Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Thursday 20 October 2011

Spend a lot, receive a little

Got my first cheque from Southern Electric following installation of solar panels on the roof earlier this year. The £139 total (I’m ignoring an extra 4 p) covers 310 kilowatt hours fed back into the National Grid between July 12 and September 30.

The amount of juice I generate varies with the light (not heat) put out by the sun but, just for fun, here’s some back-of-envelope calculations. On the basis of this payment my average expectation is £1.74 per day. Thus in a year I can expect £635.

All in, the system cost £8000. Amortising this figure at this rate would take 12.6 years and I would be nearly 89. None of you, but none of you, will be reading Works Well in 2023 although we’ll draw a discreet veil over the most likely reason.

However… fuel prices are going up. The wretched Huw Edwards (qv) says so, so it must be true. Stick with me until my early eighties and I’ll let you know.

The lower photograph shows the inverter, installed in the loft.

A MAN OF METHOD Faced with a meat-and-two-veg dinner I eat the greens first (spinach before green beans), then the potatoes, then the meat. The meat is a final treat, like reaching the top of Kanchenjunga. I am not interested in rickety forkfuls containing all four constituents.

I check incoming comments to Works Well via LiveMail but never read them there. Immediately I whiz over to Blogger and read them in sequence with the relevant post. Doing it this way makes me feel I’m doing the right thing by my correspondents.

When I go to the toilet… But perhaps that’s enough in the way of nervous tics.