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Saving Energy Without Derision
George Maschke writes "Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation). The author welcomes comments and intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
http://www.zelicoff.com.nyud.net:8090//SMLR/Saving Energy.pdf
5mb PDF linked directly on the front page of slashdot? Whoa.
I can't comment because I can't download the fucking 5MB .pdf ...
Why do people use PDFs when HTML works perfectly fine? Do you REALLY need to control the layout that much?
Might be outdated! HERE
With the increasing interest in hydrogen fuel cells it may be time for the 'coalition of the willing' to begin the inva^H^H^H^H liberation plans of those countries that possess surplus hydrogen reserves.
It also might be time for a manned mision to the sun...
[insert obligatory joke about overheating server]
A direct link to a 5mb file in the article summary? Never mind energy bills, hope this guy has paid up his server bill.
Read the HTML version instead, without the pretty graphs
Google is your friend.
There is a definite need for energy conservation ideas that can be directly supported with economic validation. So many "green" initiatives are driven solely by politics and have economics, and often even environmental impacts, that are questionable. We need more people installing compact flourescent lamps and water heater blankets...not $20,000 solar panel arrays. A healthy dose of common sense here could really make energy efficiency ideas more popular. Here's hoping it works.
If someone actually manages to download this, can you please post a torrent. One post in and the thing is at a crawl.
This is a collection of stuff that we do anyways, just because in the last 20 year, the middle-class earning power WENT DOWN.
Do you turn off your displays when you leave the office? My coworkers always leave them on, and it drives me nuts.
OTOH, I have no problems leaving my CPU running - it takes long enough to boot up that I'm willing to contribute to global warming.
...is that it isn't an energy *source*. You have to make hydrogen, either by splitting it out of water, or some hydrocarbon source (e.g. petroleum), then pressurize it to extremes in order to get any usable range out of it in an automobile. If hydrogen can be manufactured by renewable means (geothermal, for example, would work well in Iceland), then there is some benefit to it.
However, if you use solar energy to create electricity to electrolyze water, and make hydrogen gas that way, you end up with less energy at the wheels of a car than you would just charging a battery from the same solar energy.
So you have to ask yourself, who benefits from multi-billion dollars of investment into a Hydrogen energy infrastructure?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
I beleive in this stuff, I really do. /.'d currently - but we all know the content - "Install insulation, drive a fuel-efficient car". Lovely, great thought - but how do you put it into practice. I don't own a car, I make a point of not owning one but how do you convince Mr Tinyknob in his suv-sports-environment killer to drive something fuel efficient? He's never going to impress people any other way.
I can't rtfa as it's
OK, I'm being harsh, but it's fair. I take all sorts of precautions to leave a fair planet for my (currently) 5 week old daughter, but I frequently wonder what the "£$%ing point is if the guy at the next desk drives 500 miles weekly in his V8 5litre penis extension because he's got no self esteem what-so-ever?
Driving a modern VW or MB diesel whether or not you ever plan to use a single drop of domestically produced biodiesel is a good place to start.
My 2003 Jetta TDI has 40862 miles on it and I've used 832.7 gallons of diesel (and 56.9 gallons of biodiesel) thus far. For those of you keeping score at home, that's about 45.93 mpg over the life of the car. Not too shabby.
Why wait 15-20 years for hydrogen when we can start reducing our dependence on foreign oil NOW?
Stop voting for Republicans.
Save energy on your server farm by not allowing multi-megabyte links from Slashdot.
One energy tip I've thought about is putting a diode in series with each of my incandecent fixtures with a capacitor across the lamp to bridge the missing half of the cycle. While this won't actually save any energy, as you will be drawing twice the current through half the cycle, it should add a DC bias to the current which won't be measured by the inductive meter, thus you will save money. Make sure all the diodes point the same way so that all your lamps are drawing from the same half of the cycle, otherwise, you might lose the DC bias and end up paying full price for your electricity.
Unknown host pong.
PDFs are the only way to create a completely encased document, and be able to save it, email it, archive it, etc. If you want, you can even encrypt the info so nobody else can modify it (although only with Acrobat 6.0 Security... before that, security was a joke). I prefer to read online stuff in HTML. But for whole documents or books, I much prefer PDF format.
Batteries are amazingly corrosive.
A lot of the U.S. gets its electricity from coal and other non-replaceable fuels that damamge the environment.
Everytime you drive it you have to plug in and get more electric charge from the above environment destroying power plant.
Where's the bonus?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
You are forgetting that in a hydrogen society - there is now room to bring nuclear power back into the picture. Now people have the potential to create hydrogen on a vast scale far away from any place that might have political fallout.
In spite of all the bad press, the fact is that nuclear is still the safest, cheapest, and most environemtally friendly energy source ever created. IMHO, it's bad wrap had far more to do with its threat to OPEC then it ever had to do with safety or radiation.
for most paranthetical comments in a Slashdot news post goes to . . .
Uhm... I'm not an automobile engineer, but somebody got to explain this to me. Is the *average* American car really in the 200HP range? I mean, I have a 225HP car, and that's considered "a lot" in Europe. Is there anybody that can explain this to me?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
a PDF is a text file made slightly fuzzy so it looks shit.
Nobody really wants 50 miles per charge even if that covers 90% of eventualities. I like the idea of hydrogen and the gasoline hybrids because they seek to lower emissions and raise efficiencies while giving drivers what they want. The 50-60 miles on an electric charge car may get us a commute to work, but if we want to do some shopping, or take a day trip to the shore, we are stuck with a charge. People want to feel their vehicle purchase gives them choices (even when they don't use them 90% of the time), not forces a choice down our throats. I'll always bet on a solution that deals with the realities of consumer choices, rather than those than impose a morality that will never exist with most of the market.
Instead of investing billions in pipe dreams, we should focus on excellent technology that can be implemented in the next few years for a reasonable cost. Renewable cellulose-derived ethanol could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels and is neutral in net carbon impact (the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are offset by growing more low cost fuel crops that take CO2 out of the environment). And current gasoline engines run with minimal modifications on E85, an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mix. Making FFV engines (flexible fuel vehicles - compatible with ethanol and gasoline in various mixtures) can be done for at most 100-200 dollars of extra cost at vehicle build time, and many FFVs are already on the road in the US (in many cases, people don't even know they have them, the manufacturers build them for tax breaks then don't market the features outside of certain areas of the midwest where corn-derived ethanol is available at the gas station).
At current gas prices, cellulose-derived ethanol is actually more than competitive, it is cheaper than gas - the problem is the long term instability of gas prices makes investing in infrastructure to produce cellulosic ethanol as a fuel substitute too risky - it's hard to compete with something pumped out of the ground, where most of the costs are transportation, and political/defense issues. Please note that we're NOT talking about corn ethanol, which a highly subsidized and environmentally contentious product due to high energy costs of growing and harvesting corn.
sandia is operated by lockheed. it is part of the military-industrial complex, just not that part
Actually you can have a multipart document - email clients do this the whole time - a single file can contain the html, images, css, flash whatever.
----
Are those the same HEV's that most people do not get the advertized MPG? /. has ran a few stories on it, look in the archives. IIRC, most uses got about 1/2 of the advertized MPG.
I went shopping this morning - spent my time shuttling my car between various big-box stores. WalMart, the grocery store, the bank. I've got a 2 year-old, so walking is out of the question (and, honestly, I wouldn't want to walk that distance anyway). The truly sad thing is that the shops are "next to each other" but separated by huge expanses of parking lot. What makes it truly sad is that there is an LRT line that runs through the shopping district, with a stop at 2km intervals. Too far for anything but waiting for the busses (which run on a 45 minute schedule on the weekend). My point? Its nearly impossible not to have a car, and each of the free-standing houses in the surburban neighbourhoods is approximately 2000 square feet. Most are at least 2km from shops, schools, and rec centres. I doubt many residents want to live in the area, but we cannot afford expensive "trendy" inner city homes. And the developers seem stuck in a rut -- they just churn out more sprawl each year. I wonder if its possible to make them change? Signed, Sad is Suburbia.
I have not read the paper (it seems to be slashdotted), but with respect to the author's reference to "derision", this is something I am interested in, so I will go ahead and comment on it.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
But encouraging consumption is only one side of pro-consumer propaganda--those of us who resist the consumerist religion are held up for derision: people who advocate environmentalism, socialism, universal healthcare, and other viewpoint that are less than all-out friendly to consumerism, they are all objects of derision.
Also, viewpoints that advocate a more relaxed workplace and more leisure time off for Americans, they are also objects of derision among the consumerists. For example, European countries taht mandate 35 hour work weeks and 4 weeks or more a year of vacation, such as France. No, France wouldn't be an object of derision, would it.
And this is why America does not have universal healthcare, good public transportation, worker-friendly labor laws, etc etc etc.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Lately I've been really thankfull to see people being more honest and pratical about the environment, and resorting less and less to what I call enviro-guilt.
All to often I've ran into people who could not offer compelling benefits for using less resource intensive stuff, so instead they resorted to heavy handed guilt trips and would go on about how anybody who had anything in the world was destroying it for us all. I'm really thankfull to see more compelling approaches lately, I hope this is the start of a new trend.
90% of the crap you buy at the store was transported in a diesel truck at one point or another so everyone relies on diesel fuel.
Build more nuclear reactors. Develop a working plutonium breeder (invest money in research). Drive down the prices on solar and wind (a wind turbine that can be manufacured in 300-400$ cost 2-3K$). Move out of teh suburbia. Start buying from local shops instead of driving to Walmarkt. Move closer to your working place even if the rent is 20% higher. Use the bike more often (is healty, environmental friendly and cheaper). Recycle. Increase the thermal efeciency of your home (better insulation ....). Get a VIA C3 or Crusoe instead of the P4. Get a hybrid car or a diesel. And most important DON'T VOTE BUSH! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Dear Mods: -1, WTF
...than a statement of practical alternatives. That is why for example the Prius is a much bigger seller than the Civic Hybrid even though they accomplish the same thing. It's why recycling garbage bins are so distinctive looking and why people obsess about which day to put which trash in which can. People generally want to be seen to be environmentally concious just like they want to be seen wearing a dozen or more different colored ribbons at awards banquets.
But his buddies in the oil industry have a vested interest in his continuing to feign ignorance rather than promoting anything that could prove to be viable competition.
I'm no expert, but I've believed this to be the case ever since I wrote a paper on it for a chemistry course and (for an unrelated course) designed a methanol reformer for use on a fuel cell vehicle. I've never said much about it, because I thought, "Well, who are you? All these specialists and people who make energy policy seem to think it's feasible.."
It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.
Two things that the first /.er to get this PDF down has to do:
1. Get a bloody torrent up and post it here.
2. Convert the PDF into a nice chapter by chapter HTML site. I hate PDF.
Looks like good literature!
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
there better be lots of nice pictures with that!
That makes a difference how? I never said we don't depend on diesel. I stated that driving a diesel vehicle is probably the highest thing from enviro-friendly that I know of. Might has well set oil field on fire.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
lol, please tell me that was a troll...otherwise you are one sorry unit....hahahaha....
I doubt many residents want to live in the area, but we cannot afford expensive "trendy" inner city homes.
Knowing the inner-city conditions and living costs of most major cities i've been to, i'm continually amazed anyone wants to live there. More crime, more pollution, less open space, and so on. Somehow being closer to shopping makes it all worthwhile to some people, but for many others, it's not.
And the developers seem stuck in a rut -- they just churn out more sprawl each year.
So are these all going empty, or what?
I don't get where the angst at having to drive your car short distances is coming from...If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better, or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
I'm guessing you don't/didn't want to do that, and at the price of having to drive your car a bit more, probably have more living space and financial resources available to spend. Such is life.
While the low-hanging fruit concept is good for the present, you have to think of the future. We actually need more people to suck it up, take the First-Mover Disadvantage and buy those $20,000 photovoltaic solar arrays. because the same setup will cost $200 once mass-produced...
You have a couple hundred amps of free electricity falling on your roof in the daytime... if you had amorphous solar cells up there instead of wood shingles.
How much energy would the USA save by switching from 110VAC to 220VAC power distribution? It would halve the ohmic losses in local wiring and would also reduce the amount of copper used. Since the rest of the world uses 220V, it would also simplify equipment design.
(Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's [hydrogen] a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)
What is also sad from my viewpoint is that hydrogen, technically, isn't really a "fuel". You need a lot of energy to make it. Now, if one uses solar power to make electricity to crack water to make H, then you've sort of solved part of the problem, but solar panels have a shelf life, and are dependent on local weather conditions.
