OK, yes, being energy efficient is great, and my wife and I are currently hunting for a house to buy and renovate, with the idea to make it as energy efficient as possible. BUT... you've gone a bit overboard on some of your ideas.

To suggest that everyone should have tiny windows is insane. Windows are brilliant for a large number of reasons:
* Free light
* Free solar heating when it's cold (including heating up a large mass like a brick wall to radiate heat inside the house)
* (most importantly for me) Removes the feeling that you're living inside a tiny box... large windows overlooking a garden or nice view can turn an otherwise normal room into a peaceful oasis.

Definitely do all you can to reduce heat loss from the house through them when it's cold, or heat entrance to the house when it's hot... but getting rid of windows is NOT the way to live. Not in any sane sense of having quality of life. And suggesting that people have sheets of plastic over their windows really is a little horrendous. That's utilitarianism taken to extreme. It may work, but your house will resemble a shanty town.


LED lights would be great to have except that there are NONE that are anywhere near to bright enough to replace even moderately bright incandescent bulbs at a pricepoint less than $100... so until they become a logical choice it's compact florescent for our house at present.

You haven't really even touched on passive heating/cooling, and you're very much only thinking of keeping a house warm when it's cold rather than cool when it's hot. I live in Melbourne Australia, today the temp is going to be 44C (111F), which is STINKING hot by anyone's measure. But it also gets down to single digit temps (40s F) in winter... so we have to have homes that can be good both ways.

One of the best ways to keep a house cool is to keep air moving through it. If you have vents/windows up high you can have them open to vent off hot air that rises, and window down low open to draw in cooler air from outside. This is one thing our current house lacks. It may have lots of windows we can open to let air through, but being that they are all about midpoint through the wall it is infuriating to have the house too hot and yet a change has come through and it's lovely outside but you can't coax the air through the house.

* Insulate as much as you can afford.
* Build the house (when you're doing so from new) such that it takes best advantage of the sun for the given times of year.
* Install Solar Panels for electricity
* Use an on demand gas hot water system (so you're not heating a large container of water and have it sit there), and even better have it be a backup to a solar hot water system
* Install Rain water tanks
* Use dual flush toilets (amazing that they are not common in the US)
* Use evaporation cooling over refrigerated
* Use as much passive heating/cooling as you can.

Crying foul of how inefficient things like stoves/fridges are is a little pointless, as other than getting the most energy efficient ones you can when buying, what can you really do about it?

Definitely think about energy and insulation and actual energy usage, but you don't have to live in a sealed, windowless box in order to live efficiently.

my house was built in 1956, its in fantastic condition and i have been slowly updating to make it more energy efficient. one thing i have yet to replace, because they are so fucking expensive and my house has so many of them, is the windows. when i had the inspection done the dude even told me not to open them because they are so old he thought the panes would crumble if handled too roughly. where i live its not uncommon for it to be 106F + in the summer and currently its 10F right now and dropping. so... we experience a bit of extremes and my energy bills are always high. (though much much lower than any apartment i ever lived in)

tell me more about this plastic. i think the plan i had originally was to slowly replace a window or two at time with solar windows. but theyre horribly expensive and i decided i dont really like how dark they look from the outside. kind of an eyesore. especially on a yellow house.

for my birthday a few years ago my stepdad came over and installed some insulation in the attic, which is great. and i bought a new AC and furnace with all kinds of extra fancy filters after i found out my asthmatic son is also allergic to everything in existence. that seems to have cut my energy bills by about a 1/4 and seriously reduced the amount of trouble he has with his asthma which has also saved me money on medicine. i dont even want to think about what kind of grossities were hanging out in a 50+ year old AC unit.

i also discovered some awesomeness last winter. i put electric blankets underneath the fitted sheet on all of our beds in the winter. turn them on about 5 minutes before we lay down and the bed is toasty warm when you get in. and most of the fall and winter you can shut the heater off at night. our blankets have timers on them, so they stay on for about 30 minutes. the bed stays warm all night and the hot air isnt blowing into the house all night making us all stuffy nosed and dry in the morning.

In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world's first and only hot air baboon ride.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^potchi79:
So you start a pulse jet with a leaf blower?

Mostly yes, the idea behind most jets is to compress incoming air with fuel. No spark is needed as the compression causes heat. The problem is you need the air already moving to start. The same is true of turbofan engines of most jet airplanes. In my day they used electric motors to start the fan blade spinning. Once they are up to speed, they feed enough air fast enough into the combustion chambers to keep it going. A leave blower is a lot easier to add to a project then an electric motor. If you look up DIY jet engines in youtube, you will see it as the staple for home brew jet starters.
Jets are much more "simple" then combustion engines as they are mainly self sustaining when up to speed. They are very complex in other ways though, like how to not melt down under extreme heat and such. A flame out at low speed typically spells doom for a jet...engine restarts when careening downward is not as experience you want in life.
One thing I have never understood about a pulse jet is how to ramp your speed up. With a turbofan, you just up the fan speed or fan blade pitch...with a pulse just I have no idea. Add more fuel maybe? If that were the case, then the max speed would be dictated by the explosion maximum. If your explosion is to great, you risk vibration annihilation or destruction of your combustion chamber...or you spit the hot air out the back end before the pulse can bring it back for re-ignition? Or perhaps it has to do with pulse modulation and changing how long you wait till your open the valve. The longer you wait, the more thrust you get before the next cycle? Dunno, pulse jets were always more of a curiosity than an area of study.
Edit: Jets are very similar to diesel engine as there is no spark needed...all the heat is gained through compression. Hope that isn't TMI at this point


than

Though your knowledge of jets is impressive. Let's really try to stomp this sign of the internet generation out, shall we?! Who's with me!?

