Finding the chase and cutting to it

We take how warm our houses are for granted, but as someone who took advantage of a cheap deal if we got our windows replaced during the “autumn” (autumn my #@!£$), it is interesting to see why we keep windows and doors closed while it is 5°C outside!

Our Tado radiator valves and thermostats all tell you the temperature in your individual rooms…

Our super-controllable house is in “frost protection” mode during the fitting times, because the heat is just leaching out of holes in the walls where the old windows used to be. Our bedroom was 19°C this morning but with the front door open and a window missing in the spare room, the temperatures soon start to drop. The internal doors are thankfully insulating, but there is no point heating a couple of rooms when the corridors are dropping in temperature this quickly every time you open the room’s door.

We can see the drop in one of the last to still be heated, my beloved’s office:

We can see from the readings from the smart radiator valve thermostat that the heating came on this morning for his office about 06:30. Even with the heat pump, the temperature rose to its setting of 19°C. All the cold air rushing past his office door then brought that temperature down to 18°C.

In a room with the actual window out, that is exacerbated. I switched off that room’s thermostat before the work started, naïvely thinking that would be enough. Obviously, it wasn’t, and the impact has been huge.

Why go to all this bother, then? You had double glazing!

Our double glazing was failing after 16 years. This first window to go was the one I had repaired (remember the extra caulking), because it had a 3mm gap between the window pane and the frame!

This one is having a tilt and turn window, which is more popular in Europe according to our window fitter and our son, respectively, for pretty much the reasons the Europeans have them installed. Our south face of the house bakes in the summer sun. Having a window upstairs we can open inwards means we can fit external shutters, allowing us to shield during the summer heat and recover during the night. Instead of opening the window to vent, we can tilt it at night with the shutter shielding us from moths and other insects.

We don’t need this downstairs, because we can walk to the outside of the window and pull a shutter closed, but upstairs, we need to do something different.

The triple glazing is to reduce our u-value further – vital for the north face of the property during the winter. U-values are the rate at which heat is lost from a surface and is dependent on a few things such as materials, air gaps, and is measured in Watts per square meter a degree Kelvin or W/m²K. (Kelvin’s are used here as they are the scientific unit (also known as the SI unit) for temperature, unlike the Celsius unit and you then don’t need a pesky ° symbol when typing this out). The lower the u-value, the better. It’s one of the things measured on an EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) report.

Our old units, having started to fail (apparently they were made in 2009 and installed later that year, looking at Google Map’s “see other dates”). No-one lived in the house until late 2011, early 2012. By the time we had moved in May 2013, some of the fixings and hinges had begun to rust. The vaccum units started to fail last year – but with the boiler failing, we had other priorities!

Windows are never as good as brick at keeping a house warm. But on top of good units, having them fitted by someone who knows what they are doing is essential. Any gaps round the windows will let any heat poured into the room find an escape route. I know people who moved into a house that had had the windows (not UPC ones, just wooden frames) installed upside down. When a window is installed upside down, rain pours into closed windows from the top. A good fitter is vital otherwise it can all go horribly wrong.

One of my pet peeves is trickle vents. Required by building regulations, they poke a hole through your sealed units. Doh! The idea of them is to “let hot damp air vent when you can’t open a window” but all they do is chill the windows allowing said damp air to condense on your glass panes. Eight months of the year, in the UK, they are just causing more issues than they solve, and the other four months of the year, we can just open the window!

That aside, it’s really exciting to be fixing our window problems for the next 25-30 years.

By the time you read this, all the work will be complete and you’ll only have to wait a week to see the finished result. We’re at the point now with 80% of the upstairs windows fitted though not completely fixed and finished.

What about the temperature inside your house at this point?

Good question. Let’s have a look at that.

The kitchen and Jon’s office have kept their temperatures up – the benefits of a closed door, good insulation, and windows not being messed around with. The spare room is, frankly, a bit parky. As is the landing – having dual aspects and open doors here. My office has lost a few degrees too, but is looking great with its new window. Our main bathroom has also been done but it’s thermostat isn’t a smart one, so isn’t showing the 12°C on the room’s thermometer.

Most of the removal and refitting has been done today, so I am gently starting up the heating. Upstairs that means the ensuite and bathroom in our spare room – our home from tomorrow night for a few days – will start to get warm again.

