What’s a kWh? (And other money-saving tips)

When I was at school, they taught us how electricity works only as part of science lessons. It was something future engineers might need, yet we all use electricity at home every day.

The problem with electricity is we’re a little bit separated from its cost. With cars, we fill up the car with fuel and pay for it right there and then. With electricity, we use many different appliances which all add up to an eye-watering bill at the end of the month.

This is my guide to what everyone needs to know about electricity.

Introducing the kWh.

Electricity is sold in units of “kWh”. We’ll come to exactly what those three letters mean later on but for now, imagine your electricity is being delivered to you in barrels, each one a standard size called the “kWh”. Think about your local electricity station and imagine one of these “kWh” barrels of electricity being hooked up to the wires that lead to your home. When a barrel empties, someone comes along and replaces it with a new full barrel.

The “kWh” has a scientific definition that all electricity suppliers agree on. It is so ubiquitous that if any supplier decides to use a different unit, they’re most likely up to something dodgy.

How much is a single kWh barrel of electricity? Check your electric bill. Here’s mine…

The 45Âľp per day standing charge is fixed. It doesn’t matter how much or how little I use; I still have to pay that 45Âľp every single day and there’s little I can do about that other than maybe switch providers.

More interesting is the 33p per kWh. At the end of each month, they count up all the empty barrels of electricity I’ve gone through and bill me 33p for each one. I’ll use that figure in my examples but do look up your own rate and replace it with however much your kWh costs.

Also note that it doesn’t matter how quickly I go through each barrel of electricity. If I go away for a few days leaving everything except the fridge switched off, it will take a lot longer to finish that barrel than when I’m home and everything is switched on. Either way, they still charge me 33p once that barrel is empty.

We’ll now pull apart those three letters, but always keep in mind that metaphor of barrels of electricity hooked up to the wires leading to your house.

Little barrels on the hillside.
Little barrels full of ‘tricity…

What Watt?

The W is short for the “Watt”, named after James Watt who invented them. If you’ve seen a capital W or “Watts” or “Wattage”, they all mean the same thing. The number of Watts any electrical appliance has is a measure of the rate of consumption of electricity over time. If you like, think of it as the speed that something eats electricity coming out of the outlet on the wall.

"High power fan heater. 3000 Watt. 2 heat settings, 1500W/3000W. Adjustable thermostat with overheat cut out protection."

This heater consumes electricity at a rate of 3000 Watts, or 1500 Watts if you use the low setting. Because one Wattage figure is twice as much as the other, you can safely assume that the high setting consumes electricity exactly twice as fast as the low setting.

Lightbulb in packaging. "15 year warrantee. 13.5W. 100W replacement. 1527 Lumens."

This lightbulb consumes electricity at a rate of 13.5 Watts, yet it shines as brightly as an old-fashioned 100-Watt filament lightbulb. Quite the improvement!

A quick exercise: Find an electrical item in your home and look up its Wattage figure. It might be on a label or written on the original packaging. If you can’t find it written down, try using a search engine.

Ooh kay!

1 kW (or one kiloWatt) means exactly the same thing as 1000 W. Adding “k” to “W” to make “kW” means the amount is multiplied by one thousand. The heater above could have “3 kW” printed on the box instead of “3000 W”. It would mean exactly the same thing.

Devices that draw a small amount of electricity like lightbulbs or phone chargers are usually rated in Watts, while larger devices that eat a lot of electricity like ovens or electric car chargers are typically rated in kW. They mean the same thing underneath.

Whoever makes your electrical appliances might have a personal preference for small numbers in “kW” or big numbers in “W”. The manufacturer of that heater probably wants to emphasise how well it heats, so they prefer to use the bigger number of “3000 W” instead of “3 kW”. More W equals more heat.

Our hours

The last letter is “h”, which is short for an “hour”, named after its inventor Sir Claudius Hour. (At least that’s what a man at the pub told me. He might have been joking.)

