"Pete C." wrote:

John wrote:

"Pete C." wrote:

John wrote:

"Pete C." wrote:

John wrote:

"Pete C." wrote:


trimmed

Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about
it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the
equipment.

Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real
unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas
too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance
companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat
exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner,
but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too.

A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if
you keep replacing the components around it.

Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to
last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat
exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust.



That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my
mother's place has a comparable warrantee:

"Limited Lifetime Warranty
Covers cast iron sections. "

And what is the efficiency of that unit again?

What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger
warranty you were crowing about?





I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in
flux.

You mean your argument. A FUD one at that.



Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short
term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based
on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old
oil equipment.

That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr
old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace
with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes
the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead?

Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves
me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas
outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in
damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the
pipes, most people don't).

There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it
makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up.

http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/med...rthwestern.com
http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?S=4218169&nav=0Rcx
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...102003/1163272
http://girardpress.com/stories/12210...51221038.shtml
http://www.wowktv.com/story.cfm?func...y&storyid=1683
http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp...ype=Printablen
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_96369163

Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports.

Yeah, it's just happening all over. Gosh why haven't the insurance companies figured out that natural gas heated houses burn down so much more? Why aren't they as enlightened as you?

Because the total number is low enough not to bother them. That does not
in any way invalidate the relative difference in safety between oil and
gas.

Oh just earlier you were saying they were happening all over. Now the number is low enough not to bother the companies that pay for damage. Hmmm.
















is subject to outages and is far
more dangerous than oil.

With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose
from,

Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in
price.



you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages


No outage here in 35 years.

I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas
interruption is a big concern.

And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast.
It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple
years ago.

How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut?

My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas
company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines.

The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at
least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not
there to personally count them probably several more per year that got
little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36
years of flawless oil service.

Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I
wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything.

That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably
fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly
long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly
unreliable.

I live in a suburban/rural area and I have gas. "Not reliable" to you is never having an outage in *DECADES* to me.

Different areas have different reliability. If your gas lines were
installed fairly recently or your gas company is particularly good about
replacing older lines you're lucky. Not everyone has such luck.

So given that premise I should have had my gas service crap out many years ago.











It obviously isn't for 95% of us who
use it. I've had nat gas service for 25+ years, that has never gone
out once. I live in central NJ, 50 miles from NYC. But I've sure had
electricity go out.

Indeed I did as well and when it did I simply started my generator and
went back about my normal business without more that a few minutes
interruption.

Good for you.

Yep. Better to be prepared than screwed. Almost like a boy scout, except
I was never a scout.




And it;s the nature of the two systems that's key.
An underground piped system is immune from much of what can halt
electric service. A thrunderstorm, snow storm, car hitting a pole,
all are common electric system weak points, that gas generally is
immune from.

You are ignoring the fact that it is possible and economical to provide
backup for the electricity, something that is not possible with the gas.

Are you nuts? You have never heard of automatic standby generators connected to a
gas line? If your electric service is crappy enough to warrant it, that's the way
to go. No fuel to have to worry about storing and engines last a long time with
nat. gas, maintenance is very low too.

You misread that statement. I said it is possible and practical to
provide backup for electric service. It is not possible or practical to
provide backup for gas service.

True. Fortunately that is not really necessary.

I suppose not really necessary if you enjoy spending a few nights in a
shelter with a hundred other people and don't mind repairing frozen
pipes.

Huh? Shelter with a hundred other people? Sorry dude, never happened. No outages either.

Never happened to you perhaps. I most certainly did happen to people
near me.

Yeah you know one neighborhood, you claim.









Providing backup for gas service in a residential setting would require
a redundant backup furnace or boiler fired by an alternate fuel like oil
or electricity.

Wood fired boilers are becoming popular in the northeast, but as primary
sources, not backup for the most part. Some commercial sized burners are
available in dual fuel (oil / gas) though and can switch between fuels
at any time.

I would hazard to guess that the "popular" percentage is still quite a bit lower than 17%,
which is the percentage that you said is "not significant" for oil generation in USA
(1973).

Correct, wood boilers are probably in the low single digits at this
point. Due in large part to their applicability to large heavily wooded
lots where you can log your own fuel.

Uh huh. So your point?

The point was noting the relative impracticality of providing backup for
unreliable gas service.

Well yeah of course it's impractical. Because you'd have to go find some "unreliable gas service."











Additionally time to repair a damaged electric line is significantly
less than time to repair a damaged gas line in most cases. You also
don't have to spend additional time purging a repaired electric line
before returning it to service as you do with a repaired gas line.

