#Natural Gas Water Heaters

[plumberofthewoodlands]

Plumber of The Woodlands

Plumber The Woodlands TX is a locally based business that wants to help you with the difficulties that are troubling right now. If you’re ready to upgrade your appliances and make your system right again, then our servicemen can help you. Keep reading to learn about the many services we can offer.

[plumbingservicethewoodlands]

plumbing service The Woodlands

When you have major plumber related work in your home you should hire a master plumbing pipe specialist to do the work. Our technicians are in the know when it comes to any issues to do with drainage, leaks, or installing new pipelines. We are experts in Drain Cleaning and unblocking and have some tough equipment for the job. Some of our tools are manual and others are automatic and will be used depending on the circumstances. Do you have a Water Leak that needs a fix? Whether you need Water Heater or Sewer Repair because of a clogged kitchen sink we are ready to assist. In The Woodlands, TX our services are available in Zip Codes 77375, 77389, 77354, 77380, and 77381.

[little-pondhead]

Question: how does one safely use boiling water to wash their hair?

I have no hot water at the moment and aside from dunking my head in ice and hoping for the best, I don’t really have a good way to properly wash my extremely thick hair.

[featuresofinterest]

in my head i've been like "the power will come back on friday" but honestly now i think it's gonna be like. sunday. fml

[cherryblossomshadow]

You Don't Want a Gas Stovetop

vlogbrothers, Hank Green

.

.

Transcript (emphasis mine):

Good morning, John. I've had a half a cup of coffee, and I'm going to do something I almost never do I'm going to make an unscripted video about a thing that I care very passionately about

You watching this video need to not want a gas stove

Why? Because they suck!

Here's the thing that you are right about. The curlicue heating element stoves, they are the worst. They're hard to clean, they're extremely hard to control, like you cannot turn them on and off quickly. They take forever to heat up, they take forever to cool down

Now what happened is the stove top and natural gas industry made it so that what takes the place of that in your brain is a natural gas stove that has like the little blue flames – they're so beautiful – that like Gordon Ramsay used. But what you're doing when you have a natural gas stove is burning stuff in your home! Which results in, get this, decreased indoor air quality. How you can get around this by like having your fume hood like going full blast and certainly never have a natural gas stove that doesn't have a hood. Or get this?! You can have an induction stovetop that has more power and is easier to control than natural gas!

Chances are, there are three pipes connected to your house. There's the one that brings you water, that one's important. The one that takes the water away, we also want that. And the one that brings you methane. What century is this?!

It would be like having the gas station bring the gasoline directly to your car. Like this is a bad idea!

Now I know what you're thinking, “Hank. There is no way that cooking my hellofresh is significantly adding to climate change.” And you're right

But here's the thing, household natural gas use is a big contributor to climate change, it's just not mostly the stove top. However when natural gas companies ask people how they feel about switching their furnace from gas to electric or their water heater from gas to electric, they're like, “I don't care, whichever is better, I don't know.” Because you currently have a really efficient way to get power into your home that isn't a pipe full of methane! It's a power line! And there are great electric water heaters, and there are great electric furnaces and heat pumps, but people say, “I want my natural gas stove.” But that's a tiny percentage of the methane that is actually being sold by the gas company. Almost all of it is used in furnaces and water heaters. But as long as people are like, “I want to keep my gas stove, it's harder to clean, it makes the air inside my house dirty, but House Hunters says that it's a top tier product,” people will keep having the natural gas companies build and replace this extremely expensive infrastructure to pipe gas into our homes!

And gas companies are freaking out about this. They're doing all these campaigns about how great gas ranges are, even though they are objectively worse. Because if they can keep that toehold, they can make it make sense to keep giving you gas for those other things that electric could easily replace. But look electric could also easily replace your stove, because induction stove tops are better than gas!

And so one of the most important things that you can do as a person who's concerned about climate change is take the little thing out of your brain that says, “gas stoves are the best kind of stove,” and look at it and be like, “you're a freaking idiot.” Then you throw it onto your induction stove top and nothing happens, because that's not how it works. It induces the heat in the pan. The stove top itself doesn't get hot cuz they're amazing. So you have to put it into a pan, put that on the stove top, fry it up, and have it with butter … This is why I script. That right there, is why I script, so that doesn't happen!

