EV are they worth it?

[Avocet]

Not in my house, but did have them in the caravan, they not only gave out light, but kept the caravan warm.

There is a blinkered approach to energy saving and CO2 reduction. With a gas or oil heated house, LED lights saved money, but as to saving energy, not so sure, the heat from tungsten lights since in the main inferred, reduced the air temperature required for comfort, so in winter with no heat recovery unit fitted tungsten lights save more energy than LED.

As to transport, in North Wales just outside Mold, I did not NEED a car, it was nice to have a car, but buses stopped yards from house, and ran every half hour 9 am to 5 pm, and a short walk, ¼ mile, and buses 6 am to 11 pm to Chester and Mold. Delivery of food shopping was free if we spend over £25, so there was not NEED for a car.

Here is very different, three buses a day, and walk to bus stop up rather steep hill, the route means 1 hour to do 8 miles, yes in summer also a train, but even more of a walk, and no local taxi to get to train station.

So it is time to stop putting the cart before the horse, and get the bus service good enough so we don't need a car, and clearly those buses can be electric or hydrogen, when all commercial trains and buses are electric, then time to look at cars.

Yes, you get a bit if heat from incandescent lights. But, if your house is anything like mine, the lights are mostly on the ceiling, so all that happens, is that you heat the space above the plasterboard!

We have about 38,000 buses in Great Britain, compared to about 33 million cars! Why not go for the big wins first? Better still (as is happening), go for all of them together?

 

[DiyNutJob]

and get the bus service good enough so we don't need a car

Going to screwfix to buy some minor things costs me 1/2 to 3/4 of a day using well developed public transport in central london. On car, it's less than 1 hour. It all depends on how much effort you can handle. For me, it's car all day long for a happy life.

What should be improved is free delivery for shopping. They can run EVs all day long and I won't be affected the least. If all shopping by all people are done via deliveries, the cost could be reduced to 0 from economy of scale. This will eliminate car use for majority of people. But the government won't be interested because they derive revenue from cars. The best scenario for them is that you keep buying this or that type car more frequently. It isn't about the environment because there is a direct correlation between consumption and pollution.

 

[JohnD]

in central london.

EC postcodes? Or WC? Or single-digit SW?

Using a private car is impractical in the centre.

 

[ericmark]

Yes, you get a bit if heat from incandescent lights. But, if your house is anything like mine, the lights are mostly on the ceiling, so all that happens, is that you heat the space above the plasterboard!

You clearly don't understand inferred. Your talking about convection which also happens with a tungsten bulb, but it is the inferred which allows air temperature to drop, but still feel comfortable.

 

[Avocet]

You clearly don't understand inferred. Your talking about convection which also happens with a tungsten bulb, but it is the inferred which allows air temperature to drop, but still feel comfortable.

You're right, I don't. Never even hard of it, in fact.

 

[ericmark]

You're right, I don't. Never even hard of it, in fact.

Heat can travel in three ways, conduction, convection and radiation. The heat from the sun is radiation and mainly in the inferred spectrum, so the air can be at 15ºC but in the sun one is actually too hot.

We use to have inferred heaters for bathrooms, and a standard one bar electric fire gives off mainly radiated heat, the heat from the bulb is clearly far less, but 20 odd years ago in the last century we would heat the living room to 18ºC all day and evening, but when we went to compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) we found it too cool in the evening, so had to change the simple thermostat to a programmable one, and set it to 20ºC in the evening, back then we did not have TRV's and the like, so we did not get a graph of room temperature, today we do, the central heating not running at moment so nearly flat the orange line shows what I have set it to heat to, and in the winter the room overnight does not cool very fast and it is loosing more heat the hotter the room is. So with inferred the room air is 2ºC cooler so we loose less heat.

Would I return to tungsten, hell no, I remember having to change a bulb on average one every two weeks, and oil is cheaper than electric. So yes I now use LED throughout the house, but although the tungsten bulb cost more in power used that was only if you had gas or oil heating, and in the summer lights are used less, so energy wise the tungsten was better than LED as the heat in the main was wanted.

Of course outside completely different, although have seen people use patio heaters.

 

[Mottie]

You clearly don't understand inferred.

Is that the same as infrared?

 

[Avocet]

Is that the same as infrared?

That's what threw me! I'd heard of Infrared, but not Inferred!

 

[Mottie]

Fork handles….

 

[DiyNutJob]

EC postcodes? Or WC? Or single-digit SW?

Using a private car is impractical in the centre.

Outside of EC. At times I drive across London to Heathrow with no problems. The 20mph zones slowed everything down making the tube a possible alternative. I haven't tried but I don't believe point to point for the same journey using public transport is any quicker. A car offers greater comfort and costs less for 4 passengers. It would take £20 of petrol with left over for a round trip.

 

[ericmark]

The bus for me in Wales is free, and the train I pay for 3 years at a time, we also have 20 MPH limit, and yes now some times quicker by push bike as a result, the cycle event through Wales had to have route altered as the support vehicles could not keep up, so in the interests of safety they had to abandon routes with 20 MPH restrictions.

 

[ericmark]

This is a good point, cost for one is very different to cost for five. But I was waiting for the bus at Asda in Queensferry North Wales, and a woman was phoning for a taxi, I said why not catch the bus, answer the taxi was 10p more than bus, and driver carried bags to door for her.

There must be some thing wrong with pricing for a taxi to be same price as a bus.

But what one wants is for the bus and train to be synchronised, I would catch the bus to train station, that was whole reason for the bus service, he got fined £1000 for delaying leaving the station until train had arrived, VOSA is the government, so we can blame the government for the poor public transport system, when they fine operators for using common sense.

It seems from that the government does not want public transport to work.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

There must be some thing wrong with pricing for a taxi to be same price as a bus.

I have only once ever used a taxi, and that a black cab, to get me home from a trip to London, many decades ago. What they cost now, I would not have a clue - they are not an option I even consider.

For the very local trips around the village, I have resurrected my deceased partner's class II mobility scooter. She made little use of it from new, so it sat unused for years, to the point where it needed new batteries. I now 'run out of steam' walking, so I thought to buy it some batteries, and just see how it went. It's been great. So good, and handy for dashing to the shops, and carrying the load back home. I was a bit concerned about it's range, but I still haven't managed to run it out of battery.

An EV might work as well for me, except an EV would be pointless trying to tow a caravan, so my diesel stays put.

 

[Brigadier]

Going to screwfix to buy some minor things costs me 1/2 to 3/4 of a day using well developed public transport in central london. On car, it's less than 1 hour. It all depends on how much effort you can handle. For me, it's car all day long for a happy life.

I have at least four Screwfix branches within fifteen minutes' drive of where I live, and one of those is less than 5 minutes.

If your situation is what you'd consider "a happy life", it is far removed from what I would.

 

[Avocet]

I have at least four Screwfix branches within fifteen minutes' drive of where I live, and one of those is less than 5 minutes.

If your situation is what you'd consider "a happy life", it is far removed from what I would.

But the rest of the country needs to be grateful to Londoners for living there. If they didn't, they'd be competing for houses with the rest of us who want to live somewhere nice!