>Storm Bert: Second named storm of season to bring snow, rain and 70mph winds to UK at weekend
>Heavy rain and ice could cause flooding and travel disruption to different parts of the country this weekend as the second storm of the season arrives.
Scored a 2kw oil heater for £25 on Amazon for Black Friday. Not paying a fortune to run all my heaters properly again this winter, I've literally only just paid off last year's, so I needed one for cold snaps like these anyway. It just so happens it went half price just at the time I needed one. Nice things do happen sometimes I suppose.
That said my weather app is still telling me we're going to have temps of up to 15 degrees this weekend, which will feel positively fucking tropical after this week. Not sure how that squares with even more snow.
I've calculated that pound for pound, it's actually more expensive to heat my livingroom with firewood in my open fireplace than with central heat. A midsized bag of firewood logs from Homebase lasts about five hours in my fireplace and costs £7. It means I can turn off the heat for five hours, during which it saves about 35 kWh of natural gas to heat the house. At the current price per kWh, that works out to around £2.50.
You do have to dry your wood for about a year or two before you should fire it. Some areas even forbid the burning of green/fresh wood altogether, because it creates much more smoke than properly dried wood.
I get a good bit of my wood out of my back garden, although not all of it, because I simply use my fireplace too often. But I make sure my own wood spends at least two years in the boiler room of my basement. Which isn't canon to some people, who will tell you it's not the best place to keep it. But I've found that the warm and dry air works quite well to dry out your wood.
There's a Norway Maple in my back garden that I'm half eyeing to cut down for firewood someday. It's now about 25 ft and it grew from a randomly dispersed seed from my other Norway Maple, and by the time I noticed it, it had already grown to about ten feet and seemed a pity to cut down. But it's directly on the edge of my property, and I've got an agreement with the neighbour that if at some point the tree becomes too wide and tall, I'll cut it down. They can grow to 75 ft, if untouched and in optimal conditions.
>>41906 Buying wood from homebase is much the same as me buying my gas in big red bottles - a last resort, and not really a sensible base for comparison. I pay nothing (well, time, some chainsaw fuel, etc) for my firewood but I don't even want to think about the £/kWh I pay for gas. Everyone burns wood out here in bumpkin land. That, or whines about heating oil prices. I don't suppose either of you have played with one of these? (It turns long logs into 8" sticks). I'm very tempted, but the seller seems a bit sketchy.
If you want to moan about the price of gas, try having leccy heating. My flat block doesn't even have a gas main. Shite state of affairs honestly but how else are you going to afford property in 2020s Britain.
I complain but I suppose living where I do, in this decrepit old ex-council shithole, my mortgage is probably about a quarter of what some of you lot's is. Swings and roundabouts. Costs me a fortune in winter but the rest of the year I'm laughing.
A friend bought a former council estate terrace a few years ago when his local council were looking to gradually get rid of those particular properties. He got a very good deal on his 1100 sq ft house, but the downside was that it was showing signs of long-term neglect. Which meant that bit by bit, he ended up spending about 20,000 quid on renovations that he did all on his own. So imagine what it would have cost to get professional help in. It was a good investment, but still. I remember him talking about tearing down and rebuilding entire dry walls and completely gutting and remodelling the main bathroom.
>>41916 Electric heating is just a nightmare. Of all the 'electricity is the future' things, heating to me feels the most doomed. (Ground) transport is getting better and I can see a path to it dominating. Heating, though - maybe small heat pumps like window or single-room ASHP units? Insulation is just so hard to retro-fit at a sane price, but it has to be part of it. My workshop is electrically heated, which means it's basically not heated, I really feel for you fuckers having to heat homes that way. What to do, though?
>>41917 'property ladder' shouters tend to miss out the ongoing, sometimes major, amounts of money you have to dump into a house to keep it from turning into a hole. (Yes, it's still been a few insane decades for prices but just about being to make the mortgage payments is going to leave you in trouble).
>'property ladder' shouters tend to miss out the ongoing, sometimes major, amounts of money you have to dump into a house to keep it from turning into a hole
Quite. And there is a reason when a property is on the market unusually cheap. The property market isn't charity. It's cheap because it probably needs plenty of work. But if you know how to do most or all of it yourself, you can both save loads, and end up with a very good investment.
