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Pierre Marcolini, haute chocolaterie & tea room,
near the Bourla theatre, Antwerp
Olympic rings
*****
The government's insulation programme has extremely poor public takeup for well understood technical reasons.
It has not been some villainous politician sabotaging it.
The kind of insulation used is not hung up on by any advanced nation other than Britain. Indeed, it is prohibited by many.
It might work well insulating an industrial unit's refrigeration block but that is not what is in play.
You can just about trust new housebuilders to embed it safely, provided you keep it out of cladding, but getting it installed securely in retrofit is quite another matter.
Most of the firms wanting to install will not meet the certification standards required by the civil service and those that do will triple the resultant cost to the consumer because even with meeting the standards the legal liabilities are very open ended.
Firms seem even reluctant to take on the remedying of defecting cladding and, for the low grade work of retrofit, the building labour simply does not exist. Most labour gangs for construction work are made up of continental Europeans.
If you amortise the carbon cost of retrofit work across 15 years you still do not get carbon savings, except for roof insulation, and moving families out of their rented accommodation for two months is not desirable.
Passing legislation that dumps responsibilities on the building owner may relieve the civil service of some liability but it does not address all the truth.
In tall HMOs the hot air often rises to the topmost floors in summer. In flats with mainy southerly or southwesterly aspect this can produce a risk to life in summer.
This type of insulation traps the hot air inside and opening the windows in hot direct sun makes no positive difference.
In the Mediterranean, and even in a latitude across Europe just below Paris, solid masonry walls are used. They absorb the heat during the day and let it out in the cooler nights when it might be needed. The walls absorb cold from the night air and keep the building cool during the day.
Many people agree that Victorian houses in southern England and stone buildings further north can do this very well. Sash windows that still open also facilitate convection, as did open chimneys.
Many, we can attest, use very little heating or cooling input as a result and their carbon budgets could be brought to near balance by a small grant for solar panels only.
With PVC windows and the subdivision of properties for rental purposes we do, of course, have new problems and more occupiers die of stifling heat in summer than cold in winter.
Airtight homes with their bacteriological problems, mould, smells and condensation problems are going to make things worse and push people into using electric air conditioning.
WELCOME to the FOOD pages of WORLD REVIEWS!
Pablo Picasso, Still Life of Octopi and Cuttlefish, 1946
We have the following recipes and reviews in this section:
FOOD0002/0821 click here for:
NOSHING AT NIGHT IN MELBOURNE
Reviewed by EREZ GORDON
FOOD0004/0125 click here for:
MANGE 2
Reviewed by MARTIN CALDWELL
FOOD0005/1115 click here for:
THÉ CHING WO
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
FOOD0003/0322 click here for:
CHICKEN MARENGO
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
FOOD0001/0920 click here for:
CORN OYSTERS
Written by ELIZA LESLIE, 1846, Philadelphia, U.S.A.
FOOD0006/0718 click here for:
TOMATES SOSNO
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
FOOD0007/0120 click here for:
PINA FLAMENCA
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
FOOD0008/0322 click here for:
MENTON LEMON FESTIVAL 2022
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
Day of the Triffids approaches - the pineapple keeps growing
Ephemeral comments:
Inedible not inflammable
Catching on not catching fire - for extensions and conversions.
These insulation blocks may look like Lion bars in consistency but they also do the job - structurally, too, which is not the case with a piece of foam - and don't cook.
Wind back to a house in the same area of Cambridge just passed with a new ground floor extension built with plastic cladding and foam insulation but with the garden wall rebuilt in lovely brickwork as if it were a Victorian house. Crazy. Good luck with that if you get a lithium-ion battery fire whilst charging an e-bike in the extension.
It got planning permission at the height of the Insulate Britain furore. No thought to technical details in the activists. Ideology comes first.
You would have been forgiven for thinking Labour was their political wing with leftist politicians like Andy Burnham (king of Labour closing hospital wards) parroting their ideologies.
Luckily you can get out of an extension that does not require you to go down a staircase full of toxic fumes if it is only one storey high.
So what happens if there are no hospital beds, after you have done all the prevention instead of acute treatment (not prevention of building fires, mind) you claim, for someone who does get burns?
There is an election. So ask Labour because the wholesale moving of doctors out of hospitals to work in clinics in the community not yet built or kitted out, and which they may not wish to work in, in one parliamentary term, will not work. AI telling you that you cannot have an appointment is no substitute, which is what will happen under Labour as Wes Streeting drafts in private equity to replace doctors with the non-qualified. The truth is that Labour does not really know what to do - on anything.
There is a specific additional problem that relates to Cambridge. There has been the additional housebuilding political parties have souight - in Cambourne, Trumpington, Northstowe and even a major council homes site in central Cambridge - but no additional hospital. Neither has there been reopening of closed wards, even during Covid, due to the impossibility of staffing them. This has increased health demand on the largest hospital in the region to the edge, even in midsummer.
Net zero has to some extend become a political project - the young across Europe support it less than the old. It has, to some extent, been undermined by the first solutions being snatched at, against the background of changing climate data.
Proper hospital provision in an advanced country is essential. So before reality and moving science does it there needs to be a change of political priorities.