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Is It Cheaper to Heat the Person Rather Than the Whole House?

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  Is It Cheaper to Heat the Person Rather Than the Whole House? If one person is sitting in one chair, do we really need to heat twelve thousand litres of air around them? For many households, this is no longer an academic question. As autumn turns into winter, people begin looking at the thermostat and wondering what the next energy bill will bring. Some respond by heating the whole house less. Others retreat into one or two rooms, close doors, turn down radiators elsewhere and put on another jumper. I see this very close to home. My mother is 95. She worries about the cost of heating an entire house when she spends most of her time in only a few rooms. She turns off radiators in rooms she does not use, closes the doors and keeps the rooms she does occupy at around 18°C. In fact, that basic idea is very close to current Age UK advice: keep the rooms you use most at a steady, comfortable temperature—around 18°C is suggested—while unused rooms can have their radiators turned o...
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Autumn Solar: What Happens When Those Brilliant Summer Generation Figures Disappear?

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Autumn Solar: What Happens When Those Brilliant Summer Generation Figures Disappear? “Solar doesn’t stop working in autumn—but the way you use it needs to change.” There is something very satisfying about owning solar panels in the middle of summer. The sun comes up early. Generation starts while many of us are still asleep. By breakfast the panels may already be producing useful amounts of electricity. During the middle of the day there can be more energy available than the house needs, the battery fills, and the figures on the monitoring app look wonderfully impressive. Then autumn arrives. The mornings become darker. The evenings draw in. The sun sits lower in the sky. Grey days become more frequent. Suddenly those enormous summer generation figures begin to disappear. It can feel as though something has gone wrong. Usually, nothing has. The solar panels are still doing exactly what they are supposed to do. The problem is simply that the amount, timing and reliability of the availab...
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America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt

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  America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt Drought is shrinking the water supply. Wildfire is stripping the landscape. Then extreme rain arrives and washes part of the hillside into the reservoirs designed to protect us from drought. Before worrying about whether a reservoir is half empty or half full, perhaps we should ask another question: how much of it is now filled with mud? When we think about drought in the American West, the images are familiar: exposed reservoir banks, dry riverbeds, struggling farms, shrinking snowpack and arguments over who should receive the remaining water. But an article from Bloomberg recently highlighted a much less obvious problem. Dirt. Wildfires burn vegetation from hillsides. Intense rainfall then falls onto those damaged watersheds. Instead of being intercepted by leaves, roots and forest litter and gradually soaking into the soil, water can rush downhill carrying ash, sand, soil, stones and even trees. Some of that material event...
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