Vox

Musings, rants, rambling, general nonsense

New Clear Days *

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | No Comments

Here in Arizona we are big fans of nuclear power, been using it for years. Of course, Palo Verde is an old plant – they all are since no one is allowed to build them anymore – but it still works, it still produces oodles & oodles of yummy clean, efficient electricity. How great if we could make more use of that sort of thing.

As Gregory Sullivan states in The Top 10 Steaming Heaps Of Eco-Friendly / Frugal Living Horse Dung:

You can build a tricked-out nuclear power plant for about ten billion dollars. If we’d spent the trillion or so of “stimulus” on 100 nuclear power plants, instead of on signs by the side of the highway telling us they’re thinking of paving the road again to fix the recession, the price of electricity would plunge, we could all afford to heat our house with electric baseboard heat, tell the Saudis to eat sand, and read our puny utility bills by incandescent light before we dropped them in the fireplace. And the 200,000 power plant construction jobs would have been, well, 200,000 more jobs than we got for the trillion.

“There’s ice on the inside of the windows, but don’t worry –- every room has a ceiling fan!”

* Yes, the title is a musical reference. I remember it clearly from my awesome brother’s awesome album collection 🙂

I updated my link to reflect a cached copy of Gregory Sullivan’s post (the formatting seems to have gotten fubar’d in the archives) Because of the difficulty that presents in reading, and because it seems in danger of disappearing completely, I am going to cut and paste it all here. I mean no disrespect or copyright infringement, I just want my readers to be able to see what I was referencing. If you find Sullivan’s original post somewhere other than the Right Network archives, let me know and I will link it.

Maine Family Robinson: The Top 10 Steaming Heaps Of Eco-Friendly / Frugal Living Horse Dung

by Gregory Sullivan | December 18, 2010

Well, it’s winter again. The economy is about as lively as an Amish rap group, we were promised Globalistical Warmening but all we got was frozen orange juice on the branches instead of in the freezer case. Our banks and credit card companies are treating us like a baby treats a diaper, and the government has mistaken us for galley slaves. If you’re in the media business, that can mean only one thing: Frugal living stories!

Frugal living stories are great because they appeal to the entire political spectrum. If you’re of a progressive stripe, you advocate (others) shivering and freezing in the dark to save the planet. If you’re a raging capitalist, you recommend shivering and freezing in the dark to save a couple bucks to buy Krugerrands and bury them in the yard. Either way, all the advice is hoarding and rationing and scrimping, and very little common sense.
Hoarding and rationing and misery smacks of the apocalypse, which is always more fun than muddling along; that’s why we enjoy reading about it. It’s also why Hollywood destroys the entire Earth in most movies. Apocalypse sells. Since I can offer only common sense, I doubt you’ll like it. Boring. Sorry.

So here’s our Top 10 Dumb Things Other People Want You To Do To Wreck Your House And Save Money

  1. CFLs: You don’t have to pass laws to force people to do things if they make any sense.

    Exhibit A: We’ll soon be squinting at things using only the wan, greenish-yellow, light-like waves dribbling out of the expensive, delicate, miniature Superfund sites screwed into our lamps where a proper lightbulb used to go.Yes, Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb use is already the law of the land, phased in over a period of years. We’re supposed to pay quintuple for one-fifth the light, all to save us from the dreaded “waste heat.”

    I live in western Maine. “Waste heat” is as mythical a beast as I’ve heard of. Rarer than honest State Senators and more elusive than pretty girls that pay for their own drinks. I’m thinking of going back to Coleman lanterns instead.Either way, imaginary problem solved.
  2. Venting clothes dryers indoors: You’ve purchased a very expensive, profoundly poorly designed and built home. You’ve wasted tens of thousands of dollars trying to turn it into a hermetically sealed dungeon in an effort to save four cents on heat, all so you can sit in the middle of it and worry about breathing outgassing formaldehyde from your eco-friendly IKEA furniture.

