Treading Lightly

Wedding at HHP

hobbitrob — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:29:07 +0000

SHOCK turbine opening

Liz — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:27:00 +0000

Alan Simpson MP and over 70 shareholders and suppliers came to Hockerton to celebrate the official opening of our community-owned wind turbine. It was a stunning day, with plenty of wind and solar power, and inspired plenty of ideas of how to spend the income from the turbine – the most popular being a foot and cycle path to Southwell, a village green and playground, and energy audits of local homes – a good mix of social, environmental and economic options for sustainable Hockerton.

As well as Alan, one of the main campaigners for the new feed-in tariff, we were joined by a small film unit from the Energy Saving Trust who are covering the project for their Green Communities site to show what communities can achieve.

One year’s energy

hobbitrob — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:10:26 +0000

Now we’ve lived here for a full year, I was keen to see how much energy we’d actually consumed in the house (OK, I’m a geek!)

So the headline facts are as follows:

1 year’s energy consumption in the house – 3,395kWh. For those of you with a life, you may wonder if that is good or bad; well, the EST published figure for annual energy consumption for the average UK house (a 3-bed semi with gas central heating) is 25,500kWh, so I’d say it is good, especially when you consider that …
in the same period, our community solar PV panels and wind turbines generated 14,035kWh, so our share of that is 2,807kWh, meaning that our net annual household consumption was 588kWh
however, that’s not the full story, because we also have a separate home office, which Liz uses for her work, as did I when in full-time employment; the total consumption of the home office for the year was a further 337 kWh, so that puts us up to 925kWh
mind you, that home office consumption really “belongs” to our respective employers, so I think it’s fair to ignore that
and since Liz has “migrated” back to an office in the house since mid-Nov (the home office isn’t as well insulated) then a significant (?) proportion of our energy use in the last quarter (Nov-Jan) really “belongs” to Consumer Focus; it’s not possible to determine the exact amount though I’m afraid – Liz wouldn’t let me put energy monitors on every electrical device in the office (I don’t know, some people …) It is worth noting however that until the last quarter (as at 13th Nov 2009), our net energy consumption was -148kWh (do they call that carbon positive or negative; I’m never sure)

Anyway, time to turn this computer off, I’ve an energy debt to pay off … I’ll bore you with water consumption data in a day or two, next time the sun shines or the wind blows …

Oh, and our £3k share in the village community wind turbine is estimated to be worth 5,000kWh/yr, so what am I worrying about?

One year on …

hobbitrob — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:29:57 +0000

Well, it’s exactly one year since we moved to Hockerton Housing Project, and fitting perhaps that on the same day as we appeared on Country Tracks on BBC talking about the village community turbine, we were at the turbine giving it an unofficial christening.

We failed miserably in our plans to Blog our first year here, but who knows, maybe we’ll do better in the second, and hopefully many, many more to come.

Here are a few snaps from today; cheers.

The thaw is almost complete

hobbitrob — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:04:58 +0000

Here are the remains of the snowman in the middle of the lake … look carefully, he is there

January snow at Hockerton

hobbitrob — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:08:53 +0000

We’ve not had it as bad as most of the UK, but it may not be over yet, and it is very cold. The lake has been frozen for a couple of weeks, and is now home to a snowman! Some snow scenes below.

A trip to the seaside

hobbitrob — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:04:43 +0000

Beach hut north of Mablethorpe

We’re on “staycation” at the moment, and today took a day trip to our local coast in Lincolnshire. We headed to Mablethorpe, known to the locals as “the village of the daleks” due to the unusually high number of motability scooters in town (and it is true!)

A very traditional British seaside resort, with beach huts (although some unusual designs as you can see), donkeys on the beach, sticks of rock for sale, only bucking the trend with a complete absence of “kiss me quick” hats and both a nearby on-shore and off-shore wind farm.

A beautiful coastline with great beaches, and the pinnacle is surely the Gibraltar Point nature reserve just south of Skegness; maybe it was the fact that it was such a vivid and welcome change from it’s neighbouring resort, or the fact that the sun finally came out when we got there, but the peace and tranquility was stunning.

Selected highlights below.

Another beach hut

And another

And a load more!

Donkeys on the beach

And sticks of rock!

SHOCK Turbine – the foundations are laid

hobbitrob — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:00:38 +0000

It was a long hot day of concrete pouring for the foundations of the turbine. About 30 cubic metres of concrete was required to make the foundations secure, and it had to be tamped down (smoothed with a big piece of wood; a bit like icing a cake …) to slope away from the foundation ring so that rainwater will run away from the base. You have to work quickly as the concrete soon “goes off” (sets), but it all went smoothly are here are a selection of photos of the day’s events.

Concrete being pumped

The Pump Meister

Remote control pouring

With a little manual intervention

A vibrator to help the concrete settle

Then the tamping begins ...

... and thankfully eventually ends

The finished product (well, a tower, turbine and grid connection still to go)

What a load of carp …

hobbitrob — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:31:37 +0000

Our lake is well stocked with carp:

Which is why the heron likes it here so much ….

The heron catches a carp (honest, zoom in ...)

The BBC come to Hockerton

hobbitrob — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:17:59 +0000

We had a visit today from the BBC to do some filming for Country Tracks. Country File visited many years ago, so they’ve come back to see how we’re getting on. The focus of the item will be on our renewable energy generation, both on site, which meets 90% of our demand, and the latest project to install a village community turbine.

Presenter Ellie Harrison interviewed Liz and I at HHP (no photos of that for obvious reasons) and then went up to the site of the new village turbine and interviewed our neighbour Nick Martin who was busy installing the foundations, but not too busy to be interviewed by the BBC – see some photos below. Not sure when the programme will be broadcast, but we’ll post when we know.

Nick Martin and presenter Ellie Harrison

Nick & Ellie talkin' turbine

There was a sad end to the day though when we found one of this year’s lambs dead in one of the lakes in the “bean field”; poor thing had got his head stuck in a watering can and fallen in the lake. With this life you have to take the rough with the smooth.