You know what an hour is, don’t you? It’s the time it takes to watch a normal episode of Star Trek with ads. It’s how long it takes me to walk all the way around my local country park if I don’t stop. It’s the time it takes to walk my sister’s dog before she (the dog) gets tired.

“And I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 miles more.”

All together now!

Now we know what each letter of “kWh” stands for, let’s bring them all together. A “kWh” is the amount of electricity consumed by a 1000 W appliance if it is left on for an hour.

Find an appliance that’s rated at 1 kW. Plug it in and switch it on for an hour and then switch it off. You’ll have used exactly one kWh and your electricity bill will have gone up by 33p. (Or whatever your supplier charges.)

Let’s work out a practical example. Recall that 3000W heater from earlier. How much do you think it costs to run that heater for five hours on the high setting? We’ll ignore practical realities like the built-in thermostat and assume it goes for five hours straight with no gaps.

3000W is the same as 3 kW and we want to run it for 5 hours, paying 33p for each kWh. Multiply those numbers together:

3 kW Ă— 5 h Ă— 33 p/kWH = 495p (or roughly ÂŁ5.)

Try this calculation yourself. Pick an electrical appliance in your home and find its rated wattage. Think about how long you switch it on for and work out how much it costs to use it for that amount of time.

Applying the knowledge

It can be tempting to look at how much some appliances like heaters or ovens cost and conclude the only way to save money is to be cold and not eat. I hope that’s not the conclusion you draw. The benefit of knowing how much something costs to use is that you can make informed choices.

Will buying an air fryer save you money when your kitchen already has an oven? Work out how much it costs to cook your favourite meal in the oven then do the same for an air fryer. If you know both in actual pennies, you can make an informed decision to make that purchase or not.

While the Wattage figure tells you the rate it consumes electricity, it may be that the higher Wattage appliance gets the job done faster. Say you have a choice of two kettles, one runs at 1 kW and the other at 3 kW, it may seem at first blush that the 1 kW kettle will cost less. However, if the 3 kW kettle gets the water boiled in a third of the time as the 1 kW kettle, they will cost the same to use.

Does your supplier offer a different service with more expensive electricity during the day and cheaper electricity overnight? Which appliances would you use overnight when the kWh barrels are cheaper? Would that save you money overall?

Many thanks to my wife and my brother Andrew for their helpful feedback. Thanks also to my local B&M store for the pictures of lightbulbs and heaters I took while shopping there.

Creative Commons Picture Credits:
📸 “saturday recycle” by Andrea de Poda.
📸 “sad kilo” by “p med”.

Why the UK should re-join the EU.

I advocate for the UK to democratically re-join the EU. Without shame or apology.

“We can’t re-join, there was a referendum!”

There was indeed. The referendum said the UK should leave the EU. On the 31st of January 2020, it left.

The referendum did not say “The UK should leave the EU and stay out forever”. It didn’t even give a minimum number of years. I checked the wording on the ballot paper just to be sure. It prescribed a single action and that action has been done.

The moment the UK left on the 31st of January, the 2016 referendum lost all power. The UK could have re-joined the next day. We do not need to continue to “respect the result” because it has already been respected, in full.

This piece is an attempt to persuade you, dear reader, that the UK should apply to re-join the EU. “Remaining” is not longer an option, but applying to re-join certainly is, and it is an option we should wholeheartedly take.

“We couldn’t get the same deal we had before.”

To re-join, the UK would be entering the EU as new members. The opt-outs negotiated by governments past would not be available. Let’s deal with those before going any farther.

“The UK would have to join The Schengen Area.”

Yes! Let’s join The Schengen Area! This was meant to be a section of responses to reasons not to join, but this is a benefit. We’d get to be in the Schengen Area! Huzzah!

This is an agreement that allows people to cross internal borders without having to show a passport or apply for a visa. You just cross the border, maybe glancing at the welcome sign that announces you’re in a new country now. There are exceptions allowed for emergencies and pandemics, but most of the time you cross over without ceremony.

