Earth Notes: Diarycast - Year In Review (2024)
Updated 2025-12-30 11:47 GMT.By Damon Hart-Davis.
The 2024 EOU diary, including finally ditching fossil gas... #yearInReview #heatPump
Diarycast
The DHD/EOU diary for .
No audio for this one, because I did not muster enthusiasm in time!
- :
filled in a REACT follow-up survey (originally from covid times).
- : tuning and working around a hardware problem (non-working bypass valve) on the heat pump, and discovered a nifty feature/bug which may subtly push some demand away from 4pm-to-7pm peak, setting back LWT/flow temperature at that time even though nominally not possible with external call for heat.
- : DHW tank temp ~37°C on leaving on the 24th (am), 29°C on return today (26th) (pm). Turning heating on before setting off home had the place warm when I arrived.
- : during my monthly UK central heating micro-poll Daniel Taylor tells me that
I haven't put my heating on in three years.
He lives in the south of the UK and further saysI have south-facing double glazing with retrofitted secondary glazing. It gets very cold in winter but I prefer to layer clothing and use blankets than heating the whole place. I think the 'connection charge' on my energy bill is generally half or more of the total.
A 'heating off' vote for my survey! - : another exploded/imploded triple-glazing unit this morning!
- : the solar panels (and guttering) cleaned today; also showed a Kingston University prof and master's student around the carbon-saving features of 16WW; wrote and gave a talk.
- :
the gas meter was taken away a little before 4pm by a man in an SGN van. No more fossil gas!
- : participated in the Replication Games today, online. Also managed to pay my university fees for the year, but the payment gateway UX is horrible...
- : attending (online) and speaking at LOCO 2024 today [hart-davis2024feeds].
- : PhD university fees are coming due again: £2393 for the year.
- : the Octopus heat pump is officially commissioned!
- : heat pump is in and running and keeping us warm and making hot water, and I tested the latter for science by taking a nice hot bath.
- : heat pump work continues, and this afternoon our gas supply is being capped, so we are 'fossil free' at home.
- : my tax return is done and I have paid HMRC my due taxes today.
- : our gas boiler has been removed and the heat pump system is starting to take shape.
- : given that our heat pump is due in next week, and all DHW until then is from the gas combi given that the Thermino is disconnected, I replaced my weekend hot bath with a shower this time.
- : really disabled Thermino grid top-up this time, after getting a hot bath from it yesterday and letting fill to the brim again overnight.
- : booking train and hostel for Eurostar for FOSDEM!
- : even though my disk is at a balmy ~17°C, I have plugged in the USB heated insoles FTWarmth!
- : finally reading NKD's dissertation and capturing a copy of the data from 16WW that she collected [kalantari2024overheating].
- : I have been selected to do a lightning talk at LOCO24 on my RSS side-quest in December!
- : captained "Sussed Surrey" team in Climate Brief quiz to =45 out of 54 teams.
- : shifting my family's money (ISAs etc) out of US assets today...
- :
turned 2b Radbot down from 3 to 1 as the room is no longer being used, nominally, and it was the only Radbot persistently on today.
- : given a very sunny (mainly blue-skies) day, I am happy to have been to squeeze in a 65°C "intensive" (as maintenance) dishwasher run with basically no draw from the grid...
- : out monster hedge at the front of the house was trimmed today and lots more light is getting in again!
- : two FoI requests today; it will clearly be exponential growth from here...
- : I am taking a leaf out of the Clean Energy Wire book, and making all texts created for EOU and not otherwise explicitly licensed or restricted available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0) licence.
- : 1TtCO2 removal to limit warning 1.5°C, 3TtCO2 to get back to pre-industrial [ransohoff2024removal].
- : I put in my first ever UK Freedom of Information request on TTK's behalf on Thursday (10th) asking a school about the age of its gas boilers and replacement schedule and presence of PV, and received a useful answer today.
- :
The BBC is forecasting rather high winds, nearly 5,000 mph locally...
- : son moved into daughter's room but 2b and 1g room designations remaining unchanged.
- : restarted taking D3 supplement pills today.