I don't see Hydrogen as much of a solution for transportation. But I do think it could be used for home heating and local electrical generation in adverse environments. Still, the generation of Hydrogen is the big nut to crack. I think one nation on earth could become the Saudi Arabia of Hydrogen: Iceland.
1. They're an island, so they have all the water they need.
2.The whole freakin' island is basically a lava slick.
You don't have to drill very far down to get Enormous Amounts of geothermal energy, which they are already tapping for island electrical needs. All they have to do is build extra geothermal plants and crack the Atlantic Ocean. Geothermal s steady and continuous power (the earth isn't going to cool off anytime in the near future, and as Iceland is part of the Atlantic Spread, I don't think anything we can do will slow plate tectonics or cool Iceland off).
Hawaii and Vanuatu could be the Pacific Equivalents. Steady energy, lots of water. With that kind of a set up, we'll have a situation more like petroleum, where we'd have a real "fuel" i.e., lots of stored energy for very little energy expenditure in its creation.
I used to be all into Hydrogen - thikning - Hey - it turns into WATER when you burn it! KEWL!
But when I found out that the easiest hydrogen to get is out of petroleum, and that getting it out of either water or petroleum takes a lot of energy (which we get from either petroleum or fission - neither of which is renewable, except for the politically suicidal option of breeder reactors) my enthusiasm faded.
The first thing is conservation, and the article provides a lot of great ideas (many of which I am already doing, and had pointers for some that I will be dong!) for that. But I'm afraid that the next several decades will be warfare over water and energy, and we really need to find solutions to both problems.
I've stated before that the real problem is demographic - there are simply too many people. We need to *gradually* reduce populations to a sustainable level (I would estimate a global population of 250 - 300 million could be made sustainable indefinitely) and then develop long term energy, water, and metal recycling solutions.
If we don't the not so distant future will be one of horrifying catastrophe: disease, continuous war over ever dimishing resources, no power, crushing poverty and crowding, and a long term future best described as a paleolithic extinction event.
So, these are simple little choices we can make now, so we can plan for the future. OR, we can be our typical shortsighted green eyed greedy guts eat the world up everything for me and mine, and fuck the rest of you losers and simply watch the most precious of things in the universe - sentience - disappear.
It WILL eventually disappear, but it doesn't have to go this way - so stupidly, and so preventably.
Your every decision has far reaching effects.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
has anyone mirrored the file yet?
I really doubt in a nation filled to the brim of SUVs that average America has a real concern for environmental and energy-related issues...
Most inner city neighbourhoods here are quite nice, but property costs are easily 2-3x what they are in the suburbs, which puts them completely out of my reach - the "average" suburbian cost is approaching $220K, so an extra 400K mortgage would be financial suicide. Check out http://www.carfree.com/ for a few great ideas about how cities should be built. :)
The point of hydrogen is to create an abstraction layer between creation and consumption of energy.
Then everytime you come up with a better way to create energy you don't have redesign the engine and wait for it to be adopted. It will work in any fuel cell car. If everyone has a hydrogen car and you invent "the next big thing" in energy creation all you have to do is start making cheap fuel cells that way and selling them. You don't have to design a new car and try to get people to buy then and gas stations to support it.
You'd think programmers would be able to appreciate the value of this...
And of course fuel cells have many applications outside of cars...i.e. laptops that last a week, local power generation on your own block so no more "mega-blackouts" etc. the possibilities are endless....
I also saw something cool on the web. Some guy had a small solar panel and battery kit which could hold enough of a charge to run a small air conditioner for most of the day (when there was sunlight). I think that is a cool idea, as most friends who must use window air conditioners always complain how much more their electricity bill is in the summer.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
download 5MB pdf about saving bandwidth
http://www.zelicoff.com.nyud.net:8090/SMLR/SavingE nergy.pdfE nergy.pdf
http://www.zelicoff.com.nyud.net:8090/SMLR/Saving
thanks already for thinking _before_ posting slashdot stories next time.
With sentences like this, no wonder it's a 5MB article.
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
I'm up to page 22. Page 22! I started to read this to find ways that I could save money on my energy (gas/electric) bills. Instead, I'd bombarded with page after page after page of introductory material.
Mind you, this is good background information that seems really thought out, but you really have to WANT to read this thing in order to get it done.
I'm just hoping the end of this is better than a standard energy saving pamphlet, or I'll feel like I was bait-and-switched to read some environmentalist's propaganda.
If saving money isn't the botton line, then the goverment is doing it's job (which it isn't).
Money makes the world go round. We should not blame people for making decisions based on economics: rather, we must blame the government if they institute an economic and regulatory framework that fails to ensure that the good economic decision is the decision that's good for society (i.e. the environment) also. The current bad system actually subsidizes (encourages) poor decisions (dirty methods of energy conversion) and fails to appreciate the value of (encourage) good choices (clearner methods of energy conversion).
NOTE: It is the failure to *value* cleaner methods of energy conversion that prevents people from not only making the 'cleaner' choice, but also from making the more energy efficient choice. why? Simple. It's because the cleaner technologies that emit less pollution per useful unit of energy output (Pollution Efficiency) also happen to be the technologies that have higher useful energy output per unit of fuel (Fuel Efficiency)!
Therefore, consumers can't just buy a more fuel efficient car for a higher price but make it up on the fuel savings... no... because they are also paying more for the cleaner technology, but they get no reward for it!
SO, and I hope despite being AC, this idea is evaluated on it's own merits and modded up if it makes sense to you, economically recognizing the value of clearner technologies is *the* lynchpin not only of less pollution, but of greater efficiency as well!
The problem is: energy production systems need to be universal. And I DON'T think giving the likes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, Burma, Chechnya, etc. access to plutonium is a good idea under ANY circumstances.
The only nuclear power that's worth a damn is fusion, and we haven't puzzled that one out yet...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...with the consumer "choice" model. Example, the GM EV-1 pure electric. The people who got to lease them loved them, wanted to purchase them outright. GM refused and is now crushing all of them. It worked too good or something. You can still google and find enthusiast boards about those cars. It was normal size, fast, carried people in quiet comfort and eliminated the cocnentration of pollution in the downtown area, something you still get with hybrids no matter how efficient they are.
Here's one I'd like to see as one sort of choice. A pure electric for the day to day commute. A dedicated solar array at home for recharging it when not in use (along with the normal plug in charger). An add-on cargo trailer for trips that also included a fuel generator and fuel tank to give you the option of automagically turning it into the extended range vehicle you need, plus some additional cargo capacity. As a plus, the genny is useful for those situations at home when the grid goes down, recent hurricane action shows the practicality of having that. You get the best of both alternative auto worlds then, plus the grid backup aspect.
Powering cars by rechargable batteries has MANY more problems... If 50% power loss is assumed at each step (optimistic), how much power is really needed to charge a battery, after 1) Generation 2) Transmission 3) Step down to battery V in garage 4)Recharge loss 5) Storage loss
You want leaks? Battery drains faster than hydrogen can escape
Let's not even talk about the unchanging (heavy) weight of batteries (whereas fuel weight decreases at is consumed). You are still hauling 500 lbs of battery full or empty.
What about practicality? It takes several hours to recharge a battery vehicle. They are only practical in closed loops e.g. golf courses, where usage is more or less constant. Though admittedly a setup with chargers at home +and+ at place of employment would be useful for the 9-5'ers.
What about the environment? Lead and elecrtolyte will have to be replaced regularly. And accidents will get really ugly as acid is spilled all over the place.
Last week we were called to install two 3 door coolers for displaying and selling beer. They are in a small room, each with a 3/4 hp 115v compressor. The room will overheat very quickly.
We suggested installing a single compressor on the roof to reject the heat outside instead of into the small room. But no, we were told to install an air conditioner to cool the room.
This 'solution' will use twice the energy, but installation will cost approximately half.
They will pay the difference maybe twice over the lifetime of the equipment in increased energy costs.
This is real world. The only thing that will change this mindset is a drastic increase in energy prices.
Derek
http://66.102.7.104.nyud.net:8090/search?q=cache:u sehYaQtyhgJ:www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/SavingEnergy.pdf +www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/SavingEnergy.pdf+savingener gy.pdf&hl=en
The evil corporation has become to the left what the physical embodiment of Satan became to the born agains: the external excuse for all the choices people make that they don't agree with.
We have this ability to chase our tails with the endless pursuit of bling-bling precisely because will DON'T have a socialist worker's paradise and universal health care. The nature of our country filters our population towards the entrepreneurial, puritan, workaholic, tightasses. Our consumer culture is the result of this, not some evil ad firm.
I'm all for ditching the endless debt and ceaseless work hours for a few new baubles, but claiming the American consumer is not making a choice and is merely another corporate victim, is false.
All because, here, in the US, our diesel fuel has insanely high proportions of sulfur. Once ULSD becomes the federally mandated standard for diesel fuel (in 2006), we can use all the wonderful exhaust treatment techonologies in use in Europe today. These more effective exhaust treament systems are killed by the high levels of sulfur in todays US diesel fuel.
Using biodiesel, even on our current diesel passenger cars, lowers the emmissions significantly. All modern diesel engines should be capable of operation on biodiesel with no modifications required. Gasoline engines (unless they are FFVs) cannot switch their fuel source away from gasoline. Well, maybe a 10% ethanol blend would work, I'll admit I'm not that familiar with that side of the fence...
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
If you take a look at the League of Conservation Voter's identification of the worst policians in terms of environmental record, it's true that most are Republicans, but not all. In particular, if you happen to live in Minnesota's 7th district, and care about the environment, you'd do well to vote against Democrat Collin Peterson, who has one of the worst environmental records in the House.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I highly doubt a 2003 VW diesel pollutes more than a gas version. This technology has improved lately, and diesel fuel can be cleaned of many pollutant-causing components (and it is in Europe as I recall). and if you go to biodiesel, then where's all this nasty pollution coming from?
if you mix this
s tm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3631964.
with this
http://my.voyager.net/~jrrandall/BublGen.htm
would it work ?
I've not been able to read the whole thing - just bits of the draft.
It seems like most of the things are common sense. The trouble is most of the big energy savers, new fridge, new furnace, new car cost a lot of money up front - its easier to be energy efficient and save money when you have plenty of money in the first place.
2 ton ? try 3 or 4-ton (H2, Excursion, Expedition, and other oddities).
As father of five kids, with seven people in the house, basic things such as double-paned windows, water-saving shower heads, gas dryer, hot-water blankets, compact flourescent bulbs, and so on have been the mainstay.
If this was not the case, my monthly utility bill (in California) would easily hit $500-$600/mo. As it is, we're lucky to have bills typically in the $200-$300 range. (I have two mini-servers for my business that are never off)
Often, these kinds of things provide clear advantages beyond merely saving money.
Recently, the water-saving shower head in the downstairs bathroom broke, and I screwed on the original shower head, which I still had in the shed, thinking this would "get us by" until I could get in for another one.
Boy, was I wrong! With the old shower head, we could shower everybody in the household, one right after another in about one or two hours, including dressing.
But, with the new shower head, we ran out of hot water within 20 minutes, making showering everybody nearly an all-day venture while we waited for the hot-water heater to catch up.
Once, my son left the shower running hot water all night long, and in the morning, we found the shower going, and there was still plenty of hot water!
Another example: Flourescent bulbs not only use far less energy than incandescent, they also last much longer (who wants to replace light bulbs once a month?) and don't heat up the house.
I noticed the difference when I changed out the three 60-watt bulbs on the living room fam with three 15-watt flourescent! The room was, if anything, brighter, and, previously, when the fan was on low, you could FEEL the heat coming off those three 60-watt bulbs!
Double-paned windows mean that my teen children can blare their punk music as loud as they want to without pissing off the neighbors. Also, we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Also, in the winter time, you can sit next to the windows and not feel cold. That adds much to my sense of well-being on a cold winter morning...
Embrace conservation. It doesn't *have* to be a hassle!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
you wrote:
The evil corporation has become to the left what the physical embodiment of Satan became to the born agains: the external excuse for all the choices people make that they don't agree with.
So? An empty accusation with no reasoning or evidence?
We have this ability to chase our tails with the endless pursuit of bling-bling precisely because will DON'T have a socialist worker's paradise and universal health care.
Is that a tautology, circular reasoning, that I see before my eyes?
The nature of our country filters our population towards the entrepreneurial, puritan, workaholic, tightasses. Our consumer culture is the result of this, not some evil ad firm.
