ENERGY MATTERS

[David Whipp]

Not sure if dad was still buying nutty slack well after coal shortages eased, or it was just household rationing that eked out our stocks well into my childhood, but I well recall having to deal with it during the family Cold War - and I'm not quite an old crumbly yet!

In the here and now, the present day family Whipp are basking in the glow of a centrally heated home for the first time in the best part of a month. Ben Greenwood got the new boiler up and running, despite running into a secondary problem involving the pitter patter of tiny feet... (if I get the chance today, will relate the whole sorry saga....)

[Stanley]

Mice?

[David Whipp]

You've got it...

[Tardis]

Lost in translation to newspaper copy then

[Tizer]

Can any of you remember the dreaded 'Nutty Slack'?

Yes, but what about burning cinders?
EDIT: Stanley has corrected me below - it should be `coke' not cinders!

[Stanley]

If by 'cinders' you mean coke, no problem once you have got a good bed in the fire. The mistake many made was trying to light the fire with it which was possible but a bit of a challenge. OK if you had a gas poker but you had to leave it in for a long time. The secret was clean firebars to get a good draught and put plenty on.
I have a story about coke.... In the days when we were all poor, my Mate Ted Lawson and his wife Joyce were living in an estate cottage at the Kennels near old Gledstone Hall. Ted used to walk to the dairy over the fields each morning and back the same way at night. One day he was going over the field in the dark and tripped over something. Being a nosey bugger he investigated and found it was a heap of coke that had been used in the hall's filter bed for the sewage, they'd evidently cleaned it out to put fresh coke in and just left it in a heap. Ted used his head, he took an empty bucket out in the morning and hid it near the heap, on his way home he filled the bucket and he and Joyce had their own coal mine! That brings the old drift mines under the edge of the Burnley-Bacup road. At one time all the local farmers were using the workings to get house coal, I wonder if it's still happening? One more thing, the Settle Coal Company used to sell used filter bed coke and I had quite a few loads from them while I was at Hey Farm. It was cheaper because some prople were put off it but it never bothered me. In fact, it probably had a higher calorific value because of the added organic matter!
The worst stuff of the lot to burn was the Lend-Lease brown coal we got from the USA after the war. I found some at the back of the coal stock at Bancroft in the 1970s when coal was short and we had to burn the stock. Almost impossible to burn, you had to mix it with good coal to get it to burn and the ash it made was unbelievable. Newton talks about burning this in his transcripts on the LTP, he used old motor tyres with it to get it going. Imagine the smoke that would be going up from Clough Mill. (Isn't burning stuff interesting!)
How's the new pot doing?

[Stanley]

Core temperature of the house as low as it has been this backend. CH on for an hour, that will keep me warm till stove time later in the day!

[Tizer]

Coke! Yes, that's what I meant but couldn't remember the word. I can remember my parents trying to burn it when coal was in short supply, but not very successfully. I like the story about the filter bed coke!

The new, taller chimney pot has slightly improved the stove's performance when the weather conditions are favourable. But we still get `dead' times when the fire almost goes out or can't be lit. I now realise it's nothing to do with the fire, the chimney or the house's internal conditions, it's the external conditions that cause it, presumably an inversion layer of cold air above the house because we are at the bottom of a shallow slope. I think the secret is to stoke up the fire with plenty of logs when the conditions are OK, almost to excess, and that tides us over the bad spots - partly because the fire and chimney are so hot and partly because the brick fireplace around the stove has good thermal mass and emits heat, a bit like a storage heater, until the fire gets going again. I got that idea from the procedure used to run a log biomass burner - you don't keep one of those running all the time, you fire it once a day with a full charge of logs and that heats a very big tank of water which then runs your heating through the rest of the day and evening. In other words, my operation of the stove is a bit like peddling your bike downhill to gain momentum and that makes it easier then to go over the next hill!

