EU energy efficiency regulations

Dear Olly, totally right. Let me to confirm that if we start to looks better into ingredients we will discover Palm oil almost everywhere oil fat is necessary, it is often used because is cheap and tasteless in respect to other cheap vegetable oils. Consider also that it is not the worst, often isn't specified the origin of fat used... But are prices of food so considerably cheap? Not so...

Dears, as we now in padded cell, may I add that a lot of us agree on a more conscious approach at energy consumption we need to live (in a wide concept that include food and water waste) but please, don't looks into the quiescent warmup current of hi-fi gears or other domestic electrical devices, these are alredy in EU sorted out and their efficiency is acceptable.

Looks at naim_nymph graph and outspoken to politicians where they need to drive their pencil!

It would be interesting to know the split between household consumption and business consumption.

Using the above figures, if we all immediately switched off our hifi systems and never turned them on again we'd have a grand saving of ... 3%.  Not much really.  Make a 4% reduction in heating and hot water energy usage and you've already exceeded my theorised 100% reduction on consumer electronics.

Looking more broadly, if the energy split is heavily weighted towards businesses using more energy then it would make sense to focus there first.  But then we're up against the usual problem of big business being politically influential (unions etc), hence the individual gets hit.

We should ask Naim to add an extra power input into all their power supplies.  This could be fed from the output of a bicycle on a turbo trainer.  A neat side effect of this is that we'd see a fantastic health drive in all Naim's R&D staff although we might have to change up a gear and peddle harder on the bike during louder passages.

We could then ask Trek to design us an ultra low noise floor bike for this purpose.

Thanks a lot Jon.

Now I have a very bad headache.

I'm not sure how much of that 3% figure for consumer electronics actually accounts for home audio use, i would think most would be televisions [especially big plasma screens], but the point i made was why worry about squeezing a tiny saving from a little 3%, while space and water heating account for a massive 84%, and if this could be made, say 10% more efficient with the benefit of better more modern technology, more insulation and careful usage the saving would be over 8%.

But all this is wishful thinking, the facts remain that ever since the Electric utilities [of the UK] were privatised [around 1990] the building trade has simultaneously constructed poorer quality housing, a deliberate ploy to cause more consumption for electrical power as to make bigger greedy profits, and the incentive to continue constructing poorer quality new house builds which will require more power so the arrangement here is consistent of capitalist thinking, it's the only way the buggers know how.

Debs

On the upside, global warming should quickly start to eat into the 60% of energy that is spent on space heating.

Union members are individuals too, over 6 million of them in the UK, mostly good hard working individuals with families to support, and can't blame them for the mess that privatisation has caused, not many unionists wanted it or purchased shares. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

Also, union membership has been on a downhill trend over the past 35 years, it's currently less than 7 million and the last time is was that low was before WWII.

This means it's influence on politics is limited, it was under the New Labour government who often behaved very Tory, and even more so now under the Condems.

Debs

Finally - something I can comment on with authority!

The heating/hot water debate is a bit more complex than I've seen presented here as it's predominantly met through gas/oil at present for most homes. Electricity is a far more valuable and expensive fuel in many ways - not least from conversion efficiencies - and is only now starting to be used for heating at a wider scale through the use of heat pumps.

Having measured the electrical energy and DHW use profiles of a number of social and non-social houses a few years ago, I provided the aggregates of these profiles as a series of downloadable Excel files from the International Energy Agency website for the Annex 42 project I was involved in. These can be found at:

http://www.iea-annex54.org/annex42/pubs.html

The upshot is that the average UK household uses between 3,000 to 4,000 kWh of electricity every year i.e. mostly excluding heating but including some DHW in the form of electric showers or immersion heaters. Some larger houses will use up to 10,000 kWh/a.

My Uniti 2 has a quiescent power rating of 35W, which is about 10% of my overnight load (and 20% of the overnight load of a typical house) and will account for 35 * 8760 = 306.6 kWh per annum if I never turn it on to listen to it. This is around 10% of the typical annual electrical energy use of a house, and if we could save that across the whole of the EU we would save about €120Bn/a.

In my current research, I am looking at trying to reduce the electrical energy use of the EU by up to 5% through improving the energy consumption of Heating, Ventilation and Air conditioning equipment in non-domestic buildings. These savings are truly significant in terms of electrical supply capacity, supply network infrastructure and future security of supply (including whether we need to build more nuclear power plants or wind turbines).

