Big J

We're looking at a panel array plus battery box system, so some gain will still be had. Also, the slightly longer days (we're on the same latitude as Aviemore) will mean that the panels will be producing before we get up and after we're back home through summer. There is about 50% more sunshine May-September compared to the UK, so efficiency should be good. You can also sell excess kw to the grid (and then buy it back when you need it), but I've not yet had a chance to discuss the economics of this with Svea Solar. We've got a chap coming on Thursday to inspect the house ahead of quoting for the installation, so I can ask him then.

No. EV tax is £30/year in Sweden, insurance similar to here, servicing costs reduced compared to ICE and consumables are similar. We'd do more than 12k a year, so the standing charges like insurance and tax become proportionally cheaper, and adding additional mileage allowances to the lease aren't proportionally more expensive.

Oooh, I like the detail and numbers I reckon that a lot of the economy of EVs is what actual mileage you do. Here in Devon at the moment, we do about 45-50k between three vehicles a year. We'll reduce that a fair bit in Sweden as the school run reduces from 11 miles each way to 550m. But we'll still end up doing 36k I reckon. Once you're up to those sorts of mileages, the unit cost of diesel starts to look pretty brutal versus electricity, even at the UK's silly kwh prices. I also have no interest whatsoever in maintaining my own vehicles. I can just about tolerate working on forestry machines, but everything is too cramped and too tight together on cars and me being the size I am, my hands just don't fit into any nooks or crannies. I wish I did have an interest in it, but I'd rather spend an extra couple of hours forwarding and pay someone else to do it. Something else to consider is that ICE car tax is still very cheap here versus the EU average (especially northern Europe). If the government starts to up that, the balance starts to shift a little.

Touché! 😁 I just get lost in the numbers sometimes. I hate inconsistency without explanation? Why does the same product/service cost very different amounts in different places without obvious cause? Anyway, I don't think any of us can deny that Arbtalk is basically a care group for socially dysfunctional misfits, of which I proudly count myself as one

It's pretty apparent that vehicle leasing is another example of rip off Britain. I compared the MG ZS EV, like for like in the UK and Sweden. Both on 12,000 miles/20,000km a year on 3 year terms, same equipment level. UK price is £430/month with £270 fee initially, whereas Sweden, it's £259/month with no upfront fee. And then, assuming you're charging exclusively at home and at night, your electricity for those 12k miles will cost you £977 in the UK and £500 exactly in Sweden. So cost per mile over three years on 12k a year is £0.52 in the UK and £0.30 in Sweden. You really don't have to go back many years and the UK was one of the cheapest places for cars anywhere in Europe. Not at all the case now. Links to leasing sites: MG ZS EV Car Leasing | Nationwide Vehicle Contracts WWW.NATIONWIDEVEHICLECONTRACTS.CO.UK Join the electric revolution and lease the MG ZS EV from just £194.03 ex VAT a month with Nationwide Vehicle Contracts... MG ZS EV Privatleasing - Holmgrens Bil WWW.HOLMGRENSBIL.SE Upplev helt nya MG ZS EV. En bekväm och intelligent SUV som är helt elektrisk. Just nu privatleasing från 2.495kr/mån.

A colleague down here ended up with an MG5 and loves it. By the time the discount had been applied and the older diesel was traded in, it ended up costing him about £14k plus VAT!!

Interesting that the running costs weren't covered. Could you go into a little detail? From my calculations, running diesels in Sweden would cost us around £0.41 a mile whereas the EVs would be £0.21 a mile. There are a few things that am EV would struggle with (heavy towing, longer distance work) but with over £7k saved annually, it offers a substantial budget for car hire. Additionally, I have friends there I can do temporary car swaps with, should we need to.

That is interesting. I guess it comes down to the vehicle you already have, the mileage that you do and your charging options. As I said, an element of it is that electric vehicles (and indeed many others too) are cheaper in Sweden, and the electricity is a third of the price. That is a factor of course.

