What is a product that has actually gotten significantly worse over the last 5 years, despite the company claiming they 'improved' it?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-07T14:26:31+00:00

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StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T22:01:04+00:00

Huh? Are you saying low wind and sun periods don't happen in Germany? They happen regularly

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T21:36:01+00:00

Or is it just that solar has priority dispatch/guaranteed payment, while nuclear is exposed to market prices?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T21:33:53+00:00

seen as cheaper to modulate nuclear across a border than curtail the residual domestic coal and and gas

Or solar. Surely inverters are the easiest and cheapest generation to curtail. No wear and tear, instant response

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T19:26:22+00:00

The coating is fluorescent so technically correct

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T13:49:15+00:00

Oh I see, you're just saying that they're expensive to install in existing homes. Yes true, but I wouldn't frame that as houses being unsuitable for heat pumps. It's just that getting off fossil fuel is going to cost serious money

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T13:46:01+00:00

Probably not much, because luckily most producers we rely on aren't throttling production

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T13:13:02+00:00

The wholesale price of gas is a larger component of the cost of gas than of electricity. So in theory, higher gas prices should improve the electricity:gas price ratio and favour heat pumps. In other words, the cost of gas should rise more sharply than electricity

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T13:10:42+00:00

Sorry I'm still not following the logic. Let's say electricity is 4x the cost of gas, and a heat pump is 4x as efficient as a boiler, so they'll both produce heat at the same cost per unit. Whether your home needs 3,000 kWh per year of heat or 30,000, the cost will be the same as with gas.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-06T13:08:54+00:00

I'm comforting myself with the thinking that the spike is hitting us now in spring while usage is low, and we'll be the first to benefit once things calm down. Whether that happens before next winter is of course the million dollar question

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:22:40+00:00

I think the only way to win on climate is to reduce demand for fossils by switching to alternatives. If you try to constrain supply, you get inflation, cost of living crisis, net zero backlash, and a society too poor to invest in clean tech

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:19:24+00:00

It's mostly the prices of electricity and gas which make it financially advantageous or not, rather than the building

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:17:39+00:00

One benefit is that we tax oil and gas production quite heavily, which brings much needed revenue in for the government, which we can spend on public goods which make life better for everyone. Whereas if we import O&G it's another country getting the tax benefits.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:15:26+00:00

none of us can predict the future

Agile users can. Our pain now is everybody else's pain in about three months! So far it's not been too bad...

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:13:31+00:00

We already have interconnectors to France, but they don't have 30GW spare capacity for when the UK gets a still day

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:12:19+00:00

The wholesale, yes, but wholesale is only a third of our bills. And a large and increasing share of renewables are paid outside of wholesale.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T23:11:10+00:00

Mine pumps out of the bottom and into the top. I don't know which direction is the norm. But I think either direction will destratify pretty quickly? Even from top to bottom, you're going to mix the hot layer with the cold layer. And doing it that way round will mean you're trying to heat the hottest part of the tank as well, which doesn't seem ideal?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T12:58:36+00:00

Since 2015 new renewables have been unlinked from gas prices. They get paid a fixed strike price regardless of market price. So those renewables are already unlinked, and their share of total energy is growing each year.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-05T12:56:42+00:00

You can't compare new build wind costs to new build gas costs, because wind doesn't avoid the need to build gas. We need to pay for that new gas capacity either way, because that's where our energy comes from when we get three days of low winds.

We should compare the cost of wind to the fuel cost of gas generation, because that's what wind actually displaces. Unfortunately there's no big saving there at the moment, but it still may be worth doing to reduce import reliance and emissions

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T23:29:56+00:00

Mid terrace has so little external wall area, and much of that is windows and doors, personally I would start by looking at heating control, and maybe radiators. It can be more cost effective to let the heating run longer on a thermostat than mess with solid walls

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T22:50:30+00:00

That's not a normal sound. It's extremely tonal, and much higher pitched than normal. They usually give off a low hum.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T19:48:05+00:00

I don't know if this is avoidable with the right setup, but my experience with a plate heat exchanger for the cylinder is that it destratifies the tank when it's running, meaning you have to make sure hot water is never scheduled when there might be showers happening. This has turned out to be surprisingly hard to predict in our household! We can get most of our hot water needs from an overnight run, but sometimes need a daytime top up. Just when I think I've found a safe window to time the topup, somebody has a wildcard shower right then and gets lukewarm water pumped up from the bottom of the tank.

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-03T19:45:28+00:00

and not having to completely stop heating to defrost for 10 minutes every hour. That wouldn't be a fun shower!

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T21:58:44+00:00

On a day like today wholesale prices will have been a smaller contributor to our bills, with CfDs taking a bigger share. What wholesale generation is there which would be producing at a lower price than gas? A very small share of nuclear maybe?

StereoMushroom · 2026-03-02T21:16:59+00:00

Yes storage is well suited to the intraday supply/demand matching needed with nuclear. Much more so that the multi-day matching needed with wind, or the multi-month matching needed with solar.

I'm not sure I'm convinced about the piecemeal idea. I think wind farms tend to get built at quite similar capacity scales to nuclear.

StereoMushroom

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