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.