Finding the chase and cutting to it

I hate networking, small talk, trying…

No, I am not talking about that.

I am talking about one of the wonders of modern life, the LAN (local area network) in your house.

For some, this is synonymous with Wifi, of course, coming from a telecoms work life, we have an odd assortment of different devices and connection methodologies which we really do need to rationalise at some point…

Which was all fine until the Tesla stopped talking to our old network router completely about three weeks ago. On its own, we could have lasted quite a long time without the ability to go off-grid at a moments notice, but an annoying consequence of this was the component nearest to house was in the habit of beeping every five minutes.

Having some friends who are much more informed and experienced in these things, we bought a new router and you should be experiencing the joys of this equipment.

We certainly are! Faster wifi, consistently running in every room for a fraction of the power outlay. For a start, instead of needing three satellite pods to reach every part of our long house, we have one.

Wifi 7 seems to just work and at 46 Gbps (46,000,000,000 bits per second) is a bit nippier than wifi 6’s 9.6 Gbps. Of course, this is a little meaningless as our internet is limited to 915 Mbps download and 953 Mbps upload – internally we’re quick but it doesn’t make a great deal of difference when speaking to the outside world. Of course, Wifi 7 gives us more than a speed boost: this standard has far more resilience and increased bandwidth: which basically means we can support far more devices, if we need to, without issues!

We have a few legacy devices round the house which have their own dedicated area networks, allowing them to function and keep safe. Such networks are not as secure, so they cannot reach any of the computers et al that need such protection in terms of encryption and secure passwords.

This ability to create such segregated networks should allow our home control to provide great service for many years to come. The router itself will allow us to make that move at our leisure when we’re ready.

This is all about your automated home!

Not just that. Yes, much of our great energy performance is thanks to controllable devices, but on top of that is the services we provide for work and leisure. Being able to cast our phones to all our TVs, watching Apple TV et al.

Even our scales talk to our network, so we can monitor our weight, helping us make conscious decisions about what we’re eating and cooking. We should not forget the faithful 2016 internet tablet that lets us see the recipes I have published to help us reduce our cholesterol and increase our fibre in-take.

That’s without talking about our working. My husband enjoys working from home a few days a week and my new business is based here: even though much of it is run in the cloud, enjoying working from home is saving me money on office space.

But the combination of new and old is a battle many of us now face. Thankfully, I have never used WEP, but this has been unanimously dropped from all newly updated routers.

Having these separate subnets in our LAN means we can securely manage this, while retaining the services.

So how did it go?

Got the new one up and running in less than 10 minutes, and got 90% of the devices working without faff. A few things were picky and needed a special subnet, properly secured. We’re very happy with the new setup. And enjoying the benefits of good networking.

As the UK is coping with high humidity and high outside temperatures, it may seem an odd time to be thinking about insulating your pad. Summer is a perfect time to strip out older insulation and replace it with newer, “up to code”, materials and thicknesses.

There are 21 million homes in the UK and only 7 million meet the insulation standards set after 1976. Only 1.6 million meet the newest set of standards, set in 2003.

Given that the average home uses 12 MWh of gas for heating, insulating to today’s standards would lower that bill to 9 MWh, saving approx. £172.20 at £0.0574 per kWh of gas. When prices go up to £0.0733, that is worth £219.90, per annum.

Spread that over 13.9 million homes, and that reduces the UK’s gas usage by 41.7 TWh, a cost of about £2.4 billion if the gas price is £0.0574p per kWh. Prices are about to go up to £0.0733 in the UK on the 1^st July 2026, making that total worth £3.1 bn.

Let’s look at what you can do to “get your house up to code” and make these savings. This is going to be one of three in a series looking at insulation for your house. Starting with the roof, the walls, and, finally, the ceilings and the floors. In this entry, we’re talking about your roof, or your house’s hat.

Reaching, very reaching…

I try. In the UK, all new houses were fitted with roof insulation since 1973 in response to the burgeoning energy crisis.

I’ve a strong sense of deja vu

Indeed, much like the global economic situation we find ourselves in now. Back in 1973, that insulation was typically mineral wool (often fibre glass). Before then, mineral wool laid to 28mm in depth, and was seen in some homes from as early as 1965. 1973 saw that rise to 60-70mm… Actually, let’s see that in a table and a graph.

