A family member has recently bought a house and is now interested in getting Home Assistant installed there. No problem, I thought; I've still got a repurposed mini PC available; I'll just get a new hard drive. The only problem is that exactly the same hard drive (a 512Gb NVMe module) from exactly the same vendor now has a price tag of £74.99; almost 3 times the price. The last time I remember seeing something like this was after the 2011 earthquake in Japan when a key semiconductor factory was damaged. I'm also well aware there was another global shortage of semiconductors in 2020 as a result of the Covid pandemic. Both of those instances could reasonably have been called "acts of God" and therefore not reasonable to foresee.

Not so this time, though. There is indeed a global chip shortage but the reasons are more prosaic. It's AI. The rapid expansion of AI services offered to us all has triggered a huge need for more data centres and more servers to go in them, meaning a voracious appetite for chips. At the same time, the demand for electronics in other consumer goods hasn't dropped off so the AI industry - where the money seems to be at the moment - is paying top dollar for the pick of the manufacturers' production. As a result, the cost of computers and computer components has rocketed, some products (for example the Sony Playstation 6) have had their launch date delayed by months or even years because of supply issues and several tech manufacturers have suffered a hit on their profitability with consequent dips in their share prices.

I'm not going to argue that AI doesn't have benefits. However, I find it hard to believe the majority of AI processing isn't expended on document summarising that we could do ourselves, photo editing to make absurd pictures of friends and family, manipulating videos to create compellingly believable "fake news" and even creating posts on forums to sidestep the author having to do it themselves. And the cost of this benefit? We've already got another thread or two looking at the ecological effect of all the heat produced by these data centres, but now we all have to pay dramatically more to buy the electronic kit we need to access the AI that's pushing the prices up.

Can we PLEASE all step back from AI for a moment and make a conscious decision to use it only when it actually adds real value, not just when it's convenient?

**Steps back down off soapbox, takes a big deep breath.**

The images from Tehran continue to dominate the screens: vast plumes of black smoke rising from the Shahran oil depot and other fuel storage sites in the Iranian capital, ignited by strikes carried out jointly by American and Israeli forces as the conflict enters its second week.

Credible reporting from outlets including Sky News, BBC, CNN, France 24, The New York Times, AP and Reuters confirms that these attacks, which began targeting energy infrastructure in earnest over the weekend of 7-8 March 2026, have set alight depots holding millions of litres of refined products. The fires are not brief flares. They burn with the intensity that turns night into an orange haze, releasing hydrocarbons directly into the atmosphere in quantities that dwarf everyday calculations of domestic emissions.

A single large oil storage tank, when breached and ignited, can release tens of thousands of tonnes of petroleum products into combustion within hours. The combustion is unforgiving. Each tonne of fuel burned produces approximately 3.1 tonnes of CO2.

Eyewitness footage and satellite observations suggest multiple tanks at Shahran and nearby facilities were compromised, with fires spreading across infrastructure linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Conservative estimates, drawing on the known capacities of these depots (often in the range of hundreds of millions of litres) and the visible scale of the blazes, place the immediate CO2 release from one night's strikes in the order of 50,000 to 200,000 tonnes or more.

This figure excludes additional emissions from associated refining complexes damaged in the campaign, as well as the black carbon and other short-lived climate forcers carried aloft by the smoke.

The military operations themselves compound the damage. The United States has deployed carrier-based aviation from the Abraham Lincoln strike group in the Arabian Sea, launching waves of F/A-18 Super Hornets and F-35 Lightning IIs. Israeli squadrons of F-35 Adirs and F-15s have conducted long-range strikes, supported by aerial refuelling tankers.

Each fighter sortie consumes between 5,000 and 15,000 litres of jet fuel, each B-2 or refuelling mission several times that. Aviation kerosene emits approximately 2.53 kg of CO₂ per litre when burned. A single Super Hornet combat sortie therefore generates 15-40 tonnes of CO2... a B-2 mission more than 60 tonnes.

