heat battery started 11:00-ish.
2025-02-28: I accidentally forced the Ecotricity bill a day early, but in any case for this month it is ~£99 vs ~£20 more last February.
2025-02-27: I saw inside an A&E (US: "emergency room") for the first time, at UCL, accompanying a friend there. Got to the front of the queue after ~5 minutes, triaged after another ~10 minutes, discharged ~90m from arrival.
2025-02-21: external temperatures up to ~15°C in the afternoon; technically we barely need space heating, which is handy as I completely powered down the heat pump to help reconnecting the heat battery.
2025-02-21: I posted a talk proposal for the NLUUG spring conference.
2025-02-21: I filed a claim with Thames Water for a surface water drainage rebate (~£50/y) on the grounds that all our rain run-off goes to soakaways, eg as listed under Non-energy things done 2010-10-18: installed roof downpipe/downspout with 200l+ water butt for watering garden ... Run-off is to garden which should very slightly reduce strain on drains during a rain storm.
2025-02-18: PV diversion to the DHW tank before noon...
2025-02-16: the off-grid battery hit FULL today, and there was a smidge of diversion on-grid to the DHW tank.
2025-02-15: unexpectedly giving a talk on my start-ups tomorrow at the Hackathon17 that I am helping out with again; the hackathon is all weekend.
2025-02-14: a bit of solar spill to grid before 1pm...
2025-02-10: new glasses today, with a slight prescription change.
2025-01-25: I have been delivered a new shiny toy - an Etekcity Lasergrip 1080 infrared thermometer!
2025-01-25: according to the new pretty dashboard on AlDente Pro 1.30 my MBA's battery's peak capacity (after 272 cycles) is ~86% of FCS having dropped off a cliff from ~93% to ~88% on 2024-07-02, so I am recalibrating in case that helps.
2025-01-24: ARRRGH! — the Eddi stopped working properly yesterday evening apparently due to some latent old code causing undervoltage fault 47 and other weird behaviour and the live values I can see are not being properly stored in the myenergi database for later access, and the OpenTRV stats receiver seemed to have gone at least partly deaf though improved when power cycled and moved a few cm away from the outside wall and ~30cm from the Purrmetrix gateway (currently indicating that it is using 3G)...
2025-01-23: Octopus declared "job done" today and I paid the balance of their fee. Another tentacle SPAMed me the next day offering me 10% off solar PV...
2025-01-22: I attended a useful all-morning AI seminar for researchers in the engineering school at university, which taught me the current/new art terms for things I had had to work out myself in my GA (genetic algorithm) fiddling before university the first time ~40 years ago: "reward shaping"! Spent quite some time before, during and after the event comparing Octopus Daikin home heat-pump installation notes with a recent head of my department (AD)...
2025-01-20: new fibre optics have just been laid today into the part of the estate due to be bulldozed, including close to me...
2025-01-19: to slightly lighten my footprint, on my personal Mastodon/Fediverse account I have set posts to evaporate (auto-delete) after a year if they have not been liked or boosted etc, which should trim storage requirements a little with minimal loss of value.
2025-01-15: daughter back to uni today, so she did not get to see out of a fixed window!
2025-01-14: the window people did not show today (looks like the work did not get booked in on their side)...
2025-01-10: had to use MailChimp today for the first time (historically I have been SPAMmed crazy through it) for Kingston Invents.
2025-01-08: actually during my PhD supervision, one of my supervisors had his gas meter removed, so both he and I have switched from gas heating to heat pumps and 'defossilised' this winter!
2025-01-05: reduced my review rating for the Enphase system from 4.5 to 2 because of the continuing failure to make stats available across the LAN as before which breaks lots of my integrations.
2025-01-03: outside temperatures touched -2°C first this this morning making for some pretty frost on our windows in the morning sunshine, and an iced-up bathroom fan overnight. The new heat pump is working well, and at noon was being entirely powered by our PV, which I did not expect to happen in winter!
