GM Gasoline-Electric Car

[Captain Pink]

[quote="Martin Blank";p="716600"]A cubic meter of plutonium-88? It doesn't exist. Nuclear weapons that make use of plutonium in a highly-enriched state use only a few kilos of it, and they use longer half-life isotopes. I suspect that a cubic meter of Pu-88 might be close to, if not past, critical mass.

[/quote]
I was speaking theoretically (as I said before).

Incorrect. Outdoor pools in the US are emptied during the winter months. They are not heated during the summer.

Not incorrect. With this technology you can run them even at winter. And if you do not want to, you just use it to warm your house and in the summertime to warm the pool. simple.

Explain. Show us that Solar or Water or Wind are taxed more than Coil and Oil.

My mistake. I was speaking about the row Coal-> fossil gas.

They are exotic in that they require digging. An air heat pump sits outside the home on a small slab of concrete. A geothermal requires digging a deep hole or trench.

technically they are not.

10-12 feet? By any chance does that still have to be in soil/dirt or can it be through anything? I know in my area, once you dig down 6 inches, you hit solid clay for who knows how far. Other people I know from other states hit bedrock at 6 feet.

If you have a well, you can use this. And you do not have to go so deep. I found articles on the web (sorry, only German) that speak of 2 meters (~6 feet) and a pipeline laying 2 times around the house.

[HTRN]

[quote="Lucksi";p="716605"]And that is why we ship our radioactive waste to France.[/quote]

They're french, they deserve it!

Captain Pink - They can put a vertical loop in the same hole as a well pump? I was under the impression they filled the hole with grout after sticking in the ground loop.

Adciv - Virtually everything I've seen says a horizontal loop goes in roughly 9-12 feet underground - Clay is meaningless, you're not digging it by hand. Bedrock however.. The third option is a water loop, but that requires a decent size body of water to reject/absorb heat from.

Deacon - I'm intimately familiar with most forms of building construction. Insulation is "Cheaper" but not "Cheap" - for instance, the common retrofit insulation when doing siding, Polyisocynaurate board, runs $27 for a 2'x8'x2" at Home Depot. To do my house in a single layer, would cost approx $4K in materials alone. The increasingly popular spray foam insulation is roughly 20% more than traditional fiberglass batt, and isn't "DIY", you have to hire a contractor. While "superinsulated" houses are becoming more common at the higher ends of the market, particularly for custom homes and renovation, it's still relatively rare to see it mass built "builder" homes.


HTRN

[Deacon]

HTRN, the point is that building your home with a radiant barrier system in the attic and reducing the number of windows on the western wall (and eastern, I guess) and other such steps I listed are relatively easy and inexpensive and generally are not dependent on local geography, and they do often make a tangible difference in the value of most homes to most buyers. Therefore they make more sense than installing exotic systems that will take decades to pay for themselves...

[Captain Pink]

Captain Pink - They can put a vertical loop in the same hole as a well pump? I was under the impression they filled the hole with grout after sticking in the ground loop.

I have a different approach on this. You put in the pump and use it to pump the water up into a heat exchanger that is placed near/at the heat pump. When the water has left the heat exchanger, you can bring the water back into the earth (not in the same well!) or you can take the water and use it for your toilette, washing machine aso. It is still clean, but no drinking water (in German it is called "gray water"). The positive effects are:
1. You need only one well.
2. You can use the well for water supply, too
3. You can use a plate heat exchanger instead of a loop.

For the insulation, you can use hemp instead of fiberglass. It is roughly 15% cheaper than fiberglass, technically the same and 100% natural.

[Deacon]

Plus, when your house burns down, you won't care for a while.

[Martin Blank]

[quote="adciv";p="716616"]Martin Blank, I'm pretty sure Pu-88 does not exist.[/quote]
Pu-88 does not exist, though Pu-238 does (and has a half-life of 88 years). I misspoke, crossing isotopes with half-lives.

[quote="Captain Pink";p="716621"][quote="Martin Blank";p="716600"]A cubic meter of plutonium-88? It doesn't exist.[/quote]
I was speaking theoretically (as I said before).[/quote]
You take a case that cannot possibly exist and use it to attempt to prove your point? How about dealing with the reality instead? Radioactive waste is, in the US, to be stored in casks made of steel-reinforced concrete that in some cases has been tested by dropping it onto its corner, by running a locomotive into it at more than 80 miles per hour, and shooting an anti-tank missile at it. They chipped it.

[quote="Captain Pink";p="716836"]The positive effects are:
1. You need only one well.
2. You can use the well for water supply, too
3. You can use a plate heat exchanger instead of a loop.[/quote]
This depends on the water table, though. The local water table for me is about 115 feet underground.

For the insulation, you can use hemp instead of fiberglass. It is roughly 15% cheaper than fiberglass, technically the same and 100% natural.

Actually, you can't use hemp in the US. It's illegal to grow, and difficult to import. There are a few companies that manage to get in some hemp-based fabric for shirts, but they're niche markets, and the shirts are often much more expensive than their cotton counterparts.

