Earth Notes: The Earth Notes Podcast @Home

The podcast started in June 2019. The first two episodes were created to support a local naturalist who leads guided walks around our local council housing estate.

Episode are typically just a few minutes long, on a 'green' or energy efficiency or energy data topic, and usually based at home.

Some episodes are a little more tangental, such as listening to the temperature of your radiators for a whole year in one second.

See below for some ideas that I have brewing, though they may never happen!

Episodes

• 2020-05-23 Diarycast - Urban Dawn Chorus (2020-05-23) 24 min
• 2020-05-13 Diarycast - Ambient Sound of a Graveyard (2020-05-13) 11 min
• 2020-05-10 Diarycast - Lockdown Patently Workable (2020-05-10) 4 min
• 2020-05-03 Statscast - PV Up, Travel Down, Weakly Weeklies (2020-04) 11 min
• 2020-04-22 Diarycast - Blue Skies PV High (2020-04-22) 3 min
• 2020-04-19 Metacast 2: Podcast Specs and Workflow 5 min
• 2020-04-13 Diarycast - Lockdown Lawnmowing Sadly Allowed (2020-04-13) 3 min
• 2020-04-10 Metacast 1: Blue Yeti, Shy Eurasian Footwear 4 min
• 2020-03-21 A Short Coronacast for March 2020 2 min
• 2019-12-30 Sign-off for 2019, Hello 2020! 7 min
• 2019-11-09 VIDEO OpenTRV Movie Mashup 1: Video Out-takes and The Rest! 2 min
• 2019-10-29 Water Music: How Does Tap-water Temperature Sound in Time-lapse? 5 min
• 2019-10-28 The Green Existence of Adam Hart-Davis 6 min
• 2019-10-19 PV Sounds: How Does PV Grid-tie Generation Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min
• 2019-10-13 Battery Sounds: How Does a Battery Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min
• 2019-10-12 Rad Sounds II: Attempting a Higher-fi Home-heating Time-lapse 3 min
• 2019-09-22 Greener travel: Why We Should Cut Car-bon Miles 4 min
• 2019-09-15 Rad Sounds: How Cool is your Home Heating in Time-lapse? 3 min
• 2019-08-28 Aircon On, Windows Open! 3 min
• 2019-06-21 About Our Greenish Home aka 16WW, with Bonus Bats and Sparrows 4 min
• 2019-06-15 Solar Panels in My Garden 2 min

Other Ways to Listen

AMP and 'lite' pages play smaller, mono versions of the audio files where available. Smaller files may help save your mobile data allowance and a tiny carbon toeprint. The smaller version may also be served automatically if you have data saving mode (Save-Data: on) enabled in your browser.

This podcast is also available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and Listen Notes.

An RSS feed is available.

Plans

Here are some vague plans for future episodes. Don't hold your breath!

• Do 'virtual' very low carbon non-holiday (video?) sadcastvisit to Midi w/ receipts and photos and clips from last time!
• Diary of EOU HQ and notable events/stats.
  • 2020-06-04: Met office: Why 2020 saw a record-breaking dry and sunny spring across the UK: One factor that has not played a role in the record levels of sunshine is the coronavirus lockdown across the UK (and much of the world). While the wide-ranging reductions in travel and industrial output have likely reduced emissions of aerosols – tiny particles and droplets – into the atmosphere, this has not caused the sunny weather.
  • 2020-06-02: May becomes 'the greenest month ever' in the UK: ... the first full calendar month of electricity generation without coal since the industrial revolution ... an average 28% of electricity generation was from renewable sources during May, with wind energy accounting for 15.8%, solar power 11.4%, biomass 8.7% and gas 30%.
  • 2020-06-01: Climate change: UK's record dry spell after extreme rainfall astounds Met Office.
  • 2020-05-31: PV generation a record for May (24kWh/d vs prev best 21 and typical-ish 18), and well above PVGIS prediction (18).
  • 2020-05-29: UK weather: Sunniest spring since records began.
  • 25th: my glasses are falling apart so emailed my opticians on this bank holiday more in hope than expectation since I need them to work. Amazingly had a email and phone responses and have ordered replacements to arrive by post.
  • 18th: ~60Wh imports from the grid reported. Under 1kWh/d (and over 90% self-consumption) from 4th.
• Turn-of-the-month updates from our home energy stats: consumption, generation, import, + gas (DHW) + water temp + other significant GB/Europe/world numbers over the previous month. Maybe a simple sonification each time.
• Interviews with FnF, about how lockdown has effected their 'greenness'.
• Fairphone 3 review, possibly as a video episode, and possibly including audio/video recorded by the FP3 itself.
• Sonify change in GB electricity generation before and after lockdown.
• Sonify change in GB transport use (eg TfL journeys) before and after lockdown.
• Sonify Web logs, eg all hits, bots, malicious, real humans.
• Capture weekly cycles, though that means running faster than 1 year to 1 second (day = 365Hz, week = 52Hz) to make week audible.
• Discuss eg reduction in peak-time weekday imports with Enphase ToU, and sonify, and discuss other Enphase featues and foibles.
• Turn snippets of sonified data into sampled notes and form tune / percussion. Maybe have note frequency be the mean for the data set.
• Mains water temp to midi note; poss play all years in parallel.
• Audify the fridge/freezer (W -> midi note) and other appliance.
• A take on the daily treadmill getting Radbot to market, eg including fundraising (maybe with some video clips spliced in).
• Interview (audio only, or video) over Skype or SquadCast or Zencastr or similar.

More

You may be interested in nitty-gritty tech updates and daily learnings while keeping the Earth Notes site up and running.

Some documentation of my set-up and workflow is in Metacast 2.

See also Podcast Industry Statistics, updated daily.