We use horizontal flues extensively here too. My gas-fired fireplace vents out the side wall.
The material is what was curious to me about your post. I wondered how you could get away with plastic ducting for what for us is high-temperature exhaust.
All modern boilers in the UK are condensing boilers, and have been (mandated I think) for about 20-30 years. Condensing boilers use a heat exchanger in the exhaust to utilise the otherwise-waste heat to pre-heat the heating medium, for greater efficiency, and hence the exhaust temperature is much lower.
Thanks for reaching back into the mists of time. As with many historical occurrences, we may may not remember all the details but we remember what we were doing (or should have been doing) when they happened. Now I'll explain why I asked, and in the process take a moment to thank all the people who spontaneously chimed into tell us their Apollo 11 watching experience and additionally what the prevailing television technology was where you lived.
Honestly you fine people couldn't have made my point any better.
On page 319 of the earlier edition of Dark Moon, we hear the story of "Una Ronald." Having put her name in scare quotes once, I'll refer to her normally from now on. As with "Dr. David Groves PhD," I doubt she exists in the form purported by Dark Moon's authors. Una lived in "a small Western Australia town." That's a long, long way from Sydney. There was no national television network in Australia in 1969. Correct me if I'm wring, but if you lived in Western Australia you got Sydney television programming by videotapes being sent cross-country. That sucks if you want to watch a live moonwalk.
Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek are comparatively closer to Sydney. Those are the ground stations receiving the television signal from the Moon. Once converted from slow-scan to NTSC at PKS or HSK, the signal went over landlines to Sydney where it was uplinked to an Intelsat satellite to be received in California and forwarded to Houston via landline. From Houston the signal was genlocked (i.e., frame-synchronized to TV networks) to the television networks and then sent back out over ordinary commercial television feeds (including via satellite). Naturally the feed was split in Sydney and converted to Australian TV format so that Sydney viewers didn't have to wait for a round trip.
But what about poor Una? How was she going to watch a live moonwalk? The boffins in Carnarvon were already part of the Apollo network receiving telemetry. They figured out that one of their smaller dishes could be trained on the Intelsat relay, which at the time fed the entire Pacific region. They could pull down from the Intelsat the same signal meant to go to Houston via California and send it down their terrestrial television network to most of Western Australia. So Una not only got to watch it live, she got a nice clean signal that didn't have to bounce through California, Texas, and an additional satellite.
David Percy says that Una Ronald saw something in her "private" broadcast—seen only by a few stalwarts in Western Australia—that he thinks is evidence of his purported "whistle-blowers." She saw a Coke bottle rolling across the right-hand side of the screen! She knew it from its distinctive shape. How could there be a Coke bottle on the Moon? Percy's theory is that because Western Australia got their live feed from a completely ad hoc setup, some whistle-blower could have interjected that telltale into the signal as it came back down from the Intelsat to Carnarvon and then down the landlines along the coast, finally broadcast over the airwaves to individual households. Houston wouldn't see it. The rest of the world wouldn't see it. Just Una and her fellow townspeople.
When Una rang up her friends, none of them had seen the Coke bottle live. So they all vowed (Id. p. 319) to watch the re-runs—flown in from Sydney—to see if they could see it. It wasn't there, raising suspicion. But there was much to say in the papers, says Una (Id., p. 320). Letters flowed into the West Australian about it.
Now you remember that the televised moonwalk took place during the day in Australia, around lunchtime you reckon. You would ordinarily have gone to your college lectures. For us in the United States it happened in prime time, just after dinner. We remember sitting on the couch watching it with our families. Importantly, those of you in U.K. remember that it happened for you in the wee hours of the morning. As youngsters we remember being given special dispensation to ignore bedtimes.
Here's Percy's version of Una Ronald's account. "Having decided to stay up and watch what she believed to be live images of the 'Apollo 11' EVA direct from the Moon,..." (Id. p. 319, emphasis added). Through the magic of arithmetic, we learn that the moonwalk happened around 11 o'clock AM in the Western Australian time zone.
We all remember distinctly what time of day it was when we watched the Apollo 11 moonwalk. In fact, it's the thing we remember most vividly. But somehow Una thinks she had to stay up late to watch it. Not the kind of thing a native Australian would get wrong, but exactly the kind of slip-up a U.K. author would make if he were inventing a story. David Percy would have had to stay up late to watch it. It's the thing he would remember, so it's the colorful detail he injects into the story he's probably making up.
But what about the newspaper letters? Isn't there documentary evidence of this? Una tells us there were letters in the West Australian. Percy claims he contacted the West Australian asking about it and never heard back from them.
I, on the other hand, also contacted the West Australian and within twenty-four hours heard back from a very helpful archivist who had scoured their back copies of the West Australian for a month after the Apollo 11 mission and had found nothing in there about people seeing a Coke bottle during the live telecast.
