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Playing it cool

June 20, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I gather that the UK is currently experiencing something of a heatwave. Lucky you, say I to those that reside there. Of course, excessive heat – brought about by climate change – is not a good thing at all, but then neither is an extended, unfulfilled wait for summer.

Long-time followers of these postings may recall a missive that I uploaded at about this time last year (entitled ‘Head for the Hills‘) the which contained a description of the unprecedented ‘heat dome’ under which the west of Canada was then suffering. The Girl and I retreated into the basement of our residence for a week or so to avoid the worst of it, but it was not a pleasant experience.

In a second post, a month later, I reported that we had decided to have an air-conditioning unit added to our forced-air heating system – to protect ourselves against future such weather events. In these strange times all such projects seem to take an inordinate amount of time to be effected. We finally ordered the system at the very start of this year, but the first installation date that we were offered was not until June.

Well – I can now report that we have enjoyed the required visitation, the work has been most efficiently carried out and we are now the proud possessors of equipment necessary to enable us to keep our cool in any future such events. The installation was rendered much easier by our having considered this as a possible option when the furnace was installed back in 2017 – the necessary spacing and services having been left intact should we decide to go this route.

Inside the house there is nothing new to see – unless one looks really closely at our furnace room. Outside there is a small and elegant compressor, tucked away in a part of the estate that we normally only see when cutting the grass.

Now – of course – we are eagerly awaiting an opportunity to try it out! Here we are in the middle of June and the weather has still not caught up with the season. There are few cloudless days, temperatures are still struggling to get up to seasonal norms and – though I have fired up and checked out our garden irrigation system – it is still not running to its normal schedule because there has been no shortage of rain!

I have no doubt that this will all change abruptly in a couple of weeks, when we have set out on our travels and are no longer in residence.

Sigh!

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Cold and Hot – 2

July 20, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

It will surprise the gentle reader not one iota to be informed that the worst time – the very worst time – to seek to purchase an air-conditioning system (be it portable or fully installed) is when a ‘heat dome’ is camped on top of one’s home town – when temperature records are a-tumbling day on day – when wildfires are breaking out faster than they can be brought under control…

…and when the forecast is for more of the same.

Oddly enough one is never the only person in such circumstances seeking to obtain said items or systems.

Nonetheless, on the first day that the temperatures soared unpleasantly towards the stratosphere (as documented in my last post) and we decamped to our basement, I called our heating/ventilation engineers and – when I eventually reached a real person rather than a voicemail box – asked to be added to the list (the long list) of those who would like to talk about air-conditioning. A week and a half later I had a call back and an appointment for a visit was set up – in the middle of August.

Well – we knew that it would not be quick – and also that by the time anything were to be installed it would probably be the middle of winter… whatever that looks like these days!

Now – as detailed in that last posting – when our inherited heat pump gave up the ghost some years back we replaced our furnace but went no further. We did – however leave in place the duct-work and necessary services such that a heat pump or air-conditioner could be added at some point in the future. Well – that point is now – and we are pretty certain that we are going for the latter – though our engineer may well try to sell us the former.

Our rationale is this: The house is good and warm during the winter and the gas bills are very reasonable. During the temperate parts of the summer we like to be able to throw our windows wide without having to worry about interfering with whatever a cooling system is doing. If we have an air-conditioner (which would be much cheaper to install than a heat pump) we can leave it turned off except for those exceptional periods when it will prove a life-saver.

If we only run it when absolutely required it will not only cost considerably less to run, but it will also last a whole lot longer than if we run it all the time.

That, at any rate, is our plan at the moment. I will, naturally, issue an update in due course.

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Hot and cold – 1

July 15, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

A few short posts back I was regaling ever patient readers with a description of life under the great North American ‘heat dome’. My intention to develop that thought into something related (but slightly off-topic) was overtaken by the tragic events in Lytton.

With (as ever) the reader’s kind permission – and given that I am always loathe to leave a notion only half-considered – I will just dot back to that thought now…

OK? Good!…

When we purchased our home here on the peninsula some six years ago it came with a heat pump. For those who do not know what a heat pump is, Wikipedia offers this explanation:

“A heat pump is a device used to warm and sometimes also cool buildings by transferring thermal energy from a cooler space to a warmer space using the refrigeration cycle, being the opposite direction in which heat transfer would take place without the application of external power. Common device types include air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps”.

A heat pump, then, is a sort of air-conditioner that works in both directions – taking heat out of the air during the summer and adding it in during the winter. Heat pumps are all the rage in these parts because they can offer considerable potential savings on heating costs in this sort of climate.

I say ‘potential savings’ because the amount of heat that such a pump can produce depends greatly on the type of device that has been chosen – and on that also depends the cost. Air source heat pumps are unable to deal with very low temperatures but are the cheapest to install. The other types do better with lower temperatures but cost a great deal more.

