openspaceman

It's interesting that I seem to hear more problems with ASHP than GSHP but that may be because they tend to be much cheaper to install. My first experience of GSHP was 30 years ago on a big house, offices and garden of a property developer. The pipes were under about an acre of lawn. In deep winter they tried to heat everything, including a pool and stables and this resulted in the soil around the pipes freezing and raising ridges in the lawn. This was entirely a problem of the development company owner not understanding the science and he scrapped the installation rather than accept its limitations and add an alternative for cold weather. I came across a similar thing when my brother converted an old house into 8 flats, he did not take advice and fitted radiators instead of underfloor, he also used the ASHP for domestic hot water whereas a point of use hot water would have been more sensible. Worse still was because 8 flats domestic hot water was stored in a common tank the temperature had to be raised electrically each day to eliminate Legionella bacteria. Had the ASHP only supplied underfloor heating it would have been adequate most of the time. Instead it was ripped out at great expense. The interesting thing about ASHP is that the air temperature varies much greater than the soil even only six feet down, so in cold weather the GSHP has less work to do as long as the heat exchange surface under ground is adequate. Both depend on the sun. Oddly a lot of folk seem to believe that GSHP get their heat from the earth's core[1], there is some but it's only about 50mW/m2, the vast bulk is stored up in the surface layers in warmer weather. It strikes me a big pond would be an ideal source as the bottom layer would remain at 4C even as ice thickens over the top. [1] this reserve of heat in hot rocks is accessed because the hot rocks have been heated for millennia but as the heat is taken out, in Iceland as high pressure steam or low temperature water from flooded mines, the rocks cool faster than the heat coming in from the core, so the heat is not sustainably mined any more than an aquifer in a desert region is mined for water.

You too are missing the point like @Big J's guardian reader. As @Woodworks says if the stonework is insulated outside the insulation can prevent solar gain, thus keeping the inside cooler

This is exactly the situation we decided air circulating pellet stoves were ideal for, a 10kW fast heat up of the air space which tailed off as horsed of sweaty bodies contributed their 200W to. We imported 25 in about 2000, I still have the demo unit idle in my shed, but take up was not good and the pellet price shot up from£70/tonne.

and Gaia kicking back.

Yes but fundamentally they are the same a fridges so I expect only minor tweeks. They will be "tuned" to give the best result (Coefficient of Performance) at a given output temperature and temperature of whatever the collector is outside. This is unlike to exceed a COP of three and a bit most of the time, so if we ignore the substantial capital and replacement cost with electricity at 22p/kWh the heating won't get better than 7p/kWh. Drop to a delta T of over 20C then what happens? So it looks like the intention is to let gas rise from the current 4p/kWh (I still pay 3p till April) to above 7p/kWh. If you accept the grant for a heat pump then you lose your gas connection forever. As to hydrogen; I do not think it can use any current gas grid as it finds leaks much better than methane. I do wonder why the capital invested in the natural gas network is not worth finding a way to synthesise methane from all this hydrogen we expect and carbon from plants or indeed oil. With the move to electric cars I think a domestic CHP becomes worth looking at even if it is internal combustion based I bet the constant running for short periods charging a battery will compensate for the varied conditions a IC car has to deal with and running on methane it will be very clean plus heat the house. See above and for the small amount cooking uses LPG will be around for a while. A decent induction hob should be up with gas for better heat control

AFAICS there's not much not to like about underfloor heating apart from, perhaps, places that are only occupied for a short while, village halls, scout huts etc. I was working at a large townhouse yesterday, cutting some ash from the felling of an open grown tree about a year ago, sizes were from 4" to 18" in a neat stack of about a cord. Split faces were about 36% mc on my meter,Took me 4 hours and three tanks of fuel but that won't last their 2 stoves and jetmaster long. Anyway the house was 50 metres from the gas main and would cost £6k for the connection so when the new owner moved in he elected for an air source heat pump. It looked like 4 of those fan-coil air conditioning units you see on office buildings. A bit incongruous on the outside of a Victorian, flint knapped building. I'm biased but thought it looked worse than the 16 solar panels I have on my house. He did say that he was surprised at how much electricity he was using but wouldn't go into detail, I imagine it was still using radiators.

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Yes it's very sad but I'm not sure what my cousins did, one of the three was definitely a carpenter and the eldest one left early and became a publican yet they three all died from asbestos related disease. I don't think any got to my age now. In my teens we would have raucous family gatherings for weddings and such at a ex serviceman's club somewhere off union street.