Sounds like hell.

But it should be worth it. I will do a deep dive analysis on the figures at a later date.

Though, as hinted, this is about more than just improving the u-values. Our house was completed in 2012. Yet, “cottage-style” windows were installed. By choosing modern style windows, we should be improving the aesthetic too and allowing light to fill the rooms.

Converting our bedroom’s window to a French door (with balustrade initially) will let in more light and allow the courtyard to be see from anywhere in the room.

The same goes for the large patio door in the lounge. It shares the same view, albeit from the ground floor. Only, the small French door and window the other corner of the room meant the courtyard could only be enjoyed from a few points in the room. The window area is increased but so too is the wall area – and corners, we will gain two big corners in the room.

It’s hard to describe the benefits of walled corners in a room. A place to put a cabinet or a chair, a set of shelves, or just a piece of wall. The 1960s architecture in the UK often featured wall to wall windows. Why, oh why?

There are some wonderful rooms that have round the corner windows, with a great view, this can be stunning. But it needs really careful thought about how you enjoy those views.

We’re lucky in that our lounge is really open, a basic rectangle that can be divided into zones. A reading zone, TV zone, small table for a snack in the evening and a music listening zone. With the new patio door, the courtyard is now a feature against all these activities.

One of my favourite things about the courtyard is the fact there is a flower in bloom at every stage of the year. Whether chrysanthemums and a clemetis in October, November, December, a Christmas rose or snow drops in January and February, bluebells in March and April, Wisteria in June and July, honeysuckle and weigela in July and August, clemetis in July, August, and September. Something is happening somewhere for you to look at. Whether in the garden or in the lounge.

Motives are what define us. They allow us to get up in the morning and get a boogie on rather than languish in bed – and believe me, we have all had those mornings where staying in bed and pulling the covers over our heads makes the most sense!

For many, their jobs allow them to live. They do not enjoy what they do, it is simply a means to an end. When I was growing up, my parents allowed me to see that if I wanted them, I had options.

It doesn’t mean there haven’t been impossible days at work (or in real life), but even then, I have had choices about what I do with those days, how I act and carry myself. Hopefully, I have always done that to the best of my ability.

Is this going anywhere? Or is it just a 50+ person being a boomer?

Firstly, I’m a Gen-X person, not a boomer, but whatever my age, our motives are what drives us. Secondly, I got to go to a Christmas fair yesterday and met some amazing people living their dreams. That is always inspiring: indeed, the experience inspired me to write this piece, as we have spent the past couple of weeks achieving a bit of a dream of ours. Albeit, nearly at the end of what seemed a long journey while we where travelling!

We’re coming to the end of our window installation, well, it was a replacement window exercise for all but three of our windows, which were radically transformed.

We got a bit of a bargin because of the time of year we did it, but it was still a big job and once the building work is done, our bit of the story will begin.

Building work is not typical in having your windows replaced. We have a bit of experience of doing this, having turned an existing window into French doors, which can be transformational. Letting more light and much more of a view into any room. It also created some corners in a room… For a modern house, it can make a feature for surprisingly little effort if you have a lintel that’s at the right height.

This time, we turned a window in our bedroom into a pair of French doors, and took a window and a pair of French doors near two corners of a wall in our lounge and turned them into a patio door in the centre of that wall opening into a courtyard garden. We thought it was an obvious thing for the architect to have done but it was never in the previous owners drawings for the house, so we had to do a bit of a rennovation and found a company willing to do it. The work went smoothly but took some planning, which always takes time.

Can I confess to something? I love painting walls. I do the prep I need to, including masking tape (a terribly stressful part of the operation), but the rhythmic dipping of a paint-pad in a tray of emulsion, smoothing the paint onto the wall, and the end result when it is finally dry. I do this without music: just me and the wall to be done. Of course, I am going to be doing two walls with two doors on them – masking tape is going to take a good hour of the prep work. There’s a ceiling to do too. It’s a big job – a good weekend’s worth. Bliss!

The balustrade for the upstairs French door is being constructed and fitted as I type this. The render will need refreshing (and some patching). But unlike previous years, we should be able to do that leaning out from our safe doorway.

