Comfortable as in sheltered, warm in the winter, fed any time I feel like it any time of year, and dry when a thunderstorm has knocked out the power and is dumping on us.

To restate. Critical being the heating boiler (LP), some lights, the kitchen (except the electric oven), a sump pump, and a circuit for the living room and master bedroom. I grew up without running water and with wood stove heat. The current setup is way better than that. And it does last for days without starting up the generator.

Sure, the inverter/ATF is a Xantrex SW4048. The model has been replaced with other models. I've never had a problem with it, although I've heard some complaints about components in the newer models. The main service tie is a 30 amp 110 circuit, and there's a secondary input that I can drive with a generator or other 15 amp 110 source.

The batteries are Fullriver DC310-6 gel-packs which are supposed to deal with hydrogen out-gassing. I think the model number translates to 6 volt, 310 Amp hours. They're connected in series to yield 48 volts DC to the inverter.

The system was sized to run the critical circuits in the house for 3 days. (Critical being the heating boiler (LP), some lights, the kitchen (except the electric oven), a sump pump, and a circuit for the living room and master bedroom.

A demonstration plant for conversion of electricity to feed the natural gas network was ready in Germany in 2012. There should be more details here. http://www.zsw-bw.de/infoporta...

I've got a "whole house" battery backup that I installed several years ago for about $ (usd)8k. It has 8 batteries (6 volt gel packs in series) and a 3 Kw inverter with integrated auto transfer switch. That's been enough to run the critical systems in the house for 3 days (from experience). It doesn't run the air conditioning, but everything else works just fine.

No. Simply No. This is wrong. In almost every particular

The continents are masses of rock that are on average less dense than mantle rock. So, the continents are floating on the mantle rock. Upwelling plumes from the mantle are most often associated with volcanic activity and aren't "lifting the land up" at least in anything approaching a continental area. When ice melts off a continental area, that part of the continent will rebound, floating higher on the mantle rock. Some areas on the periphery of the land mass will sink due to the changing orientation of the mass, but the general motion is upward. All of this takes place over millennia. Parts of North America are still rebounding from the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet. The convective cells in the mantle have some effect on the height of different land masses, but those changes take millions of years to be measurable.

It has been observed for quite a while. At the Panama Canal, the Pacific Ocean average sea level is about 8 inches higher that the Atlantic Ocean average sea level.

Here's a prime example of someone speaking with absolute certainty and near complete ignorance.

The "extremely nasty" chemicals in the battery are aluminum and oxygen. Solid aluminum metal will yield 8kWh of electricity per kilogram of aluminum mass when reacted with oxygen. When aluminum first became an affordable material it was referred to as "solidified electricity" because of how much electricity the Bayer process consumed to refine bauxite. Also, the aluminum is basically consumed by being transformed back into aluminum oxide. But, if you run the alumina back through the Bayer process you get aluminum metal again. Pretty much a closed cycle.

Possibly from something more like an egg-laying mammal (see Monotreme). Although there is evidence that Cynognathus and Thrinaxodon (before the dinosaurs), had fur, may have been warm blooded, and may have given live birth.

They all lost out the the dinosaurs and only occupied the mouse like environmental niches until the dinosaurs went extinct.

I've seen this, (a while ago it's true). I was curious about why some GTK applications had such terrible remote performance. When I ran the applications through xscope, before the first window materialized, I saw thousands of calls to XGetGeometry(). What made that doubly silly is that any window geometry change is provided to the client as an XConfigureEvent. So, a local copy of window geometry information can be easily kept up to date.

EV charging systems already are configured for managing recharging load. My Focus electric can be set to start charging at any time. So, I get home plug it in, and it waits for the cheapest rates to start charging. It's called Value Charge. With smart metering and coordinated load management from the utility, it becomes even easier to optimize the whole system for electric vehicles.

Why don't you take your tin-foil hat brigade somewhere else. Maybe Syria, Somalia, you know someplace that has no effective government.

Could we at least number the anonymous cowards, I'd like to know if the crap is coming from one blabbermouth or if there's a team of sock puppets at work.

It would make it easier to get a better signal to noise ratio.

This has been proposed and it seems like it really can work.

The process goes something like

Use surplus renewable electricity to split water to get hydrogen.

Run the hydrogen and atmospheric CO2 through a Sabatier reactor and get methane.

Feed the methane into any natural gas pipeline (The nation wide natural gas pipelines typically have at least a 7 day supply available).

Use the nation wide natural gas pipelines to deliver the product to gas turbine generators.

Storage and production largely use existing infrastructure.

There's an enormous difference between "Question Everything" and "Only acknowledge what seems to agree with preconceptions".

I'll leave it for others to work out which behavior is theirs.

Escape velocity is Mach 33, 11.2 kilometers/second, orbital velocity is Mach 25, 7.7 kilometers/second.

It's got a ways to go.

Here's a more subtle way of doing a file system in (from personal, bitter experience).

As root of course.

Start in any directory

rm -rf .*

On the system that I discovered this on, the first file it removed was the system kernel. That's when the panic started. I was just trying to get rid of some hidden directories in a home directory.