Living in the energy conservation stoneage

[nothing to lose]

Try decent brands, but haveing said that myself I have cheap ones and better ones, all still working well and I don't even know which are which anymore.

We have all kinds of power problems here. Sometimes the power would go off and on like a light switch being flipped quickly 4-8 times in a row. Outages, another one sometime in the middle of the night lastnight. Brownouts and flickering at times. You name it and our Crap-op has the problem!!

Cfl's are not going bad for me at all. As kinda said in my other post, normal use I really have not had a bad one yet.

It did take me a little time to get used to them in some parts of the house, now I don't even think of them at all, just flip on the switch and I don't even notice them.

[nothing to lose]

"The grow bulb units actually make the rooms look the same as those so called to "Natural-Look" bulbs at 1/2 the or less the energy charge."

 I don't even notice a difference anymore myself even when going to a friends house with all 100 watt bulbs then comming back home again to my CFL.

As for the grow bulbs? Not sure how they work, but isn't that kinda the same type used for tanning beds, hardening silk screen goop, etc... Kinda a UV emitting type or something like that. Sort of why plants grow under them maybe. If so not sure I would want to use them in my home as normal lighting. Might fade stuff like the sun does, to much tanning bed is bad for your skin same as too much sun, maybe other things there also to think about. I could be wrong about that, but if I am correct then I would not want to be under those lights 5-6 hrs (or much more even) every night myself.

 I get enough sun, maybe too much anyway, don't want even more in my house too.

[nothing to lose]

Yes but he was into RE and conservation big time.

Rarely left the candles on when leaving a room.

Probably used renewable wood heat

Did not leave his horse running full blast 20 minutes while buying scratch off lottery tickets and griping about the cost of feed.  (lottery ticket sales should be outlawed anywhere that sells gasolene! )

He even walked places saving fuel, something about returning a penny I think.

[nothing to lose]

Ok, I can see the reflection of the windmill blades on the windshiled, but where is the mill? I geuss this is electric powered by the gennie right.

Great job, wish I could do that.

[nothing to lose]

Well I agree there on the first part and to add to it,

Rail saftey was not always as good as it is now either. Not that it couldn't be better, but it is better than it was.

In the old days a train coming around a curve had no way of knowing another broke train was blocking the tracks. Today they have transmitters on the back of train I beleave instead of a caboose with a person in it. In an emergency now about half the time they could probably call an engineer on his cell phone to tell him a track is blocked also

But....

"the only way the railroads will gain market share is if we (the taxpayers) are willing to finance a major expantion in the rail network, and then USE it.  right now, market forces are concentrating rail traffic more and more onto central corridors and the old branch lines out to small towns and small industry are being removed because they cost more in upkeep than they return in revenue."

I kinda disagree on that part.

 There is NO logical reason for railways to not be used more. How many semi trailers do you see on flatbed rail cars on some of these trains. That right there proves anything about warehousing or rail line to a factory is all bunk. Just adding more trains with flatbed cars and semi hauling ability is all that is needed. Any factory or other business located anywhere can have a semi trailer trucked to a rail yard anywhere. So truck the trailer 100 or 200 miles and drop it to be loaded onto a train, pick up a trailer and truck it back the 100 or 200 miles. The trailer on the train goes a few 1,000 miles on a train, then trucked to the end point another 100 miles.

So what have you got there, 200 miles of trucking and over 2,000 miles of train, shipping North Carolina. furniture to California??

And drop and hook operations are everywhere already anyway. Drop a trailer at a warehouse to be unloaded and pick up a full trailer already loaded ready to roll. The only difference is the trailers would only be getting trucked a few hundred miles instead of coast to coast! Still need a ton of semi's for smaller runs of maybe 500 miles for over night one day shipping maybe and for certain for local shipping.

 The trucking companies or large individual businesses like Wal-mart already have all the trailers for drop and hook operation and are doing it now anyway, only the trailer is not on the trains for those long hauls cross country they are on the roads. How many semi's run coast to coast to coast on a highway right next to the train tracks? 1,000s to say the least.

The cost of the rail service is a big problem and probably why it is not done more often. I was going to ship a 22' truck once, it would have cost about 3 times as much by rail as what it cost me to drive it there and drive a car back home. I hauled the car inside the truck on the way there. I got the truck there and was back home before or about the same time the train service said the truck could have been ready to pick up also.

