* Posts by John Robson

5142 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Assumptions

Which one company is already doing...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Assumptions

"Domestic hot water has to be at least 60C to eradicate legionella"

Only if it's stored at moderately high temperatures.

You don't want a tank of water sitting at 50 degrees, but you can have cold water heated on demand to 50 degrees all day long.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

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Re: Unblock and get infected

Ads should be a static image, that doesn't need six megabytes of javascript, and 14 more imported dependencies.

It doesn't require write access to my hard disk, nor read access to anything - it's a fscking image, it can be served up as one. That should reduce the cost to the advertisers by an order of magnitude.

And you target them as you always have - find an outlet that serves the audience you think will want your product, and pay them to display it.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

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Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

>> "So that's ~1.1m/kWh"

>There's a big difference between the latent energy in a fuel and what you can realistically extract from it. A piston engine isn't all that efficient...

Indeed - such a difference that if we took the petrol, and burnt that in a power station... even at just 40% efficiency (typical for an oil fired plant), accounting for transmission and charging losses (0.4*.92*.9) we're at 33% efficiency, which is *still* better efficiency than burning the petrol in a car.

Of course we also just cut out a major distribution step in the petrol supply chain, and we wouldn't need to refine the fuel as heavily (saving a pile more energy), so the balance is actually even further in favour of the EV.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: people like me who drive about 3 miles per week.

"the Citroen Ami. My neighbour has one, good enough to go to the shops but i'm not sure i'd be happy on a motorway in it."

They're not designed for, nor permitted on, motorways.

Would you feel comfortable using one as a submersible, or a space capsule? They're not designed for those uses either.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: No shit

Taking a quick look at screwfix (other retailers exist) showers up to 11kW (10.8 at any rate) are quite common, most are over 8 - there were only 2 as low as 7.5kW

A typical EVSE at a home will top out at 7.4 kW, and will modulate the power which the vehicle is allowed to draw based on the grid load to the property - generally aiming to keep it below 60A (14kW).

To get to 11kW in EVSE world you need to be three phase - at which point you're well outside typical domestic usage.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: No shit

I haven't come across a *rubber* plug for at least a decade (I still have a dual gang extension with moulded rubber sockets)

Granny chargers also don't do 13A for exactly this reason... 10A is the UK limit (though you can buy EVSE that don't respect that).

Or you can run the same off a commando socket - giving you 16A rated - all well below the typical 32A rating for a domestic ring main in the UK.

At 2kW you need ~2.5 hours between getting home at 6pm and leaving at 7am - so you could, if you were so minded, turn the wick right down, and draw ~500W for 12 hours - that's 6kWh - more than enough for the typical needs of a UK car.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure

Petrol and diesel both burn very well given appropriate conditions - that's kind of a required feature.

And in a car fire satisfies those conditions.

The cause of the fire will be something in the vehicle's 12V system...

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Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

Shall we call your nurse?

John Robson Silver badge

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

2-3 times? Are you having a laugh?

9.5kWh/litre would be 40kWh/gallon - that is quite a bit higher than is usually quoted: 33kWh/gal petrol, 37 for diesel.

Average UK car does a shade under 40mpg (36 petrol, 43 diesel)

So that's ~1.1m/kWh

To be as low as twice as efficient you'd need be looking at a Vauxhall Vivaro, or an eVito, or an EQV300... all of which are vans, not cars.

Heck, even the ID Buzz gets over three.

If you're in a car and getting less than 3.5m/kWh then there is something seriously wrong - 4 is regularly acheivable, and many models will do 5.

I have a first gen MG ZS, and it's long term average is 3.7. It's an aerodynamic as a brick, and has nothing approaching thermal management of the battery - on a good run I'll have that giving me over 5, but it tends to be between 3.5 and 4.

Let's go the whole hog and account for 10% charging losses and 8% grid losses... that's 3 to 4 times as efficient as petrol.

Butwe really ought to be accounting for the energy used in drilling, transporting, refining, transporting, delivering... petrol/diesel... Frankly I can't be bothered to do the maths on those.

John Robson Silver badge
Trollface

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

You meant he wrong side instead of the right side... don't know how you managed to type left there... :p

John Robson Silver badge

Re: increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure

The vehicle was, as a quick check on the relevant government website will show, a pure diesel.

Had it been the hybrid version the battery would have been on the other side from where the fire clearly started (since we have video of it).

Of course the fire spread because when an ICE vehicle catches fire it leaks flammable liquids across the floor - an EV fire doesn't "leak" battery - hence the recent arson attack on a telsa dealership (I think) in Germany there were a few cars gutted, but they were right next to unaffected vehicles - Oh, and none of the batteries were burnt.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

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and, of course, coarse hair

India's lunar landing made a mess on the Moon

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Re: Artificial gravity doormat

IIRC it's static that keeps it on the spacesuits...