I have an American extended family, via my American wife. One of those relatives was going to visit Paris as a second honeymoon and they asked us if they could come and visit us in England on a day-trip through the tunnel. We looked at the details and because the UK has never been in Schengen, they would have to formally leave Schengen in order to enter the UK. On their return to France they would have to go through the process again to re-enter the Schengen area again under a new visa, just to return to their hotel room where they left all their luggage.

In the end, the hassle of multiple entries and re-entries was too much and they decided against including England on their second honeymoon. I see this often in Americans travelling around Europe, skipping the islands because the inhabitants’ insistence on being special and having their own passport area.

But if you really want to keep the advantages of being outside Schengen, I have a plan. Next time you travel to France, take your passport, even though you wouldn’t have to. When you arrive, approach some passing French person and demand they look at your passport.

“Look at my passport, Frenchie! Look at it!”

“The UK would have to join the Euro.”

Great! Let’s join the Euro! (Why are benefits of EU membership keep getting named as down-sides?) We’ll be able to trade with other member states without having to bear the costs of exchanging currency rate all the ding dang time.

We won’t be missing much. The Pound we have today isn’t the same Pound from my childhood. Small change nowadays goes straight into a jar in the corner. 50p coins used to have an image of Britannia but now is only some design from a trendy design studio. ÂŁ1 coins used to have the Latin “Decus et Tutamen” engraved around the edge, a tradition that dates back to Isaac Newton, but no more.

Since Brexit caused the value of the pound to tank from which it has never recovered, people have no idea how much things are any more. The pound has given us neither history nor stability. We may as well join the Euro and retire the pound.

But even if you are not as enthusiastic for joining the Euro, the EU’s rules only require that new members join when the economy is ready. Those EU members who are not using the Euro seem quite relaxed about this status quo and are showing no hurry to switch. There’s no reason the UK can’t do the same.

“The UK wouldn’t get the rebate from its membership fees.”

Finally!

In the 2016 referendum campaign, busses were driven around with the claim that the UK sends ÂŁ350 million a week to the EU. This was false, because it didn’t take account of the rebate the UK negotiated in the 80s. The actual amount the UK sent to the EU was in fact significantly smaller. If the UK did re-join, it is with a bit of irony that this could actually end up being the amount we’d send to the EU.

It sounds like a lot of money, but is it really? There are around 42 million adults in the UK. Divide one figure by the other and the cost of the UK’s EU membership is on average, around ÂŁ8.33 per week per adult. That’s the big scary number on the side of a liar’s bus. Eight f…ing pounds and thirty three pence a week!

If that one pound and change per day is really the argument for staying out, Brexit itself has already cost the UK almost as much as it has sent the EU since joining the EEC in the 70s. Throwing good money after bad is not a viable economic strategy. Add all the costs and benefits together and the UK gained from EU membership!

The UK would benefit from membership.

Support for the Good Friday Agreement. Freedom for UK citizens to live/work/retire across the EU. Participation in Galileo satellite navigation. Driving licences and insurance valid accross the EU. Erasmus student exchanges. Mutual recognition of professional qualifications. (Just a few of my favourites from Edwin Hayward’s list.)

We’d get the benefits of EU membership. Why shouldn’t we pay at the same rate all other member states have to pay?

This is the core reason I advocate for re-joining the EU. We would be members and membership has its benefits. Thanks to the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union, any EU based business can trade all over the EU. Any regulatory tests can be done once without having to repeat them for each member state. Your couriers don’t need to wait for customs checks or to pay tariffs. Your invoices can be paid without additional paperwork.

It might be argued that the UK could join the Customs Union and Single Market, without joining the EU as full members, as many of the EU’s neighbours such as Norway have done.

But imagine if a club local to you offered you a couple of choices. Both choices included use of the club’s facilities in return for a membership fee, but one choice also gave you a democratic say in how the club is run.

That democratic say in how the EU is run comes with membership. Norway doesn’t get to sit at the European Council nor do their citizens get to elect members of the European Parliament. If we’re going to be in the club, let’s be in the club!

