This is an inherantly impossible question to answer.
"Hey Doc, I felt fine until I didn't."
How many things could go wrong? Well, two I guess. Hardware, or software.
Did a fan fail?
Is a hard drive failing?
Is there a memory fault?
Did you hit the "turbo" button (get off your 386, hehe)?
Do you have [mal|spy|ad]ware that you don't know about?
Did a Windows setting get changed?
Is it network related?
Are you just overwhelming your machine?
Oddly enough, I've seen Windows PC's, where the owners set their own DNS servers to somewhere pathetically slow or down. It wasn't just the Internet that went slow, but everything. That's probably because so many applications call home now. They were hanging trying to call home, and instead of going to sleep like they should have, they'd stay busy, and make the whole system busy.
This problem isn't something that can be diagnosed by a posting.
A friend called me. "My server crashed twice today. What's wrong?" Good question. I told her I wanted to shut it down and pull the cover off, so I could have a peek inside. She didn't want me to. I suggested it may be a failing fan, hard drive, etc, etc. She insisted I install some tools, rather than just pop the cover off. I tried. The machine crashed about 2 minutes in.
I took the opportunity to pop the cover. The CPU fan had failed. Beyond that, the motherboard must have been going, probably from the heat. After changing the fan, it wouldn't power back on. I moved her drives to the most similar spare machine I could. It wasn't similar enough. Windows wouldn't boot because of the differences in the motherboard. {sigh} One in-place upgrade later, a few dozen updates, and shes running.
So, what's wrong with your PC? If I have to base it on my most recent experience, I'd say your CPU fan is gone, and your motherboard is about to go. Really though, we need an awful lot of information to even give a good guess.
I just told someone else, I was saying that from a logistics view, not a legal or moral one.
The UK puts cameras everywhere they can. Watching reporters is an infinitely better source of information.
In my example, the source wasn't a whistleblower, nor an anonymous informant. You never know who you're going to bump into. Agency investigators are busy following leads. Police are busy doing their jobs. Journalists are out asking lots of people lots of questions.
The casual comments aren't really going to get you into trouble. If they flagged every person that said something stupid like that on the phone or in an email would have pretty much the whole country flagged. That's an unusable list for narrowing down potential threats.
There's a subtle difference between a.cn domain, and fbi.gov, dia.mil, dhs.gov, eop.gov, cifa.mil, nga.mil, etc, etc, etc.. There are lots of them. I skipped the obvious ones, and went for the ones that'll make you think a little more.:) The list is huge. For some of them, I had to contact people I know working for the government, and they even had to do some work to find out what agencies they were. A few only ever came back with "there's no such agency."
But hey, I'm not trying to prove anything to you. This is just idle chatter in the virtual Slashdot bar.:) It's up to you to believe me or not, it really doesn't change anything.
I'm not arguing the legal merits of it. I'm suggesting the logistical merits of it. Those are two completely different realms, even though the logistical realm should be limited by the legal one.
Then again, the deeper the 3 letter agency, the less applied are laws.
Monitoring journalists is actually a smart move, for an organization that wishes to gather intelligence.
Journalists write about the news. They're sent out on great breaking stories, as well as little crappy ones. They may have one piece of a much bigger story, and never know about it.
Think about this. A guy steals a car in New York. Not big news, right? But someone is bound to cover it. The police only have so much manpower to investigate things. Now, an investigative reporter finds that it's a little old lady, and wants to make it news. It's a fluff story, but maybe someone will have some sympathy for her.
The reporter goes to some neighboring houses. They ask "did you see anything." "What can you tell me about the little old lady." Oh, she's nice, tends to her flowers every day, and has 14 cats. Big deal. That is, until you find that one of the neighbors was actually a person of interest.
The neighbor of interest normally lives in California, but is now in New York. Another person of the same organization had flown into New York (found through the airline reservation systems). Another was stopped crossing the Canadian border because he had a forged passport. Documents in his bag indicate he was going to... you got it, New York.
I won't agree that it's nice that they record all my calls, emails, and movements. Their job isn't to be nice. Theirs, for the most part, is to gather intelligence. By monitoring journalists, that would put an extra 50,000 eyes and ears out there (according to ASNE) every day. Add that to the more traditional resources, like other law enforcement agencies and their own agents, and now you get a much clearer picture.
