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Automotive News & Views Are gas prices fueling your pain? 
10042 messages, Last post on Jul 12, 2008 at 3:07 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: tedebear (Mar 13, 2008 8:29 am) Must be your area. We have a lot of bicycles on our country roads here. Especially weekend riders. Some sections have the white line with a couple feet of pavement. Mostly the bike riders share the roads. If you have to slow down to pass them safely, I have not seen any animosity shown. I rode my bike all the time in Kona HI. Never had anyone honk at me. And the main stretch I used was Alii Dr. very narrow two lane road. Maybe the high price of gas has struck home to a lot of commuters that are jealous of your saving gas. Be careful.... |
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Replying to: kernick (Mar 13, 2008 8:54 am) "Auto-parts manufacturers blend a finely pulverized sawdust called "wood flour" with plastic polymers to make a lightweight material to cover steering wheels and dashboards." (WSJ paid link) |
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Replying to: kernick (Mar 13, 2008 8:54 am) My electric rates have been steady for years. There is a slight increase in my bill the winter, a big drop in spring, a significant but not unreasonable increase in the summer with the A/C, and a big drop in the fall. I wouldn't say the increase in fuel or heating prices has affected my ability to pay my mortgage, utility bills, or run up my credit cards, but I have cut back on discretionary spending like entertainment. |
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Replying to: kernick (Mar 13, 2008 6:14 am) We rode in the back of a PU truck as much as we did a car back in the 1950s. I used to love our trips to the desert camping. All the gear was in the bed of the truck. We would hollow out a place to lay back there and just enjoy the ride and the fresh air. None of us kids wanted to ride in front with the adults. Fast forward to 2008. We took another couple and made a trip to the Anza Borrego desert yesterday in our Sequoia. It is a GREAT vehicle for driving down those rutted sandy side roads out into the desert. The flowers were in full bloom and it was great. It probably cost me about $60 in gas at the current $3.59 at Shell. Cheaper than a round of golf. It all depends on what you enjoy doing. The other couple paid for our meals and it was about a wash. I cannot think of a vehicle that would do any better for any less. The people in their cars along the highway could only guess how much beauty they were missing not being able to get away from the crowds. PS I bought it cash. If I cannot save up to buy a vehicle I will keep what I have. |
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Replying to: kernick (Mar 13, 2008 8:54 am) We recently had our electric rates jacked up. They were projected to shoot up something like 50% in 2006, but then that got phased in over two years, with a partial in 2006, and the remainder kicking in June 2007. Once you factor in all the tack-on fees and such, our electric comes out to about 15 cents per kilowatt hour. People were whining about it, and carrying on about the big bad electric companies gouging us, but the truth was, the rates had been held artificially low for too long. My first electric bill was back in late 1994/early 1995, after I had bought my condo, and I remember it came out to about 9 cents per KW. So we're talking about a 66% increase, over the course of 13 years! Not so bad when we put it in that perspective. I moved into my house in late 2003, and got a contract with the oil company. That first year, it was $1.19 per gallon. Now, a little over 4 years later, it's $3.55 per gallon, about a 200% increase! I am seriously thinking about switching to a heat pump. Even though it doesn't put out the same nice, toasty heat that oil does (or natural gas or propane, I guess), I'm sure it'll be a lot cheaper in the long run as oil prices continue to climb. Plus, it would be nice to have central air conditioning, so I don't have to deal with lugging these danged window units in and out every spring and fall. And it would be nice to get rid of the oil tank and the little room that houses it...or just use that room for storage I guess. |
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Replying to: lemko (Mar 13, 2008 9:06 am) Southern CA is outlawing wood burning stoves and fireplaces. You can get a $500 fine in some areas on certain days for burning wood in your home. Several of my neighbors use wood to heat their homes. Dead Wood is very plentiful since the last two fires killed so many trees. Not sure if the trend will spread to San Diego county or not. Seems a bit repressive. San Francisco claims wood smoke from fireplaces produces the most particulate matter in the area.
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Replying to: lemko (Mar 13, 2008 9:06 am) Wood stoves can be a nuisance in a populated area. It's one thing to be out in the middle of no where (like where I grew up) and heat with it or even have a "recreational" fireplace, but in the middle of the suburbs, it's just plain annoying. Not much better than buring a pile of leaves in your yard. In our neighborhood, which is a new one, they thankfully required all the builders to use gas fireplaces if they chose to put in a fireplace. No wood burning was allowed. Be do have a cabin that uses a pellet stove besides also having a furnace. That is an entirely different form of wood burning, though. You can see heat waves coming out of the chimney but no spoke. It burns incredibly clean. The chimney rarely if ever needs cleaning and the ash tray has about two cups of ash from burning a 40 or 50 pound bag of pellets (which takes about 30 hours of continuas burning to use up). I've never smelled any smoky smell from it when I'm outside and it's running. Every now and then there will be an article or TV news story about towns or cities having major air pollution from wood burning stoves. Again, these are stoves that heat the whole house as a primary means of heat and not from the occasional fireplace type use. It mainly impacts towns that are in valleys with mountains holding in the smoke. The air quality can be worse that a bad day of LA smog. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Mar 13, 2008 9:20 am) My house used to have a wood burning stove in what is now the livingroom. Once upon a time, I think that was its only source of heat! About 10 years ago, my uncle and I tore down an addition to one of the outbuildings that was about to come down on its own, and we found some coal on the dirt floor, so I'm guessing at some point in time, my house had a coal furnace or stove, or something. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Mar 13, 2008 9:20 am) When we built our place we had propane because we knew the gas lines were coming and it's a simple conversion. It took forever to boil a pot of water! We passed the $3 regular mark today. Guess we were about the last holdouts. |
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There was once a type of furnace called a parlor stove which was about 5/8 as tall as a refrigerator and about as wide and finished in brown enamel. It usually burned anthracite coal and had a galvanized pipe running from it to the chimney. A grate in the ceiling above it would allow the heat to go upstairs. A lot of older homes would have both a coal stove for cooking and heating and a parlor stove to supplement it. When both were going, it got quite toasty. My great-grandparents' homes were like this. I believe the rather large coal stove in the kitchen had a boiler behind it to provide hot water to the house. Going to great-grandmom's house was like stepping back in time to the 1920s-40s. Not only did she have both the coal stove and the parlor stove, but one of those huge console radios, a GE refrigerator with the motor on top, and a washing machine with a wringer. |
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