- : Google force-added AI to my searches. I cannot disable it easily (no setting available). I spend my time trying to fix climate change, and having an unwanted energy-heavy extra waste for every search is bad. So I have stopped using Google search for now, on mobile and on desktop. Google will not notice, but for me it is as sad as giving up on AltaVista... (I have a degree in AI; I have sold products containing AI; I watch my research colleagues doing good things with AI.)
- : I have a story at the top of Hacker News again!
- : registered for LOCO2024 online; I have already submitted lightning and normal talk abstracts.
- : Ellie is off to university today...
- : it seems that I have been doing my podcast LUFS all wrong at -23 as if for broadcast, when everyone else does -16 for podcasts...
- : passed my PhD confirmation viva with no corrections!
- : Octopus has confirmed that it (the design team) is OK with the placements shown in the side and plan views (alternative 3), so I have signed thee provisional sales DocuSign form. Lots more details to be sorted out...
- : hosting another Open Home session this afternoon as part of Sustainable September locally. One visitor was defeated by building works and traffic, and another by travel back from a break. Hey ho.
- : no word of a remedy from Enphase yet.
- : SoundCloud reinstated with good grace the track.
- : just had my newly-created RSS-feed-hits sonification rejected by SoundCloud for copyright infringement of a track which sounds utterly different, which I have disputed!
- : Enphase support emailed:
I received an update from the team stating downgrading the gateway software version isn't possible. We're exploring alternative solutions to address the issue with your system. We'll provide an update by September 4th 2024.
- : went to the doctor to get a blood PSA test, which I hope to repeat every couple of years, though the surgery will not send me reminders. The BMI and blood-pressure machine in the lobby was finally working and confirmed to the cm the height that I have been claiming for years and the weight I think that I am to within a kg (slightly overweight, nominally, and a BMI of ~25) and that I have highish blood pressure but not hypertension. Straight off to the pub afterwards for beer and near-lethally hot pizza!
- : Enphase decided to do an unannounced forced Envoy firmware upgrade at about 9pm (yes, on a Friday evening), from D5.0.34 to D7.0.88, breaking my local data access (to
/production.json, in spite of my clear instructions to them not to do so, and I have so far spent an hour on the phone trying to get its support to revert which they claim not to... At the very least the system will be broken until I spend many hours rewriting access to some other mechanism. :FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them
. - : this weekend I want to go through yesterday's Octopus heat pump proposal design documents, and make sure that we can fit everything neatly in the kitchen and possibly even regain a sliver of space.
- : A-level results day for my daughter: she has her grades to get into her first-choice course! And her start date is essentially the same as my PhD confirmation viva: let us hope that higher education is not a 1-in-1-out for us...
- : my team won the group challenge (planning for better use of 'hyperscale' data centre waste heat), mainly by making use of a 60°C stream from liquid cooling for domestic space heat and DHW, ~10k+ homes in heating climates for each 100MW of data centre power demand, tacking fuel poverty and earning a social licence to operate, on the final day of summer school.
- : off to Durham (first time, I think) for a summer school starting tomorrow. Things did not start too well — I received a SPAM call claiming that my phone is about to be deactivated as I set off, then the first leg of my train was cancelled and I had to divert via bus and Tube! Then the bus would not let me off at the Tube station! But I caught my main train.
- : member of the team winning the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence.
- : back from a few days at a music festival: I danced so hard that I have blisters on my feet! (I was also without a laptop for the longest in many years...)
- : free idea to save the climate and our gardens, and puts the sex in sustainability, well SECCS actually. A robot that catches slugs, bakes them to pure #carbon (ie #biochar) and buries them deep in the soil. Slug Enemy Carbon Capture and Storage.
- : had MSc student visit to install some sensors for their overheating in Superhomes study.
- : Simon E fixed Transcobble, thank you (him) and hurrah!
- : an unexpected small third tranche of cash arrived from the sale of Ixaris today!
- : Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate: it was me that reported it to elReg, having noticed that my grid intensity calculator stopped dead at midnight!
- : my name is on a letter to the Prime Minister about repair and reuse from the Restart Project.