Oh, "the nature of our country"? Thanks for the trenchant insight.....
I'm all for ditching the endless debt and ceaseless work hours for a few new baubles, but claiming the American consumer is not making a choice and is merely another corporate victim, is false.
I ask you to look at history. Look at the wartime cultures of Japan and Germany. Look at what happened in those countries. Look at kamikaze pilots, at death camps. Why is it that those populations allowed such things, why would a young man go to his death? Why do people do things that are clearly against their own best interests? Is it possible that they were manipulated to do so against their best interests by powerful institutional entities?
Oh, but that could never happen here in America. We're special.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
"I don't own a car, I make a point of not owning one but how do you convince Mr Tinyknob in his suv-sports-environment killer to drive something fuel efficient? He's never going to impress people any other way."
In a free country, you suck it up and respect the guy's right to spend his money on what he wants. He lets you have a computer, right?
Or you could do it the other way, and arrange a government that will confiscate his car. Of course sooner or later the Ministry of Waste will decide that YOU don't "need" that computer, and then we won't be reading your amazingly stupid postings here.
So you should really think about whether you want to live in a free country with nice food and things in the stores, or do you want to see that rich guy with the big car punished for having something you don't like. You are not going to have it both ways.
By the way the Freudian "penis extention" theory you're going on about? Total crap, very old news. Try to keep up eh?
Bull. Dielsels emit LESS greenhouse gasses than gasoline cars. They do produce more soot, which eventually settles out of that atmosphere... but it's gasoline engines that produce all that nasty carbon monoxide etc.
It can however be dampened. You can impose taxes which make it so expensive that only the truly rich can afford them, not the "lease more than I can afford so I can appear rich" crowd. You can institute a shame campaign much like what's been done with smoking.
Biodiesel is extraordinarily clean. It's the sulfer levels allowed in American diesel that kills the pollution equipment and controls.
I don't read AC A human right
Equating death camps with consumer culture is such a stretch is seems unreasonable. The choice to walk into a Walmart or drink a Starbucks hardly equates. Death camps and Kamikazes are products of socialist systems the sublimate the will of the individual over the wishes of the state. I hope our socialists never reach the same level of control (although the neocon socialists are getting close)
A healthy dose of common sense here could really make energy efficiency ideas more popular.
That's the thing about common sense. There's an old quote about common sense that says "For every complex problem there's a solution that's simple... and wrong."
We need more people installing compact flourescent lamps and water heater blankets...not $20,000 solar panel arrays.
Those early adopters are the ones are helping these promising technologies get more and more affordable through their, what basically is, debugging.
I little foresight would help see that those $20,000 panel may one day be a lot cheaper than they are now, and ultimately are much more environmentaly sound than just "slightly reduced" use of coal/nuclear energy.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
By the same token, we shouldn't blame people for holding slaves, or blame men for treating their wives like servants. It's not their fault! It's all society's fault that people have such rotten values. Racism... sexism... monetarism... that's just the way things are, and we shouldn't expect them to change.
The article (which I've only read through the google cache link) has a bunch of images, which are probably bloating it to the 5MB mark. The cached version, including all of the crazy markup google uses to make the HTML look like the PDF, is ~380K.
I live in NYC and don't need or want a car. My neighborhood is pretty safe. I live next to Central Park and so have more of a backyard than most suburbanites. The downside? It cost me about $800 per square foot. At that rate the typical 2,000 sqrft home would cost $1.6 million.
The problem is that most small cities just don't have the cultural features and good jobs to encourage people to concentrate. Cities like NYC, Boston, San Fransico, etc... do and property values SOAR.
Did the polls mention that women like SUVs because they don't trust their children's safety to the tiny little cars we have these days? Thanks to the enviro-mental movement regulations on cars require that companies build unsafely small vehicles.
Give me a 1974 Buick or Oldsmobile and I'll think about parking my truck. But some dainty little envirocar? Doubt it. I have no wish to die on the highway.
The growth in energy demand from the industrializing Third World dwarfs anything we can do in this area.
Conservation is fun stuff, but if we are to survive the consequences of past and present energy policy, we need to get to work on the real problem.
We need to be looking at energy replacement instead, and that energy should be a lot cleaner and a lot cheaper than we are buying today.
The author pointed out that the future "hydrogen economy" is a cruel hoax perpetrated by the ignorant and by people who find the technologies so l33t and k3w1 that they haven't noticed that hydrogen is an inefficient energy distribution medium that might be uneconomic even if the price of electricity were $0.000 per KWh.
We are best off growing our own crude oil and prcessing and distributing it using existing infrastructure.
Biodiesel even when grown using ridiculously energy and labor intensive food crops is at rough parity with diesel fuel drilled in the middle east. We can do better than this, turning our sewage treatment plants into energy farms for algae that transforms raw sewage into crude oil should be a lot cheaper.
Remember the article here about $250/ton transport to LEO?
The NASA proposal for the Space Power Satellite showed that the system would be profitable even at launch costs of $400/kg.
What does 25% a pound to orbit using an extension of a 200 year old technology suggest to you?
Hopefully, more than it suggests to our political and corporate leadership.
If we can sell electricity directly to the Third World cheaper than they can buy oil to make it with, that's a lot of carbon dioxide and general pollution that isn't going to be happening.
We can replace fossil fuel, both as oil and as coal with solar energy packaged as cheaper and cleaner replacements.
For more information, click here. This includes links to the relevant UNH / NASA / DOE / space transportation sites.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...alternative energy conversion devices, but I'll be the first one to admit that more sane conservation will do more in the short and medium term than anything else. It's jhoe sixpacks best bet dollar for dollar right now. Making homes with double the insulation for example, and using triple pane nitrogen gas filled windows, or integral blinds, etc are all great. The water heater blankets. Much better quality home appliances, like sunfrost units instead of el cheapos, and etc.
Basically, I like both methods simultaneously. My theory is you work both ends towards the middle. Produce (or use) more of your own power using renewables, and conserve what you use, use less but get more. Eventually those two lines meet up and you are sitting pretty energy wise.
some more things I'd like to see:
LEDs becoming commonplace in replacement of incandescents and fluorescents
Solar hot water heating and some more PV action on all the millions of sunny roofs out there
More commercial sized wind gennys on farms, both to help out the farmers and to add to the grid redundancy without resorting to more fuel burning plants.
Electric vehicles are practical enough now, need the manufacturers to just come up with a few normal looking models and sell the dang things, recharging at night is a benefit to the big power producers as well,they have to keep their units running even when demand is low like at night
Building codes and mortgage lenders need to get into the act and stop lending or approving dismally low levels of insulation in new construction
Stop the destruction of community small scale hydro electric like they are doing now, hydro is the cleanest and most cost effective low tech solution for electrical production.
Legalise industrial hemp and partially use it for liquid fuel production, the "solar conversion" with plants is very good and the ethanol or methanol or biodiesel that can be produced burns fairly clean. Hemp is good because it grows so fast, requires little attention or fertilisers compared to alternative fuel crops like corn for example
Higher mandated average vehicle mileage. Detroit whined and sniveled, said it was impossible, but once it was passed, by golly they met the goals. They could do it again because the higher mileage vehicles are out there now in other areas of the world, and until there's an incentive like a law, it won't happen as much as it needs to happen. And include normal pickups and SUVs into the mix. They could add take a scosh better mileage.
R&D I'd like to see
I think there's some huge power to be harvested in the areas of atmospheric static electricity and in the "differential" areas like in the ocean thermocline difference and with deep earth to surface differences. Pilot programs have shown it's there, just needs a little more work to get it consistent and useable
More work on improving permanent magnet motors and generators, they also show some decent promise in efficiency gains in a variety of applications
More mandated recycling, stop the nutso throw away culture. Products should also have their recyclability taken into consideration during design phases. Most people don't mind recycling at all-if it's convenient and actually useful
A LOT more methane production from ag waste and community sewer treatment plants. It's barely got off the ground in some places and it's proving practical, just need more of it and better designed digesters, etc.
Let's cut Capsaicin Boy a little slack. After all, he did mention that a fraction of the fuel is using is biodiesel.
Here's a link to a DOE summary about the benefits of biodiesel:
www.nrel.gov (248KB 2-page .pdf)
Summary:
- Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil and alcohol (methanol)
- It's biodegradeable
- There's no sulphur in biodiesel, so there are no sulphur dioxide emissions
- ...read
.pdf for more
So, while your statement that "gasoline drivers use more fuel and pollute less" may be true, if people with diesel autos choose to use biodiesel (or even a percentage of biodiesel), pollution levels will go down.You conformists never can quite get clear of logical fallacies, can you.
Social indoctrination via propaganda can be used for many purposes. A society might, for some reason, indoctrinate its young to stand on their heads whenever they hear a cricket chirping. Or whatever. Or these institutions might crank out propaganda to indoctrinate its young people to give up their lives in war, thus providing great profits for munitions makers, etc. Now we cannot find any examples of THAT in world history. Can we?
Or, they might be indoctrinated to be good consumers, and to work as hard as possible and spend as much money as possible, and also to heap derision and scorn on those who would advocate anti-consumerist thinking.
No, THAT could never happen. Or could it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The normal Prius uses its battery pack to help acceleration, hill climbing, and to power accessories. The battery pack is recharged by the gas engine and by regenerative braking. Every place except North America, the Prius has an EV button, which turns the car into a pure electric car -- but only for a mile or two before the battery reaches a state-of-charge (SOC) that is too low. The Prius battery back is designed to last an extremely long time (warranteed for 150,000 miles), and one way Toyota assures that is by limiting the SOC to a small range, from about 25% full to 80% full.
Priusplus is adding a separate "traction" battery, that works with the normal Prius drivetrain, to provide a long-distance EV mode. In their first proof-of-concept car (which should be finished this weekend) it uses 12 motorcycle Lead-Acid batteries, and it should go about 20 or 30 miles on an overnight (or overday) charge. Using far superiour Lithium Ion batteries, they should get about 80 miles for a battery pack that costs about $5,000 or so (although current Lithium cells are quite small indeed, requiring a rediculous number of batteries wired into a large pack)
If I could go, say, even 40 miles on a charge, I wouldn't use the gas motor in my Prius except to climb very steep hills during the week. I'd effectively get well over 100 mpg (Electricity costs, even in California, give a price-per-mile of about 2 cents. Unfortunately, at this point, the cost for the traction battery (because it is more deeply cycled it doesn't last as long) probably adds another few cents/mile.
PriusPlus is hoping to display there car at a show here in Los Angeles at the end of the month, and is attempting to persuade Toyota that this is a car they should build. Once people are educated about the benefits of hybrid technology, it should be a small step to show them the further benefits of plugging them in.
I fervently hope that PriusPlus will succeed!
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Every form of energy is unclean at SOME point - solar panels aren't clean (their production isn't very efficient), ...
But there is one point - during USAGE the hydrogen fuel cells are a lot cleaner than cars, leaving pollution a business mainly during the creation of the fuel.
While the pollution in those cases might still be a lot, we can also do quite a lot to reduce emissions at that particular place (in fact, we can build any kind of device to help clean up the production emissions. In a car, we can't do that - due to constraints in weight (you can't install a 3 ton pollution filter in a car weighing half a ton), size (similar to the above) and price (hardly any consumer will buy a "clean" fuel powered car, if the equipment to filter the emissions from the engine costs several 10s of thousands of dollars.
A "factory" that extracts hydrogen neither needs to care too much about the size/weight/price of the emission filters -- granted, they WILL care about the price, but once one company actually installs the very best filter equipment and is still able to offer their hydrogen at a good price, they WILL start advertising the fact and hence put the other manufacturers under pressure to come up with similarly good pollution filtering or risk losing business to eco-aware fuel buyers...
Exactly. Look no further than your most recent spam. Except for tracking links, all the pics they want you to see are already embedded in the email.
No one is going to read nor do what this book says. I read the first sentence of the news, got bored, and abandoned it.
Those things have no crumple zones at all. You get into a crash, they stop suddenly, and none of the energy is absorbed by the car - it all gets transferred to the people in the car. Squish.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
"Why wait 15-20 years for hydrogen when we can start reducing our dependence on foreign oil NOW?"
Umm. What do _you_ think they use to make diesel?
Where I live (Canada) the heating season is 7 months.
Installing compact fluorecents and water heater blankets will not have as big of an effect as the glossy pamplets from my power company suggests.
