According to this handy page: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/energybasics101.html Average monthly residential electricity use is 920kwhr / month. That is about 1.28kW average. A 1MW plant could power about 800 homes. US electric production capacity is roughly 1TW. You would need 1 million of those 7m snakes to service the US. That is 4.3 thousand miles if they are side to side. The total 'tidal' coastline of the US is about 12 million miles. So if we don't mind completely destroying the ecosystem on 33% of shorelinesâ¦
There are lots and lote of schemes to harness a few 100 kilowatts here and maybe a megawatt there. However, unless the schemes are really cheap (this one is not) and can be deployed unobtrusively (this one is not), they will only ever serve niche markets.
Re:Marine battery + panel + DC lighting. Done
on
DIY Solar Resources?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That is a good basic plan. The 'open circuit' voltage of the panel needs to be around 18V to charge a 12V battery. 12V CF lighting is available from a number of vendors, I would highly recommend it over 12V halogen track lighting:
You are missing the elegance and simplicity of using ice water and body temperature to calibrate thermometers. In the 18th century, every thermometer was hand calibrated. Plunge the thermometer into a vat of ice water and make a mark. Plunge the thermometer into your body, make another mark. If you are using ancillary temperature (under the arm) rather than oral or rectal temperature (and really, where would you rather stick that thermometer?), 96 is pretty close. Make 64 evenly spaced marks between the two marks by subdividing by 2 six times. Why not use the boiling point of water? The simple answer is that it is too hot. You would end up with a thermometer unsuitable for measuring outdoor temperatures in a fancy garden, which I imagine were the most profitable sales of the thermometers.
Notice that 32 is also a power of two, and that there are 180 degrees between the boiling point of water and the freezing point.
A little more than 50% of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline.
And this little tidbit from the plastics industry:
Less than.05% of a barrel of oil goes into making all the plastic bags used in the US while 93% - 95% of every barrel of crude oil is burned for fuel and heating purposes. Although they are made from natural gas or oil, plastic bags actually consume less fossil fuels during their lifetime than do compostable plastic and paper bags.
Seriously, how many pounds of plastic bags could you possibly be using in a year? How many pounds of plastic on in your car? A weekly 15 gallon fill-up is about 90 pounds of fuel, or a little less than 2.5 tons a year. My whole car doesn't weight that much, and most of it is steel.
Save your bags if it makes you feel good, but it ain't gonna make any real difference.
not only is parking a leaky tank in a garage a bad idea, so is any underground parking lot, dense parking area with low wind, or other places. I would rather face a hydrogen leak than a gasoline leak anyday. Hydrogen is much lighter than air and will dissipate quickly. It does not pool in low places like gas. At normal pressure, it does not have that much energy density. Carbon Monoxide from gas engines would be a much bigger problem in underground parking areas.
Second, H2 is not a liquid at that pressure like propane is. H2 only becomes liquid at rediculous pressure or extreme low temperuature. Quick physics lesson: Hydrogen's critical temperature is -240C (33K). Above this temperature, hydrogen CANNOT be made liquid, regardless of the pressure. Once you are below the critical temperature, you don't really need much pressure to keep it liquid.
A propane tank of H2 at safe pressures would only take you about 5 miles 5 miles would be optimistic from a 5 gal propane tank at 100psi.
To pressurize directly to liquid and store it without 70 degree below zero refrigeration would be a massive tank, several inches thick, and still only have enough storage for about 200 miles. Again, you CANNOT "pressurize" hydrogen to a liquid above 33K. "70 degree below zeor" is meaningless. You wouold never need a tank "several inches thick" under any condition, even high pressure storage. And 200 hundred miles is not a bad range.
At that pressure, a rupture could kill a hundred people, rip your house apart, or crack a bridge, just on vapor expansion laws alone. But probably wouldn't. Ruptured high pressure tanks are no fun, but they are not exactly bombs either. You tend to get a very directional blast from a ruptured high pressure tank.
Oh yea, compressing H2 to that pressure has less than 8% efficiency. We can make it at 96%, but loose most of that transporting it. I have no clue where you are getting these numbers. Nor do they really matter.
I agree with your overall conclusion that hydrogen cars are probably not going to happen, ever. Hydrogen is difficult to make, difficult to transport, difficult to dispense, difficult to store on vehicle, and difficult to utilize. We have not really solved any of these issues. And as you said, the only real advantage is that it burns clean (sort of, if you burn it in an ICE you will likely still have NOx issues).
