Chowbow,

British Gas (who also supply electricity) put their Bills up 12% today the second such increase in less than a year. Petrol is back up at £1 a litre (OK I exaggerate it's 99.9 pence/litre)

At this rate we'll be back to the stone age before you know it glad of a bit of global warming. Hope you are a dab hand with the old flint axe?

My fishtank is in this thread by Johnny Cool http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=7386
with the scorching heat in the UK and the associated Thunder Storms I don't think the heater comes on very often at the mo

Dave

Cool tank you got there! I'm into salt water stuff, and recently got out of salt water coral reef stuff. Now I have a fish only tank. I had 750W of metal halide lighting to keep my corals healthy, and a chiller to keep everything within decent temperatures for a while. It just cost me too much and took too much time so I converted into a fish only tank with minimal maintenance and MUCH lower cost to maintain.

I actually don't have a huge problem with the gas prices here. I used to live in Hong Kong, one of the most expensive places to buy fuel in the world... Many moons ago, I remember it being approximately $7.xx per gallon when gas in the US was about $1.20 per gallon. At $3.xx per gallon now, it's still OK to me. At $1.xx a gallon like it used to be, it was just dirt cheap.

But man, I just paid Sekerob's annual crunching bill last month!

Vester, no idea what state u are, probably not California, anyway for world awareness, Venezuela aside where gasoline is cheaper than water, almost, The USA has less than 5 percent of the world population, yet consumed per an analysis of a few years ago, 50% of the global energy.

More frowns causing is, that voices were heard, like George Dubbaya Bush, who said, YES HE DID, that the cause for the energy price hikes was amongst the fault of China and they needed to be taught to be energy conserving, and needed to moderate their economic growth. Well the rest of the world hearing this went For as long as i can remember, been driving a car that has not done worse than 25 miles to the gallon. Most all Europeans drive such cars, and 40 miles to the gallon on modern cars now becoming the standard. Many a US citizen can take an example from that!

96US is change as far as energy bills is concerned....most my lamps are now the energy saving types taking 5 to 15 watt/hour, but emitting equiv of 5 times and lasting 7 or more years. The fridge is of A++ type, taking 300kwh per annum etc etc. If we dont conserve on a big and radical scale, we'll be riding bikes.....and i'm not worried about that as i got a city and a mountain-bicycle, powered by 2 legs.

Compared to other countries, US has collectively polluted the most over time. Tha Dubbya urges China and other developing nations to stop polluting, when the US had polluted it's way to success in the past 200 years with our industrial revolution of yore. We finally have the technology to start conserving, but other countries still have to develop... And with that comes pollution...

But man, nobody has beat me yet on their energy bill? Don't tell me that!!!

I am in upstate South Carolina and my home is ~40 miles from a nuclear power plant. At one time I was about 8 miles downwind from it.

My cheapest power was on the Gulf coast of Mississippi where we had a <cough> coal-fired steam plant.

Two years ago I replaced my heat pump with a natural gas furnace and high SEER air conditioner. My heating bill doubled, but it is more comfortable. We have too many days at 40 F and lower with high humidity, and the heat pump spent lots of time defrosting.