Never, my father was determined to get away and came to Surrey. All my male cousins seemed to work there and have passed away, asbestos related cancers.

This is a family song so: This one it did it was wrapped in a tin I cannot remember any of the other verses but I associate it with the yard at devonport

Or maybe a little piece of paper carefully folded up with some white powder inside. I'll sing you a story of my uncle Jim Somebody threw a tomato at him Tomatoes don't hurt you, I said with a grin,...

Expensive for what looks like a hermetically sealed compressor from a refrigerator sat on a reservoir. You could probably make one from an old fridge freezer and a propane tank with a pressure switch and a timer to stop it running more than ten minutes in 30 minutes.

No I don't think so, I guess you mean a tandem pump where at low pressures both pumps output but as the pressure (an hence required power) increases one pump's output is diverted to tank and all the horsepower is then used to drive the active pump. I imagine the logbullet has more sophisticated variable output pump which will optimise the use of the little engine's output. An intensifier is simply an extra ram and possibly some automagic valves. All the time the ram is managing to split with 6 tonnes force the output at 160 bar manages but when there is more resistance and 10 tonnes is needed to keep the ram moving the 160 bar pressure is fed to the extra ram which has nothing connected to it. The output from the piston side of the ram is now fed to the splitter ram. If the ratio of area on the piston side to the area on the rod side is sized to be 210:160 then the pressure multiplication is sufficient to get the splitter moving again.

It seems strange to see apples and pears falling to rot in people's gardens when they are such good food. I juiced mine this year to make better use of them. Also so disappointing to see all the cob hazelnuts taken by squirrel because they too make a long lasting food. So yes I would like to see more wild food planting. For my part I guerilla formative prune self sown oaks as I am about walking. Having made most of my income from selling timber it breaks my heart to see so much new growth being of such bad form it will never make decent sawlogs.

Yes but there is a way around it by using it that 95% of the time at full speed and then dropping the speed but increasing the pressure to 10 tonne by adding an intensifier.

Don't you mean larger?

The bark present at the time of damage is still there, so it doesn't look like mechanical damage, from the regrowth either side of the sunken area it looks like the undamaged part has put on most of a growth ring and is trying to occlude the damage. which happened at least one growing season back. It is too localised low down to be sun scorching so given the slight blackening I'd guess a car exhaust has done the heat damage.

Pug 3008 hybrid4 does that and there is due a citroen aircross hybrid4 and maybe a vauxhall equivalent plus it's the same layout as a one of the vans, possibly a berlingo but no 4wd version van. The cars are supposed to be plug in and run for about 20 miles on battery. I through I would need to tow a chap out of a wet field in an older C5 hybrid but he drove out and it was quite strange to see the rear wheels spinning faster than the front. I mentioned this to @Big J a while back in a thread as he has one of the citroen vans using the same base

I'm not sure why we don't produce more beans and pulses apart from harvesting them immature for freezing. Of course we dump a vast amount of nitrogenous liquid into the rivers and sea each day.

Yes and given that most of the world's population can never reach our standard of living I don't have much hope for COP26 either. Trouble is the problems are coming home to roost a bit earlier than I expected. This current energy crisis is a case in point, We need nitrogen for crops, it's equivalent to having more acres, traditionally it came from hydropower and more recently made from natural gas, often from stranded resources which would have been flared. Now it's worth liquefying and shipping it so no need to make ammonium nitrate with it. Then given a stranglehold on the west's supply of gas from the east...

I'm all for sustainable farming but the regulations around farming are bewildering, I left working dairy farming 45 years ago and wonder if I would have been able to keep up. The old farm is now a golf course and an academy. Given all the conservationist eulogising rewilding and loss of all Knepp's arable acres I do wonder how we are going to compete for food on the world market as we fall back to the interwar 50% dependence on food imports. I think we produce 60% currently and even during the war only got to 70% plus the population has doubled since.

I thought shrews were insectivorous so never saw them as a problem, it is bank voles (our commonest rodent I think) that will strip a young plant and they also love the shelter provided by a plastic tube.

The roof space in a well insulated roof should be near ambient air but yes whole house ventilation units are often in the loft but vent directly to the outside because of condensation risk.

Funny thing is I have never seen lodgepole pine grow into nice poles here, completely unlike in america apparently (never seen it there). Most woods if peeled early and dried quickly will be to some extent durable, sitka dries hard and lasts if kept dry but sweet chestnut and yew would be my choice. With sweet chestnut some care needed with fixings as it splits readily.

fair comment