Just this moment, the world feels safe and hopeful. I can see the thaw of last night’s frost steaming off the fence in the courtyard as the noon day sun hits its peak in teh sky on this crisp December day. Hope you’re having a great day where-ever you are.

OK, last weekend the clocks changed and I did have that extra hour in bed last week. But I am still working on summer time, so when I woke up early this week, I seized the day.

My beloved husband has taken up a lot of the slack since I got a bad bug last October (October 2024). It not only knocked me for six for the couple of days I was really ill (temperature, upset stomach, the works), but I have really struggled the past year. That includes much of the outdoor work: sweeping the leaves, weeding, and the other smaller jobs I tended to do.

Today, I got up and huzzled. I knew we were heading out for lunch later, but got a loaf on for this evening. Packed the dishwasher, plugged in the car to charge, and prepped for the day.

A beautiful, crisp but not freezing autumn day. I sorted out my clothing, keys, equipment, and started the leaf sweeping job that is essential this time of year. Only to find my air sourced heat pump was a perfect collector of fallen leaves. That took 15 to 20 minutes to sweep up as many as I could but it got me thinking as I did the rest of the garden.

The final bit was finishing off by the shed and I spotted the old remains of a raised bed – mostly rotted, but enough wood, I thought, that could provide a protective run around the heat pump. A physical low barrier would stop a percentage of the leaves collecting while allowing air to pass into the system, so it could work well. It would also be easy to pull apart as soon as the leaves stop dropping.

So I built it. I will have a look next week and see if it worked.

Doesn’t sound lazy at all, to me!

I’m getting to that. To support our local hospitality industry, we try to eat out two or three times a month.

Our first choice was fully booked, so we headed to our local town’s quai and had pizza watching the clouds chase across the sky, eating pizza, sharing a single glass of wine and large bottle of mineral water, and a salad. It could have been any port anywhere in the world.

We then waked back through town, looking in shop windows, soaking up the sun, basically busy doing nothing.

I’m a little tired as the sun sets today, but feel like I have made a small difference to my world, and am very relaxed and happy.

I’ve also managed to lose 7kg over the past six months and hit my target weight. I have done this by eating less, substantially less chocolate and treating hypos. Along with the energy levels, my blood glucose levels have behaved themselves far more predictably. So, that’s another boost to my feeling of contentment.

Any one who says it is easy to lose weight is making a mockery of the human condition – we are the decendents of people who had periods of starvation and feast and we live in a world of plenty.

We eat feast food every day, sugar like it is going out of fashion. So to all those others out their who are trying to lose weight too, keep up the great work. You can do it, if I can.

It’s 2.6°C at this moment in time and I don’t feel too much of a whimp saying it’s cold outside.

Today is day three of our “replacement windows, making a hole bigger, and centrering a window in an existing wall” adventure or our trek into how cold can we go in our house?

It’s going to be worth it, but I sincerely believe the gentlemen doing the work are earning what they are being paid. It is so cold, I am wearing treble layers and gloves inside.

Of course, we’re doing our best to retain what heat we can. Making the most of the kitchen being completely vented, I started the automated cleaning on the cooker. Fuggy smoke from the cooker went straight through the open holes and the heating was off anyway…

The UPVC windows have three fitting stages, the last being the application of some glue to finish off the trim. The easiest way to vent this is to open the windows for 30-60 minutes, depending on the wind. Off goes the heating in the room and set a timer for when to reclose and reheat!

Even with retaining the heat, raising the temperature from 8.8°C back to 16°C is hard work. Over the build we have spent far more than our usual 8 kWh a day on heating, to put it mildly.

Our “base usage”, lighting, cooking, EV charging, etc, is typically 7 kWh a day – a little heavy but we both work from home. Our usage yesterday was 54 kWh. And we were both out for the majority of the day – 42.5kWh was on the heating, 6 kWh was spent charging the car.

You should have done the windows first – then that heat would have come from nice, cheap gas!

Not really, because that 8 kWh of electricity would have been 12 kWh of gas a day and the 42 kWh would have been over 60 kWh! We would have saved money on heating the house when we’d moved to the heat pump but the tasks would still have burnt a lot of gas to heat the house.