Year	Minimum requirement (mm)	Estimated U-value (W/m2K)
1960	0	2.5
1973	60	0.6
1976	70	0.5
1985	100	0.35
1990	150	0.25
1995	200	0.2
2002	250	0.18
2003	270	0.16

Here is a quick reminder on what the u-value is (aka the thermal transmittance). The u-value measures the rate of heat transfer through a material, divided by the difference in temperature across that material. A lower numbered u-value is better, the limit being 0W/m²K – or zero difference in the heat being lost. The graph above let’s us see that we can dramatically reduce the amount of heat lost by increasing the thickness of the roof insulation, if the insulation material is mineral wool.

Some things not obvious from the results.

A couple of things to realise here.

1. The thickness of the insulation is achieved by layering different pieces of rock wool together. Though these days it can be bought in 50mm thick slabs too, in which case you would buy six layers to achieve 270mm.
2. When climbing about your loft, ensure your feet touch only the beams and girders. Your plasterboard ceiling will not appreciate any weight on it!
3. While it can be done as a DIY job, protective equipment is essential. Rock wool/mineral wool/fibre glass insulation is made from small particles that can be absorbed through the nose and lungs, skin, and eyes. Therefore, the following is required:
   • Breathing equipment and respiratory filters up to standard FFP2 or P3, disposable ones are best.
   • Wearing tightly fitting safety googles, fitted over glasses. This is to protect against air born fibre fragments.
   • Good boots are essential. Leather or thick soled and padded working boots.
   • Long sleeved and trousered, loose fitting clothing. This means any material that brushes against you is caught by the clothing and not absorbed through the skin. A type 5 (dust tight) coverall is ideal.
   • Heavy duty gloves with a good layer of protection.
   • Ideally a hard hat and protection for the head, ear, and neck against brushing against the material.

Young children and pets should be kept away from the area. Dust sheets sealing the loft hatches can help keep exposure contained, otherwise any fibres need to be vacuumed using a HEPA filter, or use a damp cloth which can be binned, and wear gloves while you wipe up the residual dust.

Sounds scary.

Sorry, but I needed to ensure anyone inspired to renew or install from scratch their loft insulation knew that safety equipment wasn’t optional. Of course, you can pay specialists who have this equipment to do the work for you.

Newer versions of stone or fibre glass mineral wool come with layer of reflective material for better infrared insulation.

Of course, you can also use sheep’s wool, with products often called thermafleece, that are produced from that renewable of sources, the common or garden sheep. That doesn’t need as much safety equipment to install.

Having installed it, mineral wool is good for 30-50 years where it is not compressed, it is protected from the elements, and rodent or pest ingestion or habitation. Ensure there are no heavy boxes stopping your base layers from being compressed. A u-value of 0.16 W/m²K is an amazing level to sit at. Of course, the UK building standards mean that this is baked into new builds, and any renovations being performed.

Where the loft insulation material is damaged, or thermal bridging occurs, it is worth refreshing the loft.

So, install it once, and we’re sorted?

A couple of things to appreciate, if you are doing it yourself.

• Any gaps provide a thermal bridge. If you are using a roll, make sure your layers overlap.
• Any compression reduce the performance. If you are thinking of boarding out the loft, ensure the posts you are using will allow that 270mm to sit without being squeezed.
• Ensure the rock wool sits against the ceiling boards and over the girders and beams.
• Venting – ironically, you don’t want any thermal bridging but it is essential to ensure the roof itself, above the thermal insulation, can breathe to prevent damp.

These are things the professionals build into their designs which you must consider when doing the job on your home.

Then all done?

This is an amazing start. But there are things done on newer builds that are worth considering.

1. Celotex between roof rafters, sitting the house side of the roof underlay. These sit on laths, allowing 50mm gap between the membrane and the Celotex to allow everything to breathe. This technique allows you to butt right up against the rafters and even cover them with a thin strip of Celotex to prevent a thermal bridge.
2. Dormer windows are really difficult to insulate well. Consider a plan to allow a box of insulation to be created but allow that air gap.
3. Steel girders, even powder coated ones, need special attention. They are often boxed in Celotex. This is to stop the steel beams and columns getting cold and allowing water to condense on them. This is not a DIY task, because if it get it wrong, you risk dramatically shortening the life of these critical building elements.

Good luck with your roof’s insulation project, I hope I’ve provided food for thought.

I wanted to follow up on Walking in the shadows, which looked at the using passive cooling methods for coping with the Heat Dome, which affected Africa and Europe in the last week of May 2026.

After all, we hear the same advice every year, but life gets in the way. We get home from work, exhausted, and think, “I’m buying a fan or air-con unit,” as we find ourselves stuck in the fiery furnace of our own living rooms. Indeed, that was the very advice I was giving this time last week.