They can't depend on the news that does make it. Plenty of stories are written and rejected. The journalist trying to make the story about our little old lady, her 14 cats, and stolen car, will probably never see the light of day. It'll be superseded by any more interesting story.
Do I know that any of this happens? No. But, it would make a lot of sense. I know my own news site is read on a regular basis by just about every intelligence agency there is. I know when I write a story about being flagged as a security risk at the airport, I'm not flagged again. Really, if they monitor everything I do, they're bored out of their minds, but they do know, I'm not a risk. I know if I look through my logs, I get a good glimpse of what they're willing to let me see (the occasional IP from their agency). I know that's not the whole story either. I just think of it as their way of saying "hi".
It's a matter of public record if a person has been arrested.
It's a matter of public record to who is having a hearing when about what.
It's even frequently leaked or released that an individual is a "person of interest" or a "suspect". That, in the public eye, is damning.
Consider the Elizabeth Smart case. Richard Ricci died in prison, because he refused to confess. He was innocent. Bret Edmunds almost died. He was innocent.
It's not only things as serious as this, that can ruin a life.
What would happen if it became known that you were a "person of interest" or that the "authorities wanted to talk to you" about a drug or sex crime? If your employer found that out, you'd likely be without a job.
I had an investigator come into my office once. He wasn't sure who he was looking for, he just knew he had the correct suite. It was regarding an electronic trespass (someone broke into some government servers). In many respectable offices, that would sign the end of my employment. My office was fairly casual, and it became clear what was going on. I helped the investigator get to where he needed. Sure, they "wanted to talk to me", because I was simply a link between two leads. I was nobody, and had nothing to do with the case.
Sometimes people say and do stupid things. What if an angry ex-girlfriend said that you raped her? What if she got her underage daughter to say it? You'd be screwed in more ways than one. And when the angry ex-girlfriend stops being angry, and apologizes for everything? That doesn't matter. You'll be remembered as the pedophile rapist, even though you're innocent, and the charges were dropped.
If no information on a case is ever released, it does make the investigation a little harder. There are no spontaneous sources of information. People don't know to look for anything. In the case of a legitimate suspect running, there would be no anonymous or random tips to their locations.
The Red October was suppose to be a series of high power magnets, that moved the water without any actual motion. There could be no cavitation, since there is no screw.
The magnetohydrodynamic drives do exist, and are proven to work, but they're slow.
In the book, the Red October ran on pumpjets. Basically the way a jetski works.
But hey, who am I to ruin fantasy. If a Russian officer wants to steal a super-duper secret submarine, kill the leading party officer onboard, pretend his ship sinks, and hand his ship over to the Americans, so they can hide out in rural America somewhere, to never see their friends or family again, so be it. It would have made more sense to retire into rural Russia somewhere, with a shotgun and a dog.:)
Last time I was up there, my friend pointed out the fact that his stairs had separated from the house by about a foot at the bottom (and still attached at the top). Either the bottom of the stairs slid one way, or the house slid the other way, or both. That was in the span of about 5 years.
It reminds me why I'm happy not to be living in California. I love hurricanes. They're a lot of fun. Big rain storm, lots of wind. Sit around in a fairly safe building and have a nice party. Earthquakes are nasty. They sneak up on you, and knock you out of bed (or knock the house down on you).
Ya, if the climate dictates, you'd have to make it deeper.:)
I did a little more research on this today. I lost my old bookmarks (switching computers too much, and reinstalling for fun), so I don't have the good sites. I did find a couple pages on Wikipedia though. Search "Ground-coupled heat exchanger" and "Geothermal heat pump".
I was talking to a friend in Alaska about this. A long time ago, I had read about setting up for the nuclear tests at Amchitka, Alaska. If I remember the details right, when they dug down to make the cavern, at about 100 feet, they were working in total darkness and effectively deaf due to the digging machine noises. The temperature was over 100 degrees due to geothermal activity. That's a long way from Anchorage though, even though both are geologically unstable (expect your pipes to break in the next earthquake). He took the opportunity to tell me about an earthquake in the 1964 that destroyed over 100 buildings in Anchorage. He noted one part of town that I drove through, that was a small valley, was flat land previous to 1964.:)
I was trying to find how deep they'd have to go in the Anchorage area to find warm ground. I found the building codes dictate all underground water pipes must be 10 feet deep. My friend confirmed that, but said even at 10 feet, they have water pipe freezes and bursts in the winter.
