The end of the cosy open fire?

[Ed.]

DonkeyApple said:

Cotty said:

I often watch YouTube videos about narrowboats and saw this one about a fuel boat taking on a delivery of coal to sell to people heating their boat in winter. Not sure how this will work in the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OZDFML7gY

I guess that those 25kg bags of house coal will just become 25kg bags of smokeless coal. The consumers will suck up the extra cost and his margins will remain unchanged. He is probably quite safe as boaties are going to be less likely to try and bypass the law and buy house coal on the black market as it’s cost will be higher and they’ll have to go and get the bags themselves rather than having them delivered by a kosher business.

Ending green wood isn’t really going to impact anyone. It burns so badly that the extra cost of seasoned wood is pretty much covered by the extra heat it gives thus you use less. House coal is going to have a wider cost impact but it’s really just bringing everywhere else into line with places like London where you’ve needed to buy smokeless coal for years.

Firstly the provided link is interesting and I agree the stopping of selling wet wood is no bad thing. I will miss coal because I like how it burns on a hot dry fire, besides people nearby still burn peat.
That doesn't make this ban without further information a good thing, you agreed earlier that this is probably early step in the burning is bad message.
If that is to be the message in 10, 15 years why not let it out now, why wait till enough people have replaced their boilers? Biomass as mentioned a few posts up is seen as a eco friendly alternative when it is still burning material.
It just seems similar to the whole diesel was good but now it is bad scenario with more misled consumers.
If solar/battery is the answer, perhaps the feed in tariffs should not have been phased out and Vat should stay at 5% instead of going up to 20%.
I know some posters don't think it's all about the money but I disagree, if electricity was the same price /kW as mains gas few would bother with gas, oil etc.

[AndyTR]

Ed. said:

Firstly the provided link is interesting and I agree the stopping of selling wet wood is no bad thing. I will miss coal because I like how it burns on a hot dry fire, besides people nearby still burn peat.
That doesn't make this ban without further information a good thing, you agreed earlier that this is probably early step in the burning is bad message.
If that is to be the message in 10, 15 years why not let it out now, why wait till enough people have replaced their boilers? Biomass as mentioned a few posts up is seen as a eco friendly alternative when it is still burning material.
It just seems similar to the whole diesel was good but now it is bad scenario with more misled consumers.
If solar/battery is the answer, perhaps the feed in tariffs should not have been phased out and Vat should stay at 5% instead of going up to 20%.
I know some posters don't think it's all about the money but I disagree, if electricity was the same price /kW as mains gas few would bother with gas, oil etc.

I agree Ed, with electricity being approx 3 times the cost per kw of gas it's too expensive and there is also the fact that to run a 30kw electric boiler you need a 3 phase circuit. For older properties, like ours, the only viable solutions are oil, lpg or biomass. With Biomass we'd have to burn approx 5 tonnes of pellets a year. Biomass works out at about 4.5p/kwh, with the upfront cost of approx £12-14k (50kw with a hopper) and with the feed in tariff it's a long payback over LPG (7.5p/kwh), working it out I reckon it's about 10 years. However, we would also produce 80% more CO2, just not from fossil fuel. Fuel costs are likely to increase over the payback period and we may end up with a dead duck.

[Wacky Racer]

otolith said:

Wacky Racer said:

Stalybridge station when I was a kid.

There's a steam train in there somewhere.

There's a bar in there somewhere...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZcQWnjXEHo

[DonkeyApple]

Ed. said:

DonkeyApple said:

Cotty said:

I often watch YouTube videos about narrowboats and saw this one about a fuel boat taking on a delivery of coal to sell to people heating their boat in winter. Not sure how this will work in the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OZDFML7gY

I guess that those 25kg bags of house coal will just become 25kg bags of smokeless coal. The consumers will suck up the extra cost and his margins will remain unchanged. He is probably quite safe as boaties are going to be less likely to try and bypass the law and buy house coal on the black market as it’s cost will be higher and they’ll have to go and get the bags themselves rather than having them delivered by a kosher business.

Ending green wood isn’t really going to impact anyone. It burns so badly that the extra cost of seasoned wood is pretty much covered by the extra heat it gives thus you use less. House coal is going to have a wider cost impact but it’s really just bringing everywhere else into line with places like London where you’ve needed to buy smokeless coal for years.