[Stanley]

Your thinking is correct Tiz. Inversion layers can affect draught badly even on industrial stacks. One of the things you soon learned running a big coal-fired boiler on natural draught was that atmospheric pressure played a big part in efficiency. The higher the pressure and the colder the ambient temperature, the better your draught was. Inversion layers are slightly different and we didn't suffer from that at Bancroft. The place where you suffered most from that was in deep valleys like the Todmorden valley. That's why there are so many detached chimneys, stubby chimneys high up on the hillside connected to the boiler by a long underground flue. There was very little cost penalty because the long flue and stubby chimney was cheaper than an excessively tall stack. The theory of the mass of the flue and the wall as a heat sink is good as well. After the weekend, in very cold weather, it took a day's hard firing to get the boiler settings back up to temperature and Wednesday onwards were the best firing days. If you wanted a cure, fit a fan up, the exhaust off a vacuum cleaner would do it, and when the fire gets slow give it a blast of air (like a blacksmith's forge) to get the flue temperature up. I can still remember my mother commenting, as we sat by a bright open coal fire in winter, "That fire's burning frost", she could tell by experience how cold it was outside by the way the fire was burning. By the way, it's amazing, even with a good flue, how soon it is affected by even a light coating of soot. Always a good thing to keep it clean and occasionally get the fire as hot as you can to burn the surface soot off.
On a domestic note, it's frosty outside and the stove was still in from last night so I've fired it up. Economy may be the household mint but bugger having a chilly house!

[Stanley]

I lit the stove yesterday at 16:00 and never fired it again so it was virtually burned out by 22:00 when I went to bed. It's noticeable that despite a cold night the residual heat in the stove was sufficient to stop the CH firing up during the night. (I can tell by the boiler temperature which was 19C this morning. I've just ashed it out and it's still too hot to touch, the equivalent of a hot radiator all night and then there is the heat sink of the chimney breast. My mind goes back to the enormous tiled stoves in private houses in Berlin which had an incredibly small firebox but were kept in permanently during the winter and despite being just warm, the mass of the brickwork kept the room warm in the coldest weather, and it can get very cold in Berlin!

[Tizer]

`Thermal mass' has become popular again - people got carried away with building well-insulated timber-framed houses and then realised that they retained hot air very well but once that had cooled they didn't have any further heat to give up into the rooms. So they want log-burning stoves now and stone or brick chimney breasts as a heat store. The alternative is underfloor heating to trickle in the heat but it needs to be left on all the time and you can't get a quick burst of heat from it when you come in from the cold.

[Tardis]

Did you hear the biomass piece on Today this morning?

Drax power station is converting to use 'waste' wood, but apparently already has the capacity to burn more wood than the UK forestry industry can produce in a year.

The power station is getting a grant of upwards of £1 billion for this policy

Sounds a bit silly to me

[Tizer]

Yes, and I'm glad they pointed out that in the short term burning wood is as bad as burning coal as far as climate change is concerned - it's all combustion of carbon compounds to produce mainly CO2 and water. On the other hand, if you look at it in purely economic terms, burning a waste material seems useful. But they said that the shortfall of wood will be met by supplies sent from America - presumably on ships burning oil!

[Stanley]

I'd rather see them extend the life of an investment as big as Drax by burning wood than replace it with gas-fired capacity which is what would have happened.
So, there are suspicions that the gas wholesalers are running a cartel. Surprise surprise. So what's new? We relinquish hold on the commanding heights of the economy and then whinge when we get screwed, Go figure.....
Get hold of Anthony Sampson's 1975 book 'The Seven Sisters'. Explains how the oil companies exploited the Middle East and the customers as well. Many of the problems in that area had their origin in these activities.

[Stanley]

I have an idea that Pluggy might agree with this... It struck me yesterday that using the stove gets you much closer in touch with temperature and fuel usage. Pluggy gets his information by a more high tech method but it's the same principle. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of high energy costs, if we've any sense we are forced to pay more attention to the matter. Twenty years ago you just switched the heating on, now we check everything and use no more than we need to do.

[Pluggy]

Drax power station has has had a biomass pilot plant running for several years. I agree with Stanley, its better to recycle Drax than to built new gas plants to take up the 4 GW hole (around 10% of typical summer UK load) it would leave if it were closed. Its already fired by mainly by foreign coal so shipping timber scrap in from abroad isn't going to make much odds to its carbon footprint. I always regarded anti - green power activists who actually use grid electricity to be hypocrites. Years ago when the anti phone mast brigade were foaming at the mouth, I refused to sign their partitions because I had a mobile and I would have been a hypocrite. I want a mobile phone and I expect to use it but I don't want the infrastructure to support it.

