Is this board fading out?

Maintenance/Repairs
141

@“MG McAnick” Ah, thank you for the clarification. I had forgotten the correct way in which burning wood could power an engine.

And I also was under the misapprehension that gas powered fridges had a compressor.

I am batting strike out with recent comments. Time for me to hush up, speak less, listen more, and go back to still reading, still learning.

I shall leave with the thought that if one is to listen to Grieg, his music should be paired with music by Sibelius (sp?) who, if I recall correctly, was from Finland.

142

I think the Mountain King,was a troll.Gas O Gens,produced carbon monoxide,which coud be completely oxidized into the venerable greenhouse gas CO2

143

You’re right @kmccune and @Marnet . I knew it was Grieg, but the plot of the story was not part of my musical education. I had to google it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hall_of_the_Mountain_King

And I thought Sebelius was President Obama’s “fall guy” for the roll out failure of the Obamacare website.

To make this automotive, her personal driver during her tenure as Kansas governor was an ex-highway patrol trooper who got pulled over for speeding.

144

“These refrigerators were common in parts of New York City which had direct current even into the 1950s.”

Correct!
An aunt of mine lived on The Upper West Side–long before it was fashionable or expensive. Unlike the ritzy Upper East Side–which had AC current–her area was still supplied with DC by Consolidated Edison.

In those days, one of the few merchants that sold DC radios, irons, toasters, etc was Macy’s, and they actually had a separate small appliance section in the Herald Square store that was devoted to the sale of DC appliances for those who lived in the…less fashionable…parts of NYC.

145

Will you folks please stop talking about Sebelius, Obama, Christie, etc. You get me shaking just thinking about them and I don’t want to respond politically in a car forum. I’ve gotta go have a smoke but connect the dots on the Cincinatti/Chicago/DC connection from back in the 60’s.

146

Not old enough to connect the dots, but re the board, last 2 hours 7 pph (posts per hour) seems like a fine speed.

147

@Bing. Finnish classical music composer Jean Sibelius has nothing to do with politics.

148

@Marnet I’m aware of the Finnish composer Sibelius. He pops up in other discussions of Scandinavian composers. I figured we needed more levity around here.

Hey @VDCdriver , they had DC power in parts of Manhattan until 2007. Unbelievable.

Isn’t Google wonderful…

Would you agree that Thomas Edison wielded a great deal of power LOOONG after his death?

Did he ever drive an electric car?

Odd how the Tesla car is DC powered.

Gotta keep it automotive…

149

Long distance high voltage transmission works very well on DC, with substantually less transmission loss then AC,believe it or not,with at least two long transmission lines in the US,I do believe Mrs Edison drove an electric car powered by Edison Nickle-Iron cells(still a very good battery by the way,a bit costly though)
Musk is posed to hit a home run with His battery systems,with a 250 mile range car soon,even the Leafs range is getting better(somewhat over 100 miles now I believe)electric cars are starting to find a bigger place in the marketplace,if they can get the price down,my future hoped for vehicle will either be electric or diesel compact AWD.and you can drive on sunshine if you are properly equipped.

150

@marnet Oh thank heavens. I thought you were talking about the former HHS Director that rose to her level of incompetence but was in good company.

151
Odd how the Tesla car is DC powered.

Because there’s no such thing as an AC battery. The Tesla motor, however, is a 4-pole, 3-phase AC motor.

Long distance high voltage transmission works very well on DC...

How high a voltage? Where is this method being used?

152

@insightful, I think @kmccune typed it backwards. DC has never been able to go the distance of high voltage AC. That was DC’s demise. If I’m wrong, I’d like to know where I can read up on it.

153

Google it,theres many places in Europe,and looks like the San Jauqoin Valley and a line in Maine,that sticks out in the The US map,money talks,the other walks.

154

I thought that AC won the day because of DC s long distance transmission problems… but I m often wrong…

155

AC won the War of the Currents for many reasons. While there may be a few isolated places where DC is used successfully, there sure aren’t many. If it were a great system, we’d all be on it.

156

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/12/121206-high-voltage-dc-breakthrough/

Compared to AC, HVDC is more efficient—a thousand-mile HVDC line carrying thousands of megawatts might lose 6 to 8 percent of its power, compared to 12 to 25 percent for a similar AC line. And HVDC would require fewer lines along a route. That made it better suited to places where electricity must be transmitted extraordinarily long distances from power plants to urban areas. It also is more efficient for underwater electricity transmission.