Don't even ask about the time I wanted to ship stuff in a box car

As for riding the rails, I have traveled by train in the US several times. Fly, train, bus, done it, would rather hitchhike cross country (did that too)!

 That's why I drive everywhere I go. Trains cost me more than driving would have cost and then no transportation when I get there unless I rent a car someplace, forget that. Not any faster than driving unless maybe 1,000 mile trip and probably not then either. And the last one I rode on had problems and stopped 3 times and just sat there about an hour each time. I do like trains and flying to just be doing it, like I have been sent to pick up trucks across country and drive them back. No hurry and no need for transportation when I arrive, just a cab to pick up the truck I'll be driving. Thats when Trains and Planes are nice. If I am in a hurry or will be staying 2 weeks, time to drive it.

 Now about the Hitch Hiking part, as  truck driver I didn't/don't stand on the road with my thumb out, unsafe and illegal in many places. I would go to a truck stop, shoot the bull for a couple hours with drivers, find one going my direction and get a ride to a truckstop where one of us would be turning off. Sit and talk to drivers, awhile at that truckstop and get another ride, however many times I needed to get to where I was going. THAT was faster than taking a bus (always and safer too, ever see the slum bus stations), got me where I was going sooner than the train would have most the time, and when you figure having to wait till the next day for an airline many times it was even faster than flying. Even figuring buying food at the truckstops and sometimes buying a trucker diner as a thanks for the ride, it still came out far cheaper than any other methode of travel except driving my car.

If the railroads got their act together they could make a ton of money, the equipment exists, rails exist where most needed, terminals exist, sidelines are plentyfull, etc...

 Not properly managed and prices too high are the main problems.

[nothing to lose]

" That's also why I propose orbital industry; if all the really energy intensive processes are undertaken outside the atmosphere, then the waste heat isn't a problem for the planet at all; "

Hmm, energy intensive processes?

Would that be similar to refining aluminum oxides back into aluminum as was mentioned durring a Hydrogen thread about using lye/water solution to release the hydrogen and capture the oxygen?

Hows this thought for orbital industry then.

Use aluminum to break down water to use the hydrogen for power down here. The aluminum oxidizes durring the process capturing the oxygen. Blast those oxides up to a space processing center and using the power of the sun there refine the oxides back into aluminum, perhaps releasing the oxygen so we capture it also. Then send both back down to the planet. Release the oxygen back into the inviroment, or sell bottled for welding gas or medical grade tanks.

Use the aluminum again to make more hydrogen from water. Send oxides back to space to be reprocessed again.

The aluminum could be transported anywhere on earth and stored easily of course, much better than most things in use today. So if this is feasible, then aluminum would basically become a renewable resource itself.

Another thought since we are talking about space here. Space gardening/farming!

 I have no dought the earth is warming but I dought most of the reasons claimed. Too much land is being cleared at an alarming rate for golf courses, tennis courts and other un-needed uses like big cities. That means all the plants, trees, etc... that were consuming CO2 are destroyed when it was cleared. What we need is more vegitation to consume the CO2.

 So we make space farms as a controlled environment, collect the CO2 that is the greenhouse problem and release it into the space farm. Plants there thrive in CO2 and sun and create oxygen which we then blast back towards earth every so often where it is needed. If we are growing food there great we can send it back to feed the world. If we grow sugarcane or sugarbeets, process that (useing the sun) into alcohol to use as fuel instead of using oil for fuel.

[maker of toys]

I like to say that we're not in the information age, we're in the energy age; taking the name of the age from the limiting/defining resource for techinical and social expansion as we have since the bronze age forward.

in a gravity well, matter is plentiful, and energy is the limiting factor.  

in space, matter is the limiting factor; once we're firmly ensconced in space, then we'll be (probably) in the aluminum age.

back (sorta) to topic:

Dropping aluminum and hydrogen down the gravity well and shipping the oxides back up for reprocessing would work excepting for the huge energy penalty for the up-bound trip. . . the energy required to orbit mass from earth far, FAR outhweighs any energy that could be garnered from using the aluminum as a energy source.

However, it is an interesting way to get oxygen into orbit in an inert form, and might off-set some of the orbital insertion energy penalty if we left it there.