The purpose of that mental exercise was to find a way to warm a friend's cabin, in the middle of nowhere. The air temperature recently was 35F below zero, and that didn't account for the wind chill. Brrr.:)
I found this page which they tested such a system, where the air temperature would reach 10F. They buried their pipes 4 feet deep, but ran electric heat for 4 months of the year. They should have gone deeper.:)
I still haven't found a good answer for "how deep", but obviously 10 feet isn't enough in Anchorage. It probably requires a prolonged test with thermometers at different depths, to test the local conditions. I know soil composition makes a big difference too.
Here in Florida, if you go too deep, you find ground water pretty easily. Water wells can be as shallow as just a few feet here. When I was a kid, we had a water well, that was dug into a cavern at just about 30 feet.
She has a small lake in the back. It should be cool enough at the bottom. I'm going to have to test temperatures before I start. I'm pretty sure it's spring fed. That's about as cold as it gets around here, since the water comes from deep underground. That's about as close to ground temperature as we can get.:)
That was my general idea (I've had a few) for building one with available parts, instead of making lots of custom stuff.
A 4-core radiator for say an old fullsize Chevy truck or Cadillac would work well. Those trucks generate a lot of heat, because they're usually geared for towing, or moving lots of weight. We had a '79 Chevy crew cab, that could only do about 70mph because it was geared to tow a 5th wheel trailer.:) At one point the radiator went, and I threw one in from an old Cadillac (because it was handy), which was also almost the same size.
I'll probably build hers to cool one room, appearing to be a window unit. If she goes to do the full house, cascade several of these radiators together, and increase the volume of water pumped. And yes, a pretty box to go around it.:)
I did find some commercial units, that were laid out kind of weird, with the inlet air at the bottom, and the outlet on the side. To build one, the easiest would be to literally build a square box. The radiator would be perpendicular to the house. Both inlet and exhaust would be on the same side, one in each half of the unit. A little weatherstripping around the radiator, and you'd have a good seal where the air could only go through the radiator.
Well, when it's over 95 every day, 70 degree air wouldn't be bad.:)
We have high humidity during the summer here, so it works out pretty well.
Here's some weather stats for the area, as found on myweather.com (the first place I found with a Google search that showed them). My apologies for the formatting. You'll figure it out.:)
If it could hold 70F at the coils, it would get us through the worst months (the summer), and provide cooling. Outside of the summer, some people keep the windows open, until it gets hot (about 10am to 5pm daily)
Month Temp Dew Morning Afternoon Point humid humid Jan 61F 49F 79% 57% Feb 63F 52F 80% 56% Mar 55F 68F 79% 54% Apr 73F 58F 78% 51% May 78F 64F 79% 51% Jun 82F 70F 80% 58% Jul 83F 71F 78% 59% Aug 83F 72F 81% 61% Sep 82F 70F 83% 60% Oct 76F 64F 80% 55% Nov 69F 59F 81% 58% Dec 63F 52F 80% 58%
I don't really agree with these stats, or more likely how they're being represented. 95F to 105F daily from late June through the end of August are the norm, not the exception. That's also when you'll have a flood outside your A/C condensation drain.:) A 2000+ sq/ft house will leave a small flooded area where it drains all summer.
I want to implement such a system for a friend of mine. She doesn't have a lot of money, so most of the year she doesn't run heat or air. In the summer, her house is typically 85F or so, with the windows open, and obviously the humidity isn't removed at all, unless you consider it being sucked into my clothes as removal.:)
That's a beautiful example. And, they're still using the water for drinking, which is perfectly safe, since they're running it through a heat exchanger for the system, not using it directly.:)
That would all depend on the size of the heat exchanger, and the duty cycle.
If, for the sake of argument, the typical duty cycle of a functional unit is 50% with say 12sq/ft of surface area on the evaporator, at 45 degrees at the evaporator. If you had 60 degrees at the evaporator, but increased the size to say 24 sq/ft, and the duty cycle to 90%+, it should be no problem. Consider that a system like this would require a pump similar to a swimming pool pump or smaller, which most people that have pools run for 12 hrs/day every day. A system like this wouldn't need to run at 90%+, but it would have that ability.