I thought I would share exactly what we did, and when we did it, and whether it actually worked. So, here is a measured look at our strategy, tracked through the detailed data provided by our Tado smart radiator and room thermostats.

The strategy.

As I mentioned in the blog, we set up to test the thermal resilience of our building and window infrastructure by following the advice of keeping windows shut and curtains closed. We were not alone in this, talking our usual evening postprandial, many of our neighbours were doing the same thing, many south, east, and west facing windows were shuttered against the sun.

But did it work?

Basically, yes, but we did manage it.

First post on this subject was the 22^nd May, today is the 30^th May. Let’s track our bedroom over that period (why this room? Well I don’t know about you, but when hot weather happens, you need a place you can be cool where you sleep).

So, not looking too bad. The curtains are blocking the heat. You can see on the 23^rd, we cooled the room by opening our windows after sunset. Having had French windows fitted, we opened them and the en-suite velux window wide open, which created a through draft. I shut the door to the landing and left the room to it. You can see when we went closed them too, at 10pm ish.

You can see this impact on Sunday, that sharp drop, again just post sunset.

The Monday, with people back on the road, our weather forecast may have said 29°C, but the thermometer for the Viessman reported 31°C! Same pattern and by the time we went to bed, the room was a comfortable 22°C.

Now, we have not used a fan to help.

Tuesday 26^th May, and the first outside forecast of over 30°C.

You can see I was late in opening the windows, but if anything that helped as the air was cooler.

We forgot and opened the draws on the 27^th May, so despite a cooler forecast, we were in a similar position until the magic time when the windows were flung open and the cool air can come in.

Again on the 28^th.

Only this time, I didn’t open the windows like I did on Friday.

The pattern was repeated in all our south facing rooms. Many have not required windows being opened and if they have, we were reasonably disciplined about ensuring it was post sun-down.

Isn’t it easier just to plug in a fan and forget about it? Or buy air-con?

The short answer is yes. But shall we examine those options.

If you buy a fan, and plug it in, moving hot air around with a motor, which is generating heat, is not going to work long term. You need to ventilate. Should we have used a fan at the same time? Interesting question, but actually, we didn’t need to and our “summer fan” is still in the loft.

Air-con is really efficient, but again needs to be vented and maintained. When I ask people about when they last changed their filters and topped up the fluid, I generally get met by a blank stare.

I have to say, if we’d had “heat and air” in the house for our air pump, so we could get it to cool during hot weather…

But we don’t.

Actually, talking of the heat pump…

I did completely switch off the heating circuit, and the heat exchanger has pretty much coped without needs to run the fan at all. Our hot water has used:

Day	Electricity (kWh)	Heat generated (kWh)
23/05/2026	1.25	6.51
24/05/2026	1.55	7.05
25/05/2026	2.44	11.9
26/05/2026	1.25	6.58
27/05/2026	1.4	5.93
28/05/2026	2.3	11.6
29/05/2026	1.54	6.63
30/05/2026	1.85	9.85
Total	13.58	66.05

Which gives us a SPF of 66.05 / 13.58 = 4.89. Which is not as good as we get for doing the heating circuit, in the spring, when we need to heat, the SPF is typically above 6!

Still, it is better than we get for the solar diverter.

What about the days when it was above 1.6 kWh? These are days when we’ve done many loads of washing or had a bath and the water went from its usual 58°C to 33°C. It is allowed to use a bit more in those circumstances. I also did a hygiene programme on Thursday.

Solar generation-wise, we have done really well since the 23rd. We have had a day where we have been up over 99% self-powered. Even charging the car by 60%. Because we used passive cooling, our power consumption a day was typically 10kWh for a house that is 244m², that’s 4.1kWh per 100m² which is passive house territory.

Global warming not an issue for you then?

This is not good for the UK and our flora and fauna. Being human, we can use tools to adapt, but this is not yet past the point where people can’t make a real difference.

This is happening everywhere, to people who don’t have the luxury of well insulated houses and free electricity to power fans and air-con. Even if we had heat and air, it’s a shock to walk out of rooms chilled to 18°C when it’s 35°C outside. Who wants that?

It’s a lazy, sunny Saturday in May and I have opened our patio door wide to shelter from the sun. The shadow from our sun shade is covering the settee facing the courtyard perfectly, so it makes perfect sense. Honestly.

A splash of light cloud drifts across the pale blue sky. There are insects buzzing round the lilac wisteria, pink weigela, bluebells, white mexian orange blossom, light pink clematis montana, and white allysum (related to candy tufts). Some things have finished already this year: the lily of the valley shrub has done its business by March, and the honey suckles (a red and a white one) won’t come in to flower much later, around the same time as the passion flower.

