Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 13, 2015

Heat pumps north of the NC/VA line, in the east, are clean, inefficient and undependable. But they are cheap for builders to install in new homes.

And Arlo’s thinking “But my heat pump works fine if you’d just turn it on.”.

almost heaven, need a heat pumplife is good there, fix up the old dump

Dad always threatened to drive south with a snow shovel tied to the roof. The idea being that when someone asks us “What the heck is that?”, we’ve found our new home.

I don’t miss cold, snow, and ice. Brrrr. I’m trying to convince my parents to move down here (they’re retired) but so far only one is on board.

Janis is still trying to avoid the subject by dancing around it.

Insulate air tight,solar exposure,heat exchanger for fresh air,your choice of heater. IMO :) Peace.

biglar, I like that!

I Google/Wikied heat pump…I still have no idea how they work…..

The trouble with America is that the line across the country above which winter is too cold is (mostly) on the wrong side of the line below which the summer is too hot and humid!Yeah I live in S.E. Australia, somewhere it never snows and the hot dry spells are broken up with regular cold fronts, and yes, heat pumps work very well here!

Spent two years in Miami. Those of us who live anywhere else, other than San Diego or Kona, are idiots.

“instead of burning natural gas, the cleanest fuel known to mankind (besides hydrogen), to make heat, let’s use a complex electric-powered machine that only provides heat when the outside air is within 40 degrees of the inside temperature ".Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel..The cleanliness of hydrogen depends on how it was generated..Nuclear fuel is the cleanest fuel of all, with solid waste of less than 10 grams per person per year. (Think two nickels by mass, volume about 41% of that, so 0.8 nickels per person per year. Coal ash in contrast produces about 100 times as much radioactive waste per person per year. Natural gas much less than coal, I would think, but it does contain radon…)

( And coal ash contains nonradioactive but still toxic wastes as well. Natural gas is. MUCH cleaner. )

Take a look at ductless mini-split heat pumps from Fujitsu or Mitsubishi. They are more efficient because of variable-speed compressors, and no duct. This link talks about using one in Massachusetts.http://www2.buildinggreen.com/blogs/7-tips-get-more-mini-split-heat-pumps-colder-climates

She has to plan ahead for when Arlo is gone….down stream

Infrared is 99% efficient, 1000 degrees at the source. I stay real warm whether I like it or not.

iammu: An airtight house will trap its own pollution, but otherwise I agree in principle..DavidHuieGreen: Own any real estate in Chernobyl? Birth defects doubled after the “nonevent” at Three Mile Island. The Pacific coast is importing radioactivity from Japan’s debris. There is no place to store the waste, so we are spreading it across the Middle East in the form of “depleted” uranium munitions. Great power source.

Arlo may want to think about who he is going to retire with as well as where and when. Janis can be a real unromantic downer at times.

I’ve worked at a college for over 20 years and have been to a lot of retirement parties. I’ve been asking the retirees whether they plan to stay in the area or move. Invariably there’s only one determining factor:

Family

If they have family in the area, they stay. If they move, it’s to be with family members somewhere else.

A and J could be getting ready to move to the bayou with the kids and spend their golden years embarrassing Gene.

@hippogriff.“DavidHuieGreen: Own any real estate in Chernobyl? Birth defects doubled after the “nonevent” at Three Mile Island. The Pacific coast is importing radioactivity from Japan’s debris. There is no place to store the waste, so we are spreading it across the Middle East in the form of “depleted” uranium munitions. Great power source.”.No, I don’t own any Ukrainian property.Yes, they let the radioactive material escape by intentionally draining the water from the graphite reactor. It caught fire and released much radioactive material.Poor design. Poor planning. Interestingly, the zone too hot for us is a haven for formerly endangered species. Also interesting that the radioactive material released was still less than from coal ash..Three Mile Island, also a disaster — financial, not health. No release of radioactive material as proven by test of undeveloped photographic film all around. I would question your birth defects source since nothing was lost from the reactor which could cause them..Depleted uranium is not from “spent” reactor fuel. It is naturally occurring uranium depleted of its most radioactive isotope, U-235, leaving only U-238. This is actually used for radiation shielding since it is so dense..And, yes, radioactive isotopes from Fukushima are in the Pacific ocean, found in tuna. Naturally occurring Polonium-210 has over 600 times the radioactivity and even at that 7 ounces of tuna contains about 5% of the radioactivity of one uncontaminated banana, so we’d have to have 600 Fukushimas to double the radioactivity of uncontaminated tuna and12,000 of them to bring them up to banana-levels..I hope I haven’t scared you off bananas, just trying to put things in perspective. .We can assume the design flaws in previous reactors will not be in new ones. All the so-called “waste” can be used up in breeder reactors. No smokestack emissions, no greenhouse gases, fewer mining and transportation deaths, more reliable domestic energy supply..Yep, nukes are the best.

I thought they lived in the south, near the gulf coast?

DavidHuieGreen: You won’t scare me with denial. I use the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, CDC press releases, and even my father’s seminary classmate, Washira Nagamachi, who was headmaster of a school in Hiroshima in August 1945, for my information. My father was also a high school classmate of Chet Hollifield, one of the first defenders of The People to sell out to the nuclear industry. I go way back on this subject.