In reality, it's not even required to run a pump on a system like this. There's a university (I can't remember who off-hand, but a big one) that is currently using a system exactly like this. They don't run pumps, the entire system relies on convection. The cooling itself is free, where the should have huge chillers, lots of freon, and huge power bills. They do still require power to run the fans for circulation inside the buildings, but that's it.
For an ad-hoc system, I made the assumptions of double the size for the "evaporator", and one 1/2hp swimming pool style pond pump, that was able to handle small debris, with a bypass. If convection did it fine, then the pump was a waste. Even still, when I estimated the costs, and I am good at providing complete estimates, it was less than half the price of purchasing a new HVAC.
But, your arguments are valid, and a good example of why people aren't willing to step away from what everyone else has. "Oh, that could never work."
The same could be said of a Peltier/TEC based refrigerator for your car, yet they not only work, but people are very happy with them. Oddly enough, everything I've mentioned is not theory, but working proven fact, that has been implemented. Unfortunately, not widely, because people are afraid to change.
I don't know how it is there, but in the US an awful lot of people here run air conditioning, heating, and heatpumps (A/C that runs in reverse to make heat above 40F outside), that all run on electricity.
There are some areas that do have a natural gas infrastructure, so they usually heat on that. I just haven't happened to live in too many.
In the summer time, pretty much every building in the US has an air conditioner running, either central or a window unit (or sometimes both). There are exceptions to that too, but relatively few.
Actually, there are lots of people who have no idea that this can be done.
I live in Florida, and very few people that I've spoken with know anything about it. I haven't been able to find anyone that installs it either, but I'm not looking so hard now that I don't own a house any more.
There are quite a few interesting variations on this. I won't bother mention the well system, since that's what the article talks about.:)
One was a dry system, where you simply needed a series of tubes (intentionally said for Sen. Stevens) buried in a horizontal plane at about 10' to 20' deep. You can pump a liquid for a heat exchanger, or even just air, to stabilize the air temperature at about 60F degrees. There are all kinds of options on this. A heat exchanger, or even circulating home air through have both been done successfully. Adding a small amount of outside air can raise or lower the temperature as needed. If 65F is too cold, say 10% outside air could raise that up to 75F.
Another uses river or lake water. This would depend on your climate to if it would work really well. A friend of mine lives beside a lake that's between 20 to 30 feet deep. Her air conditioner also works very poorly. I introduced the idea of an open loop system, where it would pump water from the lake, through a coil and back to the lake. It would need some degree of large debris filtering, but not a lot (try not to suck up the Loch Ness monster). The coil at the house would simply recirculate just as the regular air handler in the house would, except the coils would maintain about 60 degrees because of the lake. When it's close to 100 degrees outside, and the lake water is in the high 60's at the bottom, a 75 to 80 degree house is a welcome temperature.:)
Unfortunately, most people look at it as "but, everyone else has a.....". Some people were worried about a reduction in their resale value, because if they sell their home, now there's a "nonstandard" system there. Who would want a house with an almost free heating/cooling system?
A freon free, low energy system, that takes advantage of the difference in air and ground/water temperature is a wonderful thing.
This wasn't news, and I wanted to say so too, but people need to be exposed to the idea.
I was pretty sure the boxes I've looked at have a single bar down each side for their hot, one from each incoming hot line. Next time I'm in a box, I'll have a look.
I really don't do anything with 220v, so it really doesn't matter much for me.:)
Well, a 220v breaker is really attached to one leg of the 220 coming into the house. You usually have two hot leads, and one goes on each side of your breaker panel. You'll notice that any 220 breakers are only on one side. If you had two 110v lines in different phases, they'd need to be on both sides.
Since both hots on a residential 220v are coming from the same bus, splitting it at the breaker box, or with a little junction in your living room makes exactly the same electrical potential. Well, except for the fact that the bus can pass much more power, and two heavy leads can carry much more current.:)
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This is an inherantly impossible question to answer.
"Hey Doc, I felt fine until I didn't."
How many things could go wrong? Well, two I guess. Hardware, or software.
Did a fan fail?
Is a hard drive failing?
Is there a memory fault?
Did you hit the "turbo" button (get off your 386, hehe)?
Do you have [mal|spy|ad]ware that you don't know about?
Did a Windows setting get changed?
Is it network related?
Are you just overwhelming your machine?