One question:  where does the hydrogen/water come from that you're breaking down in orbit?  the solar wind, i suppose, but have you stopped to consider the energy cost in collecting the solar wind without being 'blown' out of orbit?  The only other place I can think of would be cometary ice- with obvious practicallity issues involved with recovery.  The supplies of water on the moon are only conjectured and would be a finite resource better suited to leveraging moon habitation (should we choose to undertake that) or outward bound exploration. The water reserves on the moon, even if the energy cost to get them into LEO were negligable, would be insufficient to make even a small dent in humankind's thirst for energy. But, because electrolytic separation of water is easy to undertake, it becomes a stepping stone to  industrializing space.

to modify your scenario a bit (the following still fails the economics test, but it's closer. . . lift one or more energy producers (fission, fusion, PV, solar concentrator, antimatter, trilithium, unobtanium-zero-point-resonance-reactor, who cares) onto the moon.

Mine the moon for aluminium oxide and any mineral hydr-, carb- or nitr- -ides or -ates that might be present.  Process those materials and capture the light elements for lunar use, or combine them into water or other compounds for shipping convienience and send them up to the L-point where they could be used for farming or separated for fuel/reaction mass, or even (gasp) breathing.

Form the aluminum into coil-gun or railgun projectiles, with more valuable cargo embedded, and fling them into one of the L-points for use in space industry.

(The moon has a lower 'escape' velocity and no atmosphere, so magnetic launching from there reaches the ragged edge of feasability.)

Loft some alumina-based foamed ceramics heat shields, too: Any material excess to requirements for shipyards/habitats/powersystems/industry in the L-point gets mated with a heat shield and pushed via ion engines to a re-entry vector and left to drift 'home'(say, the shallows off the US/Mexican Gulf coast or perhaps potions of the Mediterranian or the western pacific) while the robot-guided ion tug returns for refueling and a fresh load.  

The potential for terrorism here is high; imagine the fun a 'cracker' could have 'throwing rocks' at cities or countries he took a dislike to. . .   with no parachute, you'd have incandescent multi-ton projectiles at trans-sonic speeds.  not a good thing to have landing in your city.

Due to the thermal and impact loads, shipping finished goods down would likely be impractical; but with a presence in space, the follow-on to the shuttle could be used to de-orbit more sensitive cargoes.

the payloads get recovered and parceled out according to the highest bidder;  if using the aluminum as a 'fuel' were a desired outcome, then there you go.  

at least in this scenario, the gravity equation is positive instead of zero-sum. . .

I make no predictions about environmental effects in the impact zone/s. . . undoubtably, there will be some rare organism there that needs protecting somehow.

[ghurd]

Part of the rail problem could be improved ports.

I just shipped a large quantity from China, figured it would come into LA, then trucked across the US.

It went on the boat in China, off the boat in Cleveland, then 70 miles in a semi.

Half way around the world, and only 70 miles on wheels!

""where they were needed when they were needed, and then they wouldn't guarantee to get them delivered in time""

Most long distance shipping is by sea.

The shipping companies can't even give a window of a month as to destination time.

I asked "How long? 1 week? 1 month? 3 months?"

The answer was "Probably."

Once the boat was in port, 70 miles from me, I got a 8 day window that was too optomistic.

But they still get most of the shipping bussiness.

G-

[finnsawyer]

Shipping by boat or rail works best when there in a constant predictable input and output (crude oil, for instance).  When inputs are small or scattered trucking works best (UPS?).  That still doesn't explain the situation here via logs and rail cars.  I bet the cars went to Canada.  Where are our representatives when you need them?  I'd be all over the railroad telling them to get their act together if they want to continue to do business in the U.S.  Our laws regarding foreign ownership are too lax.

[rotornuts]

You can't expect Canada to allow liberal American ownership of companies doing bussiness in Canada without extending the same privelidge to Canadian companies wishing to do bussiness south of the boarder.

You should check to see if it is indeed CN that is moving the cars in your area because it may be an American owned shortline that is shunting cars for CN.

Regardless, I think we likely agree that rail operators on both sides of the boarder have done a lousy job and the loss of bussiness they've experienced in the last 10-15 years is thier punishment. To stay profitable I would think you'll see the rail lines focus on long haul and heavy frieght hauling due to the prohibitively expensive load and unload requirements. It doesn't pay on short runs, that can't access product at the manufacturer's back door, to load product on a semi to get to a reload yard, load it on  rail cars then reverse at the other end.

Mike

[nothing to lose]

"where does the hydrogen/water come from that you're breaking down in orbit?"

No I meant break down the water down here, use the hydrogen on land and any heat produced also in the process. Blast the oxides produced back up into space to be processed back to aluminum there and sent back down.

