Earth Notes: The Earth Notes Podcast @Home

Auto-updated 2021-02-25 11:57 GMT.

Listen to the Earth Notes occasional podcast on all things eco and green and efficient @Home! #eco #snackable #podcast

How to cut your carbon footprint at home without pain! All Earth Notes podcast episodes (audio-based articles) are listed here. Look out for the full transcripts.

The podcast started in June 2019. The first two episodes were created to support a local naturalist who leads guided walks around our local council housing estate.

Episodes are typically:

'snackable' at just a few minutes long
on a green, or energy efficiency, or energy data topic
based at home

Some episodes are a little more tangental, such as listening to the temperature of your radiators for a whole year in one second.

Some episodes are longer. Watch out for video too!

There are also ambient episodes with little or no commentary.

Episodes

2021-02-07 Soundscape - Going Postal in Audio 21 min
2021-01-14 Diarycast - Interview Snippets (2021-01-14) 4 min
2020-12-31 Statscast - Load Profile (2020-12) 4 min
2020-12-22 Soundscape - Solstice Exercise Mile Walk 20 min
2020-12-21 Diarycast - Solstice Lockdown Edition (2020-12-21) 8 min
2020-11-13 VIDEO Smart Radiator Valves - EcoHome Lab (2020-11-12) 17 min
2020-10-10 Statscast - Baselines and Bats (2020-09) 9 min
2020-09-26 Weymouth Ambient (2020-08) 22 min
2020-09-25 Diarycast - Summer Catch-up (2020-09-25) 5 min
2020-09-21 Soundwalk - an hour on the Cambridge Road Estate (2020-09-12) 61 min
2020-09-18 Bats Around our Home aka 16WW 38 min
2020-07-26 Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping - Travel (2020-07-26) 9 min
2020-07-12 Diarycast - Conscious Uncouping (2020-07-12) 7 min
2020-07-05 Statscast - Normal-ish June, Heating Re-viewed (2020-06) 9 min
2020-06-10 Statscast - Lockdown Changes, Log Noises (2020-05) 11 min
2020-05-23 Diarycast - Urban Dawn Chorus (2020-05-23) 24 min
2020-05-13 Diarycast - Ambient Sound of a Graveyard (2020-05-13) 11 min
2020-05-10 Diarycast - Lockdown Patently Workable (2020-05-10) 4 min
2020-05-03 Statscast - PV Up, Travel Down, Weakly Weeklies (2020-04) 11 min
2020-04-22 Diarycast - Blue Skies PV High (2020-04-22) 3 min
2020-04-19 Metacast 2: Podcast Specs and Workflow 5 min
2020-04-13 Diarycast - Lockdown Lawnmowing Sadly Allowed (2020-04-13) 3 min
2020-04-10 Metacast 1: Blue Yeti, Shy Eurasian Footwear 4 min
2020-03-21 A Short Coronacast for March 2020 2 min
2019-12-30 Sign-off for 2019, Hello 2020! 7 min
2019-11-09 VIDEO OpenTRV Movie Mashup 1: Video Out-takes and The Rest! 2 min
2019-10-29 Water Music: How Does Tap-water Temperature Sound in Time-lapse? 5 min
2019-10-28 The Green Existence of Adam Hart-Davis 6 min
2019-10-19 PV Sounds: How Does PV Grid-tie Generation Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min
2019-10-13 Battery Sounds: How Does a Battery Sound in Time-lapse? 3 min
2019-10-12 Rad Sounds II: Attempting a Higher-fi Home-heating Time-lapse 3 min
2019-09-22 Greener travel: Why We Should Cut Car-bon Miles 4 min
2019-09-15 Rad Sounds: How Cool is your Home Heating in Time-lapse? 3 min
2019-08-28 Aircon On, Windows Open! 3 min
2019-06-21 About Our Greenish Home aka 16WW, with Bonus Bats and Sparrows 4 min
2019-06-15 Solar Panels in My Garden 2 min

Other Ways to Listen

AMP and 'lite' pages play smaller, mono versions of the audio files where available. Smaller files help save your mobile data allowance and a tiny carbon toeprint. The smaller version may also be served automatically if you have data saving mode (Save-Data: on) enabled in your browser.

This podcast is also available via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and Listen Notes.

Please do the like/rate and subscribe thing to help other people find this podcast!

An RSS feed is available.

Plans

Here are some vague plans for future episodes. Don't hold your breath!