Oddly enough, I've seen Windows PC's, where the owners set their own DNS servers to somewhere pathetically slow or down. It wasn't just the Internet that went slow, but everything. That's probably because so many applications call home now. They were hanging trying to call home, and instead of going to sleep like they should have, they'd stay busy, and make the whole system busy.
This problem isn't something that can be diagnosed by a posting.
A friend called me. "My server crashed twice today. What's wrong?" Good question. I told her I wanted to shut it down and pull the cover off, so I could have a peek inside. She didn't want me to. I suggested it may be a failing fan, hard drive, etc, etc. She insisted I install some tools, rather than just pop the cover off. I tried. The machine crashed about 2 minutes in.
I took the opportunity to pop the cover. The CPU fan had failed. Beyond that, the motherboard must have been going, probably from the heat. After changing the fan, it wouldn't power back on. I moved her drives to the most similar spare machine I could. It wasn't similar enough. Windows wouldn't boot because of the differences in the motherboard. {sigh} One in-place upgrade later, a few dozen updates, and shes running.
So, what's wrong with your PC? If I have to base it on my most recent experience, I'd say your CPU fan is gone, and your motherboard is about to go. Really though, we need an awful lot of information to even give a good guess.
Nah. I passed it by a few knowledgeable people. Knowledgeable, based on their past employers. We'll let it go at that.
I just told someone else, I was saying that from a logistics view, not a legal or moral one.
The UK puts cameras everywhere they can. Watching reporters is an infinitely better source of information.
In my example, the source wasn't a whistleblower, nor an anonymous informant. You never know who you're going to bump into. Agency investigators are busy following leads. Police are busy doing their jobs. Journalists are out asking lots of people lots of questions.
The casual comments aren't really going to get you into trouble. If they flagged every person that said something stupid like that on the phone or in an email would have pretty much the whole country flagged. That's an unusable list for narrowing down potential threats.
I am not a number! I am a free man!
There's a subtle difference between a .cn domain, and fbi.gov, dia.mil, dhs.gov, eop.gov, cifa.mil, nga.mil, etc, etc, etc.. There are lots of them. I skipped the obvious ones, and went for the ones that'll make you think a little more. :) The list is huge. For some of them, I had to contact people I know working for the government, and they even had to do some work to find out what agencies they were. A few only ever came back with "there's no such agency."
But hey, I'm not trying to prove anything to you. This is just idle chatter in the virtual Slashdot bar. :) It's up to you to believe me or not, it really doesn't change anything.
I'm not arguing the legal merits of it. I'm suggesting the logistical merits of it. Those are two completely different realms, even though the logistical realm should be limited by the legal one.
Then again, the deeper the 3 letter agency, the less applied are laws.
I put the flag in the flower pot, on my window ledge. Then they know we are to meet.
I cannot further discuss this matter at this time. I can explain it all, once "they" come forward on "their" own.
You do realize most of the readers here are too young to know what a mimeograph is, right?
Monitoring journalists is actually a smart move, for an organization that wishes to gather intelligence.
Journalists write about the news. They're sent out on great breaking stories, as well as little crappy ones. They may have one piece of a much bigger story, and never know about it.
Think about this. A guy steals a car in New York. Not big news, right? But someone is bound to cover it. The police only have so much manpower to investigate things. Now, an investigative reporter finds that it's a little old lady, and wants to make it news. It's a fluff story, but maybe someone will have some sympathy for her.
The reporter goes to some neighboring houses. They ask "did you see anything." "What can you tell me about the little old lady." Oh, she's nice, tends to her flowers every day, and has 14 cats. Big deal. That is, until you find that one of the neighbors was actually a person of interest.
The neighbor of interest normally lives in California, but is now in New York. Another person of the same organization had flown into New York (found through the airline reservation systems). Another was stopped crossing the Canadian border because he had a forged passport. Documents in his bag indicate he was going to ... you got it, New York.
I won't agree that it's nice that they record all my calls, emails, and movements. Their job isn't to be nice. Theirs, for the most part, is to gather intelligence. By monitoring journalists, that would put an extra 50,000 eyes and ears out there (according to ASNE) every day. Add that to the more traditional resources, like other law enforcement agencies and their own agents, and now you get a much clearer picture.
They can't depend on the news that does make it. Plenty of stories are written and rejected. The journalist trying to make the story about our little old lady, her 14 cats, and stolen car, will probably never see the light of day. It'll be superseded by any more interesting story.
