120 yen

This used to be the rate for a dollar, and it was alarming to see the pound keep dipping the wrong side of it.
The first time I came to Japan, the pound was around 290 yen, and it fell to 230 in 9 months. The yen kept climbing into the 1990s. Then towards the end of the millenium the pound started going up and the economists talked about the Japanese economy stagnating. Of course the economy was still working away, money was circulating from consumers to producers to employees, and most people were employed by somebody and consuming something, so things probably weren't so bad. Roofs were over heads and food was on tables. Not only that but petrol was in cars, software was in game computers and champagne was on the shelves in supermarkets. It would be like looking at my height and weight and seeing no change in the past twenty years, declaring that I was stagnating, and lamenting that I wasn't three metres tall weighing 400 kilogrammes.
Anyway, the growth stopped by Summer 2007 when the pound was 250 yen. Then the wheels fell off the western economic bus. Perhaps "bus" is not a particularly appropriate metaphor for the western economy. It seems to have turned more into one of those sports cars that are great for the driver, but not very good for carrying other people.
This graph has nothing to do with temperatures, but you can definitely see some trends as different economies heat up and cool down. At one point it looks like one boiled over and spilt out of the pan and into the fire.

This all relates to our house since some of the financing came from savings in sterling. If I'd had a crystal ball and knew that I was going to be getting some land, that the western economy was in for a wobble, and that the yen was about to become a safe haven as the least-bad option for cash to flow into, I would have transfered a lump sum in the summer of 2007. As it was, and as usual, rather than doing it when I could have or should have, I left it until I had to.
If I'd had more sense, whether or not I'd had a crystal ball, I would have started transfering sterling in regular lumps as soon as we decided on the land. At the time the rate seemed so low and the pound so weak that I ought to borrow as much as possible in yen and save the sterling for later when the pound would surely be stronger. Of course it didn't get stronger. It got weaker.
Past performance is no guarantee of future growth. I was comparing the yen to my ideas of what it related to in sterling, but the two currencies were blissfully unaware of my opinions. A rate of 160 yen to the pound may have seemed very poor when I was buying the land, but it looked pretty good when the building bills started to come in and the pound was heading to 130. It still looks pretty good today when the pound has climbed a mountain and the rate is around 145.
With a currency pair, only one thing is certain. The rate will either get better, get worse or stay the same. There may be different probabilities for each outcome, but it will certanly be one of them. So the most sensible thing to do if you know you need to transfer money over the next couple of years is to start moving it, steadily.  The next question is how.

Snow in April

It snowed in the night and the there was a couple of centimetres left on the roof on the morning of April 11th. I had to go to work and didn't have time to clear it, so there's an opportunity to see how much less electricity we generated and the value of clearing snow. 

Here's a comparison between the generation on the snow-covered day with the day before, which was otherwise similarly sunny.

In these graphs, the pink is the electricity consumption, highest in the wee hours when the eco cute is making us hot water. The blue is the generation, peaking with the rising sun. Notice the difference bewteen 6 and 9am.

It looks like the snow was still there until around 9 o'clock, stopping the rays of the sun reaching the panels, and stopping any chance of the heat melting it from beneath.

time	Generation / kWh
	11th	10th	Loss
6:00	0.0	0.6	0.6
7:00	0.1	2.0	1.9
8:00	0.4	3.1	2.7
9:00	4.0	4.9	0.9
10:00	5.9	6.0	-
total loss			4.1

HTML Tables

The total loss was 4.1 kilowatt hours and we're getting 48 yen per kWh, so that's a couple of hundred yen. Is it worth spending five minutes clearing snow off the bottom of the roof for that?

Sensor lights

One of the problems we came up with in the one-year evaluation was the light in the under-floor store room.

We put a regular ceiling light with a sensor on it, and the problem is that you have to crawl into the middle of the room for it to switch on, since the ceiling is only about 1.4 metres high so the cone of the sensor's sensitivity doesn't spread very wide. My idea of a solution was to move it closer to the door, which should be relatively straightforward.

Their first suggestion was just to put a light switch on it. Since this is a fluorescent tube and it's in a store room, where it could be left on for a day or two, this seems a pretty good place for a sensor.
That night when I put the kids to bed, I noticed that the light was still on in the machine room, where we had been during the visit. This is one of the few places we have a light switch and if the door had been closed, it would have been on for the rest of the month, until next time to clean the filters.
Another option is fitting an external sensor to the light, to switch it on. A further complication with the room is that it has two entrances, around 3 metres apart, so it would be tricky to get one sensor sensing activity in both places. There are sensors for yard lights that react to movement up to 10 metres away, so this should be possible.

The sensor itself sticks down in the middle of the light, which is round with a round fluorescent tube inside. It's not designed to be adjusted, as are most of the other sensors I bought, but I do have a screwdriver.