Epilogue

I wasn’t going to write this. A friend of mine asked me to make a case for re-joining and it felt like a fool’s errand. I know his feelings about the EU and I doubted any argument I could make would persuade him, a serious long-term euro sceptic. The arguments I’ve made here are what would convince me, but I’m already a flag-waving pro-European.

As such, I would like to consider this piece part one of a series. To both my euro-sceptic friend and anyone else who may be reading this, why do you want the UK to stay out of the EU? If I get enough responses, I’ll put a part-two together responding to those points.

Sources

Picture Credits

The Brexit Chart War

There’s a movement among remainers to get Ode To Joy to number one in the charts for Brexit day. We know, even if successful, it won’t change anything. Johnson isn’t going to cancel Brexit because of this. (He totally should, nonetheless.)

So why is there a similar movement among Brexiters to get their own song “Seventeen Million F–k Offs” to number one instead?

They’ve won. Despite only getting about half the votes in 2016, Maximum Brexit is going ahead. But once the party’s over, they still won’t be happy and deep down, they know. Victory feels so much like defeat.

And among all this false revelry, there’s a bunch of smug Remoaners trying to spoil the party. “They were supposed to have been defeated by now. Our victory must be total!”

And so they get a song that’s literally telling remainers to f–k off to number one. Maybe that small victory on top of all their other victories will finally make them happy?

Sorry Brexiters. You lost. We all lost.

Get over it.

Should MPs who “cross the floor” face a by-election?

When standing for election a politician will usually run as the member of a political party. The quid-pro-quo of this arrangement is that the party will collectively campaign for all their candidates. In return, the party will expect the successfully elected MPs to support their leader’s policies and support that leader in any votes-of-confidence.

Occasionally, an MP will decide to leave their party. This is often called “Crossing The Floor” for rather archaic reasons. Sometimes that MP becomes independent, sometimes they join other parties. Most famously, wartime leader Winston Churchill left the Conservative Party in 1904 to join the Liberal Party, only to return in 1924.

When an MP does this, it will often be met with calls for that MP to put themselves up for re-election by their voters in a by-election. Normally, this only happens when an MP dies, resigns, or maybe appointed to the House of Lords.

“The voters elected a Conservative to be their MP, not a Liberal! You should let the voters have their say if they want to keep you as their MP.”

I disagree.

We Elect People, not Parties…

“These are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.” – Edmund Burke, 1774.

In the Westminster system, we vote for people. We don’t vote for parties.

It might not seem that way, given how much of campaigns at election time are for the various political parties rather than for the individual candidates. Nonetheless, at the completion of an election, the end result is that a person will have been elected to serve as MP. That MP is an individual who has been empowered by the voters to be their representative in Parliament for the term they were elected for.

If it were the case that we do actually elect political parties, we shouldn’t need a by-election when an MP needs to be replaced. The party could simply select a replacement internally without needing to involve the electorate. This shouldn’t be a problem, after all, the voters elected that party for a five year term, not the MP.

In fact, why not just give parties the power to dismiss and replace their MPs at will? If a party leader doesn’t like how an MP is acting, they can tell that MP “You’re Fired” and appoint a replacement. If that idea seems like an undemocratic stitch-up, I quite agree. (This is also a reason why I prefer AV over PR, but that’s another article.)

Currently, the only thing that can force a by-election for an MP who doesn’t want one is if that MP is convicted of a crime and enough constituents demand a “recall”. Is leaving a political party really up there with being a convicted criminal?

… and that’s a good thing.

“It has long (perhaps throughout the entire duration of British freedom) been a common form of speech, that if a good despot could be insured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what good government is, which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally vitiate all our speculations on government.” – John Stuart Mill, 1861.

It’s a good thing that we elect people instead of the parties. MPs are elected and empowered to make the difficult decisions and be held responsible for them. That is the essence of Parliamentary Democracy. By so empowering MPs, they become one of the checks-and-balances. A party leader can’t overrule the objections of other MPs, precisely because dissenting MPs are so empowered. Those MPs know they will be held accountable to their voters, not to anyone else. 