Do I know that any of this happens? No. But, it would make a lot of sense. I know my own news site is read on a regular basis by just about every intelligence agency there is. I know when I write a story about being flagged as a security risk at the airport, I'm not flagged again. Really, if they monitor everything I do, they're bored out of their minds, but they do know, I'm not a risk. I know if I look through my logs, I get a good glimpse of what they're willing to let me see (the occasional IP from their agency). I know that's not the whole story either. I just think of it as their way of saying "hi".
It would be nice if that was the way it works.
It's a matter of public record if a person has been arrested.
It's a matter of public record to who is having a hearing when about what.
It's even frequently leaked or released that an individual is a "person of interest" or a "suspect". That, in the public eye, is damning.
Consider the Elizabeth Smart case. Richard Ricci died in prison, because he refused to confess. He was innocent. Bret Edmunds almost died. He was innocent.
It's not only things as serious as this, that can ruin a life.
What would happen if it became known that you were a "person of interest" or that the "authorities wanted to talk to you" about a drug or sex crime? If your employer found that out, you'd likely be without a job.
I had an investigator come into my office once. He wasn't sure who he was looking for, he just knew he had the correct suite. It was regarding an electronic trespass (someone broke into some government servers). In many respectable offices, that would sign the end of my employment. My office was fairly casual, and it became clear what was going on. I helped the investigator get to where he needed. Sure, they "wanted to talk to me", because I was simply a link between two leads. I was nobody, and had nothing to do with the case.
Sometimes people say and do stupid things. What if an angry ex-girlfriend said that you raped her? What if she got her underage daughter to say it? You'd be screwed in more ways than one. And when the angry ex-girlfriend stops being angry, and apologizes for everything? That doesn't matter. You'll be remembered as the pedophile rapist, even though you're innocent, and the charges were dropped.
If no information on a case is ever released, it does make the investigation a little harder. There are no spontaneous sources of information. People don't know to look for anything. In the case of a legitimate suspect running, there would be no anonymous or random tips to their locations.
Yup.
The Red October was suppose to be a series of high power magnets, that moved the water without any actual motion. There could be no cavitation, since there is no screw.
The magnetohydrodynamic drives do exist, and are proven to work, but they're slow.
In the book, the Red October ran on pumpjets. Basically the way a jetski works.
But hey, who am I to ruin fantasy. If a Russian officer wants to steal a super-duper secret submarine, kill the leading party officer onboard, pretend his ship sinks, and hand his ship over to the Americans, so they can hide out in rural America somewhere, to never see their friends or family again, so be it. It would have made more sense to retire into rural Russia somewhere, with a shotgun and a dog. :)
For some reason, when I read the question, I thought "tiny elephants".
Either that, or an elephant with tapeworms, but I don't think that was the purpose of this mental exercise. :)
This is one of the articles that I had found before. Thanks for posting the name!
I agree. It was a neat passing idea though.
Last time I was up there, my friend pointed out the fact that his stairs had separated from the house by about a foot at the bottom (and still attached at the top). Either the bottom of the stairs slid one way, or the house slid the other way, or both. That was in the span of about 5 years.
It reminds me why I'm happy not to be living in California. I love hurricanes. They're a lot of fun. Big rain storm, lots of wind. Sit around in a fairly safe building and have a nice party. Earthquakes are nasty. They sneak up on you, and knock you out of bed (or knock the house down on you).
Ya, if the climate dictates, you'd have to make it deeper. :)
I did a little more research on this today. I lost my old bookmarks (switching computers too much, and reinstalling for fun), so I don't have the good sites. I did find a couple pages on Wikipedia though. Search "Ground-coupled heat exchanger" and "Geothermal heat pump".
I was talking to a friend in Alaska about this. A long time ago, I had read about setting up for the nuclear tests at Amchitka, Alaska. If I remember the details right, when they dug down to make the cavern, at about 100 feet, they were working in total darkness and effectively deaf due to the digging machine noises. The temperature was over 100 degrees due to geothermal activity. That's a long way from Anchorage though, even though both are geologically unstable (expect your pipes to break in the next earthquake). He took the opportunity to tell me about an earthquake in the 1964 that destroyed over 100 buildings in Anchorage. He noted one part of town that I drove through, that was a small valley, was flat land previous to 1964. :)
I was trying to find how deep they'd have to go in the Anchorage area to find warm ground. I found the building codes dictate all underground water pipes must be 10 feet deep. My friend confirmed that, but said even at 10 feet, they have water pipe freezes and bursts in the winter.