- : I harvested my first blackberry today, from a bramble.
- : I received a cheery automated note from
preprint.orgsaying:Congratulations! Your following work is gaining recognition and it has reached the milestone of 100 download!
- : UK General Election today, and have been a teller at my local polling station from 5pm to 9pm. I have also nearly finished reorganising my sock drawer (yes, really: I have too many socks), and made some decent progress on my PhD confirmation report.
- : sadly someone seems to have comprehensively pulled to pieces my favourite wooden bench in the Garden of Remembrance in the cemetery.
- : my daughter is on her first trip abroad as an adult with friends, by air to Spain.
- : read [govUK2024community] and made a personal response.
- : today Clarivate / Web of Science alerted me to the citation from my paper (
DOI:10.3390/su16114710) to my dataset (DOI:10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2t6). - : I received my postal ballot paper for the UK general election and have voted: I am now officially immune to further politicking!
- : living it up on a sunny start to near longest day: some TLC and a hot (70°C) near-empty maintenance wash for the dishwasher! Tomato-y fatty gunge is a horror!
- : read [govUK2024electricity] consultation and (partially) responded [PDF].
- : open house today, 1st visitor at 1pm, 3 more at 2pm! We will quite likely do some follow-up over email.
- : shockingly Hermes/Evri fails to deliver an Amazon order with no updates at all since Wednesday 12th, and Amazon says
We're very sorry your delivery is so late. Although it may still arrive, you can request a refund now.
So, dear reader, I requested a refund, and asked Amazon not to use Hermes/Evri. Given the behaviour of the owners I do not wish to support them. - : we are having some electricity power cuts this afternoon; cable damage to a single phase it seems like, maybe related to the redevelopment works. Internet continues, powered off-grid! The circuit breaker for 3/4s of the PV tripped at some point; I realised the next morning (~07:30Z) because of poor generation even in bright sunshine. Subsequently confirmed in a letter on the 18th from Vistry/Countryside that
accidental damage to an unidentified underground power cable during ground clearance operations on site caused the power from the substation to shut down.
- : Hermes/Evri twice fumbling a now-late Amazon delivery to me (from Amazon's tracking pop-up):
Wednesday, 12 June 10:39 AM Out for delivery Kingston Upon Thames, GB; Tuesday, 11 June 10:23 PM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 5:30 PM Problem resolved and parcel is in transit Brooklands, GB; Monday, 10 June 3:20 PM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 7:43 AM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility Rugby, GB; 7:42 AM Parcel arrived at a carrier facility GB; 7:39 AM; Problem resolved and parcel is in transit Rugby, GB; 12:40 AM Package departed an Amazon facility Me3 9Ly, Rochester, Kent, United Kingdom GB; Sunday, 9 June 6:42 PM Package arrived at an Amazon facility Me3 9Ly, Rochester, Kent, United Kingdom GB; Carrier picked up the package.
- : the full HTML paper is up, V2 of the PDF is up, manuscript not, status still
Website online
. - : just ordered tent, etc, for the festival in August; I will find out what vital equipment I have ordered just as I need it! (All arrived by the 18th, except for the sleeping bag apparently lost by Hermes/Evri, and refunded.)
- : my son's ballboy duties at Surbiton continue, and my daughter is still deep in revision in the midst of her A-level exams, on this sunny weekend.
- : my paper's landing page is still saying
This is an early access version, the complete PDF, HTML, and XML versions will be available soon.
- : new Fairbuds arrived today, on charge (at 50%), paired with Fairphone and MacBook. (My Fairphone asked if I wanted to grant access to my contact book and something else: I said no.)
- : lawn mown this sunny Sunday morning; the (5A) extension head fuse blew when I was nearly done removing several inches of growth in the first cut this year, so I rescued one from from an ancient power adaptor in my treasure/junk drawer!
- : The rise of Heat Geek — a startup hell-bent on bringing heat pumps to the Brits mentions my research:
Among those impressed by his understanding of heating system technology is Damon Hart-Davis, a PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. He recently wrote a research paper on something occasionally discussed by Chapman in some of his videos — briefly, that turning off the heating in one room in a house can, in some scenarios, be less efficient overall than if you just heat every room. "I thought, 'Oh, this can't be right, I shall prove him wrong'," recalls Hart-Davis. But the modelling instead validated Heat Geek’s analysis, given certain conditions. "That is really surprising," says Hart-Davis.
