openspaceman

No gas has been burned in open cycle gas turbines in the past year, we have relied heavily on gas to follow demand using combined cycle gas turbines which convert 60% of the heat energy into electricity. Last week we curtailed more wind generated electricity power, which still has to be paid for, than Hinkley point is designed to produce because the grid couldn't cope with it, yet we will have to pay the French government 3 times more for the use of Hinkley point electricity that we currently pay for un subsidised off shore wind (also foreign owned). The subsidies for sizewell will be higher.

I'll beg to disagree with you there, there are many better ways to store excess without the inefficiency in conversions.

The costs of solar PV and batteries has come down a lot recently such that if I wanted to DIY a new installation of 6kW PV panels £1062, 5kW off grid inverter £1049 and 10kWh of battery £2925 plus fittings, total ~£6k I would have a system better than the 4kW PV I had fitted for £13k 12 years ago. This would supply all the needs of a 3bed household, except heating, for 8 months of the year. Trouble is to connect it to the grid there is the need for another of these gravy trains, MCS but there is an easy work around. Those prices are inclusive of VAT and a qualified electrician can claim that back and not charge VAT for the whole installation, giving £1000 to offset labour costs. On a similar system that cost £12k by an MCS installer on my daughter's house she ran her EV from March to October too and it is on target to produce 6MWh in a year. She is paid up to 15p/kW hour for the excess she exports. For 12 years I have produced more electricity than I used net, for 2 years I have had a battery that has reduced my reliance on the grid to 500kWh/year.With a small few hundred Watt CHP I could cover that with 3 47kg propane bottles and pay for those with the reduction of standing charges for utilities. I reckon about a quarter of UK houses could do the same. Here is a graphic of nearly a year record, as I only started it last March, but it shows clearly the hungry period around Xmas where the blue is imports from grid and the yellow showing self consumption plus the red being exports to the grid.

Actually that is just how the pyramid of safety selling works, trainer charges trainee, after number of trainings verifier charges trainer, after a number of verifications verifier gets checked. Then once a year all the trainers, assessors, verifiers get charged to attend an update session hosted by the top dogs.

In the good old days 60 years ago I collected a crate full of Watneys pale and brown ale bottles after a family party in order to collect the 3d deposit, loaded them on the battlewagon and hauled them in to the jug and bottle kiosk of the local pub. I handed them over to the landlord, Ernie Madder, who took them and refused to pay me my three shillings on the grounds I was under 18 :-(.

I'll see if I can take some photos of the manual if you want? I worry that more modern versions are different.

The manual for my 1980s one shows 0.5-1mm. I used a hacksaw blade thickness but more slop at the outer edge.

Yes and that is why the contribution from wood burning is becoming a higher proportion of what is overall a smaller amount.

It's 2.5 micron and down and while most of it may be carbon when it is collected on a filter the mass agglomerates and and can be analysed for markers, wood smoke typically has benzo-a-pyrene adsorbed onto the sooty particles amongst other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

Why take two weeks? Our kiln dropped 18 tonnes of poplar down below 20% in a 24 hours cycle. Of course the practicalities are different between cutting and seasoning logs for domestic use from doing the same on a commercial firewood sale but until the moisture content drops below about 20% various microbes in the wood are respiring some of the dry matter in the wood. I surmise the stuff they consume is the more volatile compound that give a lively flame so this bit is lost over time when logs are stored out in the round. The concern is about particulates which are Products of Incomplete Combustion I suspect even if you could largely eliminate these, perhaps with an electrostatic filter, you would still have the smells of wood burning ( which are also PICs but gaseous rather than sooty particles).

See my reply to Stubby, also forest fires tend to happen in summer when stoves tend not to be needed.

The environmental air scientists can differentiate particulates arising from combustion of fossil fuels from those from biomass burning, so that is accounted for in the overall picture. What they cannot do is tell whether the biomass is burned in a stove, open fire, bonfire or wildfire.

The DPF traps small particulates and if it is hot enough burns them, over time the minute amount of ash in diesel that remains will clog the filter. There are firms that clean this ash by back washing the DPF with various chemicals. If you drive the vehicle such that the DPF doesn't get hot enough for the sooty particulates to burn in the excess air a diesel always has in its exhaust the trapped soot builds up back pressure in the exhaust which is sensed. The engine then dumps some extra diesel into the exhaust to burn and raise the temperature of the DPF enough to burn the accumulated soot.

https://stoveindustryalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/22-01-31-The-contribution-of-domestic-outdoor-burning-to-UK-particulate-matter-emissions.pdf A long read and biased toward ecodesign stove sales but one measure is 2.1gram of pm2.5 per kilo of wood burned in a ecodesign stove on average. I have no idea what a modern HGV emits but it will have a particulate filter. What are these 750 HGVs doing, idling or working?