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

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Re: My touch bar is almost entirely unused

It's a work issued machine, and it does sometimes get used as a laptop... but travel has been rather curtailed recently (and even before that I stopped commuting for other reasons)

John Robson Silver badge

My touch bar is almost entirely unused

Primarily because the laptop sits on a pole mounted shelf (an old CRT TV wall mount) and I use an external keyboard/trackpad/mouse (yes, all three).

The only thing I use it for is the touch ID - and if that could be on the external keyboard that would suit me just fine (no I'm not buying a newer magic keyboard, my current keyboard works just fine)

Europe bans Meta from using personal data to target ads

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Re: And nothing was lost

And some people spend money without having had adverts shoved down their throats.

If I need something I'll look for it.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Consent??

> Facebook has no f**king idea about how to process personal information properly, and doesn't care.

I suspect they do have an idea, but that idea is fractionally less profitable.

How many EU users? 5 years of 4% turnover please - with a complete ban on operating until it's paid into escrow.

FAA is done with Starship's safety review, now it's over to the birds and turtles

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Re: No doubt in my mind

IF - they get a first launch today.

AND - it goes as planned

Then they can look at starting to trying to catch the boosters (since that's where the major expense is) and simultaneously put a couple of ships in orbit with the first tests of transfer.

The QD plate already exists, so the concept of refuelling isn't completely mad, but it is going to be some interesting engineering to keep the two ships attached whilst still (I assume) accelerating enough to settle the fluids into the pump intakes.

The biggest risk is still that a failed catch could cause some significant damage to stage zero...

2025 is certainly very ambitious, but if you don't set ambitious targets than they you aren't ever going to meet even reasonable targets.

(And no I don't think they'll be ready in 2025, but neither do I think that BO is likely to have all that much more than slide decks by then either.

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

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Re: I know it's hard to believe

Or - you use swap for the half dozen times over the lifetime of the laptop that you need a little more fast storage.

Bulk storage - not in a laptop thanks, that's why I have a server, with protected storage and regular backups.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I know it's hard to believe

"The 8 gig is basically useless"

Well that's just not true.

I know, because I run a couple of macs with 8Gb, and they work just fine.

What you might have meant was that you would want more.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: We need a new metric

So what OS are you using?

Just because M$ can't deal with less than a TB of ram to boot and open notepad, doesn't mean other OSes can't do much better.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

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So - let's do the maths

Meta claim ~115 billion dollars of ad revenue.

They also claim 3.6 billion users.

So that's a relatively simple sum - Ad free should cost at *most* $32 a year, and since they don't have to store or serve those ads it should probably be less.

Either that or they will be losing $10/month - $120 a year and they've actually got less than a billion users, so they're lying to their customers.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

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Joke

Re: Armateurs?

Like the Titanic, as opposed to the Ark?

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

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Re: Safe

They certainly don't hide in the corridors of Westminster.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

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Re: Pour one out for the 'also ran' smartphones...

"because IT COULD MAKE AND RECEIVE PHONE CALLS, something the android phone I moved from had difficulty doing some days. /sarcasm"

Well I swore of windows phones after my XDA mini - it would receive a call, the screen would light up and tell me who was calling, the ringer would start, and the vibrate alert started...

But they would just carry on - there was no ring ring, it was just riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii..... and no Bzz Bzz, just Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

To stop this I had to drop the battery out and put it back in, then phone the person back.

It can't have been happening to all of them, but it was rather annoying.

Boffins say their thin film solar cells make space farms viable

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"If the power density on the ground is significantly lower than that, the project doesn't make sense economically; just build solar panels, they won't make as much power, but they are cheaper and easier to maintain by, I dunno, two orders of magnitude."

Except that your new power density doesn't have down time each day (at least not significant downtime).

a PV farm using sunlight has, on average, 12 hours of daylight - and there is a significant bias towards the middle of the day even during that time. A space based array could have virtually no time in the shadow of the planet, and therefore have a much higher load cycle, requiring lower power density for the same overall generation.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

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Re: No corruption here.

So - you'd allow them on your network then...

That's the whole point of guest and sewer networks.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: No corruption here.

I said - be *able* to, not have to.

There are places in the world where the meters are in a location which is pretty heavily shielded from any RF comms.

The ability to drop them onto a network would actually be useful, there is no need for them to have any access to your home network - they'd only need net access and that's why guest networks exist.

As for packet tampering - that's why they'd use a VPN, because then the tampering would be evident.