Firstly the provided link is interesting and I agree the stopping of selling wet wood is no bad thing. I will miss coal because I like how it burns on a hot dry fire, besides people nearby still burn peat.
That doesn't make this ban without further information a good thing, you agreed earlier that this is probably early step in the burning is bad message.
If that is to be the message in 10, 15 years why not let it out now, why wait till enough people have replaced their boilers? Biomass as mentioned a few posts up is seen as a eco friendly alternative when it is still burning material.
It just seems similar to the whole diesel was good but now it is bad scenario with more misled consumers.
If solar/battery is the answer, perhaps the feed in tariffs should not have been phased out and Vat should stay at 5% instead of going up to 20%.
I know some posters don't think it's all about the money but I disagree, if electricity was the same price /kW as mains gas few would bother with gas, oil etc.

I think that what we are seeing is a building religious war against PM2.5 rather than specifically ‘burning stuff’. Under these crusades, excuses are given for the burning of some things while inquisitions and witch hunts are hurled at others. Like with all religious mechanisms, to put it simply, there is good murder and there is bad murder.

The ending of burning rubbish fuels isn’t a bad thing and is a logical step forward and I feel from the gist of this thread that most of us see a logic in moving us forward a little step. My concern is that while it is a logical step forward it is also an empowerment of the building PM2.5 extremists and at some point the same and logical majority must decide where to set the sensible line and to halt the particle taliban.

These are, afterall, extremist individuals who wish to oppress all before them and subjugate by any means at their disposal. In any other field they would be branded for what they are cultists, fanatics and it would be clear that at no point do they have the well-being of the masses in mind.

If we look to the media over the last couple of years we can see a strong growth in this new mantra re PM2.5 which is why we must try and educate ourselves about what it is so that we can decide what is right and where lines must be drawn.

For example, 28k people in the UK are supposed to have died last year as a result of air pollution. While 17k are supposed to have died as a result of fuel poverty. At what point do we say that a few coal fires really has almost no impact on this group of 28k deaths yet could have a material impact in those 17k deaths?

We should even be asking how many of those 28k deaths are linked to historical employment and lifestyles (a simple map of the deaths overlaid on a map of 20th century industry is likely to show a strong correlation). How many are linked to personal lifestyle choices and how many to genetic disorders. Drill down to get a clearer picture as to how many are actually attributable to modern pollution. Is that figure large enough to warrant what must be the pretty miserable deaths of 17k pensioners who can’t afford to heat their homes?

It’s the same with the move to electricity. It is cleaner to heat our homes with electricity than with gas, oil or lpg but just how dirty and dangerous are the emissions from an efficient gas boiler?

Well, this link tells us. You can see the PM10, CO2 and VOC data for all fuels and all appliances:

https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/repor...

The tables for wood burning through to natural gas start at page 41.

What we can see is that the burning of wood and coal generally isn’t all that good for us and potentially others and more importantly we can see that the burning of natural gas in our central heating is a total fking irrelevance. It falls quite firmly into the zealotry box with a huge fking tick.

This is a good article to skim through and get a feel for just how relevant Gladis’ gas central heating is on a global scale in reality:

https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/housin...

Fuel security is infinitely more important than fuel pollution. The most polluting fuels are not just minority uses but are being phased out. Fuel oil will be the next next dirtiest domestic fuel but it exists to serve another purpose as does LPG which is to fuel more remote properties where it is not cost effective to deliver mains gas and not cost effective to use mains electricity. Do the last few turn of the century apartment blocks in central London still need communal oil boilers? No. Does it makes sense to target the rural community as a part of getting rid of the last urban diesel heating systems? No.

In an age where we import coal, import natural gas, import lpg, import oil does it make sense to work to shift away from being reliant on Russia for our gas, the Middle East for our oil and South America for our coal? Absolutely. Does it then make sense to hand over control of domestic power production to the Chinese State? Well that seems a bit daft.

But does it make sense to have a balance of domestic usage? Some using gas, some electricity, others oil, lpg down to wood and coal? Arguably it makes absolute sense to have a spread. Is this national fuel security hedge more valuable than the damage caused by efficient gas central heating systems et al? That’s a debate in its own right but I would say it is as a subjective view.

What we risk is this particle debate going the way of the electric car. The EV has clear advantages but it’s disadvantages mean that few can afford them, no one who can does unless there are huge taxpayer subsidies and you can never get the world or even the country to switch to pure EV until energy storage and energy generation have both made enormous step changes in efficiency. But you don’t even need EVs to significantly reduce air pollution from cars. You could simply phase out large cars. Just the act of switching everyone down to smaller cars and smaller engines will reduce the amount of fuel consumed, reduce the amount of raw materials, reduce the weight so reduce tyre dust, brake dust and road wear dust. While EVs remain powered by massive, heavy Victorian era batteries they remain inefficient and flawed and not a viable social solution requiring vast subsidies to even sell.

