[geeks] Mr Bill?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 12:20:59PM -0400, Francois Dion wrote:
>On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:
>> We've got water pressure and a natural-gas-powered water heater
>
>I've always wondered about that, if something like that happened if
>they would leave my natural gas on or not, and if there is flooding,
>water is surely unsafe to drink. One winter, several years back, we
>lost power for two weeks due to an ice storm that left a good part of
>the eastern US disabled. We had gas but no way to run the electric
>motor on the forced air heater.

A friend of mine had that problem in the 1950's. He had an old coal
fired hot air heater in his house that was no longer in use.

He took a pipe and made a burner out of it, and stuck it in the furnace
and let it burn. He had a hot water heating system with seperate oil fired
and natural gas fired boilers and could switch between them depending upon
which was cheaper. However both of them needed electricty to operate. :-(

We have a gas fired stove which uses LP bottles (butane/propane mix) which
are outside with a pipe run into the apartment. Occasionaly I've had to
put pots of water on the stove to heat the apartment. I also have a 
gas grill which uses a different fitting, but I have a regulator and
hose to use it on the stove and one to use the same tanks as the stove
on the grill.

I remember reading about a gas fired 10kw home electric supply made by
GE, I have no idea if they ever were produced, or how much they cost.

I happen to prefer a gas fired barbecue to a charcoal one, so having
a gas grill makes a lot of sense to me. If I were to buy a generator
I'd get one that ran on the same gas. 

I also have left over from the days I cared about such things, a Bluett
gas stove which uses little butane cans. 

I don't have to worry about flooding though. I'm 3,000 feet up in the desert,
so if the polar ice melts and the sea level rises, I'm going to have a 
lot of company, but no flooding. :-)

If your water became unsafe to drink, you can sterilize (but not clean) it
with iodine tablets which are available in any camping store and 5 drops
of chlorox. The chlorox loses its strength when opened, so store small bottles,
not big ones.

If you want to remove the chlorine, you can filter the water with a Brita
filter, which are pretty cheap, but don't do much*. The best ones according
to the people I correspond with are the Berkey filters, which use permanent
elements. 


Geoff.

* According to a magazine article I just read, you can make good vodka out of
really cheap vodka by running it through a Brita 4 times. :-)

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM