Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tea urn?

If you're as old as me you'll remember the classic Eric Morecambe joke from the post title. Just as big a joke, but considerably less funny is the advice being provided by the government funded quango, Envirowise .....

In a statement it tells businesses: "Appoint a tea task force or tea monitor to make sure all your office hot drink-making facilities are as efficient as they could be. Only boil the water you use - this will avoid water and energy being wasted."

Tea monitors? Tea task force? The companies I know that still make tea or coffee by hand rather than getting it from a vending machine are all tiny - and few and far between. Even very small companies tend to have vending machines or, if not, coffee machines.

Mary Leonard, director at Envirowise said that the advice would serve as a "resource-saving initiative" for small and big companies.

I've got a better idea. Why don't we sack Mary Leonard, get rid of this (and all the other) useless quango and save ourselves even more money.

Apart from being impractical it is probably spurious advice anyway - water that is already half boiled will take less time to boil than cold water. So if a kettle is already half full of half boiled water it will take less energy to boil it again than if you half filled it once, boiled it, then half filled it again and boiled it again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're right about the moonbats and the need to get rid of useless parasites like this woman, but a bit wrong about everything else.

I work for a company of about 500 and we still make tea by hand in the office.

And the thing about cooling kettles - no, energy loss is proportional to how much hotter something is than its surroundings, so boiling too much water does waste energy: any cooling of the left-over water is a waste of heat.

But it's true they ought to have better things to do with their time and our money than point out the bleeding obvious.