I love the colours, the image above does not do them justice, and it is well worth the effort to maintain the garden. While we live on a busy road, the courtyard is protected by the house, providing a welcome respite from the busy world.

Our courtyard is a good size, when the traffic dies down the bushes and trees provide a shimmering rustle in a light breeze. The weigela is mature standing at a good 2m tall, and the japanese maple is now well over 1.75m, providing a colourful red fountain of leaves while a brilliant red rose grows next door to it, the dark green leaves popping against the firey red ones. The flowers are yet to bloom but the buds show promise of pillar box red globe flowers as big as my fist.

The walls provide a resting place for butterflies and larger flies as the barbecue slowly loses its heat from cooking a couple of home made burgers served in home made baps which we cooked for lunch.

Various birds are enjoying the shade provided by many of the trees in our neighbour’s garden and the ones owned by the council on the verge. Some squirrels are frolicking along the same branches too.

I love these times, sitting doing nothing, and thought I would share it with you and as a reminder to myself when the winter is at its bleakest, darkest, and dankest. Late spring will come again, along with summer.

For me, this is why I look to curb my carbon footprint, my waste of food, use an electric car, cycle or walk. To keep this reflection of eden.

Last week, we looked at the difference using our solar panels has made to our carbon footprint. Of course, that isn’t in isolation. At 27kWh, we have a large amount of battery capacity. But what got us here, why is that working so well for us?

What is the easiest?

Energy. I don’t use a hairdryer often. I dry my hair naturally. It means I don’t use much product at all. I put on a jumper if the room is 19°C, it’s not cold, if I am. So, I need more clothing. Thick socks are worth their weight in gold to guard against a chilly feeling.

The transport is next. If I possibly can, I walk or cycle. Blood sugar management makes a difference to what I can and can’t do, and that is really hard. But if everything else is working well, I can enjoy being outside and feel the sun against my skin.

We made the choice to move to using our combination microwave for most of our cooking. This is not a downgrade on taste but a huge upgrade in energy saving. I use it for all solo cooking and most of our two and three people meals. Even when using it as a fan oven, it is a much smaller cavity, so it heats up quickly without using more power.

Timing our cooking makes a big difference too. Last Friday, while the oven was warm after baking some rolls, I did some shortbread. The oven didn’t spend energy on cooling down then heating up, and the shortbread was a lovely, cheap, treat.

If you haven’t tried a combination oven roast, you haven’t lived. Tasty chicken cooked with peppers, tomatoes and roast potatoes and courgettes. All for less than £0.40 of electricity, if you aren’t generating it yourself (when of course the energy cost is zero).

Check out your kitchen and bathroom for halogen bulbs. At 50W a pop, having more than a couple in a room can ramp up that carbon footprint. Swapping to LED GU10 bulbs can make a significant saving – we had 28 in our kitchen (28*50W= 1.4 kW) and another 100W under the counter. Swapping them out in 2013 cost £200, but saved that in electricity costs in a month. We had 200W on average in 2 of the bathrooms and another 4 kW in costs around the rest of the house.

Swapping out the lighting took our summer monthly bills (at the time no solar power) down from £110 a month to £40. Of course, electricity was significantly cheaper in those days.

OK, so there are things I can do to reduce my carbon footprint and my draw on electricity. Why does that matter now?

Knowing our footprint and reducing our need for electricity means we have options available to us right now. Soon, I’ll be able to pop into my local Lidl and pick up a solar panel to plug into my 13amp socket and donate spare energy into the grid.

That’s without any need for some professional advice or delay in getting scaffolding to put it up on my roof. Or if I rented, no need to get permission from my landlord.

But that could mean wasted opportunities for people to use those panels in the most effective manner for their needs.

TechoSolara (please see https://techosolara.app) has been updated to provide users with the recommended “pitch” for their location in the world. TechoSolara gives the range of pitches applicable to the site in question, one value for the summer, one for the winter, and a third for the equinoxes (that’s autumn and spring to you and me).

Why are these different?

Because the Earth is tilted towards the star it is rotating around (Sol or the sun), during the summer the sun seems much higher in the sky. This makes a huge difference to the way photons emitted from the sun hit solar panels. The beauty about these “balcony” panels, is you get to easily change the angle at which the sun strikes the panels – effectively to track the sun.

Team that with the Cumulative Report in the “Planner 3 aspects” screen, and you can see when the sun rises in a given month, and when it sets.

If you are investing in some of these panels, it might be worth checking out TechoSolara on the Google play store.

