11-04-2018, 09:30 AM
Brian, does preconditioning the car (defrost etc) also warm up the battery?
As for environmental problems, it's hard to know the balance between the reduced CO2 from diesel and its other problems. Nothing is entirely good or entirely bad. Doing a full energy and environmental audit of any activity is very hard. For example we want warm and cosy homes. So we insulate them. The insulation has embedded energy and other environmental costs. These are likely to be much smaller than the extra energy you would consume heating the house otherwise but it's not easy to assess. A more concrete example. My house walls are mainly 9" solid brickwork. Thes are lossy. In most parts internal insulation (easy and cheap) isn't feasible. External insulation is expensive and can cause damp problems. Rate of return on cost would be poor as far as I can tell, unless I was doing a major external refurbishment where the cost would partly absorbed in other work.
Coming back to car emissions. The published results on CO2, fuel consumption etc don't reflect real life experience. We simply don't know whethere there's more harm from some extra CO2 or NOx and particulates.
As for environmental problems, it's hard to know the balance between the reduced CO2 from diesel and its other problems. Nothing is entirely good or entirely bad. Doing a full energy and environmental audit of any activity is very hard. For example we want warm and cosy homes. So we insulate them. The insulation has embedded energy and other environmental costs. These are likely to be much smaller than the extra energy you would consume heating the house otherwise but it's not easy to assess. A more concrete example. My house walls are mainly 9" solid brickwork. Thes are lossy. In most parts internal insulation (easy and cheap) isn't feasible. External insulation is expensive and can cause damp problems. Rate of return on cost would be poor as far as I can tell, unless I was doing a major external refurbishment where the cost would partly absorbed in other work.
Coming back to car emissions. The published results on CO2, fuel consumption etc don't reflect real life experience. We simply don't know whethere there's more harm from some extra CO2 or NOx and particulates.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
