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THE PSNI HAVE launched an appeal for help finding a 33-year-old woman last seen on Wednesday in Newry.
According to the police service, Emma Rafferty has “close connections in the city as well as in Carlingford” in Co Louth.
Emma is described as being of slim build, approximately 5’3″ tall, and with long bleached blonde hair with brown dip-dyed ends.
When last seen, in the Sandys Street area of Newry, she was wearing a red t-shirt and jeans.
Anyone who knows her whereabouts is being asked to contact Ardmore Police Station in Newry on 028 302 65500.
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I called to my local builders providers yesterday and noticed dozens of oil boilers in stock.
Clearly, the alternatives are not easier and cheaper or the message isn’t getting through.
I see very few deep home insulation retrofitting except by those that can afford a very expensive house renovation.
It appears to be a scheme for the very rich that can afford it or people on welfare that get it for nothing.
In between are the vast majority of us that can’t afford it ourselves but pay for others through ever increasing carbon taxes and vat on every small energy saying measure we take.
@Thomas Sheridan: heat pumps don’t suite the irsh climate, 20c one day 10c the next. They need to be on all the time and will drive your sustainable electric bill to unsustainable levels. If it sounds to good to be true, it usually is. Put on an extra t-shirt
@P. V. Aglue: If the property is properly insulated and your heat pump system was correctly designed to the property for example the size and output of the heat pump. Then a heat pump will be absolutely perfect for the Irish climate. Installing a heat pump in a C rated house for example won’t work well. I was only having a talk about this recently with some of my work colleagues. The ones who had oil central heating, their electricity bills in winter were in the region of €300 for 2 months and home heating oil cost them near €600 for the same 2 months. €900 ISH for 2 bills. The guy with the A2 rated new build home with a heat pump said his dearest bill over the winter was €389 for 2 months. Both figures don’t include the deductions for the Energy credit either.
@P. V. Aglue: I have a heat pump and solar. Home is fully electric. Total cost of electricity €650 last year. Home at 22/23 degrees all year. Water always 50 degrees. Serious incentive to go that way if retrofit was not so expensive for older homes.
@Thomas Sheridan: I couldn’t have said it better myself ! My kerosene heating boiler is about to go (25 years old ) and ditto with the neighbours. We are all replacing with same oil burning boiler as its too cost prohibitive to install air to heat pump and all that goes with it. Ditto with solar and to make matters worse they have reduced grant
@Thomas Sheridan: @Thomas Sheridan: I couldn’t have said it better myself ! My kerosene heating boiler is about to go (25 years old ) and ditto with the neighbours. We are all replacing with same oil burning boiler as its too cost prohibitive to install air to heat pump and all that goes with it. Ditto with solar and to make matters worse they have reduced grant
@Argus Romsworth: that is the main point to expensive to retrofit even with grant for most people
There is no way in hell I’m taking out a 100k loan to retrofit my house to avoid two large gas bills a year, go away and give your head a wobble. If somebody wants to do it for free work away be my guest.
@Fiona Wyse: Ah Fiona think of your great great great great grandkids they’ll be the ones suffering don’t you know.
@Ger Whelan: I don’t have any biological children, that’s my good deed done for the world!
@Ger Whelan: it will all have changed again long before that
Data centres being granted permission shows me that out politicians are clueless about what it takes to mitigate emissions and I don’t support the measures being brought in by the same politicians as they disproportionately punish ordinary people instead of companies.
@Lewis
Why would anyone find the following comment offensive so as to erase it.
People laugh at the naivety of people who participated in Papal indulgences to assuage human guilt and save them from the fires of hell as the curia drummed up financial support for St Peter’s construction in Rome.
The 21st-century version is not much different but more widespread, so although no more than Christians, apart from concerned Christians at the swindle, give Catholic indulgences more consideration as Christians, neither does the modern type pay any attention to genuine climate research.
