Lead free solder is also a threat to the environment !
Read :
leadfree.ipc.org/files/RoHS_16.pdf
skeptically.org/env/id2.html
And there is much more as you search.
Quote : If lead free solders containing silver or antimony are
improperly disposed and contacted groundwater, the solders could render that groundwater unsafe to drink per
USEPA standards.
The amount of lead that leaches into groundwater from electronics-industry waste is negligible. Some studies suggest that silver and antimony may pose more of a threat than lead in landfills, since these materials are more soluble under certain groundwater conditions. The replacements for tin-lead solder alloys (the most common of which is a silver-tin-copper mix) have not been shown to be any less toxic.
Read :
leadfree.ipc.org/files/RoHS_16.pdf
skeptically.org/env/id2.html
And there is much more as you search.
Quote : If lead free solders containing silver or antimony are
improperly disposed and contacted groundwater, the solders could render that groundwater unsafe to drink per
USEPA standards.
The amount of lead that leaches into groundwater from electronics-industry waste is negligible. Some studies suggest that silver and antimony may pose more of a threat than lead in landfills, since these materials are more soluble under certain groundwater conditions. The replacements for tin-lead solder alloys (the most common of which is a silver-tin-copper mix) have not been shown to be any less toxic.
EC8010 said:
Forget it. I have a patent on the positron tube, and waiting to get my patent on BJTs using positrons and anti-holes to go through. But if you can convince that guy who has a patent on the negative resistor to sell me a license, we might be able to make business.
Maybe at some places, but most likely not for any big towns or even whole towns. It is becoming increasingly popular for one-family houses though. Either by drilling a deep hole in the ground or using serpentines of tubes (water tubes, but you are british, so won't get it wrong
) on the bottom of a lake. I even know of an church that uses geothermal heating to help cutting down on the maintenance bills. It is quite expensive for them to heat a huge church once built for hundreds of people, that now maybe gets ten or twenty people each sunday. It costs a lot in investment to use geothermal heating, but it seems to save quite a lot of money in the long run. That is, until they start taxing it somehow. Who owns the heat hundred meters down? 
poobah said:Negative resistors are easy... noise and freq. response are still issues though.
Nah, just filter out all the positive frequencies and work only with the negative ones. Remember your Fourier analysis, there is a mirror image of the positive frequencies on the negative side, so that is enough to work with. Noise is an issue though. Thermal noise is a random movement of electrons and the negative resistor correspondingly suffers from a random laziness amongst the electrons, making them sometimes not move when they should, which mathematically gives about the same disturbance in the current.
Now, has anybody got the light absorbing diode to work yet? I have almost given up on that one.
(Shouldn't need a smiley, but one never knows)
Christer said:
We're stuffed. Even when the fellow with the negative resistance patent returns a telephone call, he just gets louder and louder until he distorts.
So if your central water heating isn't geothermal, how is it heated, and how does it make sense (in a cold country) to distribute hot water across a city? Or is it just a block?
Christer said:
I have a solution for that! My girlfriend's cat is the laziest cat I've ever seen (and I like cats, so I look at them). He's a big black lumbering thing and only two years old. He is the ideal black hole/sink for lazy electrons, photons, gravitons, and cat food. Guaranteed low 1/f frequency.
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EC8010 said:
I know. I thought he wanted to sell them, but it seems not. He is a very negative guy, talking about earning negative money from not selling them.
As I said, I think they still burn oil in most places, with some exceptions, like burning garbage where I live.
And yes, the do distribute over whole cities. They are even extending it to some smaller places up to 30 km away from this town now. The key is to have very thick isolation on the pipes, and then. Of course the temperature will drop quite a bit and there will be a loss of energy, but it works surprisingly well. I guess the reason they think this is better is that they can burn the oil more efficiently and have very efficient pollution filters on the central plant, compared to if you burn oil in your own heater. Usually you are still circulation water in the radiators, even if you have your own boiler, and boilers can take either oil or wood. But now they try to ban burning wood, since they think the smoke is very unhealthy. As if we hadn't done that for thousands of years. Besides, this is controlversial since some research hints that the smoke from wood isn't actually very dangerous.
So, how is it in Britain? I have only vague ideas about it. Still using coal, are you?