…

It's not important that you replace your gas stove right now. In fact, it's probably best that you don't. It's important that you don't think it's better than induction because it's not. Because at some point in the future, someone's going to knock on your door and say, “This area is about to have its natural gas pipes replaced, and we have to decide whether or not to replace them with infrastructure that will last 60 to 80 years.” And if a bunch of people in your neighborhood say, “Well, I would, but I really like my gas stove top,” it's not going to happen, and we're going to keep burning methane in people's houses for 80 years! I would be sympathetic if gas were better but it's not!

[eccotemp]

Top Tankless Water Heaters in 2023

How to save energy, space, and money with tankless water heaters? This article will show you the top models from Eccotemp that can meet your hot water demands in 2023.

Get all the information here:

[hotwaterheaterrepairspringt]

Hot Water heater Repair Spring TX

Water heater problems can cause every one and their families to become more aware of their electricity and energy bills and carbon footprint as they are becoming more and more popular. At Water Heater Repair Spring TX, we provide expert installations and services for these times of need, to ensure they are in the best working condition and operating as efficiently as possible.

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[springwaterheaterrepair]

Spring Water Heater Repair

Have you been having some heating problems that are affecting your many waters? If you’re unable to figure out the best way to get your tanks fixed up, call in Spring TX Water Heater Repair. We’ve got a ton of different solutions we employ to help you, so call us to find out more information

281-756-7861

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from the Substack Distilled:

In the last few months, the Biden administration has quietly passed multiple federal policies that will transform the United States economy and wipe out billions of tons of future greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new policies have received little attention outside of wonky climate circles. And that is a problem.

Earlier this year, I wrote that Biden has done more to mitigate climate change than any President before him. For decades, environmentalists tried and failed to convince lawmakers to pass even the most marginal climate policies. It wasn’t until Biden took office that the logjam broke and the climate policies flowed. And yet few American voters are hearing this story in an election year of huge consequence.

It’s been two and a half months since I wrote that article. In that short time, the Biden administration has passed a handful of climate policies that will collectively cut more than 10 billion tons of planet-warming pollution over the next three decades, more than the annual emissions of India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the entire continent of Europe—combined.

One climate policy that flew under the radar recently was the administration's latest energy efficiency rule, unveiled at the beginning of May. The new rules will reduce the amount of energy that water heaters use by encouraging manufacturers to sell models with more efficient heat pump technology. The new regulation is expected to save more energy than any federal regulation in history. 

Most people give little thought to how the water in their homes is heated, but water heaters are the second-largest consumer of energy in the average American home and one of the largest sources of climate pollution in the country. 

A few days before the administration announced its water heater efficiency rules, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced another sweeping policy.

According to the new rules, existing coal power plants will need to either shut down or install carbon capture technology capable of removing 90% of their carbon pollution. The policy will also require any new natural gas power plants that provide baseload power—the ones that run throughout the day and night, as opposed to the peaker plants that only run for a small fraction of hours in the year—to install carbon capture technology. 

The new power sector rules are effectively a death blow to coal power in America, which has slowly faded over the last two decades but still emits more carbon emissions than almost every country in the world. 

The water heater rules and power plant regulations will help the country meet its goal of cutting emissions by 50% by 2030. But impactful as they will be, they weren’t the most important climate policy that the Biden administration passed in the last two months. 

That honor goes to the EPA’s tailpipe rules, which are set to transform the auto industry over the next decade.

Today the transportation sector is the largest source of climate pollution in the United States. Within the sector, passenger cars and trucks are the biggest contributors to emissions. While electric vehicle adoption has grown in recent years, America lags behind many other countries in decarbonizing its vehicle stock. 

The EPA’s new rules will force automakers to reduce the amount of pollution and carbon emissions that come from their vehicles. The federal policy doesn’t specifically mandate that automakers produce EVs or stop selling gas-powered cars but instead regulates the average carbon emissions per mile of a manufacturer's entire fleet over the next decade. That means automakers can still sell gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing trucks in 2035. They’ll just need to sell a lot more EVs or plug-in hybrids to bring their average fleet emissions down if they do.

Like the power plant rules, the EPA’s new auto regulations are designed to avoid being thrown out by a conservative and hostile Supreme Court. 