So my final thought is that, if I can reduce my electrical energy use by 5 - 10% by Naim incorporating a decent design to their amplifiers stand-by then I would very much like to have that option. To put it another way, my Naim Uniti 2 uses more electrical energy per year than any other single electrical household item I own.

In the wider world I do not see how Naim will be able to justify using a minimum of 35W continuously in one piece of equipment for much longer.

Good post Penarth Blues.

But let me to know, from thermodynamically point of view the heat dissipated by the Naim (and any other electrical device) has to be replaced by conventional heating system when switched off. Let consider this true only for the months in which heating system is on at least.

If you need to doing correct balancing on large scale you have to valuate also this parassite benefit.

You will see numbers reduced by quantities.

I'm open to comments, ciao, Maurizio

In theory you are correct, in practice the 35W from a Naim piece of equipment makes little difference to the heating needs of a room unless you are in a Passivhaus - in which case it could become a problem as it's not controllable.

Most radiators in a normal sitting room (where most Naim kit resides I'd guess) will be above 1kW in size - some up to 4kW. So when heating is required the output from the Naim will be dwarfed by the radiators contributions.

Essentially you are looking at the heating gained from a 40W tungsten light bulb and this is of little or no value to the normal heating of a room in practice, as its effects will be dwarfed by the ventilation loads, and when the normal heating system comes on its thermostat is too insensitive to take advantage of the 35W of equipment heat gains.

Where the equipment standby loads start to get up to around 150 to 200W (for some of the Naim systems people have on here) then this will start to be noticeable (it's the equivalent of the heat output from 2 people). For modern well-insulated homes this will in fact be a problem for large parts of the year as it will lead to overheating in parts of the non-heating periods. We are seeing this problem already rearing its head, as residential air-conditioning is the largest growth area in AC systems across Europe, as we start to heavily insulate our newer homes.

So not only are you using electricity you don't need to be using, but you may end up having to install and use AC systems to make your house comfortable.

So, the bottom line for me is that the unnecessary use of energy WHEN NOT PROVIDING A SERVICE makes no sense IF it can be avoided.

Despite my work and knowing what I do I still consume more electricity than the average because I want my Naim available to me when I wish to listen to it. I also have far too many TV's, laptops, fridges and freezers which could all be rationalised and made more efficient.

I do however try and buy the most efficient appliances I can when I renew them, so have hope that the new EU laws will make my energy use more efficient over time :-)

I agree Penarth Blues.
Just for clarify I'm not a waster... I live in pretty efficient bioclimatic greenhouse (less than 29 kWh/m^2 per year) with photovoltaic and so on...
I agree that any device that use (better waste) energy without proving a service has to be considered at least illogical.
But, as you also wrote, the heat dissipated by modest Naim equipments (leave aside any 3-way active system with NAP 500 ) is minimal in a large footprint calculation for domestic houses and even if we would consider that warm-up and usage, the heat is not lost outside the house; its contribution, even minimal, is ennobled to as parasite benefit.
My humble personal opinion is that the laws must be now oriented on much larger energy usage (in industries of any level) and not to force renew (and redesign) of domestic equipments.
We have already done this in EU by labelling the energy consumption of any electrical device so we can choose for the right one when we will need to change (fridge or so on).
The wrong is to oblige a new design, because any amplifier in class A/B suffer of thermal drift problem that can be mitigated only by a steady state heating working condition (warm-up is very helpful in this).
Recently I have audited some new amplifier in class D that should not suffer too much on thermal drift problem. As I have ESL, it simply clipping, no good for SQ.
I would generally accept that some devices need to use a small amount of energy for working properly.
I would consider that a class A/B amplifier works as an hair dryer or a toaster (*), you can't get any improvement because if you need heat you must convert it by Joule heating and this is also the most efficient way to transform electrical energy in heat energy.
I agree that electrical energy is far to be green and we must use carefully (tax and prices are there for push our complain on that), but a general approach sometime have undesirable side effects.
I feel sometimes this rules push a renew of devices non because they need improvements but because this force the economy to propose innovation (non really so in our case) and stimulate selling. Usually at higher price (on which the sistem get flawlessly 20% of vat).

(*) 

I like to go on the topic but maybe this is not the correct forum.

So, let go to back to music! Thank you for your comments and any other you would add anyway.

On the general topic of heating and wasted heat in the home , I think this BBC article is interesting as a side-light.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12606943

I am not sure why central heating has become so popular, but it should be discouraged in my view.

