That is most unfortunate, and a waste of a great technology that isn't a solution to an energy shortage, but could be one part of a solution.
My systems have saved me about $3-400 a month because I pre-heat my hot tub and hot water heater with hot water solar instead of electricity (which was insanely costly). We have the same issues with selling at >.10 and buying back at >.30, and maximum production/selling limits too, so it's better to use your power as you make it....but we also have a plan where our produced power is used first to erase our purchased power at a 1:1 ratio (based on 3 times of day/rates) so on that plan I never pay the highest rates and never sell at the low rate, because I don't make enough power to have a net surplus, so I don't sell. It's not perfect, but it's acceptable. I just wish they would implement some storage methods like I described and make solar farms more beneficial and allow/incentivize home users to produce more than they use.
True enough, just lots of panels isn't a way to get off fossil fuels.

My fave was probably the hot water heater overpressure test.

So. Many. Flaws.
4 more people and that thing would be at water-level.
They did all that work, and they still had to make a fire-powered water-heater that was land-based?
Did they varnish that wood before attaching it to the sides of the structure? There are so many superior material options.

In what way ?

Hot water radiators (possibly the type in this skit) are powered by circulating hot water from a boiler. the water only gets to a certain temperature and then is dispursed through the pipes of the building.

The water stops flowing when the room itself/thermometer registers that the air temperature is what you want it to be.

The water/radiator does not heat up quicker if you jack the temperature on the dial, the water just flows longer to heat the air up longer. The water is at a constant temperature, unless you have a shit boiler/water heater.

Electrics might be different, well they are actually when they have settings like 500 watt 1000 watt and 1500 watt settings. But in apartments it all depends on what the thermostat reads.

Now I wonder if your comment was facetious...

http://waterzone.org/water-heater/hot-water-heater-leaking/

It's a Swedish show where they try different things with a house (already set to be demolished) to see how dangerous things can be in everyday situations. In this episode, they wanted to see what would happen if they tried to fill a whole room with water. In other episodes, they took out an outside supporting wall of the house to see what would happen, or they removed safety devices on a hot water heater to see what would happen.

Haven't bought this lower taxes = jobs at all. I don't know how anyone can hear them say it and not tell them to go fuck right off with that nonsense.

Now if they say "lower taxes IF we create X number of jobs not counting bringing back laid off employees, etc" then we'd have a conversation. But it's grabbing lower taxes while at best bringing back laid off employees as the workload increases, which the workload is going to increase despite whatever the tax rate may be...people can only cut out certain things for so long until absolutely need them when it comes to manufactured goods whether it be paint, siding, car parts, clothes, water heater, etc. Stuff breaks, wears out, needs maintenance, etc.

What the discussion should be put to is raising taxes, but allowing companies to expand their operations (including hiring more people) and keep the current tax rate. So there is incentive to put money into expansion instead of into their cash reserves and sitting on it. And there should be similar thinking to that when it comes to corporations going forward. Laws limiting their ability to enter into bankruptcy while paying out bonuses to the people who led them into the hole, because it is a total conflict of interest to have people drawing excessive non-salaried money out of a company that should be conserving. They should be directing them, by law, into actions which benefit the US society first and foremost and global society secondary so they have a "healthy to the economy" but profitable operation and not the current parasitic relationship going on where the corporation takes everything and pisses on everyone else. It's creating an animosity that really doesn't need to exist between the citizenry and the corporations.

But wait...right at the end there also seems to be some pretty messed up venting on what appears to be the water heater. I see some foam type stuff with some nice duct tape (NOT what duct tape is meant for) and that vent seems to loop around a bit before going who knows where. Can anyone say carbon monoxide?