Systems such as the one we inherited use the relatively inexpensive air source pump but supplement it with a backup furnace – ours being an electric one. The problems that can occur with this sort of system became apparent a year or so after we moved in. The refrigerant circuit sprung a leak which went unnoticed until the electricity bill for a couple of months of electric furnace heating showed up, causing us to fall off our chairs with the shock.

We were advised that the old heat pump was not economical to repair (quelle surprise!) so we set about looking for an alternative. This was at about the same time that we were starting on the major renovations that were most fully documented within these pages. Being uncertain as to whether or not a straight replacement for the old heat pump was the best solution we chose instead a sort of halfway-house. We replaced the electric furnace with a modern efficient gas furnace and left space to add either a heat pump or an air conditioner should such prove necessary in the future.

Since then we have enjoyed a lovely toasty warm house during the winters for very reasonable gas costs – helped considerably by the replacement of most of the windows and the upgrading of the insulation during our renovations. Until this year the summers had not called for anything more than throwing the windows wide and turning on the ceiling fans.

This year – of course – has caused us to think again…

…but more on that next time…

 

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The cruel hand of fate

July 1, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

Two days ago I started a relatively light-hearted post on the subject of having to move into our basement to avoid the worst of the recent heatwave. By the time that I had finished and posted it yesterday the mood and tone of the piece had changed. News of the tragic sudden deaths of an unexpectedly high number of  the elderly and infirm of British Columbia certainly put into perspective the trivial inconvenience of having to transfer our sleeping arrangements into our basement.

My post had also made reference to a visit that I paid back in the 1980s to the hill station of Ootacamund in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I included a quotation by the first Lord Lytton concerning the ‘English’ nature of the rain and the mud at Ooty. This Lord Lytton was the very same (though I had not noticed the fact at the time of writing) for whom the small settlement (less than 250 inhabitants) in the Fraser valley in BC was named – the which was coincidentally also mentioned in my post yesterday as being the town that had – over the past three days – set three successive all-time heat records for Canada.

It is doubtful that many outside the country had even heard of Lytton – though some may have seen items in the international press on this new and unwanted record.

Today Lytton is gone!

On Wednesday afternoon a wildfire swept through the town so quickly that there was no time to issue evacuation orders. Residents grabbed what they could, took to their cars and fled. Within two hours ninety percent of the town had burned to the ground. Though loss of life is thought currently to be mercifully light, the loss of homes and property is not.

Our heartfelt thoughts are with all those who have suffered and those who will continue to suffer as a result of this climate-related episode and should any others wish to suggest that now is not the time to be raising such matters I can only say:

“Now is exactly the time!”…

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Head for the hills

June 30, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

I have only visited India once – and that was a long time ago, back in the 1980s. We went – very sensibly – during what is, I believe, called the ‘post-monsoon’ season. This period – from October through November – is usually fairly dry but also considerably cooler than are the summer and monsoon seasons.

Such things are understandably of concern to the Brits, who, for some hundred of years, insisted on venturing to parts of the globe for which they were (and are) not really equipped.

We went home, of course, before the weather became too extreme for us. The Brits who were stationed in India during the British Raj were obliged (by their masters) to stay. To avoid the more unpleasant (to them at least) aspects of the climate they established settlements between two and three thousand metres up in the foothills of the Himalayas and in other elevated parts of the sub-continent, to which they might retreat when the heat on the plains became intolerable.

These Hill Stations – as they became known – were frequently modeled on aspects of the Old Country, such that the ex-pats might pretend that they were back in good old Blighty! Lord Lytton said of Ootacamund (Ooty) in the 1870s – “Such beautiful English rain – such delicious English mud!”. This does, of course, beg the question…

As it happens, I did visit Ooty. I had long nurtured a fascination for the place having seen images in one of my father’s old railway magazine of the steam rack railway (the Nilgiri Mountain Railway) that still connects (and is still operated by steam) Ooty to Mettupalayam on the plains below. The excursion from Bangalore to Ooty and back was quite an adventure and not one I could contemplate undertaking now – but I am very glad that we did so then.

“But why?” – the gentle reader might reasonably ask – “Are you reminiscing just now about your travels in the sub-continent some decades back?”

Good question!

Here in Canada we have for the past few days been sweltering under the influence of a heat dome. You may have read about this because it has become an international news story – and not for positive reasons. Such has been the intensity of this heatwave that the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada was broken not once, not twice but three times within the last few days – each time at the small settlement of Lytton in the Fraser Canyon right here in BC. Yesterday’s maximum was in excess of 49°C! Tragically this heatwave has led to a spate of sudden deaths amongst the elderly and infirm across the country. Our thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones.

Given the changes in the world’s climate it is very likely that we will have increasingly to adapt to such conditions. Having no hill station to which to retire The Girl and I did the best that we could – we retreated to the guest bedroom in our walkout basement, where the temperatures have been a good few degrees cooler.

Clearly this is not an ideal long-term solution to ever rising temperatures. My next post will explore the matter further…

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