2025-01-01: we used less electricity last month than the previous (warmer) December, so the heat pump seems to be doing its job.
2024-12-29: filled in a REACT follow-up survey (originally from covid times).
2024-12-28: tuning and working around a hardware problem (non-working bypass valve) on the heat pump, and discovered a nifty feature/bug which may subtly push some demand away from 4pm-to-7pm peak, setting back LWT/flow temperature at that time even though nominally not possible with external call for heat.
2024-11-11: even though my disk is at a balmy ~17°C, I have plugged in the USB heated insoles FTWarmth!
2024-11-10: finally reading NKD's dissertation and capturing a copy of the data from 16WW that she collected [kalantari2024overheating].
2024-11-08: I have been selected to do a lightning talk at LOCO24 on my RSS side-quest in December!
2024-11-06: captained "Sussed Surrey" team in Climate Brief quiz to =45 out of 54 teams.
2024-11-06: shifting my family's money (ISAs etc) out of US assets today...
2024-10-26: turned 2b Radbot down from 3 to 1 as the room is no longer being used, nominally, and it was the only Radbot persistently on today.
2024-10-24: given a very sunny (mainly blue-skies) day, I am happy to have been to squeeze in a 65°C "intensive" (as maintenance) dishwasher run with basically no draw from the grid...
2024-10-18: out monster hedge at the front of the house was trimmed today and lots more light is getting in again!
2024-10-17: two FoI requests today; it will clearly be exponential growth from here...
2024-10-15: I am taking a leaf out of the Clean Energy Wire book, and making all texts created for EOU and not otherwise explicitly licensed or restricted available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0) licence.
2024-10-15: 1TtCO2 removal to limit warning 1.5°C, 3TtCO2 to get back to pre-industrial [ransohoff2024removal].
2024-10-14: I put in my first ever UK Freedom of Information request on TTK's behalf on Thursday (10th) asking a school about the age of its gas boilers and replacement schedule and presence of PV, and received a useful answer today.
2024-10-10: The BBC is forecasting rather high winds, nearly 5,000 mph locally...
2024-10-09: son moved into daughter's room but 2b and 1g room designations remaining unchanged.
2024-10-06: restarted taking D3 supplement pills today.
2024-10-06: Google force-added AI to my searches. I cannot disable it easily (no setting available). I spend my time trying to fix climate change, and having an unwanted energy-heavy extra waste for every search is bad. So I have stopped using Google search for now, on mobile and on desktop. Google will not notice, but for me it is as sad as giving up on AltaVista... (I have a degree in AI; I have sold products containing AI; I watch my research colleagues doing good things with AI.)
2024-09-29: I have a story at the top of Hacker News again!
2024-09-25: registered for LOCO2024 online; I have already submitted lightning and normal talk abstracts.
2024-09-21: Ellie is off to university today...
2024-09-19: if seems that I have been doing my podcast LUFS all wrong at -23 as if for broadcast, when everyone else does -16 for podcasts...
2024-09-17: passed my PhD confirmation viva with no corrections!
2024-09-09: Octopus has confirmed that it (the design team) is OK with the placements shown in the side and plan views (alternative 3), so I have signed thee provisional sales DocuSign form. Lots more details to be sorted out...
2024-09-08: hosting another Open Home session this afternoon as part of Sustainable September locally. One visitor was defeated by building works and traffic, and another by travel back from a break. Hey ho.
2024-09-07: no word of a remedy from Enphase yet.
2024-09-03: SoundCloud reinstated with good grace the track.
2024-09-02: just had my newly-created RSS-feed-hits sonification rejected by SoundCloud for copyright infringement of a track which sounds utterly different, which I have disputed!
2024-08-31: Enphase support emailed: I received an update from the team stating downgrading the gateway software version isn't possible. We're exploring alternative solutions to address the issue with your system. We'll provide an update by September 4th 2024.
