ENERGY MATTERS

[Wendyf]

My son's gas central heating boiler has gone on the blink. Can anyone recommend a reputable central heating engineer? He lives in Colne.

[PanBiker]

We have a maintenance contract for ours with BG, as far as I am aware they will come out to non contract boilers. Have a look on the BG site Wendy if you are stuck.

[Stanley]

I am on the BG contract as well Wendy. I forget the monthly charge but it is less than £1 a day. That may sound a lot but actually it's a good deal because they are efficient and all visits, parts and annual service are included. There is also the inestimable benefit of feeling secure, no unexpected bills! I recommend it to anyone....

[PanBiker]

Just logged on to the BG site as I need to do my meter readings. They quote £79 - £409 for a one off repair and the Homecare 200 plan that we are on is £22 per month.

[Wendyf]

Thanks Ian, will pass the info on to Col who is trying to sort it out for Craig. Couldn't believe it when my oil-fired Stanley cooker failed in the middle of sausage cooking last night! Poor Col, who is still running a slight temperature, was having to sort that out as well. We had a broken spring on the Skoda last Wednesday, then when it came back from the garage an emissions warning light was showing, got the problem identified by the garage as a broken pipe on a sensor somewhere...but of course my feverish husband insisted on bringing it home to repair himself rather than letting the garage put in a whole new unit.....he managed it!
Just waiting to see what fails or goes wrong next.......sometimes it's wonderful to have a husband who is capable of doing most jobs himself, sometimes it's a nightmare!!

[Pluggy]

If you want a local man who knows his job . Alex Leaver. Unlike many of the plumbers out there he has a clue when confronted with a modern combi boiler.

http://www.boilerguide.co.uk/listings/l ... d-plumbing

[Wendyf]

Thanks for that Pluggy, I'll make a note for the next emergency. Craig had arranged for someone to to look at his boiler before we got involved, and this chap charged him £80 for the call out, quoted over three hundred pounds for a new "board" which might or might not fix the problem and offered to fit a new boiler for £1200. Col went down to look at it on Tuesday night, googled the problem when he got home and found that it was likely to be a leaking diaphragm..bought a £7.00 kit from the plumbers merchant and sorted it in an hour yesterday. The boiler has been running without a problem for nine years, so it has done well and probably does need replacing, but at least it can wait till warmer weather.

[Big Kev]

He should be reported for that, the diaphragm and the microswitch it operates, are a fairly common fault on combi boilers. For someone to quote £300 is outrageous.

[Pluggy]

Tell me about it, It was the one of the last faults on my last boiler before I replaced it. It was 3 microswitches operated by one diaphragm, I had to give clues to the "heating engineer" who couldn't read the wiring diagram. It cost me £120 by the time he'd finished which was reasonable considering how long he took to fix it.(sic) I used Alex Leaver for another boiler I'm responsible for, he impressed me because he knew what a wiring diagram was,he had a test meter in his bag and he quickly diagnosed the fault

I bought an Intergas boiler when I replaced it, because they don't have diverter valves,secondary heat exchangers or diaphragms....

[Stanley]

Wendy, it's horror stories like that which convince me the BG contract is for me. I know exactly what the boiler will cost to maintain, the monthly service charge....

[Wendyf]

Good point Stanley, on the other hand Craig's boiler has run without any problem at all for a month short of 10 years....that would have been a lot of money handed over to BG for nothing but peace of mind.

[plaques]

Just a small point. A friend had a CH boiler fitted by BG together with the service agreement. Two years on, they said that they couldn't service it because the 'filter' cap was out of the wrong material. That would be £150 please. Note! they had fitted the filter unit as part of the latest bells and whistles. (cunning wheeze!)

[Pluggy]

Service agreements are like extended warranties, some people swear by them, I wouldn't entertain them. Each to their own....

[Tizer]

The Financial Times today has an item saying the power companies are worried that a solar eclipse next month will cause a break in electricity supply due to the increased dependence on solar energy.

[Stanley]

Should we panic? I don't think so........
My energy management has altered slightly this winter. Due to being in the shed every day I am running the front room stove slightly cooler so that the gas CH is doing more. This means that there is a low level of heat going into the shed. Gas bill up a bit but coal down and a more even spread of heat in the house. I keep the door to the shed closed until we go out for our first walk of the day. This means that the heat from the kitchen gets the shed up to about 55F by the time I go in. On the coldest days it has never dropped below 45F during the night. I haven't looked at the economics but I suspect it will be slightly higher overall but a more even distribution.

[Whyperion]

The Financial Times today has an item saying the power companies are worried that a solar eclipse next month will cause a break in electricity supply due to the increased dependence on solar energy.

