Hi all,

What would people say are the opportunities and main energy and ecological considerations when specifying new build domestic electrical installations?

Putting RES to one side, concentrating just on internal work, is specifiers scope just limited to cfl / led lighting and pvc free cabling?

pv panels on the roof 12 or 24 v supplies battery bank , wind turbine are all green things

computers and most high tech stuff works on low voltage.

"The only real ecological consideration seems to be specifying pvc free cabling? " No there is a whole lot more to it than that!

Tom, do you have any kind of physics background at all?

First of all, there is no "permanent static field" from an AC supply, let alone a "cage of electrical charge". AC produces electromagnetic radiation and it makes no difference if the house is wired with ring mains or spurs.

Secondly, there is no "static charge" in an AC circuit - even if there was, what difference would it make? I could conceive that an alternating field may have some physiological effect but a static field is unlikely to.

Thirdly, even if you remove all the sources of mains radiation in a house, we're still completely surrounded by electromagnetic radiation - from deep space, from TV transmitters, from radios, cellphones, the sun etc. etc.

Fourth, there are no peer-reviewed medical articles that I'm aware of that demonstrate any causal link between electromagnetic radiation and adverse effects on the human body. So called "Electrosensitivity" is almost certainly psychological in nature, not physical. See http://www.badscience.net/2007/07/essex-electrosensitivity-study-results and http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2093724,00.html

By the way, 99% of residential electrical installations here in Canada use fused spurs rather than ring mains. Your "automatic double pole isolator" system would also work with ring mains too - there is nothing different about a ring main if you think about it.

Paul in Montreal.

Neil,
How about wiring the home to include what the Americans call a "killer switch", last out flicks the switch and kills all non essential electrics, I would prefer to call them a "green switch" and may be even colour the switch green, it would take some planning to make sure it doesn't switch off something important like the...... fridge (sorry couldn't resist).
You could also use sun pipes for those darker rooms to avoid using lights during the daytime.
How about using electricity wisely, did you know that boiling a full kettle of cold mains water for 1 cup of tea wastes approx £46 a year, nearly as much as a solar panel will save you!!

Say Neil, if you have your highly insulated fridge room aka " a cellar" above ground in your eco house. The only thing that would be missing is the coolness of a subterraneum cavern, so why not bury a plastic pipe loop under the house and pump its coolness through a heat exchanger within the fridge room. You will have to run a water pump and a temperature of 10 deg C will be achievable without any compressor or CFCs.
Frank

Posted By: fostertomConventional science is a wobbly mast to be nailing your colours to, right now

My whole career is based on conventional science - I'm in the silicon chip business and none of the technology we see today would be even remotely possible if it wasn't for "conventional" science (where "conventional" includes, of course, all of quantum mechanics and such like which many people find very far removed from what would normally be classified as conventional).

The problem with the insulation debate is that real-world applications are complex - this isn't science, it's engineering. There's nothing in the debate that isn't addressed by conventional science - just because the modeling and testing done may have been too simplistic doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the underlying science. In my own case, I built a model of my house in hot2000 and the predicted energy use is close to what I have measured in two years of real-world measurements so this gives me confidence in the underlying models (even though there are simplified compared to the complexity of the real world). The power of the scientific method is its application in prediction - this is how real advances have taken place - when the predictive power of a model breaks down at some extreme condition, a new model is required. It was precisely because of this fact that Newtonian mechanics was replaced by Einsteins work - though at "everyday" conditions they both give the same results. Same thing with Quantum mechanics - none of the electronics we currently rely on are even remotely possible without the predictive nature of Quantum mechanics. I'm more than happy to nail my colours to the scientific method.

Paul in Montreal

Tom,

never underestimate the power of the mind to influence the body. Our bodies have been bathed in electromagnetic fields since the dawn of time so there's nothing much new now (apart from, perhaps, specific frequencies).

As for fringe stuff being non-science, I don't recall expressing an opinion there. I just stated that the scientific method has proven very valuable so far - but, of course, we're not at "the end of science" yet so there's still plenty of stuff to explain.

As much as you might think I'm a scientific rationalist, I will freely admit to resorting to using my water divining skills recently to locate a pipe. I didn't think I would state this in a public forum for fear of being classified as a nutcase, but we recently had a plumbing situation in our basement (with an old cast iron pipe) that required the pipe to be traced. While the plumbers were out to get their high-tech radio-location device, I fashioned a couple of diving rods out of a coat hanger and a pair of pen barrels and successfully located where the pipe turned and connected to the main drain. The master plumber was somewhat bemused, but my location was correct. He was even more bemused when one of his workers were able to locate various pipes in our front garden that they had no idea were even there in the first place.