2024-08-29: went to the doctor to get a blood PSA test, which I hope to repeat every couple of years, though the surgery will not send me reminders. The BMI and blood-pressure machine in the lobby was finally working and confirmed to the cm the height that I have been claiming for years and the weight I think that I am to within a kg (slightly overweight, nominally, and a BMI of ~25) and that I have highish blood pressure but not hypertension. Straight off to the pub afterwards for beer and near-lethally hot pizza!
2024-08-22: Enphase decided to do an unannounced forced Envoy firmware upgrade at about 9pm (yes, on a Friday evening), from D5.0.34 to D7.0.88, breaking my local data access (to /production.json, in spite of my clear instructions to them not to do so, and I have so far spent an hour on the phone trying to get its support to revert which they claim not to... At the very least the system will be broken until I spend many hours rewriting access to some other mechanism. 2024-09-06: FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them.
2024-08-17: this weekend I want to go through yesterday's Octopus heat pump proposal design documents, and make sure that we can fit everything neatly in the kitchen and possibly even regain a sliver of space.
2024-08-15: A-level results day for my daughter: she has her grades to get into her first-choice course! And her start date is essentially the same as my PhD confirmation viva: let us hope that higher education is not a 1-in-1-out for us...
2024-08-14: my team won the group challenge (planning for better use of 'hyperscale' data centre waste heat), mainly by making use of a 60°C stream from liquid cooling for domestic space heat and DHW, ~10k+ homes in heating climates for each 100MW of data centre power demand, tacking fuel poverty and earning a social licence to operate, on the final day of summer school.
2024-08-11: off to Durham (first time, I think) for a summer school starting tomorrow. Things did not start too well — I received a SPAM call claiming that my phone is about to be deactivated as I set off, then the first leg of my train was cancelled and I had to divert via bus and Tube! Then the bus would not let me off at the Tube station! But I caught my main train.
2024-08-08: member of the team winning the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence.
2024-08-06: back from a few days at a music festival: I danced so hard that I have blisters on my feet! (I was also without a laptop for the longest in many years...)
2024-07-30: free idea to save the climate and our gardens, and puts the sex in sustainability, well SECCS actually. A robot that catches slugs, bakes them to pure #carbon (ie #biochar) and buries them deep in the soil. Slug Enemy Carbon Capture and Storage.
2024-07-30: had MSc student visit to install some sensors for their overheating in Superhomes study.
2024-07-28: Simon E fixed Transcobble, thank you (him) and hurrah!
2024-07-10: an unexpected small third tranche of cash arrived from the sale of Ixaris today!
2024-07-09: Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate: it was me that reported it to elReg, having noticed that my grid intensity calculator stopped dead at midnight!
2024-07-08: my name is on a letter to the Prime Minister about repair and reuse from the Restart Project.
2024-07-07: I harvested my first blackberry today, from a bramble.
2024-07-06: I received a cheery automated note from preprint.org saying: Congratulations! Your following work is gaining recognition and it has reached the milestone of 100 download!
2024-07-04: UK General Election today, and have been a teller at my local polling station from 5pm to 9pm. I have also nearly finished reorganising my sock drawer (yes, really: I have too many socks), and made some decent progress on my PhD confirmation report.
2024-07-01: sadly someone seems to have comprehensively pulled to pieces my favourite wooden bench in the Garden of Remembrance in the cemetery.
2024-06-24: my daughter is on her first trip abroad as an adult with friends, by air to Spain.
2024-06-22: read [govUK2024community] and made a personal response.
2024-06-22: today Clarivate / Web of Science alerted me to the citation from my paper (DOI:10.3390/su16114710) to my dataset (DOI:10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2t6).
2024-06-21: I received my postal ballot paper for the UK general election and have voted: I am now officially immune to further politicking!