One of the big benefits of having a heat pump that doesn’t provide cool air in the house, is the ability to stand in front of the fans while it rips the heat out of the air to heat our hot water. Yes, dear readers, this is what I have been doing in sunny Ipswich as Sol climbed to its zenith over the East Anglian countryside and towns. Standing and enjoying the cold air washing over me as the waste air was expelled from the heat pump.

We’re doing other passive things to keep our cool on this warm (and dry) May bank holiday. Most of them figure in the UK Health Security Agency’s pages on the short heat wave.

Not being lazy, being intentional.

When we lived on an estate, people thought we were lazy not drawing our curtains in the morning. But if you can leave the house in the early morning without opening the drapes and blinds, you get automatic shielding from the sun. I had a friend pop in after work one day and I drew the curtains as they asked whether we had air con. The room was about 18°C despite having a big south facing window because the blinds had shielded the room from the infrared heat.

Keep your windows closed as much as possible during the day. It may seem tempting, but often your house can be several degrees cooler than the outside and all you do opening the window is letting the hot air in.

Drink water and try to eat.

Water allows you to sweat and keep your inner core at a sensible temperature. Plain water is your friend. Salty snacks and sauces can help replace some of the salt you lose in perspiring too. You need around 30-35ml per kg you weigh.

I weigh 69kg, so 69*30ml = 2.07 litres of water a day or 73 fl. oz.

But that total is all the fluid you take in the day, including liquid in your food.

When the temperature gets above 28°C, humans start to struggle, though if we’re being careful and not doing too much, most of us are a way off heat exhaustion.

By the time you get to 35°C, and most people see their metabolism spike. Heart rates increase, stress chemicals are boosted, all in an effort to keep cool. The theory is that this leads to heat exhaustion, the body burning excess energy trying to keep cool. You will need food to power that energy burst.

No such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.

To quote Billy Connolly, what is true in the winter is doubly so in the summer. Clothing can help: ironically, long sleeved tops and trousers can help to wick away sweat and keep you cool. People who are based in hot regions often wear layers of light clothing for this very reason; especially when outside.

Wear light, reflective colours when you’re out in the sun. I love the old movies with armies wearing light colours when in the desert. Many think that is for camouflage: but really it’s because light sandy colours keep the soldiers much cooler. Remember those experiments in science at school? Well, that works out of the classroom too.

Hats and light scarves all help to shield the skin and body from infrared heat from the sun and reflective surfaces. Glasses help prevent eyes from drying out, as well as protecting against glare and UV radiation.

Choose your time of day.

Going outside is best avoided in the UK between 11am and 3pm during May. I would add that if you live by a busy road route, heat from cars can be high between 4pm and 6pm.

Going for a walk before 11am and after 6pm can allow you a kinder time of it to your body.

The same with your car: parking the car in your garage allows the car to start the journey cool, saving energy (petrol, diesel or electricity) on powering up fans and air conditioners.

If you can’t do that, open windows at opposite ends of the car when you first set off can help the car lose heat sooner: I do passenger door front and the window behind the drivers seat. I’ve heard people recommend “wafting the doors” on opposite sides of the car too, but that can be tricky in a car park! Remember to put the windows back up to aid your fuel efficiency when your speed increases. Venting your sunroof can be really useful too for the first five minutes of the journey.

Plans for the rest of the weekend?

A quiet one for us, though I will be keeping an eye out for when the heat pump’s fan is turning and popping out with a chair, a book, and some headphones to enjoy the cool waste air from the heat pump.

Have a lovely break. And remember to wear sunscreen.

It’s hard to believe the UK has broken its solar generation record twice this April, after such a dull and grey winter. The day before that last record was broken, the UK achieved its lowest ever value for how much carbon dioxide was used to produce its electricity. These two things are connected!

When you have solar panels, you appreciate the tie between the temperature and the amount of sun your bit of the world really gets. The cooler weather and the sun’s angle on the panels add up to great solar generation. If the clouds are at bay…

This year, the start was grey but by the 7th April, we had one of our best days ever, as did the solar generation farms in the UK, producing at total of 14,414 megawatts (MW) or 14.414 GW (gigawatts).

When it’s not what you have, but what you do with it.

Our solar generation means we had enough to cook, clean, heat water, run extractor fans, charge the car a little, heat a couple of radiators first thing in the morning.

It wasn’t the only day we were in this situation. Towards the end of the month, and we had had several “off-grid” days. In prep for our annual barbecue, I was able to make four batches of rolls from our generated power and the stowed excess from our generation.

