Before heat pumps, these two were clearly our largest loads. We still use a bit of electric resistance heat at the far end of the house, and a space heater in the far bathroom. How many people in your household? Ours has just two. While household energy consumption is not directly proportional to the people count, there is a strong connection. Our electric clothes dryer (currently on a homebuilt monitor made from a refurb old style residential watt-hour meter) is using just under 500 kWh/year, not enough for me to yet seriously explore next-generation heat pump dryers. Let those mature for a while. While curious about the electric range consumption, I haven't yet metered it. Maybe I'll take the dryer submeter and rebuild it with 50 Amp pigtails and plugs. How much water do you pump from the well? How much lift? Is much water used outside in the yard? Pumping this is potentially a large factor. If not much is used outdoors, then make sure the indoor water appliances are water efficient. When I replaced the old water-hog toilets with 1.6/gallon/flush models (original 3.5 gallon units were actually drawing closer to 5g/flush due to cheap replacement internal parts) and more water efficient clothes and dish washers, our water use dropped sharply. Drip irrigation keeps the garden water use reasonable. Oil burner fan? I don't know how much to allow for that. Some old fans and fan motors can be terrible energy hogs, such as central blower fan on dad's old central wood furnace. (That has been replaced by a ground-source heat pump system, eliminating the required regular feeding of the furnace, the firewood harvesting, and the awful local air pollution of a 1950's wood burner.) Regular exhaust fans can be cheap noisy and inefficient, or can be quiet and efficient. I have replaced one original cheapee with a greatly improved modern unit, the other is used so infrequently as to not be an issue. Part of the idea of conservation is to reduce usage without drastic lifestyle changes. So keep exploring for where the energy is going.
Our boiler and hot water tank have electric ignition, and you can get a whiff of the odorant if by the exhaust when they fire up. In the incident I learned about it, it had been raining, so the soil was quite wet.
Imagining a science-fair project: Tank of 'city gas' (CH4, CO, CO2, H3CSH), long columns filled with water, dry soil, or wet soil, thiol concentrations at outputs determined with local university gas chromatograph. Yields real data, possibly even publishable. For the public demonstration phase, just let people sniff. If the demonstration hall has a fire marshal*, project might get shut down. *as it ought to have
Sorry but between the thread title and the last post, I can't resist. Poor little Willie, We'll see Willie no more. For what he thought was H2O Was H2SO4.
Interesting story - my dad once worked in a plant that made those mercaptan odorants (he was a chemical engineer). The company he worked for had sent him down there to investigate why their equipment needed replacement so often. He found out that the increased maintenance was coming because the plant employees sprayed everything with water at the end of the day. When he asked why, it turned out that the plant was on the edge of a residential area, and if they weren't careful to catch any leaks, and spray water everywhere to neutralize the leaks they didn't catch, dozens of people surrounding the plant would call in and report a gas leak. The local gas company would have to investigate every report, every time. They were not happy. The neighbors were not happy. Spraying water, said the chemical operators, kept them from being lynched, since they all lived in the same town. So...everything got sprayed. And everything exposed to water degraded faster. Happy ending, for the most part - Dad had to have everything replaced with marine-quality components, since the chemical operators flat out refused to stop spraying water. They had to be able to show their neighbors that they were doing everything possible to prevent leaks, you see, whether it worked or not. Far as I know, the plant is still running.
...pretty much people equate risk with odor, so a little trace of mercaptans can get you in big trouble real quick
It is rather fascinating to read about people that don’t have Nat gas piped to their house as the norm. Out here in Minnesota it is almost unheard of to not have nat gas unless the house/cabin is very remote. That said, when building our house, we made the decision not to use nat gas at all. No meter even. Electrify everything
You got me! I forgot about that, as I don’t grill. My wife does though, with propane. Heat, hot water, cars, snow thrower, mower, leaf blower, stovetop, clothes dryer are all electric (ground source heat pumps for heat and water heating).
And now we'll take it higher .... Senators Markey and Warren have sent a letter to Columbia Gas / NiSource inquiring about a pressure apparently twelve times higher than expected: Pressure inside Columbia Gas pipes 12 times higher than normal - The Boston Globe It seems that was a figure from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and the specific values were 6 psi, compared to a normal ½ psi. Hmm, now that doesn't answer all my questions. Six PSI inside my house would be terrible (½ psi isn't even the "normal" for my appliances, it's the "replace if ever exceeded" maximum). But how would it get into the house in the first place? Six psi arriving at my house would be controlled perfectly well by this guy outside at my meter: And an overpressure from outside would have to be yuuuuge to exceed that guy's venting capacity by enough to reach six psi in the house. They stopped the graph before 3 psi, and for the red trace (that'd be my house, with the smallest available orifice) to get anywhere near six psi out, it would have to be hundreds of psi in. But, but wait ... here's a press release from NiSource: Columbia Gas of Massachusetts Commits to Complete Replacement of Merrimack Valley Gas Distribution System They're committing to replace their whole distribution "system in the towns of Andover, Lawrence and North Andover with state-of-the-art plastic distribution mains and service lines, and modern safety features such as pressure regulation and excess flow valves at each premise." Wait, you mean all this time they haven't had pressure regulators at each premise? They've just had three towns worth of houses all plumbed directly onto some giant fat-pipe low-pressure gas bus? That would explain a lot.... I didn't even know that was a thing. I don't think I've ever lived where there wasn't a regulator at the meter, and a higher-pressure, skinny line coming into it. -Chap
I'd also like to see some venting data for those caps that have been installed outside in the North East for 100 years worth of bug guts and dirt and freeze/thaw cycles, etc. I've never seen in directly piped in either, but when you have buildings built in that time, it was kind of an anything goes and you don't have to fix it if you don't touch it. Got to love grandfathering.
NTSB put out a preliminary report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/PLD18MR003-preliminary-report.pdf The houses were all on a shared, low-pressure distribution system (pressure was supposed to be around what appliances expect). That was fed by 14 regulators from a higher-pressure main. The regulators were remote-sensing. The crew was decommissioning one piping system and putting another in service, and the one being decommissioned still had the sensing lines connected to it. So as its pressure dropped, the regulators responded increasing flow into the in-service system ... uncontrolled for pressure there, because that wasn't where the sensing lines were. They'll be replacing it all with higher pressure service lines and a regulator at each customer, much like it's done in my town. -Chap
Sort of like a winter cabin I once stayed in. Heater in one room, thermostat in the other, and we didn't know that when closing the door between at bedtime. One group got chilly, the other group quite hot, before we figured out what had happened.
I live in the deep South, so I can afford to live in an 'all lectric' house, and since we 'live small' our 'lectric bill almost never goes over $100 a month. However (comma!) I wanted to install a ventless fireplace (while they're still legal!!) and heater for aux heating for ice storms, etc. Imagine my suprise when I found out that even though we're city slickers now, we're not "served" by our city gas service......so it's Propane City Baby!! No wondering what the monthly bill will be...... No reliance on city employees..... Maybe the rednecks aren't so dumb as city slickers always presume......
It's only a matter of time...... Ordinances and Regulations for Wood-Burning Appliances | Burn Wise | US EPA
