Bruges/Brugge/Whatever

I've just got back from Bruges/Brugge/whatever in Belgium, and it was fabulous - sun, canals, quaint buildings, beer, chocolate - what more do you need?

Anyway from a green point of view, the amazing thing was the sheer nmber of solar PV installations. I took quite a few train trips as I had a number of work appointments and it was rare to see a village or a suburb without at least one house with panels. The photo is a bit rubbish as it was taken from a moving train with a camera phone. I saw dozens of these in each one hour trip. As a comparison I saw a miserly two solar hot water systems on the trip back from London to Newcastle. They have a feed in tariff, we don't. Go figure.


As with most Northern European cities the cycling facilities brilliant despite the limitations of the medieval streets.


One way for cars, two way for cycles and scooters.


Cycle paths on narrow streets - we saw really young kids using these.



The mother of all cycle parks, Bruges station.

As a keen cyclist, I was very jealous!

26°C...

No it's not a dodgy '24' rip off for the innumerate!

It's a cool March morning here in Newcastle - the Beeb is saying a max of 11°C outside. I've just been up to see how my solar hot water panel is doing - the collector is at 36°C and the water in the tank is at 26°C, and this will continue to rise over the next few hours. That might not seem much, but it is about 20°C that the combi boiler doesn't have to heat the water - saving over a third of the energy required. Just imagine what it would be doing if our house wasn't pointing the wrong way (or in a valley).

Green Home Improvement - Energy

It's been a revolutionary eco-living week chez Kane this week (hence the lack of posts). We've had a new condensing boiler put in along with a solar hot water panel on the roof. The condensing boiler is about 97% efficient compared with the 80% efficiency of the knackered old 80's combi we found when we moved in, which will save a lot of gas and carbon dioxide in itself.

To comply with building regulations, we had to have thermostatic valves installed on most of our radiators. These use a gas filled piston to open and close the radiator valve depending on the room temperature. We've found this has really helped level out the heat in the house and cut draughts.

Most solar hot water systems use a twin coil hot water tank which is heated by a conventional boiler and the solar panel in parallel using a coil each.

We didn't have space for this type of tank and wanted to keep 'hot water on demand', so we went for the alpha boiler system. This has its own tank heated by the panel (the picture shows it without its polystyrene cover). If the water in the tank is above 60°C the water feeds the taps directly. If it is below 60°C, it feeds into the boiler for a top up - using a lot less gas. This arrangement means we never heat water with gas that we don't use as we would inevitably do with a hot water tank system.

The standard rule of thumb is that a well-positioned panel will provide 70% of the hot water for an average household. Frankly our panel is not well positioned as we're in a valley so we don't get much sun in the winter and our chimney shades the panel from the south west. So at the minute it's not doing an awful lot - raising the water temperature by about 3-5°C, but in couple of weeks it will be getting direct sunlight and we'll be able to see what it can do. This seasonality will lengthen the payback and reduce the carbon savings, but we put it in as much for the statement as anything else.

Sadly, we've been wandering about for the last couple of days getting envious of houses with unshaded south facing roofs bathed in lovely winter sun...