157

My mother attended a small state college in the early 1930s where the campus generated its own power in the daytime, but switched over to municipal power at night, or possiblly it was the other way around. At any rate the campus generated direct current and the municipal power plant supplied alternating current. Some students had radios damaged if they forgot to turn them off during the power changeover. Of course, students didn’t have refrigerators, televisions, computers, etc. at this time. Even a radio was a luxury. My mother had to drop out of school after 2 years for lack of money. She then taught in a one room school with no electric power or running water. She fired up the coal stove every morning. For all this, she got $100 a month, but saved enough to go back to school afterr 2 years and complete her degree.
When I think about her college campus mixing alternating current and direct current, I can see that happening in homes as solar panels become more common. We will use the direct current produced by the solar panels and stored in batteries for operating our computers, television sets and some lighting while the alternating current from the power company will be used for the compressor motors, electric ranges, etc.

158

@idiot, & @kmccune that’s very interesting. Live and learn. I wonder if they will make the switch any time soon. My guess is it won’t happen to a great extent in this country in my lifetime.

@Triedaq $100 a month for a teacher in the early '30s was a very good salary. Many men, who were lucky enough to be employed, made a dollar a day during the depression. My mother got $50/mo starting out as a teacher in 1937 in a two room school. The last contract she signed, in 1984, paid her more for A DAY than she made in a month in '37. She had to resign when she got married in 1937 as it was not considered proper for someone who knew about “men and such” to teach in that school district. Her sister taught in the other room, and hid the fact that she had gotten married until the end of that school year. I guess Uncle Lee sneaked in through the bathroom window for a couple of months. Reminds me of a song.

159

There is no difference in losses for the transmission of electricity between AC and DC. Its Ohms Law and Ohms Law applies to both AC and DC circuits the same.

There are two types of grids in this country, the distribution grid and the transmission grid. The distribution grid is your local grid, that is the grid from your local power station or sub station to your house or business. The transmission grid is the grid that interconnects all the distribution grids.

In the early days of electricity generation known as the current wars, there was no transmission grid. AC is ideal for distribution grids because it can use high voltage, low current lines for distributing the power locally and different types of transformers to reduce the distribution voltage (2400 to 19900 VAC) down to the lower working voltages (120, 240, 277, 480 etc) and higher currents that the customer needs.

The disadvantage to the DC systems was that the voltages could not be transformed. That is why AC won out over DC.

But AC has a big problem on the transmission grid. Electricity takes time to move from one place to another. Its fast but it does take about 5.38 micro seconds to move a mile. On a short distance, this is insignificant, but over hundreds of miles, it becomes a problem. The problem is called phase shift.

60 HZ AC electricity has a one degree of phase shift for every 8.6 miles of travel. A couple of degrees is not significant, and in a distribution grid with just one power source, it is not a problem through out the whole grid, but if you try to connect two grids together to share power generation capacity and the grids are say 200 miles apart, the phase shift between them is now about 23 degrees and that is a problem.

If you want to deliver power from A to B, and A is 200 miles from B, you have to adjust the timing on A’s generator to be 23 degrees ahead of B’s generator. Not to difficult until you have to sync hundreds of power plants to share power in any direction and at different distances. It takes a sophisticated computer system to do that, and the computers are linked by the internet. If you didn’t understand why cyber security for our power grid is so important, I hope you see it now. If someone were to hack into the power grid computer system and adjust the timing of just one generator, it would wipe out large sections of the transmission grid.

Wind and solar farms have made the AC situation worse because they make up hundreds of generators that also must be synced with the transmission grid, and they only provide supplemental power for another power station that is several hundred or a thousand miles away.

DC works better for the transmission grid because it does not have a phase angle component to the power. It is never out of phase. Typically they use about 600kV which can transmit for a thousand miles or more. They also don’t have a fluctuating magnetic field that some believe is a source of cancer (not proven). The magnetic field that is generated is mostly self canceling as you have one field radiating from each wire, but they are in opposite directions. The residual field left because of the separation of the wires is small compared to the strength of the earths magnetic field so does not interfere with bird migration.

There are only a few DC transmission grids in the country but now Dc transmission lines are being taken seriously. There will be a new one going from the panhandle area of Oklahoma to Tennessee to deliver power from the wind farms to the TVA.

160

This is probably the only car repair forum on the planet where people can knowledgeably discuss classical music, history, DC vs AC power, etc. As such it probably would not be a bad idea to have a “general off topic” forum where people could discuss anything and everything.

However I also sympathize with the moderation pratfalls of such a forum, because once people start discussing politics it can be awfully hard to keep things from devolving into “that Kenyan muslim terrorist” vs “corporate apologist neo-con warmongering traitor.”

Perhaps the site should have an off topic room and cull volunteer mods from the established community to help keep things civil.