In summer I use very little light (long days). In the winter when I use a lot of light, *ALL* the waste from regular incandescent bulbs is turned into *HEAT*. So as a result, my natural gas furnace works less and releases less greenhouse gases.
You are forgetting that nuclear does not produce neither money nor energy.
The fact that nuclear power does not work should be hinted by the other fact that, doh, nobody wants to build them anymore. Even the French have stopped. The investments are simply not worth it, and the energy balance is heavily dependent on finding uranium with a high concentration of the good isotope, else the enrichment costs eat up money and energy. And no, there are not many of those.
Nuclear fission is a miscarriage of science, that got initial funding by military objectives and survived promising improvements that never came.
As for the "safest, cheapest, most environmentally friendly" crap, I don't know whether I should laugh or cry.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
fucker can't even post a goat.cx link correctly goat,cx doesn't work
Ok, I haven't read the article yet (mirrors?), but I have read some of the comments.
Don't think of hydrogen as an energy source or a fuel: as has been pointed out many times before (and not just on /.), hydrogen is a rotten fuel since it takes so much energy to harvest it (i.e. from water or hydrocarbons). Instead, think of it as a half-decent battery which can store a *lot* of energy and doesn't have any toxic waste.
After all, what do you do with a battery: you charge it somehow, the energy is stored chemically (notoriously inefficient), and then it is discharged. Some batteries can be recharged and reused but, in the end, there is always a shell laden with noxious stuff left to dispose of.
How does a hyrdogen cell work? You put energy into creating and storing the hydrogen ( think charging a battery), the hydrogen is expended by combining it with oxygen in the air (producing heat and, hence, work to drive an engine or generator). After the cell is discharged, it can very likely be reused or, if not, recycled.
The problem with a hydrogen-based 'energy transport mechanism' (aka battery) is the source of the energy initially required to break the hydrogen from its chemical bonds. Lots of options:
- nuclear (results in some nasty waste, but it is a heck of a lot less stupid than burning fscking coal
- solar
- wind
- bacterial (proposed as a way to break some hydrocarbons)
Some of these mechanisms are made more viable because you're using a more efficient battery to store the energy.My $0.02CDN.
#include "cunning_plan.h"
Don't forget that living in a major city also increases your earning potential.
I live in Tucson, AZ, in a 2500 sq. ft. house, with lots of windows. The electric bill runs about $150 in the middle of summer, $60-$75 in winter. I do have 2 PCs and various other equipment running 24/7.
Friends who live in a 2000 sq. ft. home built by a volume builder pay about $300 right now, and I have heard of people that have $600/month power bills.
We spent a few $1000 extra to get a more efficient house:
- blow-in insulation was used everywhere. There's more than a foot of the stuff under the roof, and 6 inches in the walls, packed tight.
- most windows are dual-pane Low-E2, tinted to reduce glare
- we limited the number of skylights
- the A/C is a high-efficiency, dual-compressor model (18 SEER)
- we use fluorescent lights where possible
- we keep shades drawn in rooms we don't use, such as a guest room, and my office on weekends.
It looks like we'll recover the extra cost in about 5-7 years.
He says that an average gallon of gasoline releases 20 pounds of CO2. I didn't realize gasoline was so heavy. A gallon of water is only 8 lbs.
These comments do express the opinions of my employers, and, personally, I think they're complete rubbish.
You can reasonably easily convert a gasoline engine to run on ethanol. Ethanol tends to vaporize though, and you get way lower mileage on ethanol compared to gasoline. At least has a high octane.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Available at:
http://tdiclub.com/TDIFAQ/
BTW, with VW's TDI you can actually go to your local fast food place and use their cooking oil to drive (just filter out all the floating pieces of Fren^W freedom fries). Biodiesel is a renewal resource: you grow crops to create it. And the growing of the crops also takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (which is then placed back in by burning the biodiesel -- a nice (mostly) closed loop).
We know its a storage medium. We got that.
We also know, which you don't seem to, that its a crappy storage medium. As in, you can't store it. There's no such thing as a welded joint that hydrogen won't leak through. Leaky joints means your tank of liquid hydrogen will be empty if you let it sit a while. Same for pipe, same for valves, fittings, flexible tube etc.
For hydrogen to work as a storage medium there will have to be a major breakthrough in metalworking technology and metal fabrication techniques. That's a multi-trillion dollar proposition, not billion.
Besides, how much money do you think is tied up in the existing oil/gas storage and transport infrastructure world wide? The number would stun you I'm sure. You wanna just junk all that? We'd be world-wide broke.
Finally, you know where hydrogen actually comes from these days? Coal. And it is one dirty, stinky process with lots of nice toxic leftovers.
Its better to just burn the coal, all things considered.
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.
Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.
Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.
You must not drive in the Midwest much. 89-octane is almost always 10% ethanol here, and in the Dakotas it tends to be the same price as 87-octane. It works quite well. No needing to mess with anti-jelling additives in the winter. :)
1. My wife has lupus, so getting in and out of my Saturn SL (29/40 mpg) is painful. My father-in-law has rheumatoid arthritis and couldn't get into my car if he tried. They both drive trucks because they couldn't get a fuel-efficient car if they wanted to.
e s/18168.shtm ls htm l
p anies/ volkswagen/audi-ag/audi-pikes-peak-03/audi-pikes-p eak-03.htm
what the does fuel-efficiency have to how hard it is to get into a car? Yes the saturn might be hard to get into, but I can't imagine jumping out of a truck is any better on the knees. This is crap, find a more comfortable fuel-efficient car. There is nothing inherent in a a truck that makes it easier to get in and out of, compared to a minivan or large sedan.
2. My mom commutes 40 miles to work every day in a Mazda 2200 truck on a crowded interstate. She got rear-ended once by a Cadillac and drove home while the other went to the junkyard. She's happy to sacrifice the mileage for idiot protection. I don't want to imagine what that Caddy would have done to a hybrid.
So your mom can't avoid getting in accidents, so she drives a tank. uh-huh. That really solves the problem, buddy. Odds are she's just as bad a driver as everyone else (literally, the odds are this). Ever heard of a volvo? Safest damn car there is. If you were really concerned about safety, get a volvo, not a tank..
Once again, where's your evidence for this statement: (1*k)/fuel_effiency = safety.
3. What about if you're married with four kids? Your options start getting slimmer because six people just don't fit in a car. Not many other choices outside of a minivan, which doesn't exactly get great mileage either.
Still better then a n suv. And better gas mileage.
Do some reasearch:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/nofram
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/17102.
5-6 mpg may not be huge, but every chunk helps. And a minivan is easy to get in and out of.
(see #1)
4. Suppose you don't live in an urban hell. Good luck getting out into the woods in a low-riding economy car. Every time my wife and I would go visit her grandmother in southeast Arkansas, I'd bottom out my car in a gravel road pothole.
Oh yes, a suv with Four-wheel independent suspension (you don't want independent suspension for off-road). That's *really* designed for the off-road world. Yes, uh-huh, all the guys I see going out with a lincoln navigtor off-road.
Once again: What does "fuel-efficiency" have anything to do with this? If you don't think smaller cars can go off-road, go to a rally race you nitwit.
Point it case:
This car:
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews961.html
Became this car:
http://www.autointell-news.com/european_com
because hick jerks like you don't know jack about cars, or driving off-road.
So in summary, sounds like you need a minivan:
1) easy to get in and out of.
2) plenty safe
3) better gas mileage then an alternative that meets all the fuctionality requirements.
4) Will do just as good off-road as any suv I've seen.
blah. People like you are idiots. I drive an suv for the *children*. come-on..
Most modern water heaters already have the equivalent of the insulation blankets people put on older models. A recent model will not benefit from the blanket nearly as much as an older unit. More insulation always helps, but the gains become very small after a while.
A quick reference on when to use or not use the blanket. Anybody reading this should note that the original poster's "warm to the touch test" is absolutely correct-- if it isn't warmer than the surroundings, it isn't losing much heat.
What you REALLY want to fix this "keeping a tank of water warm all the time" problem is an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits:
1. No tank to take up space.
2. Never runs out of hot water.
3. Doesn't have to keep a tank of water warm when not in use, making them much more efficient.
I'm surprised that #2 alone hasn't made them the de-facto replacement for tank water heaters in America (I understand they're common in europe and japan). Energy efficiency aside-- you can't run out of hot water with a tankless, on-demand water heater!
If you're even *considering* a new unit in the near future, go tankless! Installing them isn't any different than anything else that needs plumbing for water and gas-- even if they've never heard of one, your local contractor will be able to install it.
Knowing the inner-city conditions and living costs of most major cities i've been to, i'm continually amazed anyone wants to live there.
I'm amazed that anyone thinks suburbia is a good place to raise kids. I was a prisoner in my home until I was 16 and allowed to drive a car. After-school options until that age were curtailed by the lack of transportation. It would have been good to have some kind of after-school clubs to go to, but who's gonna drive us home? Our school was 7 miles away. If you wonder why our culture is so vapid, maybe it's because the last generation of kids, instead of going to band practice or drama practice after school, went home to watch the Jefferson's on TV.
When my sister and I were in high school, we both had our own car, and worked crappy McJobs to pay for them. That's one household, four cars. We didn't need to haul things, usually--we just needed them to get ourselves places. What a waste.
I live in "inner city" San Francisco now, without a car, and I love it. My stress is so much lower now that I no longer spend an hour a day fighting traffic. No place in the city is more than 2 blocks from public transit. If I need a car, I can rent one, but so far I haven't needed to at all this year. My neighborhood isn't "crime-ridden." There was a murder a couple years ago, but the locals were as shocked as if it had happened in any Mayberry, USA. We have great parks that are much more interesting than any fenced-off suburban yard.
I do miss having a dog. Maybe when I can afford doggy day care...
The reality is that the earth is constantly changing. The short period of time we have been here and able to remember things from the past is a blink of an eye in the time of the earth. Some of the change may be due to our influence but nothing we do is going to really change the overall environment, aside from total thermo nuclear war. In the long run the earth goes through various geologic ages. Our development happend to coincide with a realtively mild period in the earths history. Eventually this will change and if we have not created self sustaining colonies on other worlds we will pass into history. Maybe the next speciecs that develops intelligence will find some of our remains and wonder why we let the SCO lawsuit drag us to our demise since that will be the last item on the news services when it all ends.
It really amazes me that the "greenies" don't really understand that the environment is in constant change. Species rise and species die. Natural order of things. But they all seem to want to freeze everything as they happened to stumble on it as if that is the way it has been since the dawn of time. The fact that we might be going through a slight warming cycle is not cause for alarm. Yes some species will go extict but eventually others will fill the void. We are in a unique position since we can to some degree modify our own environment for our survival but we can also modify and adapt ourselves. In the long run it really depends on what we decide to do as a species. I personally would like to see us establish self sustaining colonies on the varous palnets and moons of this system. And even that eventually will not be far enough as the sun will go nova and wipe out this system. So we will need to spread to the stars to survive.
I just wonder if SCO can get a change of venu for their on going case against IBM?
These more effective exhaust treament systems are killed by the high levels of sulfur in todays US diesel fuel.
:-)
The biggest problem is that the high level of sulfur compounds will destroy the new generation of catalytic converters that double as particulate traps too easily due to the sulfur compounds acting akin to sulfuric acid. It should be noted that these new catalytic converters will work safely if the sulfur level is under 200 parts per million, and the initial EPA standard that will be phased in starting next year will be around 20 parts per million. These new catalytic converters/particulate traps should allow a diesel-powered vehicle to meet the Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard easily.
The nice thing about these clean-burning diesels is that we can eventually make all our large vehicles (minivans, light trucks and SUV's) all switch to diesel power starting in 2006. That right there will improve fuel efficiency as much as 45%; imagine a Honda Odyssey minivan with a turbodiesel engine rated at 240 bhp but with far more low-end torque than the current 255 bhp gasoline engine found on the 2005 Odyssey. It could also mean mean EPA milage ratings of 28 mpg city, 39 mpg highway!
I don't get where the angst at having to drive your car short distances is coming from...
Because it's not politically correct, and for good reasons.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I don't think what he's suggesting will dim the bulbs. His suggestion is basically a hack that screws with the oddities of AC power. Without checking things exactly, I believe what he's done is screw up his Power Factor. In the US (I believe), residential owners are billed without consideration for the Power Factor, so he's probably right that this will save you money. The light won't be any dimmer.
He's also right that it doesn't save any power. And he omits the fact that screwing up your Power Factor is not good for the efficiency of the grid, and probably ends up costing the grid more power than just running normally in the end.
