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Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 153
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Here (border region, might be untypical for Germany)today:
95 @ 1,24
Diesel @ 1,06
Usually petrol here is bit more expensive than in France but the ranges(low cost supermarket <-> motorway station) are more important than the countries' difference. B and NL being 5 to 20 cents higher at the moment.
For information leaded fuel has not been available since about 2000. I don't even remember when exactly. In France it is still sold as so many cars survived.
There are more things about that topic. In Germany for example heating with wood is pretty restricted, in France it is more a basic Human Right to pollute the whole valley with smoke of the old trees harvested on the own property (terrain).
Wolfgang
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Joined: Aug 2001
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For information leaded fuel has not been available since about 2000. I don't even remember when exactly. In France it is still sold as so many cars survived. Is that actually leaded fuel or a lead substitute? I thought the withdrawal of leaded a few years ago was under some EU directive (although at least France has the good sense to ignore such things a lot of the time!). We have LRP on sale in Britain -- Lead Replacement Petrol, which is still used by a lot of people with cars made prior to about 1986 or thereabouts, which I think is when all new cars had to be capable on running on unleaded. A lot of people with classic or vintage cars prefer to fill up with unleaded and use a separate additive though. More on-topic, it's quite interesting to see all the pros and cons put forward for different types of heating over the years. I was browsing some magazines here from the 1963/64 period the other evening. The advertisments for electrical heating emphasize the cleanness of electricity, the minimal maintenance requuired, and the ease of use, along with comments about efficiency (referring to the fact that with gas or oil etc. some of the heat is wasted out of the flue). Ads for gas make a big point of how much cheaper it was compared to the equivalent energy from electricity at the time, and how much less labor is required than for a solid fuel system. Proponents of solid-fuel systems all made a big point of it being the cheapest overall to run, and tried to counter the more intense labor issue with automatic hopper feed systems etc. which require only a couple of minutes per day to load up. Oil-fired heating has become very common in this country in places which have no gas suppyl, but with the price of heating oil having doubled in a relatively short space of time, a lot of people are now finding it to be less attractive. [This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-16-2006).]
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Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 1,803
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Saving energy is as important as which fuel happens to be cheapest right now. Deciding which fuel to use when you install a system is risky- look what's happened to gas and oil prices recently.
If I were designing a house from scratch now, I'd plump for:-
Geothermal heat source- either a bored well or a pipework lattice laid in the garden coupled to a heat pump.
Insulated floors, walls, roof, low-e double glazing, with a minimum equivalent to 8" of glass wool in walls and roofspace.
Underfloor heating, getting the same 'heat effect' with 10% less fuel, [ie. 2C lower stat. settings].
Double-flux forced air ventilation, 100% fresh-air input, via a heat exchanger to give controlled airflow, with microproccessor control, and recovering about 1.0kw.
Reversible Air-con, to give rapid heat on days when it turns chilly. [Underfloor takes 5 hours to heat the slab]. Latest split model with a COP better than 4. This is not a luxury- imagine cooking on a 4kw range in a house with a net 1kw loss when it's 17C outside and then work out what the house temperature would be!
Apart from my bad mistake of retaining my existing deisel fired boiler, I'm doing all the above in my re-model. Theoretically, the 2000 sq ft house will run on about 2kw with a difference inside/outside of 21C [38F]. I could have done better,[ie sun trapping on S. elevation], but I'm constrained by a shell built in the mid 17th century, limited funds and old bones!
As to burning wood, as Wolfgang mentioned, it can pollute. But if you use the right species, [oak, fruitwoods, hardwoods, but not pine] and dry it thoroughly for a couple of years, smoke is not a real issue. Here in the agricultural North of France, hedgerow trees are an important source of timber for fence posts, farm buildings etc., and are pollarded regularly. Burning the offcuts, if they're dried properly, is recycling carbon- a true bio fuel. And there is immense pleasure from a fire on a cold day. Must be something primordeal?
Alan
Wood work but can't!
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,498 Likes: 1
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It was an EU directive that killed the lead in 2000. It must have been several years since they stopped selling lead replacement petrol here, because I remember working for a company in 2002 that had no longer any real need for the pumps. More different locations to fill the same fuel was just an extra cost. The United States banned leaded fuel ages ago. Kudos to them. Today even Africa is going unleaded. Lead is dead. Unleaded in Africa Leaded in Europe (PDF) [This message has been edited by C-H (edited 01-16-2006).]
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Joined: Dec 2002
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By 2000 many EU countries had already banned leaded petrol though.
LRP's not really sold here anymore as there is extremely limited demand other than classic car enthusiasts.
The oil companies should voluntarily remove it from petrol (gasoline) supplies in developing nations where it is still permitted. It has to go!
[This message has been edited by djk (edited 01-16-2006).]
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Joined: Dec 2004
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The United States banned leaded fuel ages ago. Kudos to them. Today even Africa is going unleaded. Lead is dead. Not completely, you can still buy 100 octane low-lead at the race track here in the states, but it costs about 3 times as much as pump gas. [This message has been edited by IanR (edited 01-16-2006).]
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Joined: Dec 2002
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When you think about it, it was incrediably weird that a heavy metal additive was allowed at any stage. Even by 1930s environmental standards that was pretty bad!
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Joined: Dec 2004
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No, leaded petrol is still very available everywhere, but for aircraft. Redesigning and requalifying aircraft engines for unleaded would be very expensive, and just using unleaded in existing aircraft unsafe, so lead additive will go on for the foreseeable future.
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,498 Likes: 1
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Thomas Midgley made two major inventions in his life. Both are still widely known today. They were: - Leaded petrol - Freons http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi684.htm Sorry about the threadjack!
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Joined: Dec 2001
Posts: 2,498
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Hmm... what should I say... small single-bedroom apartments in Vienna have been found to have a 220V 10A single phase service at times! I've seen one for real, the house had central heat and hot water running on coal, maybe later converted to gas (judging by the like 10ccm diameter of the main gas line, as large as ours for a roughly 8000 sq. feet) and a gas cooker. That left full 6 amps (my guess about the circuit fuse, couldn't check any closer since the house was half collapsed) for 3-4 light bulbs, maybe a table light, a radio and a TV...
20 or 25A single phase services are still very common. Even though during remodels code requires 10mm2 feeders only 25A fuses get installed.
In Vienna supposedly the voltage of the 10/20kV medium voltage network was raised to achieve the 230/400V mains voltage. Wonder why we still got 220/380 or lower at school... we have been down to the tolerances at times. The school has it's own transformer vault stepping 10kV down to 220/380V with two transformers, one supplying the school and one supplying the surrounding area.
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Posts: 356
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