[gashotbox]

I was on a long, as in 5-6 hour days, car ride this weekend and only ate garbage from fast-food places and gasdtations the whole time the whole time. I had the whole backseat to myself and spent the whole ride stuffing my face with my leg cocked up, blasting the most rancid, hot farts into the car. they were so wet and bubbly, and the smell was enough to make my friends eyes water (not that they were entirely innocent, they had plenty of gas themselves). on the way home, we pulled into a drivethru, just to tie us over. naturally, I ordered the chilli cheese fries, a double bacon burger, and a large milkshake. about halfway through the meal, my stomach began to protest, loudly. I began to let out these hissing, silent farts the smelled like absolute death. It was too cold outside to roll down the windows, and the heat was on full blast, so the car was muggy to say the l

car hotboxing .. i’m fucking frothing at the mouth🥴 that meal ??? just thinking about how ruined your stomach mustve been is making me blush. and all three of you trapped in a car ripping ass together, heater on full blast? i know the windows were steaming ..

[lt-kim-kitsuragi]

*leaves Rheem RTG-70XLN-3 High Efficiency Non-Condensing Outdoor Tankless Natural Gas Water Heater, 7.0 GPM, Gray at your back door.*

🦂

Why? What is the purpose of leaving vaguely inconvenient items at the Precinct?

[argumate]

ah come on, if we had cheap clean limitless power we'd use it for all the stuff we already use electricity for! it'd be sweet! plus, it would change the incentives for using electricity vs other things--we would want more electric cars and fewer gas ones, more electric water heaters and fewer natural-gas-powered ones, etc. to my mind the idea isn't so much "we could do stuff we don't currently do", but rather "we could keep doing stuff we already do, while having less pollution"

yes we could dial in whatever atmospheric carbon level we wanted

[beardedmrbean]

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s capital and outlying provinces have faced rolling power blackouts for weeks in October and November, with electricity cuts disrupting people’s lives and businesses. And while several factors are likely involved, some suspect cryptocurrency mining has played a role in the outages.

Iran economy has been hobbled for years by international sanctions over its advancing nuclear program. The country’s fuel reserves have plummeted, with the government selling off more to cover budget shortfalls as wars rage in the Middle East and Tehran grapples with mismanagement.

The demand on the grid has not let up, however — even as Iranians stopped using air conditioners as the weather cooled in the fall and before winter months set in, when people fire up their gas heaters.

Meanwhile, bitcoin’s value has rocketed to all-time highs after the U.S. election was clinched by Donald Trump. It hit the $100,000 mark for the first time last week, just hours after the president-elect said he intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to be the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The surge has led some to suspect that organized cryptocurrency mining — sucking away huge amounts of power — has played a part in the outages in Iran.

“Unfortunately, some opportunistic and exploitative individuals use subsidized electricity, public networks and other resources for cryptocurrency mining without authorization,” Mostafa Rajabi, the CEO of Iran’s government-owned power company, said back in August.

Iran’s state energy company did not respond to a request for comment.

Power outages have come and gone in the past in Iran, which struggles with aging equipment at many of its plants. Over the summer, sustained blackouts struck industrial parks near Tehran and other cities. Then in October and November, rolling power cuts across Tehran’s neighborhoods became the norm in daylight hours.

Climate change has been blamed in part, with persisting droughts and less water running through Iranian hydroelectric dams.

Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered several power plants to stop burning mazut, a high-polluting heavy fuel common in the former Soviet Union countries. Tehran has used it in the past to make up the difference in electricity generation.

Fuel reserves, both in diesel and natural gas, also remain low even though Iran is an OPEC member and home to one of the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas, behind only Russia. There’s been no explanation for the decision to keep those reserves low, though critics have suggested Iran likely sold the fuel to cover budget shortfalls.

For his part, Pezeshkian has said that he must “honestly tell the public about the energy situation.”

“We have no choice but to consume energy economically, especially gas, in the current conditions and the cold weather,” he said in mid-November. “I myself use warm clothes at home; others can do the same.”

Still, winter heating isn’t in full swing quite yet on Tehran — raising questions where the power is going.

In many poor and densely populated neighborhoods across the country, people have access to free, unmetered electricity. Mosques, schools, hospitals and other sites also receive free power.

And with electricity in general sold at subsidized rates, bitcoin processing centers have boomed. They require immense amounts of electricity to power specialized computers and to keep them cool.

Determining how much power is used up by mining is difficult, particularly as miners now use virtual private networks that mask their location, said Masih Alavi, the CEO of an Iranian-government-licensed mining company called Viraminer.

Also, miners have been renting apartments to hide their rigs inside of empty homes. “They distribute their machines across several apartments to avoid being detected,” Alavi said.

