Another prototype

Absolutely. Just used it. Kettle, drip cone, Peet's French Roast. With homemade bisquits, cooked with gas. Mighty tasty.

Electricity is fine for some things, but not for space heating or for stovetop cooking or for fake fireplaces. Hey, I'm an electrical engineer.

The old pipes are rusting, so they are being upgraded. They sneak yellow plastic tubes inside the old pipes, run them at higher pressure, and add regulators at every house. Saves tearing up the streets.

What they should have done, 150 years ago, was to put big underground pipes that water, gas, electricity, telaphone, cable TV lines could run through. They should have anticipated cable TV.

Our old house, built 1892, originally had gas illumination. I understand it was sooty and not much light.

Heating could be more efficient, with electricity or with gas, with some sort of heat pump system.

Some things, like bread and French sauces, aren't worth the labor and mess of doing at home. That's what restaurants are for.

You'll pry that rare, charred burger out of my cold, dead, sticky hands.

You 1 percenter you! Stop working so hard, your getting ahead. Damn capitalism, it's making people wealthy. What are we going to do? Mikek :-)

I discovered the secret to wealth and happiness. Marry a woman who has a good job.

Tell us what you really think! I'd quibble with unreliable, have you had a lot of repairs on electric stoves? Mikek

You mean the furnace that needs electricity for the thermostat? You can't have a house without electricity, but you can have a house without gas. That greatly increases your danger. Gas A/C has a very unique problem of potentially generating phosgene gas when a refrigerant leak occurs. I know someone who was affected by this. His daughter almost died.

The main problem with electric cooktops is that they respond so slowly. With gas, when you turn it down, it's down--no red hot element to cool. It's much easier to cook well with gas.

Gas ovens are useless, though--the pastry comes out tough and the roasts don't caramelize nearly as well.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I don't know, I think we spend about $1 a day for two of us. I like an occasional hot bath depending on how my back is feeling, but most of the time it is showers. I will ad, my water heater power use dropped by 1/2 when my daughter went to college. I have a power meter on my water heater that I use to track kWhs. At one time I was building solar collectors to heat my water, that was when I put the meter on my water heater. I have a log I can check to see what it is running lately. Mikek

The problem with using a heat pump for heating is that the exterior heat exchanger gets choked up with ice. A heat pump plus underground rock heat storage, say, might be a good solution. Geothermal seems to be a bit hit-or-miss.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Nope.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Where do you live that you have such problems? I may have lost power 5 times in six years. A couple of those were unknown to me except I noticed I had to reset the clocks, and twice the transformer across the street become defective. Istr it took 4 to 5 hrs to replace it last time. Long enough that I fired up the generator to keep my freezers running. Mikek

ke

on work off gas? Lose your electric power and you're back in the 18th centu ry living standard. Gas is good for powering cheap electric generators.

that much electricity to cook. Peak demand may be high but total energy con sumption is small. The one electric appliance that I agree is a hog is the hot water heater, but everything else is nominal now.

lot of people here (out side the range of district heating) have Geothermal it seems to work fine, it takes a lot of cooling to freeze your whole garde n ;)

The biggest problem I see with geothermal is that it isn't very hot so you pretty much need to have underfloor heating, radiators would need to be hug e compared to the ones for 80'C district heating

-Lasse

Well I married a type A+. She is always working. I once said having her around is like have two 3 year olds, constant activity. I'm not a type A, We have been driving each other nuts for 32 years ;-)

Mikek

There are large sections of the country where power is not assured, mostly the more rural areas. I have a place in central Virginia where the power can go out for short periods quite often... not sure just how often that is really. I just know clocks get disrupted a lot more often than my other house which seems to be once a month or two.

Hit or miss what??? You do understand geothermal does the heat exchange wit h the soil as opposed to the conventional method using air? There's a littl e extra overhead on installation because it requires a licensed well drille r to bore the holes. All the manufactured geothermal systems are at the top end of high efficiency, because that's what their clientele are after, so of course that costs more, which misleads people into thinking geothermal i s pricey, but it costs exactly the same as high efficiency air exchange sy stems.

Hit or miss, as in, do you actually get enough heat for the application. I've seen a couple of failures, both at universities. Failure is very expensive.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Was the faculty involved in the specifying the equipment and system parametrics??? That is a REALLY bad thing to do. I'm not aware of anything but success in this industry:

Despite what that article says, closed loop is THE way to go in residential for a variety of reasons.

You don't just plop the heat exchanger wherever it fits, they do take engineering samples of the soil, sand, rock at depth to gauge its conductivity and makeup.