Earth Notes: The Earth Notes Podcast @Home

Auto-updated 2022-05-20.
By Damon Hart-Davis.

Listen to the Earth Notes occasional podcast on all things eco and green and efficient @Home! #eco #snackable #podcast

How to cut your carbon footprint at home without pain! All Earth Notes podcast episodes (audio-based articles) are listed here. Look out for the full transcripts.

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.

Episodes are typically:

'snackable' at just a few minutes long
on a green, or energy efficiency, or energy data topic
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.

Some episodes are longer. Watch out for video too!

There are also ambient episodes with little or no commentary.

Episodes

47 episodes, newest first:

2022-05-08 Hanwell Hootie Ambient (2022-05) 11 min
2021-12-29 Diarycast - End of Year Roundup (2021-12-28) 3 min
2021-11-14 Diarycast - June to November Roundup (2021-11-14) 6 min
2021-09-08 English River August Ambient (2021-08) 11 min
2021-09-05 Microbrewery Ambient (2021-09) 11 min
2021-08-28 Direycast - I'm All Right Jack (2021-08-28) 4 min
2021-08-22 On Being a Hardware Developer (2021-07-30) 12 min
2021-08-01 Herne Bay Ambient (2021-07) 24 min
2021-06-27 Wren Loud and Bold Ambient (2021-06) 2 min
2021-06-14 Diarycast - March Warm, April Snow, June Xmas (2021-06-14) 3 min
2021-03-21 Diarycast - Smoke and Snow to Census Jab (2021-03-21) 4 min
2021-02-07 Soundscape - Going Postal in Audio 21 min
2021-01-14 Diarycast - Interview Snippets (2021-01-14) 4 min
2020-12-31 Statscast - Load Profile (2020-12) 4 min
2020-12-22 Soundscape - Solstice Exercise Mile Walk 20 min
2020-12-21 Diarycast - Solstice Lockdown Edition (2020-12-21) 8 min
2020-11-13 VIDEO Smart Radiator Valves - EcoHome Lab (2020-11-12) 17 min
2020-10-10 Statscast - Baselines and Bats (2020-09) 9 min
2020-09-26 Weymouth Ambient (2020-08) 22 min
2020-09-25 Diarycast - Summer Catch-up (2020-09-25) 5 min
2020-09-21 Soundwalk - an hour on the Cambridge Road Estate (2020-09-12) 61 min
2020-09-18 Bats Around our Home aka 16WW 38 min
2020-07-26 Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping - Travel (2020-07-26) 9 min
2020-07-12 Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping (2020-07-12) 7 min
2020-07-05 Statscast - Normal-ish June, Heating Re-viewed (2020-06) 9 min
2020-06-10 Statscast - Lockdown Changes, Log Noises (2020-05) 11 min
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 (2020-04) 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 (2020-04) 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

'Lite' pages play smaller, mono versions of the audio files where available. Smaller files 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.

Please do the like/rate and subscribe thing to help other people find this podcast!

An RSS feed is available.

