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[Closed] We've all been using the heating too much!

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I love how the nations energy supply worries are solved by the arrival of 140000 m3 of [url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/24/uk-gas-supply-pressure-eased ]LNG in one ship[/url]! (140k m3 does not sound like much but it expands about 600 times on its way back to room temp, so they actually delivered 84million m3 of gas)


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:24 pm
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can you imagine being in charge of docking the ship and then coupling up the hoses?


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:30 pm
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Total UK storage capacity is roughly 4.3 billion cubic meters:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/24/britain-gas-storage-idUKL6E8IC5WX20120724

Worryingly, most of it is at one facility Rough (Centrica) has 3.3 bcm storage. Must be a bit of a terrorist target....


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:33 pm
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Although Rough is a depleted gas field of the east coast, so its hopefully hard to attack..


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:43 pm
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It must come ashore somewhere....


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:53 pm
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yeah I guess thats yer target..

Here is centrica's page all about [url= http://www.centrica-sl.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=46 ]Rough.[/url]
Pretty awesome.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 7:53 pm
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A mate is the chief navigational officer on a q-max tanker for Qatar gas, these things are humungous in size and i think his carries 260,000m3+ of LNG, i'm not sure what ship he is on as they've got quite a few of them, the amount of safety checks they go through is frightening but he's quite accepting of the risks as the possibility of explosion is pretty much nil due the conditions the gas is kept under.

It's really kinda scary though as his sense of direction is **** abysmal - take him out on the bike into the Galloway hills and he's **** useless at navigating but stick him in charge of the largest floating bomb in the world on featureless seas and he can pilot it round the world without breaking a sweat.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:06 pm
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I have my heating set on 26C..

I hate the cold.

We need more ships.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:11 pm
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I hate the cold too, I hope my guess of 140k m3 was wrong and its the 260k m3 ship.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:16 pm
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The Centrica animation is interesting!

Bring on the renewables..


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:43 pm
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Here is centrica's page all about Rough.
Pretty awesome.

Cool!

Pretty amazing 30 odd wells 2.4km below the sea bed!


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:44 pm
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We don't have heating 🙁
I have been known to wake up to ice on the inside of my bedroom window though 😐


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:44 pm
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It's not his ship, he's somewhere off the coast of China at the moment with an armoured gunship shadowing his tanker with a shoot first ask questions later policy - energy wars are a lot nearer than what you realise, especially in the heavily pirated china sea.

And despite having an airsource heat pump fitted by the local housing association to my rented bungalow i have the heating switched off as it costs too much to run and i can't afford it, i've got a stove fitted and forage for free wood which is far better, it's easier to wear more clothes and a hat 🙂


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 8:51 pm
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The gas pipeline from Milford Haven to somewhere in the midlands (Upton?) runs right behing my mate Timmy's glasshouses in Newent. At any time there's enough liquid gas inside just the pipes to keep the UK going for something silly like a week so I wouldn't worry too much about it. We watched the pipes being installed and buried - pity we didn't think to drill a wee hole and tap some off to heat the glasshouses for all those orchids he grows for the supermarkets.

The de-gasification plant takes so much heat out of the environment to evaporate the liquid gas that the plant is surrounded by permafrost several metres in every direction.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 9:52 pm
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Good grief that guardian article is full of half truths! A single LNG ship doesn't carry that much gas (compared to our needs) and as for 30 odd wells 2.4 km below the sea bed, what you think all those other platforms all over the North Sea have?


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 10:10 pm
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i dont know whether its frightening or alarming but the number of people not using thier heating on a cost basis is growing.
every week i visit a home that severely resticts thier usage ive even had a family who didnt call out an engineer for two months while they saved for a 'horrendous' bill.. as it turned out i fixed it for 65 quid..


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 10:28 pm
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Good grief that guardian article is full of half truths!

I'm surprised you're surprised!