The multiplier effect is still making a difference – the 42.5nkWh of electricity translated to 144 kWh of heat – an SPF of 3.4 (it wasn’t that much warmer yesterday, to be honest). We generated 4.9 kWh from the roof yesteday too, which covered a 10th of that power used.

Ideally, the work would have been on a warmer day of the year. But once it’s done, it’s done 🙂

The big thing I have found with this process is how quickly the house has got back up to temperature – the image above is four hours after the previous picture. The windows vary in their u-values between 1 W/m²K and 1.1 W/m²K for the triple glazing and a pair of south facing double glazed french door who have a u-value of 1.5 W/m²K – but we have paired these with heavy duty curtains and external shutters which should help reduce our loses. The consideration with this window was its ability to make the best use of solar gain during the winter – something triple glazed windows can struggle with.

Not long now before the job is completed. Of course, that is only the begining in terms of our responsibility in getting it finished. Painting needs to be completed once the plaster is dry and I really need to hem our new curtains for that set of French doors!

The standard says,

• Space heating <= 15 kWh/m²/yr,
• an airtightness limit of 0.6ACH@50Pa (air changes per hour at 50 Pascals),
• total primary energy demand <= 60 kWh/m²/yr.

For our house, at 244m², this works out at:

• Heating <= 3,660 kWh over the year.
• Total primary energy need <= 14,640 kWh over the year.

This year is a little weird, because we had the windows replaced while it was 2.5°C. But our heating is currently 3,270 kWh and total energy use is 8,100 kWh.

So, getting close to that ideal.

Why work this out? Well, that is what EPC (energy performance certificates) work towards; they tell you how far you are from the Passivhaus standard in terms of the energy efficiency, and give you an idea of how far you have to go!

These days, it’s important information to have, not least because it is what our energy companies do to work out what your direct debit needs to be.

Because we’re only using electricity, and electricity is £0.2527 per kWh. So, so far this year we have spent £(0.2527*3,270) or £826.33 on our heating and hot water. Our total usage has been £2,046.87, so outside of our heating, we’ve spent £1,220.54.

Only we haven’t, have we? Our solar generation has taken 3.7 MWh off thia total. That means we’ve only bought 4.4 MWh or 4,400 kWh => £1,111.88. Or £92 per month, all year round – plus the standard charge at £14 per month – so a total of £106 a month.

For everything. Cutting the grass, lighting our house, driving the car, powering the bidet loo. The dishwasher, the computers, the phones, the printers, the fridge and freezer, the washing machine and tumble dryer. Cutting the hedge, drying our hair, powering the extractor fans in the kitchen and bathrooms, the ovens (bread maker, main oven, grill, microwave, induction hob).

Our lives are electric, and we’re doing our bit to keep our use down as much as possible. Which is why we’re half-way through replacing our windows.

Our focus has been reducing their heat loss capabilities and getting more natural light in. The idea is to have something that helps us in the long term. Improve our lives, not just in terms of the cash but to make us smile too.

These figures above are a snap-shot. I want to compare them to this time next year and see if we’ve made things better.

It’s the 2nd weekend of October, and, technically, we did past the milestone earlier in the year of having generated more than the whole of 2024, but we are currently sitting at having generated 3.5MWh off our roof mounted solar panels since 1st January 2025.

It’s the first year we have had batteries in play, so since March 2025, we have had use of 90% of that energy. It doesn’t mean we are off grid, but it should mean we do pay less for what we use as less is coming from the grid. So, is that actually the case?

Up to yesterday (as that how our smart meter reports), we have used 3.85505 MWh from the grid. Plus the 3.5 MWh we generated, that makes our total usage circa (3.9 + .9*3.5) = 7.05 MWh. And that’s before we hit the cold parts of this year.

Now, we’re doing a great deal with our electricity: heating the house, all the hot water we use, and of course, powering the electric vehicle (why this part of the blog is called “Driving off the grid”). 6.9 MWh isn’t too bad and 3.9 MWh off the grid, is pretty remarkable.

The current estimates for people running an EV and a heat pump is between 7 and 12 MWh. We might get to use 10 MWh for the calendar year, if use 2.4 MWh for November and December, as we did last year. The majority of that came from the grid last year, because we only had the one battery, just 100 kWh were provided by our solar cells and our single battery.

I always like to compare this to our gas usage, and for that I need to go back to 2023.

