Lovely Snow!

Winter has finally delivered. With five inches (125mm) of snow, travel to work was not possible and I worked from home, having seen the weather reports yesterday and brought my laptop home with me. At lunch time we went out and played in the snow. Ewan was very excited by it. We even did some tobogganing on tea trays. Metal tea trays make surprisingly good vehicles for sliding down-hill. Round ones are more exciting because there's a strong possibility you'll spin round as you descend. I'm hoping the snow will make it too difficult to travel to work tomorrow as well.

The snow shows how much heat we lose through our supposedly high-tech roof. It was constructed as a so-called "warm roof": all the insulation is just below the tiles unlike the traditional British roof, where the insulation is laid over and between the joists on the ceiling of the upstairs rooms. This means that our loft space is as warm as the rest of the house. I've always had misgivings about the roof because the top four feet always melts the frost quite quickly. It also melts the snow and the whole lot had slumped into the gutters by late afternoon, unlike our neighbours. We must be losing a fair bit of heat through the top of the roof. But then, we also have the flue from the wood-burning stove passing through the loft space and that dumps a lot of heat in there. I suppose it has to go somewhere. I don't feel too bad about it though, because most of that heat was generated from carbon-neutral logs.