Almost all energy consumed by households is avoidable waste:
* think about the way you fry eggs. 99% of the heat from the burner is going into the air, not into the eggs. This should be solved by using small device that is well insulated on all sides and has an internal heating coil.
* Ovens have a high heat capacity and shitty insulation. More energy is wasted on heating up the oven itself than actually goes into the food. This could be solved by lining the inside of the oven with silica aerogel instead of metal. If an oven is properly insulated it will not feel very warm to the touch on the outside, even after being on for an hour.
* Most of your heating and cooling energy leaks out the windows -- if their inside surface feels significantly above or below ambient during extreme weather, your heating and cooling energy is being wasted and hemorrhaging out the windows. It would literally save energy to have a webcam on the roof and display that image on an LCD inside instead of having windows, if you live in a climate with extreme temperatures (especially in cold climates, as the energy used for the LCD would contribute to heating the house). All ventilation needs can be accomplished through a small portal with a fan (and a heat exchanger, of course).
* Hot water is produced very wastefully by just dumping energy into it instead of using a thermodynamic cycle to transfer heat and produce something cold as a byproduct. Hot water could be co-produced with cold water for AC / Refrigeration much more efficiently than doing them all separately.
* Hot water goes down the drain. This should at least go through a heat exchanger, which would dramatically lessen the amount of work that has to be done to heat up new hot water. A 7 Liter per minute showerhead putting water 30 degrees F above ambient down the drain is wasting over 8135 watts as long as it is running. However, I don't know of any houses yet designed with a heat exchanger between the shower drain water and the intake of the water heater.
* Fluorescent lights. Duh. Incandescent bulbs should be banned.
* Freezers built with the door on the top will waste much less energy to the convection of air when opened, for obvious reasons.

Here ends the lifestyle-neutral list of suggestions. The following would involve sacrificing something:

* Reduce excessive lighting -- if people wouldn't fuck up their retinas by driving just after sunrise or just before sunset, or seeing specular reflections of the sun on shiny cars and buildings outdoors, they wouldn't need such bright lights indoors. A 1 watt LED is plenty for reading. Sunlight could be used in the daytime instead of artificial lights.

Good discussion guys. I couldn't help but weigh in with my two cents. I think everyone here agrees that this is one issue we need to get right, as there's a lot of investment on the line. While I like most of the options mentioned, I have a preference for passive solar over photovoltaics, just because of the pollution concerns involved. These too can work on a local scale for water heaters, etc. Further, if implemented on a large scale in the southwestern US, it could power most of the country. Nuclear too is an option that should be expanded in the near term, and I don't think the NIMBY problem is as bad as you think. As my father said, in his opposition to the Cape Wind Project... "I'll live next door to a modern nuclear power plant, but those waters have better purposes." Frankly, the opposition to building new plants is just keeping older, unsafe plants online past their safely usable life. It's not like our workforce is busy doing much else right now, let's get building.

Personally I feel like it will become an issue of niche solutions for niche applications. The solution that locally make sense is the one that will be adopted. Rurally, especially in areas with little rainfall, it may be more logical to use your abundant resource, land, to generate your power. In higher density areas, this doesn't make as much sense. This brings up another big issue I thought I heard briefly mentioned which is distribution. HVDC cables, coupled with smart distribution grids leads to HUGE gains in efficiency of distribution. There were also a number of notable energy sources left out of this discussion, such as geothermal (where it applies), algal ethanol/petroleum (perhaps best for their implications on plastics), or, for the super crazy, orbiting solar plants beaming microwave power back to earth (Japan is actually researching this). Geothermal, for instance, may prove critical to reducing industrial emissions. Aluminum manufacturers have already begun using Icelandic geothermal as the refining process is extremely energy intensive, and the end product is quite transportable.

I drive by a lot of the big, regular wind turbines between Portland, OR and Spokane, WA, more of which go up every trip i make, it seems. They are rarely ever still. Not sure if that's just because we have more wind around here, but it seems to be anything but fraud from my angle.

Anyway, i'd love to have one of these for my home, but we use maybe $40 in electricity per month. Even if we pushed our usage up to $50 a month and our turbine generated 100% of our need, it could take 10 years to break even on the purchase and installation price of $6000. Maybe if we had an electric car, baseboard electric heating, and some sort of electric water heater...

^ I'd love to see some backing for that fraud claim there, probie.

At any rate, I do agree that we need more personal power generation to reduce the load on the grid and encourage personal responsibility for power consumption.

Put a couple of these in your yard, get a plug-in electric car for the daily commute, natural gas powered stove and water heater... no more dependence on foreign oil.

^That's so true. Whether blankfist posts a video about particle physics, election fraud, how to install a water heater, or the Queen of England, you just know there's going to be some farting.

castles wrote:

So how do I get my water heater to do that?

In the show they mentioned they disabled the thermostat that would normaly turn off the heat at about 140 degrees. They then showed with a busted thermostat the backup safety is a pressure relief valve. So the second step was to cap off the pressure relief valve which Adam mentioned people actually do more often then you would think. Thinking that the open pipe was from some old plumbing and since it sometimes drips water they figure they can just cap it.

BTW...don't try this at home.

So how do I get my water heater to do that?