Re: Cost of Heating oil; Cost of lumber?

Mark & Juanita (in 7ehig1licc2l058m9rpd23c6mvjf8qf4vt@xxxxxxx) said:

| On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 18:24:03 -0500, "Morris Dovey"
| <mrdovey@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
|
|| Charlie Self (in
|| 1124660115.257647.60520@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) said:
||
||| Mark & Juanita wrote:
|||| Frankly, if we are tired of being held hostage to unstable gas
|||| prices, we (the people, not the government) need to be looking at
|||| alternatives. Increased domestic exploration, identification of
|||| alternate fuel sources, etc. The oil industry has been so
|||| consolidated for numerous reasons, some due to greed on the part
|||| of business, some due to power-lust on the part of governments,
|||| some even due to unintended consequences on the part of
|||| tree-huggers that competition, for the most part does not exist.
|||| What is needed is competition at a higher level.
|||
||| And just as frankly, a solid amount of conservation on the part of
||| the consumer would help a lot. Refusal to buy barge sized vehicles
||| for single person use, better planning of trips and similar
||| tactics would have the oil companies paying attention to their
||| market again, though given the proliferation of 11-12 MPG
||| vehicles over the past decade or so, it might well take many
||| years.
||
|| <s>
||
|| Everyone wants someone /else/ to solve the problem. Preferably at
|| no cost.
||
|| The "no cost" part is more important than you might guess. In my
|| day job I sell furnaces that come with a lifetime supply of free
|| fuel. You'd think they'd sell like hotcakes.
||
|| Think again.
|
| You are making solar furnaces, right? The problem I've seen with
| them, thus far, is that the payback period is so long as to make
| the fact that the fuel is free somewhat irrelevant. Maybe your's
| are different, if so, I'd be open to more information (although, in
| southern AZ, solar air conditioning would be much more
| cost-effective).

The energy available for capture by a solar heating panel is
determined by the area of the panel - for all panels. Panel efficiency
is the percentage of the available energy that is actually delivered.
Most of the panels on the market have pretty decent efficiencies - the
largest significant difference to the consumer is price (which can
vary hugely and seems to be largely unrelated to efficiency.)

The payback period depends on the costs associated with that portion
of the heating done by a conventional system replaced by solar. The
payback period in southern Arizona will probably be longer than that
for northern Minnesota, but how much longer I don't really know...

The first collectors that I built for myself in southern Minnesota way
more than paid for themselves in their _first_ heating season. I'll
stick my neck out to estimate that my current generation of collectors
will pay for themselves here /before/ their second heating season is
over.

I wish I could offer you a solution to the AC problem. It's doable -
just picture the flame-powered refrigerator used in some campers with
the flame replaced with heat captured from a parabolic concentrator.
'Tisn't simple; but neither is it rocket surgery. [Remember when I was
asking about calculating the length of a parabola? I was working on
the refrigeration problem.]

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html


.

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