Recently (as I write this in 2019), an unelected Prime Minister wished to bulldoze his Brexit policy through Parliament. MPs did the job they were elected to do and said “No”. That Prime Minister saw first-hand what happens when you try to throw your weight around like King Charles. He found himself restrained by the very checks and balances that exist in functioning democracies.

(I stand by “unelected”. As I write this, Boris Johnson has neither been elected by the voters at large nor by their representatives in Parliament. His predecessor, Theresa May, became Prime Minister while her party held a comfortable majority in Parliament and later won a vote of confidence of MPs. I would have liked to have seen a formal vote of MPs to elect a new Prime Minister when the position becomes vacant, but I accept in her case that would have been a formality.)

If we move the focus of that empowerment to the parties, those MPs will find themselves accountable to their party, not to the voters. We’ll have reduced the role of an MP to mere party functionary. If an MP’s first loyalty is to their party rather than their voters, we’ll have just populated Parliament with a bunch of toadying yes-men. We wouldn’t even need 600-odd MPs if all you need are party robots, you could get by with around 50.

What would we gain if MPs did have to contest a by-election for leaving their party. There’s a general election every five years when they will have to be re-elected anyway. When that re-election comes around they will find themselves facing someone selected by their old party. Party leaders are already rather powerful, they could do with feeling not quite so powerful once in a while.

Further Reading/Sources:

Edmund Burke, Speech to the electors of Bristol.

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government

How MPs are elected

How to become an MP

Wikipedia, Recall of MPs Act, 2015

The Guardian, Boris Johnson to seek election after rebel Tories deliver Commons defeat

i, From ‘do or die’ to ‘dying in a ditch,’

BBC, May’s government survives no-confidence vote

Credits:

Thanks to Stuart Edmond for inspiring me to write this.

Thanks to Ollie Killingback and Andrew Phillips-Godfrey for their feedback and ideas.

Leaving Home picture by Hans Splinter.

Get Out picture by Ramy Raoof.

#DeniedMyVote at the 2019 European Elections

You may have read about the news that many voters have been turned away from voting over here in the UK. I’d like to share a little analogy abut what happened, why it is so controversial and how it goes beyond voter suppression.

Imagine you’re in California, and there’s a political party whose only policy is to deport anyone born on the other side of the Mississippi. (That and being paid donations through PayPal that are all conveniently under the ÂŁ500 limit allowed for anonymous donations. Totally not a big donation from one person that would normally need to be declared.)

A group of people living in California but born in the east are rightfully worried that this party might gain power. They are entitled to vote as citizens so they make sure they are correctly registered.

Voting day arrives and the process goes smoothly for Californians. Voters from out-of-state, however, find they can’t vote.

Some are told they should have filled out a special form but were never told that was needed. Some did fill in the form but it got lost. Some did everything right but the people running the vote didn’t know this group was entitled to vote and just struck them off the register.

Election day passed and a significant number of people didn’t get to vote. Those people probably wouldn’t have voted for the deportation party so the situation may might end up unfairly inflating their share.

(Sounds ridiculous? This is basically what’s going on here. Only difference is our Mississippi River is a bit wider and we call ours The English Channel and The North Sea.)

Just to round out the story, on the day the news of voter suppression breaks, a senior politician chooses this day (quite coincidentally) to announce their resignation. News reports quickly start paying attention to this new distraction and soon forget about the dodgy funding and voter suppression.

Further Reading:
Channel 4
Guardian
BBC

Picture credit: Vote dans Crémazie
by Jean-Pierre Lavoie.

My Crazy Software Engineer Tattoo (that I didn’t get)

I had an idea for a nerdy tattoo a few years ago. It would represent myself as a software engineer and I thought it was quite clever. I seriously considered having it done but decided against it in the end, despite its cleverness.

Ink’d

This is my idea, the “end comment” symbol in many programming languages:

*/

In C, and other languages that can trace their lineage to C, comments start with a /* and end with a */. Anything inside is ignored by the language, allowing the programmer to describe what’s going on. This is tremendously useful when reading other people’s code or even your own code from the past.

