Member postings for pgk pgk

You have to love statistics. Best stats i can find and guesstimate from give a mid-50's population around 53million a police force of 72,000 and crime figures of 500,000/year. Current population of 66mill, 122,000 police and 5.5million crimes. Interestingly back then one actually saw police out and about. Real crime figures now are likely way higher than 5.5 mill 'cos most people don't bother reporting them - unless it's something important like an insult on facebook. In the 50's car ownership was less than 15% of households but most folk now ate sliced bread. Now 60% households have at least one car.

From this we can assume that 15million people are responsible for 5million crimes from consuming too much bread and having too many cars and 50,000 police can't catch them.

pgk

One of the bigger issues was the washing machine. It's location was such that any attempt to create a big enough air-gap for water supply to it met criticism and condemnation. I ended up with commercial washers that cost more per month to lease than I'd paid outright to own our own domestic ones to get something that complied with cat5 back-flow regs. The silliest of the situations was our dental tub-table where the taps didn't comply, several plumbers failed to source new ones that might and the inspectors insisted that such existed but wouldn't tell us where to get them because that might suggest a lack of impartiality on their part! Nor would they allow me to fit in-line back-flow protectors on the grounds that if they had pre-existed then everything would have been OK but I wasn't allowed to retro-fit.

In the end I got a plumber relative to come down and fit in-line backflow further back in the piping. make it look old and explained to inspectors that i hadn't known it had been there until a lucky discovery......

As to ordinary houses.. people wash babies bums in sinks, their own in baths with rubber push on showers, veggies from the garden etc (and as above with all sorts of substances on-board)...more potential for contamination in many cases than our careful handling of clinical material and clinical waste.

If you have the relatively simple chinese holders I have then it may just be easier to make some extras to fit wider and other tooling

Fisrly I have to say that i agree with the unpleasantness of dog waste on streets and parks and the commonsense and health utility of worming pets but I do get on my high-horse when news media and people overblow the human health risks. The actual incidence of visceral larval migrans diagnosed Enland and Wales is very low. While it can afect brains and other organs the only paperwok on-line I could find currently is for the more? common ocular form here

This shows about 12 cases per year out of our 60mill population and indeed mostly in adults. A previous study i found back in the 80's on neurological cases was around 6-7. I did some back-of-fag-packet sums on it back then and if anything the risks of going to the vet to buy the worm tablets from the viewpoint of motor accidents and other hazards is actually higher (yes I realise if folk didn't go buy the tablets then human incidence would be higher )

I had a long discussion with my local health authority and environmental health folk while I was in Practice and the subject of dog faeces was media highlighted... they did claim to carry out regular checks on dog worm burdens in parks and playgrounds and finally reluctantly conceded they had never turned up viable infective material in the soil (which is not the same as saying it's not there).

I'm all for prevention and monitoring but I do get angry when stuff is blown out of proportion and magnified by social media. the classic 'If we only prevent one case' argument when there could be hugely greater benefits to mankind with resources elsewhere.

The same type of nonsense happens with the UK approach to water backflow prevention. Businesses have to comply with all sorts of legislation but there's no legislation covering households with babies in nappies, geriatrics at home or the many folk on home immunosupprresive drugs, antibiotics and chemo - which in total blows away the numbers in a few clinics. At the same time they wouldn't allow a simple mains ingress backflow solution as used e.g Australia. I'd hate to guess what proportion of domestic houses Uk still have an open water tank in the loft...

Mike,

You get the concentrated farm waste run-off. Folk in London get several cycles of contraceptive tablet excretion to adapt to...

One of the benefits of rural Wales is abundant rain (usually in excess!). Most folk around here have private boreholes as do I and our own reed-bed sewage system. No fees for water until the pressure vessel or pump goes down. It still needs some care to avoid pulling too much out and draining the system faster than it can flow in.

Our system of government promotes 'short-termism' - finagling finances for popularty and vanity projects rarely thinking ahead more than 1-2 terms of office. I agree that basic resources should be public but then the issue is the battle between unions and goverment - rarely to do with genuine worker rights as much as another layer of career politicians or foreign interference.

Democracy doesn't work with socialism and capitalism is always selfish but the nonsense of selling the family silver to pay for beaurocracy needs to stop. I can understand buying in foreign technology but selling them the whole water-works is plain daft.

Lake Vyrnwy is 12 miles from me. A wondeul example of victorian building to supply Liverpool with water. It's a shame they didn't have reason to design it for generators in winter.

