the ubiquitous blog

The more observant readers among you will have noticed that there is a now a weather report for Innsbruck in the sidebar of this blog, this is because Ulli and I are on holiday in the Austrian Tirol.

So day one, as always we were keen to get out and about doing things in the mountains, so as a warm up we decided to go out for a quick ride. Fortunately we were able to borrow a couple of mountain bikes and Ulli’s cousin Bernhard was keen to come along as a guide. Digging the bikes out of the basement where they live, I was pleased to see that the Rocky Mountain Elements bike which I was borrowing had been recently upgraded with disk brakes. The benefit increased control when braking far out weighs the cost of extra weight, in my opinion.

Bikes out, adjustments made, and we were off across the Absam fields, down the new path to cross the Weissenbach (good first test for the disk brakes) and up into Mils on the far side. From Mils we took a path around the edge of Milserwald. This forest area sits on a terrace left behind by the last ice age, and is a great recreation resource for the local area (possibly why Absam and Mils are now among the most expensive places to buy a house in Austria). Coming down the track towards Milser Eiche, on the SW corner of Milserwald, Bernhard and I were racing ahead (as usual) when we came across a Nordic walker coming the other way, who was (as is often the way with Nordic walkers) taking up as much of the track as possible, another good test for the disk brakes.

Having stopped by the big oak (known locally as Milser Eiche) to look at the view across the Inn to Volders and Glungezer (and waited for Ulli to catch up), we skirted round the southern edge of Milserwald to the pretty village of Baumkirchen. From here we picked up the cycle route, along a quiet stretch of road, to Fritzens. After Fritzens, Bernhard decided that rather than follow the cycle route along the road to Terfens, we should go cross county using a series of unpaved tracks. This proved to be much more entertaining, in particular the way Bernhard would cycle round in big circle each time we came to a fork in the track. He claimed he was changing down gear in order to be able to tackle the climb (if we were to turn that way), but I suspect that he was just lost and trying to remember the way.

At Terfens we stopped to have drink from the drinking fountain, of the type with a hollowed out log for a trough which are so common in Tirol, the water is always fresh and cold. This also meant that we neatly avoided being run over by a Dutch motorcycle club, which came noisily through the village. Drink stop finished, we turned north and headed up hill out of the village. This hill gets increasingly steep as you travel north. On a previous ride, I had had to get off and walk the last part, but not this time. We then turned off to Maria Larch (Mary of the Larches, a small church), this time instead of turning off the road to go cross county (on a track which is in winter a x-country ski trail) we continued up the road to Eggen.

From Eggen we cycled on along quiet roads through fields full of horses to Gnadenwald, joining the main road again at St. Michael. As road riding on mountain bikes isn’t as much fun as trail riding, we turned off the road again, after about 1 km, at St. Martin.

Following the off road trail, Bernhard and I raced off ahead again as usual, after we crossed the dry riverbed of the Fallbach I stopped to wait for Ulli. I heard a loud skidding noise and thought that sounds impressive, then silence. After a minute or so, Ulli still hadn’t appeared so I went back to have a look, and found Ulli standing by her bike with grazes on her arm and knee. Ulli said she was fine and so we cycled on to where Bernhard was waiting. Then Bernhard and I decided that it would be best for Ulli if she were to go to hospital to get her wounds cleaned up, so he went off to get his car and Ulli and I made our way to the nearest car park, a few minutes away.

Taking Ulli in to hospital, I expected them to just clean her up put on a dressing and send her home. So when she came out of the treatment room with a bandage on her arm and knee, I thought that’s it over, lets go home. But she said she had to wait and see someone else as they wanted to put her leg in plaster for ten days, as she had hole in her knee close to the Bursa synovialis (or in German: Schleimbeutel, which translates literally as slime bag) and they felt it would heal faster if the knee was immobilised. Poor Ulli…

We recently had a new bathroom fitted and as it is an internal room lighting is important. When we first moved, in the old bathroom gave a good impression of the Black Hole of Calcutta (well more like the green and blue hole of Calcutta, an interesting colour scheme), lit by a single 40w tungsten bulb. On the first day, all the old tungsten bulbs where removed and replaced with modern low energy bulbs. In the bathroom I put in a 14w, which has a light output equivalent to a 75w tungsten bulb, a considerable improvement straight away.

Putting in a new bathroom gave the opportunity to make more radical changes. My first thought was to use halogen down lighters and flood the room with light, however there are a few issue with halogen down lighters. First off, care must been taken when fitting them into an existing ceiling, as they can be a fire risk due to the heat they generate. Secondly, all that heat is just wasted energy, with most of the energy being converted into heat rather than light. While halogen bulbs while they are more energy efficient than Edison incandescent bulbs, they are still not the most efficient means of lighting. The search was on for energy efficient replacements for the standard GU10 halogen bulb.

Most people are now aware of low energy (compact fluorescent lamps or CFL) bulbs, even if not everybody is using them. There are now CFLs which can be used to replace the old fashioned tungsten GU10 bulbs (GU10 refers to the type of fitting). They are at the present time more expensive (£5 to £6 per bulb) than the halogens they replace (£0.79 per bulb), but the CFs use less energy and last longer, but more on that later.

