Keeping your home warm / heating / energy crisis / insulation etc

Just had this notice through, huge savings on gas in 2023!

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My email took awhile to come through, code was K448-GD59-77. Might be a one time use thing though.

Still kicking myself for not grabbing the screwfix titan windowvac for £20 in the black friday sale.

Idly checking estimated gas cost over last week or so - highs of £30 a day FML.

For the question of "how do I heat one room whilst working from home" I ended up getting a cheapo (about half a smart TRV) electric fan heater from Argos.

Costs about 80p in the first couple of hours to get my room up to temperature (albeit generally starting from about ten degrees) and then about 10/15p an hour (so long as I keep the door shut) to keep it at about 18/19 degrees whilst I'm working..

Cold and expensive....

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Holy shit, you got some sort of grow farm on the go?!? 😂

I should probably do this

I have got the imaging camera and I have just been outside to take some snaps. I probably haven't got the perfect setup for it for this particular application because I normally use it on PCBs.

It confirms my suspicions that my windows are utter shite and that the classic 60's lintels are perfect heat sinks.

Ignore the -34, that is how it is interpreting the sky.

The next one is interesting, it is my PIV outlet at the top of the stairwell ceiling, you can see the airflow path.

I just need to work out a time when I can get down to you, the run-up to Christmas is a bit hectic!

-2°c inside my workshop this morning. It’s a repurposed turkey shed with 50mm of celotex, breeze block walls and many many gaps. Well below the working temp of my adhesives and generally fucking bleak in there this week. Wearing so many layers I can barely move.
I’ve got a bar heater in there but it only heats like 2ft in front of it, no way it’ll ever warm up the space.

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Christ. How big is your house?!

I used to rent a similar business unit, single layer corrugated asbestos roof (very high) and it was almost impossible to heat. A lot of the unit was storage and I had a work bench and desk in a corner of it, I constructed a very rudimentary frame from cheap thin wooden batons keeping the height to about 6ft6" and making a hit hinged door. I stapled polythene sheet to the frame and door and that was an enormous improvement.

The structure would have leaked a huge amount of heat but it was a massive jump from trying to heat the whole unit and made winter working bearable.

God I hated that place!!

Depending on what tasks I’m working on I do sometimes make a smaller space which I can vaguely heat but not always practical, certainly not to the extent I can permanently make a space. If I’m knocking up flight cases or other chippy tasks at least I move around enough to warm up a bit.
Sitting/standing at the bench doing tasks where everything is within reach sucks the worst at this time of year. Standing on a sheet of 25mm plastizote helps a bit but basically htfu is the only real option. That said my fingers had basically stopped functioning by about 2pm today so I gave up and went home. It’s considerably more bearable on the couple of days my colleague is in, having 2 people chatting and moving around makes all the difference.

Gonna be fibreglassing tomorrow for a couple of hours so will have to get all the gubbins up to a workable temp somehow..

You need a diesel heater you’ll be toasty

You need an infrared heater or something like that, heat the person not the space. I had one in the cellar in my old place because it was never going to be worth heating but I used to spend quite a bit of time tinkering in there.

This is what I had - £50 on eBay:
https://www.sealey.co.uk/product/5637190515/1500w-infrared-quartz-heater---wall-mounting-230v

Surely you’re in battery powered clothing territory here, Ed?

Was going to say exactly this.

Also have you looked at heated clothes?

You can get battery power motorbike kit, so there must be other similar stuff available.

You and Yours on BBC R4 yesterday was interesting (there's a phrase you won't here very often):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001g38j

It was about future house-building tech and how the Future Homes Standard (the new energy efficiency requirements which come in from 2025) will be met. Lots of interesting new heating ideas like infrared mirrors in bathrooms and heated metal skirting boards. Also a lot of emphasis on heating in a smarter way (such as aiming the heat at people not big spaces as I mentioned above).

there must be other similar stuff available

https://www.dewalt.co.uk/product/dcj060xxl-xj/18v-xr-heated-outer-shell-jacket

Other jackets available for different battery systems!

Meh. Tech wazzocks inventing yet more stupid gimmicky solutions when we already know exactly what to do and could do it now.

If we just insulated to passive house standards an average 100m2 British house would need about 1500kwh a year to heat it. With a modern air-water heat pump that’ll be less than 500kwh of electric burned. <£200 a year at today’s mega high prices.

heat the person not the space

Could take the door off a microwave and sit in front of it running on defrost?

Probably wouldn’t cook your eyes, exterminate any electrical devices etc

We have a diesel one tucked away somewhere but the roar of it triggers my tinnitus.
Battery gilet is on my list for Santa

A cheaper internal heating option

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If we just

That's a pretty big "just", tho.

Although I share a lot of the overall sentiment.

Buys usb gilet.
WHY NO WORK USB GILET?