"however, it is an interesting way to get oxygen into orbit in an inert form, and might off-set some of the orbital insertion energy penalty if we left it there."

 Could be, and if people are there breathing it they will be producing CO2, that will then over time build up and food plants could be grown to consume CO2 and produce more oxygen. Perhaps over a period of time a small scale project could develope into a space community.

 By currant costs and techknowlogy what would it cost to blast a load of aluminum oxides into space in a re-usable rocket or simply a package. A rocket would not need a pilot and could be recovered by persons already in space. More sensative cargo could be loaded onto the ship and sent back down safely, dropping into the ocean to be recovered, aluminum could be packaged and blasted back as you said also. Heck take a large chunk of land, pre-program the site permantly so it can't be changed, drop the aluminum into the bomb testing grounds on certain days, have a few trucks drive out and get it. No need for oceans, ships, or all that expense either. Who cares if a chunk of aluminum has a hard landing and gets bent? Only problem here is how to re-enter the aluminum with out burning it up on re-entry and it not being able to float around wildly on a parachute. We did about the same thing with the moon Apollo rockets dropping astronauts into the ocean, should be much easier to figure a way to do lifeless aluminum.

If we could send a monkey into space we should be able to send aluminum

Not that I really think this is the best idea, but perhaps something to explore the posibilities of. Of course what kind of volume would we be needing and such to even make it worthwhile? Now if other items were being produced in space that needed a safe ride home then we have to send a ship up to get them. So if we sent aluminum oxides up in a ship that would other wise be empty, how much extra does it cost for the weight of the oxides if we filled that ship? Then as you say we have transported needed oxygen up there in the process also if we leave it.

Now what about water? Could we carry a bit of Hydrogen up there perhaps easier than water itself. At first thought we might think it defeats the purpose of breaking down the water with the aluminum and making the oxides to get the hydrogen just to take it all back to space. However it's not quite the same really, though close. If we took small amounts of hydrogen to space at times and let it recombine with the oxygen released from the oxides to form fresh pure water in space I think there would be various advantages compared to taking nasty poluted water into space or using lots of energy on earth to clean poluted earth water.

How about space food? Farms in space, a clean steril, insect free, weed free farm.

 Ok this may seem far fetched, but why not? Only thing that will be there is what we put there, so do it right. First we have to build a place to farm, large floating space islands. Large enough to capture alot of sun. Equipment to farm with would be all solar powered. Clean food the way it was supposed to be, nice and healthy, no chemicals to make it grow, kill weeds, kill insects, or to kill us! We could capture excess CO2 on earth and release it at the space farm for the vegtables. A bunch of these space farms floating around like giant satilites would shade the earth some, maybe not alot but some. So how would that effect the globle warming? Less CO2, less heat from sun, less fossil fuels used for farming on earth. The farm islands could be located over any area that most benifits the planet. Over deserts, over oceans?

 Stuff like sugar cane could be grown, processed into alcohol feul (leaving the CO2 on the farm durring fermenting) brought back to earth as a feul for the cars of today so we don't have to throw away the classics, even if we have other stuff, then we don't need fossil feul to run the cars. What about OIL crops like soybeans for diesel fuel replacements or heating oil.

If we explore the posibilities for space we see that alot of things could be done, but never will be. It all costs money and is not profitable enough for the big business to get enterested. Not enough ways to tax it for the Government to want to do anything real.

 When they do, it will be like everything else, hap hazardly done and create more problems than we already have.

 If we are looking at the future then we can not think by todays stanards as tomorrow many things are posible that are not posible today. In 1930 people probably never thought a man would walk on the moon. In 1830 people thought there was nothing better or faster than a great horse. Forget telling someone from 1830 about a man on the moon, they would not have even beleaved we could go from coast to coast in 3-4 days by land and forget telling them it's only a few hours by plane

[Tyler883]

I agree that even though CFL may not be putting a big dent in our energy consumption it is still an easy and affordable step that all of us can make. I hope it also acts as a self admision that energy conservation is important, much like the first $10 per month retirement plan is insufficient but gets us thinking in the right direction.

While we are on the topic of energy savings, I really like the hot water recovery systems that you can put on your sewage downpipe so that you can recover as much as 50% of the heat while you are running your shower. Does anyone have personal knowledge of them? I am tempted to try and build one for myself rather than pay the small fortune for a comercial one, perhaps replace a section of my sewage downpipe with a material that conducts heat better, then wrap a few hundred feet of tiny hose around it and feed it to the intake of my hotwater tank.

