OT BioDiesel

"Safe and clean electrical heat"? Surely you're not so stupid that you believe that! Every source of heat has it's risks... As if electrical fires are enough of a risk, just consider the concept of freezing your butt off because of a power outage... I responsible house design will have both gas and electricity... Each serve their own purposes and can somewhat act as a backup for the other in emergencies... I would hazard to guess that more people are killed each year using electrical power to heat their homes than are killed from heating with gas... Seems like every year I hear about a few fires from electrical heating... I can't recall the last time I heard of any gas fires...On the other hand, it seems that BBQing (i.e. charcoal and starter fluid) on apartment balconies is rather detrimental to a couple of apartment complexes each year... No matter how many times you warn them, some people just do not understand...

"This is done by heating the crude oil to a temperature at which much of it will boil." How? Solar power?

Sure, but everyone has their own little soap box to stand on, don't they? ;^)

Damn right I'm being sarcastic. Electricity in Colorado is made from coal. You want to drive by one of the power plants, when it is running wide open throttle to generate clean power for the sunny and unpolluted Rocky Mountain states. We had those commercials in New England too, set to music.

Earle

"Earle Horton" wrote in news:44615d08$0$6055$ snipped-for-privacy@reader.athenanews.com:

If you had made it, it would have worked. Years back we had a commercial fuel oil heater made exactly as you describe, it worked to perfection and heated one end of our house, the wood stove in the kitchen heated the other end. Unlike the one you describe, ours did have a fairly elaborate chimmney to exhaust the fumes.

Heh, did it have a safety system, to shut off the flow of fuel in the event of the fire going out? Because if it didn't, it was a time bomb, that only didn't go off, because of dumb luck.

Earle

If oil furnaces are so dangerous why have they not been outlawed?

Yeah, I was talking about heating it, but transporting it takes a lot of energy too, thanks for helping me make my point.

Most of the buildings in the village were built with oil fired boilers or furnaces with the exception of the schools that used coal up into the 1960s

Conversion to natural gas started in the late 50s but up into the 80s it was common to see oil delivery trucks from several different local suppliers..

My oil furnace was replaced with a 'high efficiency gas furnace (80%) in

According to the API (in 2002) 11 million homes and a half million commercial buildings in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states heat with oil and consumption is about the same as it was in the late 50s.

"Of the 107 million households in the United States, approximately 8.1 million use heating oil as their main heating fuel. Residential space heating is the primary use for heating oil, making the demand highly seasonal. Most of the heating oil use occurs during October through March. The area of the country most reliant on heating oil is the Northeast..."

Heated with oil in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Used kerosene in Vermont. In Arizona I have a heat pump :-)

There is some confusion here. The modern oil furnaces have all sorts of safeguards, like thermally fused valves and photoelectric blowout detectors, that make them more or less safe. Add a smoke detector or two, and you should be able to sleep at night.

I was talking about parlor stoves, home made devices to burn used motor oil, and antiques from another era. When one of those goes bad, you suffocate in your sleep or are blown off the face of the planet.

Earle

Design the system where the fuel tank and burner is outside in a concrete building... Use the burner to heat up water and run the water throughout the house... That way, if it does leak and catch fire, you have the fire contained in a fireproof building...

Then again, I"m on the Texas Gulf Coast... Heating comes naturally around here... I wouldn't be surprised if an electric radiant heater would keep the whole house warm all winter... Hell, I'm more likely to have the air-conditioner on in January than the heater...