The second tesla battery was in place by this time last year, but it still feels a bit new and revolutionary. We are not gaining much from exporting excess electricity just now, though as the days lengthen this summer, that will change.

I know many people are buying electricity at 5p a unit and selling it back at 15p a unit. I am not sure how I’d feel about that as our goal has been to reduce our carbon footprint since having the batteries. Ovo are about to do a “2 hours of free off peak electricity a week” between the 18th May and the 2nd August 2026. I suspect this will be during midday. We’ll use it to run the dishwasher and cycle the washing machine!

When we’re not generating enough ourselves, I look at the energy mix from NESO. NESO’s forecast of the grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of electricity generated is published. Please see https://www.neso.energy/data-portal/national-carbon-intensity-forecast/national_carbon_intensity_forecast_methodology). Your energy provider will provide this to you through their website or app, as seen in the figure.

Given this forecast, we’ll be making sure we’re making us of our 27kWh stored in our battery from 5pm to 10pm. Our current draw is 1.5kWh as I finish off the final batch of rolls. This means we should be fine until the sun rises tomorrow.

Our Tesla app allows us to see exactly what is being used anywhere in the house. We can see what is coming off the roof into the house and/or battery. Even at 5:40pm, we are generating nearly a kilowatt of electricity. Switching to the microwave, we can cook our evening meal during peak time. This avoids pulling off the grid during the first few days of May.

Gearing ourselves to manage within this budget has not meant changing our lives. We pay £150 a month to be attached to the grid for backup power. If we have a very good spring to autumn, that can drop to £40 a month in January and February.

For us, it works really well. We save up the money to insure the house and the cars during this time. Pairing that with the water meter, and we can see that our monthly bills are a predictable £170 a month.

I appreciate that is really high compared to many. Remember when the energy prices rose in 2021 and people were finding their energy alone jumped to £400 a month?

What about your carbon footprint?

We’ve used 3.217 MWh of electricity from the grid this year, so far. The carbon rate is currently around 129 gCO₂/kWh => 421 kg CO₂. The estimate for the year is approx 1,266kg CO₂ or 1.266 tonnes of CO₂. Heating is the main source of this carbon. We need to consider that there are two people living in the house, so that’s 633kg CO₂ per person.

The remainder of the year should see us using significantly less. Increased solar generation and the heat pump will see to that. Still, it would be amazing to bring that in to under 1 tonne of CO₂ per annum.

As I look at the Enphase website while writing this blog, I realised we hit a major milestone. Since we installed our photovoltaic panels in August 2014, we have generated 41 MWh of clean electricity. That’s allowed us to stop 11 tonnes being released into the atmosphere, roughly 1 tonne per annum.

It’s a reminder that while the daily ‘budgeting’ of energy is a modern habit, we watch TV, heat our food, have cups of tea, but the cumulative effect of twelve years of sun-catching is where the real change happens.

How does that compare?

The average UK home produces 6 tonnes of CO₂ per annum, the majority of that being for heating. That’s the estimate for an EPC E rated property in the UK.

This is a small percentage of a person’s total carbon footprint. Tools existing that provide an estimate of your footprint, and this year, my total is likely to be around 6 tonnes – that’s all my food, travel, heating, cooking, and purchases.

A typical footprint in the UK is around 10 tonnes per person: transport makes up the majority of this. Since starting my own business, I have chosen to work from home, allowing me to dramatically cut my footprint in terms of transport. I now do around 5,000 miles in my car (around 3,000 of that in my EV), 2,000 on my motorcycle. That saving in transport means nothing if I move it to heating the house excessively or making inefficient cups of tea!

Complicated?

And potentially hiding a great deal of the detail. I don’t buy clothing often, I still wear clothes that I bought as a teenager.

Meat is part of my diet, but rarely have more than 100g (4oz) of meat in a sitting and no more than that during a normal day (our barbecue is the exception for that). I try really hard to ensure my food is sourced locally. It is the hardest thing of all to control. The closest I come is ensuring we eat food that is in season in the UK.

Food sourcing is the one I’d love help with. If you’ve cracked it — or found something that works even partially — I’d really like to hear about it in the comments.

Throughout time, humans have celebrated life’s big events. Sometimes lavishly, sometimes simply.

Every year, we have a barbecue while a classic car run goes past our back garden. We are not the only ones, and on a sunny (or at least dry) day, the crowds lining the streets are almost as entertaining as the cars, push bikes, electric vehicles of all ages, tractors, fire engines and police cars, motorbikes, and lorries going past.