I don't think anyone would complain if they got more bandwidth for http traffic than they paid for. But if you are going to throttle any traffic to 2mps, then you need to sell it as 2mps service.
Same opinion here. Some printers work fine plugged directly into the PC but will not work when plugged into a hub. Same printer works, but only locally, printing over the network causes USB errors. Some devices are perfectly happy plugged into a hub, until you plug another similar device into the same hub, then after a while neither device works. (Not a voltage problem, I checked that.) I have had USB hardrrives pretent to work until I went to retrieve the data and found the entire drive corrupted. (And yes, I had deleted my local copies). I have seen notebooks that simply would not work with certain flash drives, and no one could tell me why.
I have built USB devices, and they work, sometimes, under certain conditions (mostly when they have a port all to themselves). Plug a bunch of them into a USB 2.0 hub and you can forget it, but a (hard to find) USB 1.1 hub works OK (albeit slow).
And as other posters have pointed out, the one-sides flat plug is not well though out, the "other end" is pointlessly far from universal, USB extension cords are "illegal" but still quite common...
It has been over 10 years now and USB is still buggy as hell. It makes me long for the old days of the old Centronics printer connector. Once you got past some basic.. finding a free interupt, the bi-directional settings, the correct "lp" numbers... those things always worked. At this point, I think USB is a do-over.
The aluminum is light (atomic weight 13) and you get up to three hydrogen atoms per aluminium atom. Unfortunately, the water is heavy (molecular weight 18) and you get only a single hyrogen atom from it. The resulting aluminum oxide is also very heavy.
What could really make this work is to extract the water from the air, react it with the aluminum and just dump the spent aluminum oxide / hydroxide on the ground. We are in no danger of ever running out of aluminum.
No more split screen! One worker wears red glasses, one worker wears blue glasses! Or just use a pair of cheap 3D glasses and keep one eye shut! Wait, sharing a screen using shuttered or color-coded glasses might just work, I better patent this...
I love the idea of those USB power strips. Imagine being able to power your notebook off of one! That could end the different power brick for every notebook mess.
On USB 2.0 vs. FireWire400/800: I know that this subject as been beat to death, but anyway... Higher speed are always nice, but I am not often limited by the bus speed. What I LOVE about USB is that the specification is open. Anyone can download it. You can build your own USB gizmos in your basement; no large investment is required. There are plenty of chips that support USB available in small quantities (like 1 or 2). You can even make USB look just like a serial port, making said gizmos compatable with LABView with no driver fuss. Try that with FireWire! Now if I could make all my little lab gizmos powered off the USB bus as well, heck, I might never go home.
I know FireWire is popular for video transfer, but isn't that what DVI is for? For data transfer, you don't have to run DVI in real time, and you can run 3.9 Gbits/sec over DVI today.
Lets see. Cost of the car = $30,000 Gas for 100,000 miles at 33.33mpg figuring $5/gallon = $15,000 That is only $285,000 more to go. Any clue where that money is supposed to go? That is $28,500 a year over 10 years.
Here is an idea: create a chain of about 8 carbon atoms and attach 18 hydrogen atoms to this carbon chain. That is about 16% hydrogen by weight! Not only that, it is an easy to handle liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. Imagine simply pouring a liquid into your car for refueling!
I have not seen an OEM CD of Windows in years. You might get a hidden partion on the harddrive containing an image to reset you machine it state when it left the OEM, you might not. Bottom line, there is really is no way to re-install windows on a repaired machine to make it pass WGA.
And this is very easy to do. Every polling places has a stack of blank numbered sheets and a couple of laser printers. The ballots are printed on demand (allowing last minute changes) instead of months before the election. All numbered ballots must be accounted for. The voters mark the printed ballots with a black pen. You are given a tear-off receipt with each ballot. The ballots are optically scanned. The results from each ballot are posted on the internet. You can go online and check your results. If you ballot is not marked as you though, you can lodge a complaint, the ballot can be pulled, the tear off can be verified, and the ballot inspected for tampering. Paper trail, last minute changes, private, fully verifyable, and reasonably cheap. What is missing?