The purpose of that mental exercise was to find a way to warm a friend's cabin, in the middle of nowhere. The air temperature recently was 35F below zero, and that didn't account for the wind chill. Brrr. :)
I found this page which they tested such a system, where the air temperature would reach 10F. They buried their pipes 4 feet deep, but ran electric heat for 4 months of the year. They should have gone deeper. :)
I still haven't found a good answer for "how deep", but obviously 10 feet isn't enough in Anchorage. It probably requires a prolonged test with thermometers at different depths, to test the local conditions. I know soil composition makes a big difference too.
Here in Florida, if you go too deep, you find ground water pretty easily. Water wells can be as shallow as just a few feet here. When I was a kid, we had a water well, that was dug into a cavern at just about 30 feet.
She has a small lake in the back. It should be cool enough at the bottom. I'm going to have to test temperatures before I start. I'm pretty sure it's spring fed. That's about as cold as it gets around here, since the water comes from deep underground. That's about as close to ground temperature as we can get. :)
That was my general idea (I've had a few) for building one with available parts, instead of making lots of custom stuff.
A 4-core radiator for say an old fullsize Chevy truck or Cadillac would work well. Those trucks generate a lot of heat, because they're usually geared for towing, or moving lots of weight. We had a '79 Chevy crew cab, that could only do about 70mph because it was geared to tow a 5th wheel trailer. :) At one point the radiator went, and I threw one in from an old Cadillac (because it was handy), which was also almost the same size.
I'll probably build hers to cool one room, appearing to be a window unit. If she goes to do the full house, cascade several of these radiators together, and increase the volume of water pumped. And yes, a pretty box to go around it. :)
I did find some commercial units, that were laid out kind of weird, with the inlet air at the bottom, and the outlet on the side. To build one, the easiest would be to literally build a square box. The radiator would be perpendicular to the house. Both inlet and exhaust would be on the same side, one in each half of the unit. A little weatherstripping around the radiator, and you'd have a good seal where the air could only go through the radiator.
Wow, a good AC post. :) Thanks!
I don't see the unit you're referencing right off, but I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about.
Well, when it's over 95 every day, 70 degree air wouldn't be bad. :)
:)
:) A 2000+ sq/ft house will leave a small flooded area where it drains all summer.
:)
We have high humidity during the summer here, so it works out pretty well.
Here's some weather stats for the area, as found on myweather.com (the first place I found with a Google search that showed them). My apologies for the formatting. You'll figure it out.
If it could hold 70F at the coils, it would get us through the worst months (the summer), and provide cooling. Outside of the summer, some people keep the windows open, until it gets hot (about 10am to 5pm daily)
Month Temp Dew Morning Afternoon
Point humid humid
Jan 61F 49F 79% 57%
Feb 63F 52F 80% 56%
Mar 55F 68F 79% 54%
Apr 73F 58F 78% 51%
May 78F 64F 79% 51%
Jun 82F 70F 80% 58%
Jul 83F 71F 78% 59%
Aug 83F 72F 81% 61%
Sep 82F 70F 83% 60%
Oct 76F 64F 80% 55%
Nov 69F 59F 81% 58%
Dec 63F 52F 80% 58%
I don't really agree with these stats, or more likely how they're being represented. 95F to 105F daily from late June through the end of August are the norm, not the exception. That's also when you'll have a flood outside your A/C condensation drain.
I want to implement such a system for a friend of mine. She doesn't have a lot of money, so most of the year she doesn't run heat or air. In the summer, her house is typically 85F or so, with the windows open, and obviously the humidity isn't removed at all, unless you consider it being sucked into my clothes as removal.
I don't suppose you'd have the opportunity to take some pictures, and diagram it for me, would you? :)
You can make an initial contact to me through the form on my site. I'll respond from my regular email account.
That's a beautiful example. And, they're still using the water for drinking, which is perfectly safe, since they're running it through a heat exchanger for the system, not using it directly. :)
That would all depend on the size of the heat exchanger, and the duty cycle.
