GM Gasoline-Electric Car

[Deacon]

Pinkers, that sounds like a logistical nightmare. Who's going to be driving around town servicing all these little generators? Why would they not simply build them all at a single location?

[Captain Pink]

[quote="Deacon";p="714409"]Pinkers, that sounds like a logistical nightmare. Who's going to be driving around town servicing all these little generators? Why would they not simply build them all at a single location?[/quote]
Roflmao! Deacon this is a good joke. Guess who is driving around town and servicing heating devices of homes?

[Blaze]

I hate to tell you this, but a generator that gets used 100% of the time is FAR more complicated and prone to breakage than a furnace.

Try again.

[Captain Pink]

Guess what, Blaze. I am working for about 5 years now in this business and we do much servicing. I never ever did servicing on a furnace. This is what a chimne sweeper does.
We have to deal more with things like a boiler with calorific value technology and matrix burner on natural gas or oil basis with remote supervising and modern automatic control systems or for other systems: sun heat collectors aso.
I think you have a quite ...oldfashioned view on my job. The modern mechanic for central heating devices has to deal with devices that are far more complecated than a furnace.
The MicrCHPs are not much more than boilers that use some of the energy of the water to produce electrical power.
Did I try good?

[Blaze]

Well, you're using very european terms for heating devices, then.

Here, a furnace is any gas, electric, coal or wood burning device that heats your home. Some of them are very advanced and technical, and still nowhere close to a generator, and none of them run 100% of the time, either.

[Captain Pink]

Coal? Electric??? You guys make me shiver! No wonder in USA is such a waste of energy and main source fossil CO2 per inhabitan! Just to make a staitment on coal: Coal produces the double amount of fossil CO2 per kWh as natural gas does. Not quite climate friendly. And my 2 cents about electric energy for house warming (or for warming in general): Are you nuts? Electric energy is mostly created with heat (at least in all classical powerplants like coal, oil, gas and nuclear pps) with much effort and low efficency. Now you want to use this to turn it back into warmth? Do you have any idea how much energy this costs? I guess not.

To the running times: Of cause they do not run 100% of the time.
So let us take a look at the times such a device is not runing. It is mustly runing, when you need a warm house, which is simply spoken when it is cold. When it is hot outside, people do not need central heating in their homes (but only if they do not use the device to warm their drinking water). What makes the outside hot? Yes, the sun. So if you combine MicroCHPs and photocells, you can produce electric energy most time of the year.
If you also combine it with efficent energy storing and efficent energy usage, you can cover up most of the need for electric energy. If you add non heat producing energy sources like water (e.g. tides) and wind, you can surely satisfy the majority of electric energy need.

[minsx]

[quote="Blaze";p="714447"]Well, you're using very european terms for heating devices, then.

Here, a furnace is any gas, electric, coal or wood burning device that heats your home. Some of them are very advanced and technical, and still nowhere close to a generator, and none of them run 100% of the time, either.[/quote]

He didn't say everyone uses a coal burning furnace in their home, he was referring to the miscommunication that was going on because it doesn't appear that you're referring to the same things you say you are.

From wikipedia

In American English, the term furnace on its own is generally used to describe household heating systems based on a central furnace (known either as a boiler or a heater in British English), and sometimes as a synonym for kiln, a device used to fire clay to produce ceramics.

In British English the term furnace is used exclusively to mean industrial furnaces which are used for many things, such as the extraction of metal from ore (smelting) or in oil refineries and other chemical plants, for example as the heat source for fractional distillation columns.

Most people I know have a gas furnace that heats their home.

[Captain Pink]

Aha. Ok. Misunderstanding I guess. But I can asure you, that a MicroCHP or BHKW as we say in german, has much to do with my job. It is discribed in the book we used at job-educatin-school and we did servicing on a bigger one a while ago. simply spoken, it is a motor running on fuel like fossil gas or oil. It powes a generator and produces heat as a byproduct, which is used to heat homes or in the case of the one we did servicing for a whole industrial area.