I have heard that other countries measure the PF for residential users-- which is why you see computer power supplies marketed with "active PF correction" to keep your 600W gaming machine's PSU from fucking up the power grid.
Here's an article (and another) that explains the basics of AC Power Factor-- an excess of capacitive or inductive loads will result in a leading or lagging power factor, which results in you getting more current delivered for the same amount of power used, and they eat it as line loss in their grid. Industrial facilities in the US *are* charged for having a leading or lagging (ie, not 1) Power Factor, so for factories with lots of electric motors (big inductors), they'll often have a big capacitor bank to pull the PF back in the other direction.
His trick is to use the fact that light bulbs could care less about PF, AC, or DC to run them roughly DC. The diode clips off the bottom half of the 120V sine wave. The capacitor (charged during the "up" cycle) will supply power during the "down" half of the cycle (which is now off, thanks to the diode), with side effect of giving him a leading power factor.
My EE classes are getting rusty, so if anybody wants to post a more thorough analysis or point out any mistakes, feel free.
1) Generally its the height of the vehicle that makes entry/exit easeier.
2) You've never driven in rush hour traffic on a freeway that averages 10 mph for 2-3 hours have you? There isn't much of a way to avoid being rearended by some dumbfuck. You can leave yourself a half car length,(any more and someone will jump in front of you anyway) but even with that you have to decide do you want to be responsible for hitting the person in front of you also and making it into a three or more car pileup. Although since I don't know the situation, it's possible you're right, maybe even likely.
3) I agree, by itself this point is worthless, in conjuntion with others(occasional offroad, anything a that 4 wheel drive helps with) it does become a decent point.
4) Lincoln navigators arn't even 4x4s those are the types of cars that shouldn't be allowed, horribly fuel inefficiant and just plain ugly. But I've got a Kia Sportage suv and that sucker goes anywhere I need when I go camping. I just wanna point out about mine to, I get about 25mpg, seat 5 comfortably and can haul a weekends worth of camping supplies easily. I generally do that once a month or so, ain't found a better vehicle for me yet.
Those things have no crumple zones at all. You get into a crash, they stop suddenly, and none of the energy is absorbed by the car - it all gets transferred to the people in the car. Squish.
The solution to this is called "seat belts."
And those things you refer to as "crumple zones" are probably more properly referred to as "income generators for body shops and automobile manufacturers."
Some industrial waste is stable. Arsenic waste from tin mining, mercury waste from gold mining, cadmium from discarded rechargable batteries, beryllium from heat transfer uses.
None of this stuff decays at all. Waste that just goes away if you wait long enough looks good by comparison.
More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between half-life and activity. When you take out your spent fuel rods there is some U235 left, with a half-life of 700 million years, and also Strontium 90 with a half-life of 29 years. The Strontium 90 with its short half-life is releasing its energy quickly. This contributes to making the spent reactor very radio-active and very dangerous. But 290 years later 99.9% of the Strontium has decayed. Meanwhile the Uranium, which is releasing its energy too slowly to be dangerous, clouds the issue of how long reactor waste lasts. Long after the waste has ceased to be dangerous, it remains slighty radioactive.
One mind boggling point is that Uranium used as reator fuel supplies about a million times as much energy per unit weight as coal. Coal is a fairly pure product and contains only about 1.5 parts per million Uranium as a contaminant. So about 50% more Uranium goes up the chimney of a coal fired power station as goes into the reactor of a nuclear power station.
That is amusing in a way, but not very important, because the Uranium that goes into a reactor isn't dangerous anyway. The worry with nuclear power is the transmutation of Uranium into short lived, highly radioactive isotopes of other elements. However the point remains that the quantities of waste involved in nuclear power are very much smaller than the quantities involved in producing power from chemical sources.
Why do I care? I was six years old at the time of the Aberfan Disaster, the same age as many of the 116 children who died, suffocated under a slurry of waste from a coal mine after the collapse of a waste tip. The TV pictures of the time showed the gable end of the children's school. It was just like the one I attended and this upset me.
I have never forgotten that quantity is a quality of waste. The waste from the coal mine might as well have been composed of perfectly safe, inert materials. It would not have made any difference. The children were buried and suffocated because there was so much of it, not because it was "dangerous" in the sense that the word is used today.
Quantity.As my friend said when it got him ithe first time in the shower...
There isnt enough Nuclear Fuel (fissionable) to handle the planet's power needs for the long term. If all our power went nuclear, we would deplete the uranium supply of the world in a decade.
Oil is usefull for way more than just fuel.
Wind power is great as a supplimental power source. But it's isnt reliable enough as a primary source of electricity.
IMHO Hydrogen + Geothermal is an energy source that's should work out best. Low pollution, steady availability.
its TV!
the auto manufacturers make bigger profits on SUV's (as well as giving them a nice loophole around CAFE standards) so they want you to buy the big SUV.
So, they advertise the hell out of SUV's & americans eat that shit right up.
I swear, you could put a turd in a can, & people would buy it if the TV told them it was the cool thing to do.
Until there's more demand for high-density urban housing, sprawl is the answer. People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle. But that requires people who want to live there. Most people, including you, probably don't.
This has been harped upon since Jane Jacob wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Numerous urban development courses focus on the problems created by suburbia. When someone buys a tract house and shops at big box stores, they vote for precisely the kind of lifestyle you claim to lament in your post.
This isn't to say that I'm perfect or somehow superior. Still, I don't say "developers seem stuck in a rut" when I know that I'm part of the rut driving the market.
Studies find that suburban sprawl may bad for your health due to it's probable link to obesity. Not terribly surprising since you're driving most places instead of walking.
If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better
Fair argument, but you assume there was better choices to make near where the parent poster works.
...or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
Nonsense and balderdash. This assumes that the only downtown spaces can be person (versus car) friendly. Space-gulping pedestrian unfriendly suburban planning (or lack thereof) is *not* a given. Alternative block design and the new trend of "traditional neighborhood development (TND) bring up alternatives to cul-de-sacs, mega-mall fortresses, and strip-mall hell.
Besides, we're smart slash-dot readers, why should be feel compelled to be stuck with inferior choices when there's a possibility of smart design for our living and working communities?
My high school location/situation was similar-- suburbs, 4.5 miles to school -- but with different results. One difference was that there were "late run" busses. School let out at about 3, with about 40 bus routes for the mass exodus. However, there was also a trio at 4:15 (when clubs let out) and another pair at 5:15 (for sports) that ran less detailed routes. The walk from the nearest stop was a little further-- I was lucky, and only had an extra two blocks; four or five was about the longest, except for one fractal neighborhood development that they simply dropped off at the entrance to (eight blocks worst case). And for the few times the club was going to run later than that, I would call my dad at work to let him know; on his way back from work, he'd stop by the school-- and expected me waiting out front.
Another alternative I used was a bicycle. The hills weren't TOO bad in that area; I wasn't bothered by light rain, and thunderstorms were infrequent. (Winter snow was another problem; yeah, then a car would have been nice.) The cost of maintenance for a 10-speed is much lower than that of a car, no worries on insurance, and your parents are usually stuck with the bicycle fuel bills. I biked to school for a good part of the school year, and biked around town several summers. There was a nice 60 mile bike trail that had it's middle near the high school; one summer I decided to see both ends; told my parents, had an early breakfast, packed a lunch, was back for a late dinner.
Quality public transportation is a good thing, in suburbs or city; it helps sustain lower incomes, and provides options for middle class youth. Good bicycle routes help reduce pollution, and provide the motivated with a healthy transportation alternative. SanFran is a little hilly for most non-pro cyclists, but most cities and 'burbs aren't quite so bumpy. =)
The quality of life for kids in the suburbs depends on the community. In a rainy, hilly 'burb, with both parents working and having a 75 minute commute to their jobs, and a wretched school bussing problem, I can see how that would suck.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Lots of info and references here.
1) Generally its the height of the vehicle that makes entry/exit easeier.
I don't see how this can be true. I've had issues with my knees, and getting down from high places was *never* fun. But agree to disagree, as I have nothing but personal exp to back this up.
2) You've never driven in rush hour traffic on a freeway that averages 10 mph for 2-3 hours have you? There isn't much of a way to avoid being rearended by some dumbfuck. You can leave yourself a half car length,(any more and someone will jump in front of you anyway) but even with that you have to decide do you want to be responsible for hitting the person in front of you also and making it into a three or more car pileup. Although since I don't know the situation, it's possible you're right, maybe even likely.
I do actually. I drove and 1hour and a half to work down the 57 (in california every day to work & back). average speed is about that. I drove an old tin can from the 80's that was cheap & got good gas mileage. You avoid getting read-ended by a dumbfuck by being careful and getting out of the way when some one tails you. If you can't get out of the way, you just slow down to the point where
1) They have plenty of time to stop even if there right on your ass (since your going so slow).
2) You have plenty of time to stop, in order to give them plenty of time to go "oh,crap, we're stopping".
3) They usually will be convinced that that other lane will go so much faster, since you have a gap between you and the car in front of you, and get off your ass into the other lane, which must be going faster... (ever seen office space?)
The major problem occurs when you leave *just enough* room for youself to stop in an emergency. (and that's stopping hard), and the guy tailgating you doesn't have even close to enough time to stop. And as far as being "responsible" for the guy in front of you, just don't taligate them!
So there's a lot you can do, if you think about it. I did this for a year, and never got hit, though I saw an average of about 1-2 accidents a week. It requires a little patience to drive safe, and costs me like 5 min total off the commute (I have weaved/tailgated all the way home once, just to see if it really saves any time, it does not save you much beyond 5-10 min) I'll take an extra 5-10 min to getting hit any day. Even if I was in a tank.
3) I agree, by itself this point is worthless, in conjuntion with others(occasional offroad, anything a that 4 wheel drive helps with) it does become a decent point.
alright.
4) Lincoln navigators arn't even 4x4s those are the types of cars that shouldn't be allowed, horribly fuel inefficiant and just plain ugly. But I've got a Kia Sportage suv and that sucker goes anywhere I need when I go camping. I just wanna point out about mine to, I get about 25mpg, seat 5 comfortably and can haul a weekends worth of camping supplies easily. I generally do that once a month or so, ain't found a better vehicle for me yet.
Well, looks like we agree here. I was mainly talking about all the big suv's, and trucks that wouldn't really survive off-road. The Kia sounds like it fits you nicely and still gets good gas mileage.
So mainly I just disagree about the whole "safety" issues. This is the one that really gets me. It's basically the same logic as a cold war. Literally. it becomes an arm's race. Yah, ur mom may be safer in an rear-end accident, but what about that other guy's mom who rear-ended her? It's not really "safer" overall. And what about having to quickly swerve out of the way of somebody? Not so much with a big, tall car.
Have you considered biking?
Seriously. Around here I see many people biking with their children in small craddles that attach to the bike's rear wheel and have a nice protective barrier for keeping anything that might kick up out.
And then, a couple of lines later:
Finally, you know where hydrogen actually comes from these days? Coal.
Ha!
http://www.pronto.it/pdf/saveenergy.pdf
Just a curious note: Sterling Cycle engines are about 33% thermally efficient and require very marginal thermal differentials to run them. Modern Air Conditioners often have SEER Ratings (Ratio of Energy to run vs energy pumped) of 13:1 or better. It should be entirely feasible to run an airconditioner to produce a thermal differential that subsequently runs a sterling engine that runs a generator that reruns the ac device. Assuming a 9:1 loss against the heat out that leaves a ratio of heat in per 100% self driven cycle vs unused energy out of about 4:1. This is enough to produce a self cooling house or to drive a generator even with a 9:1 drop as before that produces about 1.32 times the input energy in a never ending cycle?? But of course this is impossible isn't it?
There is only one problem with the argument that no system can be over unity like this. The whole universe is one grand over unity device making lots of energy out of nothing. But I am sure some Physics adherent to the "Big Bang" will say this is wrong.
Having studied energy for a long time I must say that we have no problem with supply, rather we have a problem disposing of it.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
My dad works for a heating/cooling company in Lincoln, NE, and they're putting these things in left and right. But from what I understand there are certain factors for the installation that makes it difficult to retrofit homes with it.
Housing makers tend to be traditional. Now I've been looking at the concrete dome houses. I wish we weren't still building places using the old hundred year old stick built homes that were built that way because it was cheap.
I don't read AC A human right
We bike, but usually not to go shopping. I'd need a kid carrier that could also carry a few packages -- so far, I've not found anything that wouldn't squash the poor little guy under a dozen cans of bean in a roll-over.
