The good life tv comedy programme could this be done today

rhiwfield

Back on topic, how much of the good life have you enjoyed today?

Here we've had breakfast eggs from the chooks, sarnies for lunch using home baked bread and home grown tomatoes and cucumber, and for dinner its chicken stew with garlic, potatoes, carrots, courgettes and onions from the garden, home made stock and a dash of home made wine, all being slow cooked using our own electricity.

There's loads of stuff we have to buy in and we'll never do a John Seymour, but everyone can have a bit of the good life!

zarazara

rhiwfield wrote: »

Back on topic, how much of the good life have you enjoyed today?

Here we've had breakfast eggs from the chooks, sarnies for lunch using home baked bread and home grown tomatoes and cucumber, and for dinner its chicken stew with garlic, potatoes, carrots, courgettes and onions from the garden, home made stock and a dash of home made wine, all being slow cooked using our own electricity.

There's loads of stuff we have to buy in and we'll never do a John Seymour, but everyone can have a bit of the good life!

How wonderful. I'm aiming at this,getting there,just ordered seeds to sow in late summer and autumn. Next year we hope to be able to be much more self suffiecient than be are now.

pink_numbers

rhiwfield wrote: »

Back on topic, how much of the good life have you enjoyed today?

Here we've had breakfast eggs from the chooks, sarnies for lunch using home baked bread and home grown tomatoes and cucumber, and for dinner its chicken stew with garlic, potatoes, carrots, courgettes and onions from the garden, home made stock and a dash of home made wine, all being slow cooked using our own electricity.

There's loads of stuff we have to buy in and we'll never do a John Seymour, but everyone can have a bit of the good life!

This is amazing! I wish we were even remotely close to your good life!

Yesterday, we had a lovely afternoon at a PYO farm, got loads of raspberries, gooseberries, black current and red currents. We turned the raspberry into jam last night. Also did the gooseberries, but they didn't set fully, so will be redoing them later. Will be turning the currents into respective jelly

OH also showed how to make a boiled ham. I'm ashamed to say that I've never had boiled ham! Well, they were scrummy, so I think there will be more boiled hams in the house from now on

Primrose

rhiwfield - Splendid effort. I'd love to be able to generate our own electricity. Perhaps one day some bright inventor will produce an exercise bike you can exercise on whilst plugging it into the mains to generate electricity, rather like those little Bayliss wind up radios. We're picking more soft fruit & veg than we can immediately eat at the moment so the freezer is being kept busy. Producing your own is such a satisfying feeling. I hope there are a few new growers on this thread who are discovering the joys of picking their first crops. It's a joy that never fades.

rhiwfield

Primrose, cant remember where I read it but apparently a labourer generates about 1 kWh of energy a day, or put another way, if you use £1 of leccy a day you've had the equivalent of 10 slaves working 24 hours without a break!

COOLTRIKERCHICK

primeose you can to a certain extent...

we were at the smallholders show in builth wells, and there was a lady revamping old clothes with an elextric sewing machine, that was attached to an old bike,,, peddle power was generating enough electric to make the machine work...

VinceNoir

rhiwfield wrote: »

DECC produce a projection of electricity generation by source assuming the policies in the low carbon transition plan:

LINK, then annex e.

By 2025 under the high fossil fuel price scenario renewables produce 124 out of 390 terawatts. Certainly a fraction, but quite a large one

The figures in that papaer, as usualy, only talk about capacity. Whenever we talk about power generation, we use this word. What this mean is power generation source has the potential to generate xx amount of megawatts/gigawatts per month/year.

For wind turbines, this means it will generate it's full capacity when the wind is blowing at it's optimum speed (not too fast or too slow, a light gale means they have to be switched off or else the blades will get ddamaged) continuously.

The problem of course is that this never happens. On average, wind turbines only produce about 25-30 % of their capacity, a few generate about 35% and some only generate as little as 10%.

What this means is that when the wind isn't blowing, power must be drawn from conventional coal or gas fired stations, which must be kept constantly on standby (you can't just turn these things on and off at the push of a butt) so that we don't have unnexpected power cuts. Which means any perceived saving of CO2 is wiped out.

I don't have the exact figures to hand, but over a year, all of the USA's ~10,000 actual aoutput was no greater than a single large coal or nuclear power station.

cootambear

rhiwfield wrote: »

Primrose, cant remember where I read it but apparently a labourer generates about 1 kWh of energy a day, or put another way, if you use £1 of leccy a day you've had the equivalent of 10 slaves working 24 hours without a break!

That`s why `The Matrix` was preposterous in using human bodies as a source of power.

Lotus-eater

I think it was the BBC who had a whole room full of push bike aficionados and their bikes connected up to a houses electricity supply, I think it was about 60 people, all that was just to power one house and they struggled sometimes. At the end they were all done in.

This just shows the amount of energy we use in our everyday life. Lets face it, we've become power hungry on cheap and easy power, aka, oil and gas. We've squandered the easy oil on stupid things that we shouldn't have done and now we are running out of time to get something sorted out, to continue our life the way we know it.

Despite having friends that work in the nuclear industry, I can't stand it and I hope we don't go that way.

Farming wise, I don't know what the answer is, Cuba managed it without oil, but it involved a change to the entire way of life for the population, I can't see us doing that without a massive disaster.

rhiwfield

VinceNoir wrote: »

The figures in that papaer, as usualy, only talk about capacity. Whenever we talk about power generation, we use this word. What this mean is power generation source has the potential to generate xx amount of megawatts/gigawatts per month/year.

For wind turbines, this means it will generate it's full capacity when the wind is blowing at it's optimum speed (not too fast or too slow, a light gale means they have to be switched off or else the blades will get ddamaged) continuously.

The problem of course is that this never happens. On average, wind turbines only produce about 25-30 % of their capacity, a few generate about 35% and some only generate as little as 10%.

What this means is that when the wind isn't blowing, power must be drawn from conventional coal or gas fired stations, which must be kept constantly on standby (you can't just turn these things on and off at the push of a butt) so that we don't have unnexpected power cuts. Which means any perceived saving of CO2 is wiped out.

I don't have the exact figures to hand, but over a year, all of the USA's ~10,000 actual aoutput was no greater than a single large coal or nuclear power station.

Did you look at Annex E which refers to consumption, not capacity?

The notes to Annex E refer to Dukes (Digest of UK Energy Statistics) chapter 5 and I quote from Dukes:

"In Chapter 5 Declared Net Capacity (DNC) is used, ie the maximum continuous rating of the generating sets in the stations, less the power consumed by the plant itself, and reduced by a specified factor to take into account the intermittent nature of the energy source e.g. 0.43 for wind, 0.365 for small hydro and 0.33 for shoreline wave. DNC represents the nominal maximum capability of a generating set to supply electricity to consumers."