>> ^potchi79:
So you start a pulse jet with a leaf blower?


Mostly yes, the idea behind most jets is to compress incoming air with fuel. No spark is needed as the compression causes heat. The problem is you need the air already moving to start. The same is true of turbofan engines of most jet airplanes. In my day they used electric motors to start the fan blade spinning. Once they are up to speed, they feed enough air fast enough into the combustion chambers to keep it going. A leave blower is a lot easier to add to a project then an electric motor. If you look up DIY jet engines in youtube, you will see it as the staple for home brew jet starters.

Jets are much more "simple" than combustion engines as they are mainly self sustaining when up to speed. They are very complex in other ways though, like how to not melt down under extreme heat and such. A flame out at low speed typically spells doom for a jet...engine restarts when careening downward is not as experience you want in life.

One thing I have never understood about a pulse jet is how to ramp your speed up. With a turbofan, you just up the fan speed or fan blade pitch...with a pulse jet I have no idea. Add more fuel maybe? If that were the case, then the max speed would be dictated by the explosion maximum. If your explosion is to great, you risk vibration annihilation or destruction of your combustion chamber...or you spit the hot air out the back end before the pulse can bring it back for re-ignition? Or perhaps it has to do with pulse modulation and changing how long you wait till your open the valve. The longer you wait, the more thrust you get before the next cycle? Dunno, pulse jets were always more of a curiosity than an area of study.

Edit: Jets are very similar to diesel engine as there is no spark needed...all the heat is gained through compression. Hope that isn't TMI at this point

It's easy to get worked up over this, call the guy an asshole, the whole shebang. And he is an asshole. But that's all pointless. This will keep happening as long as people expose themselves like the people involved here did. You could make laws against it, but that's not going to get the victim's faces off the net. The only solutions are to develop vetting systems and security procedures for these confidentials sites that aim to minimize the chance of trolling and, for the individual, to simply refrain from posting personally identifiable information on-line. Anything else is just hot air.

Why the fuck would you still be using txt msgs in an augmented reality? That's like using a hot air balloon in the space race.

See, now I would have done the same thing. Except I'd be inflating a hot air balloon with it. | )

I thought I was going to say something funny to reply and came up short. Bravo Shole.


>> ^shole:
i guess it's only appropriate.. the church is full of hot air anyway
badum tshh

i guess it's only appropriate.. the church is full of hot air anyway
*badum tshh*

Did you not hear the last line about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Why should we make them sweat? Because they run a successful business?

We need more of those around here.


>> ^NetRunner:
I'm iffy about actually nationalizing the oil industry, but we should be making them sweat about the threat.
Instead, they laugh because they know even the Democratic party is too right-wing to do anything like nationalize a company, even temporarily.
With two oil men in the White House, they know it's all hot air.

I feel sorry for anyone who debates with Dinesh. He is all screams and hot air. Very annoying.

I'm curious if you opposed the "alarming increases in federal power" and were for "condeming [sic] the...(increase)...of our national debt" while Bush was in power? Or are these hallow, hot-air, partisan ramblings from you? Let be honest here. Neither Republican or Democratic are for small government.

Unlike others who CLAIM to be non-partisan, I actually am... I heartily condemn many things Bush did in his term. Federal power did increase alarmingly under Bush. He expanded government in ways that should have never been allowed. Does that satisfy you? Both parties suck. We need at least ONE party to take a stand though and start paring back the size, scope, and power of government. That sure isn't going to be Obama's democrat party though.

GW and the neocons spent enough money on Iraq and Afghanistan to send manned missions to mars and back... twice? But that's cool, no problem, because ultimately, if we're killing brown people, it's all good, right WP? Spending lots of money on our own country? BAD BAD BAD.

As well as being ignorant, it seems you're also quite the racist. Unlike you, I don't place arbitrary value on human beings based on how much melanin is in their skin.

Regardless, Bush's rampant over-spending was horrible for the country. However, the bulk of Bush spending was NOT on the Iraq war. It was on massive increases to government social programs. But Obama makes Bush look like he was a miser, quintupling America's debt in 5 months. Spending 1.4 trillion we don't have? BAD BAD BAD!

I note wryly that neo-libs were all fired up about our deficit while Bush was in office. They could care less about it now. That as much as anything proves to me that most neo-libs are ignorant zombies who only care about an issue when some neo-lib flack tells them to care. Obama has told them to stop caring about debt spending, so the zombies have dutifully agreed. Pathetic.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
The Republican party isn't going to win the next cycle by co-opting liberal positions. They're going to win by taking a stand on priciples such as (1) opposing a radical social agenda (2) trying to stop the alarming increases in federal power (3) condeming the quadrupling of our national debt, etc... etc...


I'm curious if you opposed the "alarming increases in federal power" and were for "condeming [sic] the...(increase)...of our national debt" while Bush was in power? Or are these hallow, hot-air, partisan ramblings from you?

Let be honest here. Neither Republican or Democratic are for small government. Both have and will increase spending dramatically until the people stop paying attention to the magician's hands...

"Look how much pollution I just put out".
Brilliant. You just described yourself as a balloon filled with hot air, spewing toxic waste, as a good thing.

Ever get the feeling that the English language doesn't quite mean the same on Fox News as it does in other places?

Like, "Soon they'll say electro-magnetism and noise are pollutants that need to be regulated", which they make sound so preposterous, so I'd love to see Glenn move to a house next door to an airport, under a cluster of power lines please.