Another friend's sister and her husband have made a career out of fixing up and then flipping houses. They now have three own-to-let properties for which they collect pretty sizeable rent each month, and over the last 15 to 20 years, they've probably flipped up to ten more.
I've yet to turn on the heating. It's 14 degrees in my living room, 12 in my kitchen and lower in the bathroom. While wearing a dressing gown over my pyjamas all day and sleeping under two blankets, it's about comfortable, though today I did google 'does cold air effect your sinuses' because I've been struggling to sleep recently for a stuffy nose.
This time every year I get bit funny about turning on the heating until I simply can't bear the cold any longer. I even double up the socks to postpone the decision. What's funny is that I'm relieved the moment I feel the benefit of the warm radiator. I might post about in /emo/.
Well, build a fuckload of nuclear power plants and seize the infrastructure back from the greedy bastard corpo pigs so we have cheap electricity, that'd help. We built a load of homes with these systems in them back in the 60s and 70s when that was the case, and that's what made it a sensible option, sometimes cheaper than the alternatives in those days. Even up til the Ukraine kick off and Cozzie Livs it was still basically fine, not the cheapest option but basically alright. Nowadays though you may as well just withdraw your wages in cash and burn it for all the good electric heating does you.
For me it's not too bad, fortunately my office/man cave is the best insulated room with the fewest outer walls to lose heat through, so I mainly heat that for comfort (if I'm playing videogames the heat from the PC alone will keep it toasty) and only warm the rest of the place up the bare minimum. I'm going to look into doing some DIY secondary glazing on the living room windows. I have these big windows spanning the front of the room so there's loads of light and I can throw them wide open to have a breeze through in summer, but in winter they're a liability because any heat I put into the living room goes straight out of them.
>I've yet to turn on the heating. It's 14 degrees in my living room
I don't understand how that's even possible. You haven't used any source of heating at all?
It's been sub zero at night all week, even with all the best insulation in the world it's not still keeping in warmth from last month, surely. I don't understand where the 14 degrees worth of thermal energy is coming from besides your own body.
Lighting, electrical appliances, body heat, solar heating during the day, thermal mass of the building maintaining it during the night, and the enclosed space reduces airflow enough that the heat doesn't get dispersed into the ambient air.
>>41924 >You haven't used any source of heating at all?
The major contributor must be the radiators in the communal hallways of the converted townhouse I live in. I believe the heat from which is coming through my internal fire door, though there is a noticable difference in temperature on either side.
I think what's happening is the hallway heat is coming through into my living room, from where it's leached out through the kitchen, bathroom and ultimately outside.
Parts of my home are poorly insulated, so much so that I can't bear to turn on the radiators because it'll simply waste into the air within a couple of hours.
Other than that I use the oven most days which residually heats the kitchen, plus the rooms are very small to begin with.
I am also posting from the south coast - we're simply closer to the sun down here.
>>41925 I like to think this is it but I'm semi-retarded so I could be missing some obvious factors.
>The major contributor must be the radiators in the communal hallways
That explains it. There's thermal mass in the structure from that core heating, which conducts through into your space, and stops it getting down to ambient temps. You haven't put YOUR heating on, but there's heating in the building.
You get a similar effect if you live in a back to back terrace with neighbours on three sides, or a middle floor flat with neighbours above and below. You can leech off their heating, but in turn you are costing them money because they'll be losing heat into your freezing unheated home. I'm a top floor flat where I live now and I notice a marked difference when the downstairs neighbours are out and leave their heating off.
None of those would be enough to keep it that far above ambient, really. Lighting is all LED and doesn't give much heat nowadays, body heat won't contribute much because when you are wrapping up warm, you are insulating yourself to stop it being lost to the environment. The sun doesn't warm a house up to 14 degrees when it's only 4 degrees out. Cooking appliances are the only really significant source of heat in a typical modern home other than the heating itself.
>>41927 I lived for almost a decade in a top-floor flat that had only south-facing windows, including the full-height ones onto the balcony. Most years I never bothered with the heating. The buildings were built this century, which means that they were well insulated and the insulation was probably flammable.
