Of course this way of serving content works and so eventually I found that I had watched the of best part of twelve minutes of some 50-something man in branded overalls listing all his grievances with heat pumps. As most of them seemed to be that they’re a bit of a faff to fit, they were easy enough to dismiss, but one fact stuck in my mind. It wasn’t a revelation to me, I knew it already, but the manner in which it was presented caused me to doubt, to worry, to genuinely reconsider whether I should be aiming to install a heat pump. It was the fact that a heat pump will only heat your radiators to 40-45°c. This is a much lower temperature than a regular combi boiler will pump out central heating. So I wondered, what if that means I won’t be able to heat my house in winter? What if I spend all this money doing the right thing only for my family to spend their winters wearing three jumpers round the house because of the input temperature of the fancy new system?
Fortunately, I can experiment. My boiler has a temperature setting, so I set it to 45°c to see what would happen. Whilst the heating stayed on for longer each time it came on, it used less power and maintained a more consistent temperature throughout the house for longer. So what was the drawback? On the video, the heating engineer said the lower temperature means you won’t get the instant response of heating your home when you turn the heating on, and I’m sure you won’t, but that’s what programmable thermostats were invented for and also my experiment would tend to suggest that instant response is part of the problem. With the boiler output set at a higher temperature, the house heats up then cools down quickly without ever getting warm. I live in a 140 year old terraced house, it is double glazed and has some loft insulation, but nothing out of the ordinary, so what made this heating engineer believe that this form of heating will be worse for my house, rather than better (as my experiment showed)?
I’m amazed by the number of pizza/chicken delivery places there are near me. Every week a leaflet for some hitherto unknown purveyor of fast food drops through my letterbox. I can only presume that very few people in my part of London ever do their own cooking. The latest one had the usual offers of increasingly startling quantities of chicken/pizza, but instead of the usual accompanying vat of cola, these came with a free energy drink. Now I’m not an expert, but I don’t think people about to undertake endurance sports are likely to want to consume large amounts of pizza or fried chicken immediately before they start. Also I’m not sure the endurance sport community were the target audience for these leaflets. The point of energy drinks is to provide a large amount of additional energy for high intensity or endurance activities so I really don’t understand why you would want to consume one whilst sitting in your joggers tucking into your bargain bucket. I’m a water, tea or booze kind of guy though so I’m probably not the target market either. Still, I can just about understand drinking a regular fuzzy drink to wash down your fast food, but energy drinks barely function as a drink, there’s not really enough liquid for that.
My mother-in-law lives in a relatively isolated village on the Welsh border, so needs a car to get about. I regularly apprise her of the advances in electric vehicle technology and she always asks the same question: “is there a four wheel drive version?” Of course there are four wheel drive EVs, but they are universally expensive. By contrast she can get a four wheel drive petrol Subaru for relatively little money. I have repeatedly questioned her need for four wheel drive. Years ago I bought a dreaded SUV after being unable to get through flood waters round to her house in a regular height car, but I have never seen evidence of a need for actual four wheel drive. I have pointed to articles that say for country driving the kind of tires you have makes a much greater difference than four wheel drive, but to no avail. The local Subaru dealer is clearly making a killing by convincing pensioners that their well-being, indeed their whole way of life, relies entirely on four wheel drive vehicles.
Throughout the twentieth century, we were wowed with feats that relied on a certain degree of over-engineering: climbing Everest, the space race or Concorde relied on materials and processes that had to operate beyond the extremes that their situations placed them in. Very expensive equipment operating in hostile environments needs overcapacity as a fail-safe usually because someone’s life depends on it. We have taken this necessity from extremes to simply be good engineering sense and ‘just to be on the safe side’ we overpower our central heating, we drive around cities in massive off-road vehicles, we buy extra food that we then throw away. We do it because we are told to, the supposed experts that we rely on to advise us about our heating or our vehicle choice have never questioned this orthodoxy of overcapacity because it has never failed them (and most likely allows them to charge more). No one bothers to find out what the sensible capacity is, so we end up wasting masses of energy and material just to avoid the effort of finding out.
Like so many things our society currently defaults to, this orthodoxy of overcapacity needs to be challenged.
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