Re; floodlights; yeah, what a waste. Similarly I’m seeing a lot of cars driving around in broad daylight with their front lights still on <- what idjots.
Re: that UKGov committee 'Heat resilience and sustainable cooling' One-Simple-Idea I thought of was to take advantage of the
stack effect - a bit like the
mound building termites. Most UK house have a downstairs hallway, stairs, & an upstairs landing area. Normally this area has the hatchway to the loft/attic space. When houses get hotter during the Summer, particularly upstairs, simply remove the hatchway; you could also get a custom made frame, and cover it with window fly screen cloth to (temporarily) replace the existing one during the summer. This makes the ‘stack’ now extend up to the roof apex inside, reducing the upstairs temperature as the hot air moves up. You could also add a vent at the top of the triangle of the wall. Use some ultra quiet, high performance PC case fans that run off of low voltage (thinking small solar panel powered) and perhaps a 2-part 3D printed through-wall enclosure to hold the fan and screw to the wall (allowing for thermal expansion of course). This would extract hot air out, and draw cooler air in from lower down. Simple + low cost + accessible = win.
Back to rinks; #29 - payments; they perhaps need to think about psychology. One of the reasons Dancing on Ice helped was that it advertised ice skating to millions of UK homes. Yes people can search & seek out a rink, but unless there’s advertising (leaflets/local radio/newspapers etc which costs rinks) it will drop out of people’s perception. Consider a spectrum of customers; let’s ignore the extremes: the never-gonna-do-it/one-timers-only, and the skaters-for-life at the other end. Let’s say one public skating session is £10. Also ice skating is generally perceived as a Winter sport so let’s focus on the 6 months of Oct/Nov/Dec & Jan/Feb/Mar. What if a rink pitched this offer: Unlimited public skating, £100 for 6 months, or £50 for 3 months. Pretty good deal right? At £10 a session you will get a lot of people only go a couple of times resulting in less revenue overall. With the offer occasional/perhaps customers become more regulars. Also if people are on site you can easily advertise other goods/services; skating lessons, gloves, food & drink, hockey matches, ice shows etc; however, important to note from an ethics perspective, there’s no pressure if someone just wants to skate.