I think we already don't use Li-Ion AA's and AAA's because they're cost-prohibitive
The bigger problem is cell voltage. A Li-Ion cell puts out about twice the voltage of an alkaline or NiMH cell. A lot of electronic devices cannot handle the higher cell voltage. This is the main reason you do not see Li-Ion cell in conventional button-top AA format at Wal-Mart.
Could you give a few more details? What was the teachers name, what shool and the localtion of the school? Also, do you know any details of the explosion?
Fusion reactors also produce radioactive byproducts that will have to be delt with. Fusion produces gobs of neutrons, and neutron bombardment makes other materials radioactive. Also, most fusion reactions involve tritium which in made in a conventional nuclear reactor.
A survey by the Energy Saving Trust found that the average household has up to 12 gadgets left on standby or charging at any one time. It also showed that more than £740m of electricity was wasted by things being left ticking over.
£740m per year? That is about £2m/day... What does £2m buy, about 40kWh? With 24 hours in a day that comes to about 1.5Kw used by 12 devices on "Standby". That comes to 130W per device! Think of the heat put off by a 100W lightbulb. Does your cell phone charger get that hot? Does your DVD player? Does your stereo? I don't think so...
This is yet anyother article on the subject of standby power that is completely devoid of any actual calculations. Is it really so hard to show your work? How does the amount of standby power compare to the amount of "in use" power? Maybe standby power really is an issue, but until I actually see some real calculations I will remain a skeptic.
This would be a heck of a lot simpler than having every small business in every state register with the tax department of every state. Simply have the small business require out of state sales to be placed on a credit card, and report to the credit card company that the sale was of taxible goods. You credit card company bill you the sales tax, and sends a check to the state.
Another alternative is to have an alternate 10% federal Value added tax (higher than most state sales taxes). A merchant would have the option to _either_ charge its customers their state tax (and fool with all the required paper work) _or_ pay the federal sales tax. A merchant would then have the option of figuring out which was more worthwhile. Give your customers a small break in price, or simply their paper work.
My Series 1 TiVo took a lighnting hit last month and it knocked out the modem. I was paying by the month. I called to cancel my subscription, and the rep told asked if I was interested in a new Series 2 TiVo. "No, not really." "Have you _seen_ the new TiVos?" "Yes, I have. They still only have a single tuner and very limited disk storage. I don't really care about all the other features." (I had upgraded my series 1 to 130 hours with my own 80G HD.)
I was also annoyed that they had just billed me for the next month of service that I had not used it and could not use, and they refused to give me a refund. And now this!
The funny thing is that I am still using my TiVo, I am just manually recording everything. Setting the clock will be a little difficult, but other than that, I have not really missed the TiVo Service that much, even though I subscribed to it for several years.
Most of their new Oscilliscopes still use floppies to store screen shots. Most of their Oscilliscopes do not support USB drives. Unlike a new computer, the useful lifetime of a lab instrument is measured in decades. Floppies will be around for a while.
Speaking of lab instruments, my new Stanford Research SR620 Time Interval Counter requires either an Epson MX80 printer or an HPGL plotter (either RS232 or IEE488) for simple hardcopy output, and requires and analog oscilliscope for a real time video display.
Auminum oxide is not used in thermite nor in the space shuttle booster. Thermite is Iron Oxide (Fe2o3) and Aluminum powder. The Shuttle Booster uses Ammonium Perchlorate as an oxidizer and Aluminum for fuel.
People are not afriad of hydrogen because of the Hindenberg any more than they are afraid of gasoline because of the world trade center. Hydrogen is not used as a motor fuel because it is expensive to make and difficult to store. My fears of a hydrogen powered car have to do with storing a gas at 10,000 psi. Even an inert gas would be dangerous at the kind of pressures required to get hydrogen to a useful energy density.
It takes 8kWh to recharge for a 20 mile range. At 8 cents per kWh, that is 64/20 = 3.2cent/mile for fuel. If you have a 50mpg car, you would have to be paying $1.60/gallon for gas before you hit break-even. (When someone says 20-40 mile range, I think 20 mile range unless you are going downhill.) You also have to replace the batteries every 1-4 years.
It would cost a lot if you actually had to buy the pieces from LEGO. The cheapest LEGO available is a 2000 piece tub for $20, or 10 cents a piece. Unfortunately, that only contains bricks, not the plates and arches needed to build a WTC model. LEGO has been very slow to offer any bulk packages at all, and even those that are offered are still very limited and very expensive (around 10 cents a piece still, but you get the pieces you want.) At 500 pieces per floor, you are looking at an absolute minimum of about $5500 worth of bricks.
