Re: [Biofuel] exclusive: Bush Plot To Bomb His Arab Ally
[Massive Snip] Exclusive: Bush Plot To Bomb His Arab Ally Madness of war memo By Kevin Maguire And Andy Lines 11/22/05 The Mirror -- -- PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a Top Secret No 10 memo reveals I'm angry that Bush is rolling back environmental policy in favor of an extract and consume policy. I'm angry that we have made a hash of the war in Iraq and alieniated the US from the world community in the process. I'm livid about our energy policy. But I don't understand what is wrong with considering all options in war. This one was (wisely) discarded. Maybe it should not have made it up the to the president (ie been shot down at a lower level). Had he gone through with it, then yes, very bad decision. But in the context of how can we win/be successful with Bush'es Iraq adventure, I am all for creative and comprehensive thinking. And I am all for eliminating bone headed ideas from that list. To a casual observer, it looks like that is exactly what happened. So what am I missing? thanks Tom Radiance Heating and Plumbing, Inc. (ROC 204149,204150) Tom Scheel 928-380-6294 ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Scientific method- Titration and another outraged reader.
I love the JtF site. Its very existence (and this mailing list) gives me confidence to go forward with biodiesel. So I totally understand the pride of creation and that the site is excellent. As a teacher I am aware that there is only one moment when you don't "get it" and after you "get it" you can't go back and be in that place of not getting it. What is jargon? Its when "professionals" forget what words are special to their field and which are in the common lexicon. I think teaching is in essence smoothing the way to the "getting it" that moment for a motivated student. Anyways of all the items Brian brought up, the one that merited attention, in my opinion, was the "w/v". As a pre-newbie in creating biodiesel, I would not have known that term and honestly, would not have gotten it from context. Perhaps because I was taught pounds and gallons for weights and volumes, or perhaps I am not as smart as your average biodieseler (probably would have ignored it - not exactly careful process:ignore what doesn't make sense :-). Having supported that one admittedly small problem with the JtF site, I am not sure that we need to provide Brian with a new orifice for excrement removal, as he seems to be doing fine with the one he has. [Brian,hopefullyyou will get to "getting it" and get on with spreading the gospel of sustainable fuel]. If I may segue, folks on this site were recently talking about how to take sustainability to the next level, in terms of concrete actions. I think of the world in terms of tons of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) not released into the atmosphere. I make my living designing and installing solar thermal installations to heat water for space heating and domestic use. Making biodiesel is an extension of that by producing less CO2 and (I think a lot of people miss the significance of this) using current CO2, rather than stored from previous eras. So my idea is to figure out what greenhouse gasses you are avoiding, what you are using from current accounts, and talk it up. Put it in your email signature, talk to friends and family. If you want to escalate, talk about it, in concrete terms (ie we could keep x tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere if we ran the trash hauling trucks on bio-diesel) with someone in your local government. If you are not already maxed out (no non-current greenhouse gases), make a concrete commitment to reduce your gas emissions over the next 12 months. Mine, BTW is to run my business trucks on B-something large (100 in the summers, enough petro-diesel to keep the lines unclogged in winter). I haven't yet figured out what that translates into in terms of CO2 avoided and CO2 from current accounts. Tom ___ Keith I am exhausted after reading all of this. I think it should be good enough to say go back and read it again. You have a ton more patience than I do. All the best : Derick From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike WeaverSent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 5:24 PMTo: Biofuel@sustainablelists.orgSubject: Re: [Biofuel] Scientific method- Titration and anorther outraged reader. I personally am outraged. I just spent all weekend printing out and completely reading the JTF website.Though it pains me greatly to say this: I did find a comma out of place.Keith, I've done the hard work identifying the problem, now I expect you to fix it, instead of lolly-gagging, or was it shilly shallying?No matter. Enough. To arms.NB.I am sending a spare comma for your use under separate cover.-Miss GrundyKeith Addison wrote: LOL Brian!!!SNIP "Dissolve 1 gram of lye in 1 liter of distilled or de-ionized water(0.1% w/v lye solution)."Here, according to JtF, we are in the absolute most important firststep Titration, which a newbie is going to perform!Radiance Heating and Plumbing, Inc. (ROC 204149,204150)Tom Scheel928-380-6294___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Supplemental Heat by BD or byproduct
Forwarded Message From: "Terry Dyck" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Supplemental Heat by BD or byproduct Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 15:30:46 + To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.org Plain Text Attachment [ Download File | Save to Yahoo! Briefcase ] The most sensible solution for sustainable home heating is Geothermal Heat. Terry DyckNo it isn't. Your best bet is to build a home that doesn't require heating/cooling. This means lots of thermal mass, ideally exterior thermal mass, insulation, interior thermal mass (opposite of ICF insulated concrete form). Use R values greater than 3 (u value greater than .33) for your windows. Incorporate passive solar design. Next on the hierarchy is insulation (ie I already screwed up and used stick frame, what can I do). Continuous insulation (like foam wrapped around the outside of the home is good, because the wood in your home is conducting heat).If insulation were free, more would be better. Given it has a cost, stop somewhere around r30/r40. At that point your next insulation dollar should be spent on upgrading your windows (actually you should work on your windows once you get to R19 in the walls). You can get R8 windows (Canadian manufacturer). Once you have R8 (U.125) windows, add some more insulation to the walls/roof :-. Now why are our NC folks getting so cold? Because they are in an area of the country where summers are hot so people dont think so much about the cold. But consider this. Heating/cooling is in large part about the distance we get from 70 degrees F (cool enough