Month	Gas usage (MWh)
October 2023	0.569986
November 2023	1.657321
December 2023	2.134510
Total	4.361817

So, actually, while the energy use this year seem high for October, for December and November, they seem very reasonable. Of course, we are doing much more with that power. The gas was only keeping us warm and heating our water, not powering our transportation and providing hot meals and lighting and entertainment and clean clothing.

But you would say that, you are generating much of that power yourself!

Up to a point. Going by our general stats from the solar cells over the eleven years we have had them installed, we have had the best of the year. From here on in, the days are getting shorter and the sun is no longer as high in the sky.

In April, our generation is typically around 350 kWh (0.35 MWh), in October, more like 240 kWh (a good year), November is in the low 100s kWh and December, that figure drops to 50 kWh. (Edit from 14th November – this year came in as 185 kWh! November looks much better so far, and we’ve reached 3.6 MWh for the year.)

With the shortest day of the year, December is definitely the darkest month and the one where we are not getting as much off the roof. January looks more like November and February and October are comparable.

Hence the new triple glazing upstairs to stop our loses through the windows. It should mean we make the most of our heating.

Due to the nature of where we live, April and May are often our best generating months thanks to there being fewer leaves on the trees. We’re not in favour of pruning trees to give us better solar generation, but do enjoy those couple of months when a higher sun, sparser foliage, and cooler temperatures suit us to a tee!

insulin, for giving it to me…?

Yesterday was World Diabetes Day (14^th November), held during Diabetes Awareness month (November). The reason for the 14^th November is because (Dr Fred) Banting was born on the 14^th November. (For all those who write raw HTML, be in awe of my dedication to not para-phrase that to save on the HTML mark-up). This year’s theme is “Diabetes and the workplace” because many of us face stigma in the work place, from being in school (honestly, I had some great and shockingly bad experiences at school) and university through to being in work (again both the good and the shockingly bad experiences).

World Diabetes Day is a relatively new thing, established by the World Health Organisation in 1991 to “address the growing threat of diabetes”.

Which is odd because by 1991, the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial was underway which proved that diabetes impacted people did better if their glucose control was closer in range to those who didn’t have type 1 or type 2. Which meant that if your treatment allowed you to optimise control, you could live as long as someone without diabetes.

I term it that way, because it isn’t that simple – I have been given insulin dosages twice in my life – once when I was diagnosed and once when I got my pump – and both times, the expectation was that those starting points would be tuned to suit me.

Some thoughts on that:

• That english looks strained, because at 4 years old, I was not capable of doing that. My parents had to do that for me. “Never work with children or animals” is twice as impactful when you’re dealing with a child on insulin!
• Many people have been shocked by that – they felt that I should be tied to a doctor to help me live. They cannot understand that it is down to me.

(And that all ignores the fact my body produces antibodies to the insulin I inject – so after a while, I need a different sort of insulin to keep healthy and that insulin may not be as good as the last one I had, initially, as they all work differently.)

The UK is a bit strange in that respect, thanks to R D Lawrence, a surgeon who was one of the first in the UK to get insulin in 1922. He later went on to found the British Diabetic Association (aka Diabetes UK), but started a diabetes clinic to help people thrive on insulin. He recognised that doctors couldn’t be there 24/7 and help people work out what they needed, so his approach was to teach people how to tune doses themselves. That approach survives to this day. He also helped to get insulin funded for all in the UK, and went on to found the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) to help diabetics across the world.

Lawrence realised really early on that the burden needed to be eased. In 2014, Stanford University published a paper saying that on average a type 1 diabetic makes more than 180 decisions regarding their insulin regime – to me that sounds like an easier day.

And there are days when you cannot get it right because despite continuous (blood) glucose monitoring systems (CGMS), we don’t have all the information on what is going on.

Our bodies are different to each others (no type 1 is the same as any other type 1) but also, physiologically, a type 2 has different levers at play to a type 1 diabetic, even if they are both on insulin. And don’t get me started on type 3cs, who don’t have the safety net of producing their own glucagon.

Yet, we are told we can be seen as lazy if we do not get it perfectly right.

Think about that for a second. Think about the complicated job a diabetic (type 1, 2, or 3c) is doing and then be amazed we ever get it perfectly right, and many of us do. If the insulin and its delivery system (or other medication) is doing what it should do, it is still not a trivial task.

