Well, if the theft of heating oil could expose me to this kind of liability it would certainly be of concern to me. My friends are now estranged from their neighbours (it didn't do much for their own marriage either), their property and that of their neighbours has been torn-up to remove the contaminated soil, they're out of pocket a considerable amount of money, they can no longer get homeowner's insurance and they can't sell this property because the Department of Environment won't sign off on the clean-up (apparently they're still detecting traces of oil). It's just one big mess.
Be it related to theft as in this case, a leaking tank or falling ice damaging the supply line, the consequences of a fuel oil spill are pretty grim no matter how you look at it.
Generally speaking, an inside tank is your best choice. That said, thirty years ago, my mother's oil tank, which was in located inside a finished basement, began leaking while she was away on holidays. The stench when she returned was unbelievable and all the carpets on the lower level had to be replaced. They brought in big fans to try to clear the smell but it lingered on for months; when you walked through the door, you just wanted to gag.
My home is Toronto is all gas (heat, hot water, cooktop, wall ovens, fireplaces, dryer, patio heater and BBQ) and, quiet honestly, if natural gas were available here in Halifax, I would be pushing my way to the front of the line.
Funny, I could have sworn you were complaining about the "monopoly" of the local natural gas distribution company, as opposed to all of those price choices you get with oil. What good is a monopoly if you're not jacking up the price, right?
No kidding, except it wasn't a "vacation" and if you did you see you'd know it wasn't just the garage. If you read what I wrote above, you would also know that I was discussing generally why it was a good idea to shut off your water when you're away in the winter because I wrote, "furnace could sense a fault and shut down or the power could fail, or everything could work perfectly and a pipe breaks etc."
than a diesel
I'm glad you have room for a diesel generator. No way it can burn as cleanly as a natural gas engine can, and that doesn't require stored fuel either.
Yes, but that "properly sized" part can be a show stopper if you don't have a bunch of land, or a pond nearby, or can use wells.
What you are referring to as "refining" is removing impurities, or even separating off propane etc. I have heard of people with natural gas wells on their property (if I could be so lucky) piping it right to their house, with the right safety equipment.
That's because that is waste gas and junk, not the natural gas you'll find in a pipeline. Everything that comes out of the ground is not equal.
What makes you think I think that? Natural gas is not petroleum, but it is certainly related to petroleum at several junctures.
Well in 1973, as I quoted earlier, seventeen (17%) percent of electricity in the United States was produced from oil. Apparently you don't think it's significant. If
17% of the power in the USA just disappeared, I would call that significant.
You also said that nuclear electric production was lessening in favor of natural gas. In fact nuclear power generation in the United States has been increasing, with record power levels from 1997 on. This is in spite of the fact that there are less reactors in service today than there were in
1990. zp6a2
Yeah "political issues" like clean air.
Natural gas is not refined. If it was the same gas, it *would* be piped to houses.
Ok, that's not the case. You can reset ANY oil flame safeguard relay control as many times as you like.
The nucleus of gas vs. oil residential heating safety lies in the control methodology of the times.
Oil burners are direct fired. The full fuel output is ignited by a strong arc. There is no pilot light. If it does not ignite, there is approximately 10 seconds worth of atomized oil spray inside of the combustion chamber. Flame detection is performed by a Cad Cell.
Until recently, most all gas furnaces used a small pilot light to achieve combustion, which in turn ignites the main burners. More of today's furnaces are direct light off such as the oil burner, however modern flame safeguards strategies are applied to bring an acceptable level of safety to the gas burner.
There are better controls available for domestic oil burners however they have not found their way into the residential product lines.
Proportionally, there are many more instances of delayed ignition in oil, then fuel gas.
Oh it won't burn pretty, but it WILL burn under far less stringent conditions as these.
Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust.
And what is the efficiency of that unit again?
There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up.
Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything.
the way
True. Fortunately that is not really necessary.
I would hazard to guess that the "popular" percentage is still quite a bit lower than 17%, which is the percentage that you said is "not significant" for oil generation in USA (1973).
Wouldn't know. Never needed to be purged since it was up and running. Maybe we'll find out some day if maintenance is needed on the pipeline, like water pipes.
Well if that ever happens to me, I'll expect I'll heat my house with electric heat for a few days. Or maybe just keep the wood stove working overtime. But it's good to know that they could just move right back into their house, no long lived $$$ environmental clean up required.
Most anywhere. You'll find some small cities with gas service surrounded by many miles of moderately dense semi-rural area with no minimal gas service. Check the CT DPUC site or the sites of the gas utilities covering the area and you should find reports of service interruptions. I know the CL&P / Northeast utilities site has such reports for electric outages, I expect the gas utilities have the same.
and to natural
Really.
generated by
years later, oil
17% = Very little.
oil OR gas.
Cost. And gas turbines are pretty multi-fuel to begin with.
plants? Seems
Hardly. Industrial settings are the one place that gas is fairly safe as they generally get serviced and maintained properly, particularly power plants.
You said you
Electric service
You can disagree all you want. I still won't use gas any time soon.