Element users are asking for protection against government encryption busting

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Contracts must comply with laws

It is likely to allow them to "have to renegotiate" in the event that Cruella WimpyPrat ever gets anywhere near #10

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

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Re: Capacity

Getting a heat pump down to 1:1 would be a once in a "long time" event... and since even at that point you're no worse off than resistive heating...there is no benefit to relying on resistive heating.

Not that I won't have other sources of heat available... I have a gas boiler, I also have a storage heater in one room, as well as fan heaters stored in cupboards and an IR panel heater.

When I replace the gas boiler I expect that I shall only replace* the gas boiler with a heat pump - I don't expect the other heat sources to disappear.

* I'll need a hot water solution, since combi boilers were all the rage when I installed my boiler twenty years ago.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

There are vanishingly few scenarios in which either EVs or heat pumps are not actually a substantial benefit.

Air travel and container ships are the main ones for EVs at the moment, with even road freight moving closer to electrification (either with new models or by retrofitting existing trucks).

Heat pumps won't do much for industrial processes requiring very high temperatures, but for anything "low grade" heat (like domestic heating/hot water) it's as close as we're likely to get to free energy.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: El Reg strikes again..

> Please show your working on this....

> I've seen some modelling on this...

You need to do better than that, you need to show the modelling.

Because sea level rises are inevitable if we don't clean up our act, and fast.

Weather patterns are already changing, which will have significant impacts around the world.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Heat pumps cannot be the complete solution

And if you *do* the maths you'll find you're completely wrong.

We do, however, agree that hydrogen doesn't have a place here.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Heat pumps cannot be the complete solution

If the loft has been converted, then you might be able to do something with the existing historical flues as part of the pre-20C fireplace network. Probably wouldn't be cheap but surely all the unit needs is access to external air rather than actually being physically outside on display to the world?

Yes - you can duct the air supply to a heat pump - though that's normally done for dedicated hot water heat pumps, which need to move substantially less air.

A chimney would be rather restrictive for a heat pump pumping out a handful of kW of heat.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Whatever happened to HeatWayv?

Fast and efficient are two completely orthogonal measures in this case.

For one - most people boil more water than they need to in a kettle.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

So the size of the radiators is your biggest concern?

Well why did you put stupidly small ones in to start with?

The wall is already occupied with a rad, so you aren't losing more space.

Replacing microbore is a pain, but even 15mm pipe will carry just under 3kW at a dt of 5.

It needs to be done, microbore must be one of Crowley's inventions (Good Omens).

"Heat pumps are seen as some sort of magical solution however they are not."

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Those of us who understand them know that they are an excellent part of the solution - those who don't believe we think they're magic.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

>> need a coat of sealant

> Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.

Several grand for a coat of sealant? Look I've got this bridge to sell you.

Permissions is just something that can be changed... it's not actually a technical objection.

There are very good reasons why various bits of work (gas and electric) are required to be carried out or checked by a qualified person. And yes they can just be checked - wired up a loft conversion myself, and got it signed off. A competent and interested DIYer is likely to do just as good a job as a professional, but we aren't necessarily up to date with the latest regulations, nor do we have the tools to run all the tests which ensure our safety.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: move to Resistance Heating

>> "What a load of Bovine Excrement. Resistance heating is horribly inefficient."

It's 100% efficient, which isn't great - but it's still better than gas.

The down side is that a decent proportion of that electricity probably comes from gas (at ~50% efficiency).

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

"You're rather missing the point. E7 uses dedicated spurs from the supply to the heaters, so there's no power to those spurs unless switched on by the remote control signal. "

I've only ever come across that on an E10 system, not E7 - and it doesn't need a rewire anyway - just a contactor switched by a timer.

"So if EV adoption increases, 'peak rate' will continue shifting into the evenings when both wind and solar typically generate less power.. "

No - the EVs will always charge at off peak. An average UK vehicle needs about 5kWh a day, that's peanuts, it really is. You can do that in less than an hour with a normal home charger, so there is no way in hell you'd do it during the evening peak. You plug in when you get home and then the car gets charged in time for the morning - but *not* at peak rate or time.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

greenwashing is what you're doing to gas.

The weather is *always* good enough for a heat pump - you just have some grudge against the idea of preserving the planet in a state where we can carry on living.

This concept that heat pumps don't work when it's cold is only slightly less intelligent than flat earth...

Local control is an upgrade - because it *is* consumer control. The meters aren't what gives the control, but they allow for dynamic pricing - and that encourages consumer control (whether individual or using other services).

EVs, or their chargers, can time their usage, you can set the timer on your immersion heater, my storage heater is on a timer.

There are some "electron retailer" controlled devices - the Ohme EV chargers can be controlled by Octopus - and *all* the electricity you use whilst that happens is charged at off peak - that's far better than a radio clock signal - for both the consumer and the electricity retailer. You just set how much electricity you want by when, and it happens.