The first insulin pumps were developed in 1960s compared to the 1950s for the heart pacemaker and the 1940s for the kidney dialysis machines. While dialysis machines were widely available in the 1970s, it took another 25 years for insulin pumps to start hitting 2% of those with diabetes. Another twenty years for CGMS to be reliably right often enough to be considered to tweak the insulin basal and bolus, for corrections, as needed. My family does not like me using it and if I do use it, I need to check it doesn’t do something stupid.

While people many thought these early pumps were “automatic”, they needed complex programming to be useful to the users, and that is still the case today. Insulin pumps are not the same as a pacemaker in setting a guiding beat for a heart, or cleaning the blood in the case of a dialysis machine.

Responding to just blood glucose readings (and in our case, these are interpreted results from interstitial fluid) is not enough – in a non-type 1 pancreas, insulin release also impacts how much glucagon is released into the blood stream and the insulin a non-type 1 has only has a half-life of 10 minutes. My subcutaneously absorbed insulin hangs around for 5 hours!

It may not look it, but the average type 1 is doing a lot to keep safe and healthy. Occassionally, those two things may be contradictory. But just because you can’t understand what they are doing and why, please don’t think we’re not doing our best at this moment in time!

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as born in the USA.  But right this moment, I am pretty proud of my little corner of planet Earth.

Go on, I’ll bite, why?

Why, as you can see, right this moment, the electricity hitting my bit of the UK grid is being produced with 0g of CO₂!

I am not sure about your feelings on nuclear power, but it is a carbon neutral source, I’m pretty keen.

Our local reactor is a pressurised water fission reactor, Sizewell B. Up to February 2025, it had generated 250 TWh of electricity. But it is still going strong. In the East of England, just at this moment, it makes up 28% of the power on the local grid.

Our bit of the UK has invested heavily in both on and off-shore wind power – that’s causing a little controversy at the moment, because we’re generating more than we can use in our relatively sparsely populated part of England. There’s an idea to put up a cable running over ground to power parts of London and South Essex.

The other generation source on the grid is solar.

As we can see from https://energyguide.org.uk/solar-farms-uk-map/, this part of the UK is not the only one investing in renewable sources of many different kinds, including battery sources. It’s an interesting scene. And an important one, giving the UK independence from gas and oil.

France has been ahead of this game in a number of ways, not least their use of nuclear and wind power. France has a relatively scarce population compared to the UK, and that has allowed wind turbines to be placed on agricultural land, but this is not the only opportunity the UK is wasting.

We have a number of round-abouts in our city. If each one had a wind turbine on it, how many local houses could they supply? Often the round-abouts already have power going to them, so cabling into the grid would be easy. The installations could be done at night, causing little disruption to the traffic flow.

Hey, aren’t wind turbines noisy? Who’d want that on their road?

Can I answer that question in a bit, please? The reason I want to do that is to talk about wind power in general.

Wind turbines are not new, and are a secondary solar source as our wind patterns are governed by the solar radiation hitting our skies.

Unlike solar, though, wind is, potentially, 24 hour in the UK. In Europe, we’ve harnessed wind power for milling and pumping for hundreds of years. It’s more efficient than a internal or external combustion engines, and ideally could achieve 59.3% efficiency (please see Wikipedia’s page on this: wikipedia Wind_turbine ).

Since the 1940s, there have been several common types of turbine used to generate power: VAWT (often Savonius, Giromill, or Darrieus) and HAWT towered.

VAWT stands for vertical-axis wind turbine, which means the sails or blades of the turbine rotate round the axis (think pole) of the tower. These can work at low wind speeds and can be engineered to be relatively quiet in operation. For micro-generation, i.e. where they are mounted on individual roof-tops, these can be reliable, quiet, and self-managing. They are perfect for small installations up to 20kW but do not scale well – there are few that manage more than 20kW.

HAWT means horizontal-axis wind turbine, these are like a child’s toy windmill, there is a body on which the rotors are fixed and that body does the conversion to electricity. The majority of high tension (lots of power) and off-shore wind turbines are of this sort. They can be massive and it is difficult to make these quiet. They can achieve great reliability scores but often need high wind speeds that their VAWT counterparts.

