Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds

OK so you are just a POS, troll. Is that plain enough for you?

"Frank Ols>> Me thinks we need to start a slander site for your posts. Just

Blah, blah, blah...

My point is that you tend to throw in "technical" terms like "compression" and "bore" to make you sound credible when in reality you don't know much about internal combustion engines.

You continue to downgrade the contribution CFLs can make to the environment in favor of some pie in the sky grand solution. The fact of the matter is that cleaning up internal combustion engines has been the result of many incremental changes. For you to continue to blast away at CFLs is the equivalent of saying that there is no need for an internal combustion engine to have PCV since it really needs to run on CNG. In reality by starting with PCV and adding EFE, EGR, EFI and other TLAs the internal combustion engine was cleaned up to a degree unimagined in 1960.

A trip of a hundred miles starts with a single step.

You and Bass must have gone to the same school or shared the same cell. You weren't by any chance anywhere near Polk County Florida in 1979 were you?

LOL!! That sounds about right.

What are you doing here when you foremost business here is just trolling?

I guess I was right about at least one of the descriptors.

"Frank Ols>> OK so you are just a POS, troll. Is that plain enough for you?

You've gone non-sequitur on us Lewis. There was NOTHING in the phrase "high compression 1960's V-8" that implies any of the absolutely bizarre things you've claimed. It was a phrase meant to evoke the image (and smell) of a certain type of muscle car of an age gone by. Yet you believe it's evidence that I either claim to be an expert on engines or that I was making some sort of comment on compression ratios and engine efficiency.

Its easy to see why you're having so much trouble understanding the very simple things I'm saying. It's pretty clear from the flip and dismissive "blah, blah, blah" that you don't really want to have an intelligent discussion. You just want to try to throw some stink on me so you can blunt my contentions about the risks of CFL's.

I find it rather remarkable, that in a thread about saving energy, that anyone would search out two different (and peripheral) comments from two different messages and try, in vain, to imply causation that didn't exist nor was ever implied. Clear thinking people know exactly what I meant.

Do you really think I don't know what the terms "compression" and "small bore" mean?

Do you really think you have to explain, repeatedly, the rather simplistic assertion that "any savings are good savings" because "I don't get it?"

I'm just astounded that someone can take two phrases from two different messages: "high compression 1960's V-8" and "dirty, small bore engine" and use them to proclaim "you don't know much about internal combustion engines." It seems pretty obvious that you're trying to focus the subject away from the main topic of CFL's and off onto a personal tangent. I'm sorry that I seem to vex you so thoroughly that you feel this is your only option.

No, it's in favor of the *correct* solution. You talk about "every little bit helps" as if it were the single most important principle on earth. Well, oddly enough, I believe in its converse, that every little bit of mercury added via a new dispersal vector *hurts.* Adding even *more* mercury to millions of consumer products to reduce smokestack emissions a preposterous solution. You appear to want it both ways. You'd like only the little "good things" to add up but not the bad. It doesn't work like that. A solution that adds as much bad as it does good is not really a solution at all.

We need to fix the mercury and CO problem at the source, not via "we sure HOPE this reduces demand" trade-off schemes like mandated CFL use. We're going to spend perhaps $1 trillion fighting Al-Queda. We should be able to marshal similar resources to fight pollution. That won't happen if people are satisfied with Band-Aid solutions. Hoping that demand will slacken and pollution will lessen by using CFL's is just that: hope.

I've already cited studies that show Americans don't recycle yet CFL proponents just gloss over those statistics as if they weren't even there. It's that sort of blind eye to reality that convinces me that solutions that contain poison have to be evaluated very carefully. Proponents of plans to trade one vector of pollution for another have to PROVE that they work and that there won't be a tremendous remediation cost downstream.

As for demand, AFAIK, Americans have NEVER slaked their demand for electricity. Worse, still, people tell me that they find instead of 10 tungsten bulbs, they need 15 CFL bulbs to achieve the same amount of light as before. Little things like that make the alleged savings fuzzier and fuzzier all the time. That's why I don't believe this mandated push to CFLs is going to do anything terribly positive for the environment. I do believe it's going to be a great boon for *some* light bulb makers and that it will allow operators of old, exceedingly dirty plants to keep their pollution generators on line for longer than we should let them.