A sane vehicle policy would be for Westerners to buy much smaller engines cars and to use our taxes to pay the 7 billion poor people on the planet to use more efficient small engines in their transport. We would gain more just from paying to change all of India’s tuktuk engines than we ever will from 2 ton Li batteried chariots of affluence.

The whole PM thing is likely to go the same way. 3 BMW people on the planet basically burn car tyres to keep warm and to cook food. Our central heating is an irrelevance globally and it’s not actually a relevance nationally. There are other pollutants that are far more toxic and worthy of intelligent and practical targeting.

The simple truth is that a scented candle is more toxic than the average UK central heating system. So is a single jostick. As is cooking with oil and as are spray polishes and air fresheners. This is the level that we are looking at. It is arguably insignificant.

New homes being better insulated and restricted to electricity is arguably a good thing. Older homes making logical and cost effective improvements to insulation is arguably a good thing. Ripping out perfectly good heating systems and replacing them with perfectly good heating systems is closer to environmental vandalism than it is to sane environmental policy.

Just like the fanaticism over EVs is a farce when everyone could just burn less fuel by using smaller and lighter cars so the impending assault on central heating is also going to be a farce when people could just buy jumpers and burn less fuel.

[Amateurish]

Cotty said:

I often watch YouTube videos about narrowboats and saw this one about a fuel boat taking on a delivery of coal to sell to people heating their boat in winter. Not sure how this will work in the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OZDFML7gY

As I said above, house coal is not suitable for use in stoves, so narrow boats will be unaffected.

[dhutch]

[redacted]

[MJNewton]

dhutch said:

Unless you factor in the cost to the nhs of getting pneumonia. And yes I know someone who ended up in hospital with pneumonia during a winter refit of their house the involved a fortnight without central heating!

You don't get pneumonia from being cold. It is a bacterial infection.

You know someone who ended up in hospital with pneumonia. They also happened to be doing a winter refit without heating. Correlation does not imply causation.

(Arguing that you might need to huddle together in a house without heating would be stretching your point a bit too far)

Edited by MJNewton on Tuesday 25th February 16:19

[dhutch]

MJNewton said:

You don't get pneumonia from being cold. It is a bacterial infection.

You know someone who ended up in hospital with pneumonia. They also happened to be doing a winter refit without heating. Correlation does not imply causation.

Fair enough. I am not a medic, my understand that it could increase likelihood but I could be wrong.

Either way, the cost of heating (upfront+fuel) will always be relevant to take up.

And burning house coal makes a nice fire to watch!

[BugLebowski]

Sambucket said:

If electricity keeps trending down in price due to increased renewables.

Since when? source?

[irish boy]

Just realised today the ban is not coming to northern ireland. Yet.

[DonkeyApple]

BugLebowski said:

Sambucket said:

If electricity keeps trending down in price due to increased renewables.

Since when? source?

It’s risen around 70% over the last decade. We are currently trending around all time highs.

Over the same period Nat Gas, which accounts for 25% of electricity production has more than halved.

Crude oil which is also used to generate electricity has almost halved from highs within the last decade.

Coal is also about 30% cheaper over the decade.

So this might suggest that it’s the growth in renewables and their truly immense cost that has caused a meteoric rise in the cost of electricity.

At the same time we are obviously all buying more and more electricity to run the billions and billions of lumpsnof completely unnecessary electronic tat we are addicted to importing from the polluting nations every year. Our homes have become temples to crippling waste, greed and hypocrisy and our priests are talking electronic Chinese boxes sold to us by US firms that instruct us to buy more and more crap every day to save the planet. Because only through consuming more and more worthless st can we end the rampant demand for worthless st that is destroying the planet. And we finance this eco movement with money we don’t have because only debt can empower the levels of rampant over consumption needed to clean up this planet and save the animals.

But stripping the UK poor of their money via overseas owned utilities is very clearly having a positive impact on the immense manufacturing pollution we’ve outsourced to the third world and developing nations.

Legions of indoctrinated drones bend their knee at the alter of consumption , chanting the mantra ‘I am a better person because I shop to save the planet’ and the business at the temple of arsebiscuitry rolls on like a juggernaut crushing all logical thought and sane reasoning before it as it rushes to grab some bargains at the sales.

[jshell]

DonkeyApple said:

It’s risen around 70% over the last decade. We are currently trending around all time highs.