With hundreds of sorties flown since 28 February, when the joint operation began, the cumulative fuel burn from aircraft alone already exceeds 35,000 tonnes of CO2 in the conflict’s first week, according to preliminary assessments modelled on similar campaigns. Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from US warships add further emissions, as do the logistics flights ferrying munitions and personnel across the region. The Pentagon’s own historical data show that modern warfare is among the most carbon-intensive activities on earth. In fact, the US military alone accounts for a larger annual emissions footprint than many entire nations.

When these direct releases from targeted infrastructure and operational fuel burn are combined, the carbon cost of even a limited phase of the campaign becomes staggering. A single concentrated assault on Tehran's fuel depots, coupled with the sorties required to execute it, can equate to 100,000-300,000 tonnes of CO2 released in days.

In the United Kingdom, the switch from a conventional gas boiler to an air source heat pump typically saves between 1,400-1,900 kg of CO2 per household annually, according to figures from British Gas, Energy Saving Trust and other analyses. Pairing the heat pump with a domestic solar array pushes that saving comfortably above two tonnes per year for many homes.

The arithmetic is merciless. The emissions from one strike in Iran offset the annual decarbonisation gains of 50,000 to 150,000 British households. Extend this across the full scope of the ongoing campaign (with its repeated waves, retaliatory exchanges and broadening regional disruptions) and the equivalent quickly reaches hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of household-years of effort erased.

This disparity raises a question that cannot be evaded by those of us who have invested time, money and conviction in home-level decarbonisation. Is it worth it?

When geopolitical decisions taken far beyond our borders unleash carbon pulses of this magnitude, when a handful of precision-guided munitions can incinerate the equivalent emissions savings of entire cities' worth of retrofitted homes, what rational basis remains for the individual householder to persist?

The British government urges millions of installations by the end of the decade, backed by grants and mandates, yet the global carbon ledger appears to be balanced not in planning documents or domestic energy bills, but in the targeting cells of distant command centres.

The conflict's wider repercussions compound the futility. Disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas transits, have already forced rerouting of tankers, idled production in Qatar and elsewhere, and driven up energy prices worldwide. I covered this in my video here.

Such shocks historically prompt short-term shifts toward coal in import-dependent markets like Europe and Asia, as gas supplies tighten which is a "nightmare scenario" for energy security and emissions alike, in the words of analysts tracking parallels to the Ukraine invasion.

The war has suspended significant fractions of Middle Eastern supply, pushing consumers toward dirtier alternatives and elevating overall global emissions even as physical production halts in some areas.

None of this diminishes the intrinsic value of the technologies themselves. Heat pumps remain vastly more efficient than gas boilers, solar generation displaces marginal fossil-fired power on the grid. The physics holds.

Yet the episode exposes a profound asymmetry in accountability. Domestic climate action in Britain is measured with precision (every kilowatt-hour tracked, every tonne saved audited) while the carbon consequences of state violence remain largely externalised, uncounted in national inventories and politically insulated from scrutiny.

Humanity’s capacity for self-destruction appears to outpace its capacity for self-restraint by orders of magnitude. The same species that can engineer a heat pump capable of extracting warmth from minus five degree air cannot, it seems, restrain itself from setting fire to oil depots on the other side of the planet.

For the UK homeowner who has spent thousands on a retrofit, who monitors their smart meter with satisfaction, the question lingers. Why persist when distant decisions can undo it all so effortlessly?

The answer, if there is one, lies not in abandoning the endeavour but in recognising its limits. Individual and national action, however diligent, cannot insulate against a world where conflict remains the ultimate emitter. The fires in Tehran are burning more than oil, when the blazes at Shahran alone can release in days the carbon equivalent saved annually by tens of thousands of British heat pump and solar homes, one is forced to ask whether all this domestic effort is simply futile in the face of such effortless, distant destruction. They are burning any illusion that our small, earnest efforts can outrun the larger folly of which we remain collectively capable.

Happy New Year everyone!

As we head into 2026, I thought it would be genuinely interesting (and fun) to find out who the "typical" British heat pump owner really is. Are we all Guardian-reading, organic-eating, EV-driving eco-warriors? Or are we secretly just a bunch of spreadsheet-loving bill-minimisers who jumped on the Boiler Upgrade Scheme bandwagon?