- : morning paper publication level:
Pending conversion
; afternoon:Conversion Skipped
(uh-oh?); thenWebsite online
! Word count: 8669, page count: 25, submission to publication (days): 41. (It turns out that my paper was officially published today [hart-davis2024zone]!) - : paper publication level:
Author proofreading - resubmitted
; first feed hits sonification ('type 1') created. - : the last of three pumpkins that we had planted out was eaten overnight; there have been hordes of huge slugs frolicking in all the rain and wet that we have had. I spent the whole day working on the proofs of my paper.
- : went to look at heat pump installation (amongst other building works at the Surbiton home of a friend.
- :
Accepted for Publication
! By the eveningEnglish correction done
... - : on this bank holiday Monday evening, given input from me and my supervisors in response to an update from the journal yesterday morning:
Pending editor decision
... - : today at uni: a workshop on PhD-by-publication, supervision, departmental coffee time, a seminar, departmental PGR in-person socials, ... oh and some research work, maybe?
- :
removed reference to the 'old' BMRS www.bmreports.com/bmrsElexon site from the grid-intensity page, before shut-down at the end of the month. My phone WorldOfSolitare game claims that I have played 1000 hands of Turn Three Klondike Solitaire on it with 100 hands won (ie 10%) in an average of 1m3s and 16 moves... - : today was Kingston Efficient Homes Show, and the small-talks part that I ran seemed to go well!
- : on the second (and possibly final) Elexon 109 working group about possibly netting imports and exports (of 'reflux' flow) in each half-hour (HH) settlement period for domestic retail customers. It was estimated that it might save £11 per year per home, and affects maybe ~13% of settlement periods and ~160GWh/y flows given some data analysed from a ~2013 study of domestic PV customers.
- : sunny lunchtime: I am at university (with the inventors' club in Kingston later). I think that I have done all my paper revisions that I can reasonably without discussion with my supervisors / accomplices, and have discovered that the bar by the lake is open, so I am having a pint of lager by the lake!
- : we received something that is not a rejection from journal #4, hurrah! Revisions ahoy!
- : a rainy bank holiday, and my mail server is getting hammered so hard with SPAM attempts that it is sometimes refusing my own local connections!
- : 13:40Z very low wind but "fossil @ 32% 8831MW [CCGT, COAL, OCGT, OIL] import @ 27% 7308MW [INTELEC, INTEW, INTFR, INTGRNL, INTIFA2, INTIRL, INTNED, INTNEM, INTNSL, INTVKL] low-carbon @ 29% 8017MW [NPSHYD, NUCLEAR, WIND]", ie about 1/3rd each fossil, imports and home-grown renewables.
- : this evening I became (interim) chair of Transition Town Kingston: I may have to become a grown-up soon too!
- : checked connections and voltages in the main off-grid solar connector box in the back-garden and all seems OK; the Unisolar panel is being outgunned (~20V to ~23V) be others on the same string so is not currently contributing it seems, but that is OK.
- : I discovered at about noon BST that the SunnyBeam thought that the time was mid-evening ... sometime in about 2004 ... so it got reset! Also, a friend called me to say that his solar (~5kWp) and battery installation was up and running as of today, with just an Eddi diverter to set up.
- : RSS Podcast Efficiency featured in Podnews!
- : odd: playing SoundCloud music (in Firefox) seems to block/slow Time Machine finding changes to back up; pausing the music sometimes allows Time Machine to continue...
- : the council's grass-verge-trimming contractor is outside and the strimmer is so much less unpleasantly loud than previously — it seems to be electric!
- : I am posting in my vote for the London Mayoral and Assembly elections. (I previously did my 6-month PhD progress report, and will next order more ground coffee: priorities!)
- : I sent an email with an Apache log sample to
anthropic.com:When a robots.txt says "no” that does NOT mean "ask again in a few seconds just in case". This is filling my logs with garbage and wasting my CPU and bandwidth.