As much as it might appear that I've stepped over the edge into the fringe world, there's nothing, to my mind, in conventional science that is missing to explain how the diving works. So perhaps I might concede that our bodies are more affected by electromagnetic fields than I supposed - but I still contend that psychology can have a very powerful physical influence on a person such that fringe science is not required to explain certain phenomena.

Paul in Montreal.

My rods only detect pipes (though that's all I've ever looked for, and it was my father that showed me how to do this when I was a young child - I assumed at that time it was the rods themselves that did the detecting) - there's no weird physics here, the brain has cells with magnetite in them and so can detect magnetic fields. In one study I remember people were able to point north (when blindfolded and spun around a few times) fairly reliably - certainly better than chance. When the same people had coils fitted to their heads and the coils randomly energized, the people with the energized coils (they weren't made aware of if it was energized or not) could not point north with more accuracy than chance, whereas the unenergized coil people could at the same level as previously. So I stand by my question - do you have any physics background? Some of the statements you've made over the past year or so lead me to think that you might not have more than a knowledge of basic physics.

As for divining good Fish and Chip shops, I wish I had that skill as they are few and far between over here :)

Paul.

The 'Killer switch' seems to be a good idea to me, also I've seen in the CAT magazine a remote plug socket controller that works on a similar idea, I've often thought that some sort of intelligent PIR system could automate the whole thing... However this is fine for lights and DVD players but is that where the real load is...?

Could someone direct me to a breakdown of the typical household demand by type of use...?

J

PS I am constantly entertained by the 'Fostertom' vs P'aul in Montreal' battles that crop up in so many threads, keep it up guys!

We have a killer switch linked to our alarm panel. When we set the alarm to go out or to bed, we switch off about 60W of stuff like DVD player, Wii, PC, print server, router etc. We DIY'ed it for about a tenner by fitting relays in line with 4 gang extension leads and running bell wire from them to the alarm panel. The alarm panel has a small relay connected to SW+ which then switches 12V to the relays around the house.

A colleague here has used X10 to achieve the same (and more) albeit at a much higher cost.

I'd go for future-proofing the electrical system -and one of the areas where you might make some savings is in automating some of the appliances. Even if you're not planning on doing so now, I think it'd be a good idea to get the wiring in anyway.
I'd also wire CAT 6 computer cables to at least every room, with 2 points to the living room and any work areas, so you can network without wifi - but also because we keep inventing new things to throw over ethernet.
It will also mean that you can save your children from the evil death rays of wifi.

Posted By: stephendvthe evil death rays of wifi

Quite - well it's a start, and an alternative to the so-intelligent customary logic - 'we're unavoidably bathed in it, so let's be oh-so-relaxed about adding some more'

Paul, a U-curve has a down gradient as well as an up gradient (y = intensity, x = effect). If being grossly poisoned by mercury or EMFs, reduce intensity to reduce effect, but a point comes (the bottom of the U) where continued signal or substance (same difference) attenuation can transform into what homeopaths call potentisation.

Mainstream conservative Science, with its entrenched notions of scientific method (designed to disable subtle effects like Intentionality, by which e.g. potentised effect operates), and its UKIP-like quack-busting instincts, is blind to the whole range of subtle effects, which are integral to all of our everyday experience, but which 'Science' arbitrarily chooses to define out of existence and have no curiosity about.

Twas not always so, in the West - until the Roman/Christian power-conspiracy destroyed western scientific philosophy and ushered in the Dark Ages and 2k yrs of misery, slaughter and eventually mechanistic science, which we now have the opportunity to end.

Posted By: fostertom
Twas not always so, in the West - until the Roman/Christian power-conspiracy destroyed western scientific philosophy and ushered in the Dark Ages and 2k yrs of misery, slaughter and eventually mechanistic science, which we now have the opportunity to end.

Tell me about it. Them and the garden gnomes, I never did trust them with the little red pointy hats and those sneaky smiles. They ushered in Apartheid in South Africa and were responsible for more than one coup d'etat. There are rumours that they've formed an alliance with the sock stealing gnomes... no good can come of it, that I'm sure of.