However I wasn’t convinced this was the most energy efficient solution. Through my interest in cycling I knew that in high end cycle lights halogen bulbs have now been entirely replaced by LED lights. Indeed the popularity of 24 hour cycle racing, where the race continues through the night (at the extreme is the Strathpuffer with 17 hours of darkness), have helped to drive development in this area, as bright and energy efficient lights are important to this sport. If you are hurtling down a forest track in the dark, you want plenty of light to find your way. Yet at the same time you don’t want to be lugging a heavy battery about, so low energy consumption is essential. The German light makers Lupine show just what can be done with their Betty 14, a 1500 lumen 22w light which can run for 6 hours on a 14.5 Ah Li-Ion bottle battery. The whole setup only weighs 810g. Ok, so it comes at a price (£685.00, just in case you want to know what I would like for Christmas) and a 1500 lumen lamp is way more brightness that the average domestic lighting system would normally use, but has any of this high end technology filtered its way down to the domestic lighting market?

Well yes it has, you can get LED lights as replacements for halogen bulbs, but there are a few differences in what is required from a bike light compared with domestic room lighting. As stated above, top end bike lights are far brighter than domestic lighting systems, also there is the colour of the light to be taken into account. As light colour and temperature can be a wee bit confusing, here is a short digression into light colour/temperature.

A lighting designer will describe white light as being cold or warm depending on whether it is towards the yellow end of the spectrum or the blue end, with yellow being warm and blue cold. On the other hand, a lighting engineer will describe white light according to its temperature in degrees Kelvin (°K), to them a “warm white” light has a temperature of 2700°K and the “cold white” a temperature of 5000°K. So why the difference? The designer gives a subjective description of the light, and we have become accustomed to the yellowish white light of the tungsten bulb in most domestic lighting situations. Before that we would have experienced the light of oil lamps or candles, which have a similar coloured light. This light is described as being warm. Whereas white light which is to the blue end of the spectrum, and is closer in colour to that of daylight, is regarded as harsh and cold. The engineer on the other hand describes light according to the level of energy required to generate it. For millennia metal workers have known that if you heat a piece of metal it will start to glow, at first red, then as you heat further straw yellow and eventually it will become white hot. At this point metals start to melt, and if you are using arc welding gear to melt the metal, you will notice that the electrical sparks give out a blue light as they are hotter still. The temperatures at which these colours are produced can be measured, hence colour temperature is given in °K. Ok so back to the subject at hand.

Most bike lights produce a “cold” white light with a temperature of about 5000°K, this is often considered too harsh and cold for use in a living area. So for domestic use there are GU10 LED lights which can replace the bog standard halogen down lighter, these usually come as a choice of either warm white (3200°K) or cool light (5000°K). Power usage ranges from 1w to 4.3w and their light output can be equivalent to 35w to 50w halogen blubs (specifications can vary between manufactures). As this is in many ways still a cutting edge technology, prices are on the high side at between £6 and £18 a bulb.

So to the big question, is it worth spending £18 on a bulb when you can get a halogen bulb for £0.79 to do the same thing? The answer depends on the time scale you look at and how much you use it, to find out it is necessary to carry out a little economic analysis. To do this I, have developed a simple tool which you can access here.

Basically halogens are cheap to buy but use a lot of expensive energy and have a short lifespan (typically about 2000 hrs). Whereas LEDs are expensive to buy, but use very little energy and have a very long lifespan (typically about 50000 hrs), CFLs are somewhere in between. To see which is the better value in the longer term I chose the following scenario, using four bulb fitting, for four hours a day (OK so that is a wee bit longer that we normally use the bathroom per day) using electricity at a costing of £0.18 per kWh (a rate taken from an old bill, before the recent price hike!), what would be the total running cost per year? In the first year the total cost of the halogens would be £39.10, using CFLs would be £12.96 and using LEDs would be £4.90. This suggest that saving in energy costs of using the LEDs would repay the capital investment is a little over two years. However at the current time the cost of energy is going up and the cost LEDs is coming down, so this could soon be even shorter!

Having yesterday written about my new commute, I got up this morning, having listened to heavy rain falling over night and heard the weather forecast say there was more to come throughout the morning. So I decided to to take the bus instead. I knew there were several buses which I could catch, and when an express bus arrived I got on it without thinking about it. Only when I sat down did it occur to me that the bus directly behind, while a wee bit slower, would stop 5 minutes walk from the office, whereas the bus I was on stopped at the far side of the estate, a fifteen minute walk from the office. This wouldn’t normally bother me, but the reason for catching the bus this morning was the forecast of heavy rain and sure enough, as I was walking the long way to the office, it bucketed down.

As I was walking along the road through the Bush Estate, I was surprised to see a fire engine go past, as this was not a main road and such occurrences are rare. I arrived at the office a short while later, completely soaked, to find the fire engine in the middle of the car park and my colleges standing outside sheltering from the rain under the gable end of the building. It was another 15 minutes before we were given the all clear and allowed to enter the building, by which time I was starting to get cold. I didn’t fully dry out until the afternoon tea break.

If only I had cycled in, I would have arrived warmed up and invigorated from the ride, with a set of dry clothes to change into, after having a warm shower. So the moral of the story is: cycling is best.