I don't think anyone here is pushing you into EV.. it's more a case of it'll be that or hydrogen or no car.
As for society coming to any great isolation with fewer cars - there's no reason for that to happen. It was only 60 years ago that folk owning cars were relatively uncommon - they were only starting to talk about the need for the M1.
I clearly recall going to school by bus as did most folk who travelled where i lived and the myriad bicycles on the roads being used for a few miles of commute. It was that or the pre-Beeching trains. We've become a greedy society making lots of really unnecesary journeys often just for minor social and pleasure reasons and for an item or two of shopping.
If anything we've lost a lot of neigbourliness and community in the process and there's probably more folk isolated at home because they don't know folk locally - all part of centralising schools, hospitals and so forth in the name of efficiency and profit and opening stores 24/7 to encourage folk to part with money.

Tesla's original plan was battery swapping and the cars were designed for that to be an automated process taking less than a few minutes. I undertand they did build one swap-facility before abandoning the proposition (reason unknown)

Either the public shells out for longer battery life, accepts the need for stops on those relatively rare long trips UK or we go back to car-trains. Battery prices have come down lots as mentioned earlier $100/KWh is close now with efficiencies meaning upto 4 miles/KWh on the way - pick your pack size.

I've also got 2 south-facing slopes with enough acreage on them for 3MW of solar panels. Quite apart from the unlikelihood of getting planning I might live long enough to see the payback but unlikely to be in a position to enjoy it...

pgk

UK energy use

Suprisingly we appear to be reducing total energy demand albeit importing a heck of a lot more as a percentage. If we switch to an electric based system and try to go renewable then the figures are quite scary - something of the (guesstimated) order of a 50 fold increase in off-shore wind and a huge increase in solar deployment (every south facing roof and road embankment?). Wind I understand has an order of 80x payback for deployment compared to solar in the UK at about 4x. Allowing for calm and sunless times one also needs a method of storage.. molten salt apparently is one method, perhaps with enough space leccy one could consider electrolysis and H2. Biomass is a waste of farmland better used for crops and CO2 sequestration

Undoubtedly there needs to be a will to succeed and undoubteldy we are going to be forced along that route. At least there is a benefit to reduced imports and balancing our lousy economy.

Of course none of this makes a jot of difference unless the rest of the world complies.

Progress takes time but that is no reason to avoid it or criticise it. It may be impractical right now on that journey but for example one might consider and engineer a future where your car snags an overhead power line as trams and trolley buses do and only needs a tiny , light battery to get you across interchanges - no fuelling stops at all.
Before the railway your choices were sail round or a tedious trip with horse and cart and months of supplies.

Whatever the answers may be it's clear we cannot go on as we do. 350mile range at 60mph is available now, >400 is due soon - but it costs and I guess that battery supplies will be finite too. or we stop travelling 'just to visit a mate' and use video links.

The ignition backfire was a favourite amongst students who had a car.. most notably in the hyde park corner underpass for addtional resonance. It'd probably bring London to a standstill thesed days....

Clogs:

Your opportunity to shine awaits... I'd suggest a steam powered transport using focussed mirrors and lenses to heat the water a la steampunk. Also a stationary sterling for leccy generation..again mirrors to heat and seawater evaporation to cool. Or just collect, ferment and distill those spikey plants....

**LINK**

One has to wonder at our politicians... make a commitmment for enough time in the future when they will no longer be about to carry any failure.

One gets the impression they think a few more solar panels and a wind turbine or two will do. Reality is a huge order of magnitude increase in energy generation with their naive ideas of Hydrogen use (if not from fossil gasses then even more electricity needed). Nuclear with it's decommissioning costs is hardly cheap either and planting a few trees in a third world country or buying carbon credits are also a paperwork joke - just fuels more corruption.

It's also illogical to cover good farmland in generators and import food.

Sadly not even that is true. Longevity means 2 kids is really 3 kids and even then it's not simply population numbers, it's the rampant consumerism and throw-away society and air-travel etc. You'ld probably do better on saving energy by vanishing the populations of europe and N america (less then 1 billion total) than getting rid of all those in China and the Indian subcontinent (3.5+ billion)...

We risk making this thread political but it's all the fault of take-away coffee shops.

UK figures show about 30 million cars and around 2 million new cars annually so realistically if all new cars were EV it'd take 15 years for a swap-over. Reality is that even in the most prolific country taking up EV (as a proportion of new cars it's 40% in Norway) you can guesstimate that swap-over to all EV/hybrid is at least 20years away UK.

If the infrastructure changes can't cope then there will be more hybrids as a percentage than pure EV's and over 20years there will be further changes.