If I were currently using oil, if the pricing was to get too high I'd install a geothermal heat pump long before I'd consider nat. gas.
up for that
I'm afraid I don't make long term decisions like heating fuel choice based solely on price.
the gas utility
distribution
TXU and "choice"
but a very
The effective spread is a bit larger than those numbers appear since it's multiplied by a couple thousand KWH / month as opposed to a couple hundred gallons / month.
require tanks,
You clearly don't read very well.
It is practical to provide backup for electric service outages with a generator (gasoline, diesel, propane, nat. gas.)
It is not practical to provide backup for nat. gas service outages. There is no practical way to provide on-site storage for a useable quantity of nat. gas, gas appliances other than generators are particular to the gas type (different burner orifices) so you can't switch on the fly to a "hot dog" propane tank in the back yard either. The only way to provide backup for nat. gas service is with redundant appliances for an alternate fuel.
You have a nat. gas tank? You have your own refrigeration and liquification facilities too?
The reference is to the large "hot dog" propane tanks of several hundred gallon LP capacity. They can and do vent some gas while roasting in the hot sun so you aren't supposed to smoke/grill/whatever near them.
house air. It's
be made up from
with lots of weather
natural gas furnace
brings directly
And your point is? Oil furnaces can and do use sealed combustion as well. Neither gas nor oil furnaces used sealed combustion until fairly recently and both are able to use it currently. No real difference.
Raw natural gas hasnt been refined seperating butane propane and other gasses. Raw natural gas s indeed used directly in peoples homes, know a fellow with a abandoned oil well on his property, ewhen they quit pumping it he paid some $ to leave the casing and heats his home and water with gas from this well, its at 5 PSI reportedly high for butler PA area.
since raw natural gas contains other gasses it has slightly more BTUs than refined gas.
What didn't work? The lockout? There is no mention of the boiler being new enough to have the lockout controls. Indeed from the long list of problems mentioned it appears likely it was a pretty old unit.
is tiny compared to
America, not hostile
(exported 24.19 cubic
those ratios.
energy, as total gas
imports were 13.15 million
barrel of oil contains about
Not really a valid comparison. Compare US oil production to oil imports and US gas production to gas imports. In both cases we are importing sizable amounts because we do not produce enough domestically.
our foreign policy and
spare no expense to keep the
I don't know about that. It's a different world and different US from the 70s oil embargo days. I'd be rather interested to see what effect another embargo would have. I also seriously doubt that any of the OPEC folks would consider an embargo and indeed would fight one since they have learned that it would not be in their interest and could do them long term damage if people once again get serious about alternatives. Why do you thing the 70s embargo ended? Couldn't have had anything to do with people starting to look seriously at alternatives could it?
The whole islamic world which used to be a seat of learning and knowledge but has now degenerated into a cesspool of violence and hatred.
Yea, that hindsight thing. A bit late now to undo the mistakes of many decades ago.
my existing fuel?
efficient condensing furnaces
condensing application, all the
favored to be gas because it
agencies are even starting to
less emissions than #2 oil
Not really, there are a number of available technologies that make oil / diesel burn cleaner however they are being largely overlooked due to the political / emotional stigma of the word "oil" due to the middle east issues.
mean that an oil burner
leak causing heavy fumes
and the last I heard
What they do in the People's Republic of Taxachusets is hardly a model for the rest of the world. Look at their big dig disaster.
my natural gas
is opposing electric
hot water heater, gas
very efficient furnace
usage charges (similar
efficiency. Besides even in
there is a good chance I'm
"service charges" during
heating the HOUSE.
I don't know about you, but during the summer months I am not heating my house, I am only heating water.
those climates.
The main problem with those low end gas furnaces is not the blower, it's the thin, non SS heat exchangers. Rather like the couple very low end oil furnaces out there with steel heat exchangers, not cast iron.
please show the numbers.
drains, which often have
A lot. whether you are installing storm drains of gas mains you have to get through the horrendous amount of rock and ledge in the northeast.
other area in
"proove" the opposite,
gas is so expensive that
with people driving them
In those areas nat. gas, city water and city sewers are very sparse due to the huge installation costs. Oil heat, wells and septic systems are the norm.
more expensive in
is possible you might
includes sewer pipe (which is
newer subdivisions, etc.
Generally it is a big deal.
In new subdivisions the developers are required to do all that work and that is one of the reasons that new housing is more expensive in the northeast. If the developer has to shell out the money to install all those utilities they add it to the sales prices.
In all the existing neighborhoods where it is individual houses filling in, not large developments, those utilities are not installed by the builder and generally remain unavailable for a long time.
a lot of advertising
heat" and how hot it is,
other oil dealers, but an
Cooperative advertising is not collusion by any stretch of the imagination. I guess you think the various commercials from the egg board, dairy council, etc. all represent collusion between all those little dairies and egg producers eh?
Find some online prices for furnaces. They aren't out there online (rather anticompetative) so it's not really possible to provide references.
"Serviceman Reset Protection ( Latch-up after three consecutive lockouts)"
Right, but what does that have to do with the three strike lockout?
