16 June

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at running reverse-cycle units continuously in winter, to use less energy. The admins of the group, who love that the 120,000+ people there worship them as gods of energy efficiency, were so angry that my story violated the advice they’d been giving everybody for years, that they blocked all of my posts to the group. Social media is a dumb sewer, where people compete for popularity (likes) the way they did at school. It’s transforming our entire world into a school playground. Some engineers on the group contacted me privately to say how much they enjoyed my posts, and they were trying the same things too. Incidentally the advice the admins of that group were giving people is to leave your house cold for 18 hours a day, and only run the heating when you’re at home and not in bed. The lead admin even tried to tell me that a reverse-cycle unit works most efficiently when it has to heat freezing cold rooms, or cool stinking hot rooms. (Doing either of those things runs them flat out, and absolutely gulps energy.) I left the group :)