I’m writing this with a puffa jacket on and a blanket over my knees. Late on Saturday night, one of the coldest of the winter so far, when I was solely responsible for the welfare of four children, our gas combi boiler decided to go on strike. Nothing within my range of home heating skills -bleeding the radiators, readjusting the pressure, resetting the boiler – worked. Hurrah…

Meanwhile the Prof was in a rural cottage on her annual weekend away with friends, kept snugly warm by an air-sourced heat pump…

This made me think. You certainly won’t see the headline in the Daily Mail: “one house freezes as fossil fuels fail, while another basks in the warm glow of low carbon technology.” Whereas if it was the other way around…

Much of the media lives in a world where the failure of any kind of ‘green’ effort (real or perceived) is enough to trigger a headline. Botched insulation job? “Net Zero ruined our house.” Bright LED headlines badly fitted to SUVs? “Net Zero Headlights Blind Drivers”. Heathrow’s power failure? Blamed, completely erroneously, on Net Zero.

Meanwhile, if my social circle is anything to go by, gas combi boilers fail all the time and yet we just take it as one of those rather annoying things that happen at the worst moment – and certainly not worthy of a newspaper article. But those anti-Net Zero headlines do put the fear of the new into people. Unfortunately we don’t seem to have evolved a spidey sense for when a journo is trying to turn an isolated unfortunate incident into a “hell in a handcart” headline.

Two lessons from this

1. No matter how good ‘green’ is, it won’t be good enough for some people. They will find fault.
2. While it might feel futile, we must use this to drive higher standards – after all there’s nothing green about a crap product.

In the meantime, I’m awaiting the plumber and his verdict on the boiler, while investigating heat pump costs in case we need a replacement. Those costs are not as bad as I thought, once the grant is factored in, but unfortunately the space outside I had mentally allocated to a heat pump isn’t quite large enough…