I should be seeing these stickers every-fucking-where. And somehow I haven't seen any, or at least not lately. And yet, I saw that dumbasses put these up for Biden.

I should be seeing these stickers every-fucking-where. And somehow I haven't seen any, or at least not lately. And yet, I saw that dumbasses put these up for Biden.

Are you tired of winning yet?
Do you want to win more?
Please no more 'winning'... please.
Joking aside , some of my extended family still thinks the US is winning and that a lot of these 'pain points' are required to Larger-winning. I am not certain how to unpack the cope but the cope is strong.
Ah yes, just a pain point, you know, like being stabbed before dying. :P
4.7 million Americans heat their homes with heating oil. Heating oil is essentially diesel (same fraction of distillation). Its going to be a cold and expensive winter for millions of Americans.
I was super lucky to replace my oil furnace with a heat pump a couple of years ago, before prices of heat pumps and oil skyrocketed. I used to pay $600-700 every three months in the winter just on heating oil (I had a very inefficient 1950's oil furnace in my poorly insulated 1940's home).
Now I have air conditioning and heating without spending hundreds of dollars. I wonder how much it would cost to fill the oil tank now.
Heat pumps jumped in price? I just installed one myself for $450 all in (wiring, disconnext box, breaker, unit itself, concrete for the pad, etc.) for a 12k BTU unit in my living room.
I'm really happy you were able to make the jump! I'm really worried about a whole bunch of my distant neighbors this year. Prices continue to climb, wages (and employment) continue to fall. Its good to hear you dodged this particular bullet. Were you able to take advantage of any of the tax breaks or incentives from your utility provider to pay for part of your upgraded HVAC before the current administration yanked them?
I'm also very worried, as my neighborhood still has a lot of people using oil furnaces, primarily those on fixed incomes. Their situation is pretty dire, to put it lightly.
I was able to, yeah. It definitely helped me afford it. It's really sad that they got rid of it, basically ensuring that some people will be living in cold homes at some point this year. Those credits were good for everyone except for the oil companies: heat pumps help save on power bills (being one of the few > 100% efficient heating methods), they can reduce electrical grid stress if people move to heat pumps from resistive heating, and they help reduce pollution. It's just another way this administration and the oil companies are hurting everyone.
I was able to take advantage of the tax credit too to help pay for my heat pump. It allowed us to completely turn off natural gas service at our house which saves us hundreds of dollars a year for our situation.
The discontinuation of the tax credit for energy efficient homes is particularly bad because these type of programs typically gain more adoption the longer they go on as more people are made aware of them. There are likely people only today discovering these programs existed after they were discontinued by trump very early.
I don't understand how the heat part works when it's below freezing.
As long as it above 0K outside, you can (in theory) transfer energy. Heatpumps meant for cold weather climates use a different gas with a lower boiling point than those meant for hot weather climate (aircondition). But other than that, they work exactly the same.


How hot can this get my water, or are they only meant for forced air?
You can them however you want pretty much. They can heat the water plenty enough, and if you choose the right one you won’t notice any difference other than a lower powerbill.
You can get heat pump water heaters, they can get sufficienrlt hot, but are kind of slow though.
The element can cool the air below zero. They have to play games if it gets to the due point of the outside air to keep from frosting up however.
Also, there is an efficiency hit, as the temperature differential gets larger. This is why ground sourced, or even water sourced are more efficient in colder climates.
Do you understand how an AC unit works when its hot as tits outside? I cant remember the specifics but its air pressure. One way makes it hot, the other makes it cold. Just reverse it for whichever situation you need it to be
Can that be replaced with stuff that has a red 4, like formaldehyde, hydrogen sulfide, and ethanethiol?
red 4,
Red 4 is just diesel with coloring for taxation differences. This fuel will see the exact same price hikes as road diesel or heating oil because its the same chemistry under the coloring.
formaldehyde, hydrogen sulfide,
I would doubt that current residential heating oil storage and combustion systems are compatible with the noxious nature of these two to operate as a direct replacement in a home.
ethanethiol
No idea.
Really? Damn. I really want to try some alternate fuels to see how well they do.
And are you confusing "red 4" for some branded stuff? I'm referring to the red part of the NFPA 704 diamond.
Now that I think about it, pyrophoric fuel would work even better than the stuff I mentioned, right? Like, you could load some elemental potassium into an oil heater, and you won't even need to turn the thing on. It would basically fuel itself.
And are you confusing “red 4” for some branded stuff? I’m referring to the red part of the NFPA 704 diamond.
Oh apologies I though you were referring to red diesel (aka offroad diesel).
Oil furnaces are really simple machines. Just a pump that sprays fuel into a chamber and an igniter. Ethanol at the right concentration might work, but suitably heated vegetable oil might also work.
I just drove through a handful of states in the Midwest on a trip. I think I'm average it was around $6.20. the most I saw was $7.15, but that was at a podunk station off the beaten path that was more expensive across the board.
We saw one pump that a fellow filled up diesel and the total bill was $185 at $6.15. Insane costs.
Good. Starve the brodozers.
Over $10 in my state.
Are the digital displays broken?
They have some leeway, in euros it's just shy of €2.50 per litre.
So not a state as in a US state
Indeed. The obsession with petrol prices in the US is funny to me, as one of the reasons the US economy has fallen so far behind leading economies is precisely the too low prices of petrol.
Our city planning and urban sprawl was influenced by the oil and automotive industries to build a car-centric society. And now most are dependent on vehicles without having sufficient mass transit.
America, the headquarters of the capital class.
Europe as a whole is much older than the US, which means its city planning, population density, and having places to put cars for everyone is just different than the US. Here, cities were waaaay smaller when cars first came out, they could be planned around cars, and we had the room for suburban sprawl (which means less density, which means mass transit can't be so, well, massive).
So not to be defeatist, but even if we put significantly more funding into mass transit, it would still be choked up by our city planning, which is going to be way harder to overcome. Thus, we need cars which means we need cheap fuel for it. I'm fortunate enough to have an EV and work from home, but other households can be spending hundreds of dollars more per month (or more) on gas with no practical way out.
Leaving aside city planning and public transport issues (in which you do sound defeatist), it's also simply a matter of fuel efficiency. American cars are less fuel-efficient than European or Asian ones and adoption of EVs is relatively low because policymakers have deliberately followed terrible policies in order to win elections.
You're telling me to leave aside the core of the issue, which doesn't really have a solution other than to tear down and rebuild all of our cities? 🤔
I'm talking about issues that have been there for 75+ years there. Fuel efficiency would help, both from less fuel from the household and less demand on the market. But a lot of that comes from engine technology we didn't really have all those years ago.
As for EVs, you're damn right we've been a bunch of numbskulls there. I adore mine at times like this. But it does nothing to tamper car dependency. If anything I'm more likely to go for a day trip 100 miles away because I can do it so cheaply and easily.
It's because the US is a very car centric country and large geographically. We should have invested in high speed train, public transit in major cities, etc., but we didn't.
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