Weaning yourself off gas - getting it disconnected. Anyone done it?

graememk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119157411#Comment_119157411

So we'll just ignore the mining for gas, oil and processing, planting the trees, harvesting, processing, drying, groundwork for replanting and planting the forest again. So wood would never be even neutral.

Whereas solar etc do end up covering the manufacturing" costs"

Besides the the particular matter emitted from burning the wood etc

Manion

Awful smack of whatabouteery in this thread. I remember the auld lad smoking away saying Ah sure everything gives you cancer. Same vibe from these comments.

mp3guy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119157411#Comment_119157411

Different scale, lithium mining is often used as a strawman bogus argument to prevent progress. Not even close to the destruction that fossil fuel harvesting has and continues to cause.

Irish Steve

The fact that we are living means that we are going to have an impact on carbon emissions.

What's causing a lot of issues is that we have a green party that has managed to infiltrate it's way into being way more influential than the voting percentages would normally imply, and making it even worse is that way too much of supposed green policy has very little to do with real green issues, and a lot more to do with the wishy washy lettuce leaf politices of a group of people who don't actually have to live in the same reality as the vast percentage of the population, and we all know how much pressure was applied by the greens to go for diesel powered cars, and how misguided that has been subsequently found to be, and some of the most recent emission control regulations on diesel have only served to make things worse, and that's not even then looking at the whole nightmare of how they actually intend to "persuade" us to go for electric vehicles, and provide the power at home to charge them.

The real killer for me with the Greens is that the EU have approved zero rating of solar, yet NOTHING has been done to encourage more people to go for solar, and the whole process of grants and checks relating to things like heat pumps is loaded in favour of the installers, and the home owner is not getting any real guidance or assistance in terms of making good decisions, unless they are prepared to spend stupid sums to try and determine if the house is actually suitable for the install of the relevant upgrades, and the margins the one stop shops are putting on their prices is only obscene.

championc

For me, the Greens have been useless. Most policies are EU driven anyway. Doing nothing to really make us think and change our ways really. Total heels dragging on so much

Manion

Some folks act like buying an EV is the same as supporting an extra lane on the M50. The greens are doing a huge amount. Also for those talking about the greens not living in reality, when renewable electricity generation targets where first set it was said to be cloud cookcoo land stuff, but the larger of 40% was beaten we've managed to get to 75% this year. People who say there are no supports for solar automatically undermine themselves.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119157508#Comment_119157508

People have been burning wood for 10,000+ years without problem and before that there were natural forest fires . but now with the population so high anything that catches on is likely to cause problems. Remember about 10 years back they were trying to promote mackerel as a sustainable source of fish, then a few years later they were being overfished? The PM2.5 problem is probably being exaggerated to stop a "dash for wood" , air quality very good in Ireland generally but if say 1 million people convert from oil to wood then it will become a problem and there also won't be enough trees to cater for the increase in demand.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119158295#Comment_119158295

It is really terrible that they are not promoting the absolute feck out of solar given the gas shortages we are facing into. The investment can be less than 1/10 of price of an electric car

unkel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119159245#Comment_119159245

PM2.5 problem probably exaggerated. Yeah, it only kills a good few million people per year. Several times the number of people killed in road accidents. Sure who cares.

unkel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119159256#Comment_119159256

Agreed there. Not sure why you make the comparison to electric cars or how you come up with that figure though 😂

An investment of €200 in a solar panel and a grid tie inverter will pay back about €70-80 per year. Don't need to own a home, don't even have to live in a gaff with a garden. Could place it on your balcony.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119159288#Comment_119159288

The people dying from that are the ones breathing in smog day in day out in China/India and other places where air quality is consistently terrible, radon probably kills a good few more every year over here. I'd say with the daysul cars gone the few areas of Ireland where the air quality occasionaly turns yellow/orange will go back to being green

unkel

You'd say the air quality will go back green? 😂

Didn't the WHO say there are 1300 premature deaths in Ireland because of PM2.5 or thereabouts? Very little to do with diesels (they just give you cancer), everything to do with burning solid stuff in your home

Again - this is all way off topic from the original post. And I guess this thread has run its course for now. There is no motivation for me to get my gas disconnected, even if I almost completely stop using it.

bullit_dodger

This saddens me. I mean I "get" why Bord Gais would want a "parting bonus" of ~€800 when you leave as your one less customer to sustain them going forward, but it saddens me that

a) they make people pay such a large amount

b) that it's disincentivizing people (like many here) to try and do their bit for the environment.

magicbastarder

i won't believe that it costs €800 to simply stop buying gas until someone can show proof of this. my working assumption is that is the price for removal of service, i.e. physical shutting off of the gas pipe with meter removal.

Irish Steve

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119159256#Comment_119159256

Indeed,and to add to that aggravation, we don't need to use PV solar to heat water for domestic use, or to produce heat to go into a heat tank to boost the heat from other sources like heat pumps. there are very acceptable methods of using solar to water, one option being to reuse displaced central heating radiators as solar collectors, which then feed hot water to the cylinder or a heat exchanger, and that's not using any precious metals, or much in the way of anything other than plumbing pipes, a pump, and a few controls, and the saving is that the house has hot water for effectively a very low cost, and no carbon emissions worth arguing over, as no carbon based fuel is being used to provide the heat.

Total absence of joined up thinking from SEAI and the Greens, but there are others that could be making a more useful contribution, and encouraging out of the box thinking, if nothing else, why are we not looking much more seriously and urgently at using Hydrogen as an alternative to Electric power for vehicles, given that pretty much all of us will have to put Solar PV in to reduce carbon footprint, why are we not seeing designs to enable home generation of hydrogen for vehicle fuel, using the excess from the panels. Nothing being said about that possible option, and the infrastructure for a lot of it is already in place, but it needs some creative design work to produce all the parts needed for that chain. One of the reasons is that Governments don't want to lose the massive tax take from vehicle fuel, and there would be some technical issues to resolve, but if the will was there, it could happen.

Ok, some of this is a long way from moving off gas (sorry Unkel), but it needs to be being said, and we all need to be putting pressure on the politicians to start getting real about this, the time for action came a long time ago, and in too many areas, there's still arguing about it, rather than making the hard decisions, and getting on with it.

Jonathan

I think this thread has served its purpose at this stage.