Finding the chase and cutting to it

You’re one in a million is one of those adages that crops up from time to time. In a world with 8,224,932,469 people (at time of writing, please see the latest figure at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ ) in it, it is meant to make you feel a little bit special – it is such a great marketing tool.

Cynicism aside, it’s not the first time we’ve been in this position – I was in the first 500,000 on facebook, we were one of the first million to buy a Nissan Leaf (reached in July 2023) (Nissan beat Tesla to the figure by some margin thanks to being a lovely car for only £35,000 a pop giving you a top of a line Leaf compared to over £50,000 for the base model Tesla), one of the first million homes to get solar (reached in November 2021).

This time it’s for our Powerwall, our home battery. Nearly a million people have bought them across the world.

Batteries make a great deal of sense if you have solar or wind power. Around 1.6 million homes in August 2025 have solar panels fitted, about 5.5% of the housing stock. That’s given that the estimate is for 50% of homes to have ideal roofs to generate solar power. And another 17% could make some use of solar power.

Prices have come down for all these technologies. Given the increase in electrical power being supplied to homes – when we first moved into this house the charge per kWh (aka a unit in the UK) was 11p. The price is currently 25p per kWh with a solar export guarantee price being 12p a unit – as much as we used to buy electricity for…

Which really brings me to the point of this article, and its inspiration apart from being one in a million.

Carl Sagan used to teach his students that any intelligent civilisation on any planet will eventually have to harness the energy from its parent star exclusively. In the 19th and 20th Century humanity did this through the use of fossilised vegetation through coal and oil or gas.

But solar power can easily replace that – as a planet we are barely taking advantage of the 111,600 petawatt-hours the sun delivers daily. Given our solar cells only efficient enough to grab 20% of that power – covering just 0.3% of our planet in solar cells would grab all the power we need as a species.

Elevating those panels allows plants and farm animals to thrive in the shade cast by the panels. Placing them on roofs allows humans to live under them. Team solar panels with wind turbines or hydroelectric plants and we have a completely sustainable means of supplying the tools which enable life as we know it.

We can’t do this today due to cost. If we made the choice as a planet to do so, we could easily form a plan to do so before the damage is non-reversible.

The current news streams are all about immigration and the weather – I know which one I am significantly more concerned about!

Tenacious is a word often used to describe me, whether a small kid working out how insulin worked or playing bridge with my family on a Sunday evening, I am a sticker. I learn what I need to do something to the best of my ability and have goals saying whether that process is complete.

Whether it was working out how the Rubik cube worked in the 1980s (20 minutes a day before I went to sleep) or passing my motorcycle test, I keep on until the job is done.

Stubborn is another would that could be used with things like the motorcycle, but tenacious sounds much more positive, somehow.

I write this as I am recovering from the local lurgy that has been doing the rounds. I am OK. until I try to move, eat, or sleep, then everything goes to pot.

Before we go any further, there are a couple of things you may not appreciate about me. I never expected to get to 50 odd, and the whole “protecting your brain” from age related fatigue (or dare we say it macular dementia) was just not on my radar.

It was on my husband’s and when he got Vista, he started playing some of the “Microsoft games” as a work-out for his brain. Like going to the gym, he saw that as a way to preserve what he had.

Long story short, I started doing the same thing 6 years ago, although even then I resisted Solitaire – shocking waste of time and a feature on Andy Hamiliton’s Old Harry’s Game gave our protagonist his score when he entered hell. “What’s that for?” “That’s how many points you earned playing solitaire”…

Well, when I finally got a Window’s 7 machine in 2019, I promised myself I’d get to 3000 on Spider (one of the games). Which I did within a couple of years. I have done all my favourite games: Klondike, Pyramid, Freecell.

I had one left, a game I really don’t like very much at all. Tri-peaks. Today, I finished that final goal.

So why the title of this piece? Surely, I am not going to let this honed skill die? No, there are daily challenges, which I can typically do in five minutes before breakfast. I also do a few crosswords and word games.

I can’t see that part of my daily routine stopping.

But I have been doing extra games and competitions to get the total points. Now that I have reached my goal, I can learn a new skill.

Or write an update for my book.

My presentation at Snoopcon went reasonably well, I might try developing that skill or use the 45-60 minutes a day I have spent doing solitaire on learning a new game or skill.

