Some stuff I found interesting over the past few days:
Railroad stocks tumble:
Oct 2, 2008: The railroad stocks all took a hit because of the struggling economy. Factory orders dropped and new jobless claims hit a seven-year high. Good time to buy for long term though.
HHO does not increase MPG:
It might increase it by .005%, but that’s hardly worth all the crap you have to go through to make it work.
From Popular Mechanic’s Q&A:
Q: I have a question about your answer in last week’s column on HHO. You are correct. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed – that is entropy. And yes, the law does apply to the production of HHO utilizing the electrical generator in the car. The HHO generator puts a load on the generator which in turn puts a load on the engine which then consumes more fuel in order to support the additional load. But, if I were to utlize solar panels (12V/25W) to solely provide the necessary energy to create the HHO which is then combusted in the engine, then there is no additional load on the engine. The solar panels weight approx. 2.8lbs and are .03in thick – minimal wind drag and additional weight on the car. Using this configuration, then yes, you will see a significant increase in fuel economy – correct?
A: Sigh. A significant increase in fuel economy? No.
Let’s do the math…
Okay. You’ve postulated a 25 watt solar cell, park this in the sun for a generous 23 hrs per day, stipulating that we live on the equator. The cells are not oriented directly to the sun full-time, so we’ll stipulate the cell’s output is 25×12 watt-hours x 0.5, roughly 150 watt-hours/day. That’s enough energy into the battery to provide roughly 10 amps at 12.6 volts for one hour to run our HHO generator.
Suppose, instead we just put that electricity into the battery pack of a hybrid car instead of generating HHO. The Chevy Volt has a projected range of 40 miles that should deplete the battery by 16 kwh battery pack by 8,000 watt-hours.
So, out solar cells will take 53 days to recharge the battery pack enough to drive 40 miles. That’s a little over a mile per day. A sunny day, not a cloudy one.
Now let’s use that same electricity to make HHO. Some of the electricity turns into heat in the gas generator. Some is lost in heat to the wires to the generator—but we’ll simply ignore those losses. If our gas generator uses 10 amps to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, that’s roughly 120 watts, for one hour, until we’ve consumed the electricity the solar cells have added to the battery. One horsepower is 746 watts. So we’re pumping roughly 1/6 of a horsepower into the intake manifold in the form of HHO. It takes on the order of 5-10 horsepower to make a car run 60 mph. Multiply the 1/6 hp by the efficiency of the internal combustion engine burning gasoline or diesel fuel, and I’ll stipulate a generous 30% for that, and you get roughly 0.5%. Consequently, the HHO is contributing a potential one-half of one percent
to the vehicle’s fuel economy. Probably less.
And remember, that’s a 100+ mpg Chevy Volt that doesn’t exist yet. Adding and HHO generator to your 14 mpg pickup will have so little effect it couldn’t be measured. I defy anyone without access to a major, lab-grade engine dynamometer to even find that 1/2%. And that’s with the “free energy” we’re getting from the solar cells. If we have to burn fuel to run the alternator, we get less than nothing, because he IC engine only recovers at most 30% of the energy we put into the intake as hydrogen.
It sure ain’t the 3-100% improvement the websites are claiming.
E-Cigs (electronic cigarettes):
This looks promising. They’re not really cigarettes, but electronic nicotine delivery systems (!) that use a nebulizer powered by a battery to vaporize nicotine-impregnated water when you drag on the device. You inhale the nicotine vapor to get your fix, but there’s no smoke. It does make the vapor, which looks a little like smoke, but it’s just water vapor so you can smoke them indoors! I guess it’s not exactly like smoking a standard cigarette, so you can’t really switch over to these things completely, and the $100 initial cost kinda puts me off, but I’ll probably get one for going to the bar or for smoking when it’s raining outside.
E-Smokers Mag: smoke indoors in Nevada
Republicans try to strongarm Alaskan legislature:
Alaskan Republican State Reps are asking the State Supreme Court to stop the investigation into Troopergate (Sarah Palin allegedly had a State Trooper fired for personal reasons), which is due to be released Oct 10.
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And the beat goes on . . .
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