Pretty sure it doesn’t make much sense today. £100 a year just to have a connection and that is before you even use it for anything.

Heat pumps are far more efficient so even before the electricity tax cut its cheaper to run. Then the savings on having a gas connection too are huge.

And for steak fans who think gas is necessary, charcoal/wood is better. £100 a year would buy a massive gas canister for cooking over, or a massive delivery of firewood.

Oats, enough water to form a dough. Maybe some salt.

Tempted to try using an oat sourdough starter though.

CAN be very expensive. If you are doing it with a car radiator and a hose pipe it costs very little and there isn’t even a heat pump involved.

You can take it up a step by using a heat pump of course. Which you can also do fairly cheaply if you are willing to modify a portable AC unit or tbh anything else with a heat pump in it. All you need to do is water cool the hot side of the heat pump and send that water through your ground loop.

Depends how much you want out of it. Are you heating and cooling the entire house year round along with providing hot water. Or are you just taking a few degrees off the peak summer temperature in a room or two?

IIRC the latent heat of fusion of water is about 333kJ/kg. So 666kJ for 2L. With ice that averages out to about 23w over a nights sleep. Heat capacity of water is 4.2kJ/kg/k, so even if its 0c as a liquid, to warm up to body temperature is under 300kJ.

TLDR: Water going from a ~0c solid to ~0c liquid takes more than twice as much energy as ~0c liquid water warning up to body temperature.

The ice also only melts to 0c, so you get that benefit as well.

At this point I’ll gladly bake oat bannocks over the burning ruins of the US economy to survive.

Wouldn’t cold water get warm very quickly? I have thought of ice though. If you wrapped it up enough so that it takes up heat fairly slowly.

UK is doing that now. My bills going to drop to under £75/month at this rate, with a heat pump and I had the gas connection removed years ago.

I kinda wonder what that means for the gas network longer term as more people disconnect from it. They still need to maintain the same pipes under the road and I won’t be paying for it, but some of my neighbours still do. Will their fee to maintain it have to go up at some point?

Oh we talking about outdoor knives? Then yeah morakniv is good for the budget end and you don’t really need to spend more unless you are just showing off

20 is one thing, sounds like those knives are a lot more though. Getting the impression £20 or so is a pretty good price point for a knife.

So far I have sharpened a few times using the base of a mug. Its not a great surface to use but I have a few shitty novelty mugs no one is going to use so it works.

Got some clay in the garden, almost tempting to form it into a tile and use that as a sharpening stone. But stone probably lasts longer.

Yes. Please do that.

Think I will stick with my current knives then. Around £20 or so for the small ones, maybe twice as much for the big one.

Do need to sharpen them at some point. Probably could do with a decent sharpening stone too. Have thought of just smoothing a stone tile/brick and using that as one.

That is kinda like earth tubes isn’t it? Which you could retrofit. More powerful cooling can be achieved by using the tubes as part of a geothermal heat pump. Bonus there is that its also even more efficient than a regular heat pump in winter too.

You can ventilate periodically, air doesn’t hold that much thermal energy. You can also use heat recovery ventilation, should work in reverse to keep the heat out too.

Yeah just continue to overwork doctors and nurses, I am sure its fine.

I have thought of this. Paying people less could work out alright if you bring down their living costs. Housing is most of that and a lot of that cost goes to profit for banks.

Bring the cost of housing down and a lot of people will probably be happy to reduce hours worked. If you have a high unemployment rate there should be plenty of people to cover those extra hours too.

Ahh if its just box art that makes more sense I guess.

Pretty sure a butter knife sharpened on a brick would be serviceable

How much per knife? I don’t need an entire set, I need 1 knife. Maybe 2. A small one and a big one and I use that for everything.

Does sound like a pyramid scheme through.

Depends on the beach. Certainly seen some that could be a few metres above the high tide line.