Or writing one. Or playing bridge – I have taken a bit of a break from that.

The world is my oyster!

You know how much I love a three day weekend.  When my husband asked what I wanted to do with the last useful bank holiday in the UK this year, I said “clean the gutters”.

One of the few big benefits of a “chalet bungalow” is having gutters that can be easily reached reached with a step ladder without being dangerous or terrifying, is that we can really benefit from using “gutter hedgehogs”.

These stops leaves and other debris from blocking your gutter pipes. For us, living near so many deciduous trees, they are essential.

The downside is that they do need cleaning. On average, we do it every couple of years and with two or three of you, doing the whole house takes two to three hours.

Slackers!

Not really. Partly due to lockdown and not wanting to risk being in hospital, it had been a while. So, you have to relearn how to do things. I am sharing this for next time (2027).

Front of house.

Steps:

1. Starting from garage, pull out the gutter hedgehogs.
2. Shake the looser debris from each hog – ideally over the garden recycling bin or a wheelbarrow for your compost.
3. Wearing gardening gloves, “bristle” the spikes.
4. Starting at one end, use the other end to brush out the final debris.
5. Meanwhile, the person up the ladder cleans out the debris that has fallen of the hedgehog during removal.
6. Return the length of gutter hedgehog to the roof.

We have several lenghts for the front and back of the house, so repeat the above instructions for each length.

The beauty about this technique is that it doesn’t use any water or power.

It does make an awful mess of the driveway or garden in the back, but all this sweeps away fairly easily.

All in all, a job well done, and many cups of tea were used in the cleaning of our gutters.

And a note for how to do this next time 🙂

This is another look at how our heat pump is working for us.

Our home energy set-up is reasonably straight-forward.

We have power coming in from the grid and our roof-mounted solar panels. The power from the roof is either used directly, or stored in our batteries (27kWh of storage).

We also have an EV, a 2014 Nissan Leaf (24kWh battery) and a vehicle to grid charger, so theoretically, we can draw from that source too. (We haven’t done that for a while).

We then have our air sourced heat pump, providing all our hot water and any heating we need.

Like everyone else, we have fridges, ovens, toasters, hobs, microwave ovens, computers, TVs, LED lighting, exhaust fans in bathrooms and the kitchen, vacuums, steam cleaners, an iron, dishwasher, washing machine, a condensing tumble dryer, hair dryers, etc. The modern tools of life.

Cut to the chase: how much power did you use over the summer, please?

Oh, yes, that’s why we’re here.

Firstly, summer is everything from the 1st June 2025 to the 31st August 2025.

Weather-wise, it has been a warm, dry season in the East of England. A little cloudy but being near the coast, we have that cloud on occassion. It makes our temperatures a little cooler, but does mean we don’t get quite as much power off our roof. So, let us look at those figures first.

Solar generation.

Month	Power generated (kWh)
June	497.6
July	393.3
August	422.1

Which is a reasonable year, not great, but not terrible.

Our usage is broken into two categories: heat and hot water, and general use.

Month	Heating (kWh)	Other (kWh)	Total (kWh)
June	38.1	409.5	447.6
July	43	361.6	404.6
August	41.4	390.2	431.6

Heavy users!

Yes, but some of that is the car. A good 100kWh a month, at that point we’re looking at much more usual usage.

So, what energy have we bought from the grid?

Month	Generated (kWH)	Used (kWH)	Net (kWH)	Bought from the grid (kWH)
June	497.6	447.6	-50	68
July	393.3	404.6	11.3	53.70
August	422.1	431.6	10.5	73.4

Hold on, how come you’re generating more energy than you’re using in June and still buying from the grid?

The batteries are not perfect, we get between 10% and 11% loss from the power stored in the battery – so for every 1kWh stored, we get 900Wh or 890Wh out. This is called the round trip efficiency, and is given in terms of 100%-loss %, so ours is 89% to 90% efficient.

We buy some power from the grid – the battery software does its best to match our demand with our usuage but without going into “island mode” and delibrately going “off-grid”, that is going to happen.

We can’t programme the system to only use the battery during the summer. It has to be done manually, which needs a great deal of discipline, and working full time, that is a big ask.