Purging a gas line takes seconds or minutes.

For lines inside a home, not for the distribution lines in a
neighborhood.

Wouldn't know. Never needed to be purged since it was up and running. Maybe we'll find
out some day if maintenance is needed on the pipeline, like water pipes.

Right. Some of the articles noted above give an idea of how long it
takes to get the lines purged and get everyone's pilots lit again.

Yeah, since pipes need replacing like every year I guess, and they always do that maintenance in the middle of the winter, that's a real concern!

The outages aren't often related to maintenance, they are typically
unscheduled emergency events. You do bring up the additional point that
even scheduled maintenance can cause gas outages though you at least get
a few days warning.

What outages? Again, decades of having natural gas heat. Not one outage.












Again, when you put this in perspective, the gas outtage
thing is another red herring.

Tell that to the folks who lived within 10 miles of me that had to spend
several days in a shelter due to a gas outage.

When was that? Where was that? What was the cause?

Somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago. In CT, I believe in the Avon /
Simsbury area. I think it was a gas line rupture, not a dig up or
anything. Should be somewhere in the Hartford Courant archives if you
want to look.

Well if that ever happens to me, I'll expect I'll heat my house with electric heat for a
few days. Or maybe just keep the wood stove working overtime. But it's good to know that
they could just move right back into their house, no long lived $$$ environmental clean up
required.

Why would you have a long cleanup if you ran out of oil, the equivalent
of a gas outage? The closest equivalent to an oil leak that would
require cleanup would be a gas explosion.

No an explosion or fire of any type would be a disaster.

Right, but that has no bearing on the multi day gas outage I referenced.
The houses were temporarily uninhabitable because the gas service failed
and there was no backup for it. No idea how much damage from frozen
pipes also resulted, probably a good amount since not many people know
how to drain the pipes before leaving.

'No idea." Now that I believe. Good thing that oil furnaces never break down in the winter or run out of oil.

Nothing. I never said anything about unclean, just notably less safe and
reliable than oil. Burning the "raw" gas from a well will indeed be far
less clean than burning the refined gas supplied by a utility though.

Pete C.

Oil furnaces require more yearly maintence and Gas is used safely
thruout the world.

Oil is generally used where gas isnt available/

"Pete C." wrote:

wrote:

wrote:
Raw natural gas hasnt been refined seperating butane propane and other
gasses. Raw natural gas s indeed used directly in peoples homes, know a
fellow with a abandoned oil well on his property, ewhen they quit
pumping it he paid some $ to leave the casing and heats his home and
water with gas from this well, its at 5 PSI reportedly high for butler
PA area.

since raw natural gas contains other gasses it has slightly more BTUs
than refined gas.

Also, the same nat gas that is flared off at production sites is being
used, at least in part, to generate onsite power. I remember seeing a
TV program that showed how they were doing it. The problem with
getting this energy from remote locations is that there is no economic
way to transport it, which is why much of it is flared off.

But what does any of this have to do with nat gas heat being unsafe,
unreliable, unclean, etc?

Nothing. I never said anything about unclean, just notably less safe and
reliable than oil. Burning the "raw" gas from a well will indeed be far
less clean than burning the refined gas supplied by a utility though.

Funny, earlier you said that you couldn't have a hole in the ground (e.g. a gas
well) and just pipe it to your furnace. Now you say that it is just "less
clean." Actually the quality of the gas depends on the well. Gas companies
actually use mass spectrometers to measure the content (and in the end the BTU
content) of the gas that ultimately gets served to customers.

I'm not sure I understand all the details and I really don't want to
ask for clarification because my friends are reluctant to discuss it
further. I believe their insurance company covered most (but not all)
of their legal and restoration costs. However, shortly after the
initial restoration work was completed their policy was cancelled.
Now they can't obtain coverage elsewhere and they can't sell this home
because the Department of Environment won't sign off on the work (the
trace contamination might be from the church next door but how do you
prove that?). Any additional clean-up that is required will thus be
at their expense.

I do know a considerable amount of earth was removed and I believe
they drilled a number of wells and injected a water/fluid mix
containing some sort of microbe that was suppose to "eat" or breakdown
this oil. I don't believe it worked as well as they had hoped
(possibly due to colder ground temperatures?). I'm not sure if their
neighbours can resume using their wells at this point (several were
contaminated and rendered unfit for consumption).

In any event, through no fault of their own, they're left holding the
bag and it has caused them a tremendous amount of anguish.

