Severe storms ransacked Dallas and Tarrant counties last night. Some areas got pummelled by hail. My area was hit with heavy rain and wind.
According to the Dallas Morning News, the storm knocked power out to 350,000 houses. Around half had power restored by this morning. That did not include my house. I think we’re throwing out the contents of our refrigerator tonight. My whole neighborhood’s power has been out since 9:30 PM last night.
About a month or so ago, I did a phone survey of Chick Fil A because of a promised high probability of winning something. The first question was how often have you gone to Chick Fil A in the past month–besides the current visit. When I hit 0, the survey was over!
For answering that one question I got $50 of Chick Fil A gift certificates!
A member of Illinois law enforcement who specializes in traffic issues told me that Illinois uses speed display trailers for speed zoning studies.
A little background: the commonly accepted way to set speed limits is to measure the speed of passenger vehicles in a way that is not apparent to motorists. From that speed survey a traffic engineer sets a limit that legalizes most drivers and criminalizes only the fastest, most dangerous drivers.
Speed trailers bias the speed of traffic so that it conforms to the currently posted limit. For example, you will probably slow down if the speed limit sign says 50 but “YOUR SPEED” says 58.
This practice reinforces the currently posted speed limit even where properly run speed zoning studies would have required a higher limit.
What does this mean for the everyday motorist? Ever lower speed limits, causing wider gaps between the fastest and slower drivers, more tickets, and more safety problems.
In a practical sense, the commonly accepted speed zoning practice is usually overridden by arbitrary laws or politics. On nearly every road in the U.S., speed limits are already set so low that nearly everyone is a lawbreaker. Short circuiting speed zoning so that it just reinforces the currently posted limit is a shameful, corrupt, revenue-enhancing practice.
Illinois drivers should be infuriated.
My 18 month old Maxtor 80GB hard drive took a dump. Luckily I happened to have an extra 80GB drive sitting around. I managed to copy off all my important stuff (e.g., baby pictures!) to the spare drive before it finally crashed.
Now I’m having a ball reinstalling all my software.
Gas appliances supposedly save money. The theory is that it’s cheaper to make a given quantity of heat from gas than from electricity.
Is this really true?
Gas stoves and ovens throw off way more heat than an electric model.
For the stove, this is obvious: the heat from the flames goes across the bottom and then up and around the pan. Electric stoves have a much closer and more direct contact with the pan, so there is much less of this kind of heat loss.
I lived in a house with a 20 year old gas oven for two years. That oven kicked off a huge load of heat. I thought it happened because it was old. I was wrong. A friend’s new gas oven throws off as much heat. The 20 year old electric oven in my current house produces only a fraction of the external heat as those gas ovens.
So that brings us to issue #1: gas ovens and stoves waste much more heat than electrics.
In winter the heat loss is a wash. It is heat that the house’s heater does not need to produce, and it’s produced in an energy efficient manner. But I live in Dallas. We regularly run the heat only around 3 months of the year. The A/C runs regularly at least 6 months of the year. It costs a lot more to remove heat from a house (A/C) than it costs to add heat to the house (heater). Whatever you gain from efficient heating in the winter, you lose through inefficient heat removal in the warm months.
Issue #2: gas ovens and stoves increase the load on your A/C system, which is costly to run.
The big picture is that, per unit of heat consumed, gas ovens and stoves are less efficient than electric equivalents. They lose more heat, and they add to air conditioning costs. The cost of a BTU produced by gas has to be far cheaper than the cost of a BTU produced by electricity for gas appliances to pay off.
Call me a curmudgeon, but I think I’ll stick with electric ovens and stoves. At least that way I can simmer rice without burning it!
Gas dryers, gas central heat, and gas water heaters are a totally different issue. There is plenty of empirical evidence showing that these are more efficient than their electric brethren.