General > General Technical Chat
Building thermal insulation.
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PlainName:
Does it really matter if gas is cheaper or more expensive? The fact is it's a single source - run out, or get cut off, and you have nothing. With electricity you can switch to whatever fuel you can use to drive a generator - water, wind, solar, gas, whatever. So the end user (meaning the equipment to be powered) should logically be electric.

Of course, electricity consumers are dependent on the grid and whatever thy choose to use for fuel. When they go down, so do we. We might have a local generator of some form and we might even have decent solar or wind, but typically we either live and die with the grid, or completely off the grid. Even with solar and wind, if we are on the grid that all goes down too if the grid does. We need a simple way for a switch between grid and local generation, transparent (apart from how much power) to the consuming equipment.
Someone:

--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on July 25, 2022, 10:34:31 pm ---Does it really matter if gas is cheaper or more expensive? The fact is it's a single source - run out, or get cut off, and you have nothing. With electricity you can switch to whatever fuel you can use to drive a generator - water, wind, solar, gas, whatever. So the end user (meaning the equipment to be powered) should logically be electric.
--- End quote ---
The end user (generally) just picks the lowest cost option. When consumers are sold artificially cheap gas, of course they use it. Its those gas to electricity generators that should be stabilizing the relative wholesale market pricing of the two, whenever electricity is more than 3x the cost of gas all the combined cycle gas generators can start printing money (profiting), bringing the price of gas up and the price of electricity down. Around 1/3 of the electricity generation and capacity in the UK is gas fired, and load factors have been steadily dropping with the decline in electricity demand, so they have capacity spare.

When gas burned in a power plant and then used to run a heat pump makes more heat than just burning the gas directly at point of use, consumers should be incentivized to have heat pumps. A free market would have reached that equilibrium long ago. But the UK keep gas pricing low for consumers, and those consumers do "stupid" things in response (but then come on here and shout about how nothing is wrong and its all completely normal).
Zero999:
State interference with markets is seldom a good thing. The government go on about net zero and banning gas boilers, but won't stop meddling with the market. I don't buy into net zero, because our emissions are a drop in the ocean compared to other countries.

I'm not averse to the idea of a heat pump, but there's no point in me installing one. Perhaps if I have to because my gas boiler breaks down, I might consider one, if it can cool as well as heat. My CO2 emissions are well below the average for Brit. I don't drive and cycle most places. I do enough as it is.
EPAIII:
No screens in Germany. Who would have thought that? I guess the need for them, although present, must be rare.

As for US homes, my experience is windows here do have them. But doors are another thing. Most people do not leave their doors open. Closed and locked is more the norm.

That "... poorest tarpaper shack in backwoods US ..." is probably about ready to fall down or blow away with the next stiff breeze. The screen door may be the only door. Believe me, I have seen more than one.






--- Quote from: TimFox on July 19, 2022, 07:06:04 pm ---I have been a tourist when northern Europe was having abnormally-high summer temperatures.
(A headline in das Bild translated to "Is Berlin becoming Rome?".)
I was not surprised when inexpensive hotels did not have air conditioning, but I was surprised that there were no window screens to facilitate air breezes without wasps and mosquitos.
Berlin was also suffering from a wasp invasion that had killed at least one police officer;  the sidewalk restaurants had put out glasses of the syrups used for Berliner Weisse to keep the wasps from the customers.
(The poorest tarpaper shack in backwoods US has a screen door.)

--- End quote ---
EPAIII:
I did not read all of the responses above, but I do have one GREAT tip on staying cooler in the summer. It is highly reflective roof paint.

I lived for over a decade in the Miami, Florida area. Now it is not the hottest climate where I have lived, New Orleans, El Paso, and my present home town of Beaumont Texas all have hotter weather in the summer. El Paso was the hottest. The asphalt streets softened to the point where trucks sank in at traffic lights. But the humidity was lower so you did not feel it as much. Miami had the advantage of being between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and that moderated it's weather.

But back to my point: highly reflective roof paint. My home there had a concrete tile roof: they were very common in that area. It was painted white, probably because that color reflected the most light and, presumably, heat. Good idea. But after I had been there for some years I saw that my roof looked bad and needed a new coat of paint. So I purchased a brand that was highly recommended and I painted it.

The improvement was instant and easily observed. When I walked on the old paint surface, I could feel the heat through my shoes. That part of the roof was HOT. Almost uncomfortably so, even with my shoes. But the newly painted surface was A LOT cooler. I checked this with my hand. I could not keep my hand on the old paint but could easily feel the relative coolness of the new.

I can't remember the brand of paint, but I believe it contained a lot of titanium dioxide. But there may have been other, proprietary ingredients.

Another thing is most houses in the Miami/Ft Lauderdale area had stucco covered exterior walls and they too were usually painted white. And window awnings were also very popular. They stopped direct sunlight from entering the window.

My point is, the roof faces UP and therefore gathers more heat than the walls and it does so ALL DAY LONG while most walls are in shade half the time or more. A highly reflective roof paint/coating will stop the absorption of a large percentage of that heat. And the same applies to the exterior walls. To me this is the first line of defense against heat. Insulation would be second and an AC system third.

Oh, and shade trees also help a lot. But they can be problematic if your area suffers from hurricanes or other severe storms as one close to a house or other building can easily be blown over. I saw a front yard tree once that went from the front door of a home to the back door. It's roots were still in the front yard, but it's top was in the back. It cleared a path that almost perfectly bisected the house.
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