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 this week called 'Sliced bread' (as in the best thing since...) where they explore products/services that are supposed to be all that. Anyway, it was electric vehicles this week. Whether you agree with the environmental credentials or not, the one thing that came through was that they are fundamentally cheaper to own and run unless you do very low mileage. So that got my cogs turning, costing our vehicle options for us when we relocate in July. Without boring you all with the details (though I can, on request ), I did the calculations on us being a two vehicle household, comparing our current vehicles (2007 VW transporter, and anticipated 2009 2l TDI A6 estate) with a couple of MG ZS EVs on a 3 year lease. Both scenarios would involve me charging mileage to my business for commercial use of private vehicles. In short, the total cost for 36k miles in the diesel vehicles including servicing and repair, depreciation and fuel and insurance is £14,800. The total cost of leasing the electric vehicles for the same distance is £9200. This assumes current diesel prices (a touch higher than the UK at £1.95/l) and current electricity prices (much lower than the UK, with a 3 year fixed rate about £0.14/kwh). Now I appreciate that I'm working it out for my personal situation and that with electricity and electric vehicles being cheaper in Sweden, there is a degree of bias, but the cost saving is really quite large, especially considering that there is £10k tied up in the diesel vehicles which would be liberated if they were sold. Another consideration is that when we install solar (which is our intention), the electricity effectively becomes free for most of the year. And the £10k liberated from the sale of the diesel vehicles pays for 60% of the 12kw solar system with battery backup and car chargers. Generating our own electricity would bring the annual cost of running the EVs down to £7700, which is a cost saving of £7100 over diesel. I suppose the reason for this post is to perhaps share my opinion that I think that the financial case is now very strongly made for electric vehicles, especially if you can charge from your own generated electricity. This was the conclusion of the Radio 4 programme too.

As comprehensive and well documented evidence emerges of war crimes, genocidal Putin's days are perhaps numbered. There is an interesting series on Radio 4 at the moment exploring Putin's rise to power and his many years holding onto it. It's very informative.

A lot of stations lacking diesel here again. Both Cullompton and Exeter.

Better insulation is key, not alternative energy sources. Retain the heat you have, rather than just pumping more and more in.

The difficulty in internally insulating houses is that you lose interior space. Given that we live in the smallest houses in Europe, that's not really an option for most. External insulation is in a way better (especially if you have a massive stone/brick structure, due to thermal storage and regulation) but very few British houses have decent overhangs on roofs, so a new roof would be required too.

1. A great many of the older buildings I'm referring to have no architectural merit. Most of what's been built since the 50's is shite, by whichever metric you measure. 2. It depends on the building method. Massive timber systems such as brettstapel utilise low grade timber in structural walls and are fairly straightforward to get to passive standard. But yes, some of what was burnt was too low a grade, even for that. There are however better uses for it, or indeed that timber could have heated more efficient structures. A good friend up in Kincraig (by Aviemore) built himself a lovely (and quite spacious) 2 bed cottage several years back. He was mandated by planning to have to put a heating system in, but it's so well insulated that even in mid winter, one small fire (3 logs) in the stove is enough to heat the house for 3 days. It would take him about 20 years to burn what we burn in one winter here in our smaller (94 square metres versus 108) Devon farm house. Keep in mind that an Aviemore winter is at least 5c colder too. I'm not saying rip everything down, but we need to be realistic that many buildings don't meet any kind of modern standard and never will. You don't see old vehicles on the road much any more, and that's for very good reason. They aren't safe or efficient enough to meet modern standards. We ought to adopt some of that same pragmatism with our homes.

Some interesting programmes on R4 yesterday relating to this. Call You and Yours was asking "what are you doing to live in a more environmentally friendly way?" and Costing the Earth was exploring whether it was more environmentally friendly to renovate older buildings or tear them down and build again. Despite it somewhat disagreeing with the conclusions of Costing the Earth, I think in many cases tearing down and starting again is best. Some buildings are simply impossible to bring to a modern standard. If old, inefficient buildings are replaced with modern, timber constructed (ie, sequestering carbon) structures, a vast amount of fuel can be saved heating them. Over the past 14 years of living in old farm cottages/houses in Scotland and Devon, we've burned around about 450 cubic metres of firewood. That's over 200t green weight. You could build a lot of houses out of that.

Congratulations Beau - that's super news.

The main heating system is geothermal (or ground source heat pump), running through normal radiators. It's a 2 year old system, so COP is supposed to be 4.4. The idea with adding the air source pumps is to allow us to drop the geothermal system down from 20c to 18c, with the air source outlets boosting the living areas. They will also function as a/c in summer (which is a touch hotter than the hottest parts of the UK) and tie in nicely with the solar panel array we're planning to install. COP on the air source is lower, at 3 or so, but hoping to be a net producer of electricity with the panels, so it won't really matter. The house seems to be extremely well insulated. As I mentioned before, 10 times less energy is required to heat a square metre of our Swedish home than our Devon home.