2024-06-20: living it up on a sunny start to near longest day: some TLC and a hot (70°C) near-empty maintenance wash for the dishwasher! Tomato-y fatty gunge is a horror!
2024-06-18: read [govUK2024electricity] consultation and (partially) responded [PDF].
2024-06-16: open house today, 1st visitor at 1pm, 3 more at 2pm! We will quite likely do some follow-up over email.
2024-06-15: shockingly Hermes/Evri fails to deliver an Amazon order with no updates at all since Wednesday 12th, and Amazon says We're very sorry your delivery is so late. Although it may still arrive, you can request a refund now. So, dear reader, I requested a refund, and asked Amazon not to use Hermes/Evri. Given the behaviour of the owners I do not wish to support them.
2024-06-14: we are having some electricity power cuts this afternoon; cable damage to a single phase it seems like, maybe related to the redevelopment works. Internet continues, powered off-grid! The circuit breaker for 3/4s of the PV tripped at some point; I realised the next morning (~07:30Z) because of poor generation even in bright sunshine. Subsequently confirmed in a letter on the 18th from Vistry/Countryside that accidental damage to an unidentified underground power cable during ground clearance operations on site caused the power from the substation to shut down.
2024-06-13: Hermes/Evri twice fumbling a now-late Amazon delivery to me (from Amazon's tracking pop-up): Wednesday, 12 June 10:39 AM Out for delivery Kingston Upon Thames, GB; Tuesday, 11 June 10:23 PM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 5:30 PM Problem resolved and parcel is in transit Brooklands, GB; Monday, 10 June 3:20 PM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 7:43 AM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility Rugby, GB; 7:42 AM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 7:39 AM; Problem resolved and parcel is in transit Rugby, GB; 12:40 AM Package departed an Amazon facility Me3 9Ly, Rochester, Kent, United Kingdom GB; Sunday, 9 June 6:42 PM Package arrived at an Amazon facility Me3 9Ly, Rochester, Kent, United Kingdom GB; Carrier picked up the package.
2024-06-11: the full HTML paper is up, V2 of the PDF is up, manuscript not, status still Website online.
2024-06-09: just ordered tent, etc, for the festival in August; I will find out what vital equipment I have ordered just as I need it! (All arrived by the 18th, except for the sleeping bag apparently lost by Hermes/Evri, and refunded.)
2024-06-08: my son's ballboy duties at Surbiton continue, and my daughter is still deep in revision in the midst of her A-level exams, on this sunny weekend.
2024-06-06: my paper's landing page is still saying This is an early access version, the complete PDF, HTML, and XML versions will be available soon.
2024-06-04: new Fairbuds arrived today, on charge (at 50%), paired with Fairphone and MacBook. (My Fairphone asked if I wanted to grant access to my contact book and something else: I said no.)
2024-06-02: lawn mown this sunny Sunday morning; the (5A) extension head fuse blew when I was nearly done removing several inches of growth in the first cut this year, so I rescued one from from an ancient power adaptor in my treasure/junk drawer!
2024-05-31: The rise of Heat Geek — a startup hell-bent on bringing heat pumps to the Brits mentions my research: Among those impressed by his understanding of heating system technology is Damon Hart-Davis, a PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. He recently wrote a research paper on something occasionally discussed by Chapman in some of his videos — briefly, that turning off the heating in one room in a house can, in some scenarios, be less efficient overall than if you just heat every room. "I thought, 'Oh, this can't be right, I shall prove him wrong'," recalls Hart-Davis. But the modelling instead validated Heat Geek’s analysis, given certain conditions. "That is really surprising," says Hart-Davis.
2024-05-31: morning paper publication level: Pending conversion; afternoon: Conversion Skipped (uh-oh?); then Website online! Word count: 8669, page count: 25, submission to publication (days): 41.
2024-05-30: paper publication level: Author proofreading - resubmitted; first feed hits sonification ('type 1') created.
