Nice people thread part 5 - nicely does it

chewmylegoff

vivatifosi wrote: »

Ah, so she is your mrs when it comes to housework, but not on any other front. An interesting insight there methinks George.

well she doesn't do it anyway, so my misogeny has fallen flat on its face.

silvercar

michaels wrote: »

Either you have mega appliances and the wiring to go with it or you mean kw and not kwh. Spinning will always use a lot less energy than drying but may make the ironing harder. WE always spin everything at 1600.

Oops. My units are wrong. The monitor went up say 0.3kw for the length of the 4 minute spin, so that is 0.02kwh.

Thank goodnes Lydia didn't see or I'd be in detention.

If Lydia is around please tell us why you can clasp the electricity monitor on any of the 4 wires going into the meter. (PN's question from pages ago).

Noticed that my IFA has solar panels on his house, so it must make financial sense.

LydiaJ

sss555s wrote: »

Sorry Lydia as I didn't think you were a 60's baby but misinterpreted what you said and thought it must be the last year in the 60's if at all :A

Nothing to be sorry about. You interpreted quite correctly. I was indeed thinking of the first moon landings in July 1969, the month before I was born.

silvercar wrote: »

Oops. My units are wrong. The monitor went up say 0.3kw for the length of the 4 minute spin, so that is 0.02kwh.

Thank goodnes Lydia didn't see or I'd be in detention.

If Lydia is around please tell us why you can clasp the electricity monitor on any of the 4 wires going into the meter. (PN's question from pages ago).

Noticed that my IFA has solar panels on his house, so it must make financial sense.

Not in detention, just asked to stay behind for 2min of extra help.

The four wires that you can see are the live and neutral from the main, and then the live and neutral going to your house. You can think of the current as coming from the main along the live, going through the meter, coming out of the meter along the live into your house, going through all your applicances making them work, and returning to the main along the neutral to the meter and back to the main. The current itself doesn't get used up - it's the energy that gets used up - so the current in the live and neutral should always be the same, and of course it'll be the same either side of the meter. The owl meter clamps round any one of those wires and measures the current in it by detecting the magnetic field that the current causes. Since it knows what the UK voltage is, it can calculate the power, and if it times how long you're using the power for, it can work out the energy.

That's a bit of an oversimplification, of course. The current doesn't really go from the live to the neutral all the time but changes direction 50 times a second. And it is possible for the live and neutral currents to be different if you've got any earth leakage - but if you do then your RCD should detect it and cut it out immediately because it could mean that somebody's getting a shock. The RCD works in much the same way as the owl meter except that it has both the live and neutral going through it together. Since the currents should be equal but in opposite directions, their magnetic fields should cancel out and the RCD should detect nothing. If it does detect a field, therefore, it means that the live and neutral currents are not equal and there's a problem, which is why it turns everything off if it detects anything.

I hope that's at least vaguely comprehensible. I find it rather difficult explaining blind like this. I'm used to doing it live and being able to check after each sentence that people have got the first bit before I go on to the next bit.

Generali

silvercar wrote: »

Any reason you didn't fly?

2 reasons:

- To fly within the dynamic of the family would have meant the kids missing school on Friday and I think school should be important, not just what you do if it's convenient
- I've never seen north NSW and this was an opportunity to do so. We drove through some amazing bush land this morning. I've never seen anything like it.

Imagine resiting the North Downs in the sub tropics. Huge trees like oaks or sycamores only gum trees. Rolling hills covered with coffee bushes or tea tree plantations. Then perhaps 20 mins driving past sugar cane fields only to enter a small town that has a sugar refining co-op in the centre. Those towns reminded me of Lancastrian mill towns in my young childhood when the industry was still there: quite poor but with a functioning economy.

vivatifosi

When I was a kid in Australia my uncle would regularly say he was "going down the road" and take off on a drive with the family that could be as far as the Blue or Snowy Mountains, that was from Melbourne. Now he's retired he's converted a bus so he can drive to Perth (from Qld).

I honestly think Aussies have a totally different view of distance to Brits. My cousin will regularly drive for lunch in Noosa, even though she lives in Hervey Bay. It's about 180km each way and she does it at least once a month.

The big question though: has Gen been infected by the Walkabout bug?

sss555s

Well done the Welsh! :j

Worthy winners and there will be a lot of celebrating goying on down by yu

PasturesNew

LydiaJ wrote: »

...
That's a bit of an oversimplification, of course. ...

I understood the route .... but can't understand why measuring only one of the cables would make the meter work.

If you measure mains in .... it knows how much it's got .... but it won't know how much has been used. If you measure mains out, it knows how much it's got, but it wouldn't know how much it started with. So how does it know how much is being used?

PasturesNew

I wonder how far it is if you walked all round Australia... like our UK Coastal Footpath. Ours is about 2750 miles, there's about 1830 of legally safe miles and about 920 of route that's not legally safe.

I wouldn't mind walking in theory. It's just the practice that gets me. i.e. walking alone is pretty boring.... and if you attempt to walk with others you just get lectures about what you're supposed to be wearing (e.g. not shorts or leggings and flip flops or jelly shoes... and when it's freezing they talk about 'proper overcoats'). I don't have the right walking coat/shoes .... and have no motivation to start trying to work out what that actually is or how I could attain it affordably.... and, of course, actually finding a proper coat that didn't make me look like a Michelin man or a plonker.

While I wouldn't have any objection to going to work in Australia, I'm not allowed in except to holiday.... and as I don't go on holidays I'm hardly going to turn up in Aus for one.

sss555s

PasturesNew wrote: »

If you measure mains in .... it knows how much it's got .... but it won't know how much has been used. If you measure mains out, it knows how much it's got, but it wouldn't know how much it started with. So how does it know how much is being used?

It only takes what it uses, IYSWIM (just like how you can watch your meter go faster when you turn stuff on)

Think of it like a stretch of flowing water in a pipe. What is going in is also what is going out. So measuring at any part will be the same "flow"
All the cables are part of the same flow.

zagubov

PasturesNew wrote: »

While I wouldn't have any objection to going to work in Australia, I'm not allowed in except to holiday.... and as I don't go on holidays I'm hardly going to turn up in Aus for one.

IIRC this is one of those things where age does matter. You can't emigrate to Oz for work unless you're 45 or younger and NZ is 49 or younger.

I'm sure there's exceptions for key jobs of course.

I suppose the idea is that if you're more than halfway to retirement they're not going to get enough work from you to be worth paying you a full pension.

DW would love to go on a visit and my mate is returning there to bring up his young family. The economy's good, he reckons.:D

Edit: one thing I have noticed from these relocating down under shows is that costs seem to be approaching our levels so it seems to need a lot of thinking about if a person relocates (this will be old hat to gen, but I can never get my head round the costs and benefits).