Evironmentally Friendly Explosive Refridgerator

Propane as a refrigerant? Cool.

cheers

Yea, Cool

Till its Hot. Mike :-)

Yes. Propane indoors is a bad idea in general. Never store a gas grill in your garage either, for pretty much the same reason.

This reminds me of a not-so-funny story about my Grandfather however:

Waaaay back in the 1930's, he went into the refrigerator business. Only problem was, he set up shop in rural Mississippi where most folks didn't even have electricity!!

I was told he sold about 6 of them total. Mostly to folks using them as ice boxes (i.e, not plugged in.) It was years before the family let him live that down, or so I've been told.

He eventually turned out to be quite successful..., just not in refrigerators.

So if you take all the amount of environmental benefit for the ones that _don't_ explode, and you subtract out the amount of environmental damage caused by the cleanup for the ones that _do_ explode, is the net environmental impact positive or negative?

Unlike the head in the sand "let's party harder" anti-warmingists that like to drivel onto this group, I do care more about the environment than about where my next beer is coming from.

But gawd some of the environmentalists can be uber-dippy.

"Martin Riddle" wrote in news:h7s5g3$fmj$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

Way back when, a lot of fridges used ammonia...

Few years back, I bought several cans of "air" for cleaning out keyboards, computers and whatever. Didn't read the flammable warning until later; yes, the stuff burned quite enthusiastically. I think isobutane was one of the constituents.

I check for, and buy only the non-flammable stuff now.

--Damon

Actually it isn't. Butane is worse. Several of the mixes used in the immediate post CFC era are only any good if the fridge or freezer is in a kitchen at ambient >10C and loses efficiency below that temperature. If the external temperature drops below about 2C they stop working entirely. The working fluid at the internal pressure liquifies and sits in the reservoir. This makes the whole thing useless in an unheated garage. The warning is in the small print of the guarantee.

Regards, Martin Brown

Industrial heavyweight plant still does at least in parts of the chemical industry. I remember one plant with a 30' flywheel on the compressor of a plant making batches of hollow rectangular ice cubes that were roughly man sized for the azo dye process. You could always smell a trace of ammonia in the air.

It is way too poisonous for domestic use but still an extremely good working fluid for the right temperature range of freezing water. There were a lot of nasty accidents with it in homes.

Regards, Martin Brown

Industrial heavyweight plant still does at least in parts of the chemical industry. I remember one plant with a 30' flywheel on the compressor of a plant making batches of hollow rectangular ice cubes that were roughly man sized for the azo dye process. You could always smell a trace of ammonia in the air.

It is way too poisonous for domestic use but still an extremely good working fluid for the right temperature range of freezing water. There were a lot of nasty accidents with it in homes.

Regards, Martin Brown

It is probably positive assuming you like have an ozone layer and be able to walk around outside without being harmed by UV radiation. Pretty annoying though if your fridge explodes - a rare event first time I have heard of it actually happening. Maybe they should add a mercaptan to it.

Badly installed bottled gas central heating is a much more common problem and a *much* bigger bang. A house not far from me expired spectacularly this way with an illegally fitted CH system - insurance loss adjusters could not believe their luck payout was zero.

Main problem with the propane/butane/pentane fridge mixes apart from flammability is they are useless in garages during winter.

Unfortunately there is a pretty weird green fringe and always has been.

Regards, Martin Brown

Ah, the unintended consequences of ozonism AND warmingism.

Feh. Rich

What's the cost of the injuries caused by these exploding "environmentally-friendly" fridges?

Doesn't this mean that "environmentally-friendly" means "human-hostile"?

I'm proud to be a warmingism denier primarily because despite the increases in "greenhouse gases", the mean temp of the Earth has not only not increased in the last decade or so, but may actually be declining. Or are you a denier of plain factual evidence?

Also, what have you personally done to "protect the environmnet"? Have you forsaken your car and now use a bicycle or walk? Do you cut ice blocks from the lake in the winter, store them in sawdust in the icehouse, and use that to cool your beer? Where do you get your beer?

I think that's a prerequisite to joining the Church of Warmingism.

Thanks, Rich