[Martin Blank]

Industrial hemp is illegal to grow in the US with few exceptions. No variant of cannabis may be legally grown without a federal permit, and those are restricted solely to a handful of very small research farms that have incredibly tight security, and one farm that grows it for authorized medicinal marijuana uses. They're effectively impossible to get from the DEA, no matter what variant you intend to grow, security features you implement, or what the final production use will be.

[StruckingFuggle]

Hey, Martin, do you know why Industrial Hemp is so frowned upon, since you can't get high off of it?

[Martin Blank]

Depends on whom you ask. Some blame legislators for writing it too broadly, and then refusing to back down because they would look weak in the crimefighting. Those who believe it was well-written sometimes claim that it's too easy to hide some marijuana bushes in the midst of hundreds of acres of hemp. Others believe that there are industrial concerns (Monsanto is a commonly-cited name) that put a lot of money into keeping it illegal to ensure markets for their products, which industrial hemp may undercut. It may be a mix of all three.

[minsx]

[quote="HTRN";p="716645"]
Deacon - I'm intimately familiar with most forms of building construction. Insulation is "Cheaper" but not "Cheap" - for instance, the common retrofit insulation when doing siding, Polyisocynaurate board, runs $27 for a 2'x8'x2" at Home Depot. To do my house in a single layer, would cost approx $4K in materials alone. The increasingly popular spray foam insulation is roughly 20% more than traditional fiberglass batt, and isn't "DIY", you have to hire a contractor. While "superinsulated" houses are becoming more common at the higher ends of the market, particularly for custom homes and renovation, it's still relatively rare to see it mass built "builder" homes.

HTRN[/quote]

About 5 years ago, my parents insulated their home throughout using blow-in cellulose insulation. The method was simple, easy to do on an established home, and relatively cheap. Several months later, my mother noted that she was RECEIVING money from the gas company (her bill is averaged over the year, so what they'd been charging her for what they "thought" would be normal usage based on what they'd been using the year before was that far above and beyond what the actual usage was.)

I'd say that not only was the insulation cheap, but they noticed significant drops in their heating bills - significant enough to pay back the initial insulation costs relatively quickly.

[Captain Pink]

Plus, when your house burns down, you won't care for a while.

You know I was talking about cannabis sativa sativa, not cannabis sativa indica. You can smoke your door matte instead of cannabis sativa sativa. This makes you higher.

You take a case that cannot possibly exist and use it to attempt to prove your point? How about dealing with the reality instead?

The math behind this was reality enough for me.

Hemp isn´t illegal to grow. At least not in germany. And I wouldn´t be surprised if it is legal in the US too.

Actually, seeing how paranoid the US are when it comes to drug related stuff, it wouldn´t surprise me if it was outlawed.

Because there is hemp and there is hemp.

Actually, the growing of cannabis sativa sativa (industrial hemp) is regulated in Germany, too. A farmer who wants to grow this, has to report it to the officials (Landwirtschaftskammer) and every growing circle a controller form the officials pays a visit to the farmer and takes a look at the field where the hemp grows, takes some samples of it and analysis the samples. This way it is assured that no cannabis indica is grown there.
in the resent past the voices in government became louder to legalize cannabis indica, but it is not through yet. We shall see if it comes back to the early 1900s, when cannabis was legal, no mater if it was indica or sativa and German soldiers during the first world war had a pipe for cannabis in their standard equipment.

Others believe that there are industrial concerns (Monsanto is a commonly-cited name) that put a lot of money into keeping it illegal to ensure markets for their products, which industrial hemp may undercut.

Personally I believe strongly in this. Hemp was a cheap source for textiles, that putted high pressure on the producers of artificial textiles. Just take a look at the company that manly supported Harry Anslinger on his "war" against cannabis: Du Pont.

This depends on the water table, though. The local water table for me is about 115 feet underground.[/quot]
Sure. If it makes no sense to drill a well, stand by the air-heat pump.

I'd say that not only was the insulation cheap, but they noticed significant drops in their heating bills - significant enough to pay back the initial insulation costs relatively quickly.

If you are using intelligent controls and modern technology for your central heating and your air supply, you can reduce the bill to a few dollars a year or stop paying money to the gas company at all.

[Deacon]

[quote="Captain Pink";p="717111"]

You take a case that cannot possibly exist and use it to attempt to prove your point? How about dealing with the reality instead?

The math behind this was reality enough for me.[/quote]
Personally I think tulips are dangerous. I've done the math, and if you pile enough tulips on top of each other they can crush a human being. The numbers don't lie.

Actually, the growing of cannabis sativa sativa (industrial hemp) is regulated in Germany, too.

This is not shocking. Is there anything in Germany that isn't regulated?

you can reduce the bill to a few dollars a year or stop paying money to the gas company at all.

By not using gas?

[StruckingFuggle]

... I dion't know, Deacon, the mass per tulip is so minor that I doubt you could phyiscally pile up enough to physically crush someone at earth-normal gravities.

... hm. Maybe if you had some sort of tulipshaft or something ... hmmmm.... /me ponders this, which is more interesting than the thread at the moment

[Bigity]

If a sudden burst of elephant crap can kill a man, so can a sufficient mass of tulips forming above someone's head.

[LQDMTL]

Tulip death is what I fear most... /me shudders