This is actually much better than it was a few years ago, when bulk packs were not even available. At that time, LEGO seemed genuinely disinterested in and threatened by people building and displaying original modeles built of LEGO. In fact, it went somewhat beyond that. Many people (myself included) have received almost hostile rejection letters when we have contacted LEGO with ideas of pictures of models.
As much as I enjoyed playing and modeling with LEGO, I have given it up due to the expense and the company's attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this handy page:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/energybasics101.html
Average monthly residential electricity use is 920kwhr / month. That is about 1.28kW average. A 1MW plant could power about 800 homes. US electric production capacity is roughly 1TW. You would need 1 million of those 7m snakes to service the US. That is 4.3 thousand miles if they are side to side. The total 'tidal' coastline of the US is about 12 million miles. So if we don't mind completely destroying the ecosystem on 33% of shorelinesâ¦
There are lots and lote of schemes to harness a few 100 kilowatts here and maybe a megawatt there. However, unless the schemes are really cheap (this one is not) and can be deployed unobtrusively (this one is not), they will only ever serve niche markets.
That is a good basic plan. The 'open circuit' voltage of the panel needs to be around 18V to charge a 12V battery. 12V CF lighting is available from a number of vendors, I would highly recommend it over 12V halogen track lighting:
http://store.altenergystore.com/Lighting-Fans/Compact-Fluorescent/Compact-Fluorescent-Bulb-12V-7W/p1003/?source=froogle
I don't really like these 12V bulbs that screw into a normal 120V socket, but what are you going to do...
I would also suggest skylights. There is really no point is converting light to electricity and back to light.
Honda also makes some super quiet generators that are less of a pita than solar.
You are missing the elegance and simplicity of using ice water and body temperature to calibrate thermometers. In the 18th century, every thermometer was hand calibrated. Plunge the thermometer into a vat of ice water and make a mark. Plunge the thermometer into your body, make another mark. If you are using ancillary temperature (under the arm) rather than oral or rectal temperature (and really, where would you rather stick that thermometer?), 96 is pretty close. Make 64 evenly spaced marks between the two marks by subdividing by 2 six times. Why not use the boiling point of water? The simple answer is that it is too hot. You would end up with a thermometer unsuitable for measuring outdoor temperatures in a fancy garden, which I imagine were the most profitable sales of the thermometers.
Notice that 32 is also a power of two, and that there are 180 degrees between the boiling point of water and the freezing point.
According to this cute chart:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/whats_in_barrel_oil.html
A little more than 50% of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline.
And this little tidbit from the plastics industry:
Less than
oil goes into making all the plastic bags used in the US while 93% - 95% of every barrel of
crude oil is burned for fuel and heating purposes. Although they are made from natural gas or
oil, plastic bags actually consume less fossil fuels during their lifetime than do compostable
plastic and paper bags.
http://www.plasticsindustry.org/about/fbf/myths+facts_grocerybags.pdf
--
Seriously, how many pounds of plastic bags could you possibly be using in a year? How many pounds of plastic on in your car? A weekly 15 gallon fill-up is about 90 pounds of fuel, or a little less than 2.5 tons a year. My whole car doesn't weight that much, and most of it is steel.
Save your bags if it makes you feel good, but it ain't gonna make any real difference.
I agree with your overall conclusion that hydrogen cars are probably not going to happen, ever. Hydrogen is difficult to make, difficult to transport, difficult to dispense, difficult to store on vehicle, and difficult to utilize. We have not really solved any of these issues. And as you said, the only real advantage is that it burns clean (sort of, if you burn it in an ICE you will likely still have NOx issues).
I don't think anyone would complain if they got more bandwidth for http traffic than they paid for. But if you are going to throttle any traffic to 2mps, then you need to sell it as 2mps service.
Same opinion here. Some printers work fine plugged directly into the PC but will not work when plugged into a hub. Same printer works, but only locally, printing over the network causes USB errors. Some devices are perfectly happy plugged into a hub, until you plug another similar device into the same hub, then after a while neither device works. (Not a voltage problem, I checked that.) I have had USB hardrrives pretent to work until I went to retrieve the data and found the entire drive corrupted. (And yes, I had deleted my local copies). I have seen notebooks that simply would not work with certain flash drives, and no one could tell me why.