Over the same period Nat Gas, which accounts for 25% of electricity production has more than halved.

Crude oil which is also used to generate electricity has almost halved from highs within the last decade.

Coal is also about 30% cheaper over the decade.

So this might suggest that it’s the growth in renewables and their truly immense cost that has caused a meteoric rise in the cost of electricity.

At the same time we are obviously all buying more and more electricity to run the billions and billions of lumpsnof completely unnecessary electronic tat we are addicted to importing from the polluting nations every year. Our homes have become temples to crippling waste, greed and hypocrisy and our priests are talking electronic Chinese boxes sold to us by US firms that instruct us to buy more and more crap every day to save the planet. Because only through consuming more and more worthless st can we end the rampant demand for worthless st that is destroying the planet. And we finance this eco movement with money we don’t have because only debt can empower the levels of rampant over consumption needed to clean up this planet and save the animals.

But stripping the UK poor of their money via overseas owned utilities is very clearly having a positive impact on the immense manufacturing pollution we’ve outsourced to the third world and developing nations.

Legions of indoctrinated drones bend their knee at the alter of consumption , chanting the mantra ‘I am a better person because I shop to save the planet’ and the business at the temple of arsebiscuitry rolls on like a juggernaut crushing all logical thought and sane reasoning before it as it rushes to grab some bargains at the sales.

Love this post!

But, we're being told that cheap renewables are here and that we will have energy security down to that fact... All politicised guff, of course.

I keep saying, there is a reason that the oil supermajors are all banking on natural gas for the future. There's more of teh damned stuff than we can use in 60 years. It's cheap. Transportable. Safe. It's ace.

[dhutch]

Indeed.

What to be eco in your purchases? Stop buying st.
-Buy a lot less stuff.
-Buy second hand stuff.
-Buy quality long lasting stuff.
-Sell it on second hand once your done with it.

Daniel

[bristolracer]

Donkeyapple said:

At the same time we are obviously all buying more and more electricity to run the billions and billions of lumpsnof completely unnecessary electronic tat

Been saying this for years.
When I was young the only thing using electricity at night was the fridge.Everything else was off and unplugged.
I dread to think how much stuff people have running these days

[DonkeyApple]

dhutch said:

Indeed.

What to be eco in your purchases? Stop buying st.
-Buy a lot less stuff.
-Buy second hand stuff.
-Buy quality long lasting stuff.
-Sell it on second hand once your done with it.

Daniel

You mean just like we all used to before we got credit cards and could go and get lots of shiny new things?

It’s the baffling state we’ve reached of having people who buy their sandwiches and drinks from shops trying to blame the people who have spent a lifetime making their own sandwiches and drinking from the tap for the excess consumption of goods.

BLT. Buy Less Tat. As opposed to imported bacon, imported lettuce, imported tomatoes, imported grain, all packed up up in imported plastics and procured via imported credit.

[cayman-black]

Wacky Racer said:

Stalybridge station when I was a kid.

There's a steam train in there somewhere.

I thought it was Milan for a second there.

[Bacon Is Proof]

Cotty said:

I often watch YouTube videos about narrowboats and saw this one about a fuel boat taking on a delivery of coal to sell to people heating their boat in winter. Not sure how this will work in the future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OZDFML7gY

It won't affect us boat folk, we're basically all pirates/do-as-you-likeys anyway. Not that I try and burn wet wood though, that would be daft. All the dead timber has just been blown off the trees in the recent storms so thanks to that and my trusty Bahco I am well stocked.
Living on a boat has its down sides but dodging council tax more than makes up for it .

[grichard]

so, the leader of the eu - germany will now stop burning the most lethal form of coal- lignite and plunge half the country into darkness' I think not-... please excuse my broken capitals key - new board in the morning.

[DonkeyApple]

grichard said:

so, the leader of the eu - germany will now stop burning the most lethal form of coal- lignite and plunge half the country into darkness' I think not-... please excuse my broken capitals key - new board in the morning.

It’s not the worst thing they’ve burnt in living memory.

[LotusMartin]

Amateurish said:

As I said above, house coal is not suitable for use in stoves, so narrow boats will be unaffected.

I've used a mix of house coal and seasoned logs (mainly ash and beech) for years in my Morso multifuel stove. I find they compliment each other really well with predictable and controllable heat output.

Might not be the most efficient fuel mix but it's worked for us. As long as you don't overload it with coal it's fine.

Personally I'll be stocking up on a couple of tonne of house coal before the ban kicks in. Will keep us going for 10-15 years I estimate.