    /* This is a comment. */
    Code();

    /* This is another comment. */
    MoreCode();

Another way of looking at it is that these /* and */ symbols mark the change of state between comments and code. /* says “After this is comment” while */ says “After this is code.”

Or to put it another way, */ means “Enough talk, time for action.”

(This is where you exclaim to yourself how clever I am to have thought of that.)

I didn’t have the tattoo done in the end. Describing what it meant would have taken too much explanation. Even if a fellow programmer recognized the symbol, they would probably first think it looked like I’ve been “commented out”, as they wonder if I had the /* on the other side.

Also, rotated a little, it looks a bit like a squinting cyclops.

*/

Falco T310 – Unleashed

1993. Computers were desktop PCs running MS-DOS and the Internet was unheard of. My school had a number of PCs with Borland Pascal installed which my friends and I happily learnt. Along the way, we wrote a clever variation of the Minesweeper game. Life was good.

That would all change when I started my Computer Science degree course at university that year. Instead of many single-user machines running MS-DOS, we’d all be sharing a multi-user machine running UNIX.

Terminal Illness

To use this multi-user machine, we’d need to log-in from a terminal. If you were fortunate enough to find a vacant PC, you could use the terminal emulator program to connect. This had the very useful feature of being able to switch between screens so you could operate many sessions at once. I would usually have one with the email program running so I could switch to it occasionally to see if any new messages arrived, while a second session would run EMACS for whatever I was writing. A last one would compile and run stuff.

If I wasn’t quite so fortunate to find a vacant PC, I’d have to use one of the Falco T310 terminals. These were serious old-school terminals that connected to that machine over a serial port. Actual RS232 connecting to a multiplexing box in the corner. The university had maybe a hundred of them. Because they did only have a serial connection, you could only have one session per terminal. No fast switching between sessions for you – if you wanted to check your mail you had to shut down whatever you were doing and start up the mail reader.

These terminals weren’t all bad. It understood the standard ANSI codes to move the cursor about, so there wasn’t too much friction moving between the two. We coped and got on with the job.

Loss of control (characters)

One day, I intended to review a source code file, so I typed a “cat” command to show the listing, except I had accidentally run cat for the compiled binary executable instead. Oops! The screen filled with noise punctuated with beeping noises. Efforts to stop the onslaught were in vain as the buffers filled up with unintelligible bytes.

Then something unexpected happened. The screen changed mode and lines were drawn mixed in with the text. Not the box drawing characters I was used to but proper lines, drawn at funky angles spanning across most of the screen. These terminals supported some sort of control codes for vector line drawing, and my executable code just happened to randomly contain those codes. I must find them!

Living the student life, I wasn’t getting much of a chance to exercise my artistic muscles. Back at school, I knew how to program graphics in Borland Pascal and I’d come up with simple games and create animated art. Even dull homework projects would have a bit of a flourish thanks to creative use of the 640x480x16 mode. On UNIX in contrast, I was back in the 80s with an 80×24 character display, yet here was an elusive graphical mode I hadn’t seen in months.

grep -v “\a”

Actually finding what those magic control codes were was easier said than done. Once I had accidentally entered this graphical mode, I found I couldn’t type commands anymore. The only way I knew to get back to normal was to power cycle the terminal and login again. My attempts to split the file in half and display one of the halves would be accompanied with incessant loud beeping from all the BEL/7 bytes, which greatly disturbed the other people in the room. That amount of beeping could only mean I was up to no good!

After spending a day trying to extract the codes I needed, I had to give up. I was unfamiliar with working with Unix beyond dealing with plain text files. I knew how to open files in binary mode back on Borland Pascal, but not on any language I had access to in Unix. There was no StackOverflow to ask so I was stuck impotently banging rocks against this monolith. This was software development in those dark ages.

Next: Checking in at The Motel. BBS Systems, Fidonet and reinventing the remote-desktop.

Picture Credit: VT100 in the flesh, by Dana Sibera. (CC licensed.)
(I couldn’t find a picture of the Falco T310, so I used this picture of a VT100 instead. Sorry about that.)