2024-05-29: the last of three pumpkins that we had planted out was eaten overnight; there have been hordes of huge slugs frolicking in all the rain and wet that we have had. I spent the whole day working on the proofs of my paper.
2024-05-28: went to look at heat pump installation (amongst other building works at the Surbiton home of a friend.
2024-05-28: Accepted for Publication! By the evening English correction done...
2024-05-27: on this bank holiday Monday evening, given input from me and my supervisors in response to an update from the journal yesterday morning: Pending editor decision...
2024-05-22: today at uni: a workshop on PhD-by-publication, supervision, departmental coffee time, a seminar, departmental PGR in-person socials, ... oh and some research work, maybe?
2024-05-21: removed reference to the 'old' BMRS www.bmreports.com/bmrs Elexon site from the grid-intensity page, before shut-down at the end of the month. My phone WorldOfSolitare game claims that I have played 1000 hands of Turn Three Klondike Solitaire on it with 100 hands won (ie 10%) in an average of 1m3s and 16 moves...
2024-05-18: today was Kingston Efficient Homes Show, and the small-talks part that I ran seemed to go well!
2024-05-17: on the second (and possibly final) Elexon 109 working group about possibly netting imports and exports (of 'reflux' flow) in each half-hour (HH) settlement period for domestic retail customers. It was estimated that it might save £11 per year per home, and affects maybe ~13% of settlement periods and ~160GWh/y flows given some data analysed from a ~2013 study of domestic PV customers.
2024-05-15: sunny lunchtime: I am at university (with the inventors' club in Kingston later). I think that I have done all my paper revisions that I can reasonably without discussion with my supervisors / accomplices, and have discovered that the bar by the lake is open, so I am having a pint of lager by the lake!
2024-05-10: we received something that is not a rejection from journal #4, hurrah! Revisions ahoy!
2024-05-06: a rainy bank holiday, and my mail server is getting hammered so hard with SPAM attempts that it is sometimes refusing my own local connections!
2024-05-01: 13:40Z very low wind but "fossil @ 32% 8831MW [CCGT, COAL, OCGT, OIL] import @ 27% 7308MW [INTELEC, INTEW, INTFR, INTGRNL, INTIFA2, INTIRL, INTNED, INTNEM, INTNSL, INTVKL] low-carbon @ 29% 8017MW [NPSHYD, NUCLEAR, WIND]", ie about 1/3rd each fossil, imports and home-grown renewables.
2024-04-30: this evening I became (interim) chair of Transition Town Kingston: I may have to become a grown-up soon too!
2024-04-29: checked connections and voltages in the main off-grid solar connector box in the back-garden and all seems OK; the Unisolar panel is being outgunned (~20V to ~23V) be others on the same string so is not currently contributing it seems, but that is OK.
2024-04-27: I discovered at about noon BST that the SunnyBeam thought that the time was mid-evening ... sometime in about 2004 ... so it got reset! Also, a friend called me to say that his solar (~5kWp) and battery installation was up and running as of today, with just an Eddi diverter to set up.
2024-04-26: RSS Podcast Efficiency featured in Podnews!
2024-04-25: odd: playing SoundCloud music (in Firefox) seems to block/slow Time Machine finding changes to back up; pausing the music sometimes allows Time Machine to continue...
2024-04-24: the council's grass-verge-trimming contractor is outside and the strimmer is so much less unpleasantly loud than previously — it seems to be electric!
2024-04-22: I am posting in my vote for the London Mayoral and Assembly elections. (I previously did my 6-month PhD progress report, and will next order more ground coffee: priorities!)
2024-04-20: I sent an email with an Apache log sample to anthropic.com: When a robots.txt says "no” that does NOT mean "ask again in a few seconds just in case". This is filling my logs with garbage and wasting my CPU and bandwidth. The misbehaviour that had been continuing for days did stop after a few hours, so I think someone read the mail and acted on it.
