Re: energy in UK

On 4/22/2025 1:01 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-04-21 23:54, Don Y wrote:

On 4/21/2025 9:48 AM, Joe Gwinn wrote:

The 5-to-1 is installation only, but it's hard for decreased
maintenance and repair to make enough difference to tilt the balance.

>
Hmmm, I would have thought damage from storms (branches falling on
overhead lines), "accidents" (drivers skidding in snow; drunks)
and the inevitable "road widening" operations would be very costly.

 Floods can kill underground service, too.

Major cities seem to deal with it, OK.

Here, we are plagued with /caliche/ making digging very difficult

 new word to me.

Yeah, it was to me, too, when I moved here!  I rented a jack-hammer
to remove some concrete, early on.  The salesperson asked me if I wanted
the shovel attachment, too?  (I just looked at him, dumbfounded).
When I dug the holes for the citrus trees (with a regular shovel and
a "caliche bar" -- a large, 20 pound iron "spear" with a chisel point)
I understood the reference!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliche
 Caliche (/kəˈliːtʃiː/) (unrelated to the street-slang "Caliche" spoken in El Salvador) is a soil accumulation of soluble calcium carbonate at depth, where it precipitates and binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central and western Australia, in the Kalahari Desert, in the High Plains of the western United States, in the Sonoran Desert, Chihuahuan Desert and Mojave Desert of North America, and in eastern Saudi Arabia at Al-Hasa. Caliche is also known as calcrete or kankar (in India). It belongs to the duricrusts. The term caliche is borrowed from Spanish and is originally from the Latin word calx, meaning lime.[1]

Caliche is largely impervious to liquid water.  You can fill a hole with
a caliche layer at the bottom and it won't drain for DAYS.  So, a caliche
layer under a planting is effectively a barrier to root penetration -- there's
nothing "wet" drawing the roots through the layer(s).
As I stated, when I dug the holes for the trees, I was advised that I
was making a giant flower pot (think: terra cota) for each tree and
sizing that pot to accommodate the future needs of the tree.  So,
4 ft deep and 4 ft diameter to give the trees a good start (it would
have been better to make them 15 feet diameter -- the eventual
driplines for the trees -- but that would be an insane amount of soil
to remove and discard!)