Diary of EOU HQ and notable events/stats...
- 2021-02-21: ~3pm warm (~14°C) and sunny enough to have washing line drying again, and lots of windows open to air the house a bit (with the heating turned off, of course)! Off-grid battery up to 12°C.
- 2021-02-19: ~6h Internet outage (maybe routing) overnight:
```
www.earth.org.uk:443 188.226.184.152 - - [18/Feb/2021:23:33:14 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 12386 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98 Safari/537.4 (StatusCake)"
www.exnet.com:80 173.231.59.205 - - [19/Feb/2021:05:52:10 +0000] "GET /1995/09/10/ HTTP/1.1" 200 467 "http://www.exnet.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Adsbot/3.1)"
```
  The FTTC DSL connection was reported as up but not packets were flowing while I was watching. Apparently caused by "maintenance work" somewhere between me and the exchange, my ISP called to tell me.
- 2021-02-16: interested to Try Before You Bike for an e-bike (eg borrow for a month for a free).
- 2021-02-16: have tentatively expressed interest in additional solar PV storage in a "Solar Together" group buy scheme.
- 2021-02-14: external temperature at noon back to ~11°C!
- 2021-02-11: nominally -8°C overnight here last night, and a Record low temperature for the UK this millennium at the weather station at of -23.0°C, but now my off-grid battery is FULL for the first time since late October!
- 2021-01: looks like ~20% of this month had a grid carbon intensity low enough that heating water from electric resistance would be lower carbon than gas:
```
% gzip -d < data/FUELINST/log/202101.log.gz | wc -l
    4487
% gzip -d < data/FUELINST/log/202101.log.gz | awk '$2<190' | wc -l
     907
% gzip -d < data/FUELINST/log/202101.log.gz | awk '$2<190' | head
2021-01-03T03:25Z 186
2021-01-03T03:35Z 182
2021-01-03T03:50Z 185
2021-01-03T03:55Z 185
2021-01-03T04:05Z 185
2021-01-03T04:15Z 182
2021-01-03T04:25Z 180
2021-01-03T04:35Z 180
2021-01-03T04:45Z 181
2021-01-03T04:55Z 183
```
  It was available on ~18 days of the month, in all cases about enough to capture at least ~6kWh, more than our average 4kWh/d consumption, so maybe we could have avoided running our combi for DHW on those days:
```
% gzip -d < data/FUELINST/log/202101.log.gz | awk '$2<190{print substr($1,1,10)}' | uniq -c
  28 2021-01-03
  46 2021-01-04
  37 2021-01-05
  13 2021-01-10
  51 2021-01-11
  33 2021-01-12
 107 2021-01-16
  78 2021-01-17
  51 2021-01-18
  50 2021-01-19
  48 2021-01-20
 101 2021-01-21
  42 2021-01-22
  22 2021-01-25
  21 2021-01-28
  41 2021-01-29
  96 2021-01-30
  42 2021-01-31
```
- 2021-01-24: snow! (Little/no generation from the grid-tied system, some from the vertical panels off-grid.)
- 2020-12-25: Getting festive wafts of burning food and sounds of smoke alarms through my MHRV: truly yuletide!
Build a beat from eg 4 daily cycles with overlay on first beat, or interleaved beats from another source, and slower arc eg from annual cycle. BPM 120 (2Hz), 135-145?
Brief video open house tour of green features (and link clips to existing articles).
Interviews with FnF, about how lockdown has effected their 'greenness'.
Fairphone 3 review, possibly as a video episode, and possibly including audio/video recorded by the FP3 itself.
Sonify mains voltage fluctuations as seen by the Enphase.
Sonify change in GB electricity generation before and after lockdown.
Sonify change in GB transport use (eg TfL journeys) before and after lockdown.
Do 'virtual' very low carbon non-holiday (video?) sadcastvisit to Midi w/ receipts and photos and clips from last time!
Capture weekly cycles, though that means running faster than 1 year to 1 second (day = 365Hz, week = 52Hz) to make week audible.
Discuss eg reduction in peak-time weekday imports with Enphase ToU, and sonify, and discuss other Enphase featues and foibles.
Turn snippets of sonified data into sampled notes and form tune / percussion. Maybe have note frequency be the mean for the data set.
Mains water temp to midi note; poss play all years in parallel.
Audify the fridge/freezer (W -> midi note) and other appliance.
A take on the daily treadmill getting Radbot to market, eg including fundraising (maybe with some video clips spliced in).
Interview (audio only, or video) over Skype or SquadCast or Zencastr or similar.

You may be interested in nitty-gritty tech updates and daily learnings while keeping the Earth Notes site up and running.

Some documentation of my set-up and workflow is in episode "Metacast 2".

See also Podcast Industry Statistics, updated daily.