Let's settle it once and for all with the Great British Heat Pump Persona survey. It's completely anonymous, no email required and should take a couple of minutes to complete.

don’t run as long as a heat pump might…

This recipe is my own and was prompted by the almost giveaway price of bags of parsnips at Lidl today.

I used: 10-12 parsnips.

10 rashers of smoked back bacon.

1 vegetable stock cube.

A pint of boiling water.

Half teaspoon of mixed herbs.

Half teaspoon of Herbes de Provence.

1 tin of full fat coconut milk.

Knob of butter and a little olive oil optional but I added this at the start of cooking.

Method:

Scrub parsnips (no need to peel if clean skinned) then top and tail them. Chop finely as you have the patience for. Place in large cast iron casserole or similar, add 1 pint of hot stock, cover and bring to boil, simmer for ~15 minutes until soft.

During this time, chop up bacon into small squares and cook in a saucepan until most of the fat and liquid has dried away - put aside ready to add. Stir to blend the pieces of parsnip and start to mush them then add the herbs and bacon. Simmer for 15-20 minutes then turn of heat. (Solar energy powered induction hob, Natch) Give a good stir to blend and further mush the mix then add the tin of coconut milk -serve. The above makes 8 very generous portions and will freeze well if required.

Of course, with a home fitted with a heat pump, the need for such heart warming nosh is less crucial than when we had just one room heated by fossil fuel - but it is still delicious and healthy! Regards, Toodles.

We’re extremely accommodating homeowners. Always have been.

We’re polite, respectful and easy to deal with. We offer endless teas, coffees, biscuits, and if a job runs through the day, we prepare a homemade lunch. We’re clear about expectations. We give tradespeople space. We never micromanage. And importantly, we rarely choose the cheapest quote... quite the opposite. We will happily pay more for someone who presents themselves as competent, organised and trustworthy, because we want a quality job.

But this year alone has been a shocker.

Five jobs with tradespeople… and four out of the five have been genuinely poor experiences.

A quick snapshot:

1. The tiler who vanished: Highly recommended, vetted, booked… then disappeared into thin air on the day. No call, no message, nothing. We still have the tiles lying the garage.

2. Another trade who over-promised and entirely under-delivered. I’ll spare the full details, but it was the same pattern great chat, great pitch, then virtually no follow-through and work we ended up having to complete ourselves.

3. The heating engineer cowboy. This one was on a different level. One of the worst, most careless experiences we’ve had. The system was left in a terrible state... 

4. Enter @chas-b and @pirate-rich, and this is important: Where others let us down, these two stepped in and reminded us what true professionalism looks like. Chas and Richard remain the benchmark. They turn up when they say they will, do what they promise, communicate clearly, take pride in their work, fix problems properly, without excuses and go over and above expectations, Their competence and integrity highlighted just how far the bad experiences had fallen below even basic standards. They’re the kind of professionals who restore your faith in the entire sector and they absolutely deserve the credit.

5. And then comes the most recent episode, the one that prompted me to write this post. The conservatory woodwork job! 

We needed urgent woodwork and structural support replaced in our conservatory. Serious stuff and not something you rush. We found a highly rated local tradesman in early October. Very professional in person. Great reputation. He said he was fully booked for six weeks but could start mid-November. Perfect. We appreciate good trades are busy.

Mid-November came… and went. No update until we chased. He eventually confirmed he could start this Monday. Job was quoted for two full days.

He arrived on time at 8:30, we cleared the entire garden room (now piled inside the main house) and he began. The workmanship he completed looked good. Then at 15:00 he inexplicably packed up, said he couldn’t continue that day, and would return on Tuesday.

Later that evening came the text: he couldn’t make Tuesday but could come Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday arrived. No updates. At 16:00 (in the dark) he finally appeared. Much of the job is exterior work. He did some, missed a lot, and promised to return Thursday after 90 minutes with us.

