Is this a national fraud by the gas industry?

sabretoothtigger

You buy a ton of coal for a certain price and you know exactly what calorific value you have bought

coal varies in its energy. Petrol can also, keep it a few months and its not so good

dont let miliband see this thread or they'll be no stopping his hammer and sickle solutions

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

Bring back the btu

insanegloss

Unfortunately what you're asking for its physically impossible. You cannot know the calorific value of every unit of gas which passes though everyone's meter as you need to burn it to know the value, in which can you can't use the gas as you've just burnt it making the whole excercise redundant. What you can do is measure samples at all the import points on the grid to get the value for each day and this is then used in your bills.

Surprisingly, that's roughly the method that's used by law.

Conrad123

insanegloss wrote: »

Unfortunately what you're asking for its physically impossible. You cannot know the calorific value of every unit of gas which passes though everyone's meter as you need to burn it to know the value, in which can you can't use the gas as you've just burnt it making the whole excercise redundant. What you can do is measure samples at all the import points on the grid to get the value for each day and this is then used in your bills.

Surprisingly, that's roughly the method that's used by law.

So why not charge for what you can measure - the volume?

insanegloss

Conrad123 wrote: »

So why not charge for what you can measure - the volume?

I fear this idea you have isn't going to be let go.

The problem you are struggling to grasp is that we are billed for the energy we use. Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather be billed for this than some unknown amount of energy as is what you are proposing. After all the actual energy is made up of the volume of the gas, which is a known figure by your meter and the chemical energy a given volume contains. What you're proposing does away with the second part or at least give it an arbitrary number.

Why would any sane person do this, as after all using an arbitrary figure (or none) means that the actual energy billed for will be wrong >95% or of the time (as the chances of the actual calorific value, which constantly changes, being exactly the same as the arbitrary one are very slim)?

At that point you would have even less transparency about what energy was consumed by anyone in the country.

Whilst the current system (and along with practically any system devised for anything) isn't perfect, I'd be damned if what you propose is looked with a thought of 'that looks a good idea' and it being implemented.

So please, it's really not a good idea for anyone, consumer or supplier alike.

Cardew

Conrad123 wrote: »

You are correct 'fraud' is incorrect - I only used it to draw attention.

Have you ever read headlines in 'The Sun'?

Look at the left hand side of your posts - it asks us to be nice to newbies!


Not a single contributor to this thread thinks your ideas have any merit - and we try and put that nicely.

sabretoothtigger

Volume of gas is altered massively by temperature

If you were saying measure volume of liquefied gas, that does make more sense. Go talk to the LPG thread guys and they'll probably confirm they do pay by the liquid amount or Volume of gas delivered.
LPG is mostly propane and similar but 'natural' gas is mostly methane, NG can be a liquid but it requires gigantic amount of pressure or -166c ? and I think its harder to do because of that. You wont be getting deliveries that way by volume any time soon unless you can handle supertankers

yangptangkipperbang

Did you know that there is a gas platform named Troll ??