The misbehaviour that had been continuing for days did stop after a few hours, so I think someone read the mail and acted on it. - : the Octopus heat pump survey happened, taking about 4h; it will be very tight to get everything physically fitted and eg meet the GDPO requirements to avoid the need for planning permission.
- :
GPTBotandClaudeBotare all over my sites today... - : did an interview with FT Next about my heat pumps and TRVs pre-print. Also, and less fun, finished filling in PFF2 and CYI student finance forms...
- : finished off the last of the 60 podcast transcripts this (sunny) morning, hurrah!
- :
the off-grid system powered the Internet router through the night last night.
- : on the bus to meet friends in the evening, I found myself on the bus with someone I worked with in a start-up over 20 years ago!
- : I turned off DMARC
pct=100reporting on a couple of inbound-only MX domains since their misuse and its reporting continues to be solidly tiresome and distracting. - : on the GB Grid Intensity page I have renamed the
zero-carbon
fuels total tolow-carbon
because, as overall grid intensity falls, the difference stops being a rounding error! - : the heat battery was (over) full before noon.
- :
a little after all storage was pretty-much full again. In the evening peak period little of the additional demand was taken up by fossil fuels, eg CCGT, but mainly from storage and interconnectors (mainly French nukes). A marginal kWh need no longer be gas.
- : a little after the heat battery is completely (over) full and has stopped absorbing energy, as has the Enphase, so over 1kW is spilling to grid. By little after the off-grid energy store was full too.
- : I have been roped in as a judge/assessor for a university sustainability module to today!
- : I will stop taking vitamin D from tomorrow until Autumn.
- : a nearby friend who has been exploring heat-pumps, roof and wall insulation and solar PV called me to say that he was about to sign up for PV, with batteries and diversion to his existing DHW cylinder — hurrah!
- : the sparrows have been swarming and chattering and squabbling in the hedge under my window the last few days...
- : 14:45Z: just after closing the poll for central heating state (~1/3 off) we turned ours off, so that was a ~3 month heating season.
- : unexpected converging benefits of WFH (Working From Home) and Bluetooth speaker: being able to to take my bath while staying in a retrofit conference to make space in my heat battery for DHW for everyone else in the family later!
- : not a spectacular day, but most of the storage (Thermino, Enphase) got pretty full.
- : the Thermino was about to (over)fill on diversion a little before noon today, but strategic bath-time shifting has fixed that...
- : I paid in my liquidation cheque from Caredall.
- : I submitted my FHBS consultation response to [govUK2023future].
- : at noon PV generation is peaking over 2.7kW and the grid-intensity is low enough for the Thermino to be getting a grid top-up after my nice hot bath this morning: boost and divert logically happening concurrently! Came very close (~105% estimated) to 'overfull' and auto-disconnecting the heat relay...
- : I submitted my TRVs and heat-pumps paper, somewhat rejigged, to another journal today.
- : I submitted my HEM consultation response to [govUK2023HEM].
- : I am starting work on a
Home Energy Model: replacement for the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP)
consultation response [govUK2023HEM]... - : the first school is talking to KEFSS about PV, and KEFSS is meeting RBK's Property department tomorrow (virtually) to help get it comfortable with converting rooftops in their bailiwick!
- : Combiphos content changed today, roof checked and leak fix seems to be working, and a 5mm gap has been made under the
1gbedroom door which gets most humidity and condensation. - : I think that I have completed a code upgrade and improvement to cope with the coming change in National Grid's systems. Naturally, by avoiding doing the research that I ought to have been doing...
- : attended the Hackathon final-5 presentations, but did not get to see the overall winner. (Eventually ended up with another teaching award from this Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence!)
- : the second Hackathon day at uni, and I spent some quiet moments gathering some of the receipts (literal and metaphorical) for the work that got us to an EPC A (100). There was a tiny bit (~30Wh) of solar PV diversion today.