It’s also likely to hurt the batteries if we drain them consistently – there are definitely days we could have been off-grid without dropping below 20% of the battery, but it is hard to spot them ahead of time…

We have managed to donate some back to the grid too – the Powerwall does try to even out what it takes from the grid with what it donates. That is captured by a separate meter and for us is about 170 kWh which earns us our SEG (solar export guarantee) is just under £0.12, so circa £20.

What about the moolah?

It’s so dirty to talk about money – only kidding.

So, we have 92 days of standing charge, and 195.10 kWh of usage, giving us a total of £49.20 for energy charges and £40.25 of standing charge.

Summer we paid £89.45 for using that energy off the grid, or £29.81 a month. (We could say that we take the SEG money off this bill, which would be £69.45 or £23.15 a month).

I know some are doing better than this by using their batteries to store energy from off peak times, but I don’t think £29.81 is too bad, when 46% of that is from the standing charge and VAT.

Our standing charge rate is relatively low – in our circumstances, that makes much more sense as there are some days we only pay £0.04 for the electricity we use off the grid…

I am not a nationalist, so this is going to be a big disappointment to anyone expecting that kind of rhetoric…

This picture sums it up for me: a lavendar bush we planted in 2022 which is hosting a cabbage white butterfly, several types of bee, and a moth of some kind.

It’s a little blurry because the butterfly mostly had its wings closed.

We started our ecology journey to protect what we love about the UK, it’s countryside. We felt we should do everything we could to make the world better than when we came into it.

Some steps were small (swapping out our halogen bulbs for LED ones), some large (getting the electric vehicle, the solar panels, swapping our gas boiler for the air sourced heat pump, getting the batteries), some in the middle (smart radiators and thermostats).

It wasn’t all done as a big bang, and some results have been a while to realise – the heat pump being a good example of this as we had to wait for winter to be over to see the results.

But on a grey day in July, it is good to see so many insects enjoying some of the planting we did in 2020 is really welcome.

We tend to plant small and let things grow – it reduces the CO₂ footprint of the planting and moving of preniuals. Once a plant has established, we take cuttings or plant seeds from the original plant. It’s not only CO₂ friendly, but cost effective.

That is of course ignoring the beauty of such a traditional and beneficial plant as lavendar. It’s aroma deters many rodents which should form a friendly and natural barrier from some pests.

We can also cook with it. Not only is it flavouring some of the local harvested honey, but we can add it to lamb and chicken.

The other big success we’ve had this year is that the £85 hedge I bought in 2015 is now big enough and mature enough to be a proper barrier. I bought 60-90cm whips and planted as they arrived. They are now 155cm tall!

That initial planting and success in the first two years led to us replacing more of the laurel hedge. Birds nest in it and we work round their breeding season when we prune. The idea is to promote bio-diversity not scarifice it!

We still have a small section of laurel to go, and that provides really good screening for us. Which means we’ll take a different approach.

We’re likely to spend five times as much for that section, as each whip will be 150cm tall from day one and they will need a great deal of care that first couple of years unlike the youngsters I got before.

Outside of the hedging, we have a peach tree, an apple tree, and a load of raspberries. There’s a thorn-free blackberry and this weekend we should have a cooking apple and some blackberries. Then there’s the strawberry patch. I tend this by covering with netting and straw to stop birds and slugs taking advantage.

We have a rose bed with climbers and hybrid teas providing food for us (rose petals are wonderful in salads) and other insects.

We have a small asparagus patch that we enjoy end of May begining of June. Fresh, microwaved asparagus is delicious. That is sharing space with some flowers and parsely, sage, and thyme – just need some rosemary…

We have a big house project this year – replacing our double glazing – hopefully triple glazing in the north facing wall and windows with blinds in them for the south facing aspect. The idea to promote our insulation capability and reduce the need to cool in the summer while benefiting from solar gain in the winter.

Hopefully then we can spend much more time and effort on the garden!

This is a short piece on how we went about the changes we needed to make to ensure we were eligible for the boiler upgrade scheme (BUS).

Ideally, we would have got a ground sourced heat pump (GSHP), but it is much more expensive to do that once the house has been built. When we first made the decision to go heat pump, the recommendations were to get ground source to get a system with a reasonable/good seasonal performance factor (the multiplier of heat in the source to heat produced).

