Is it worth getting a solar panel?

A recent commenter asked this on an old post about installing my solar panel, and I spent a few minutes writing an answer. Rather than keep it buried in a comments thread on a post from years ago, I thought I would copy it here again.

Alison – my most recent solar post is here.

My solar panel generates around £150-worth a year of heat, and so will probably take around 30 years to pay for itself.

New deals are now available that make photovoltaic solar panels, which generate electricity, a more financially viable option.

Whether solar hot water is right for you depends on several factors, including planning to be living in your house for several decades, having a roof that points in the right direction (south!), and having the right kind of boiler – not a condensing boiler that provides hot water on demand, but a system that includes a hot water tank.

The Coalition government is preparing a Green New Deal that will provide advice and finance for greening your house, so it might be worth waiting until the details of that become clearer before making any decisions.

If you live in Notts or Derbyshire and you’d like to talk to someone about solar hot water, get someone to look over your house and check suitability, and get referrals to local people who can install them, give Sungain / Notts Energy Partnership a call on 0115 985 9057.

Wedding gallery

If people are adding pics from our wedding to Flickr, please could you tag them “pjwajf” ?

That way they can all be brought together in galleries like this one:

[flickr-gallery mode=”search” tags=”pjwajf”]

(I’m testing a new plugin – I hope as more photos crop up, the gallery will get bigger, but I don’t know if that’s the case.)

My wedding, yesterday

So, back home. The cards are open, the gifts unwrapped and the contents logged. All bills have been paid ((including the beer bill from Nottingham Brewery who hadn’t warned me I had to pay in cash when I collected the polypins, and who just said – oh, take the beer and drop the payment in the next time you are passing)). All guests have left now and the quiet time alone begins.

And married life began with thinking a) why is the sun shining today and not yesterday? and b) Ooh, the sun’s shining – quick, get the laundry on.

My trusty Zoom H2 was there, sitting in the ceremony room discretely on the mantelpiece of the massive fireplace in front of which we got married yesterday at 1pm, making a recording of proceedings.

I don’t think I will be sharing with the world a full copy of the day, although I can probably make a CD for anyone who particularly wants it.

But I did just want to share the following second or so.

This is the noise my darling husband made as he was slipping my wedding ring onto my finger.

[display_podcast]

Harrumph!

I’ll put a bit of explanation in the comments.

Tweets on 2010-10-09

  • @willhowells I may have drunk some of those pints with him, but my records are not that detailed. in reply to willhowells #
  • @rfenwick why, thank you. Sorry you were left out but times is hard and places is limited. in reply to rfenwick #
  • @rfenwick srsly you meant our wedding? Assumed you meant some other one. in reply to rfenwick #
  • *pathetic cough* *sniffle*. bleurgh. Ouch. *rusty arpeggio to get cobwebs off* *cough* *cough #
  • RT @Documentally: RT @CathleenRitt: When the Chilean miners get out & learn that they have #newTwitter they'll want to go back underground. #
  • Humming Ilkley Moor. #
  • Thunder and lightning have knocked the lights out and I can't see which is Cockburns and which is Croft. Still, any port in a storm, eh? #
  • Not so much "polishing" my dress shoes – more like "dusting" #
  • @willhowells worn down after years of use? in reply to willhowells #
  • Resigning self to thought I may not be able to read all of Twitter today. Thanks for all the good wishes! #

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Tweets on 2010-10-08

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Aargh, car.

Yet again, the car has weird faults. The dashboard stopped working, which meant not knowing how fast I was going at any given time. The ignition got ropey, wouldn’t always start, and sometimes stalled again as soon as started up. And the key has been a pain for months – you never know whether it will lock or not, and once it has locked, you never know whether it will unlock or whether you will be climbing over the passenger seat after using the emergency key.

The car does have a “lifetime warranty” which is maintained by having an expensive annual dealer service. Last year that in itself cost almost as much as the value of the car, and the latest chunk of things going wrong – apparently it needs a new key and sensors aplenty to make it work again – will easily take me over what WEBUYANYCAR, for example, would pay for it.

So, they’re not doing the work, I’m living with the unreliability, and starting to turn my thoughts to my next car. Boo hiss.

Buying the car last time was a pain. I know nothing about cars, and my criteria are a bit weird.

I feel guilty for having a car at all. City living shouldn’t need one. The buses here are excellent. But having one does make it a great deal easier to do my campaign work, including shifting leaflets about, getting to delivery places and to the secret print cave, which barely has a bus service at all. If I didn’t have a car, a lot of people around me would have to make adjustments.

Last time, at the last minute, I rejected a much smaller car on seeing the boot and thinking, “I couldn’t fit our camping kit in there.” I think this time, I will be more rigourous with myself: we only camp rarely. Most of the work of the car will be small, planet destroying city hops.

What I need:

a nice car
a tiny eco car
with a nippy acceleration
strong, instant brakes
fabulous cockpit experience
– mp3 / cd player
– radio tuning stick on driving wheel
– comfortable seats
Majorly more reliable than the bloody Renault Mégane!

Tweets on 2010-10-07

  • Who’s Suing Whom In The Telecoms Trade? http://bit.ly/anWMUR #
  • @hertsad that's itneresting: he's bringing one to Nottingham too! in reply to hertsad #
  • At Take Back Parliament meeting. (@ The Roebuck Inn) http://4sq.com/af1iAf #
  • This cider is lovely. Marcle Hill. Very smooth. Can't be too strong – is barely touching the sides. #
  • Hmmm. These stairs seem more complicated than usual. #
  • Predictive text says I'm yankepede. Which is politer than I was aiming for. #
  • City is full of lots of very loud baby-undergrads wearing "pub golf" t shirts. #
  • @brightcecilia @imslp @rfenwick I thought it was spam and garlic? in reply to brightcecilia #

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Pudding club: blueberry meringues and pink grapefruit jelly

Flying visit to say this week’s food was based on these two recipes: blueberry cream filled meringues and pink grapefruit jellies.

Some thoughts: meringues. I need more practice. I can get them to soft peak stage no problem, but don’t think I’ve ever actually got to stiff peaks. The problem used to be not reading recipes and tipping the sugar into the egg whites from the start, rather than whipping them and then gradually adding sugar. But even doing that, and beating the life out of them, I can’t get them to firm peaks.

I “lurided up” the meringues with green food colouring rather than the pink in the recipe (to go with raspberries) or blue (to go with blueberries) because I went shopping late in the day and the co-op only had red or green.

We have a blueberry bush in a pot in the garden, and this recipe used up what will likely be the last of the crop this year. Our friends have not had any blueberries off their’s as they got chickens this year, and watching the chickens climb into the pot and flap around to steal blueberries off the bush proved so hilarious they’d rather do that than get enough chicken wire to safeguard the harvest.

This recipe is a fantastically effective way of using the limited amount of blueberries you get off one bush – less than three ounces, probably 10 blueberries per person, whizzed up to a purée was definitely enough to get a good taste of blueberries in meringues for all four-point-five of us eating tonight.

The pink grapefruit jellies – slightly less successful. They didn’t set properly. I made a pint of grapefruit juice into jelly with a one-pint sachet, chilled for two days, but it was nearly liquid when served. Did the gelatine not stir in properly? Does it actually matter that the ground cow-hoof is actually, ahem ahem, a number of years beyond its BBE?

The vanilla cream really made it – even if made with cheapskate flavouring rather than real pods or essence. One 300ml pot of whipping cream, whipped, did the blueberry cream fillings for four pairs of meringues, and splodges of vanilla flavoured cream for the jelly.

The pudding club posts can now all be found on the pudding club tag.