- :
the first Hackathon day at uni today as presenter/mentor/whatevs: fun but exhausting and in bed by 7pm (having been up at 7am)! In the evening the renewed 16WW EPC certificate came in from Ecoalex and it is an A (was previously B), which is ~0.3% of existing England and Wales homes!
- : my son is off skiing with the school in Italy, by coach (~24h).
- : working on the uni Hackathon for the weekend, including problem statements...
- : Paul of Ecoalex is doing an EPV today for 16WW.
- : I have a provisional date for the Octopus heat-pump survey in April... (I was called in the Eurostar departure lounge in Brussels to agree the date range.)
- : relatively few talks attended (RISC-V, open source European legislative environment). Apparently about 8000 people attended FOSDEM.
- : in the FOSDEM Energy devroom most of today. [FOSDEM2024energy]
- : off to FOSDEM today! It is usually icy here in Brussels for FOSDEM weekend, but it is more like 10°C this weekend.
- : pushed out a quick podcast 2023 round-up episode and cajoled the MBA to top-up a little off-grid.
- : the off-grid battery hit FULL today, and I have just booked into a week-long music festival in August that I have been interested in for years.
- : kitchen MHRV motor being replaced and heat exchanger cleaned today.
- : brought upgraded heat-battery RPi (
pekoe) back on-line. - : started replacement of worn/failing microSD card in heat-battery RPi (
pekoe). - : replacement motor unit for Tempra fan arrived today, as did my first SPAM 'message request' over Signal (about Bitcoin, naturally).
- : replacement
Bodum Coffee Press Replacement Beaker, Borosilicate Glass — 3-Cup, Transparent (Capacity: three cup, 0. 35 L, 12 oz)
(£12.90 including VAT, MPN 1503-10, EAN 727015100586) arrived and fits! The packaging also lists MPNs for the metal filter parts: repair and reuse ahoy! - : attempted to connect my SoundCloud account via RSS into my mastodon.social account, to automatically feed in any new music, and possibly other things that I like/post: I will find out!
- : ordered replacement motor assembly for kitchen MHRV.
- : my simple cafetière broke this morning (the rim of the glass vessel broke. I do not think that it could go with the normal (soda) glass for recycling evening if it did not have a sharp edge, so the glass is wrapped in newspaper and in the landfill bin...
- : For the last couple of months (ish) I have been trying to reduce the amount of laundry I produce.
- : Dave the builder is on our frosty roof to try to fix the leak via the old kitchen boiler flue vent (with flashing), dodging the asbestos and pigeons... Also cable-tying a couple of the solar PV cables that have slipped down to and spilling over the gutter at the front. Also trying the boiler radiator flow temperature on its lowest (~35°C) setting, at ~5°C outside, to further probe how a heat-pump might work...
- : a flurry of snow shortly after 1pm, continued for a while, bit none settled. Did some PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) training on-line, and passed!
- : boiler board swap started just before 11am and had everything fixed in under half an hour: we have central heating again in time for the cold snap! (Time to take the Thermino off 'primary' DHW duty...) The boiler's little rest did (a) cut our mains gas consumption and footprint (b) verify that our base heating temperature is ~12C ie we do not need heating when it is warmer than that outside (c) provide a data point for a weather compensation curve (d) show us that we can cope reasonably well without heating!
- : I may do a dry-ish January, once I have finished the open bottles of wine!
References
- [FOSDEM2024energy] FOSDEM 2024: Energy Track Devroom
- [govUK2023future] Open consultation: The Future Homes and Buildings Standards: 2023 consultation
- [govUK2023HEM] Open consultation: Home Energy Model: Future Homes Standard assessment
- [govUK2024community] Open call for evidence: Barriers to community energy projects
- [govUK2024electricity] Open consultation: Delivering a smart and secure electricity system: implementation
- [hart-davis2024feeds] Podcast Feeds: The Problem
- [hart-davis2024zone] To Zone or Not to Zone When Upgrading a Wet Heating System from Gas to Heat Pump for Maximum Climate Impact: A UK View
- [kalantari2024overheating] Investigating Overheating Risks in SuperHomes using the Emergent RetrofiT Approaches in South England
- [ransohoff2024removal] Quick carbon removal demand math
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