Thursday morning came. No arrival. Midday text: He’s delayed but “will be with us soon.”

By 17:00 still nothing. Another text: he could come at 18:00. We declined. This is structural woodwork. Not a job you rush with a torch after dark to get it done. This is an expensive project, and it feels like we've been demoted to an after hours project. Now he says he can only back early next week. Meanwhile we have the contents of garden room scattered around the living and dining room. 

And it’s led me to a bigger question. Is this just us? Or has there been a real decline in tradesmanship and professionalism?

We’re respectful, communicative and willing to pay well. We treat tradespeople extremely well. Yet the level of unreliability, broken commitments, vanishing acts and chaotic scheduling this year has been honestly astonishing.

And the contrast between the bad experiences and people like Chas and Richard, who set the gold standard for how professionals should operate, has made the issue even more noticeable.

So I’d really like to hear from others. Are you finding it harder to get reliable, professional trades even when choosing the most reputable and expensive options?

And tradespeople. What’s going on?

Is it demand? Burnout? No-shows becoming normalised? Something cultural?

I’m genuinely interested in your experiences.

Ok, please read on then. In the mid-1970’s, I and a few others started ‘Reading Talking News’ - a talking newspaper for the visually handicapped. Amongst our recipients was a then retired blind gentleman who in former years had lived in the Reading area before moving to Tavistock; he had been the chief engineer on the Queen Elizabeth for some time.

One of Jim’s duties was to ensure that the water they took on board at various ports was up to an acceptable standard to ensure that their boilers could function efficiently; for this purpose, he would take samples and measure the hardness on a scale. He told me that the water they took on board at New York measured 1.0 - the water he measured from his tap in the Reading area measured 22.0 and he referred to this as ‘Liquid Bricks’! I might add that we are on our third water softener in the 50 years or so I have lived in Berkshire. Cheers, Toodles.

Back in 1971, a team of Soviet geologists were drilling out in the Karakum Desert, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. They were looking for natural gas, and they thought they’d hit a decent pocket of it. Turns out, they’d actually drilled right into a massive underground cavern that was just full of the stuff. The ground gave way, swallowing their drilling rig and leaving behind a gigantic crater. To make matters worse, it immediately started spewing methane gas, a huge problem for the environment and for anyone living nearby.

Faced with this uncontrollable leak, the engineers made a call that probably seemed logical at the time: they decided to set it on fire. Their thinking was that it would burn off the dangerous gas in a few weeks and then fizzle out. The only problem? They had no idea how much fuel was down there. That was over 50 years ago, and the crater is still burning today. It’s a literal pit of fire that’s been roaring non-stop since the Nixon administration, which is just wild to think about.

When you look at it from an energy and climate perspective, the whole thing is a total nightmare. Before they lit it, the crater was just venting pure methane directly into the air. Since methane is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas (way more potent than CO2 in the short term) burning it was actually the lesser of two evils. But the lesser evil is still pretty evil. They estimate this thing burns through about 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas every single year. That translates to roughly 300,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, which is comparable to the yearly output of an entire small country.

It’s become a weird tourist attraction over the years, which adds another layer of irony. The government has occasionally talked about putting it out, and a few years back the president even made a big show of saying it needed to be extinguished to stop the environmental damage and save the lost resource. But snuffing out a fire that’s been fed by a bottomless gas supply for five decades is way easier said than done. They’ve looked into everything from dumping massive amounts of sand on it to pumping in inert gases, but so far, nothing’s worked. The Gateway to Hell just keeps on burning.

For a community like ours that’s focused on clean energy and smarter solutions, this whole saga feels like a perfect cautionary tale. It’s a stark reminder of the "drill now, ask questions later" mindset and a visceral example of how much energy we can literally throw away without a second thought. While we’re here talking about heat pumps, optimising solar farms and building better batteries, there’s a hole in the desert that’s been burning away for half a century. Madness!

I wonder if the plumber was in hot water for that? Toodles.

https://youtu.be/TiwLUQ2jPo8?si=ez75vi0cpgtocZTw

Regards, Toodles.