Plans

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

Diary of EOU HQ and notable events/stats...
- 2022-05-07: visited the Hanwell Hootie!
- 2022-05-06: the heat battery reduced our gas demand in April to well under 0.5kWh/d; we then seem to have snuck through a few dull days at the start of May without much higher gas use.
- 2022-04-20: Sitting in the kitchen having lunch, listening to my @myenergiuk eddi clicking off (stopping diverting) when grid frequency drops < 49.9Hz! Hurrah!
- 2022-03-28: my cemetery walk was sweet-smelling with white candelabra racemes of laurel!
- 2022-03-26: it's been a sunny week, with the Thermino almost eliminating gas use. Today two showers and a bath were supplied and the Thermino nearly full up again by about 4pm having absorbed over 9kWh.
- 2022-02-26: a pleasant sunny day, the off-grid battery hit FULL and the Enphase grid-coupled battery hit 100% too, and ~4kWh has been exported most of which in future would be in the heat battery possibly destined for my bath.
- 2022-02-22: preparing for Thermino install, we are getting rid of the grill (George Foreman Dual Knockout No 10387) that I think was the first purchase through our new virtual credit-card system at Ixaris for ~£100 at Amazon! We haven't used it for years, one half no longer works, but we'll see if anyone wants it on Freegle/Freecycle...
- 2022-02-20: a walk round the cemetery in the afternoon (with a rather milder Met Office yellow warning of wind) revealed quite a lot of tree (and fencing) damage: a large Cypress smashed into pieces for example.
- 2022-02-18: today's predicted terrifying storm Eunice as of just before 8am and on the live forecast in the next hour nominal 62mph winds, is barely windy. A couple of hours later into the 'red warning' phase and for some hours, became more gusty, but still not damaging, at EOU HQ.
- 2022-02-13: because the central heating radiator circuit pressure keeps dropping to 0 (and rising sharply, so I fear a problem with expansion vessel and/or overpressure relief valve) and the boiler is making unhappy noises at low pressure, I have turned the flow tmperature down to minimum (~30°C) to see if that stresses the system less.
- 2022-02-12: the house basically imported nothing from the grid today and exported ~1kW; the Enphase started the day nearly 50% full and will end nearly 90% full with 6.7kWh generated.
- 2022-02-01: the sparrows are keeping up their racket outside my study window in the Pyrocanthus!
- 2022-01-31: it's noon and I'm at least briefly running my MBA off-grid, and the off-grid system is dumping too, so taking ~30W load away leaving ~200W to spill to grid from ~1200W generation. The Enphase AC Batteries claim to be charging ~900W, maybe below the nominal maximum because it's chilly (~7°C).
- 2022-01-30: off-grid battery hit FULL today for the first time since 2021-10-31, ie in about 3 months!
- 2022-01-30: set up basic heat-battery top-up control script and logging.
- 2022-01-29: Myenergi Eddi+Hub arrived today, ahead of schedule; very preliminary check-over, and set-up of hub.
- 2022-01-28: Fame! To quote @EarthOrgUK just now, who concisely summarized our paper: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (especially if one eye is closed and one ear covered)." We opened both eyes and found clear evidence for the obvious answer: nuclear power DOES reduce CO2 emissions.
- 2022-01-28: Myenergi eddi and hub now on their way for heat battery setup; I'm hoping to have programmed everything fairly thoroughly long before the sparks gets involved!
- 2022-01-22: in a thread on Twitter I mused FWIW I don't put any of my qualifications (or even "Mr"!) on my business cards etc. And even if I finally go for a PhD and achieve it, I won't be using "Dr" much. Objective qualifications are important but not the whole story: mediocre people collect and hide behind them...
- 2022-01-17: Energy Digitalisation Taskforce publishes recommendations for a digitalised Net Zero energy system: I contributed to the open data element of this in the Before Times.
- 2022-01-16: my MacBook Air is offering me an upgrade to Monterey even though I think it's too old (MacBookAir6,2 ~2013?) ... and when I click on the offer and get to Software Update I am told that I'm up to date at 11.6.2.
- 2022-01-11: installed the at command so that I could at noon something I want to run when the sun has been out for a bit tomorrow. I used to use at all the time, eg at uni, but probably haven't for a decade or two since it wasn't installed by default. But it only took a apt-get install at and abut 30 seconds to bring it all back!
- 2022-01-08: into part 2 of Daniel Dennett's "From Bacteria to Bach and Back" 2017...
- 2022-01-05: first decent few hours of sunshine in nearly a month, with horribly low off-grid battery managing to soak up over 360Wh cf ~50Wh on previous days.
- 2022-01-01: warm and sunny enough (>14°C) for us to have washing drying on the line in the garden, while I pored over end-of-month and end-of-year data capture and processing!

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 episode "Metacast 2".

See also Podcast Industry Statistics, updated daily.

Some anecdotes.