wrote in message
oups.com...
And passive solar design of newbuild (or occasionally retrofit) can
be
even better vfm.

The Victorians put a lot more thought into this area of building design
- sometimes. Trouble with this sort of thing is its not a universal
plug in, it requires understadning and design skills to work out how to
do it and when. And today competition on basis of cost is pretty harsh,
and rules out such unnecessary skilled input in nearly all new builds.

The publishing of a set of standard proven designs, along with
checklists for each to see when you can use them, plus payback figures
etc, could change this. But I've not seen such a thing anywhere.

Regrettably solar seems to be the domain of those with insufficient
awareness of real world finances.

The fact is that among the sea of unlikelies, there are some solar
designs that pay back excellantly. It seems only a matter of time
before more widespread awareness occurs - though it doesnt seem to have
got anywhere yet.

The US government were on the verge of introducing large scale solar
research. A report stated most of the US energy needs could come from
solar....in 1952. It was dropped for the Atoms for Peace garbage. Again a
major report indicated the same in 1980. In the final days of Carter he
stared the ball rolling. Regan scrapped it and even took the solar panels
off the White House roof. Bush has suppressed any notion of large scale
solar research.

So in the USA vote Democrat not oil company lackeys Republican. Similar
here, but on a smaller scale. The Tories pander to big oil, while Labour
have an effective wind power generation project under way and increased home
insulation levels, and are still increasing them, to levels we though only
Sweden would do.