In 2021, one estimate suggested Iran processed as much as $1 billion in bitcoin transactions. That value likely has spiked, given bitcoin’s rise. Meanwhile, Iran’s blackouts began in earnest as bitcoin spiked from around $67,000 to over $100,000 in its historic rally.

Rajabi, the state electricity company CEO, said his firm would offer rewards of $725 for people to report unlicensed bitcoin farms.

The farms have caused “an abnormal increase in consumption, disruptions, and problems in power networks,” Rajabi said.

The amount of power used by some 230,000 unlicensed devices is equivalent, he said, to the entire power needs of Iran’s Markazi province — one of the country’s chief manufacturing sites.

Iranian officials and media have not linked bitcoin’s surge and the ongoing blackouts but the public has, with social media users resharing a video showing a massive bitcoin farm earlier this year uncovered in Iran. A voice off camera asks how it was possible the electrical company did not discover the farm sooner.

The U.S. Treasury and Israel have targeted bitcoin wallets that they’ve alleged are affiliated with operations run by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard to finance allied militant groups in Mideast war zones.

That suggests the Guard itself — one of the most-powerful forces within Iran — may be involved in the mining.

In contrast, Iranian media nearly every day report on individual mining operations being raided by police.

Iran may see bitcoin as a hedge against increased pressure from the incoming Trump administration and as regional allies are engulfed in turmoil, said Richard Nephew, an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“The question for the economists inside Iran is do we trust this enough to fund the government,” said Nephew, who has long worked on Iran issues and sanction strategies in the U.S. government.

However, he cautioned against thinking of bitcoin as a magic bullet for Iran, particularly as bitcoin wallets can be targeted in sanctions.

“A pattern of behavior screams out to intelligence services,” Nephew said. “It screams out to bank compliance departments.”

[is-the-pigeon-ok]

Updates

Hoo, boy, it has been a HOT minute since I've posted anything here.

Welp!

Repairs on the new property have been painfully slow, due to paying mortgage there, rent where we still currently live, and both sets of utilities.

It's been a red light green light game of save up money, make a single repair, save up money for the next repair, rinse and repeat.

Roof and bathroom floors have been repaired, asbestos tiles in the wash room tiled over, mini split AC installed in the addition, dear hubby's office rewired to include ground wires, walls painted, central AC unit repaired, water heater converted from natural gas to electric, gas stove converted from natural gas to propane, hardwood floors professionally cleaned, and leaking faucets repaired.

It was built in the 60s, before ground wires were a thing, so almost the entire place still needs rewired to include grounding.

And the AC ducts under the house are fallen and torn, so those still need to be fixed.

Once that's done, we can *finally* start getting ourselves and our birds moved over.

What used to be a garage/kitchen on the property is going to be cleared of all debris and the new loft will be built there from the ground up.

After that project is completed, we will build a new quarantine building, also from the ground up.

Dear Hubby and I have been busting our collective asses, with the help of his family, on getting this done, and it's taken up pretty much all of our attention.

Spending time online has been a pretty low priority for me, but I have resumed posting updates on the flock and answering new asks on The Ramsey Loft blog, and as time and energy permit, may go through the posts here and answer.

I'm not going to promise any kind of schedule, but as I have updates to post there, I will endeavor to check here.

See y'all when I see you.

[lieutenant-hdb]

*leaves Rheem RTG-70XLN-3 High Efficiency Non-Condensing Outdoor Tankless Natural Gas Water Heater, 7.0 GPM, Gray at your back door* :3

What is THIS

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA scientists recreate Mars's spider-shaped geologic formations in lab for the first time

Tests on Earth appear to confirm how the red planet's spider-shaped geologic formations are carved by carbon dioxide.

Since discovering them in 2003 via images from orbiters, scientists have marveled at spider-like shapes sprawled across the southern hemisphere of Mars. No one is entirely sure how these geologic features are created. Each branched formation can stretch more than a half-mile (1 kilometer) from end to end and include hundreds of spindly "legs." Called araneiform terrain, these features are often found in clusters, giving the surface a wrinkled appearance.

The leading theory is that the spiders are created by processes involving carbon dioxide ice, which doesn't occur naturally on Earth. Thanks to experiments detailed in a new paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, scientists have, for the first time, re-created those formation processes in simulated Martian temperatures and air pressure.

"The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right," said Lauren Mc Keown of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "These experiments will help tune our models for how they form."

