Small Things

Some time back a journalist friend got to visit a nuclear facility, he not only came back with some good stories but got to wear a hard hat.  For whatever reason, for the past couple of years I've become my own builder and have been renovating my house.  The project has got to the stage where not much more can be done until the plumbing has been dealt with.

It seems that the current system is at least the third version.  The house was build in 1901 with an

extensive network of gas pipes which supplied mantles around the house and geysers in the bathroom and scullery.  A geyser is not a bad solution to the hot water problem, it heats water where it is going to be used, thus if you want 20 liters of bathwater, that's all you pay for.  I suspect that the original device discharged it's combustion products into the bathroom as there is not evidence of a vent to the outside world.    The current concern would be risk of carbon monoxide poisoning but the original inhabitants probably appreciated a warm bathroom.

Around 1950 someone thought that central heating was worth a try.  I'm guessing that the original solid fuel range was replaced by some coal burning object.  The geyser was dispensed with and bathroom was supplied with hot water from a tank in the kitchen via iron pipes.  If this arrangement bought any benefits they were short lived because rust and calcium deposits soon obstructed the flow of hot bath water.  Whilst the choice of pipe material was less than ideal (was there an alternative at the time?), it was installed with great skill along the shortest possible route.

By 1980, the house must have been inhabited by cold, unwashed people.  Someone decided enough was enough and installed a gas fired central heating system with copper pipes.  At that time energy was cheap and labor expensive.  The logical pipe routes were taken up by thick iron pipes, the alternative route from boiler to bathroom required a run of 50 meters of 3/4 inch pipe. which required approximately 15 liters to fill.  To get enough warm water to fill the basin for a shave or make-up removal resulted in running about 25 liters of hot water.  The hot water cylinder has a capacity of 100 liters and is heated by a 20 kw gas boiler (approx. cost: £2000) .  To summarize, the most energy efficient/environmental friendly way of shaving or doing the washing up is to boil a kettle (approx. cost: £20).

The big project is to reduce the pipe run from 50 meters to 10 meters.  Will it make a big difference?  Probably not but it will make a small one, both gas and water consumption should be reduced, maybe by 3 - 5 kwh/day and 25 liters/day respectively.  However, scale these saving up to a million homes (the UK has more than 20 million of them) and the reduction might be significant.  A plant producing 5,000,000 kwh is the type of place where you have to wear a hard hat.