I was sure to switch off the lights at the breaker when I was doing this. Any kids reading, get a grown-up to help you do this as you might fall off the stool trying to reach the master switches.
The sensor assembly could easily be disassembled from the bracket and the wire was stiff enough to hold it pointing in any direction, so the first thing I tried was putting the plastic cover over it, to see if the sensor could see through it.

At first this seemed successful. After I put the breaker back on, with the lighting-up duration set to the minimum of 5 seconds, when the kids went in from the kitchen the light went on, then they waited for it to go off and went in from the living room and it went on, then they didn't move and it went on again, then they got as far away from the room as possible and it went on again, then again just after it switched off 5 seconds later. Then again, and again regardless of any human activity.
I guessed that the lights were heating up the inside of the cover when they were on, then the parts inside the cover would cool rapidly, which the sensor registered as a movement of heat, therefore switching it off again. So I took the cover off, and it seems to be better. I toyed with making a bigger hole in the cover, but for the moment it's just there with the cover off, working relatively well.

Ichinen Kenshin - One-year evaluation

They came for the one year evaluation the other day. Actually three months late as it was April and we'd moved in December. If they'd had the process their way, it probably would have been April by the time we'd moved in.

The architect, the heating engineer and the boss's son from the builders came at 9 am.

The main issues we had are dirty beams on the balcony, flimsy internal doors, hairline cracks in the tiles, cracks on the internal walls, plumbing the dishwasher so that it uses piped hot water rather than electrically heating it, the positioning of the sensor light in the pantry, and the sound closing the front door. We also mentioned issues with the ventilation system and solar power conditioners.　Also I told the heating engineers about the vagaries of the eco cute, and asked if he had the COP performance against temperature, which he said he did and would send to me.

We'd shown the architect the stains on the beams a month after we moved in, and his response was something like, what do you expect if you have white beams?

The boss's son took it much more seriously, and came to the conclusion that the metal plate protecting the top of the balcony beams was too flat, so was collecting rain water, which it was then leaking steadily down the side of the beams, leaving dark marks. There were also bits of rust on some of the supports for pillars and the bannister on the balcony. Although stainless steel does not rust, it's not always stainless, and even if it is, it's cut with a steel saw. A tiny bit of steel can produce a long trail of rust.

We complained about the doors which don't seem to give any protection of the sound inside. This is inevitable in an airtight house that shuts out sounds from the outside, making those inside more obvious, and is helped by the tile floor and open plan. They knew all this, and it's amazing that after all the hundreds of square metres of insulation they charged us for putting around the house, they didn't put a little bit in the doors. At first the boss's son suggested we play music, but we didn't really think that was a solution. 

Several hairline cracks have appeared in the tiles on the ground floor, where the tile has been cut into a corner, for example where it has to go around a beam or protruding wall. This is the kind of thing we only notice because we know it is there, or when we're cleaning the floor, but in searching we found another five places, and it would mainly be nice to know what the cause of the problem with. It seems most likely something in the tilers' procedure. 

One thing the boss's son said at the end was that he would find the cause of all the problems before coming to  fix them.

The front door doesn't really bother me, but when it closes it sends a bolt of air into the house which gets many of the doors inside rattling. This is one symptom of a highly airtight house. This doesn't really happen in Europe since front doors open inwards, so the air bolt is sent ouwards when they are closed. Traditional Japanese houses are not only as airtight as an old sock, but also have sliding doors, so there would be no air movement anyway. 

The main problems stemming from this are that guests are shocked by the sound of the door, and sometimes when they leave they are so careful that they don't shut the front door properly. They turn the handle and pull it to gently, when really it just needs to be firmly shut, with the handle in its normal place. The next morning the genkan's a bit chilly and we realise the door has been ajar all night.

One suggestion was a door-closer on the hinge, which would pull the door to. The architect said the door makers probably didn't sell them. I echoed his "probably" with a critical question mark. The boss's son said it would be a good idea to use the manufacturers products if possible. 

So it looks like there may be some more building work going on in the house. Hopefully this will all be covered by the builders since they are fixing their problems, but I won't be surprised if they slap a bill on us in a couple of months.

Energy: Horses for courses

Energy is everywhere. In fact if we follow on from Einstein and the notion of modern physics that there is no wave-particle duality and everything is simply waves, then there is only energy. It takes on different forms, and we measure it in different ways. In very large amounts it is the mass of the matter, so perhaps we shouldn't be worrying about an energy problem at all. Getting the energy out of the matter has had mixed reviews though.

The energy in our food is usually measured in calories, which actually are kilo calories.

Electricity is bought and sold in kilowatt hours, kWh.

Oil, petrol and paraffin, the latter also known as gasoline and kerosene, come in litres or gallons.

Gas is measured in cubic metres or British thermal units, BTUs.