[ghurd]

The first one I saw with any info was just a verticle copper pipe (4"?),

and 3/4" copper tubing wrapped tightly around it and soldered.

The cold came in the bottom of the tubing, top went to the water heater input.

Keeping it very level is important.

Too simple.

G-

[maker of toys]

 I read a number that says it costs $10k to put a kg of <whatever> into low earth orbit with an expendable vehicle.  it costs about $25k to send that same 1 kg of <whatever> up with the shuttle; but for the cost, you get a round-trip ticket and a technician on site to troubleshoot your deployment.

. . . pretty expensive way to charge a battery. <G>

for comparison:

(someone check my math. . . it's late, and these figures seem low)

in potential energy, there's about 1/2 kWh stored in that same 1 kg at 160km altitude. (chosen as the lowest practical altitude for un-powered orbit based on aerodynamic drag)

it takes about 100 kWh to accelerate that 1 kg to orbital velocity ($12 or so at california baseline residential rates) . . . or ~170 kWh to fling it completely out of earth orbit.  (to, say, get it on its way to the asteroids, or whereever)  note that those numbers are only the kinetic energy contents of the mass; not the much greater expenditure required to supply that energy via a chemical fueled rocket, with its inherantly poor mass fraction and comcomittant poor energy efficiency.  

Much better to leave that 1kg in orbit once you've got it there. . . leverage the energy you've expended to go get some more mass, and drop THAT down the well.  or even better, leave it all in orbit, and start thinking as an evolved species for once.

(the guy who builds the first 'beanstalk' is going to leave Bill Gates and Warren Buffet playing in a sandbox when it comes to money-making potential, even if all the beanstalk gets used for is satellite launch and recovery.)

-Dan

[dinges]

Hi,

I'm still half a sleep, but when I read about your girlfriends and how 2 1/2 of them still don't work (?), I woke up. WHAT? Rereading the paragraph solved the mystery ;-)

Or did I imply things because I'm a male chauvinistic pig? Freud etc.

"I mean heck, my first girl friend did not work out either. Didn't stop me from trying a few more

In several years I only had 2 1/2 that don't still work. Kid droped one and it shattered on concrete, the other I left hanging on the back of a truck in the rain upside down,... "

It's just that sometimes my mind plays tricks on me...

[dinges]

Funny indeed :-)

BTW, crashK6, do (did) you happen to fly gliders? Your handle seems to suggest you landed one 'less than ok' (though they say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one)

Peter,

The Netherlands.

[dinges]

You're right, energy prices are the same.

However, our government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to add a bit of taxation. Last breakdown of the price of a liter of gasoline (now at 1.40E/l in NL; fortunately I live 5 km from Belgian border, with less tax: 1.30E/liter). If I remember correctly, only about 10% of the price at the pump was made up by the cost of oil; all the rest is 'accijns' (fuel tax), 'energy tax', VAT. And yes, we even pay a tax on tax...

It's not the worldeconomy that's to be feared, it's government.

Peter,

The Netherlands.

(FYI, electrical energy is 0,16E/kWhr)

[Tyler883]

Anyone know if copper is a good choice for sewage pipe, ie if the diameter and install is correct, will it still be at risk of plugging with sewage? Or am I worrying about something that really isn't an issue?

[ghurd]

Not sure about 'sewage'.

Saw 20' of 2" copper drain for a bath tub and sink that was maybe 50 years old and still working fine.

[finnsawyer]

Soldering the size copper pipe you need for sewage would be a bitch.  You also have the possibility of corrosion using copper due to currents flowing in the ground.  I think you should stick with Genova pipe.  It's relatively easy to work with and will last until nature comes up with a plastic eating bacterium.  Cheers.

[finnsawyer]

Just a little up date here.  I hope you catch it.  It was Canadian National Railway.  Our local (man, I almost wrote loco) representative contacted them about the issue.  The company allocated another 200 rail cars to the existing allotment of 400.  Some 50,000 cords of pulp were stockpiled in the eastern U.P.  That's about 2,000 cars worth.  So, there was a major problem and steps are being taken.  Of course, when the company took over there was a steep price increase.  The article doesn't say what the actual increase was.  So, the lumber industry got hit with a double whammy.  Anyway, I wanted to set the record straight.

