Comments on: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

By: solar pool heating

solar pool heating — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:23:42 +0000

Solar water heating will save you around 1/3rd of your electric bill every month. Not an exaggeration, do the math Go Green!

By: Andy @ Yellow Swordfish

Andy @ Yellow Swordfish — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:28:42 +0000

Hi Sue
Nice story! But there you go – it’s one way you can keep warm without the boiler – set fire to the house
I’ve just had my boiler replaced two weeks back and the engineer was flooded with callout calls for breakdowns. They sit there all summer and folks don’t get the service done and then expect them to fire right up…

By the way I feel guilty about not being in touch but I’ll do that tomorrow and explain why… and hope you warm up soon.

By: Kirsty Hammans

Kirsty Hammans — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:08:40 +0000

Actually it’s Sue not Kirsty today! I’m in Woodford Green and I’m frozen. It’s not that the electric power has gone, but the central heating has broken down. The thing is, why does everything break just when you need it most? I have been plagued with hot flushes throughout the year, but now I need to generate my own heat, not one !! Years ago the power went down in Debden Broadway and x-hubby dashed to bring candles to customers notice, and of course they sold well. Shop staff were all confident with their mental arithmetic, to cater for times like these when the till wasn’t working .Anyway, it was one of those rare times that the bank manager was due to visit the shop, and chaos was well underway. A borrowed generator was set up at the rear of the shop so customers could still browse around safely. Not only was the machine a noisey and smelly contraption but suddenly it decided to liven up the massive pile of bog rolls which became ‘hot stuff’ just in time for the arrival of the expected visitor. Flames were quickly put out, but I can’t help thinking about the dangers when we try to cope with alternative power sources in emergency. I suppose we should really aim to be proactive and plan for the ‘just in case’ scenario.

By: Jeannine

Jeannine — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:51:12 +0000

I lose power occasionally during storms, but usually only for a few hours. During a hurricane (I think it was Isabelle), our transformer blew up, and since it was just our street affected, we were about LAST on the priority list! There were so many trees down that about 1/2 the region was without power. Luckily for me, the next street over HAD power & I knew a lot of those people (from years of walking the dog over there…) I took my frozen food to a neighbor’s freezer, then lived for 3 days like camping out! It was late summer so warm enough to take a shower (and I have gas hot water heater anyway!) No TV, no computer, went to bed when it got dark… I was VERY glad when the power was back! We’re all WAY too reliant on electricity. (When I build my dream retirement house, it’ll be mostly solar – and I’ll sell the excess BACK to the power grid!!!)

By: stabani

stabani — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 16:25:50 +0000

I didn’t quite think about it in america… well, REALLY think about it. Then when I moved to Pakistan i realized how important electricity is.. we have about 4 hours of outages a day.

And that’s why i got my very own huge diesel generator to spew out enough power to run the house And they do make a lot of noise–and pollution!

Here’s to hoping that the lights never go down in the UK!