Niles’s Blog

My electric meter reading yesterday afternoon was 000000!

This is because Eon contacted me at the start of the new year and said it was time to replace my electric meter, which had reached the end of its life.

So yesterday, we went from this meter, with its old dials and wheels, and the wheel at the front to show how fast we were using power:

To this soulless white monstrosity:

On the way, we also lost our radio teleswitch. No more thunks at 8am as the house is remotely switched off the Economy 7 tarif.

I was a little annoyed that the meter is so basic. Routine meter replacement is an ideal opportunity to put in better meter technology. I was hoping for a smart meter which could be read remotely and give feedback on energy useage. Or at least relocation out of my hall, so that I no longer have to be home to have my meter read. I suspect the lack of a smart meter means it will have to be replaced again before long. The city council has been using remote smart metering extensively in the huge number of buildings the council is responsible for. This has helped them reduce costs and waste by monitoring energy and water use on an hourly basis. You know that a school using lots of water in the holidays has a leak, or has forgotten to turn off 15 minute flushing urinals that aren’t being used.

Back home, the measurements nerd in me is chuffed with a meter that briefly read 0. We have now used about 10kWh in our first day. I have no idea whether this is good or bad, but I do know that visitors to our house have sometimes been surprised at the lights we have on. Being green is as much about reducing routine energy useage as installing novel technology such as the solar panel.

In assessing our own energy useage, there’s good and bad to report. We routinely turn our telly off as we’re advised to. But I leave more computers running all the time than I should. Additionally, we do have a lot of lights on. This is partly because we forget to turn them off, but also because of a tension between green advice and safety advice. The green advice is turn off everything you’re not using. The community safety advice is try to avoid being burgled by using time switched and lights to make it look like someone is home. And further safety advice says things like leave the landing light on when you have visitors to prevent people unfamiliar with your home from falling down the stairs.

One last thing on energy monitoring: last year we switched away from Good Energy, the green supplier that gave kickbacks to the Lib Dems. This was mainly because we could no longer afford to pay the extra cost that came from having our gas and electricity supplied by two different companies. I’m now on an internet-only tarif with Scottish Power, which is useful firstly because they now email me when they want meter readings, and secondly because their online account details include previous data. This helps you manage your useage across years – how many kWh were you using this time last year? By logging in, I can see we averaged 12kWh a day for the two quarters we have data for.

So, work has begun on the solar panel.

This is Tuesday:

The company turned up, and spent an hour looking at the roof. Access is really tricky. There’s a car-port preventing them putting a ladder straight up to the south-facing roof. Eventually, they decide the easiest way, short of entirely removing the car port then replacing it, is to go up into the attic, out through the sky-light and clamber over the roof to the panel.

By the end of the second day, they have fitted the top part and some of the tubes. Because they only have access to the top of the panel, and not the bottom from a ladder of platform, it’s slow progress.

Here’s what the tubes look like close up.

They’re longer than I am tall – but once they’re up on the roof, they don’t look nearly so big.

The panel was completed by the end of Thursday – but so far it’s not connected to anything inside! Work continues next week – replacing the hot water tank, moving the header tank, plumbing in a new shower, connecting the controls, lagging the pipes.

Here’s a picture of the new tank – with a wheelie bin in the background for size comparison pictures.

And here’s a picture taken through the hole in the top where the immersion heater goes. I love this picture. You can clearly see both coils – a larger one around the middle which will be connected to the ordinary boiler, and a smaller one with fins around the bottom, which will be connected to the solar panel.

When we first moved in, one of our earliest thoughts about what to do to the house was to replace the tired lean-to with a new conservatory.
About two months ago, in talking about what we wanted from a conservatory, we then started to think maybe what we actually wanted was an extension, and started to think about talking to an architect.

This week I found out by chance that it’s National Architect Week, and many practices, including the one a colleague used to extend is house, are offering an hour of time with an architect in exchange for a modest donation to Shelter.  We’ve got our consult booked for a few weeks from now.  This year’s theme is how to make your house more environmentally friendly, which is great.
What we’ll actually end up discussing with the architect by then is anyone’s guess.  The first few weeks of extension planning ended up with a fairly modest proposal.  Then it started to get silly, and the latest des res plan now includes glazing the full height of the house, a mezzanine, a retrofitted solar chimney for passive solar air conditioning.

One thing is certain: following a slightly bizarre set of events, all councillor planning applications to Nottingham City are now decided by the Development Control committee, of which I am a member. For obvious probity reasons, I wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the decision myself, and neither would any of my close friends.  So it will mean in a meeting like today that I have to leave the room while the rest of the councillors get shown photos of my house and discuss the relative planning merits of my plans.

It’s important to me that the extension is fairly green. Not least because since I have invested a lot of time extolling the virtues of sustainable development to the committee, it would be hypocritical of me not to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to my own house!

I’ve been trying to read around the subject of extending houses, but haven’t found a suitable google term.  “Extension” means something else in computing terms, which throws up all sorts of distracting hits in searches.

I did, however, find this lengthy horror story of a loft extension gone wrong. – I spent far too long last night reading it through as the nightmare developed step by step.  Eeep!