Bruce

What a coincidence! Yesterday after saying how Li-Pos can catch fire, there I was flying my new foam model glider-plane when it went off the air and crashed into the top of a tree then caught fire and flaming bits fell out of the tree. I've kept this quiet cos its fire ban time around here. Not even the missus knows. For sure it was the Li-Pos did that. I don't recommend them for anything carrying a passenger. And a good thing there was not much fuel in the paddock.

Nev, there is a trick to keeping the on/off pumps from cutting in and out when you are in the shower. You set the cutoff pressure up very close to the max pressure delivered by the centrifugal pump. Then the pump keeps going even if the flow is small. Gosh I had some awful showers before I was told about this. And while you are right about elevated tanks being the most reliable, they are no longer done because the pressure-sensor pumps are just so much cheaper. Remember the old water towers in the suburbs? No new ones for many years.

OME, it will be great if a cheap battery is developed. the zinc-bromine might just be the one. It is the cost per kWh of output that matters. For the LiFe battery, 13.2 volts and 8.4 amp-hours for $100 is 110W for 1 hour or 0.11kWh . This makes $909 per kWh stored. ( capital cost of the batteries ) Maybe if they lasted ten years, this is not so bad but I reckon its too high for me.

I much prefer lithium batteries. They are light. They hold their charge. But they are easy to bugger up, and the Li-Po's can catch fire. My Jabiru has had a LiFe battery for a couple of years now and it cranks well and saves 5kg, which is a real nice weight saving from the front of the firewall. And half the price of the Odyssey it replaced.

How do they dispose of the lead in batteries right now? I reckon they recycle it, and will do so with the lithium too.

20th july is 19 days before my birthday, that's the reason.

My understanding is that Assange was prepared to face his accusers on the rape stuff, but he wanted a guarantee that he wouldn't be sent to the US. This guarantee was never forthcoming. He did agree to be interviewed by Swedish police while in the Equadorean embassy.

Thanks, old K. Yes it sure is functionally better to have the tank high. It is the building of an elevated tank platform that is costly. These days, pressure water supply systems do not use elevated tanks. They don't even use compressed air tanks, they just use pressure-sensors driving the pump . Way cheaper.... Good point though about what happens if the fire is burning and the power fails.

I for one am horrified by the treatment of Assange. The thought that he might be sent to the US for torture makes my blood run cold.

Yes Octave, that Orkney lot seems to have much better stuff than I had to electrolize the water. If you can do this at anything better than 50% then that's great. What better way to use excess solar and wind?

How big is the fuel tank on those hydrogen trucks? and is it in gas or liquid form?

It would lose my vote too. They often get it wrong and would execute the wrong person. And I reckon it lessens the stature of the whole country. Do you ever look at the American president and see a torturer and a killer? I never used to but now I'm starting to.

The Women's Weekly is actually a monthly... So why don't they call it the Women's Monthly?

I think it might be cheaper to sit the insulated tank on the ground and have an electric pump suck water from this tank and push it into (either ) the solar heater or the combustion wood burner coil. If this were all to be un-pressurised, I don't see the need for any automatic valves for protection. What I haven't figured out yet is just how to use this hot water.. As the setup is now, the pressure-pump starts and sucks from the main tank and feeds the cold taps as well as the infeed to the gas hot water heater. The output from this heater supplies the hot water, and when you have a shower, you use a mixture of both. Both hot and cold from the same pump. It is only if the hot water tank was pressurized from this pump too that the output could be joined in to the hot water line... but this is in conflict to what I said at the start...

Good onyer, old K. Some people reckon you and I are rich on account of owning aeroplanes. If only they knew huh. You are right in that I could have done better with a diy setup, and I reckon the hot water would feel better as a result. But at the time, I had too much other stuff to do building the house. And there are new regulations aimed at preventing incompetents ( children and geriatrics and mentally deficient ) from scalding themselves. I would have ignored those regulations if I did a diy setup. At the moment, I am considering making a hot water storage tank, using a jacket with waste wool insulation, and heating the water with a solar heater and a combustion heater coil of copper pipe. If this looks like actually happening, I would like to get your comments on the design ideas.