At that time, there was also a difference in how much money you got too – air sourced heat pumps (ASHP) were less efficient and you got less money!

Times have changed. Our ASHP returns a SPF of 5.7 during summer and 3.5 during the winter, giving an average of 4.15 (during the lifetime of our heat pump, we have consummed 3.97 MWh and enjoyed heat worth 17 MWh).

Yawn, and not giving me the details!

Sorry, it came down to understanding that we needed to ensure we were eligible for BUS. We mortgaged/owned the house and had a fossil fuel heating system, we had a gas central heating system to replace: two of the criteria successfully met.

We just needed the fulfill the last one: I needed to ensure our “property is suitable for a low carbon heating system.”

Heat pumps work a little different to fossil fuel boilers. Boilers tend to overheat water to send to your radiators and underfloor heating circuits.

That means working to reduce the amount of energy needed to keep the space warm and we worked to get our kWh/m² down as low as possible. A “passive house” is rated at 60 kWh/m², we’re at 64 kWh/m², so we’re close. By comparison, a “new build house” is typically rated at 95 kWh/m² and older house at 140 kWh/m² . Your figure will be given in your EPC report.

By upgrading our room thermostats and radiator thermostatic values, we cut our gas requirements down from 15MWh to 12MWh. Which meant we could have a reasonably efficient single ASHP.

Having made those changes, (over quite a few months to spread the cost), I got evidence of the improvements and applied for a new EPC certificate.

To prove the “property is suitable for a low carbon heating system,” you need to score at least a Grade C EPC. Because the house was built to 2012 standards, our insulation was good enough (floor, walls, ceilings), our double glazing was good enough, etc. We also had fitted our solar cells in August 2014, with the solar diverter for hot water heating.

Because of our heating controls and LED lighting, we scored a Grade B off our original C.

The irritating thing, this time, was there were no recommendations given, as it was deemed too expensive to make changes to our house.

Which meant we applied to the company fitting our pump and claiming the BUS in late May 2024 and got everything sorted out for fitting with the BUS in that’s year’s mid-July.

You need evidence that your electricity supply box is good too – we had upgraded our electricity fuse box the year before to 2022 standards, so had all the paperwork available.

Can you sum that up, please?

Table below is the check list.

Criteria.	Your status.
House owned or mortgaged by you.
Using fossil fuel powered boiler, which you are completely replacing.
Recent EPC ≥ C.
Proof of wiring standard.
Have an installer that is registered to make the claim on your behalf.

My beloved husband has got to an age when he prefaces statements with, “I remember a time when…”

Which freaks me out a little. I know there is a 7 years, 2 days, age gap, but just recently, it has felt like a big thing.

Only to find myself doing that very thing today! Not least because I was asked when the first house I bought was likely to have had its double glazing put in….

Where have we come from to get to this point, please!?

OK, a couple of steps back. We bought this house in 2013, and it had OK double glazing, not terrific but not bad. Fast forward twelve years, and as well as caulking (a real word, honest) a few of the windows, some of the units are failing.

Basically, we need to start the whole replacing windows thing. Being eco-conscious, I want to up the specification of these windows to the latest standards. But, like everyone, we have had some plans in the back of our minds on what would make our house a “bit wow”.

The fact you only used 3,403kWh to heat a 250m² house over winter isn’t enough of a wow?

OK, when you put it like that…

But the fact is, we don’t have a corner the south end of our lounge (not uncommon in the 1960s but less beneficial than you might think in the 21st century).

We also, technically, cannot open the doors to the courtyard (it took a good five minutes to prise it open today). True, we have some doors the north end, but trust me when I say that isn’t as convenient as you might think.

Several units have “blown”, which makes their thermal insulating properties near zero and using that little power is going to be harder as time goes on.

The number quoted was a scary number – thankfully we were both sitting down, but given our wish list, it wasn’t a bad price. Triple glazing almost everywhere, a bit of building work to give us a wow sliding patio door and corners in our lounge. A Juliette window ready for a balacony in the future in our bedroom, which again, gives us some corners ready for curtains.

Those two things alone are a fair price.

It should mean we can fit external shutters, a boon for shutting out the sun during the summer but keeping us snug in the winter with the solar gain.