ATB from George

Heating is an interesting topic in terms of its effects on our health. I grew up in a cold home but much prefer being warm in my current energy thirsty old house. My problem is that despite knowing too much about energy use in buildings and the health impacts I'm still unsure what the best thing to do is.

My belief is that the biggest problem with heating and health is mould growth and its effects on health; closely followed by the effects of being cold on circulation and attendant problems.

The mould issue is particularly acute in older homes that have had double glazing put in and sealed up a lot of draughts, but have not addressed the insulation of the walls. In this case warming the house up will encourage the evaporation of water into the air. This water would at one time have preferentially condensed out on the single glazed windows or been taken up the chimneys by open fires. However double glazing, or better, can mean that the wall room surfaces now become colder than the windows - leading to water condensing out on the walls, usually behind wallpaper. This leads to mould growth in these areas, which again is encouraged by warmer temperatures.

The flip side is that cold temperatures are not good for older people and kids in terms of health.

The best solution for all buildings (new and old) is to ensure good ventilation to remove excess moisture before it has a chance to condense in the house - either on clothing, soft furnishings or on the building fabric itself. So you should always have (and use!) extract ventilation in bathrooms and kitchens which extracts TO OUTSIDE (many cooker hoods just recirculate the moisture back into the kitchen which is not good).

I heat my whole house simply because warm air rises and takes water with it, so cold rooms would become damp and musty where the air cools down and dumps moisture. This obviously takes energy but makes the house fresher as the warm air escapes through ventilation up the chimneys in most rooms and takes the moisture with it.

As I note though, it is possible to keep the whole house cool and thus less moisture gets into the air. It's nice to have the money to have the choice - I appreciate not everyone does.

Dear Penarth,

By now there is no harm in taking this a little off topic.

I grew up till the age of nineteen in two farm houses near the Worcestershire border in Herefordshire.

The first was the Pool Farm Acton Beauchamp, and the farm actually had hedges that constituted the county border, and two acres in Worcestershire, which is why the address was Acton Beauchamp [Worcestershire] rather than Evesbatch [in Herefordshire]. A strange eighteenth century quirk of addressing and a political feud led to that!

But the Pool Fam House was in part pre-1066. The walls were about four foot thick at the bottom in the old part, and the new part was early eighteenth century Georgian. three bricks thick with a good cellar.

It was a desperately cold house where no attempt at heating would have worked. It was so cold we did bother with heating except an open fire in the front room and a paraffin heater in the bathroom whilst in the bath!

You did not have to leave the window open to get a healthy draft. Oak frames with iron opening sections in the casements. I am glad to say that the frames have been renewed in the last year, but the iron parts have been replaced with the same style. Still impossible to heat. But no mould!

Then came Evesbatch Farm, which house was eighteenth and nineteenth century. Seven bedrooms, three font rooms, and so on. Even more impossible to heat so we did not. Just an open fire in the small front room. The large rooms were left to their own natural temperature in the winter, but were very pleasant in the summer.

So I have learned from a young age to merely heat the vicinity that you are in, and wear woollens in the winter!

I find it stifling to be in a central heated house in the winter, and my current temperature here is 14 degrees, and the bathroom window [behind two closed doors] is open. When I go to bed [even in the coldest temperatures, I open the doors so as to keep it nice and fresh!

I guess that most people would rather not be my guest in the winter months!

ATB from George

Evening George

Sounds idyllic! I spent a number of blissful Summers when I was younger helping my Uncle with the farm at Ruckley Hall in Acton Burnell, Shropshire. The joys of an Aga and a constantly warm kitchen were in direct contrast to the unheated bedrooms in the Winter, but you dressed accordingly. I think there is a body of work somewhere which shows that we sleep best in a temperature of about 13°C and I'd agree that being in a cool room with a warm bed leads to the best nights sleep generally.

If you are used to those temperatures then you know how to manage your environment to keep yourself comfortable. I'd hazard a guess you have a couple of decent winged armchairs facing the fireplace to provide a nice heat trap. When heating the air is not possible then radiant heating from a nice warm fire directly to the place or person required is the only other solution that will work.

Comfort is relatively individual and there are a wide range of generally acceptable temperatures we are prepared to accept provided we have control over the heating (or cooling!) if we need it.