Folks out there, if you actually care about these articles, post them to memepool instead. It's got a smaller audience :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I live in an apartment, I don't ever run out of hot water, but the run from the heater is so far it takes two minutes to get hot water out of the faucet. I'd love to have one of these under the sink just so that I'd have instant hot water. Also, something is messed up, so that the cold water is actually than the hot water for a little while.
Gas is still cheaper here for heat, so I don't see the heaters going away. It's harder to run an instant on gas heater.
I don't read AC A human right
It's called a pressure sensor. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from installing them on showers so that when the cold water goes off, the hot water also goes off. (Think about it. Wouldn't you rather stand there like an idiot without water for four seconds instead of getting scalded out of your skin?) They're mechanical versions of relays...to keep one path of water flowing, you need to keep water though the other path. They cost like four dollars. But no one makes drop-in shower versions for no obvious reason at all.
With a little more expense, you could get a proportional valve that, if the cold water is 50% gone, you only get 50% of the ordered hot water also. But that's more work.
Of course, this wouldn't fix your problem. However, that needs to be fixed at the hot water heater...when there's no hot water, it shouldn't give out any water.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Since I have moved to Japan from the US, I am amazed at the waste in my former home. Make energy expensive, and I am sure that Americans can find some ways to reduce consumption. The Japanese have sure done it.
My home is about 125 m2. No basement. I would call it modern, but not new. We pay 9000 yen (90 bucks) a month for electricity and about 4000 per month (forty bucks) for gas. That is a family of five.
We have central heating, but most homes here have different heaters for different rooms. I have never seen that in the US. Standard kit for an "unfurnished" apartment in the US is a dishwasher, old refrigerator and electric oven and range. We have to "slum it" here in Japan by having a very small dishwasher, a gas oven, and a small modern refrigerator. I would hazard a guess that this home uses less energy than my college apartment (lived alone).
The reason so much energy is wasted in the US? I think it is the size of the house, cars, etc. I don't know why everything has to be so BIG in the US. The houses, the cars, office buildings. What is the point? (BIG GULP mentality?) You have to heat that space, cool it, clean it. You also take that space from some other, probably more efficient, use. I gas my car up for about 4000 yen per month (forty bucks) to commute, and I have a minivan that just gets outstanding mileage. It is a series that is not sold in the US. I am sure it would just be "too small" for that market.
You are in fact very wrong. Seat belts kill without crumple zones. Fact.
Have you thought of attaching a trailer to your bike?
Room for a couple of kids and some small packages, plus less prone to making your bike "roll over."
Burley makes some good ones, so does Trail-A-Bike.
http://www.burley.com/products/trailers/
http://www.trail-a-bike.com/tab.htm
http://www.trail-a-bike.com/trailers.htm
watermelon canteloupe sad hat traffic sunday power pulp sun dance mourning felt blanket wedding ribbing jingle umpire rebellion
an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits: [snip] 2. Never runs out of hot water...
I've seen those claims. However, my parents have one for their house (no traditional water heater). It does run out of hot water. True, not for very long, but it does make taking showers there, oh, so much fun. Warm one minute, freezing the next. And if you play with the water because you don't want to wait for it to kick in again (or whatever it's doing), then you get burned too.
The poor guy has just been slashdotted, and now he gives his email adres, aim nick and icq number??
Sorry - I had a typo. The Insight's warranty covers battery replacement, as they haven't been around long enough for Honda to know how long they'll last.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Here.
Other reasons:
Solar passive heat. In the right climates, the tank actually works to your advantage. I'm thinking Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah. And even in other places, it still may work to your benefit to have a tank and a solar heater. Essentially you paint a secondary tank black, place it in an insulated niche, and let it absorb sunlight all day. If you place it in the attic it will also absorb waste heat from the house and additional waste heat from the sun hitting the roof. Of course you can still couple this to a tankless, but as far as I can tell tanks aren't totally without use in a properly designed house.
GPL Deconstructed
I've thought about...putting a diode in series with each of my incandecent fixtures with a capacitor across the lamp to bridge the missing half of the cycle. While this won't actually save any energy, as you will be drawing twice the current through half the cycle
k4_pacific
>the diode prevents the cap from discharging energy back to the power company
> ericpi
True and true. Now...
Running a 100W bulb for half a cycle (8.3ms) requires 830 mJ.
If average energy is E = (CV^2)/2
then this takes a 115uF 250V lytic for each bulb
and a polarized plug for each lamp (1 amp diodes are trivial).
How long before payback on this scheme?
gewg_
Seriously, look into starting a 'torrent
of the PDF. That way all the people who
download it will be helping with the
bandwidth to distribute it.
From Merriam Wesbter's:
One entry found for adjure. Main Entry: adjure Pronunciation: &-'jur Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): adjured; adjuring Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French ajurer, from Latin adjurare, from ad- + jurare to swear -- more at JURY 1 : to command solemnly under or as if under oath or penalty of a curse 2 : to urge or advise earnestly synonym see BEG
You poor people. I have a stone, that's right, stone hot water heater put in my house when it was built in 1954. It may never leave my basement because of the weight, but it is cold to touch on the outside and the water is kept at 140 F inside. So I guess that makes it 50 years old with only a couple of replacement heating elements. I can't think of any hot water heater made today that would last that long. It is only a single element so it is not as efficient as it could be I suppose.
I can't wait for diesel-electric hybrids. Diesel has a bad reputation, but modern diesel cars (such as VW's) are actually cleaner and more efficient than gas cars. Combine diesel with an electric hybrid design and you can get over 100 MPG. Plus, diesel engines are most efficient when running at a constant rate, which would be a perfect match for feeding a hybrid car's battery. Diesel hybrids are a clean, efficient alternative using TODAY'S technology. I don't know why progressive car companies like Toyota are not more interested..?
cpeterso
There is no such thing as a renewable energy source that is burned - specifically burned in a way that releases carbon. It is all a trick. None of it works long term - for more than about 25 years. Should anyone implement this on a large scale this would become obvious fairly soon.
Are tankless water heaters a scalable solution?
What I mean is, while conventional water heaters consume moderate power for long periods, tankless ones consume very high power for short periods. Probably no big deal if you have the only one on the block. But what happens when everyone in a neighborhood has one and a significant number of them like to take showers at about the same time every morning? Would that require a more overbuilt infrastructure just to handle the peak loads?
One real energy solution is to drive less. I took a job where I can work at home exclusively. I plan my errands to take one trip per week. I put fewer than 5000 miles per year on my car. I try to carpool with friends whenever possible when going out.
Not only do I save on gas and car maintenance, but my insurance company agreed to cut my premium by several hundred dollars based on the fact that I was no longer commuting to an office.
Like most free-market fundamentalists, you don't appear to grasp the idea of social costs (a.k.a externalities). Failing to do anything about them is the main weakness of capitalism.
Burning gasoline has a social cost in pollution-related illnesses, environmental damage, stupid foriegn policy decisions, being flamed by condescending Europeans on slashdot, etc. Unless society at large (through the government) uses regulation or taxation to factor those hidden social costs into the price of gasoline and/or inefficient vehicles, people who use less gas but pay income taxes, health insurance premiums, etc (that would be you and me, with the 30+ MPG cars) are subsidising other people's gas-guzzling behemoths. We're effectively using tax money to suppress alternative fuels by indirectly subsidising gasoline.
So much for the free market...
0 1 - just my two bits
There is the fact that even with low blends (ie, B10-B30), all of the features of biodiesel get transferred to the blend. Not as good as B100, but certainly not as bad as straight fossil fuel diesel...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I agree, though, that if you do come to a dead stop, yeah - all that momentum and energy will be transferred to the human occupants, and "squish".
Oh, one other thing: in a hooptie people will tend to avoid you - something about the peeling paint, the rust, the dents, the scratches - they think you don't have insurance and are poor. They don't want to get hit, because they won't get anything out of it - so they avoid you.
I have seen this first-hand when I drive my 1979 full-size Bronco (*not* my daily driver) - it is so ugly and redneck looking no one wants to be hit by it, thinking I don't have insurance (though I do) - that, and its size...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I bet you are still paying your utility bill. Why not grow your own with this overunity device?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Cracking water/steam using solar furnaces - use the power-tower or similar concepts to first heat water to super-heated steam, then run the steam over red-hot iron (heated by the sun as well).
As I have noted before, I don't know why this couldn't work - or why it works. All I know is that this was a major method of hydrogen production back in the 1800's for ballooning (aerostat racing and exhibitions) - super heated steam was passed over red-hot iron and cracked into hydrogen (and one assumes oxygen - it binds with the iron to make rust?) at fast enough rates to fill a balloon envelope. If it worked then it would work now. In fact, a variation of this is how we crack hydrocarbons into hydrogen at a refinery.
I have proposed that a plant be built in Barstow/Daggett in California, near Boron. There used to be a technology marketed to bind the hydrogen to borax (similar to hydrate storage?) - making these "solid fuel" tablets of hydrogen - reacted in water (IIRC), the tablets would release hydrogen gas to run an engine, and heat (exothermic reaction) - and the water/precipitate (don't remember what the reaction created) could be recycled to create more "solid hydrogen" tablets (bonded hydrogen would be a better term).
How many times do I need to post this idea - and when will I get an answer of why it won't work (I have a theory that there may be a practical reason - but I have yet to hear it)? Such a system of generating hydrogen would be mostly eco-safe: solar, water, and iron (scrap cars?) would be all that is needed, and a source of borax (hence the location for the plant - plenty of nearby borax, location on a fairly major trucking route to ship the resulting fuel, and plenty of sun year round for generation!).
BTW - the test plants that were built in Barstow/Daggett - they routinely output 10+ megawatts, and used very little ground area for a solar plant (less than an airport - possibly even less than a conventional power plant)...
Damn - why aren't we doing this!?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"You've never driven in rush hour traffic on a freeway that averages 10 mph for 2-3 hours have you?"
If that's really what you put up with on a regular basis, why don't you ride a bicycle instead?
my wife's father and brother died in West Virginia in 1972 from a coal mine settling dam, Buffalo Creek. 118+ died.s eum/Buf faloCreek/HTML/index.html
http://www.marshall.edu/speccoll/VirtualMu
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
I've had this in two houses and the fuel costs where way too high and I don't think it worked as well as the standard tanks.
i like how you got modded redundant. because you
are a tard.
Most inner city neighbourhoods here are quite nice, but property costs are easily 2-3x what they are in the suburbs,
I agree that they seem quite nice when I visit friends who live in them, but personally, it'd drive me crazy. I like to walk at night and hear nothing but crickets, owls, and the occasional bat. I like to see a rich bright field of stars when I look up. The air in the city smells funny in an unpleasant sort of way (mostly due to auto exhaust).
That doesn't mean I don't consider conservation. I telecommute most days and when I go in, I take the train (20minutes drive to the train though). If I could have a decently close bus stop without the urban development that goes with it, I'd take it.
Yes, but...
There's several issues. The two big ones are zoning and the cost of transportation.
Zoning:
Once upon a time, cities were horribly dirty and disgusting places to live. (No, I mean, way more than now.) Industrialization led to rampant pollution, and there were people living right outside the factories they worked in.
Zoning laws were created to address this and make urban environments more livable, but unfortunately, they also make them *less* so in some ways. By strictly separating uses (this area is for housing, this area is for retail, this area is for industrial) we end up with people living far from their work, the places they shop, even their kids' schools.
As a result, everyone started needing and getting cars. The one-car family became a two-car family when women started working outside the home more often. This made the problem even *worse*, because now we had to store all those cars; allow another 320-350 square feet per parking space in a typical lot... that's increasing the square footage for a typical one-bedroom unit by more than 30%. Zoning laws stepped in once again, forcing developers to include "enough" parking for the future residents of their houses and apartments. This resulted in much lower densities, higher costs to build, and fewer units available.
Nowadays there are many developers who would jump at the chance to build with reduced parking requirements and higher densities, if you can just convince the city to allow it. By offering density bonuses (increasing the density allowed on a parcel... zoning laws restrict that too) and parking requirement reductions for developers who set aside units for affordable housing, who build near transit stations, and who create mixed-use developments (i.e. retail on the first floor, offices on the second, housing on the third and fourth), cities can help encourage developers to make the urban environment less car-dependent and, in so doing, more livable and affordable.
The cost of transportation:
But it doesn't happen all by itself; the cost savings of living in the city need to offset the cost savings of living in the suburbs. But transportation is too cheap.