Cheers,
Paul

On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 15:58:19 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

Unsaleable to the uninformed perhaps. To those who understand that
removing a few yards of soil and giving it to a construction company for
use under a road (where there is plenty of petroleum contamination
anyway) is pretty simple it should not affect saleability.

Too much uninformed and irrational hysteria in this country.

Pete C.

On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 05:03:34 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote:

zero wrote:


Oil burners do *not* have blowbacks on their own, they have had the
safety devices to prevent that for decades.

You don't know what you are talking about.

Blowbacks occur when someone
keeps pressing the reset button ignoring the warning not to press it
more than once. Oil burner controls from the last couple decades have
incorporated a "three strikes and you're out" lockout to prevent this.

For the last couple of decades THIS is what came on a domestic oil
burners;
http://customer.honeywell.com/techli...0s/69-0618.pdf

and before that, it was THIS;
http://www.partsguy.com/cgi-bin/Part...A117A1047.html

As soon as you purge yourself of the "three strike/ decades" sales
blurb, only then can you move forward.

Ok, that's not the case. You can reset ANY oil flame safeguard
relay control as many times as you like.


One of many examples:

Many examples? I know you are greenhorn, thats OK, however now your a
greenhorn know-it-all. This will be my last post responding to you.

http://www.carlincombustion.com/products/50200.htm

"Serviceman Reset Protection ( Latch-up after three consecutive
lockouts)"

Yes, this is one of the better controls NOW available. I referred to
this below.*


The nucleus of gas vs. oil residential heating safety lies in the
control methodology of the times.

Oil burners are direct fired. The full fuel output is ignited by a
strong arc. There is no pilot light. If it does not ignite, there is
approximately 10 seconds worth of atomized oil spray
inside of the combustion chamber. Flame detection is performed by a
Cad Cell.

Right, but what does that have to do with the three strike lockout?

Read it again slowly and carefully starting from; "The nucleus of
gas...."


Until recently, most all gas furnaces used a small pilot light to
achieve combustion, which in turn ignites the main burners. More of
today's furnaces are direct light off such as the oil burner, however
modern flame safeguards strategies are applied to bring an acceptable
level of safety to the gas burner.

If you're indicating that gas burners until very recently have had very
minimal controls with limited safeties you are correct. Many had no
electronics at all and relied on a thermocouple heated by the pilot as
the only safety for pilot loss. Most had no detection if the main burner
actually lit off properly. Most had no easily accessible emergency off
switch, you had to find the gas valve, etc.

Read it again slowly and carefully starting from; "Until recently,
most all gas furnaces..."

There is less risk involved in lighting off main gas fuel with a
supervised established ignition (a pilot), then there is lighting off
main oil fuel with a spark , unsupervised. This is probably beyond
you. Never mind.



* There are better controls available for domestic oil burners
however they have not found their way into the residential product
lines.

Huh? Those features are on nearly every residential oil burner
manufactured in the last decade. They are certainly on the oil burner I
had installed this spring.

Yes, you're new to this. So are the Carlin programmed controls.


Proportionally, there are many more instances of delayed ignition in
oil, then fuel gas.

For pilot units probably.

There are no pilots on little oil burners Read it again..

And for delayed ignition on an oil burner
rarely anything of consequence without human intervention overriding the
safety.

You don't know what you are talking about regarding oil
burners/combustion and safety. All you know is what you installed this
spring. There's more to learn. Good luck.


-zero

Pete C.

With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose
from, you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages
from a back hoe miles away, and I think you'll find the ratio of peoples
houses that have been destroyed by gas leaks compared to those destroyed
by oil leaks astonishing.

THE big problem with oil is that you require electricity to operate the oil
burners.

Thus, your oil heat is no more reliable than your electric service.

Gas can be used for ventless heaters (if legal in your area) that can keep
you quite comfortable without electric power.

But any "modern" gas furnace will also REQUIRE electric power. A "power
vent" gas water heater will also require electricity but a natural draft
heater will not. If you have public water, your water heater (believe it
or not) can provide a significant amount of heat to your house from your
kitchen and bathroom(s). It might seem silly now, but if you lose electric
for more than 24 hours and it's COLD outside, having hot water makes a real
difference in morale.

Finally, you might want to consider getting a gas cooking stove. Most
cooks prefer gas over electric for stove tops. The gas stove can also
provide emergency heat when the electric fails.

Because gas is so clear burning you might not notice any leaks which permit
combustion products into your living areas. Thus it's a good idea to get a
battery powered CO detector "just in case."