2024-04-19: the Octopus heat pump survey happened, taking about 4h; it will be very tight to get everything physically fitted and eg meet the GDPO requirements to avoid the need for planning permission.
2024-04-17: GPTBot and ClaudeBot are all over my sites today...
2024-04-16: did an interview with FT Next about my heat pumps and TRVs pre-print. Also, and less fun, finished filling in PFF2 and CYI student finance forms...
2024-04-12: finished off the last of the 60 podcast transcripts this (sunny) morning, hurrah!
2024-04-07: the off-grid system powered the Internet router through the night last night.
2024-04-05: on the bus to meet friends in the evening, I found myself on the bus with someone I worked with in a start-up over 20 years ago!
2024-04-03: I turned off DMARC pct=100 reporting on a couple of inbound-only MX domains since their misuse and its reporting continues to be solidly tiresome and distracting.
2024-03-26: on the GB Grid Intensity page I have renamed the zero-carbon fuels total to low-carbon because, as overall grid intensity falls, the difference stops being a rounding error!
2024-03-24: the heat battery was (over) full before noon.
2024-03-23: a little after 3pm all storage was pretty-much full again. In the evening peak period little of the additional demand was taken up by fossil fuels, eg CCGT, but mainly from storage and interconnectors (mainly French nukes). A marginal kWh need no longer be gas.
2024-03-21: a little after 3pm the heat battery is completely (over) full and has stopped absorbing energy, as has the Enphase, so over 1kW is spilling to grid. By little after 4pm the off-grid energy store was full too.
2024-03-19: I have been roped in as a judge/assessor for a university sustainability module to today!
2024-03-18: I will stop taking vitamin D from tomorrow until Autumn.
2024-03-17: a nearby friend who has been exploring heat-pumps, roof and wall insulation and solar PV called me to say that he was about to sign up for PV, with batteries and diversion to his existing DHW cylinder — hurrah!
2024-03-16: the sparrows have been swarming and chattering and squabbling in the hedge under my window the last few days...
2024-03-15: 14:45Z: just after closing the poll for central heating state (~1/3 off) we turned ours off, so that was a ~3 month heating season.
2024-03-15: unexpected converging benefits of WFH (Working From Home) and Bluetooth speaker: being able to to take my bath while staying in a retrofit conference to make space in my heat battery for DHW for everyone else in the family later!
2024-03-09: not a spectacular day, but most of the storage (Thermino, Enphase) got pretty full.
2024-03-08: the Thermino was about to (over)fill on diversion a little before noon today, but strategic bath-time shifting has fixed that...
2024-03-07: I paid in my liquidation cheque from Caredall.
2024-03-04: I submitted my FHBS consultation response to [govUK2023future].
2024-03-01: at noon PV generation is peaking over 2.7kW and the grid-intensity is low enough for the Thermino to be getting a grid top-up after my nice hot bath this morning: boost and divert logically happening concurrently! Came very close (~105% estimated) to 'overfull' and auto-disconnecting the heat relay...
2024-02-29: I submitted my TRVs and heat-pumps paper, somewhat rejigged, to another journal today.
2024-02-28: I submitted my HEM consultation response to [govUK2023HEM].
2024-02-27: I am starting work on a Home Energy Model: replacement for the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) consultation response [govUK2023HEM]...
2024-02-26: the first school is talking to KEFSS about PV, and KEFSS is meeting RBK's Property department tomorrow (virtually) to help get it comfortable with converting rooftops in their bailiwick!
2024-02-22: Combiphos content changed today, roof checked and leak fix seems to be working, and a 5mm gap has been made under the 1g bedroom door which gets most humidity and condensation.
2024-02-15: I think that I have completed a code upgrade and improvement to cope with the coming change in National Grid's systems. Naturally, by avoiding doing the research that I ought to have been doing...
2024-02-14: attended the Hackathon final-5 presentations, but did not get to see the overall winner.