I have built USB devices, and they work, sometimes, under certain conditions (mostly when they have a port all to themselves). Plug a bunch of them into a USB 2.0 hub and you can forget it, but a (hard to find) USB 1.1 hub works OK (albeit slow).
And as other posters have pointed out, the one-sides flat plug is not well though out, the "other end" is pointlessly far from universal, USB extension cords are "illegal" but still quite common...
It has been over 10 years now and USB is still buggy as hell. It makes me long for the old days of the old Centronics printer connector. Once you got past some basic.. finding a free interupt, the bi-directional settings, the correct "lp" numbers... those things always worked. At this point, I think USB is a do-over.
The aluminum is light (atomic weight 13) and you get up to three hydrogen atoms per aluminium atom. Unfortunately, the water is heavy (molecular weight 18) and you get only a single hyrogen atom from it. The resulting aluminum oxide is also very heavy.
What could really make this work is to extract the water from the air, react it with the aluminum and just dump the spent aluminum oxide / hydroxide on the ground. We are in no danger of ever running out of aluminum.
No more split screen! One worker wears red glasses, one worker wears blue glasses! Or just use a pair of cheap 3D glasses and keep one eye shut! Wait, sharing a screen using shuttered or color-coded glasses might just work, I better patent this...
I love the idea of those USB power strips. Imagine being able to power your notebook off of one! That could end the different power brick for every notebook mess.
On USB 2.0 vs. FireWire400/800: I know that this subject as been beat to death, but anyway... Higher speed are always nice, but I am not often limited by the bus speed. What I LOVE about USB is that the specification is open. Anyone can download it. You can build your own USB gizmos in your basement; no large investment is required. There are plenty of chips that support USB available in small quantities (like 1 or 2). You can even make USB look just like a serial port, making said gizmos compatable with LABView with no driver fuss. Try that with FireWire! Now if I could make all my little lab gizmos powered off the USB bus as well, heck, I might never go home.
I know FireWire is popular for video transfer, but isn't that what DVI is for? For data transfer, you don't have to run DVI in real time, and you can run 3.9 Gbits/sec over DVI today.
Lets see. Cost of the car = $30,000
Gas for 100,000 miles at 33.33mpg figuring $5/gallon = $15,000
That is only $285,000 more to go. Any clue where that money is supposed to go?
That is $28,500 a year over 10 years.
Give me a break.
-Charles B. Naumann
Here is an idea: create a chain of about 8 carbon atoms and attach 18 hydrogen atoms to this carbon chain. That is about 16% hydrogen by weight! Not only that, it is an easy to handle liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. Imagine simply pouring a liquid into your car for refueling!
I have not seen an OEM CD of Windows in years. You might get a hidden partion on the harddrive containing an image to reset you machine it state when it left the OEM, you might not. Bottom line, there is really is no way to re-install windows on a repaired machine to make it pass WGA.
And this is very easy to do. Every polling places has a stack of blank numbered sheets and a couple of laser printers. The ballots are printed on demand (allowing last minute changes) instead of months before the election. All numbered ballots must be accounted for. The voters mark the printed ballots with a black pen. You are given a tear-off receipt with each ballot. The ballots are optically scanned. The results from each ballot are posted on the internet. You can go online and check your results. If you ballot is not marked as you though, you can lodge a complaint, the ballot can be pulled, the tear off can be verified, and the ballot inspected for tampering.
Paper trail, last minute changes, private, fully verifyable, and reasonably cheap. What is missing?
I think we already don't use Li-Ion AA's and AAA's because they're cost-prohibitive
The bigger problem is cell voltage. A Li-Ion cell puts out about twice the voltage of an alkaline or NiMH cell. A lot of electronic devices cannot handle the higher cell voltage. This is the main reason you do not see Li-Ion cell in conventional button-top AA format at Wal-Mart.
Could you give a few more details? What was the teachers name, what shool and the localtion of the school? Also, do you know any details of the explosion?
Fusion reactors also produce radioactive byproducts that will have to be delt with. Fusion produces gobs of neutrons, and neutron bombardment makes other materials radioactive. Also, most fusion reactions involve tritium which in made in a conventional nuclear reactor.