As I took a couple of days to prep for the event this year, it’s one of the few where I can honestly say “no hydrocarbons were burnt making these rolls”. In fact, I did slightly better than that as mostly the sun was shining while I baked, so we got to enjoy 100% of that power rather than dropping 7% in the round trip from the battery!

Tonight, we are using the last of the excess stored in our battery from the past few days. It rarely means we are 100% off grid, our battery system is a little slow at switching to the store when needs change but it doesn’t do a bad job.

Of course, now we are entering summer, our generating potential is being affected by other factors. The trees being in full leaf makes quite an impact: no it doesn’t mean we wish those trees were not there. A healthy tree does far more for reducing carbon dioxide than our photovoltaics do! A pair of mature maples (like the ones we’re talking about) take ~50kg of CO2 a year out of the air. Our 4kW system saves around 700kg being produced a year for our electricity.

Er, hold on there, shouldn’t we have more panels less trees?

No, we shouldn’t. The panels mean we produce less, but trees actually reduce what is in the atmosphere. The estimate is that plants and oceans absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 people currently produce.

In fact, if we can reduce our carbon production to a low enough level, there is a chance plants can help us recover much more quickly – though we are still talking hundreds of thousands of years to get back to pre-industrial levels.

Something that took 150 years to achieve would take hundreds of thousands of years to recover from, if we could reduce our carbon footprints enough to reach zero.

We can all make a diference here. Drive less, reduce energy usage, reduce waste, switch to a higher percentage of plant based foods are all things all of us can do.

Oil prices should be higher as it does change how people behave.

While researching this blog, one of my biggest findings has been that homes in rural areas are much more likely to make the switch to heat pumps than homes in towns. 75% of heat pump installs were in rural areas compared to 25% in towns. The volatility of oil prices are thought be a leading factor in those decisions.

I know you say heat pumps are super efficient but you can’t win!

The laws of thermodynamics are irrefutable; and no, heat pumps do not break these fundamental laws. The first law of thermodynamics says you cannot get more heat out of a system than you put in (you can’t win). In heat pump terms, this isn’t efficiency but the coefficient of performance and that is a better way to think of the figures – an efficient heat pump achieves a coefficient of performance of 3.5 or greater over the entire year.

How can a heat pump be more than 100% efficient? This is what I understand. Heat pumps look amazing because for each unit of energy used by them, between three and ten to twelve units of heat (all measured in kWh) are achieved round the system.

Heat pump systems do lose heat: radiators and heated floors work by that very principle. By the laws of thermodyanamics: you can’t win and you can’t break even. In terms of electricity put in and heat delivered round the system, it does look as if that is happening – until we realise that our “loss” is the unit of electricity we are using to pull the heat out of the atmosphere and send it round our heating circuits.

We are not beating the odds because we are not creating heat, merely moving it from the air into our heating water and hot water.

If we can use home or micro-generation to supply the energy for the heat pump, and our homes insulation so we enjoy as much of that heat as possible, we are looking at a brilliant way of keeping our homes warm and our water hot.

Having had one for a year in the Suffolk Surburbia, I wouldn’t go back.

Before Covid 19 and lockdown, we spent an eye-watering amount on ready meals and eating out. It wasn’t just speed to table but energy levels. It was just easier – less washing up, less time to table, less effort.

Like many, my home cooking repetoire was pretty limited.

I don’t blame anyone for doing that. I really don’t. But even in that whirlwind of work, raising my kid, and living well, we had three meals we cooked from scratch during the week and everything was home cooked over the weekend unless we ate out.

I now cook wide range of foods, as nutritiously as possible in as little time as possible.

But I still make use of convience. I make my own shortcrust pastry, but by puff pastry. I feel really bad about that, because a “rough puff” isn’t that hard, it’s just time consuming! It’s just being organised enough to make the plan of a morning and stick to it.

I’ve also stopped making my own pasta. I buy dried. The bread is easy because, for a basic loaf, it just goes into the machine. Rolls are a little more involved (I am waiting for a batch to do now), but while it makes washing up, the task is really easy: bung the ingredients into the machine and take out bread.

Pasta is, mix ingredients, chill for 20 minutes, rollout into the shape you want, hang up and wait 30 minutes, then cook.

Pasta shapes are much quicker, but a lot of faff. The results are not as guaranteed either – I know if I practiced this more, I would get better at it, but I don’t enjoy it enough.

Which makes me wonder about the yogurt I make and the bread I bake. The yogurt, on paper, is a great deal of effort: heat milk, allow milk to cool, the heat milk for hours.

It’s easier with the machine, but it’s a big commitment. I love the results mind.