    Your latest bad idea, that was a bad idea in the seventies when I first heard it, is blowing thousands of CFM of hot air laden with gallons of wastewater and lint into your house instead of outside through a duct. If you’re educated, this sounds like a good idea, I guess, despite the fact it’s against the building code; actually wastes electricity because the dryer has to work harder to dry clothes using ambient air that’s approaching 100 percent humid; causes mold and mildew to grow on and in your walls, causing multiple respiratory infections, and occasionally, death. It soaks your batt insulation with water so it doesn’t work properly, which makes you turn your heat up; and it condenses on the inside of the exterior walls, rotting the framing and turning the OSB your house is likely sheathed with into something resembling shredded wheat that’s been left in a bowl of milk for an hour.

    All that assumes you’ve got an electric dryer. If you hook a gas dryer up like this, you’ll die of Carbon Monoxide poisoning first. My advice: Get a rope, and hang your clothes to dry — or hang yourself instead of waiting for Legionnaire’s Disease to take you.

    Either way, imaginary problem solved.
  3.  Boarding up your fireplace. It is called an “ornamental fireplace,” it’s true. It’s not a furnace. Then again, no one goes down in the basement to watch the furnace and sip hot chocolate while you snuggle with your cutie pie.

    I’ve never seen more foolishness written about anything that has to do with a house than the fireplace. Every house in a climate that requires heat should have one, and not one of those terrariums you burn LP in, either. I’m talking about a big brick thing in the middle of the house you can burn wood and electric bills in.

    Don’t enclose it in any way, except a firescreen to catch the sparks.
    Everything you’ve been told about what’s wrong with your fireplace is really a list of what’s wrong with your floor plan. It’s not your fireplace’s fault you have an open plan, or that you listened to Home and Garden TV and hung the TV over it. Load up your fireplace with wood, close the doors in the room it’s in (drive to the architect’s house and put toilet paper in his shrubs if you have an open plan), and crack a window to feed the fireplace with air.

    Bonus: A family of four will only produce one small bag of trash a week when every cardboard package from Amazon or piece of junk mail elicits a knowing look between spouses and the exclamation: Look honey! A BTU!
  4. Blanketing Your Water Heater – The government will often pay you to do this. That’s how you know it’s dumb.Your water heater is already insulated to death. Putting an insulation blanket around it often voids the warranty, and can cause a fire, too, in some cases. If you’re worried about the tiny loss of heat from your water heater, you should have considered putting it in a closet near living areas instead of in the frigid basement, or putting in two or three smaller water heaters near the fixtures they serve instead of one big one with pipes running all over. I’ve been called to houses where the pipes froze right next to a blanketed water heater. “Waste heat” is very rarely an accurate description.

    There’s that death-y downside aspect to going green again.
  5. Spray In Insulation – The home shows love this stuff, even though it costs way more to install than batt insulation. They tout the worst aspect of the stuff- it completely fills the wall cavity and doesn’t move — as its main selling point. Good luck making any modifications to your home in the future. Your electrician will need an axe instead of a little wire to fish a new circuit through your walls.

    Batt insulation works well enough, is cheap, and an amateur can install it better than a professional. Batt insulated walls don’t radiate all that much heat anyway. All your poorly located windows and doors do that. If you’re building a house, (I know, another mythical beast – a housing start) for the few dollars it costs, you should also put batt insulation in all your interior walls and floors, and your house will be quieter and your heating zones will finally mean something. By the way, some older spray foam insulation emits unbelievably toxic gas when there’s a house fire, so there’s that death-y downside aspect to going green again.
  6. Space Age Windows And Doors – Next time you hear things touted as “Space Age” whatever, it’s useful to recall the “Space Age” was sixty years ago.

    Elaborately designed, shoddily manufactured plastic doors and windows are about as cutting edge as Tang. Here’s another thing the government is paying shady contractors to do to your house to ruin it, expensively, subsidizing the destruction of perfectly good wooden windows and doors with tax credits.