If you're indicating that gas burners until very recently have had very minimal controls with limited safeties you are correct. Many had no electronics at all and relied on a thermocouple heated by the pilot as the only safety for pilot loss. Most had no detection if the main burner actually lit off properly. Most had no easily accessible emergency off switch, you had to find the gas valve, etc.
Huh? Those features are on nearly every residential oil burner manufactured in the last decade. They are certainly on the oil burner I had installed this spring.
For pilot units probably. And for delayed ignition on an oil burner rarely anything of consequence without human intervention overriding the safety.
Yea if you get it on a wick and apply direct flame to it to get it started ala oil lamp. An inch of oil across the basement floor has little chance of ignition even if there were a burning pilot light nearby. In the very unlikely event the oil level to make it to the pilot light there is near 100% probability it would simply extinguish the pilot. Nat. gas (or propane) if they leak and build until they are in proximity of a pilot have a near 100% probability of exploding.
Oddly enough I'd rather have a furnace that has received proper servicing.
Blowback, delayed ignition, whatever you want to call it. A gas buildup in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. Boilers are commonly located on upper floors in tall buildings. Furnaces tend not to be used in large (tall) commercial buildings in favor of larger boilers serving multiple heat exchanger air handlers.
I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment.
uninhabitable is
dying in
The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage.
doing all of
tank break
More like five or six or more decades. I don't know how common it is, probably fairly common with some XL houses in the northeast where a couple 300 gal indoor tanks won't really do.
Nothing in my water, I've got rather good water here. Nice and soft too, I don't miss the hard water in the northeast at all.
What do the characteristics of the MTBE problem have to do with why we have the MTBE problem? The fact is that loud moth eco-nuts badgered the government into requiring MTBE without adequate research and the MTBE problems are the result of that knee jerk reaction.
reason it was
ether is
Oil companies bought it because it was required by the feds, not because it did anything productive. MTBE looked like it helped meet clean air goals based on the emissions from combustion of a gal of gas with MTBE vs. without MTBE. The reality that was discovered later was that the MTBE reduced the mileage of vehicles using the gas with it so they used more gas with the MTBE in order to travel the necessary distances thereby producing pretty much the same emissions as they did burning less gas without MTBE.
There are other technologies available to get extra oxygen into the engine without resorting to chemical additives in the gas by the way. These of course require changes to the engine so if they were introduced in new cars they it would take some time to achieve any significant vehicle turnover.
federal
Why should the oil companies by liable for problems from an additive that the federal government required them to put in their product? Want to blame someone for the MTBE problem blame those who pushed for it and those that pushed it on the refiners.
doesn't
and if
Last reference to it was in CT, but I believe it is in the IRC codes. I was researching when looking at building a house in CT and the oil tank room required a short concrete containment wall around it. There was also a limit of I believe 600 gal in a single fire rated space.
a backhoe
if your
There was someone killed in a gas explosion at a motel somewhere within the past month. Collapsed the whole corner of the two story building. It was on the news and I think CNN. Certainly a search on CNN.com for "gas explosion" produces quite a few valid results including some doosies like one that ripped up a mall parking lot.
you can
the house,
moot with
You're the one who keeps claiming that nat. gas burns cleanly and oil is dirty which is false. Both are pretty clean with proper combustion adjustments. Improperly adjusted, oil is more detectable than improperly adjusted gas. It's not a function of cleanliness, its a function of different detection thresholds for different chemicals.
very
new oil
is just so
I've already noted why the nat. gas market is larger.
A few gas explosions:
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Just a sample, plenty more to be found. Some doosies too.
Right and that situation can occur with both gas and oil and even electric for that matter.
auto charging
than a diesel
as a natural
Room? A diesel generator doesn't require any more room than any other type of generator.
just putting
bunch of land,
Not really. Vertical loop is workable most everywhere, "wells" typically refers to the old style open loop geothermal which is rarely done these days. The newer trenched vertical coil also doesn't require a lot of area.
What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger warranty you were crowing about?
claiming "50 yr
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Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports.
either, and I
That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly unreliable.
that's the way
I suppose not really necessary if you enjoy spending a few nights in a shelter with a hundred other people and don't mind repairing frozen pipes.
lower than 17%,
Correct, wood boilers are probably in the low single digits at this point. Due in large part to their applicability to large heavily wooded lots where you can log your own fuel.
we'll find
Right. Some of the articles noted above give an idea of how long it takes to get the lines purged and get everyone's pilots lit again.
heat for a
to know that
environmental clean up
Why would you have a long cleanup if you ran out of oil, the equivalent of a gas outage? The closest equivalent to an oil leak that would require cleanup would be a gas explosion.
But keep in mind, this thing heats water that get circulated to radiators in each room, and or to radiant flooring. This is a boiler, not the same as a gas fired forced air heater. Wall thickness in the heat exchanger is much higher as a result of immersion in water, and this also lowers efficiency. But 85% is nothing to sneeze at, pretty darn good.
Someone with radiant heat will always stick with radiant heat. Switching to forced air is very expensive. The installation disrupts the house enormously while the vents are installed and radiators removed. In 90+% of cases, a faulty boiler will be replaced with a similar product.
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