The typical bid-rent curve for an urban environment is a smooth descent from high prices closest to the city center and lower prices as you go toward the periphery. Theoretically, the decrease in housing prices is offset by the increase in transportation prices, but as transportation becomes cheaper (mostly due to increases in fuel efficiency, but also there's the time cost of travel... freeway building reduces the costs of transportation severely), the bid-rent curve flattens out, giving people economic reason to live farther and farther from the city center. (Yes, the bid-rent curve looks very different in a polycentric city like Los Angeles, but it still sort of works.)
The biggest problem is that much of the cost of transportation is externalized. Though you pay the price of extracting oil from the ground, transporting it, and refining it into gasoline, you don't pay anywhere near the full costs of air pollution, traffic accidents, or congestion when you fill up your tank. Nor do you pay the full cost of maintaining the roads; California, for example, subsidizes basic freeway maintenance from general funds nowadays, because our gas taxes, vehicle license fees, and commercial truck fees only pay about 2/3 the cost of maintaining our highways. More and more of our transportation funding is coming from non-transportation-related sources, like sales taxes. This gives people no economic reason whatsoever to make decisions that will result in driving fewer miles on the road.
(The main reason gas taxes are so out of whack is that they are a specific tax, i.e. they are a particular dollar amo
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I talked to a vendor once about a tankless water heater. After asking a few questions, he told me he would not install one for anyone in my neighborhood. The drastic question? "How well do you deal with water with a high total dissolved solids (TDS) level?" The installer who was pushing them as the ultimate solution was saying that he would ruin my pipes. One reason water heaters go every so many years is sediment and gunk from impure water builds up on the bottom.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
You're kidding right? The front clip and trunk on a '74 Olds are both half a block long, all monocoque construction too. Four feet of crumple there.
I had a patient once, lived through being rear ended by a-holes going more than 50 mph, twice. Both times in a mid 1970's Caddy. Two different cars, Daddy had a thing for old Caddys apparently. Noth9ing worse than some medium strength whiplash.
You get a rust-free mid '70s American land yacht, put a decent harness in there, you're bullet proof. Add a roll cage, Oh yeah baby!
And people don't mess with you either, which is an added safety factor. Dickweeds in blinged out Hondas will NOT cut you off. They fear the ancient steel.
Isn't it awsome the way all the road scum avoid you in a big ol' beater?
I drove in New York City a couple times in a newer car, the cabs used to come within 3 inches of hitting me. It was like dodge 'em cars.
Drove downdown in a clapped out pickup truck one time, nobody came within a car length of me.
Awesome! ~:D
More hype.
I'll grant you that a Ford Explorer might roll, I've driven them a few times and I think its a skittery piece of shit on the highway. Crappy handling, wheelbase is too short, bad brakes, too tall in the center of gravity.
But for the most part, pickups and SUVs are very stable on the road. My Dodge Ram, its beauty on the corners. Not WRX class, but then what is? I can carry half a ton of drywall too. And have done.
No, I don't think so. He's moaning that all his efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle are wasted because of the other guy "wasting" resources, and what's to be done about that.
I just think it would be nice if people paid more attention to their own consumption and less to other people's. Makes life easier for all of us.
The trailers mentioned in the other reply to you also have the advantage that they don't tip over if your bike does. They're safer than the back seats.
You're right -- I better be explicit:
You: My smaller car gets just about as good gas mileage as a hybrid, and it cost about 1/10th as much to buy it. Hybrids are a gimmick, designed to bring in more profit to the car company.
Me: Huh. I thought you said your non-hybrid car (that cost $2000, remeber '1/10th of the cost') had 'just as good a milage' as a mixed power vehicle.
You: No I didn't say that. Why do you spread crap like "oh I thought" bs when you could just click on "PARENT" a couple times and copy and paste the exact quote, not the twisted version you think you remember..
So yeah. A tenth of the cost of a hyrbid is 1500 bucks. You've already spilled the beans in another post that you paid 2500 for your car that gets "just about as good gas mileage as a hybrid". So maybe you're comparing your card to a civic 4 door hyrbid. I really don't care which. My point was not about financing, or whether we should all buy 20 years of gasoline and store it ourselves, or whether we should invest in energy hedge funds or money markets... it was quite simply that hybrids are relatively in-expensive when purchased relatively new and that the savings (monetary, tax, environmental) justify their market niche. I was taking issue with the largely flamebait claim that "Hybrids are a gimmick, designed to bring in more profit to the car company."
(I'll head over and address that other comment now)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Incorrectamundo. A common mistake made by people from socialist countries.
You are arguing that the collective society has rights which are more important that those of the individual.
Because you think SUVs harm the environment, you claim the right to tell me what car to drive. You don't have to prove it, just claim it. If enough people agree with you, the collective takes my car away.
That's not a free country. That's a police state.
In a FREE country the collective society has no rights. Only actual people have rights.
In a free country I drive what I want, and if you can prove my SUV harmed you personally, then I have to pay you money. If not, you have no claim.
Of the two systems, emmigration patterns indicate that human beings vastly prefer the free country to the collective society, probably because they hate being told what to drive by the Ministry of Tiny Cars.
You've missed a few inefficiencies when looking at generating power at the power plant. There are transmission losses, and there are losses transferring the charge to batteries. The latter is 50%. Add up all the inefficiencies, and electric cars are worse polluters than gas ones.
I have an opposing view on reducing population growth.
It seems to me that most of the periods of human progress align with periods of population growth - finding new places, making new discoveries, creating new art, etc. Would we be screwing the whole human race by insisting on 'sustainable' levels of population?
Perhaps with an un-sustainable (on Earth) increase in population, we would be forced to search for alternate accomodation. I'm not so sure we'd do that with a stable, 'happy' population. We'd probably be more interested in increasing our short-term happiness...
Disclaimer: Some of this is influenced by Asimov, et al.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
We pay through the nose to live in the city, but we get what we pay for. Sure it would cost less to live in the sprawl a few miles from here, and it would cost even less to live in the sprawl a few hours from here. I could have a mansion in some flyover state, and I could probably buy a small island off the coast of Greenland. None of those options would give the same quality of life.
Especially when raising kids, you have to look at the life you're giving to them now, not the money you might or might not leave for them. If you don't want to raise them in the sprawl, rethink what you can and can't afford. If you do want to raise them there, you'll probably need to accept what you've chosen.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
It pretty much only works with gas. Say your shower is 2.5 gallons per minute, or approximately 10 liters per minute. Say you need the water to be 110F (43C) (in the pipe) to feel hot by the time it hits your face. Say incoming water is 55F (13C). You need to raise the temperature of 10 kilograms of water 30C every minute, or 1 kilogram by 5C per second. That's 5 kilocalories per second, or 21 kilowatts. For a 240V heating system, that would require 87 amps, which is a significant (some would say scary) fraction of the average home's electrical service.
For reference, the natural gas furnace in my home is capable of 55000 BTUs per hour, or 16 kilowatts. A load 31% larger is certainly within the realm of practicality.
We lost power for a week during hurricane Francis. With a hot water tank, we were able to have quick luke-warm showers for two days. And when the warm water ran out, the tank sitting in a 83F home kept the water warmer than it normally would have been. I'll keep the tank.
Rick DeBay
Hmm... I'm gonna take a really good look at these. Thanks for making me pay attention.
Business is a war were nobody dies (in principle) but there are many casualties.
Reason is the first thing to go in the pursuit of money in the marketplace.
The money the store owner(s) saved by getting that air conditioner can be used to buy beer to stock the coolers. The beer sold will generate immediate profit now (eaten up by higher utility bills) rather than having to wait later for the energy savings the single rooftop compressor would have brought. Perhaps they couldn't justify paying for the rooftop compressor--doing that might cut into their cashflow so much that they might wind up going out of business as they can't afford to keep the store stocked with merchandise to buy.
and I'm pissed you (whoever you are) would even make this argument. You just just equated "racism" and "sexism", which in this context referes to unwarranted treatment of a *person*, with "monetarism", which is the use of a common currency to facilitate transaction of goods and services! What kind of clod are you?
Free markets (using currency!!!) do not solve all ethical issues in the damn world, and it's not a fault, it's just beyond it's scope.
On top of free markets, goverments must and do (though often not very well) add a layer of either blunt regulation (which we could use less of) or other economic frameworks (like forms of pollutant emisions trading) to help ensure that economically sound decisions are not *of necessity* bad for society.
What do you want, to eliminate money so that people can't hire hitmen to kill for them?
Respond again and make some bloody sense this time you intellectual coward. If you're going to bash my ideas, at least have that much courtesy.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not in good enough shape to do that, of course it was about 45 miles to work each way, luckily only 12 miles was on congested freeway, and that was only going in thanks to having to work 2-3 hours overtime every friggin day. Now though after a center closure I get to drive all over the place looking for work.
Thread talks about unavailable pdf file, the format's 'all-in-one-file' feature is mentioned, this is compared with multipart MIME (HTML) enhanced email by the grandparent post, then the parent mentions such email as being a spam delivery vehicle (which is all it is nowadays thanks to spammers) and is modded down for it....
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!
This is proof that spammers do read Slashdot and will mod down any sort of post that talks about spam or offers a solution to the problem!
who doesn't have anything to contribute or even refute. AC just wants to be pissy and put people down who hurt his widdle world view.
0 is where you belong, skippy.
Unless it's in vaccine or fillings. Then it magically becomes safe.
You can stuff that shit. I lived thus far in a Nova Scotia village that still had its needs served by little traditional nonchain retail stores when I was little (c1970). We bought our stuff there. They died anyway. I must buy at distant chain stores now; the choice was taken away.
Why is it such a bad thing if co2 levels rise in the air? Well I mean aside from the obvious greenhouse effects and whatnot. Humans have (and need!) about 6% of co2 in their lungs. That's over 50 times the co2 level in the air.
It's quite obviously that heightened co2 levels in the air are by far NOT the cause of respiratory illnesses such as asthma, no kind of pollution causes those. The real cause of such illnesses are the simple fact that we breathe far too much, which causes are co2 levels to drop. And the lower they go the worse your health will get, because after all a lack of co2 will cause oxygen to bind to hemoglobine a lot stronger, meaning that your organs will get LESS oxygen (yes, breathing more = less oxygen).
This has been proven over and over again since the russian professor Buteyko first said it (the appropriate therapy's name is buteyko-therapy).
So yeah, I just thought I'd let you lot know that co2 is not evil.
My family recently installed a tankless and your "never runs out of hot water" argument isn't necessarily true. I've been taking showers and it'll just cut out for a minute or so and be really cold, then it ramps back up to warm. Maybe it's broken or something, but this has been my experience. And when the washer comes on it does this too, but to a lesser degree.
bananas like monkeys.
Please correct
"and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation)."
to read
"and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few US-Americans actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation)."
Glaring factual errors like this shouldn't be taken lightly.
thanx.
Check your BIOS if it is a work-related PC. I was please to see (in a Dell Optiplex) that there is a setting to turn the unit on at a set time each day (or weekday). So you can have your system up and ready for you to login and go straight to Slashdot first thing in the AM.
Heavier cars?! How about lighter cars? How about an interstate system that lets the new lighter cars have their own overhead roadway apart from the trucks? http://www.newpath4.com/interstate81.htm Isn't that what we ALL WANT?... not to have to drive beside a 70 foot long 80,000 pound vehicle being driven by a drug pusher from Mexico... who can't read our signs??
Those who choose to shop at chain stores take that choice away. In places without enough people to support smaller or speciality shops, chain stores tend to dominate -- and they bring their massive parking lots and familiar layout with them.
Saying "You can stuff that shit" doesn't make my comment any less true. You can choose to fight the forces at work in society or acquiese to them. It sounds like you've chosen the latter, since you say you shop at stores you dislike.
Ooops...Alan Zelicoff was kind enough to offer to send the file by email (since the server crashed from the extreme volume of requests) but now his email box is full and won't accept any more messages (I assume he has been sending out individual emails and saving a sent mail copy each time, at 5 MB a pop).
Sounds like your parents have an old model. I use to have a model exactly like your parents version. Then again, it was 20 years old. When I installed a new replacement this year I could not believe the difference. No more water cutouts, far more sensitive kick-on relay, pilotless (gas is ignited via electricity generated by a turbine due to the moving water in the incoming water pipe), multiple stages for increased water output during heavy load or for less fuel use during light load.
The new tankless systems are absolutely amazing and very efficient.