[finnsawyer]

I just read that if all the CO2 locked up in limestone were released into the atmosphere, the resulting pressure would be 62 times what it is now.  The Earth would become like Venus.  While fossil fuels might be limited, the potential supply of CO2 is essentially unlimited.  Other processes like acid rain can also release CO2.  So, we've got to be careful in other ways too.

[rotornuts]

Maybe the Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports can give those mills some of the 5 billion dollars woth of illegal duties the department of commerce has collected on thier behalf over the last several years. NAFTA, which Canada and the US both signed, has ruled definitively in Canada's favor on numerous occasions but the US is ignoring the agreement despite all the times the US has sued Canada and won using the same agreement.

BTW, Canada has allways complied with NAFTA rulings.

I'm sorry if I have no sympathy for the damage one Canadian company may be doing to a few US lumber companies when a coalition of US lumber companies is illegally trying to destroy ours.(We may be set back by the tarrifs but in the end we have all the wood soooo... someday when you come a callin' for wood don't knock on our door looking for a good deal).

Please read.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/051116/b111698.html

[finnsawyer]

I'd take issue with your statement that Canada has all the wood.  I've been up to Manitoba and saw all the acres of useless scrub oak up there.  Also, when one gets north of Lake Superior all one sees are aspen and firs.  So, Canada has the soft woods. We've got the hardwoods.  All of our best hardwoods (veneers, birdseye maple, curly maple, etc.) are going to the Far east.  The arguement you mention involves softwoods used in building, I believe.  I'm not too interested in that.  Nor am I a big fan of agreements like NAFTA that don't take into account the differences in infrastructure costs (namely via Mexico).  We have softwoods too.  Massive amounts of southern pine. Around here we have pine, spruce, and eastern hemlock.  I once saw a ship load of hemlock going to canada.  The logs looked like matchsticks, the load was so massive.  Turned out to be a one shot deal.  I think the load may have had too much ring shake.  Currently hemlock rots in the woods or goes for pulp, even though it is a fine wood for building if used with care.  Makes great joists.  I've got about 3500 board feet of hemlock in the house I'm currently building.  I've got enough growing for another house.  So, don't hold your breath about us running out of wood.    

[rotornuts]

Your right about the hardwoods, you guys have plenty. And I have to admit your southern yellow pine is a wood worthy of envy but on a resource scale we have vastly greater quantities of softwoods, especially spruce and Douglas fir.

Hemlock is usefull for floor joists and rafters but I don't like it for trim as it tends to split when dry and can be prone to severe warpage over a short distance if not milled with consideration. A load of hemlock pecker poles with lots of ring shake was indeed likely headed for a pulp mill. Small diameter hemlock is useless for milling as it warps and checks severely when kiln dried.

Not going to hold my breath on you guy running out of wood I just know for sure that there is no way on this earth you can supply your own domestic needs, sooo....

Mike

[finnsawyer]

The bottom line on running out of wood is manufactured joists and steel studs.  Steel studs are currently required in commercial construction.  Those were not pecker poles on that ship.  They were massive logs.  But, I have to agree with your take on hemlock.  Of course, we also have white pine (me too) for trim.  Have a nice day.

[ghurd]

Quebec, way up in the boonies (around Clova), they tell me 'all' the (commercial harvest) trees go to 'paper products'.

I find it strange... that much paper!

But a well planned operation for the long term re-grow use.

G-

[rotornuts]

I always thought it was a bit screwwed up that one mill does a 20 million upgrade to make use of the small junk and at the same time another chips everything including the beautifull big old trees that the other poor mill would love to make into good lumber.

Mike

[ghurd]

Around here the lumber mills are small, but cut-offs (like 1x1x6" to 2x2x24") are about free. $5 is the standard for all you can put in your truck, be it a VW or a 1 ton dualie. Often they burn many tons of it Saturday evening (EPA types don't work Sundays) just to be rid of it. All non-pine.

I mentioned making them into pellets to a couple of the larger outfits, but they make millions a year already and don't want to bother... Even though they can afford the equipment and would make more money!  

How much money do you need before you have too much money? I guess they know the answer.

G-

[finnsawyer]

Whatever happened to the paperless society?  Do you think one could correlate the paper production to the number of toilet flushes?  What gets my goat is when someone clear cuts a beautiful mixed hardwood stand just to let it grow back in aspen (paper pulp).