A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.
Lake District Air TrafficKent Air Traffic
Of course, this communication could be entitled:
There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports
I recently had my electricity and gas meters upgraded to “smart” meters. They aren’t that smart. All they do is upload my meter reading to the utility company at regular intervals along with this information being displayed on a screen. I look at the screen now and then but I do think that eventually I will turn it off. I know roughly how much I spend each day and it’s not really a surprise.
May Energy kWh
This graph shows the energy use each day with the lower darker bar being electricity and the light blue being gas. I have a gas boiler for water and heating along with a gas hob. The oven is electric. This can be translated into costs [at current market rates]:
May Energy Costs
At the end of May I went away for a while and I normally try to shut-down most of the energy using devices in the house. The physical process can take about 5 minutes walking around the house making sure that everything is shut down in the correct order.
If you look at the last week of May you can see low and consistent energy costs. Although no gas was used in this time period the monetary costs is the standing charge that I pay for the privilege of having a gas supply.
Minimum Running
My daily energy use in a house that is mostly turned off is 2kWh. This accounts for the following items:
Fridge
Microwave clock
Oven clock
Modem / Router
ADS-B aircraft tracker in the loft
Alarm clock
That extension lead orange light
It is taking a while for my head to get around this bizarre and stupid unit the kWh. But here goes:
My house’s power usage at baseline is 83 Watts. A human during the normal day runs at about 100 Watts [as does a 100W incandescent light bulb]. Over the course of the day this ends up being 7.2 MJ. My house needs to consume about the same amount of food as a human to run at its lowest power consumption levels.
Wolfram Alpha has some lovely comparisons for energy usage, so 2 kWh is the same as:
≈ 1.7 × energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT ( 1 kilogram of TNT )
≈ 0.57 × average electrical energy required by an Apple iPhone 5 per year (≈ 1.3×10^7 J )
And my favourite is:
Relativistic mass m from E = mc^2: 80 ng (nanograms)
When I next go away it would be interesting to see how low I could get the consumption. To be fair, I could just turn the electricity off at the mains. But the only thing I could still power down is the ADS-B receiver and I like to keep that going because I can log into it from around the world.
This place was heading east early one morning [probably to Frankfurt] and the colour of the sky and the line of the contrails caught my eye. It looked lovely.
Wokka Over Maidstone
Then there was this Chinook. It passed right over my work place and was such a lovely sight and sound. It amazes me just how technologically amazing we are as a species. Now although I know how these things work it does seem like magic at times!
Spitfire
Finally, yesterday this Spitfire flew over my village. I keep trying to remind people that one day they will be gone and we won’t see them flying anymore. It’s a lesson I have learnt from seeing many planes in the 80s at various airshows without really appreciating just how special they all were.