...until it is below 20%, which only takes a summer in a covered well ventilated store, it burns cleanly in a flaming stove.

Sulphurous acid H2SO3, made when sulphur burns to sulphur dioxide and that dissolves in water aka acid rain

@doobin runs a mechanised vegetation business, he does what the client is willing to pay for the service, the client then decides what to have done. I'm not knocking that but I was hands on and whilst I did sit in a mulcher all day mowing hundreds of ha of rhododendron I much preferred getting off the machine and doing motor manual of hand stuff in the fresh air. Heath and coppice are artificial niches created by years of agrarian practices and the wildlife now associated with these habitats is valued, so they are maintained for this conservation need. Most heathland locally is on poor sandy soil which was probably cleared for agriculture in the early iron age and became depleted and infertile as minerals were taken off or leached out.Hence they became wastes and were overgrazed by locals. Up until victorian times there was no question of leaving any plant products on site as locals valued it for burning or bedding. Also every few tens of years it would be burned to promote fresh shoots for grazing animals, still done on grouse moors. Which is why Cobbet referred to the area as "blasted heath" Much vegetation gets composted and sold and it then contributes to Soil Organic Carbon, which is a major medium term carbon store. Some could be used as a carbon sink in a recalcitrant form rather than allowed to decay back into the atmospheric carbon dioxide.

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Which probably was once heath and will promote the opportunity for the bracken to spread further into the heath as the nutrient status makes it more competitive than heathers.

Yes, my point is that it is something that cannot be policed, people may conspicuously pick up dog shit if they are being observed but there is no guarantee they will deal with it properly. Also the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 only requires a dog owner to remove it on "designated land". It has worked well for the piece of grassy verge in front of my house as there is only occasional crap to deal with there but I frequently find my hedge that runs along a footpath to the side has poo bags thrown in it. I will pick up dog shit from our dogs if it is on a footpath, urban openspace etc but not out in a woodland. In summer it goes in my black bin, in winter in the stove, mind mostly the dogs crap in my garden and that gets dumped in the sewer. As with any litter or flytipping the consequencces have to be dealt with.

Have you ever seen a dog walker hang a plastic bag containing dog shit from a branch?

This was always the policy locally post 1976 but seems to be abandoned now. Since then of course much nitrogen has been added to the soil from vehicle exhausts, coupled with rich dog food it has led to an increase in unwanted vegetation on the heath. The obvious solution is cut and collect but the wildlife trusts will not grasp the nettle and find an off site solution. It was the days when common grazing removed these minerals (to be deposited on a home farm or abattoir) that formed these heaths.

So it's you to blame for those thorns in my dogs'paws Lot's of phosphor compounds being recycled there, gorse grows at the sides of paths which have been fertilised regularly.

Yes, it took a couple of weeks to get here and it is a very similar copy of the original Walbro, less well finished on the mating surfaces but gaskets make up for that, the purge line spigot is a slightly bigger diameter and has a right angle that needed adjusting but after that it fitted okay. I'll see if I can use s slide hammer to remove the check valve that was faulty on the Walbro but I suspect even if is available as a part it will cost more. This is the second cheap chinky carb I have used, the other is still going strong on my Sihl HL75 long reach hedge cutter which I need a new gearbox for, it has a nasty Ryobi one on in the meanwhile.

I did as you suggested, put it together and with the tube to the purge bulb blocked it would run on choke and as soon as the throttle was opened it ran for a couple of seconds and died. It seemed as if the vacuum when the choke was on filled the diaphragm chamber but once the saw was running on throttle the chamber empted and the impulse wasn't able to refill it. Bearing in mind it ran fine with the carb from a working Einhell. I will leave the video up on Drive for a short while 20240125_140231.mp4 - Google Drive DRIVE.GOOGLE.COM So I gave in today when a package arrived 20240201_153432.mp4 - Google Drive DRIVE.GOOGLE.COM That was without any fiddling with the tuning screws. Apart from the faffing about it was probably worth the £6.08