2024-02-11: the second Hackathon day at uni, and I spent some quiet moments gathering some of the receipts (literal and metaphorical) for the work that got us to an EPC A (100). There was a tiny bit (~30Wh) of solar PV diversion today.
2024-02-10: the first Hackathon day at uni today as presenter/mentor/whatevs: fun but exhausting and in bed by 7pm (having been up at 7am)! In the evening the renewed 16WW EPC certificate came in from Ecoalex and it is an A (was previously B), which is ~0.3% of existing England and Wales homes!
2024-02-09: my son is off skiing with the school in Italy, by coach (~24h).
2024-02-07: working on the uni Hackathon for the weekend, including problem statements...
2024-02-06: Paul of Ecoalex is doing an EPV today for 16WW.
2024-02-05: I have a provisional date for the Octopus heat-pump survey in April... (I was called in the Eurostar departure lounge in Brussels to agree the date range.)
2024-02-04: relatively few talks attended (RISC-V, open source European legislative environment). Apparently about 8000 people attended FOSDEM.
2024-02-03: in the FOSDEM Energy devroom most of today. [FOSDEM2024energy]
2024-02-02: off to FOSDEM today! It is usually icy here in Brussels for FOSDEM weekend, but it is more like 10°C this weekend.
2024-01-28: pushed out a quick podcast 2023 round-up episode and cajoled the MBA to top-up a little off-grid.
2024-01-27: the off-grid battery hit FULL today, and I have just booked into a week-long music festival in August that I have been interested in for years.
2024-01-25: kitchen MHRV motor being replaced and heat exchanger cleaned today.
2024-01-21: brought upgraded heat-battery RPi (pekoe) back on-line.
2024-01-20: started replacement of worn/failing microSD card in heat-battery RPi (pekoe).
2024-01-18: replacement motor unit for Tempra fan arrived today, as did my first SPAM 'message request' over Signal (about Bitcoin, naturally).
2024-01-17: replacement Bodum Coffee Press Replacement Beaker, Borosilicate Glass — 3-Cup, Transparent (Capacity: three cup, 0. 35 L, 12 oz) (£12.90 including VAT, MPN 1503-10, EAN 727015100586) arrived and fits! The packaging also lists MPNs for the metal filter parts: repair and reuse ahoy!
2024-01-16: attempted to connect my SoundCloud account via RSS into my mastodon.social account, to automatically feed in any new music, and possibly other things that I like/post: I will find out!
2024-01-16: ordered replacement motor assembly for kitchen MHRV.
2024-01-15: my simple cafetière broke this morning (the rim of the glass vessel broke. I do not think that it could go with the normal (soda) glass for recycling evening if it did not have a sharp edge, so the glass is wrapped in newspaper and in the landfill bin...
2024-01-12: For the last couple of months (ish) I have been trying to reduce the amount of laundry I produce.
2024-01-11: Dave the builder is on our frosty roof to try to fix the leak via the old kitchen boiler flue vent (with flashing), dodging the asbestos and pigeons... Also cable-tying a couple of the solar PV cables that have slipped down to and spilling over the gutter at the front. Also trying the boiler radiator flow temperature on its lowest (~35°C) setting, at ~5°C outside, to further probe how a heat-pump might work...
2024-01-08: a flurry of snow shortly after 1pm, continued for a while, bit none settled. Did some PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) training on-line, and passed!
2024-01-03: boiler board swap started just before 11am and had everything fixed in under half an hour: we have central heating again in time for the cold snap! (Time to take the Thermino off 'primary' DHW duty...) The boiler's little rest did (a) cut our mains gas consumption and footprint (b) verify that our base heating temperature is ~12C ie we do not need heating when it is warmer than that outside (c) provide a data point for a weather compensation curve (d) show us that we can cope reasonably well without heating!
2024-01-01: I may do a dry-ish January, once I have finished the open bottles of wine!