281–290 of 307 posts
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Sand (much denser = sinks in water) has low thermal conductivity, and isn't much more expensive. Simply put, in two bodies of equal volume and 'heat capacity', the one that's hotter stores more heat. Sand properties: [ https://material-properties.org/sand-density-heat-capacity-t... ]
From your link, sand has much worse heat capacity than water at 800 J/kgK vs 4000 for water.
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It was next to the hot water line and not insulated (enough) and it had pretty much just been sitting there all night.
Lucky you didn't get legionella. That is not up to spec, cold water lines should always be below 25°c. I have never seen such an installation, even in development countries it was done correctly.
Yikes, that's tough. In my city, the cold water pipes are buried close enough to the surface and the brutal sun that it comes out of the tap about 27-29c during the day.
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Many American universities use district heating for the whole campus. Also, as made famous by the many steam vents in NYC movie shots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system . More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#United_States
University of Minnesota still has it and has been upgrading it: https://cpm.umn.edu/combined-heat-power-plant
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> Lastly, installing a leak detectors are trivial and common. I've told about a dozen people in my life that leak detectors were a thing, and they were all shocked at the info. From what I gather, their existence is not common knowledge. > Still, water heaters get a drain pan to catch leaks. Initial leaks yes, but eventually hot water heats fail in a dramatic fashion and spew water everywhere. > Your condo may have b…
Tanks don't fail unless the anode gets depleted. You seriously need to tell your condo association to get their maintenance people to flush the water heaters regularly (seasonally or annually) and check/change the anodes. If they're gas-fired heaters, the burner and air intakes should be getting cleaned. If this isn't being done, it's probably because your maintenance is being done by plumbers, who have convinced eve…
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I was thankful, and shocked, the one year of my life that my HVAC system didn't break down in some fashion. Hot water heaters should have leak detectors on them. They often don't. The higher end models do. Product differentiation strikes again. Last water heater I had, the anode was A-OK, I had it checked about a year prior to the water heater failing. Thermal stress destroys stuff.
> one year of my life that my HVAC system didn't break down in some fashion Something’s wrong here. I’ve only seen 1 partial failure (a refrigerant leak reduced efficiency by 5x, but the AC still worked) in the last 15 years across several houses. You’ve got an order of magnitude more failures. Do you live on a boat? :P
My current house's HVAC system was also done piss poorly in places and there can be a 15 degree difference between rooms, so that's going to be 10k+ to fix. Fun times.
[1]Despite the obscene maintenance costs, the luxury is worth it. Warm floors are really nice!
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"only after they were kicked out of SWIFT and their reserves frozen by foreign banks." This is a response to an invasion of another country. Maybe I'm reading your tone wrong but "only after" seems to imply this was unjustified or at the least had no reason behind it.
I think their point was less to assign blame, but whether or not it was war related.
It implies a forced (no choice) reaction to an unjust or unexpected cause. A more neutral tone would have just said "after"
"I ran from the police after they pulled me over for speeding"
"I ran from the police only after they pulled me over for speeding"
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It's important to remember with most of these thermal batteries is that they are limited in efficiency by the laws of thermodynamics, both when putting the energy in and then again pulling it back out. The net round trip total power loss is usually well above 50%.
Thats for electrical power, if all you want to do is extract heat, you only major loss is thermal cooling over time and in the pipes. You should be able to get most of your energy back from a well-insulated system
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Why stay in SWIFT when it's been demonstrated that they can be cut off from global supply on the whims of the US administration? That one decision did more for the death of the American empire than any other.
I don't think "whims" means what you think it does.
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Why stay in SWIFT when it's been demonstrated that they can be cut off from global supply on the whims of the US administration? That one decision did more for the death of the American empire than any other.
I don't think "whims" means what you think it does.
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From finnish point of view, those seem small. In finnish, the term is ”kaukolämpö”, literally ”far heat”. You dont heat a ”district”, you heat the entire city. I mean, electricity wires go everywhere, why not heating pipes. And so the network for Helsinki looks like this: https://twitter.com/energiahelen/status/1511998227008176129?... The red lines is the heat pipe network, it covers the entire city. When Americans t…
You're omitting a very important point: the heat sources themselves. The heat for the entire city doesn't come from a single power plant. It is distributed over many heat generation plants throughout the city, some dedicated solely to district heating. I don't think any spot on that map is more than a few km from a heat source.