I am sure that the ever increasing cost of energy will gradually reduce the temperatures we find acceptable and it may even prove to be more healthy for us all but unfortunately the widespread use of open fires or even woodburners will just cause problems in the dense urban areas so I am not sure where our healthy high temperature radiant sources will be in the future.

I think your guests will probably be quite happy with your house provided they are warned in advance and have a nice warm bed to get into!

The Pool Farm about 1966 when I was four. The hop buildings [top left with unique in the whole World, now, brick built bottle top chimneys, and preserved as Grade One Listed] joined onto the house and the part with the massive chimney is in the newer part, and the old part is the much lower stone-built section that itself joined onto stables to the right. That was stone built and black and white. It was a dairy farm in those days ...

You can imagine that growing up in those conditions was a marvellous "free-range" childhood.

ATB from George

I'm starting to sound like an old bugger now but as I'm only a couple of years older than you it sounds like we had very similar freedoms in our childhoods.

Mine was spent between my extended family in Shropshire and my home in Penarth. Shropshire was Grinshill Hill, Wem, Acton Burnell, The Three Tuns in Bishops Castle, Air rifles, underage driving and a generally idyllic rural lifestyle. Penarth was faded gentry, discovering the joys and perils of Cardiff and the Docks, the lifelong nightmare that is being a Cardiff City supporter, and the beauty of the West Wales coastline.

Wouldn't change a thing - but I'd have liked to be able to afford a Statement amplifier :-)

I could not possibly comment on under age driving, but let us just say that I was fully able to master a stock lorry as a sixteen year old! I drove the combine from the age of thirteen though not on the road of course ...

I have a good Agricultural College friend to this day who lives out on the A5 towards Oswestry from Shrewsbury at Ford, and I went to Walford Farm College at Baschurch between 1981 and '84. I knew quite a lot of Shropshire at that time.

I worked my sandwich year at Church Pulverbach near Dorrington just south of Shrewsbury, milking cows.

My friend is my age and still milks about 120 cows. He has grown up children himself now, but he was my first visitor after I broke my leg in a cycle crash two and half years ago. I think you keep friends made at a young age for all your life!

But I cannot grow to like Worcester like I like Hereford.

In fact my other homeland is Norway, as my mother was Norwegian. Between Herefordshire and visiting my grandparents in Norway, I had the most wonderful childhood, though it went a bit wrong when my parents split in 1970. Very sad period then came along.

ATB from George

gosh PB and GJ ! I like the sense of imagination you both obviously have. When I was growing up from a young age I lived in a village public house. Having both parents busy helping people drinking left me with a lot of time on my own and late nights to read ,draw and play.  As such I am quite happy in my own company and can be very productive With my time, but - I have never had children.

I decided long ago that I did not want to aspire for a big bucks paying job of some sort , and after missing out on top apprentice opportunities I knew that I would not want to bring up children as I wouldn't have had the money for it.

This brings it back to topic maybe...   Soo many people think it is their birth right privilege to have children and billions die from starvation, sold for slavery and what hell have you ! Overpopulation is the biggest draw on resources and should be regulated

I was born and lived in the North East until I went to University and got HMG to pay me to fly.

We moved home when I was 8 and both houses were heated by a single coal fire plus the "waste" heat from kitchen cooking. Hot water was provided by a boiler behind the coal fire and convected to a hot water storage tank in the loft. None of the bedrooms were heated.

Mrs D was born and brought up in London and lived in very similar conditions.

AFAICT, the conditions we both experienced were typical of the late 40's and early 50's. Uninsulated, brick-built houses, with limited heating. We wrapped up.

But times have changed. Its called progress. We had a record player and 78's, but no television.

We could live in caves, but it wouldn't make a h'peth of difference unless the rest of the world agreed to do likewise. And even then, somebody would whinge that we should put the fire out every night so as not to waste wood, even though we know it will be a real bu**er of a job to re-light it in the morning……….

Cheers

Don

Am I the only one that can see the true cause of global warming, resource shortages, lack of food/water/energy/land? Just too many damn people!! We're told to save and recycle and stop using so much, but all the time there's more humans popping out to add their own mouths to the demand. Unless something is done about the earths spiralling population then there's no hope for the future anyway; everything is just going to get gobbled up no matter what we do.

Don't worry. Population growth runs in cycles and a crash for humans is inevitable .

you lot were lucky,

we used to DREAM about living in a palace like you had.

We had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife...

Total ill informed rubbish

Building regs for insulation, energy consumption and sound reduction are tighter than they have ever been

which is why new houses are so expensive