Bruce

there's not much you can do to increase the efficiency of a fridge. The one Jerry saw was a good idea though. Not having to open the door completely would really help. The door seals really matter and will be best on day 1 of the life of the fridge. You can't change the physics, for example freezing ice cubes would require more energy than some claims would have you think. And freezing water from the air to be later defrosted out is a terrible loss. Just think of the energy used in a kettle if you start with solid ice and later boil it all to dryness. On Batteries: 1 amp at 12 volts for 1 hour is not trivial for a battery, but it is only .012 kWh which costs a trivial amount from the mains. We really need cheaper batteries for this green stuff to take over except in really remote places.

My wife agrees with you guys. No way was she going to live with a converted chest freezer. So the planet loses out. If she was wrong, you could buy a chest fridge at harvey norman.

Both my grammars were terrible and I wish there were special police for them.

It was a terrible cruel world they lived in. I'm still haunted by the "finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch delivered by a s##t". A servant-girl, unable to refuse the noblemen of the house, thrown out into the cold for getting pregnant, is what I imagined even as a schoolboy.

Australia could have several big power stations in stable arid unpopulated places and have the cheapest and safest power in the world. Just because the Russians had a poorly-maintained old design in a highly populated area doesn't mean that we would have to. And (I thought better of the Japanese) we wouldn't build one on an earthquake seafront either. Roxby uranium and Kakadu uranium is plentiful. And, old K, did you know that organic muesli, along with everything else, is radioactive? It is all a matter of degree and both sunbaking and flying are much worse than working in a modern nuclear power station. But it's too late now. By the time the politics was halfway settled, what we foolishly call civilization will be over. It will suffer as climate change and resource depletion fix the overpopulation problem.

There is a big mistake on that page 6 octave. They say " a daily power as little as 55 amps...." which is meaningless. Amps are a measure of current, not power. And power is not what you pay for, it is really energy. kWh is an energy measure. I would trust your opinion about the converted chest freezer though. Strange that all the "efficient " fridges are door type, where you lose all the cold air every time you open it. I really believe that a chest type would use a third of the energy per day.

If Trump etc were against immigration for sustainability reasons, they would have my support. Alas they have no understanding of the science of sustainability. And as for nuclear storage, what's the problem? Even if there were a problem, it would have to be really bad to be worse than the global warming alternative. Amazingly, this nuclear opposition from the greens is wrecking the planet as much as the carbon denialists. It's probably too late now to go nuclear but it could have saved civilization.

Overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change are already having an effect on incomes. So what do people do? they look for something to blame. They elect uneducated loud people who have simplistic solutions. Of course this makes things worse than before but the voters don't realize this as they find more things to blame. Trump is just a symptom. He is not even the first. And they are not completely wrong .. I reckon we are fools to take in thousands of new immigrants when we don't have any coherent plan of how to feed our population in 50 years time ...You have scientific illiterates thinking scientists will magically provide.

A guy I know well used to say that the trouble with Australia is that general Ned Kelly never got to throw out the poms. We would have our own 4th July if that had happened.

There was the wonderful invention of the atom bomb, which put the heads of government in the front line and changed their attitude lots. Gosh OME, they are terrible pictures.

Its the 11th of the 11th here today. Am I the only one to feel repelled by the childish theatrics of waiting for this day and time for ending the stupid war? What if your relative got killed on the 10th?

How about publishing a full day's gallipoli menu for everybody to eat on remembrance day?

Gosh Yenn, I thought you had to remain " your humble servant" . Regardless, I wonder if anybody still uses those phrases.

Nev, you have to agree that they handled a defeated germany and Japan well.

I really like their space stuff though. If I had my way, we would partner the US in space and not be party to any of their stupid wars.

Don't think you are right about the first world war, space. Australians were volunteers, much to the chagrin of the turncoat labor prime minister of the day who tried several times to get the constitution changed to allow for conscription for overseas service. But Australians sure were more expendable than pommy soldiers, you see this from the casualty rates. I wonder how they justified conscripts for Vietnam. ( I nearly was one but my marble didn't come up ). I think it was by redefining what "overseas" meant.

I find it hard to understand why Australia didn't become an enemy when we found out how badly they treated our troops. They got malnutrition at Gallipoli , eating far worse food than the Turks. They died from trench feet in France, since the British were too mean to pay for floorboards in the trenches. This doesn't even count the pointless cannon-fodder casualties.

Here's my explanation Old K. They went off completely ignorant, thinking it was going to be fun and a great adventure. Even the higher-ups thought it was all going to be over quick. The Germans only had 6 weeks of ammunition at the start of the war, that's how quick they thought it would be. Of course this is only true for the beginning. Why people enlisted after years of fighting when they knew what was happening is a mystery to me too.

The figure that matters is watts per dollar so you did good old K with your water heating. But now you need some system to stop the water going over 60 degrees Batteries... I reckon you summed it up well Yenn. Batteries from hobbyking cost about $1 per watt-hour, that is $1000 per kiloWatt hour. A fridge in summer uses about 6kWh per day, so that would need $6000 worth of hobbyking batteries to power for a day when no other energy came in. A converted chest freezer of the same size would use 2kWh per day so would be just feasible. Funny how nobody makes such a fridge huh.

I would love to have lots of natural energy stuff but alas its all too expensive for me. I reckon that real green equipment is for rich people, except for the odd hermit type of guy. ( I actually know a guy like this, his woman left him long ago) At the farm, a solar water heater plus a heating coil for the combustion firebox was what I wanted. But it was $6000 compared with $900 for a gas water heater. The gas bill is less than the interest on $5100. There is also a regulation about automatic systems to limit the hot water temperature for a solar heater. Perhaps another $1000? Bugger, the hot water feels much better if it comes from "free" energy.

Start with an electric bike space. They are cheap and when you use the electric boost, it is like going downhill all the time. It it only the price which stops us having a second car as electric. They are just overpriced. The same was true for bikes, they were about $2600 but now they are below $1000.

Nomad, common sense is on your side, but common sense is wrong here. The efficiency of a steam engine depends on the difference between inlet and outlet temperatures of the "working fluid". The way to get higher efficiency is to increase this difference, which is why diesels have better efficiency than petrol engines. So while you could use say ether as the working fluid and a solar hot water panel as a boiler, the efficiency would be very low. Bugger, huh.

Eugenics, applied over many hundreds of generations, explains why we today are so unreasonably acquiescent of people in authority. It was obviously so dangerous to displease authority that our very genes were altered by culling out the people who resisted.

I think the chinese , albeit with one party but many candidates for each seat, have such a system. I read that they are shocked to hear of our "donations" system and they think we are corrupt as a result.

Kerry Packer was paid in franked dividends, so the tax was already paid. He had an army of lawyers and beat the tax office over this issue. This wasn't lost on a mate of mine who started paying cash where possible and telling the tradies that his cash was the same as a franked dividend since the tax had already been paid when he got his cash at work.