Looking at this intro and the wiki page, this seems much more complicated than just having solar cells and batteries!

Yes, it is much more involved. In urban areas, it’s advisable to check if you need planning permission if looking to put one on your roof, for example.

The returns are much harder to guage too. Wind speed can be disrupted by a variety of sources, whether the trees have leaves on them can dramatically cut the wind power received compared to the values seen during the winter.

Solar is much easier by comparison and really well studied.

I start, along with the confusion of achieving something new, my husband’s tone was “game show announcer” – not something I hear from him very often!

The prompt for this announcement was my own surprise at having finished a packet of yeast before it had gone past it’s best before date – again, my beloved’s observation.

When you work full time, life is pretty hectic. During lockdown, and the great bread and packet mix shortage, it was much more understandable to be in that position, but I never really managed it.

“Of course, life isn’t like a computer game, is it. You don’t get awards for the everyday things.”

Which is so true. But, so far, everyday I wake up warm and safe. I do make decisions about how the day will work for me. I quite like that autonomy.

Being made redundant, I now have a bewildering number of options. A pay out for the incovience (believe me, I’d much rather have the role. I was doing some interesting work on managing risk), means I don’t have to leap blind – a position I have been in a few times in my career, although I have made it work for both parties.

I have a few things to do in the house, and some skills I’d like to brush up on.

Or I could pull my finger out, and write my book and my apps. I’d like to form a not for profit to provide augmented tooling for people with conditions that can be chaotically modelled.

Like many, we got the email saying we were getting a smart meter to replace our old meter.

As you know, I’m a big fan of smart meters, giving people the ability to see their usage as they are actually using it. But, I do think it was badly done when it came to energy meters (gas and electricity).

Critical, you, surely not!

Hey, I just have a point of view. I also think the energy companies focused on their needs and not their customer’s. Take our case, if I wanted to see the current, in the moment energy use, I had to go to the meter and have a look.

Which meant no-one else in the house could read that in-home display (IHD).

Now, for many, that is really useful, and I’m not saying they should not have offered IHDs to every household, but it’s worse than that. If I want to compare today’s usage with yesterday’s, I have to use our power provider’s app, and they only publish that about 13 hours after they get the data (on average).

This doesn’t change behaviours and for families, it is a disaster. The IHD can only be read in the house, so if you’ve left for work that day, you can’t see that you’ve left an appliance on until you get home and see how much energy you’ve burnt.

What should have been done, is you should have got the read only login details for your meter so you could access it with your computer or phone or tablet. By all means, do the IHD, but that should have been the basic.

Apps could have appeared for tellys, imagine seeing the amount of energy being consummed on the telly while you’re watching it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the water meter is going to be any different, it’s much more focused on showing you what you’ve done, not what you’re doing. Which is not how people work.

Ironically, getting live data from the Tesla Powerwall app is making a big difference to the decisions we make about what we run, when and how. That has impacted our behaviour and made a difference.

Well you talk about metering being a good thing anyway: where is your evidence?

Well, I am going to share our usage data. This time much more accurately than I did in my article earlier in the year. (Sorry about that, not sure how I managed to manually transpose the figures from the paper bills so badly).

Again, this has been an irritating process, not least because billing data is not “how water is being used when”, but just pure numbers.

Year	Usage per person per day (litres to 2dp)
2019	200.15
2020	208.03
2021	166.29
2022	121.41
2023	150.61
2024	174.27
2025	131.16 (so far)

That’s quite dramatic. What’s happening and why?

Well, 2019 and 2020 were lockdown and we were doing much more cooking, bathing, washing, all at home. Every visit to the toilet was at home.

2022 our son came home, which meant the totals were between three, and actually, things like washing machines and cooking are then divided by three. Washing bodies is higher usage, but if you’re all showering…

Our son left again late 2023, moving into his own place. 2024, we saved money by not doing any holidays. Still a dramatically lower amount than 2020, but not trying hard to save water.

Which we have this year, not least because we were asked to, due to concerns about the weather causing droughts.

We’re not doing badly but the United Nations say that a sustainable level of water usage is 100 litres a day (as a maximum). So we have some way to go.

Much of what we’re doing is in terms of machine usage, harvesting grey water and using it where we can, and just being careful.