The study confirms several formation processes described by what's called the Kieffer model: Sunlight heats the soil when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice that built up on the Martian surface each winter.

Being darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas—without turning to liquid first—in a process called sublimation (the same process that sends clouds of "smoke" billowing up from dry ice). As the gas builds in pressure, the Martian ice cracks, allowing the gas to escape. As it seeps upward, the gas takes with it a stream of dark dust and sand from the soil that lands on the surface of the ice.

When winter turns to spring and the remaining ice sublimates, according to the theory, the spiderlike scars from those small eruptions are what's left behind.

Recreating Mars in the lab

For Mc Keown and her co-authors, the hardest part of conducting these experiments was re-creating conditions found on the Martian polar surface: extremely low air pressure and temperatures as low as minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 185 degrees Celsius). To do that, Mc Keown used a liquid-nitrogen-cooled test chamber at JPL, the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE.

"I love DUSTIE. It's historic," Mc Keown said, noting that the wine barrel-size chamber was used to test a prototype of a rasping tool designed for NASA's Mars Phoenix lander. The tool was used to break water ice, which the spacecraft scooped up and analyzed near the planet's north pole.

For this experiment, the researchers chilled Martian soil simulant in a container submerged within a liquid nitrogen bath. They placed it in the DUSTIE chamber, where the air pressure was reduced to be similar to that of Mars's southern hemisphere. Carbon dioxide gas then flowed into the chamber and condensed from gas to ice over the course of three to five hours. It took many tries before Mc Keown found just the right conditions for the ice to become thick and translucent enough for the experiments to work.

Once they got ice with the right properties, they placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulant to warm it up and crack the ice. Mc Keown was ecstatic when she finally saw a plume of carbon dioxide gas erupting from within the powdery simulant.

"It was late on a Friday evening and the lab manager burst in after hearing me shrieking," said Mc Keown, who had been working to make a plume like this for five years. "She thought there had been an accident."

The dark plumes opened holes in the simulant as they streamed out, spewing simulant for as long as 10 minutes before all the pressurized gas was expelled.

The experiments included a surprise that wasn't reflected in the Kieffer model: Ice formed between the grains of the simulant, then cracked it open. This alternative process might explain why spiders have a more "cracked" appearance. Whether this happens or not seems dependent on the size of soil grains and how embedded water ice is underground.

"It's one of those details that show that nature is a little messier than the textbook image," said Serina Diniega of JPL, a co-author of the paper.

What's next for plume testing

Now that the conditions have been found for plumes to form, the next step is to try the same experiments with simulated sunlight from above, rather than using a heater below. That could help scientists narrow down the range of conditions under which the plumes and ejection of soil might occur.

There are still many questions about the spiders that can't be answered in a lab. Why have they formed in some places on Mars but not others? Since they appear to result from seasonal changes that are still occurring, why don't they seem to be growing in number or size over time? It's possible that they're left over from long ago, when the climate was different on Mars—and could therefore provide a unique window into the planet's past.

For the time being, lab experiments will be as close to the spiders as scientists can get. Both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are exploring the red planet far from the southern hemisphere, which is where these formations appear (and where no spacecraft has ever landed). The Phoenix mission, which landed in the northern hemisphere, lasted only a few months before succumbing to the intense polar cold and limited sunlight.

TOP IMAGE: Spider-shaped features called araneiform terrain are found in the southern hemisphere of Mars, carved into the landscape by carbon dioxide gas. This 2009 image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows several of these distinctive formations within an area three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) wide. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

CENTRE IMAGE: These formations similar to the Red Planet’s “spiders” appeared within Martian soil simulant during experiments in JPL’s DUSTIE chamber. Carbon dioxide ice frozen within the simulant was warmed by a heater below, turning it back into gas that eventually cracked through the frozen top layer and formed a plume. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

LOWER IMAGE: Dark splotches seen in this example of araneiform terrain captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2018 are believed to be soil ejected from the surface by carbon dioxide gas plumes. A set of experiments at JPL has sought to re-create these spider-like formations in a lab. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

BOTTOM IMAGE: Here’s a look inside of JPL’s DUSTIE, a wine barrel-size chamber used to simulate the temperatures and air pressure of other planets – in this case, the carbon dioxide ice found on Mars’ south pole. Experiments conducted in the chamber confirmed how Martian formations known as “spiders” are created. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech