MEANINGLESS CLAIMS No. 9,461

Seen in a product brochure for a control system: “The theory states that if you allow the indoor temp to vary by 8ºC in a commercial or public building the heat saving will be 80%. In practice a span of 3-4ºC is usually more realistic (20-24ºC is common) resulting in heat savings of 20-40%. The use of a temperature range does not mean that the indoor temperature will change 3-4ºC over 24h, the average change in indoor temp over 24h is less than 1ºC, which is enough to utilise thermal storage. If no range is allowed, none of the excess free or purchased energy can be stored in the building.”

MEANINGLESS CLAIMS No. 9,462

I recently reported the new fashion for describing boiler-water additives as ‘organic’ to make them sound benign. As I pointed out, cyanide is an organic compound. Now here’s a new twist: a report on the efficacy of a certain boiler water additive says “[it] is 100% organic so the embodied carbon is 0.58kg of CO2 per bottle”. Er… How do they figure that?

MEANINGLESS CLAIMS No. 9,463

The same report cited another which said that a certain programme of domestic energy-conservation refits had yielded “up to a 42% increase in living room temperature”. Cold comfort indeed if your room started at zero degrees Celsius; 42% of zero is zero. Oh wait: what if you had used Fahrenheit, where freezing point is 32°F? A 42% increase on 32°F gives you 45.4°F (7.5°C). So it depends what temperature scale you use, and the truth is you can only talk about a percentage increase in temperature relative to absolute zero (-273°C). If we start at an absolute 273K (0°C), a 42% increase takes us to 388K or 115°C. To be honest, that doesn’t sound too comfortable either.