But here's my main gripe. Farmers like us could each remove many tons of carbon from the air by charring stubble and timber. If this were done everywhere, the planet could yet be saved. The money to pay for this would have to come from the world's military budgets.... fat chance huh.

At the farm, I wanted to have the hot water made from a solar heater in the summer and a jacket on the combustion heater for the winter. We have unlimited firewood , at a cost of about $30 pa in wood getting gear wear and tear. Alas, the cost of doing this was about $6,000 compared with an instant gas hot water heater at $900 plus about $50 pa for the gas. That's why I think green stuff is an indulgence for rich people.

Here' my suggestion for all the high-ranking bigwigs to eat on Anzac Day. The same as the troops ate at Gallipoli ! The meal will consist of tinned bully beef ( minced corned beef thickened with fat and gelatine, stored outside in the hot sun for 6 weeks.) It will be served on tin plates which have never been washed ( if you ask an officer where there is water to wash anything, he will tell you that a Furfy is arriving tomorrow. A Furfy is actually a small tank of water ) The area must have millions of carrion-flies, such that if you stop shooing them for a couple of seconds, the plate goes black with flies. Accompanying the bully beef, there is only hard-tack biscuits, which even strong young teeth can break on. You are allowed to soak the biscuits in water. The biscuits are made from flour, salt and water. Nothing else, and yes you will get scurvy on this diet, not to mention all the nasty diseases carried by the flies. The army could easily buy vegetables from Egypt, but they are saving money. The Turks up the top are eating better, but they suffer just as much from the fly-diseases. What a patriotic feast, say I, for the Governor etc to commemorate Anzac Day.

Nev, the Sustainable Australia party is a completely different lot to the Pauline Hanson party. They are very respectable, try and google them up. But, I still remember when the Greens had a sustainable population platform, which they abandoned when they were accused of having something in common with One Nation. And, I still remember how wickedly Pauline Hanson was treated, gosh they jailed her on trumped up nonsense.

One Nation had it right about population growth and immigration. To me, that was so good that I could overlook other things. Fortunately, we now have a sustainable australia party which is respectable and a few of us actually vote for it.

Yep, the bit of information the insurance companies know very well but don't disclose is the payout percentage. That is, what percentage of claims are actually paid out. I reckon we need an insurance buyers co-op to sort this out.

You can't be serious Nev. There is a Mormon church near me, and it helps me keep my feet on the ground. If I ever begin to think there is any hope for the human race, I only have to go past that church and be corrected by the sight of it.

In the news, this 78 y/o woman who had paid her private health cover for years was refused admission to Hobart private hospital because of her age. A very similar thing happened to my Auntie Pat, when we were told by the Ashford private hospital that she wasn't welcome back there next time, on account of ( they didn't say this explicitly ) she had become unprofitable for them. I reckon that they should disclose this policy up front so that silly old people don't live in a fantasy world. Auntie Pat finished being looked after in a nice Catholic place ( she had been anti-Catholic for ignorant reasons) and the public hospital system, despite being proudly "private". Maybe right-wing oldies are easy to rip off, methinks.

But keep your feet on the ground guys. Hydrogen has been around forever and it is very expensive. Once, I made hydrogen and oxygen from a wind-generator and it would have taken 2 weeks worth to boil a cup of water. It would never have paid off the embedded energy in the wind-generator. But here's a thing often misrepresented... the Hindenberg airship was so flammable because of the nitrocellulose dope over linen, almost a recipe for gun-cotton. Not so much because of the hydrogen.

I don't understand the desire to find that amazing technology in the hands of some ancients. The pyramids, for example, are quite crude structures quite explicable by the technology, such as it was, of the day. The book " chariots of the gods " was written by a bloke called Von Daniken while he was in jail for dishonesty of some sort.