Mrs B does an experiment at home

My wife did an awesome experiment and piece of analysis with the heating system at home last week. She ran the heating system all day - 7.30am to 8pm one day. The next day, she ran it for two short slots - 6.15am to 7.30am and then 4.30pm to 8pm.

Converting data into kWh, the all day use was 174kWh which cost £6.52.
The two shorter slots used 83.8kWh which cost £3.14.

So that suggests using shorter slots because it costs half the price.

But when you work out the cost per hour, running all day was 52p per hour but the two shorter slots were 66p per hour.

We need better insulation if we want the "keep it on all day" approach to reap benefits. The problem is clearly that the house cools down considerably between the two slots and then has to be reheated.

Pigeon Post

I've been reading the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series again for the first time in 35 years. In this book, they discover an ore in the hills that they think is gold. What I really like about this is that they are prepared to have a go at anything - an nearly get killed twice along the way - so don't try it at home! But they make pigeon post work, devising an automatic bell to alert them.
Then they work out how to make charcoal and build their own blast furnace. They try to test their ore using a mix of acids called aqua regia. I had to look this up! Try Wiki.

But it's their attitude, that if they hear about something they will try it. That's education.

The future of energy?

We went to Watchtree Nature Reserve on Sunday. You can see these turbines from the window of my lab. They are going round nicely this morning! Most opinions that I hear in these parts are against wind power and in favour of nuclear. It is very different to the opinions I heard in Nottingham. However, there are a lot of jobs in nuclear. Importantly, there is a meeting being held by Allerdale Borough Council in the Market Hall in Wigton on Thursday 25 November to discuss the council's interest in having nuclear waste buried beneath us. There will be presentations at 4.30pm and 6.30pm. I will definitely go to one of them. If you'd asked me 5 years ago I would have been strongly against nuclear power. In the mean time, I've read a book about the aftermath of Chernobyl which suggests it might not be that bad, so Ive got an open mind and will listen to what they have to say. It is my opinion that you can't be in favour of nuclear power but insist that all the bad stuff goes somewhere else. And of course you are allowed to disagree!

An interesting opinion on wind farms comes from a woman called Sara Maitland. She is a writer who has retreated to silence in a remote part of Galloway. Read what she says by going to her website, clicking on "About me" and scrolling to the bottom.

We notice wind farms, but can you spot the TV masts and pylons on this photograph of Skiddaw?

Jupiter

This awful photograph is my attempt to capture the planet Jupiter. I used a telescope that was actually designed for looking at wildlife, with a 40x lens. The beauty of a digital camera is that it will work in really low light levels because it has a quantum efficiency of over 70%. In other words, 70% of the light falling on its charge coupled device (CCD) is cpatured and recorded. The figure is 3% for old fashioned film, so a traditional camera won't take photographs through a telescope. You can tell that this is a planet and not a star because it forms a clear disc, not a point. In fact, I could see 4 of Jupiter's moons in a line stretching from the right of the planet. They have not come out in the photograph. I could even see light and dark bands on the surface of Jupiter. If you want to see Jupiter at the moment, it is the bright star in the south in early evening. So if you look from Wigton at 7pm, it will be the bright star above the Caldbeck masts. It was just such an observation that got Gallileo into trouble. He was the first person to see the moons of Jupiter. They change places over several days showing that they orbit Jupiter. In Gallileo's day, everything was supposed to orbit the Earth. Showing that moons orbitted another object seriously undermined the "Earth as the centre of the universe" theory.