There are also other systems with external control - Mixergy tanks will stop heating at times of peak grid load, they'll still heat if they *need* to, but they'll delay if they can.

For all the "end up costing consumers more" bollocks you spout I pay far below the 27p you claim for electricity - it's been 9.5p over the last year. Gas over a similar timescale (309 days) has cost me 10.9p. Interestingly I've used similar amounts of each this year so far (8.3kWh electricity, 7.4kWh for gas) but I expect gas to overtake electricity as the year finishes off with colder weather, and since the price has recently dropped, and I expect higher usage, the overall cost of gas will drop somewhat. However since the price of electricity has also recently dropped, and the value of exported electricity has increased - that value is unlikely to rise much, despite the lower insolation as the year ends.

Yes - Vimes Boots - I appreciate that I was able to put some more environmentally friendly technologies in place last year, and I expect to continue doing that (when my current boiler fails for instance).

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

"Resistive heating is also 'un-green'."

Resistive heating is 100% efficient, which is substantially better than gas, but *way* worse than a heat pump.

"Plus in our infinite wisdom, the extremely simple radio signal that controls the meter is due to be turned off soon. And we've 'invested' billions in 'smart meters' that can't do the same thing."

Except that what we've done is move the logic. My storage heaters were never controlled by a radio signal, only by the clock on the meters - what I have now is a simple timer.

Turning on/off immersion heaters across the whole country at the same time is daft anyway.

The local control, which is actually better now that we have smart meters and other associated options, is an upgrade - not the downgrade you consider it to be.

If heat is "wasted" into a home *in winter* then it isn't wasted... it certainly is in summer, and might actually increase the cost of cooling (whether active AC or just fan based).

Distributed storage is, of course, less profitable than concentrated storage - that's why we don't see hundreds of tiny coal power plants in people's sheds - the economies of scale are obvious.

However home storage is still a valuable technology, with or without solar.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

You seem to be under the impression that heat stops at a certain temperature. I mean you're right, it does... but that temperature is 273 degrees below zero.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

GSHP are a great option... if you're converting a field into an estate.

You have access for the machinery, nothing to work around and avoid... just slam the holes in when you have all the access you'll ever need.

For retrofitting... ASHP are far easier, and nearly as good.

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Re: Capacity

Besides which - a bearing replacement after five years... is hardly a big deal.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

That was rather my point.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Capacity

"Nope, i'm saying heat pumps are an economic insanity"

Well then you're spouting more crap than the back end of a bull with diarrhoea.

"outright requirements to do things we don't want people to do should be modified forthwith"

You mean like lying about how fossil fuels are brilliant and cheap and have no drawbacks, but electrons are the work of the devil?

Or do you mean that we should allow people to drive at 90mph through town as school ends because "they want to"?

Perverse incentives exist - and do need to be mitigated. For instance there is no way coal should ever be cheaper than gas, and gas prices shouldn't be subsidised by clean energy generators.

There should be an outright ban on hooking up new builds to gas - because better solutions exist - both individually and societally. But no - we can't do that because someone's ancient house might need a coat of sealant on the old chimney.

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Facepalm

Re: Capacity

Ah yes - the conservation area friendly bright yellow paint.

See - the area is already changing... and will continue to do so. An unobtrusively located ASHP isn't going to cause the ground to swallow up the area in disgust.

Ah yes - the "but I can't afford something that will save me money"

I am well aware of vimes' boots. That's why grants for such things exist - because it's actually a societal benefit having them installed. As more are installed the price then comes down, and more people are trained in how to install them so the availability and price comes down further. For some reason our electrical consumption attracts ~12% "green levy" compared with ~3.4% for our gas consumption - despite about 40% of our electricity coming from renewable sources, and some from nuclear.

Imagine requiring people to spend much of their income of device to allow them to continue travelling...

The starting position should have been (ten years ago) to ban gas in new builds... Then to look at replacing failing "old" boilers, then more modern boilers as they age and fail... There simply isn't the capacity, the will, or the benefit to suggest that all boilers should be immediately ripped out and replaced with heat pumps.

I am very well aware that there will be people who aren't in a position to install a heat pump at the moment... many of those people should, at the time their existing boiler fails, have the equipment installed by their landlord (some proportion of which will be the council), rather than out of their own pocket.

In the same way in the early days of cars, telephones, televisions, mobile phones, computers.... any of the things you now think of as ubiquitous parts of society - they weren't immediately accessible to everyone. Why do you insist that heat pumps buck that trend?

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

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Re: Amen

It's not just borkzilla.

There is very little around that's worthy of a major version number being ticket up, and we should be ok with that.

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

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Re: Errrr

But it's the attempt that's criminal, not just the success.