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 10:44 pm
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Whenever I see an article or TV feature about something I have personal knowledge of, it's full of mistakes and inaccuracies. Makes you realise probably almost everything you hear in the news is at best inaccurate if not plain wrong.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 10:51 pm
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I hope they don't cast off without disconnecting the hose first.


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 11:02 pm
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Whenever I see an article or TV feature about something I have personal knowledge of, it's full of mistakes and inaccuracies. Makes you realise probably almost everything you hear in the news is at best inaccurate if not plain wrong.

That is more or less word for word what I say when discussing news/media. I read that thinking it was an old post of mine in a bumped thread.
Oh and you are obviously right, you did forget the bit about lazy journalism though. 🙄


 
Posted : 24/03/2013 11:43 pm
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I hope they don't cast off without disconnecting the hose first.

😆

So who would be paying for that repair, huh?


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 7:02 am
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[i]Whenever I see an article or TV feature about something I have personal knowledge of, it's full of mistakes and inaccuracies. Makes you realise probably almost everything you hear in the news is at best inaccurate if not plain wrong. [/i]

+1

Except it's usually non-personal knowledge, just common sense like how journalists quote numbers without actually considering 'does it add up'.


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 9:03 am
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The Guardian article misses a key point, INSULATION. Insulate houses properly and you don't need gas.

There's no ice on my bedroom window, perhaps because it's triple glazed (ug 0.7, uw 1.1) and I close the shutters at night (uw roughly 0.7 shutters closed). There's 100mm of recycled polyester under the floor, a multilayer insulator behind wood on the walls, three layers of insulation in the roof.

We don't need to secure energy supply as the Guardian states but houses that aren't so energy greedy.


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 7:24 pm
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I have my heating set on 26C..

Eeeek - I start chuntering if ours goes above 20 degrees!


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 7:28 pm
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Did some business with a company that made fire detection systems for LNG tankers, they were camera based devices that used fuzzy logic / early AI to detect whether the fire or smoke was real or not.

The main reason behind the technology was apparently the issue they used to have with LNG tankers was that the crew had a habit of abandoning ship if the fire alarm went off ... buggering off well out of the blast radius area and waiting... if the ship went boom then there was a fire if it didn't then they would motor back to the ship after a couple of hours! ...bearing in mind that an LNG taker is basically a small nuke by another name as the subsequent blast is measured in kilotons.

Personally I wouldn't blame the crew for that course of action but the owners of the vessels used to get a bit upset as these tankers were often followed by salvage tugs/crews who would take the risk and board after the crew vamoosed... thus effectively salvaging an abandoned ship and earning a lot of lolly... provided it didn't of course go boom.


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 7:41 pm
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The Guardian article misses a key point, INSULATION

Except that the vast majority of housing stock in the UK has bugger all insulation and it's difficult to retrofit to solid walled Victorian / Edwardian property...


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 8:17 pm
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[i]Whenever I see an article or TV feature about something I have personal knowledge of, it's full of mistakes and inaccuracies. Makes you realise probably almost everything you hear in the news is at best inaccurate if not plain wrong.[/i]

Me too, one of the reasons I abandoned TV. And when they do so presenting their own slant in a programme about someone's business, that's unforgivable.


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 8:38 pm
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I see your LNG tanker and raise you an FPSO (shell Prelude)

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/the-big-story/shell-set-to-build-worlds-biggest-floating-structure/1009213.article


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 8:44 pm
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Except that the vast majority of housing stock in the UK has bugger all insulation and it's difficult to retrofit to solid walled Victorian / Edwardian property...

It's not difficult or expensive, it just requires losing between 6 and 10cm of interior space depending on the materials used to cut losses by better than 80% in those properties (Over 90% at the thermal bridges around the windows). Most people think of insulating on the outside which is expensive and upsets the planing people on many old properties.

The other neglected area is under-floor insulation. People say heat rises so it's not important, well if there's a 12°C temperature gradient over 25mm of wood then it is important. Besides, it's nice walking around barefoot.

[img] [/img]


 
Posted : 25/03/2013 9:34 pm

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