Climate change - anthropogenic or not?

That's the operative word: "believed". I'm glad you've finally come around to realize that AGW is a belief system. It's liberating to go where the independently verified data lead. Prosthelytizing missionaries are very annoying, after all.

 

Energy audit is done. All appliances are within current energy star guidelines. Heat and AC are all 98% efficiency units. Majority of usage is during daylight hours.

Home is more well insulated than any you will ever see. R40 exterior walls. R50 ceilings.

Average electric bill is between 50-65 dollars a month

 

So much for trying to keep it civil!

I hope the post Re: solar panels was informative. You are welcome!

 

Like I said, thanks for keeping it civil. Nice to know the rules of civility only apply to people you agree with.

 

Don't want to nit-pick but the most efficient gas furnaces are maybe 96% and % efficiency doesn't have anything to do with AC.

Wow, very good!

OK, but how many kWh/month is that?

Since this is obviously off-topic for this thread - why don't we start a new thread just for the discussion of PV power and we'll follow it up there so it doesn't get lost here. PM me with the details.

 

I'm guessing that he might be using ~15-20 kwh/day which in a "normal house would be pretty darn good. In our off grid house, we get by with ~1 kwh/day but in the grid tied house, we average ~10 in the summer, 15 in the winter, with the bulk coming from a bathroom heater, and the hot tub!

I wish I could figure out a way to keep the hot tub warm without so many KWH. I've been playing around with the idea of using a flat plate collector and a storage tank since it is so much more efficient that using PV to heat the tub.

Hot tub could circ into the storage tank and pick up heat as needed, as long as the tank temp was higher than the tub set temp. Probably more trouble than it is worth.

 

What other energy sources receive taxpayer subsidies? Oil? Natural Gas? Nuclear?

Nah, wind farms are quite capable of nay-saying themselves, they don't need my help. Have you ever seen the huge wind farm at Altamont Pass east of San Francisco? At any given time it seems that many of them are kaput. I've seen as many as 50% or so not spinning. Yes, it was windy.

 

I dont have a hut tub at my residence but on my recreational property I do.

however its not a commercially available unit. I designed it and built it with spare parts from our farm.

The tub itself is an old milk bulk tank cut in half. I purchased the pump and jets from a hot tub replacement parts catalog and installed them.

The heat source for it is the wood burning boiler that is used to heat the house as well. We get up there start the boiler and its ready to go in less than a half hour. The boiler is set up with zone controls for all of the buildings on the property

 

We have one at our off grid house. It is a submersible wood stove that sits in the tub. The tub itself is a 6' galvanized stock tank. We built a plywood surround and covered the tub with 2" styrofoam. With the foam cover, it stays ~80f day to day, and so it heats up in about 1 hour to 105f. From a cold start, 36f water, it takes about 6 hours.

Pretty cool to be on the ice, with the northern lights dancing and singing, sitting in a hot tub, the nearest neighbour 50 mlles away.

 

Using Altamont Pass as an example of a modern wind farm is like using a Model-T Ford of an example of a modern automobile.

The turbines used at Altamont Pass are obsolete. It would never get built today.

 

Yeah, and at the same time the temperature was over 40 degrees in Perth. Remember this is a discussion about climate, not weather.
Perth hits 41.1C after hottest January night in two decades | Perth Now

So it was unseasonally cold at the tiny tops of a mountain but extremely hot over half the country, sure sign of global cooling.

 

Sorry, sometimes Aussies can be like that Icarus. He attacked me to back in his early days here. That is just the style of debate.

 

What about a national grid and a blend of wind and solar? Combine that with hot rock (geothermal) and new thermal storage in solar heat collector arrays ( Solar power providing electricity 24 hours a day in summer | Beyond Zero Emissions ) then tidal. Use fossil fuels as a backup and there you have a stable mostly renewable energy grid.
Somewhere on the continent of North America the wind will be blowing, and the sun rises 3 hours earlier in the east and sets 3 hours later in the west, and moves north and south. It would really only take a small portion of land to be covered in solar collectors to capture enough energy to meet all our needs. All those bare roofs are such a waste.

 

I wonder, what if it's all a conspiracy by the scientific/industrial complex. All intended to make Al Gore richer.
Am I going to bet my grandchildren's lives and livelyhoods on it?
I think not, I'll play it safe and do my best to do as little damage to the planet as possible.
Tony Renier