Pretty sure it doesn’t make much sense today. £100 a year just to have a connection and that is before you even use it for anything.

Heat pumps are far more efficient so even before the electricity tax cut its cheaper to run. Then the savings on having a gas connection too are huge.

And for steak fans who think gas is necessary, charcoal/wood is better. £100 a year would buy a massive gas canister for cooking over, or a massive delivery of firewood.

CAN be very expensive. If you are doing it with a car radiator and a hose pipe it costs very little and there isn’t even a heat pump involved.

You can take it up a step by using a heat pump of course. Which you can also do fairly cheaply if you are willing to modify a portable AC unit or tbh anything else with a heat pump in it. All you need to do is water cool the hot side of the heat pump and send that water through your ground loop.

Depends how much you want out of it. Are you heating and cooling the entire house year round along with providing hot water. Or are you just taking a few degrees off the peak summer temperature in a room or two?

Depends what you compare it to really. Its better than ICE cars, but electric bike, bus or train is even better.

I cycle to work and that is 8km each way. Takes about 20-25 mins depending on how much I have to wait for car traffic and if I can filter past them.

People should stop doing that

Yeah, plenty of us like to joke about stuff regardless of how rich the victim was.

Bricks are also fireproof and yet we still have house fires in the UK. Even if your walls don’t burn, things like furniture, garden plants, trees, wood fences all burn.

Wouldn’t cold water get warm very quickly? I have thought of ice though. If you wrapped it up enough so that it takes up heat fairly slowly.

Yeah to fully charge for longer drives you kinda need the roof of your house. I know a few people who drive EVs fully charge on solar like that.

I don’t have a car so no need myself and ebike restrictions are so extreme in the UK that I don’t see the point for myself. 250w and 15.5mph limit, I can cycle pretty much that fast anyway. 13mph is the AVERAGE speed I go to work and that includes stopping for cars and lights. So potentially a road legal ebike would just be a dead weight motor to pedal against most of the time.

A spare wheel with a motor on it that I can swap between to convert it into an ebike for long distance rides could be cool. But ebike throttles are also not road legal. Must be pedal assistance only, and that seems like it might be quite a lot to convert it each time I switch. Maybe I need to talk my partner into getting an ebike that we could both use…

UK is doing that now. My bills going to drop to under £75/month at this rate, with a heat pump and I had the gas connection removed years ago.

I kinda wonder what that means for the gas network longer term as more people disconnect from it. They still need to maintain the same pipes under the road and I won’t be paying for it, but some of my neighbours still do. Will their fee to maintain it have to go up at some point?

Other than the extra weight, larger battery doesn’t matter.

If you had a 500MWh battery and it takes half a year to charge it doesn’t matter for the solar panel if you only actually use 5kWh a day.

Just looked it up, sounds like Americans drive way more. In the UK I cycle around as much as the average lazy fuck person drives.

Stats for typical driving distances are comically low. Quite a lot of people would drive distances below 1km.

Who is emptying an entire battery every day though? For low distance usage it might not be too bad.

Wouldn’t it depend how much you drive though? I am kinda curious what sort of distance/day it could get. Also lighter cars might help.

Solar tuktuk?

Oh we talking about outdoor knives? Then yeah morakniv is good for the budget end and you don’t really need to spend more unless you are just showing off

20 is one thing, sounds like those knives are a lot more though. Getting the impression £20 or so is a pretty good price point for a knife.

So far I have sharpened a few times using the base of a mug. Its not a great surface to use but I have a few shitty novelty mugs no one is going to use so it works.

Got some clay in the garden, almost tempting to form it into a tile and use that as a sharpening stone. But stone probably lasts longer.

So unless fertiliser results in more than 30x yield, the cow is worse than eating the food directly.

Only thing is if its grass fed then its food humans can’t eat. But grain or soy fed cattle? We could eat that! And I can’t imagine many people are using fertiliser to grow grass. Well, except people into lawns.

Are energy costs soaring? They just dropped VAT on electricity, my bill is dropping quite a bit.

I’ll take solar panels though. Want to see what kind of pricing they come in at. Could even stick some on top of my heat pump.

Think I will stick with my current knives then. Around £20 or so for the small ones, maybe twice as much for the big one.

Do need to sharpen them at some point. Probably could do with a decent sharpening stone too. Have thought of just smoothing a stone tile/brick and using that as one.