Wow! I am frankly amazed that you could conjure up such an unfounded analogy out of what I have been saying. All along, I've been very clear. We cleaned up cars, despite Big Auto assurances it was impossible. We can (and must!) clean up power plant exhausts. All of these carbon offset schemes, alleged savings from CFLs and other proposed solutions are all boons for certain sorts of businesses, but no one can say for sure what the future *total* costs and benefits will be. Recently, with the discovery of lead in Chinese toys, there's been a big push to redefine the levels of acceptable lead exposure:

My sole purpose in life is to stalk Bass. I love him. I have his picture on my desktop and make obeisance to it every time my computer starts. I'm hoping he's going to divorce that beautiful Brazilian woman soon. I'll move to Florida, camp out on his lanai and cook him some real food for a change (like planked wild Pacific salmon - not the farmed Atlantic kind - which has lots of Omega 3 fatty acids and will ensure he lives a long and productive life on USENET).

Thanks, I'll take a look. I think you'll find that someone will offer incentives to the consumer to have this done. Then it will be consumer's choice and not a bad thing. One way or another I still think we're going to see this. I think we may also see more time of day billing and a way for consumers to see the reporting. I think the problem will be getting the f-utilities to give us real-time (or near real-time) reporting. I'm not sure they have up-to-date db systems for this kind of thing.

A lot of words prove nothing.

I boils down to this:

You claim A=B

I point out that you don't know $h!t about A so therefore your internal combustion engine analogy obviously questionable.

I can also point out that modern landfills tend not to pollute groundwater nearly as much as you seem to believe since the leachate is collected and treated. Since many items in the waste stream are toxic CFLs are only small part of this problem and are likely to remain so as recycling efforts start to kick in.

You may convince some with your long winded rambles but you will never convince me that more efficient lighting is a bad idea. Unfortunately most good conservation ideas need legislation to make them work.

To put you on the right track:

All other things being equal a higher compression engine will pollute less that a low compression engine since the fuel is burned more efficiently. The drawback is that higher compression requires higher octane to prevent detonation (knocking). We discuss technology here. Using a "phrase meant to evoke" has no place in technical discussions especially when it is a$$backwards.

What you were really getting at with your similarly misdirected "small bore" comments are small displacement engines which are typically low compression.

If you can begin to comprehend this you understand why I take such exception to your ill informed rants.

lol They write for the military.

Cahoots is in terms of the present secrecy, Non Disclosures and all that garbage.

Would agree, power is only one part, automated climate, higher level security (boundary, property, site, personal, home), single user touchscreen interfaces, self-opening doors, voice recognition for automation instruction/usage, and concierge services which allow the control of highly automated homes from outside (remotely) by homeowner request instead of homeowner directly accessing the controls themselves.

Correct and their approach is that the market (ultra-luxury) is more interested in energy sourcing, independence, long term cost savings, and the potential obsolescence of very expensive homes if they do not get on the hA and alt energy bandwagons.

Thanks, can't find any argument with that.

At least it's clear *you* get it. The high compression V-8 monsters of the '60's were one of kind. My Ford (a recycled cop car) had an Interceptor 428 with beefed up forged-steel connecting rods, 360 horsepower @ 10.5:1, an aluminum intake and a high performance camshaft. I got only 7MPG but could hit 140MPH on the straight-away. Even before the rings began to wear out, it could produce an exhaust cloud that could knock someone right off their feet. I had to drive home after I hit something in the road and tore upon the muffler. It sounded like I was driving a B-29. Up until that point I had no idea how loud a car engine could be. I wish that I had the sort of printout that the State emission test centers now produce. My bet is that it wouldn't pass - nor would any large engine of that era.

Of course, what any of this has to do with measuring the consumption of electrical energy in the home is still a mystery to me.

-- Bobby G.

So you drove a POS used cop car. What does that prove other than that you care nothing about the environment and you have poor taste in transportation? BTW, my transportation can do about 150 (though I won't go quite that fast), has the largest reciprocating-engine pistons being used in any production passenger car or motorcycle on earth, can reach 60 mph in under 4 seconds and gets ~32mpg.

Nothing, but the thread is way past that now anyway.

A followup on a previous post - URLs provided by me from Google - no affiliation . . .

-- Bobby G.