If, for the sake of argument, the typical duty cycle of a functional unit is 50% with say 12sq/ft of surface area on the evaporator, at 45 degrees at the evaporator. If you had 60 degrees at the evaporator, but increased the size to say 24 sq/ft, and the duty cycle to 90%+, it should be no problem. Consider that a system like this would require a pump similar to a swimming pool pump or smaller, which most people that have pools run for 12 hrs/day every day. A system like this wouldn't need to run at 90%+, but it would have that ability.
In reality, it's not even required to run a pump on a system like this. There's a university (I can't remember who off-hand, but a big one) that is currently using a system exactly like this. They don't run pumps, the entire system relies on convection. The cooling itself is free, where the should have huge chillers, lots of freon, and huge power bills. They do still require power to run the fans for circulation inside the buildings, but that's it.
For an ad-hoc system, I made the assumptions of double the size for the "evaporator", and one 1/2hp swimming pool style pond pump, that was able to handle small debris, with a bypass. If convection did it fine, then the pump was a waste. Even still, when I estimated the costs, and I am good at providing complete estimates, it was less than half the price of purchasing a new HVAC.
But, your arguments are valid, and a good example of why people aren't willing to step away from what everyone else has. "Oh, that could never work."
The same could be said of a Peltier/TEC based refrigerator for your car, yet they not only work, but people are very happy with them. Oddly enough, everything I've mentioned is not theory, but working proven fact, that has been implemented. Unfortunately, not widely, because people are afraid to change.
Would we though?
I don't know how it is there, but in the US an awful lot of people here run air conditioning, heating, and heatpumps (A/C that runs in reverse to make heat above 40F outside), that all run on electricity.
There are some areas that do have a natural gas infrastructure, so they usually heat on that. I just haven't happened to live in too many.
In the summer time, pretty much every building in the US has an air conditioner running, either central or a window unit (or sometimes both). There are exceptions to that too, but relatively few.
Actually, there are lots of people who have no idea that this can be done.
I live in Florida, and very few people that I've spoken with know anything about it. I haven't been able to find anyone that installs it either, but I'm not looking so hard now that I don't own a house any more.
There are quite a few interesting variations on this. I won't bother mention the well system, since that's what the article talks about. :)
One was a dry system, where you simply needed a series of tubes (intentionally said for Sen. Stevens) buried in a horizontal plane at about 10' to 20' deep. You can pump a liquid for a heat exchanger, or even just air, to stabilize the air temperature at about 60F degrees. There are all kinds of options on this. A heat exchanger, or even circulating home air through have both been done successfully. Adding a small amount of outside air can raise or lower the temperature as needed. If 65F is too cold, say 10% outside air could raise that up to 75F.
Another uses river or lake water. This would depend on your climate to if it would work really well. A friend of mine lives beside a lake that's between 20 to 30 feet deep. Her air conditioner also works very poorly. I introduced the idea of an open loop system, where it would pump water from the lake, through a coil and back to the lake. It would need some degree of large debris filtering, but not a lot (try not to suck up the Loch Ness monster). The coil at the house would simply recirculate just as the regular air handler in the house would, except the coils would maintain about 60 degrees because of the lake. When it's close to 100 degrees outside, and the lake water is in the high 60's at the bottom, a 75 to 80 degree house is a welcome temperature. :)
Unfortunately, most people look at it as "but, everyone else has a .....". Some people were worried about a reduction in their resale value, because if they sell their home, now there's a "nonstandard" system there. Who would want a house with an almost free heating/cooling system?
A freon free, low energy system, that takes advantage of the difference in air and ground/water temperature is a wonderful thing.
This wasn't news, and I wanted to say so too, but people need to be exposed to the idea.
I was pretty sure the boxes I've looked at have a single bar down each side for their hot, one from each incoming hot line. Next time I'm in a box, I'll have a look.
I really don't do anything with 220v, so it really doesn't matter much for me. :)
Well, a 220v breaker is really attached to one leg of the 220 coming into the house. You usually have two hot leads, and one goes on each side of your breaker panel. You'll notice that any 220 breakers are only on one side. If you had two 110v lines in different phases, they'd need to be on both sides.
Since both hots on a residential 220v are coming from the same bus, splitting it at the breaker box, or with a little junction in your living room makes exactly the same electrical potential. Well, except for the fact that the bus can pass much more power, and two heavy leads can carry much more current. :)