The entire green industry in the UK serves to extract grant money and feed in tariffs, with the efficacy and functionality of the systems a second priority. Until technology makes sense without grant assistance, universal adoption won't happen. The thing with things like heat pumps, solar and other forms of microgeneration is that they are relatively easy and cheap to install compared to properly insulating our homes. It's a form of 'green washing' that shows people (and voters) that you care about green issues without actually tackling the underlying, main problem. With 29 million homes in the UK, the task to bring them to a 21st century standard is unenviable. Anyway, I've just accepted a quote for air to air heat pump installation on our Sweden home. Mitsubishi units, with up to 7kw of heating or cooling, split across two units. Total installation quote - £3195. Installation cost would at least double here.

That is what I meant. The Norwegian spent and invested their oil revenue wisely, whereas we (to coin a phrase popularised by our current dear leader) "spaffed it up the wall". I agree that there is an element of necessity with warmer houses in Scandinavia, but I'm not sure that's it entirely. We had a house for a few years up by Aviemore that I used for work, fishing and holidays. We rented it, and it was an old crofters cottage with one of the best views in the Highlands. It was nevertheless actually unheatable in winter, and an Aviemore winter isn't a world away from southern Sweden. I remember being there one winter for work and with both fires roaring and electric storage heaters on max, not being able to get the bedrooms above 11c when it was about minus 6 outside. The cottage needed to be demolished, to be honest.

I may be confusing the issue with my terminology. It's a deep borehole, ground sourced heat pump. 170m down. The COP is 4, so for every 1kw of electricity fed into the system, you get 4 kw of heat out. I've been down a solar panels rabbit hole this morning, pricing them for our house and we're hoping to have them installed this summer. So I then went onto a UK comparison site to check electricity prices and was staggered at how much they've increased. 28.5p/kw night rate and 43.4p/kwh day! We don't use a lot, but that equates to £2200/year. Then add on heating, which if we heated with oil would be £3k a year. That's £100/week to heat and power 94 square metres in a mild climate. That compares to an expected £45/week to heat and power 240 square metres in Sweden, but can bring that to below zero (as in, we make money) if we install solar.

It's a point aside, but having calculated the heating needs of our house in the UK and the one we're moving to in Sweden, our Swedish house uses 8 times less energy to heat it, per square metre. Extrapolating from the bills we've had so far, we'll be using about 7,000 KWH to heat 240 square metres in Sweden, whereas our normal annual usage of firewood here of 28 cubic metres to heat 94 square metres equates to 28,000KWH (or 21,000KWH accounting for 75% efficiency of the stove). So that's 29kwh/sqm in Sweden where the average night time temperature for the last 4 months has been about minus 6-7 and 298kwh/sqm here in the UK (or 223kwh, accounting for stove efficiency) where the average night time temperature has been 4.4c over the same period. Our house in Sweden is a totally normal 1957 built house with geothermal heating. Our house here is a totally normal little farmhouse, built in two stages in 1860 and 1930. I think that this is illustrative of the biggest issue we have in the UK. Our buildings are so thermally inefficient that we might as well be leaving the windows open. It's like driving a car with a hole in the fuel tank. 50 years of north sea oil means 50 years of becoming accustomed to cheap heat and not having to think about insulation. Norway treated their oil and gas bonanza very differently.

Her voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me. There are plenty of pleasant northern accents (I say that with grandparents from Rawtenstall and Sheffield) but hers is not one of them. It might be a tiny bit prejudiced of me to suggest that people with extreme regional accents make a bit of an effort to communicate in a flatter, more accessible manner, but given that the purpose of communication is to communicate clearly, her thick NW parlance inhibits her ability to reach people outside of her geographical area.

Almost any firewood cut and split now (to normal 10" log sizes) will be perfectly dry by September if stacked in a windy place outside. No need to even cover it. A Somerset summer is fairly hot and dry, and some species would take only 6-8 weeks to dry (poplar, larch, spruce etc). Try local tree surgeons. Otherwise forestry companies like myself can supply lorry loads, but you need the storage space and access.

The green technology initiative is one of efficiency for me. I don't believe that I can individually make much of a difference, but if my house has a 15kw solar array on it's roof, heat pump heating (both ground and air source) and we have a couple of electric vehicles, we're pretty much self sufficient in terms of energy use. Work lorry and forestry machine excepted. This is our plan for the next few years once we've moved to Sweden. Transporting energy (in any form) any distance is wasteful. Given that payback periods of solar are now so short, it makes perfect sense to install. Combine that with increased insulation and heat pumps and you'll laugh in the face of increases in the energy price cap

I don't, but I can look at it when we are there next month.