Yes it takes some planning just as cabling for the internet, swapping over to 5G etc all do. Even if it ends up taking 30 or 40 years it doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.

The alternative is a superb public transport system but gov is hopeless at bringing in that sort of project.

Even if total automation doesn't work it may be possible to send your car off on it's own to go park-up and charge itself at an out of town facility and come back ready.

Forecasting this is a fools errand with many scenarios. The death of the High St is down to Internet shopping and probably as much due to traffic and parking charges. If service stations die away then so be it but BP's plan is to move towards EV charging with cafe and snacks in the short term. It's easy to speculated re other silly things like internet showrooms and a myriad ways of entertaining folk and taking their money while they wait. Taxation will likely be seperate from buying fuel (electricity).

The Tesla dream (which i personally think is pie in the sky) is early autonomy - currently new cars cannot be bought after lease termination.. they are claimed to become part of his new fleet of robotaxis along with any other customer who wishes to put their car onto that fleet when they don't need it themselves and earn revenue. Quite apart from autonomy and auto charging one needs a way of keeping them valetted and stored when unused. 3 yrs is tosh, 5 yrs is a very outside chance, 10 yrs may be doable...

Far from becoming the province of only the wealthy if such a system does occur (eventually) then fewer total cars, car sharing, no need for owning and depreciaing and servicing/insurance etc - could end up cheaper to use a car. Convenience will be a problem rurally but there's lots of cities where car ownership is uncommon and taxis roam everywhere.

Foreacast 100 years and pick your choice between a utopia of fusion power or a skeleton planet after the starvation riots and migrant wars. My head in a jar will tell you i told you so.

The world will adapt.
Lampost chargers now available in some areas so no need for wires across the pavement.

One can speculate re parking meter chargers, all car-parks being required to install systems progressively to all bays. New builds havng to allow for the same. Many EV's can use a simple 32A Commando socket or even 13A (albeit v slow charge rate on latter). If one accepts that city/town cars only need 100mile range for commute, kids to school, shopping then 30KW battery is enough so even at 3A overnight.

Wherever folk park can be converted over time.

I noted today that we now have two sites with 350KW CCS chargers UK - all we need is a vehicle capable of accepting that rate (Porsche have made such a future claim).

It's the car that controls the charge rate.

Any change to full EV will take at least 15yrs with a hyrid mix meantime. By then the dream of genuine autonomy may even have happened and folk just order up a car as needed.....

According to today's news the dangers of tyre and brake particles also significant. I havenlt figured out how they're gonna manage without tyres but regen braking reduces dust markedly.....just those iron rims are going to make for a bumpy ride...we need to train coopers again.

The cost figures are unarguable. But...cost per KW battery has dropped from nearly 300US towards100US over the last few years with lighter packs and greater energy density. Doubtless there will be further improvements. Tesla claims (obviously exaggerated and unsubstantiated) that their latest creation is designed for 1,000,000 miles on powertrain and battery pack is rebuildable. Servicing is now claimed not to be at any given interval but only 'when you think something needs doing'. Brake wear is so low that the biggest issue is lack of use of the calipers.

Granted model3 costs 3x a cheap IC to buy and even gets into luxury car tax brackets on road fund licence. My only real joy with my even more outrageously priced one is that now I've got the thing i happily use it for the most unnecessary journeys on free power ( as in drive an extra 10 miles to save £1 on cost of milk) - doubtless it's costing on tyre wear. It is a joy to drive though with the instant power and torque.

I offered before for anyone who wants to come out here to the sticks to play with it .. they really are that good to drive.

Veggie growing has been a nightmare for me too...just had all my brassicas and beans eaten by slugs and weather turned cold so the carrots and parsnip seeds failed. As you say its cheap to buy. I do way better in the greenhouse and half the year have surplusses of salad stuffs.
I still haven't finished eating last years blueberry crop (frozen) and have just finished the currants. I always have a goosegog surplus but sadly the rasps have been overtaken by weeds. Apples, pears, plums in excess but the darned birds get all my cherries and most of my grapes.

Still with cheap fuel for my car it's no sweat to drive 15 miles to Lidl's for the veg.

The greatest EV uptake in europe is in Norway... not a member of the EU. Globally the largest amount of EV's are US and soon China. That's not to detract from the EU intentions to move to EV but they aren't leading yet. And you donlt have to be in the EU to make the move to EV. Norways success has been down to the level of subsidy and (I think) free recharging en route. The limiting factor for EV production is battery manufacture and what technology method is used.