A survey by the Energy Saving Trust found that the average household has up to 12 gadgets left on standby or charging at any one time. It also showed that more than £740m of electricity was wasted by things being left ticking over.
£740m per year? That is about £2m/day... What does £2m buy, about 40kWh? With 24 hours in a day that comes to about 1.5Kw used by 12 devices on "Standby". That comes to 130W per device! Think of the heat put off by a 100W lightbulb. Does your cell phone charger get that hot? Does your DVD player? Does your stereo? I don't think so...
This is yet anyother article on the subject of standby power that is completely devoid of any actual calculations. Is it really so hard to show your work? How does the amount of standby power compare to the amount of "in use" power? Maybe standby power really is an issue, but until I actually see some real calculations I will remain a skeptic.
This would be a heck of a lot simpler than having every small business in every state register with the tax department of every state. Simply have the small business require out of state sales to be placed on a credit card, and report to the credit card company that the sale was of taxible goods. You credit card company bill you the sales tax, and sends a check to the state.
Another alternative is to have an alternate 10% federal Value added tax (higher than most state sales taxes). A merchant would have the option to _either_ charge its customers their state tax (and fool with all the required paper work) _or_ pay the federal sales tax. A merchant would then have the option of figuring out which was more worthwhile. Give your customers a small break in price, or simply their paper work.
My Series 1 TiVo took a lighnting hit last month and it knocked out the modem. I was paying by the month. I called to cancel my subscription, and the rep told asked if I was interested in a new Series 2 TiVo.
"No, not really."
"Have you _seen_ the new TiVos?"
"Yes, I have. They still only have a single tuner and very limited disk storage. I don't really care about all the other features." (I had upgraded my series 1 to 130 hours with my own 80G HD.)
I was also annoyed that they had just billed me for the next month of service that I had not used it and could not use, and they refused to give me a refund. And now this!
The funny thing is that I am still using my TiVo, I am just manually recording everything. Setting the clock will be a little difficult, but other than that, I have not really missed the TiVo Service that much, even though I subscribed to it for several years.
Most of their new Oscilliscopes still use floppies to store screen shots. Most of their Oscilliscopes do not support USB drives. Unlike a new computer, the useful lifetime of a lab instrument is measured in decades. Floppies will be around for a while.
Speaking of lab instruments, my new Stanford Research SR620 Time Interval Counter requires either an Epson MX80 printer or an HPGL plotter (either RS232 or IEE488) for simple hardcopy output, and requires and analog oscilliscope for a real time video display.
Auminum oxide is not used in thermite nor in the space shuttle booster. Thermite is Iron Oxide (Fe2o3) and Aluminum powder. The Shuttle Booster uses Ammonium Perchlorate as an oxidizer and Aluminum for fuel.
People are not afriad of hydrogen because of the Hindenberg any more than they are afraid of gasoline because of the world trade center. Hydrogen is not used as a motor fuel because it is expensive to make and difficult to store. My fears of a hydrogen powered car have to do with storing a gas at 10,000 psi. Even an inert gas would be dangerous at the kind of pressures required to get hydrogen to a useful energy density.
It takes 8kWh to recharge for a 20 mile range. At 8 cents per kWh, that is 64/20 = 3.2cent/mile for fuel. If you have a 50mpg car, you would have to be paying $1.60/gallon for gas before you hit break-even. (When someone says 20-40 mile range, I think 20 mile range unless you are going downhill.) You also have to replace the batteries every 1-4 years.
There are only 5 planets that can been seen wandering in the sky with the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
It would cost a lot if you actually had to buy the pieces from LEGO. The cheapest LEGO available is a 2000 piece tub for $20, or 10 cents a piece. Unfortunately, that only contains bricks, not the plates and arches needed to build a WTC model. LEGO has been very slow to offer any bulk packages at all, and even those that are offered are still very limited and very expensive (around 10 cents a piece still, but you get the pieces you want.) At 500 pieces per floor, you are looking at an absolute minimum of about $5500 worth of bricks.
This is actually much better than it was a few years ago, when bulk packs were not even available. At that time, LEGO seemed genuinely disinterested in and threatened by people building and displaying original modeles built of LEGO. In fact, it went somewhat beyond that. Many people (myself included) have received almost hostile rejection letters when we have contacted LEGO with ideas of pictures of models.
As much as I enjoyed playing and modeling with LEGO, I have given it up due to the expense and the company's attitude.