in summer, toasty warm in winter). If your temperatures range from 30 to 100 you need 33% more energy to get warm on the coldest day (40 degrees F from 70) than you do get cool on the hottest day (30 degrees F from 70). But your house is optimized for cooling (no radiant in-floor heat), ducts placed for A/C, whimpy, expensive to operate furnaces.OK. Now on to active systems. Choice # 1 is solar heat (you can use an air coil (heat air by blowing it across a heat exchanger heated from solar) if for some reason you dont have/cant add radiant heat). Solar heat will always be cheaper than geothermal (all energy comes from the sun, the farther you get from the sun, the greater your real costs are (ie natural gas is cheaper than solar PV because we are deferring the pollution costs (start with 200 billion for Katrina recovery), we subsidize natural gas, etc. etc).For cooling, if you havent build a house like I told you to above and if your climate rarely sees 90s, do it with night-time cooling. If you need both heating and cooling and you have less than a month in the 90s, you can cool your home with radiant cooling, using passive geothermal (ie no compressor). If you live in a hot climate that needs cooling and heating, dont have radiant, have a poorly built home (ie 90+% of all homes), why then I agree with Terry, and geothermal (active) is your best bet (but throw up some PV to offset the electric requirements of your compressor (energy hog). It is much cheaper than trying to accomplish cooling your house by heat exchange with outside air (ie extracting cool from 100+ degree air) the traditional air conditioning system. But as I have said, geothermal will never be a cheaper option than solar for heating, and a well designed house elegantly side steps the whole issue. From: "Darryl McMahon" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.org To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Supplemental Heat by BD or byproduct Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:55:19 -0400 Kurt Nolte [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/3/05, Paul S Cantrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: iI live near Charleston, SC USA about 40 miles from the coast,/i so it gets cold for a few weeks or a couple of months depending on your definition of cold. Anyway heating season is about November to March and natural gas prices are through the roof. I'm really keen on what you find out as a solution here, too. I'm also an SC-er, Upstate, near Clemson/Anderson. Similar scenario, centralized heating with a forced air natural gas furnace in the basement, and we're staring an estimated two grand in heating costs for the winter. (Wide open house. Dumb idea when it freezes regularly during the winter. Heating all that airspace sucks up the gas. x.x) So if you get suggestions or ideas, please share? I'll be keeping an ear out myself and send some your way if I hear them. I can only assume these are large homes. I live in Ottawa, Canada. South Carolina is where our snowbirds go in the winter to get away from the cold. My annual natural gas heating bill, including hot water, is about Cdn$600, approximately US$500. It is a reasonably small house though. Heating season here is October to May. (But it's getting shorter courtesy of global warming.) I have some tips for you on reducing you heating bill. http://www.econogics.com/en/natgas.htm You
Re: [Biofuel] solar heat exchanger
A viable solar installation has solar collection, heat exchange, and storage. I've proposed a system that combines heat exchange and storage, thus giving you efficiency of design. The storage tank and the draindown tank can be the same tank, thus removing a maintainance/failure item (glycol - which likes to leak, is less efficient than water as a heat transfer medium, costs $8/gallon (in the US)). Plus you are saving time as it looks like you are hunting around and experimenting with low percentage ideas (PVC/CPVC = PITA). The proposed system does require a pump (you should be able to use two circulators in series - read your pump sizing charts). As to "DHW through excessive piping" - I presume you are talking about pressure drop. That is solved by taking your 3/4" supply and running it throughthree 1/2" loops in your heat exchanger. And you are only adding 100 to 120 feet of run, so the pressure drop should be manageable (even if you kept it a single 3/4" loop in the heat exhanger. Tom Ken wrote: Tom,Does a drain down system simplify anything other than the heatexchanger and eliminate the use of glycol? Or course, you're addingthe drain down. It almost seems like a wash (there is a pun in theresomewhere, I'm sure). I would like to use my solar hot water forspace heating as well - either radiant heat or with a liquid to airheat exchanger and blower. Either way, I think I'd prefer a closedloop so that I'm not pumping DHW through excessive piping.Am I missing something else? If the goal is to keep it simple, do two things differently than you are contemplating: 1 - make your heat exchanger by putting multiple loops of coiled copper in a polypropylene tank - at most you will need soldering skill if you want to break up a 3/4 or 1" flow into multiple 1/2" coils (surface area = good). One logical loop for (may be many loops of a smaller pipe diameter) for the load (ie DHW or hydronic heat) and (2 below) 2 - use a "drain down" open system instead of glycol. This allows you to use water everywhere. A pump (not a circulator) pumps the water up to your rooftop collectors when the system senses available heat (standard, cheap solar differential controls) and gravity drains it down when the system is not in use [this method requires that the panels be above the storage tank and that the pipes exposed to freezing are graded towards the storage tank - usually very easy to do] Note that the PP tank in step one above is the drain down tank and storage tank for your hot water (they can be separated if desired, and a larger tank/multiple tanks will provide additional storage, which is the key to effective solar hydronic installations). So you end up with one (open system) tank full of hot water from the sun, heating your coils of copper, containing the water from your (closed system) DHW. Similar technique (add a logical coil) for the hyrdonic side. Just make sure you don't always "preheat" your hydronic -sometimes the return water from your heating system will be hotter than your solar storage - you need a control to tell you whether there is heat available for the hyrdonic system (not an issue for preheating DHW - your solar storage temp will be almost always be above your groundwater temp).Radiance Heating and Plumbing, Inc. (ROC 204149,204150)Tom Scheel928-380-6294___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Polaris as heat exchanger (was solar heat exchanger...)