For 8 to 15 mins in the UK
Cor, we have nights longer than that, and them dark stormy clouds always pass in 20 seconds dont they?

[Pluggy]

I'd be another to pour scorn on the solar eclipse having any effect on the UK's electricity. Solar energy's contribution to the total grid load in the UK is effectively a rounding error. Either the FT has some really thick journalists or it was a seriously slack news day.....

[Tizer]

Here it is...
`Solar eclipse puts Europe’s power supplies at risk' (FT, 23rd Feb 2015)
"An eclipse of the sun next month could disrupt Europe’s power supplies because so many countries now use solar energy, electricity system operators have warned. “The risk of incident cannot be completely ruled out,” the European Network Transmission System Operators for Electricity said on Monday, adding the eclipse on March 20 would be “an unprecedented test for Europe’s electricity system”. Solar power covered just 0.1 per cent of all the electricity produced in Europe from renewable energy sources around the time of the last large solar eclipse in Europe in 1999, according to the network, known as ENTSO-E. But since then solar power generation has soared to at least 10.5 per cent, as countries subsidise green power to meet EU renewable energy targets."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6d366fc2-bb5b ... z3Ss4oNgOE

[Pluggy]

The UK has about 5GW of installed solar capacity, On the 20th of March at around 9AM, at the very best, it will be producing about 2GW of power (clear skies over all the UK), The grid keeps about 8GW of spinning reserve.

A complete non event.

[Pluggy]

On another energy related subject I went through my gas consumption for the past 5 years and compared that with Met office data temperatures over the period. In October 2013 I replaced a draughty old front door with a UPVC new one and in December 2013 I replaced a 1990 Combi Boiler with a new condensing Boiler, the past 2 years have been the 2 lowest years for gas usage, December - February 2013/2014 was very mild so no surprise there, December - February 2014/2015 has been an average(ish) winter, but this years total gas was lower than last years (the winters was slightly higher). By my reckoning, the winter drawing to a close (Met office Winter ends at the end of February) is about the same (slightly colder if anything) as the Winter of 2011-2012, and we used 13% less gas this Winter than that winter.. 2012-2013 was the very cold one and 2013-2014 was very mild. Of course with the huge increases in gas prices since 2011, its costing me a lot more.......

We use about the same amount of gas from March to November as we do from December to February.
The gas savings will pay back the cost of the new door and boiler over the next 15-18 years or so.

[Stanley]

"I went through my gas consumption for the past 5 years and compared that with Met office data temperatures over the period."
Very satisfying no doubt and deep respect, but my god Pluggy.....!

[Tizer]

`World's first lagoon power plants unveiled in UK', BBC web site, 2nd March 2015
"Plans to generate electricity from the world's first series of tidal lagoons have been unveiled in the UK. The six lagoons - four in Wales and one each in Somerset and Cumbria - will capture incoming and outgoing tides behind giant sea walls, and use the weight of the water to power turbines. A £1bn Swansea scheme, said to be able to produce energy for 155,000 homes, is already in the planning system....."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31682529

I'm glad that these lagoon projects might go ahead, although we have to be careful of unintended consequences such as adverse effects on wildlife and on the regular movement of silt up and down estuaries. Really it's a modern and much bigger version of the old tidal mill concept used in Britain since at least as early as the 1200s. Below is my photo of the remains of a tidal mill on Penpol Creek at Point in Cornwall. The view is looking down the creek to the River Fal at low tide. The creek is now silted up but would once have been much deeper and wider and the lagoon was in the area at bottom left of the photo. Even in the 1100s and 1200s there were fights between the builders of the mills and weirs and the people who fished the rivers because the blocking the rivers prevented fish migration. Now it's going to happen again!

[PanBiker]

I cant see any technical reason why they they should have to build them on or near estuaries. If they kept them well away on sections of coastline without river outlets surely there should be less of an impact to wildlife or river silting issues.

[Stanley]

I'm in favour of anything that produces clean energy......

[Tizer]

I cant see any technical reason why they they should have to build them on or near estuaries. If they kept them well away on sections of coastline without river outlets surely there should be less of an impact to wildlife or river silting issues.

That would be like a bigger version of those saltwater swimming pools that fill when the tide comes in. An energy lagoon would provide plenty of space for swimmers...boating too. I suppose building them further out away from estuaries might be much more expensive due to the deeper water? Possibly also a greater danger to shipping? But I agree with your point about not interfering with river flow and fish migration. Perhaps they could be built where sea flooding and coastal erosion is a problem as on the Norfolk coast to reduce the damage done by the sea as well as create energy? "Rebuilding the coastline".