-sirket
Tankless systems are just as energy efficient as a tank water heater, they just don't waste time keeping the water hot all the time. The reason tankless systems have not caught on is that for a long time they did not have multiple stage burners to cope with extra demand. What that means is you could take a shower and wash dishes, but if you also did laundry, you would run out of hot water. Modern tankless systems are available with multiple stage burners and do not have these drawbacks.
-sirket
Tank systems have a problem with dissolved solids because the water slows and has time to discharge the solid material into the tank where it can collect. A tankless system has no where for the solids to collect. They are constantly being flushed and it keeps them operating well.
The very reason I switched to a tankless system was because I was sick and tired of replacing my water heater every few years. I put in a tankless system 15 years ago and it still worked perfectly when I upgraded to a newer version last year. When we pulled it apart, the pipes were clean as a whistle despite well water with a very high TDS level.
-sirket
If you're only interested in the energy-saving tips and want to skip the background info, check out p24 and p32. But the background info is really interesting, so I recommend you at least skim it.
Nuclear plants in several countries (Mexico, UK) have probed economically unviable.
In places like France or even the US they are very often heavily subsidized and would not survive the slightiest of competitions from other energy sources.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I want to see a reputable journal with a reputable study.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
How does voting for a Democrat who wants to destroy the environment, when he's running against a pro-environment Republican, help things? That's sending the message, "even if you help the environment, I'm still voting Democrat because I don't like you Republican folk." The idea is to send a message by actually voting for those who are responsible on the environment, and voting against those (like our Democratic friend from MN) who are irresponsible. Otherwise the only message you're sending is "if you want my vote, join the Democratic party, and I'll vote for you even if you make it your campaign platform to chop down trees as much as possible."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You're overestimating the efficiency of the internal combustion engined car and substantially underestimating the efficiency of combined cycle power generation. CC power plants are 50-60% efficient. You have also overestimated the electricity transmission losses, for the whole of the UK the transmission losses were an average 1.75%. Electric motors are 90-98% efficient and batteries are similarly efficient at storing electricity, depending on the technology and charging regime.
Overall, an electric vehicle converts 40-50% of the energy from the fuel into motive power where a good internal combustion engined vehicle will only convert 10-15% of the energy. Hybrids approximately double the efficiency of an IC vehicle but are still substantially poorer than a pure electric.
I do agree that fuel cell vehicles are a waste of time given the way battery technologies have improved over the last 10 years, but then, how else are the oil companies going to make you take the weekly pilgrimage to the pump?
"People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle."
I live in Seattle, and let me be the first to say that it is NOT the city to live in if you want to give up your car. Indeed, in King County, cars outnumber people.
Neighborhoods differ, of course, but in general, there is no single neighborhood that would allow you to buy everything (or nearly everything) that you need to survive within walking/biking distance of your house. And bus service here (while better than many cities) simply isn't comprehensive enough to take you where you need to go on a reasonable schedule.
Seattle doesn't even remotely compare to New York or Boston in terms of urban livability -- we have most of the inconveniences and hassle of urban life (overcrowding, filth, awful traffic, ridiculous amounts of panhandling) with very few of the benefits (convenience, culture, sophistication).
If anything, Seattle is a city of spoiled yuppies who make poor urban planning decisions and call the resulting mess an inevitability of the "urban lifestyle".
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
So, its a class envy thing then eh? "Rich bastards, the nerve of them having a bigger car than me! There oughta be a law!" That sounds about right.
Yuppies live in a free country too. If you can show some damage you've personally suffered from some individual Yuppie in an SUV, press your case.
Otherwise...
The wells to wheel efficiency of the Toyota Rav4E as measured by EPA is 301 Wh/mi which translate into an equivalent of 49 miles per gallon of gasoline. A Honda FCX (fuel cell vehicle) when hydrogen is made from renewables (electrolysis of water) is 12 miles per gallon. The battery electric car is 4 times more efficient.
The ACPropulsion tZero can travel over 300 miles on a charge and be recharged in 2.5 hours. It uses Lithium Ion batteries that have an energy capacity of 160 Wh/kg. Several batteries under development have energy capacities of 245 Wh/kg and 420 Wh/kg which, if they make it to market could give the tZero a arange of 450 and 750 miles per charge.
Solaicx has a new solar cell technology that can cut the cost of silicon solar cells to about a $1/watt. to be competive with commercial utilities you have to be about $1.50 to $2.50 a watt.
Personally, I see the Toyota developing a plug in hybrid that can be refueled from solar cells. Gasoline usage around town could go to zero.
So now you're probably wondering about the details: just where does all of that
electricity and natural gas go in the typical house? What insights can we gain
from teasing this question apart?
Maybe it is most applicable to hair dryers?
Nah nah - nah nah nah!!!
Slashdot editors--please consider posting Coral mirrors for stuff like this. It's one thing when it's a major business, but another thing entirely when it's a personal or small site.
My book "Saving Energy without Derision" can be accessed in the at several mirrors and by Bittorrent. Mirrors are posted at: http://www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/#PayPal_Line Bittorent file at: http://www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/SavingEnergy.torrent
we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
:)
Get back at them by blaring punk music they've never heard of, because it's older than them! Make them feel uncool and maybe they'll shut up. If not, at least they'll get a music history lesson.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Sadly, their's heater is fairly new. It was installed about 2002.
Is there a version for those of us not stuck in the dark ages? The first few paragraphs talk of pounds, ounces and degrees Farenheight and horses walking 1/16th of an inch etc.; my head's swimming...
No, actually, it is not. It takes very special conditions for it to be explosive. Don't believe everything you see on TV (where someone might shoot a couch and have a big gasoline explosion).
Get a bike with a kid trailer. Add some panniers for extra storage.
It's true that you might not be able to haul as many groceries as in a SUV, but if you make the trip more often, you will be getting exercise, so you can be doing double duty on your trips (transportation and exercise). For pretty much all trips up to 5 miles / 8km (10-mile / 16km round trip), a bike is the way to go.
I can fit about six plastic bags full of groceries in my medium sized panniers.
If your LRT has accomodations for bikes, this might be a good option as well, especially when your child is old enough to ride a bike of their own. 2km on bike practically nothing.
A tankless water heater can't "run out" of water, period. If theirs is shutting off during use, it's broken, or has some sort of over/underflow shutoff that isn't properly set up for their usage situation. I would have it looked at ASAP.
It just sits on the pipe, and cold water goes in one side, and comes out the other side hot. You should be more than able to run it all day long. When they DO shut off or fail, the transition to cold will be abrupt-- there is no "gradually running out" like there is with a tank heater.
I should have mentioned this. The most efficient setup would be to run solar and/or geothermal preheat into a tank of warm water that then goes through the tankless/instant water heater, just like you say. You can use geothermal preheat even in colder areas-- sink some pipes underground to act as an exchanger, since the ground stays 50-60F all year round. This means your tankless unit will be starting with 50-60F water, rather than the near-ice-cold stuff coming out of the pipes.
Solar preheat (or fully solar) is workable with panels full of black pipes (or a simple black tank), too. In the summer, you may get enough heat that the tankless unit never runs. In winter, it means that the tankless unit doesn't have to use as much fuel to bring the water up to temperature.
I was trying to keep it easy, mostly-- things get more complex with multi-stage systems, and it's hard to convince most people to do that. But getting them to go tankless is relatively painless, and even offers some benefits besides the efficiency to help sell it.
I strongly encourage everybody to go whole-hog-- power companies are greedy monopolies, and projects like super-efficient multistage water heating systems are the pinnacle of geeky home improvement.
Broken (as in, just shutting off) isn't the same as "running out." If it's not working, it's hardly a fair comparison! If it gets colder (but not as cold as when it's off) when the washer comes on, your tankless unit probably isn't big enough for the combined load.
You could increase its capacity (after you get it fixed) by looking into solar preheat. Essentially, you have a tank *before* the water heater that contains water warmed by the sun-- giving the heater a "head start," so not as much energy is needed to warm the water. This means:
1. less energy to achieve the same amount of water
2. maximum flow of heated water is higher, since we don't have to do as much work to heat it.
I'm waiting to replace my old tank with a tankless unit when it expires-- so I don't have firsthand experience. Friends and family are recommending them, but a couple of posters have indicated problems like yours as well as one guy who thinks he is less efficient than he was with a tank-- so careful research into the details of which unit you want and how it will work in your situation are a must.
Holy Apples and Oranges Batman!
Thats like saying "Teen pregnancy prevention programs have little value because they do not help prevent highway robbery"... getting robbed on the highway and teen pregnacy... all the same.
I grew up in a small city, and frankly it was a great place and a good neighborhood but one big problem. The schools have gone to pot.
The problem was that while my neighborhood was a very nice and safe place, my school district was also shared by some ghetto neighborhoods. The end result is that my school, despite the fact that the majority of the students came from good families, had many of the same problems with gangstas and thugs that inner city schools had. Despite being a small percentage, I tell stories that make people think that I lived "Dangerous Minds".
Sometimes the problems were benign, like some thug screaming up and down the hall "Man I eat pussy on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays Thursdays and Fridays." Sometimes the problems were not so benign, like people bringing guns to school or (an actual quote) people "taking you to the ghetto" (read, a lynching)
I currently live in Boston. I love living in the city. My neighborhood is quite safe and I love not having a car and wish that I could maintain my lifestyle throughout my entire life. But I cannot do this pernamently; when I have children, there is no way that I will be living in a school district that I have to share with a housing project, subsidized housing or anything like that. The choice is subjecting my children to what I had to deal with, or sending them to private school.
The thing that makes me very sad is that I am lucky; I can afford to do this. The saddest part of the situation is that there are millions of people in America that cannot afford the options that I have, and send have to send their kids to schools like that. What are the cause of those problems? We could spend all day discussing the problems. However that it is little importance to me; all that matters from my perspective is the result.
Natural uranium that comes out of the ground is about 99 percent U-238 and about 1 percent U-235. After it is enriched for reactor fuel it contains about 2-3 percent U-235. The U-235 in the reactor is induced to fission at a vastly increased rate. It is nothing like natural decay which has a halflife of 700 million years. These reactions produce vast amounts of neutrons that are captured by the 98-97 percent U-238 to make plutonium etc. This is unavoidable and being very careful doesn't help.
The neutrons are also captured by other elements in the reactor appart from the fuel and more material is contaminated during manufacture and reprocessing of the fuel. The fission products of U-235 are also very radioactive. Ultimately the whole reactor core becomes waste when the reactors life ends. The highest level waste is the spent fuel but there are very large volumes of intermediate level waste from other contaminated materials before you even think about decomissioning the reactor. As I said before you are taking mildly radioactive material out of the ground and putting larger amounts of vastly more radioactive material back when you are finished.
Finally the large amounts of the U-238 (plus plutonium contamination) is never going to end up back in the ground. It is used in depleted uranium (DU), in weapons and after use is aerosolized as uranium oxide particles that contaminate vast areas of the Balkans and the middle east.
There are no veins of uranium under your house! Radon comes from the traces of uranium in granite rock but this is nothing near the concentation of uranium ore and is not mined for uranium as the amounts in it are tiny. Most Uranium mined today comes from remote parts Canada and Australia although most Uranium used today comes from storage since usage in reactors is more than double the rate it is being mined.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is correct, and any time you find yourself talking to someone who advocates old-fashion statism to protect the environment, try them out with the slogan: "Coercion is not sustainable."
Coercive policies from the left or right are the antithesis of a truly green society, which must be based on the voluntary commitment of the majority of citizens if it is to be truly sustainable.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I can see why this isn't done, now - you bring up a good point, one that I will have to ponder on. Even if you use scrap, eventually you would run out of that, and the process of making new is an energy intensive process, as you noted. I wonder if solar-based smelting could be done?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
...I don't think helping anti-environmental Democrats helps. All you end up doing is promoting anti-environmentalism within the Democratic party. If you do that too much, it eventually won't make a difference which party is in power, if they both hate the environment.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you know the manufacturer of your parents system? I'd like to research their product.
-sirket
Unfortunately as I discovered one time the ones installed in the showers in my home are sensitive either way. You need pressure on both the hot and cold lines for it to output water. I discovered this after my hot water heater sprung a leak and was shut off.
I couldn't get any water, even cold water, in the shower. So basically I had to turn on the water to the heater, have a shower, turn off the water and mop up the spill; or else have sponge baths from the sink until a new water heater could be installed.
That was annoying.
As for what you're talking about, that's why things need overrides. ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?