I am making three or four batches of rolls over the next few days for our big barbecue of the year. Because I predominantly now make the brown rolls, this is 3¼ hours of waiting then the last three stages are all done my hand. But they really taste good.

On Sunday, I’ll make the bread totally from scratch for eating on the day. But the rest will be finished off – if I part bake them, they keep really well and taste amazing.

A little salad, hence the yogurt for coleslaw (my favourite salad thing), some freshly made burgers and Bob is your uncle, so to speak.

We have one “emergency ready meal” a week, typically a curry or complicated tray bake thing. Something we don’t cook ourselves very often. We have family favourites we come back to time and again…

It doesn’t look too bad a way to approach life, does it?

Whatever your plans are for the week, bon appetit.

I have spent the past four years of my career helping teams understand their cyber risk.

I would say, first and foremost, many of the established ways of doing business fundamentally introduce vulnerabilities into code.

I love open source, but there are libraries I do not touch because I only “need” a couple of functions and the remainder of the library is just not well written – but many of the cyber scanners will report you have risks that are not appropriate for you. Which then needs to be analysed.

It’s noise. Many firms are losing personel too, which is going to amplify the impacts we’re seeing.

I’m starting a few projects to see what the market is interested in, and I have to say, I am not keen on using an AI that suggests doing things using insecure libraries. Because I am looking at doing stand-alone tool on Android, why would I use anything that isn’t part of the core languages I am using?

I am starting as a sole trader, as soon as I register my company. Why would I make my life harder by using libraries that are not really well written?

How can I tell?

This is a really good question, and many people will point to open licensed versions of the big scanners, things like SCA or source composition analysis (for analysing those open source vulnerabilities) or SAST (static application security testing) tools which analyse your own code.

SCA in big companies is really important, but if you are doing something novel, your design should include some basic checks. My main server is using Tomcat, so I can physically go and look up this component here: https://www.cvedetails.com/version/2036048/Apache-Tomcat-10.1.48.html. When I am writing this, this version has no known issues found against it.

I make the choice to use a library, I can go and look that up. Including a linux tool, most of those are in here. Each vulnerability is looked at in terms of how the exploit is leveraged, so if you really cannot upgrade the library, toolset, or function, you can quickly decide how the mitigation is going to be made.

Such practices allow code to be maintained. Some of my code is over 30 years old now, and still works. I keep my code lean.

Key questions.

If you are using a library from somewhere else, what appetite do the manufacturers have to look after the code? How often do they review what is in that library or toolset? How are releases made?

Should you own some of the functions after a while? Open source is great for getting you going, but actually, if you are using a tiny subset of the library in question, should you edit out what you need?

Are you updating your languages often? Can you automate that update and regression testing? Do you have testing and development areas so you can do that with a “if it all passes, go straight to live” mentality?

If not, is it being flagged to the appropriate people to say things are not working? Are those tests failing supported by error handling with allows those people to go straight into the functions in question, to make debugging easy?

Do you have designs that allow deep debugging without much head scratching? UML is ideal for this: I love an object design that includes the lirbaries in question.

Isn’t this all a lot of effort?

Yes, but if you are doing things properly, shouldn’t it be effort?

What about if you haven’t done enough?

I formed my company on the 1st March 2026. I produced a company website, running on my existing infrastructure. But on the 18th March, my home website was attacked by a sustained distributed denial of service attack (aka DDOS).

Because my site is engineered for resilience, it only affected two of the services I offer. Logging helped me identify what was going on. Because this is not my area of expertise, I did reach out to Claude to help me configure the services beyond what was already in place.

Within 3 hours I had a solution and, more importantly, was able to re-establish provision of service. I think that is slow, but would have taken me longer without that access to approaches and techniques.

But it highlit that actually, such tools, like people, do not work well without breaks. The models found difficultly reshaping their reasoning based on new facts after ninety minutes or so.

The good thing was the tools I approached looked at the underlying architecture, but this probably missed some avenues accessible from the tools being impacted.

Why were you attached?

Always an interesting question, but I think this was a webcrawler looking for holes across the internet. I had 2 million hits per hour. That’s not a targetted hit, that’s a “I’ve found a weakness, I’m having some fun”.

The security fixes I have put in were only possible because I was fully patched. Otherwise, I would have had to fully patch first, then apply the fixes after that.

Many systems do not come “pre-hardened”. Documentation can be difficult to find, without seeking it out. Maybe tools like Claude.ai and Gemini would help people to do that.

Of course, some people are using such tools to find exploits. Tools like chat bots have allowed queries to be much more effective without specialist knowledge!

But the opportunity is there to enable you make your environments safer and more resilient to attack.