I pay my electric bill and I expect to be able to use it when I want but be damned if I'm going to let facilities be funded / built to actually produce the stuff. Hello ?

If your stove is doing the business, Stanley, good on yer. I also agree that a cold house is no fun. I've turned my heating up a tad (half a degree celcius) to reduce complaints that its too cold.

[Stanley]

SSE have announced annual profit up by 38%. Bit of a clue in there somewhere?

[Stanley]

Pluggy, just caught your comment about being forced to turn the heat up. I can't imagine what sanctions were threatened to get you to do it!
Quite amazing how hot the stove is with only a few glowing embers in the bottom. It's enough to stop the stat coming on demand (18C) and I've just put six knobs of fuel on. If they catch it will keep the CH quiet all day.

[Pluggy]

Sanctions ? Mrs T ? Nahhh....

I have to admit she did have a case, the half degree makes all the difference. The temperature still varies by time of day, I just turned the afternoon and evening temperatures up. For the inquisitive, Afternoon is now at 20.5C, Evening is now 21C. The living room is what is maintained. The other rooms are at the mercy of the radiator stats.

Just coming up to the anniversary of having the PV panels installed. No regrets, one of my better moves I think. I'm going to be around 100 kWh short of the 2040 kWh predicted for the year. Considering the lousy summer we had, hardly surprising. FIT Payments for the 12 months will total around £900 (£730 so far, approx £170 coming for the last quarter). Savings on electric about £100 for the year. £5800 still out of pocket.....

[Stanley]

That's not an excessive temperature at all. It's about what my kitchen is during the day but front room is warmer in the evening of course. One thing is certain about both our energy bills, they are smaller because we are taking notice of what is happening. The main problem with those who have high costs is that they haven't looked to see where they can save without damaging their lives. I was thinking back yesterday to the early CH systems where the boiler was always on demand and the thermostat controlled the circulation pump and we thought how modern and efficient we were!

[Tardis]

News today that no one has taken up the Green Deal yet.

On top of which this new Energy bill from DECC seems to reward those big companies who develope those large wind farms etc

Subsidies increasing by about £5bn although numbers not totally scrutinised yet

No comments towards Carbon either

Newspapers reporting that green energy costs every household £147 per year, which will increase under this bill, but you'll not hear a politician shouting about the 'taxes' on your energy bills

[Pluggy]

So then, Tardis, how would you do it ?

[Bodger]

I totally agree, politician type replys always bug me, they will complain about what the oposition proposes, but never come up with their alternative proposal, if you are going to say something say something constrctive, i was in management for over 40 years, and if i did'nt agree with something that was being suggested i would never reply unless i had an alternative suggestion !.

[Stanley]

The bottom line is that all parties have procrastinated for so long the options are limited, all that will save us is the dash for gas and extending the life of the conventional plants till enough nuclear comes on line to 'save' us. It was always obvious that nuclear was the long term answer till fusion came on the scene. As usual, despite all the protests, the consumer will pay.

[Pluggy]

They couldn't win, if they went with green power (nuclear and wind) and "they" funded it aka the taxpayer, they'd have been slated, if they stopped all the subsidies for green power and built gas or coal plants they'd have been slated. If they'd have left it be and let the country suffer rolling power cuts when the aging plants start dying they'd have been slated. If they'd have let the consumer pay for the real cost by the unit of producing green electric they'd have been slated.

Nuclear is still too inflexible to be used as a solution and renewables too undependable, they'll still need something (oil, coal or gas) they can control in the equation. Nukes run flat out all the time except during maintainance, and wind (and solar) produce power when they feel like it. I suspect the grand solution of nuclear fusion will be more inflexible than the present nuclear fission. Pumped storage would be a big help but that is frighteningly expensive for serious capacity and where it can be built tends to be out in the sticks and needs infrastructure to bring it in to civilisation. (Pylons get the NIMBYs going almost as much as wind turbines). Some of the present ones are subsidised by running them as tourist traps.

Here endeth my expose of the futility of politics.