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Re: Energy Efficiency Con
As one “global warning” heretic put it, although I do paraphrase…
There’s approximately a trillion or so barrels of oil in the ground. That means that there’s over 100 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of money to extract from the Earth, the price of which will only rise as the resource gets scarcer.
If you’re an oil company do you have any interest in forcing down the price of oil?
If you’re a government that takes tax revenues from oil sales as a percentage on cost, do you have an interest in seeing cheaper oil and oil based products?
I do think that it has sunk in however that oil is a finite resource now.
Electric, without a technological step forward and away from fossil fuel generated power, only shifts the problem somewhere else, it solves nothing. Aside from which there’s notably no mention of the production cost in energy terms of the components to “save” this energy nor any mention of the nasty, nasty stuff in the batteries or their lifespan as well as replacement costs.
Don’t get me started on wind and solar. :rolls:
An awful lot of it is just smoke and mirrors IMHO.
The simple fact of it is this, without a major step forward in energy production technology, such as a move to actually solving the issues with getting fusion power generation to work on a commercial scale, there is no actual solution. All that’s left is to shift the blame and cost about to somewhere else.
Without that, you can shave a bit here… a bit there… but you end up in the same old rut/s ultimately.
K.
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
They’re riding the boom. It’s profitable and known science and it’s now not under state ownership. Given the truly massive level of re-investment required to bring the new technologies on-line and develop them into sustainable reliable use, I know as a head of an energy company, what I’d be doing at the moment.
Ride it ’til it busts and get out with the profits. Thank you and goodnight. Fortunatley, I’m just an appliance engineer, so it won’t be me doing it.
Cynical – Moi?
Chris.
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
Electric, without a technological step forward and away from fossil fuel generated power, only shifts the problem somewhere else, it solves nothing. Aside from which there’s notably no mention of the production cost in energy terms of the components to “save” this energy nor any mention of the nasty, nasty stuff in the batteries or their lifespan as well as replacement costs.
I am not sure about smoke and mirrors Kwatt but there are serious alternatives to the production of electricity which does not involve wind/solar or steam !
The Energy companies know that both wind and solar generation will not produce any reliable amount of energy and in the case of both for home use it would take many decades to see any return versus investment, with solar thats geographical.
But imagine if you could produce electrical power at home for nothing ! say 25 to 50kwh per day ? Imagine not filling your vehicle with petrol or deisel but water ?
These technologies are with us now and there are people who have and are producing this stuff, there goes a story that a guy by the name if my memory serves me well called Steve Myers an amercian who developed the HHO engine, he developed this technology and presented to the US Military the idea which was so they could power their tank divsions. After a tank was converted and proven to run the US goverment scrapped the whole project, some while after this guy died and evidently it was found that he had a chemical present in his body which a certain goverment department only had access to ?
So it was that at that time the HHO technology was effectively buried like its inventor, trouble was that unknown to the Goverment Mr Myers had registered the HHO Patent at the Patent Office in Washington somer years before and it was there for all to see.
Make of it what you will but there are many examples of inovators who have developed proven energy alternatives only to fade away and its with interest that not one of these inovators have been from any major energy supplier or State. Mm
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
Talking of false claims by manufacturers, the thing I often think about is spin speeds. When did anyone last use a tachometer to measure the speed of a spinning drum. Any engineer will tell you that the life of a bearing is inversely proportional to the square of its speed. In other words , double the speed , and reduce the bearing life to 1/8. So how come we still use the same size bearings as when drums spun at 500RPM?
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
Spinning clothes is a waste of energy anyway. So is rinsing. Do the washing on a rainy day. Hang it out unrinsed. Rain = free rinsing. Next day raining too? Good. Free second rinse. Three wet days in a row, well that’s unlucky but you’ve probably got enough clothes in the cupboard to cope.
Result: no more need for nuclear power station across the road, or for windmill in the garden. Fewer expensive washing machine repairs. (Don’t tell my customers this.) And enough money in the bank so you don’t need to borrow. (If everyone did it, there’d be no need for spending cuts to repay half the national debt within four years. 😆 )
There was a discussion on radio 4 Womans Hour this week about going back to line drying. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/ … _thu.shtml
Great. No more tumble dryer repairs, never liked ’em anyway.
Mike.Re: Energy Efficiency Con
leavemetogetonwithit wrote:Spinning clothes is a waste of energy anyway. So is rinsing. Do the washing on a rainy day. Hang it out unrinsed. Rain = free rinsing. Next day raining too? Good. Free second rinse. Three wet days in a row, well that’s unlucky but you’ve probably got enough clothes in the cupboard to cope. Mike.
Yeah and turn your underpants inside out when dirty and save washing them so often 😆
Steve
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
EFS wrote:Yeah and turn your underpants inside out when dirty and save washing them so often 😆
Steve
Small minds think alike!
Mike.Re: Energy Efficiency Con
I do hope you’re joking Mike?