    There’s a dirty little secret I’ll let you in on. Your 150 year-old windows with combination storms over them are almost as energy efficient as the most expensive triple-glazed argon-filled UV coated plastic wonders, and they’re probably already on the house. I’ve painted thousands of single-glazed windows that were a century or two old. I’ve never seen a plastic double-glazed window still in use after 25 years. Check that; not never — I admit, I have seen them, usually visible from the street due to the white cloudy smears between the glass panes when the seals give out.
  7. Open Floor Plans – On any TV show about real estate, everybody involved never calls anything a room. It’s always “the space.” This is the result of decades of poorly educated designers trying to turn a house into an airport lobby, because that’s what they studied in school.

    Except of course, the yard. There are no rooms inside, but the yard is now an “outside room,” and you’re instructed to build a kitchen and a living room out there. Might as well; the house is unlivable, because it’s a space instead of some usable rooms. They use the adjective “open” as an unqualified good, too. It isn’t.If your house is a big, undifferentiated run-on cavern, all the advice you’re likely to get on saving energy is really just the fools who advised you to build a bad house trying to divert attention from their crimes by yelling: Look! Over there! An air leak! Put a door or doors in every hole between rooms and your house will stop being so hard to heat.
  8. Low Flow Shower Heads – Little known fact: The original idea for low-flow shower heads came from R. Buckminster Fuller, a really interesting, smart guy brimming with bad ideas, which makes him a kind of god for our times. He noticed when he was in the navy that standing on a boat in the fog cleaned your face. Like all engineer types would, he extrapolated that mostly useless nugget of information into proposing standing in a shower with a trickle of moisture as a satisfactory way to bathe.

    Like all schemes that involve such rationing, whatever water you’d save is lost by staying in the shower longer because you’d prefer to get wet, not just damp, in there. Fuller also thought we should all live in domes, like astronauts or Hobbits or something. Never get advice on non-technical matters from engineers. They can’t even dress themselves. Get a big honking showerhead and enjoy yourself for ten minutes a day. The water will just get cold in the water heater if you don’t use it, because you listened to me and didn’t wrap it in an insulation blanket.
  9. Ceiling fans – I’ve probably looked at pictures of ten thousand houses in Maine while looking for a house to purchase. The only thing they all have in common is every house has a gaudy, useless ceiling fan in every room, even though it’s never hot here. They’re mostly hanging one inch lower than the top of my head.

    People run them in the winter, too, thinking BTUs are in the Calorie Klan and refuse to come down from the ceiling and mix with the Cold Races near the floor. Heat doesn’t work that way. You’re interfering with heating the room properly by running a ceiling fan and introducing turbulence, and wasting electricity while you’re doing it. You don’t live in Casablanca. Stop it.
  10. Elaborate, Tax-subsidized Boilers- The feds are currently paying wealthy people to install brand-new twenty thousand dollar boilers that are about five percent more efficient than the ones they’re replacing. The payoff time on that without the tax theft — I mean credit — is about ten centuries. The boilers are still only about 90 percent efficient. I hereby demand that all heating systems be 100 percent efficient! There is a form of heater that achieves 100 percent, by the way: Electric baseboard heat. Try heating your home with no waste and see how much it costs. It would be cheaper to burn dollar bills and warm your hands over the fire.

    Hmm. You can build a tricked-out nuclear power plant for about ten billion dollars. If we’d spent the trillion or so of “stimulus” on 100 nuclear power plants, instead of on signs by the side of the highway telling us they’re thinking of paving the road again to fix the recession, the price of electricity would plunge, we could all afford to heat our house with electric baseboard heat, tell the Saudis to eat sand, and read our puny utility bills by incandescent light before we dropped them in the fireplace. And the 200,000 power plant construction jobs would have been, well, 200,000 more jobs than we got for the trillion.

So maybe my ideas aren’t so boring. China Syndrome, anyone?



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Category: AZ, peeves, politics, science, technology

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