Christer said:
No, we've been turned away from coal ever since our esteemed Margaret Thatcher (fascist Prime Minister) closed down the coal mines in the 80s. We now primarily use gas. That made sense from the 70s to the 90s, but now that North Sea gas is running out and we're being held to ransom for Russian gas, it looks less good. We're a warmer country (Gulf Stream), and with cheap gas for years, our housing stock is only slowly coming up to your standards for heating efficiency. I'm looking to move, and we looked at a very pretty three bedroom house today where the owner blithely told me that it cost her £800 per year in oil to heat the house! We didn't make an offer...
I take your point about the efficiency of centralised burning of oil versus local burning, I'm just surprised that the numbers work out once distribution is taken into account.
EC8010 said:
I have always been surprised too that it works so well, but this has been common in most/many towns and cities for at least 40 years, I think. I suppose that before 1973, nobody cared about the cost and efficiency. Oil was cheap and nobody cared much about the pollution. I am no expert in the political history of my country, but it might have been that they then encouraged people to swtich over to electric heating then. At least I remember a lot of people doing so. We had a lot of hydroelectric power and we already had and were building more nuclear power plants. Enter the Three Mile Island incident, and a lot of people suddenly wanted to get rid of nuclear power. Most politicions didn't want that, but they had to listen to the voters, so there was a referendum. The compromise won, close down, but not immediatly. Ever since then there has been a strange politics. The politicions has tried avoiding to follow the referendum, but has officially disencouraged the use of electric heating etc. etc.
BTW, I had almost guessed already that you like cats. Guess why?
Christer said:BTW, I had almost guessed already that you like cats. Guess why?
Anode is my avatar; she's not a very good hunter, but her sister, Cathode, is a superb hunter.
In the long term, the only safe power is anything directly derived from the sun. Anything from the ground is stored power being released, whether it be nuclear, burning (coal, oil, gas), or geothermal. Either way, it upsets the planet's energy balance between what is received and what is lost. We could accept a net input of heat if we could balance it with an equal loss. Currently, the planet's losses are falling, yet we increase our heat input...
To get back on topic, I'm looking at more efficient loudspeakers so that I can use smaller amplifiers.
We just need a small black hole to dump all our toxic waste down. We could locate it on a small island in the Pacific and everyone could ship their garbage there. We could hire some fools to watch over it, tell them to push a button every 108 minutes to let us know all is safely contained within a magnetic levitation field. This would certainly propel the worlds space programs. You know, just in case. And a side benefit is that black holes are actually quite cold, maybe we could use it to reverse global warming somehow. I'll let you all know how my experiments go.
Dharma,
Dharma,
Well said. I propose that we should all be required to place mirrors on our roofs to reflect solar energy back into space to compensate for fossil energy "liberation". Those with bigger cars would have to mount bigger mirrors. Those driving SUVs who don’t really need them (90%) would be required to polish their very large mirrors daily. Those with Class A amps would also have to wear mirrors on top of their heads as a form of public humiliation. Do you think I have a future in politics?
OK everyone, back to the thread; there’s nothing more to see here.
Here in south Florida, we essentially have no winter. There are a few days in December and January when I can turn the airconditioner off. Otherwise it runs year round. The cooling bill is about $2000 USD per year, and the electricity rates were raised again.
That would mean listening to a class D amp year round. I built exactly one of those, and I didn't like it. I currently have 5 class A tube amps, and I am likely to build more. The bigest one requires engaging a second air conditioner to maintain thermal equilibrium in the room. Yes this is doubly wastefull.
What have I done to offset this wasted energy. To paraphrase a slogan used by the NRA "I will give up my tube amp when they pry my warm hands off of it". So I looked for other ways to reduce wasted energy, particularly in the form of heat. Right here in the lab, I replaced my 21 inch CRT monitor with a 20 inch LCD monitor. We all have computers, right. The LCD monitor consumes over 100 less watts than the CRT. This made a noticeable temperature drop in the room. This alone covers the heat generated by the two small SE amps that I use most of the time. The computer is on for a few hours each day, and it is often on for a whole weekend straight.
I am experimenting with class B tube amps. This is a viable alternative to those solid state thingies.
Now if I can just convince my wife that every light in the house doesn't need to be on all of the time. I replaced most if the incandescent bulbs with flourescents, already.
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