O/T: Finally

How many cubic feet of greenhouse gas in an elephant's fart?

The ONLY thing this will accomplish, is to raise your energy prices through the roof, further sabatoging an already shakey economy. It will have NO other effect. No, wait - it will have one other effect - it will increase Al Gore's income.

-Kevin in Indy To reply, remove (+spamproof+) from address........

Someone once said that the romance of the North went away fast when you were behind a dozen sled dogs that had eaten old frozen fish for lunch :-).

Not the big ones - it is termites. They out produce all sources other than volcanoes.

Now think of the rotting wood in Brazil ? ......

Mart> >> EPA declares greenhouse gases a health threat.

Good question.

Here in California, a major dairy state, cows are a major source of animal farts, but don't think elephants have yet been monitored.

Lew

Gore is a fraud.

Careful, now. If you talk like that he'll ban you from the Internet. He invented it, after all, so he must have controlling rights.

;-) Glen

Quick kill all plant life as plant life emits gas found in green house.

Gore is a fraud.

Yeah, he's a fraudy cat.

Their goal is to remove all Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Fortunately, the amount of CO2 in the air is a negligibly small percentage...

Well, it might increase /my/ income, too. :)

FWIW, the customer whose shop is featured at

And by the time they're done we'll all be starving. Plants need CO2.

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:30:43 +0100, Lew Hodgett wrote (in article ):

I don't even own a greenhouse. It's not my problem

- - George W. Shrub

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:04:53 +0100, J. Clarke wrote (in article ):

So does the thing in my basement....

Next time I build, I will be contacting you for prices or plans, one or the other.

BTW, in reference to this... "The construction crew expressed amazement at the temperature and force of the panel airflow - they were surprised that the air could be moved so rapidly without blowers."

Does the size and/or shape on the cold air intake vents have anything to do with this? Or is it just a case of being big enough?

This will finish off most of what is left of the US industrial complex. Hello third world US.

basilisk

I can help with the first, but for the second you can consult

Yes - but also the sizes and shapes of the plenums and discharge vents.

This too, but height and depth are far more important than width for airflow.

Morris, I'd take you up on that, but payback here in AZ would be measured in decades (I buy about $40 worth of kerosene per year to heat my shop).

Get back to me when you get that stirling cycle air conditioner into a commercially viable format, then we'll have something to talk about. ;-)

Would you settle for a solar powered swamp cooler?

Dave in Houston

Lucky you! At one point I needed to heat my shop to get an order out and burned more than $40 worth of LPG in a single /day/.

I'll invite you to be really specific about what you mean by "commercially viable format".

The air conditioner is a two-part - or, depending on your definition of "commercially viable format", three-part problem.

Part one is to produce a Stirling cycle engine suitable for use with solar heat. We know (sorta) how to build different flavors of Stirling engines, but there's a lot of R&D needed. IMO, there's a serious lack of R and even less D - and there are significant political disincentives for correction of that problem.

My progress has been limited by the fact that I'm only able to spend about $50/month on the project. I just bought a torch, regulators, hoses, etc to that I could braze prototypes - and that outlay represented more than three months of saved-up R&D budget. Oxygen and acetylene may be do-able next month, we'll see.

My first priority isn't air-conditioning - it's a solar powered pump suitable for irrigation and village water supplies, and if you have an interest in how things are going, there's a menu of web pages at

The engines that you see there are the probable forerunners of the engines that will be the core part of that air-conditioner.

It's looking more and more likely that it won't be me who gets back to you on the solar Stirling air-conditioning unit, and it may be to your kids rather than yourself, but it will happen.