gas

Unblogged May

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Just a short one this month – as mentioned yesterday, I’m still in my recovery, and my typing is slow and not particularly accurate.

What we didn’t do in May

I did my usual look ahead to the start of the month on the 1st, listing the things we expected to do. Alas, my injuries meant that I never made it to the Everything Electric show in Harrogate, or the gig that I mentioned. That was a Professor Elemental gig in Leeds, being supported by fellow ‘chap hop’ artists Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer and Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq. Ironically, this is the second Professor Elemental gig we’ve missed this year, as we were supposed to see him at Sci-Fi Weekender in March before that got cancelled.

Christine also never made it to London, as she stayed back to help me, and we’re not at UKGE this weekend. Oh well.

Does bad luck come in threes?

There’s a saying that bad luck comes in threes. If we take my injuries as one, then number two would be that we had a gas leak at home last week, and number three would be that we got a flat tyre on our car on Friday.

The gas leak was easily solved – we rang the National Gas Leak Emergency Number, and an engineer from our local gas distribution network was over within the hour. It was a minor leak – the pipe connecting our meter to the inlet pipe had come very slightly loose. Once tightened, it was fine. And as the leak was on the network side of the meter, we would not have been charged for the excess gas. It’s probably a good thing we no longer have a gas cooker, as that would have ignited the leaking gas and could have caused a major explosion. As it is, we only need gas for our central heating and hot water, and in the long term, we’ll replace our boiler with an electric heat pump so that we can come off the gas grid all together.

As for the flat tyre, we used our breakdown cover to get a recovery truck to bring the car home (seeing as it was after 7pm on a Friday and we weren’t too far from home), and we have a technician coming to us to replace it today. Like the gas leak, easily fixed, but a bit annoying. Let’s hope that I don’t have any more bad luck, eh?

The Wolverhampton Taxi Problem

Back in 2015, I wrote a (comparatively) lengthy blog post about taxis registered in the borough of Rossendale in Lancashire, but operating elsewhere, and the issues this causes. A decade on, and it seems like the issue has shifted to Wolverhampton: there’s a lengthy piece on Mobility Matters about it. Almost 30,000 private hire vehicles are registered in Wolverhampton, which would mean one taxi for every ten residents, against a national average of 3 to every 1000. Of course, they’re not all operating there, and it’s reckoned that around a third of those operate in Greater Manchester. A hat tip to London Reconnections for the link.

Nesting

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A photo of our Nest thermostat with the heating set to 19 C

Along with our new boiler, we also got a new thermostat – a Nest Learning Thermostat. I’d actually bought it in January, in the hope that it could be fitted to our existing 1970s central heating system. With both Christine and I being on maternity and paternity leave respectively, we were at home most of the day and so the heating was on almost constantly – I hoped that a better thermostat would cut the amount of energy required. Alas, the fitter who came to install it told us that our system was too old – he could fit it, but it would only power either the hot water or the heating, and not both at the same time.

Now that we have a more modern boiler, we could also make use of the new thermostat.

The previous thermostat also dated from the 1970s and was a basic model that, theoretically, would heat the house until it reached the set temperature and stop. But I’m convinced that it didn’t do the latter – the heating would still be on even when it was utterly roasting. With such an old system, the fault could have been in any one of several places. Either way, it’s not an issue now.

Whereas the old thermostat was upstairs, we’ve fitted the Nest in the dining room. You can install it using the standard thermostat cables to your boiler, or there’s a micro-USB socket and an AC adaptor included. We decided to go for the latter, in case we want to move it somewhere else. It’s quite easy to fit to the wall and the backplate even includes a spirit level to help you align it correctly.

The Nest offers several useful features:

  • It learns how long your heating system takes to warm up. So if you want the house to be warm by 7:30am, you tell it that, rather than telling it to come on at 7am in the hope that your house will be warm enough by then.
  • You can tell the thermostat that you are away, allowing it to maintain the house at a cooler temperature, thus saving energy.
  • Your thermostat can be managed using official apps for smartphones or tablets, or on the web.
  • It has a motion detector, so the display turns off when no-one is about. It can also turn your heating down if it detects no motion in the house for some time.
  • Integration with IFTTT and other smart home technologies.

Whilst it’s been a warm couple of weeks, thanks to the Nest our heating has only needed to be on for an average of 30 minutes per day. I’m hoping that it will save on our energy bills – my mother-in-law has one, and she credits hers for halving her gas bill.

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