WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2024-04-12 from FLAC by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:02.000 Statscast 00:02.000 --> 00:07.500 [INTRO MUSIC] 00:07.500 --> 00:17.500 Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis, and welcome to Earth Notes podcast on all things eco and green and efficient at home! 00:17.500 --> 00:22.500 9th October 2020 for stats from July to September. 00:22.500 --> 00:32.000 Turn-of-the-month update of home energy and related stats and poking at data from 16WW and beyond. 00:32.000 --> 00:37.000 Here's two mystery sounds to keep you guessing until later. 00:37.000 --> 00:39.000 [???] 00:39.000 --> 00:41.000 And 00:41.000 --> 00:46.000 [???] 00:46.000 --> 00:50.000 16WW Energy Stats. 00:50.000 --> 00:57.000 Key monthly stats are weather (heating degree days), electricity consumption and gas. 00:57.000 --> 01:07.000 Heating degree days (as used for 16WW with a base temperature of 12 degrees C) are nothing special for the three months, compared to previous years. 01:07.000 --> 01:18.000 Interestingly, July accrued more than one heating degree day, which hadn't happened since 2008. Not quite evidence of global cooling though! 01:18.000 --> 01:27.000 (In line with more normal weather, PV generation was in normal ranges too, with September at 13kWh per day for example.) 01:27.000 --> 01:43.000 Electricity and gas consumption had risen a little under lockdown, but with both kids back at school full time in September, demand is largely back to normal, at about 5kWh and 4kWh respectively. 01:43.000 --> 01:51.000 Demand didn't dip as much as usual though, this August, since instead of a fortnight away we took a single week UKation in Weymouth. 01:51.000 --> 02:00.000 The Enphase battery and PV did their jobs and there was no electricity imported in our absence, along with no gas burnt as expected! 02:00.000 --> 02:11.000 This reveals true baseline energy draw, with an empty house ticking over, of somewhat under 2kWh per day of gross electricity use, over half being the fridge/freezer. 02:11.000 --> 02:24.000 The shoulder months such as September and March could make good use of an additional 1kWh or 270W of Enphase ACB to improve self consumption and reduce grid flows with their attendant losses. 02:24.000 --> 02:31.000 I hope to simulate that, to see what difference it would make, and trade off against standing losses of the additional unit. 02:31.000 --> 02:40.000 (See the Saving Electricity and Gas 2020 page on Earth.Org.UK for the complete month by month breakdown.) 02:40.000 --> 03:09.000 A new paper, "Providing decent living with minimum energy, a global scenario", suggests "final energy for decent living (DLE)" in 2050 of about 4MWh per person per year, which is not hair shirt stuff, but for example includes "50 liters of clean water supplied per day per person, with 15 liters heated to a comfortable bathing temperature; ... an air temperature of around 20 degrees C throughout the year, irrespective of geography, ... 03:09.000 --> 03:29.000 a computer with access to global ICT networks, ... linked to extensive transport networks providing 5000 to 15000 km/m per person each year via various modes, ... universal healthcare, ... education for everyone between 5 and 19 years old, ..." and so on. 03:29.000 --> 03:48.000 At 16WW the direct energy demand for the 4 of us, ignoring PV generation, is about 2MWh per year electricity and 3MWh per year of gas (higher in colder years). With PV those net out to about zero. 03:48.000 --> 04:00.000 Maybe all our stuff and food and travel and Internet etc does fit within 4MWh per year each. Are we living a sustainable 2050 life in some aspects already? 04:00.000 --> 04:10.000 Lockdown Shopping. Some of that future DLE mobility would likely be used for shopping, the who knows what 2050s will be like. 04:10.000 --> 04:24.000 The shopping experience for customers and retailers has been changing significantly this year. In April's statscast, Sainsbury's CEO said that customers were "coming less frequently and are buying about twice as much when they do come". 04:24.000 --> 04:50.000 Now, (via HL and BBC) Tesco tells a similar story: "customers made fewer trips but bought more on each visit, with the average basket size increasing by 56%" and "Tesco more than doubled delivery capacity to 1.5M slots a week during the first half, including serving 674,000 vulnerable customers." 04:50.000 --> 05:05.000 Sound to Light. In other episodes I've turned data into sounds or pictures, (e.g. graphs). Sonograms, AKA spectrograms, show sounds as pictures. 05:05.000 --> 05:12.000 It's interesting how shuffling data around between our senses can help reveal interesting features! 05:12.000 --> 05:25.000 It turns out that 16WW is in a bit of a bat hotspot. Bats tend to flit around at twilight when we can't see them very well, and make ultrasound that most humans can't hear. 05:25.000 --> 05:30.000 So to better understand bats we transform what they do into a range that we can perceive. 05:30.000 --> 05:53.000 A 'bat detector' will, as a minimum, usually shift the bat echolocation and social calls several tens of kilohertz down into (adult) human audibility. 05:53.000 --> 06:04.000 But these calls can also be shown as plots of amplitude and/or frequency against time, which can help identify bats by species, and how social or aggressive they are feeling. 06:04.000 --> 06:12.000 The pattern of peaks in the amplitude and characteristic streaks in the frequency plot provide many clues! 06:12.000 --> 06:22.000 It is also possible to plot the bats' movement over a map. Really clever bat detectors running on a powerful tablet can do more than one, e.g. plotting bats' species and movements. 06:22.000 --> 06:37.000 Here is a short segment from the edge of the nearby Hogsmill River (in its unglamorous urban concrete channel) where there seem to be two different bat species feeding (roughly first and second halves of the clip): [...] [...] 06:37.000 --> 07:02.000 Here is a minute of minute bats' chat from the Hogsmill just from the frequency-division channel of the Batbox Duet, cleaned up with a 1500 Hz to 7500 Hz band pass filter. 07:03.000 --> 08:04.000 [bats] 08:04.000 --> 08:10.000 All fascinating, and I've only been paying serious attention to these creatures for about a month! 08:10.000 --> 08:18.000 I'm documenting what I see and hear (and visualise) on my Bats Around Our Home page. 08:18.000 --> 08:20.000 Mystery Noises 08:20.000 --> 08:23.000 [...] 08:23.000 --> 08:33.000 Ok, I confess that the first mystery noise is a mystery to me too. I think that I activated the field recorder in my pocket by accident while walking through London. 08:33.000 --> 08:47.000 The second one you may now recognize as a bat, in this case a common pipistrelle I think, as bat-detected from my front window by my desk just on the frequency division (FD,/10) channel. 08:47.000 --> 08:59.000 [bats] 08:59.000 --> 09:05.000 There's more on my Earth Notes Web site at Earth.Org.UK.