Because the first house I bought had windows by this manufacturer we were eligible for a discount. Ironically, the price wasn’t that disimilar to my first house’s mortgage!

The weird thing is, actually, it could cost in during the winter. Yes, the air sourced heat pump uses 75% less than a gas boiler but electricity is four times as expensive as gas. So, anything extra we can save… for the extra expenditure…

That’s not the reason we’ve been doing this. We are keen to reduce our carbon footprint. It’s not the only steps we’re taking of course. With our current windows failing, we may not have that much of a choice.

We don’t have to do anything more than just replace what we have.

Bangs per buck, it may be much more effective to get the same size and slightly better spec windows (for significantly less) and buy more solar panels.

Decisions, decisions.

I have rearranged my pre-planned publishing list to squeeze this in, because I think it’s pertinent to our time.

Which contradicts the subject of this post: procrastination.

There are all things we procrastinate about and research actually shows this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (unless you have a time limit on anything). Waiting to or delaying the start of a task gives your subconscious time to process things in the background and come up with better answers.

Over the past week, I have had a serious case on ennui about three things: sorting out my office, sorting out the next few years of my career, and the final pieces of decorating and gardening in our first phase owning our house.

The office problem.

Let’s be honest, when I’m working, I do not notice very much about my surroundings. I’m not inheriently a slob, honest, but my priority is the couple of screens I use to do the magic of my job.

August is when the general decay from the last big tidy has got to the point where serious action needs to be taken.

I even managed to find a lampshade and desk chair a few weeks ago that I thought my spur me on, but all I feel is more down about the state of the room rather than garning the task.

It’s slightly worse than that. Because I do video conferencing call, all the detritus has been put in bags and hidden from view.

I clean out the actual rubbish, and wash the dishes, but I need it tidy for a call on Wednesday. This is not one I want to do with a filter on the camera. Just at the moment though…

The career problem.

I have a great job but the big task I have been doing is coming to an end, just one little bit to finish and next week is the time to do that – I have a plan and it looks achievable and fun.

But after that, it’s back to the day job which isn’t really my kind of thing. It’s handle turning, which fills me with dread.

I am doing some things about this but like many, it feels like it’s falling flat. Maybe while I’m clearing my office, inspiration will hit on what to do next?

The final hurdle, or the last jobs in the house.

We all have these plans when we move into a house, and over the past 12 years, we have achieved them and more besides.

I love our home. It’s very much a joint venture, and it is a place I can chill or entertain or heal after a big or learn something new…

What “needs” doing?

1. Carpet in the spare room and a repaint.
2. Redoing main bathroom. We have a design in mind, and a scoped cost.
3. Kitchen – much more involved than the bathroom, let’s face it.
4. Garden, specifically the back garden. We have vague ideas but it is going to be a huge task.

On the list this year is the windows for the house. The windows originally fitted started falling apart 5 years ago, so we’ve been fixing issues and filling gaps. And saving. We have 26 windows, given a range of £500 to £5,000 is the range of prices for replacement windows in the UK (including fitting and taking away the old ones), you see why we wanted to have the cash before getting in some quotes.

Of course, like many in their homes, we had some ideas of what could make our nice house great and up to date. So that is being factored in too.

We’ve been able to go for triple glazing on the north side of the house, and the normal bedroom windows. Everything else is double glazed – important for the french doors in the kitchen and lounge.

It might mean we’re finally able to get that EPC A grade for the house.

You and your EPC!

Actually, we think this is really important. I don’t think it adds to the value of a house but if you have two lovely houses in a great area and one is has an EPC grade D and the other a B, choosing the B means you don’t have to do much to keep your costs down. For us, since we’ve made the investment, life becomes pretty cheap no matter the weather.

We last got the house assessed in 2022, which is a year examined in how do you get an a rated epc. Our house was one of 56,678 or 3.78% of the assessments that got a B.

Since then, alongside the planned windows, we’ve got a couple of batteries and, of course, our heat pump. We’ve finally got Cadent to check the removal of our meter and all is good as far as Ofgen are concerned.

We’re producing 18.8% of the CO₂ footprint the average home does in the UK in terms of energy usage. Because it’s a 244m² house, we’re unlikely to do much better than that, even with the new windows, but it should keep us current.