I marvel at how naive society is. There are busybodies from top to bottom focusing on heat pumps and solar panels, but the same people wouldn’t give 5 minutes of their time to the bigger perspective.
Did someone in that department miss the obvious? Heat pumps run on electricity. If the house is well insulated then it may be viable but if the house is not then it will operate constantly. Electricity may very well be coming from an oil burning power station so the demand will in all likelihood increase. As more home are retrofitted the demand increases exponentially thus more fossil fuel needed to power the generators to supply more electricity.
If the government is really serious then nuclear power stations are the way to go
@Paul1st: a government this incompetent should never attempt to use nuclear power.
They’d probably use what’s left of the pyrite to build it.
@Paul1st: about 40% of our electricity currently comes from renewables and this percentage is increasing. This is the one area where we’re actually doing a reasonably good job of getting away from expensive imported fossil fuels.
@Brendan Cahill: Yes. 41%. That’s great. Now the other 59%, when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun shining or beyond the few hours of battery storage. That is why a world mass move into SMR technology is the only solution. Green Hydrogen and mega grids are technically possible, but economically out of the question. Get rid of the data centres of course, onto the Moon, or would Mars be better.
In other astonishing news, water officially declared wet!
@Colin Byrne: ‘Wet’ means ‘Covered or saturated with water or another liquid’. Water arguably isn’t wet: it’s whatever is covered or saturated with water that is wet.
@Brendan O’Brien: Is water not made up of multiple molecules of water and therefore covered and saturated in itself arguably making it itself wet?
@Diarmuid Hunt: well it isn’t dry that’s for sure.
@Diarmuid Hunt: That did occur to me, but it is not what someone means when they say that water is wet. They mean that it is intrinsically wet rather than wet through contact with other water. And whether it is intrinsically wet is arguable imo.
The oil burner based heating system is simple and straightforward and easily replaced, heat pump systems are complicated and expensive to maintain and have a finite lifespan and like death you’ll try and not think about it until that inevitable day comes, if the CCAC put more thought into a substitute for imported oil and less about creating new jobs from imported heat pumps they would be doing everyone a favour.
We have everything we have because of fossil fuels. At the moment governments all over the world are realizing there is nothing to replace them reliable. If the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow Renewable energy is useless.
@Washpenrebel: That is something that is being addressed through technology.
Try to get a single electrician for a job is already a nightmare. Way too cheap for the lads busy in buildings all around Dublin. Curiously no problem to get one during COVID
The amount of emissions that could be eliminated from the decommissioning of thousands of household fossil fuel home heating and reduce our need for gas imports if all DataCentres where connected to DistrictHeating from the get go!
heatpumps need to be properly sized (developers have been under sizing then and they suck too much power) and they have to be able to do cooling as well as heating. We’re going to need Aircon folks, and sooner than folk think.
No point the CCAC bleating on about Fossil Fuels & blaming people & placing extra financial pressure on them through Carbon taxes unless you financially assist working families, who are unable to afford the cost or “cheap green loans,” to retrofit. Only homes been retrofitted around us are the very wealthy & those who don’t work. As ever in Ireland, ordinary working taxpayers pay the price.
What good doing personal good if the very foundations such positive acts are built upon are decrepit and deceitful grounds. Such minute positive actions make fools of people while the majority of ruling actions serve to undermine the very fabric of society. Yes, there is an argument for self-preservation,personal and anarchy by way of depending on ones own power and self-sufficiency, but at what cost to the individual’s personal economy, especially when state funds in so many cases are mis-appropriated and squandered. There is of course the saying ‘Do as I say, not as I do’, but also the saying ‘lead by example’.
No mention of self production of electricity of course. These nut jobs same as Green Party . Why are they not interested in helping people have no need of anything from a Utilities company ?
Rather than getting an expensive and inefficient heat pumps, could they not install technology that converts carbon to o2 in each house. I think that technology exists (like a tree but with tech). Future thinking is needed now.
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