It's almost as if someone were trying to make it difficult to compare them.

The average calorie intake in the world takes a few searches to find. At first almost every hit is on a website about healthy eating and dieting, telling you what your calorie intake should be, or how to get it under a certain level. I guess people who are starving to death don't use the internet! There's a list on wikipedia by country. No points for guessing which country comes top of the list at almost 3,800 kilocalories per person per day. The European average is a little less with the UK weighing in at 3,400. The Japan average is significantly lower at 2,800. Converting to Joules, the standard SI way of measuring energy, US consumption corresponds to 5.8 gigajoules per capita per annum; Japan 4.2 gJ/a; UK 5.3 gJ/a.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN recommends a daily minimum of 1,800, which is a little under half the US and European consumption. The actual figures are probably a little exaggerated, as they refer to market consumption, and don't account for food wasted between production and table, or table and mouth.

Here is another angle on energy consumption and energy waste.

In energy consumption, the US comes in 11th with 300 gigajoules per capita per annum, beaten by several gulf oil states, Trinidad and Tobago and its northern neighbour Canada. Iceland comes top of the list with over twice the consumption. Japan around half, at 160 gigajoules pa. UK less still at 140 gJ/a.

So, comparing food and other human energy use, we use something like twenty times more energy than we eat. My first reaction to this was one of pity, that we need so much more energy for our tools and toys than for our bodies.

One consequence of this is that biofuels could be devastating. If we tried to produce 1% of our energy needs by biofuels, this would mean 20% less land is available for food. This would likely be the 20% that the poorest 80% of the world live off. Advice on keeping calorie intake down would probably still ride to the top of the internet hit list.

Whistles and bleeps

The whistle could be one of the greater inventions for domestic energy saving. Apparently it was invented after the first world war by Sholom Borgelman, owner of a sheet metal works in London. It's one of those inventions that is so small and obvious that we forget it was ever invented, and details are difficult to come by. You get into one of those circular searches on the internet, where the same little bit of information has been cut and pasted from site to site so many times that it's difficult to see where it came from. Also, most of the hits refer directly or indirectly to items for sale, reminding you that the internet is not so much a font of information as a large shopping arcade. 

Sholom Borgelman is a great name, but apparently he changed it to Borman. It's difficult to find any other information about him. There are no other references to him or his sheet metal works on the internet except single sentences talking about his whistling kettle invention. He doesn't even feature on Wikipedia. Ancestry.com has no Borgelmans living in the US or UK. It looks like his son Barney Borman was a communist councillor in East London, so perhaps the whole family's history was swept away, leaving only a kettle whistle rattling on the floor. 

The steam whistle had been around since the 1850s, although applying the same principle to a kettle only seems obvious to us after the event. The whistle itself is ancient, going back to China like most other inventions that we don't associate with a dead white male, and a few that we do. Wikipedia tells us that Joseph Hudson of Birmingham, England, made the first whistle to be used by a football referee in 1868 and William Atack, a New Zealander, was the world's first referee to use a whistle to stop a game of sport in 1884.

So anyway, for the past year, I've been thinking about getting a kettle with a whistle. This would save  electricity. It's been estimated that 4% of UK domestic carbon emissions come from the kettle, and as another tea-loving nation, Japan no doubt is similar

The beauty of a whistle is that it tells you when to switch off the heat. Running in the kilowatts, ten seconds of extra kettle boiling equates to an hour leaving one of our low-energy LEDs on. The electric kettle goes one step further by switching the heat off for you when the desired temperature is reached. Seth Stevenson pays homage to the electric kettle here. 

Hot water dispensing Thermos flasks are common in Japan, many that can be plugged in to keep the water at the desired temperature. I'm ambivalent towards these as the savings made by stopping the heat as soon as the water boils are probably squandered in the energy used to keep the water hot for hours afterwards. So for the past year we've been using our stove-top kettle, still quite impressed that the handle doesn't get hot.

Then, when I put the kettle on this morning, I found a function on our IH hob. I knew there was a tempura setting, which keeps the chip-pan at 180 degrees. This morning I found a kettle in the menu, with choices of 0.5 litres up to 2 litres. It beeps a few times when the water has boiled, and switches itself off, so we have the best of an electric kettle and a whistle. 

The key point to energy saving is to just boil the amount of water you need, and of course the steel kettle doesn't tell us how much water is in it, and the fact that we have to choose a setting for the amount of water means that it's probably working on a timer rather than a thermostat to decide when the water is ready. Further investigation is necessary. We should probably put in different amounts of water depending on whether we want a rolling boil for proper tea, or water at slightly lower temperature for green tea. It will take time to change the ritualistic behaviour of kettle boiling, but it's time to make new rituals for a new world; to raise awareness of exactly how much water should go into the kettle and then bury it in our subconscious.