The Polaris flue is a 2" diameter heat exhanger. That is how the Polaris achieves 95%+ efficiency ratings. That is the good news. The bad news is that the source of that heat is that 100k+ BTU gas burner you tossed out. So you will not get the short recovery times. What is your square footage of collector? (you would need roughly ten 4'X10' panels to match the oringal 100k BTU (not suggesting you do that, especially given that your heat exchanger can't exchange that much heat)). You will need to move more GPM (gallons per minute) than "normal" becuase of the large flue size. And your post identified the biggest problem, your surface area per volume is low (surface area=good). All of that said,I can't say it won't work. Please update on your progress/results. HiI have been following this thread. My plan for the heat exchange between the solar collector and the potable hot water system is to modify a discarded gas fired Polaris hotwater heater. The tank of this hotwater heater is made of stainless. I have pulled out all the gas burner guts out of it, made a plate to close off the bottom of the heater end. I hope to acheive the heat tranfer by circulating hot water from the collectors throught the flue of this tank. this setup does not leak but I am not sure how well it will work as a heat exchanger as the surface area of the flue is not all that large.stanRadiance Heating and Plumbing, Inc. (ROC 204149,204150)Tom Scheel928-380-6294___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Double wall heat exchange - Solar Hot Water Heater
If the goal is to keep it simple, do two things differently than you are contemplating: 1 - make your heat exchanger by putting multiple loops of coiled copper in a polypropylene tank - at most you will need soldering skill if you want to break up a 3/4 or 1" flow into multiple 1/2" coils (surface area = good). One logical loop for (may be many loops of a smaller pipe diameter) for the load (ie DHW or hydronic heat) and (2 below) 2 - use a "drain down" open system instead of glycol. This allows you to use water everywhere. A pump (not a circulator) pumps the water up to your rooftop collectors when the system senses available heat (standard, cheap solar differential controls) and gravity drains it down when the system is not in use [this method requires that the panels be above the storage tank and that the pipes exposed to freezing are graded towards the storage tank - usually very easy to do] Note that the PP tank in step one above is the drain down tank and storage tank for your hot water (they can be separated if desired, and a larger tank/multiple tanks will provide additional storage, which is the key to effective solar hydronic installations). So you end up with one (open system)tank full of hot water from the sun, heating your coils of copper, containing the water from your (closed system)DHW. Similar technique (add a logical coil) for the hyrdonic side. Just make sure you don't always "preheat" your hydronic -sometimes the return water from your heating system will be hotter than your solar storage - you need a control to tell you whether there is heat available for the hyrdonic system (not an issue for preheating DHW - your solar storage temp will be almost always be above your groundwater temp). Tom From: Ken Dunn [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Double wall heat exchange - Solar Hot Water HeaterDate: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:53:41 -0400To: Biofuel@sustainablelists.orgKjell,I will certainly give this a try for my own purposes, it seems simpleenough. But, I can operate a TIG and have access to one. Unfortunately, a TIG welder and the associated experience are notwidely spread. I do want to keep this project as Appropriate aspossible. So, I'm trying to find materials that are as readilyavailable as possible. Also, I plan to use propolene glycol so, thereis the issue of double walls. I could certainly adapt this ideaaccordingly. Its really too bad that brazing the plate togetherwouldn't be sufficient - that would make it an easier DIY.Thanks a bunch,Take care,KenOn 9/27/05, Kjell Löfgren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: Ken, to avoid the tube bending business you can use a plate heat exchanger - more compact but if DIY you have to do some welding. Cut two equally sized pieces of *thin* stainless steel plate. Make about two dimples about 2 mmSNIPRadiance Heating and Plumbing, Inc. (ROC 204149,204150)Tom Scheel928-380-6294___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
