Earth Notes: Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping (2020-07-12)

Diarycast

Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis, and welcome to Earth Notes podcast on all things eco and green and efficient @Home!

12th July 2020.

A brief personal record of events seen from EOU Towers since the end of May. My corner of the Conscious Uncouping and lockdown lifting...

(There are some photos and and other extras in the page for this episode, added to the transcript.)

2020-05-25: my glasses were falling apart so I [e]mailed my opticians on this bank holiday Monday more in hope than expectation. I need my glasses in order to be able to work. Amazingly I had email and phone responses very quickly, and I ordered replacements to arrive by post. After a chase-up and a fortnight-ish, shiny new replacements did indeed arrive!

[00:55]

2020-05-31: as noted in the statscast for May, PV generation was a record here at 24kWh/d over the month, versus the previous best of 21 and a more typical-ish 18.

2020-06-16: I had to return a failed product to Amazon today, and so visited my friends who run the coffee stall at the station near the drop-off point. The roads were fairly quiet and the train station very much so, given that it was just after 9am on a weekday.

2020-06-16: in confinement I have ordered a few relatively inexpensive tools — this lockdown is neither war nor Armageddon and thus online ordering still works. Today's innovations include a nicely designed RPi3B+ case, a clever bidirectional Satechi USB-C power meter, and a rug under my desk and chair to protect the carpet a bit!

[01:47]

2020-06-17: I (wonkily) counted steps for my 'normal' lockdown exercise jaunt, to and around the edge of the cemetery next door. The circuit seems to be about 2000 steps, or 20% of what should likely should be my daily target.

2020-06-20: I encountered a new, bright Cinnabar moth in the cemetery, identified for me by the nice denizens of Twitter! My photo attempts don't do it justice, seemingly almost fluorescent pink when fluttering in direct sunlight over a grass lawn.

[02:16]

2020-06-22: yesterday someone on Twitter suggested that home batteries, such as my Enphase, should be recorded on the local fire brigade's database, since as with PV, there are some extra hazards when fire-fighting. I contacted London Fire Brigade yesterday and today had a call back saying that LFB has no such database!

2020-06-28: as described in the statscast for June, I have finally created visualisations (graphs) for gas consumption versus weather (kWh/HDD) from Loop and DegreeDays.Net data. I did this to better understand 16WW behaviour, but also to better understand the relationships between those items, to check if the kWh/HDD normalisation is reasonable. I think it is — not perfect — but a fair reflection of the physics in messy real life.

2020-07-09: I visited the barber for a long-overdue haircut and not-so-close shave, hurrah! The place wasn't very busy, and only alternate chairs were being used. But a couple of us were waiting inside and facemasks weren't required. Clearly, touching of hair and face is going to happen in this situation.

[03:27]

2020-07-11: I went to the pub (my old local) for the first time in months, and caught up with the landlord, Rick, and a friend I hadn't even considered might be there. We ended up discussing Open University computer science teaching, which was unexpected! That serendipity is what social non-distancing is all about. Like the barber's, not very busy, doors propped open, facemasks not required.

I was less than impressed by the bloke who followed me into the gents, ignoring the one-at-a-time sign, questioned the whole lockdown saying that he didn't know anyone who'd died of it (I said that I do, sadly), then left without washing his hands. Oh dear.

[04:03]

These experiences are probably not much different to anyone else's. But sometimes it's worth contemporaneously capturing the detail before it fades from memory!

And now here is a gratuitous clip of the ambient sound from 16WW's back garden as I have been preparing this episode.

[04:19]

Enjoy!

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There's more on my "Earth Notes" Web site at Earth.Org.UK.