I could recount how the whole washing of clothes thing came about and how rinsing has been an integral part of that since, well, pretty much clothing came about. But I expect it’d be wasted here.
Suffice to say that, regardless, people will want to be clean and fresh without waiting days for the laundry. I mean, for goodness sake, they b1tch about waiting two hours for a wash cycle, en masse. The chances of Johnny Punter waiting days is beyond comprehension.
That said, in the ISE brochure we actually tell people to line dry rather than use one of the dryers. It’s more efficient on many levels.
Spinning is a process that goes back thousands of years, before anyone even thought about a washing machine, it was just a different way of achieving the same thing, speeding up the drying process. Same with rinsing.
Quite funny though, I caught a bit of an embarrassing story on Radio Scotland yesterday from Tom Morton I think, saying that he hung his stuff out to dry in January and it froze solid. Took three days to dry out over radiators (compromising the heat output and bumping up the energy requirement, remember, no free lunch) and they still didn’t smell right.
You don’t really get the cold as bad as we do, or anywhere North of Bristol so you don’t have that problem. 😉
K.
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
neptune wrote:Talking of false claims by manufacturers, the thing I often think about is spin speeds. When did anyone last use a tachometer to measure the speed of a spinning drum. Any engineer will tell you that the life of a bearing is inversely proportional to the square of its speed. In other words , double the speed , and reduce the bearing life to 1/8. So how come we still use the same size bearings as when drums spun at 500RPM?
All I got to say is materials. :rolls:
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
No – destruction cycle. Cost analysis to the fraction of a penny of the life expectancy of a given product. A bearing set which was fine for 7 years on an 800pm machine can be used quite happily on a 1200rpm machine designed to last 3 years – if that’s all you want it to do. And they do…..
There is no “New Market” for appliances as there was through the 80s and early 90s; now there is only a replacement market – but – the factories have expanded to produce huge volume. The manufacturers could have had a quiet word with each other and scaled back, but no. The volume boys now make carp on a short life cycle to keep the factories running. And the public fall for it……..
The nearest thing to perfection is an ISE10 – no compromises, excellent warranties and as far as the retail side is concerned, no discounts.
Will put hobby horse back in the garage now…
Chris.
Re: Energy Efficiency Con
Penguin45 wrote:
There is no “New Market” for appliances as there was through the 80s and early 90s
Chris.
What about all the newly wealthy Chinese, Indian, Brazilian etc. etc. who would prefer not to buy the products from their own countries (at least not directly :wink:) ? Eastern Europe too, having joined the EU and got wealthier, must surely be adding to the market.
I don’t entirely (only nearly entirely) share your cynicism about the capitalist system. True that quality, in terms of robustness, has decreased, but it is competition between manufacturers trying to supply a public ever more demanding of more machine for less money that is driving this trend. Penny pinching yes. But I see this as being driven as much by the consumer as by the producers.
Manufacturers might have had quiet words in each other’s ears but without trust between them that could not have worked.
There will always be niche markets for better quality stuff like ISE but the vast hordes just want something to do the washing. They don’t really care too much if it only lasts 3 years (although they would hope for five and often do get more than that; we only see the failures). They’ve only paid, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, about half what they paid for their WM series back in 1995, so it looks like a bargain and it ain’t that bad. (Nice silent induction motor, bigger capacity, higher spin speed, fewer hose connections, lower energy and water consumption….). Yes, I know that last one is verging on the self-contradictory. 😀
Further to all this there is fashion to consider. Not how the machine looks, although that is important. But fashion as in tendency for more washing to be done than is really necessary. This seems to me to continue on an ever upward spiral, just like spin speeds. As we become more and more affluent (perhaps I shouldn’t use “we” there, more “you” 😀 ) we/you need to look smarter and cleaner to keep up with everybody else. So stuff gets washed more frequently, machines get ever more hammered, and that they last three/five years under such conditions isn’t so bad considering.
OK hobby horse chained up to railing outside now, (no garage).
MikeRe: Energy Efficiency Con
kwatt wrote:
1. I do hope you’re joking Mike?2.The chances of Johnny Punter waiting days is beyond comprehension.
3.[Line drying is] more efficient on many levels.
4.Spinning is a process that goes back thousands of years,
5.You don’t really get the cold as bad as we do, or anywhere North of Bristol so you don’t have that problem. 😉
K.
Point 1. There’s never a truer word… I don’t waste my wit trying to be funny.
Point 2. I have mine trained to wait up to a week. I direct them to others if they’re the seriously “ASAP” kind. More hassle than they’re worth. Had one left a message on my AP the other day, TV blaring in the background. No thanks.
Point 3. Glad you agree with me in essence.
Point 4. Thousands? I’m intrigued. Was that how the whirling Dervishes earned their keep?
Point 5. Not so cold here but we have our share of damp. (Apologies to the Cumbrians who had a bit more than their share of late.)Sorry, horse broke free briefly but have tied him up again. PS: it’s not really that late – something out of synch with my clock.
Mike.
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