[adciv]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="714456"]Coal? Electric??? You guys make me shiver! No wonder in USA is such a waste of energy and main source fossil CO2 per inhabitan! Just to make a staitment on coal: Coal produces the double amount of fossil CO2 per kWh as natural gas does. Not quite climate friendly. And my 2 cents about electric energy for house warming (or for warming in general): Are you nuts? Electric energy is mostly created with heat (at least in all classical powerplants like coal, oil, gas and nuclear pps) with much effort and low efficency. Now you want to use this to turn it back into warmth? Do you have any idea how much energy this costs? I guess not.[/quote]

The USA has lots of Coal. Little natural gas. It's used in power plants, not homes. By the way, while your natural gas may not release as much CO2, it does release H2O, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.

As to the costs of heating a home with electricity. Yes, I do, if you are talking financial costs. You see, my parents have an all-electric house. No natural-gas or heating oil AT ALL. The heating is generally done through a heat-pump with electric heating only done if it gets too cold. And no, they are not rich.

Ah, one more thing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_cooling_tubes

Sorry, not sure what the de article is called. However, it mentions the "German Passive House". Basically, air is warmed by the ground in winter and chilled in the summer.

[Gowerlypuff]

[quote="adciv";p="714719"]The USA has lots of Coal. Little natural gas. It's used in power plants, not homes. By the way, while your natural gas may not release as much CO2, it does release H2O, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.[/quote]

Now, this may be a trap or something, but how is WATER a greenhouse gas?

[adciv]

Water Vapor, not water, actually. Seeing as how this is coming right out of combustion, it's most likely still a vapor.

Water vapor is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas and accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor concentrations fluctuate regionally, but human activity does not directly affect water vapor concentrations except at very local scales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse ... ater_vapor

[HTRN]

A coupla things about burning coal..

We burn coal because we have lots of it, and it's cheap. Mostly Bituminous coal(relatively "dirty" compared to Anthracite), but because of scrubbers and other tech, it's increasingly "clean" in terms of emissions. What you neglect to mention is the relative costs - Coal is less than half the cost of Natural gas.

Natural gas as a fuel source for power generation in "Peaker plants", small power generation facilities that are brought online during peak demand periods Con Edison has a bunch of them throughout NYC..

If Emissions were our sole concern, we would be building CANDU reactors everywhere, but that drags politics in...

Oh! Adciv, alot of people still use coal as primary heat source - it's somewhat common in Eastern PA, as the "Coal Region", the largest region of Anthracite coal is there - they use an auger and coal bin to feed the furnace/boiler. Heck, people heat with corn in the midwest, and I personally have a cast iron wood stove as supplemental heat. There are even Woodfired boilers that you put outside your house(reduces fire hazard).

One more thing - "Furnaces" when referring to home heating usually refers to forced hot air, "boilers" referrs to water systems.


HTRN

[adciv]

About how many people are still on coal? I didn't think many were in an area where they couldn't get something else such as heating oil. Although, I wonder what they use in the back woods of Alaska, where the only way in is an hours flight by propeler-plane.

Oh, personally I'd preffer aFast Breeder Reactor over a CANDU reactor. New methods of refining would eliminate having any weapons grade material at any point in the process.

[HTRN]

[quote="adciv";p="714870"]About how many people are still on coal? I didn't think many were in an area where they couldn't get something else such as heating oil. Although, I wonder what they use in the back woods of Alaska, where the only way in is an hours flight by propeler-plane.[/quote]

I couldn't tell you how many are still on coal - but I can tell you is that in the middle of Stroudsburg, PA, they had a coal dealer, selling it by the 50lb bag, and would deliver it in bulk.. They had a solid chunk of Anthracite about 2 feet square, by 5 feet high sitting outside the office door, biggest lump of coal I've ever seen. I think it's predominantly still used in the Eastern PA, because Anthracite burns so clean, it gets by the EPA. Why use it? Because it's frikken cheap, that's why!

And oh, Fast breeder reactors are not at the economically viable stage, unlike CANDU's. CANDU's are meltdown proof, as well as not requiring uranium enrichment. Canada is the nation with the most experience with them. There is ongoing development to mitigate some of the drawbacks of the design, mainly the need for a heavy water coolant, it's called the Avanced CANDU Reactor(ACR). Like you mentioned, Breeder reactors, is they can be used as "dual purpose" which makes the US very, very nervous when certain people start building them.


HTRN

[adciv]

A properly designed breeder reactor is meltdown proof. That is not something unique to CANDUs. Besides, it also supplies it's own fuel and allows us to keep using nuclear power for a very long time.