It’s all money 🙁

It is, but as someone who used to watch the House Doctor series, you should spend 1% of your home’s value on its up keep, excluding bills. A finger in the air makes ours about £9,000 per year! Our 26 windows at £2,000 a pop is £52,000(!) so we’ve saved that money over many years to incorporate some building work. It’s come in at much less than that, thankfully, even with the building work!

Same with the bathroom renovations and the kitchen, when we get round to it. Doing the windows should make those final two jobs much easier.

Fingers crossed.

As we have travelled to another part of the UK, Glasgow to be honest, one of the greenest places in the country in terms of power generation…

Preciously what, may I ask, has that to do with on-line shopping, please?

Oh, sorry, got distracted by the 20 or so wind turbines I can see spinning on the horizon as I write this…

Can we get back to the point, please?

Oh, yes, of course. I bought shoes. Always a difficult thing to do back home, but I thought there might be a chance of finding some that fitted here in Scotland.

Go on then, did you?

Yes, and having learnt my lesson from the past, I bought in bulk. But having got the boxes back to my hotel room, I was reminded why I don’t buy shoes on-line and really why that should be possible.

The boots and shoes I bught were American size 7 ½ and European size 39. That’s somewhere between a UK 5 ½ and 6 in shoe sizes.

What I should be able to do is give a vendor my foot length, the circumference of my widest part, and ideally, how far from my toe and heel that widest part is. You can do this in centimetres, which are the same where-ever you are in the world.

It would then be really easy to say whether a shoe was going to fit and be comfortable.

There are few other clothes that can be as easily achieved.

Yet, I have not seen any vendor do this. Why is that?

What on earth is an Eddi?

Good question – it is a solar diverter and to be fair, it was setup’ish, it’s just now talking to the internet.

Why, oh why…

Hey, this is my thing. Everyone needs a hobby!

A solar diverter is something we have had since we first got our solar panels and our old one, a Solar iBoost, was exceptionally handy when our boiler stopped working or during the summer, when any spare power we had generated would heat our hot water rather than just go back onto the grid.

A simple monitor reads what is coming off the roof and what is being used. If more is being generated than used, the immersion heater is used as a solar dump.

Our Solar iBoost was simple but did a great job. The Eddi2 is a little more complicated but allows us to set everything up on an app and track how much we are diverting too.

This functionality is very useful if you have an air sourced heat pump during the winter. Setting a schedule allows the hot water tank to heat up to 60°C or so using the immersion heater, but powered from the solar cells.

But, unless the temperature gets to sub 4°C, the air sourced heat pump is going to be more efficient – yes, it goes down to getting 3.4kWh of heat out of 1kWh of input energy, but that is way better than the 1kWh to 1kWh of input output we get from the Eddi.

That doesn’t make the Eddi only useful while it’s cold, our recent travels made the Eddi invaluable not least in keeping the battery 100% full while reducing our overall usage.

Of course, during a heat wave, this is not as efficient as using the air sourced heat pump, though any spare would be used for that (were the hot water cool enough). In fact, because solar cells do not perform as well when it is hot, it may be much more expensive to use the solar divert function in place of the heat pump’s hygiene programme.

Hygiene programme?

Heat pumps typically heat “hot” water to between 40°C and 50°C, which is plenty for a lovely hot bath or shower, or washing up, or cleaning dishes or clothes..

But it is also a temperature which can allow legionella to thrive. So, at least once a week, aim to have your water taken up to 60°C or 65°C for an hour or so.

We’ve timed ours during the summer to run when the solar divert is unlikely to be kicking in.

Of course, the solar divert is doing this task during the winter months, when the cells are operating at their peak, a couple of times a week.

Saving us a little money but making sure everything is kept in tip top condition from an investation point of view. We’re happy, the legionella is not, as our bills are kept as low as possible.

Are you sure this is worth all this fuss?

Yes. You need to do this kind of thing with a gas boiler, but it requires the same kind of “fuss” or rather conscious decisions being made on what happens: when and where if you are looking to reduce your carbon footprint and be a responsible user.

We’re just doing the same with our electric powered heating, which measn the decisions are a bit more tangible when it comes to tracking usage.

Speaking of which, I’m off to jump in the bath before the hygiene programme starts.