Get your dumping right

More cleaning up
The Grahamstown Residents’ Association (GRA) has been encouraging clean-up initiatives around town and there have been various success stories – including the clean up near Gowie Dam, culminating in the Gowie Valley Conservancy.

More cleaning up
The Grahamstown Residents’ Association (GRA) has been encouraging clean-up initiatives around town and there have been various success stories – including the clean up near Gowie Dam, culminating in the Gowie Valley Conservancy.

A big part of the problem is public education. Dumping things where they are supposed to be dumped and separating out garden waste, recyclables and general trash makes it a lot easier for the municipality to manage waste – and less costly. It is our money, and the city has a limited tax base, so why make it harder for them?

Recently, I went to Complete Compost in the industrial area and found the garden waste dumped there was full of all kinds of trash – soft drink cans, old plastic bags, black trash bags and even an old carpet. The fact that the general public can dump garden waste there is great – but if the service is abused, the operators will sooner or later have to stop allowing the general public to dump there. If we reach a point where you have to hire a garden service before you can get your garden waste dumped, will that be a good thing?

Let us all start thinking like citizens with a common interest.
More on GRA: http://grahamstownresidentsassociation.co.za

Clean, cheap hot water
If you want to cut your electricity bill and be less dependent on our not so reliable electricity grid, what are your hot water options?
The obvious choice is solar hot water. A good modern system will extract some heat from the sun unless it is severely overcast or rainy. Provided there is some sunshine, you will get hot water even if the electricity is off.

A solar hot water system can get so hot that it has to vent off water to lower the temperature to a safe level. For this reason, on a hot day, use the hot tap for things like rinsing vegetables, without letting the water actually run until it’s hot. Also consider taking the overflow to a rainwater tank.

Another option is a heat pump. A heat pump works on a completely different principle: the same physics as a refrigerator or air conditioner. It moves heat from one place to another. Unlike a refrigerator, you use a heat pump to harvest heat and discard the cool side. The physics works like this.

If you compress a gas, it gets hot. If you reduce the pressure on the gas, it cools down. So if you compress the gas on the hot side, pipe it around to the cool side and expand it, you move heat from one place to another. A heat pump can reduce your hot water heating bill by 80% – but it has to be installed correctly.

I used to have one in a part of the world where we had a separate meter for electricity for hot water and it really did save 80% of consumption. But I have heard bad reports from people whose heat pump was incorrectly installed.

A heat pump costs more than solar and won’t work if the power is out. Why would a heat pump ever be preferable? A solar system relies on storing energy by heating a tank of water to a higher temperature than you need. If the temperature drops too low, it uses a standard electric heating element to top up the heat. If you use a lot of hot water at night and the solar system falls back on electric backup, you start to lose its cost advantages.

In our climate, taking into account the potential for power outages, I prefer solar hot water. If you have a large household that could use up all the stored heat overnight, consider a heat pump – but ask for references from the installer to make sure they do a good job.