Of course David Percy would not help us contact Una Ronald to fact-check her account. We're naughty "debunkers" with nasty big pointy teeth, and in any case what would Evil NASA do if they were able to track down this witness to someone blowing the whistle on Apollo? Her life would be in danger, so no we don't get to see Una Ronald and ask her questions about her experience and such other troublesome details as how she was able to so clearly identify a moving Coca-Cola bottle in grainy Apollo 11 video.
None of that purported danger stopped Percy from plastering her face all over his video. She told the story of "staying up" to watch the moonwalk and seeing the Coke bottle in the video Percy says everyone needs to buy and watch. To be sure, given what we know about this story, the face is probably that of some relatively unknown actress. But we don't have to chase that because the story is more likely fabricated than true. And when we pointed out the slip-up, Bennett and Percy made all sorts of excuses ("Maybe she just misremembered," or "Maybe she was a night-shift worker and slept during the days"), but then quietly re-edited the book to remove the reference to the erroneous time.
What you might not know unless you're one of Weaver's purported cabal of Secretly-NASA-funded Debunkers (Where's my check?) is that the "Coke bottle" story was already out there. As anyone knows who has watched the Apollo 11 telecast lots and lots of times, the video is plagued by a certain catadioptric (Gr. "against the lens", i.e., reflection between lens elements) effect that reflects bright spots symmetrically across the optical axis. There's an annoying slanted string of spots next to the flag that's an internal lens reflection of the bright sunlight reflecting off one of the LM landing legs. And you constantly see "ghost" astronauts seeming to walk in the opposite direction of whoever's moving in the frame.
At around MET 110:14:03 (53:14 in this video) :—
...you see Aldrin conducting prescribed mobility exercises. He walks toward the TV camera at an angle. The sun glints off his visor, and the corresponding catadioptric spot "bounces" across the surface apparently behind him for a few seconds. Contrary to Una's "private" feed, this is what almost everyone who saw it referred to as, "the Coke bottle kicked across the lunar surface." That's the real origin of the story. Percy just seems to have borrowed it to wrap a fanciful whistle-blower fairy tale around it.
Naturally we reproduced this effect in the desert.
That's Ollie, our intrepid actor who endured desert heat and the neck ring of the suit digging into his shoulders for hours. The suit is the one worn by actor Tony Goldwyn who played Neil Armstrong in HBO's From the Earth to the Moon. And in case anyone wants to use this picture to fact-check "Dr. Sir David Groves PhD KCVO FRS CIoP MRCVS," please note that we rigged the RCU higher on Ollie's chest than would be normal so that we could get it in frame.
Great piece of detective work, thank you. I had heard the coke bottle story and dismissed it as complete bollox, it's nice to read a bit more into why it is complete bollox. Nice touch with Ollie holding the Coke bottle!
Here's a late 1990's vintage commonplace gas hot water heater venting, called a Power Vent. Same thing, 2" PVC exhaust, pushed by that black booster fan motor to let it run horizontally. Not some Harry Homeowner improvisation, either. Very typical.of new homes in this area for decades, legal and municipally inspected.
Eta: thought this was attached to the previous post about chimney piping, but apparently I got high on exhaust fumes and screwed it up.
Not even needed. The exhaust temperature is around 100F. It's just regular old schedule 40 PVC, same as you use for domestic plumbing. Wild how far they are coming with this stuff.
Oh yeah, this is all legal and conventional and spec'ed in the Nat'l Plumbing Code. It's not any kind of improv at all, literally by-the-book manufacturer's instructions.
Eta: it does of course assume fairly high efficiency equipment, which has more or less become standard.
In fairness, you are in a fairly toasty climate, IIRC? Gas consumption/efficiency may be a lower priority in warmer areas, and the less efficient but cheaper (and arguably more reliable) jazz doing the job at noise-range higher expense.
In fairness, you are in a fairly toasty climate, IIRC? Gas consumption/efficiency may be a lower priority in warmer areas, and the less efficient but cheaper (and arguably more reliable) jazz doing the job at noise-range higher expense.
... Here's Percy's version of Una Ronald's account. "Having decided to stay up and watch what she believed to be live images of the 'Apollo 11' EVA direct from the Moon,..." (Id. p. 319, emphasis added). Through the magic of arithmetic, we learn that the moonwalk happened around 11 o'clock AM in the Western Australian time zone.
We all remember distinctly what time of day it was when we watched the Apollo 11 moonwalk. In fact, it's the thing we remember most vividly. But somehow Una thinks she had to stay up late to watch it. Not the kind of thing a native Australian would get wrong, but exactly the kind of slip-up a U.K. author would make if he were inventing a story. David Percy would have had to stay up late to watch it. It's the thing he would remember, so it's the colorful detail he injects into the story he's probably making up.
If it does the job, there's no need to fix what ain't broken. Low-tech is generally more user friendly anyway. The high efficiency stuff has a series of 'proves' detected by multiple sensors that... you guessed it... fail with annoying regularity. Motherboards, condensate pumps... I often question how much of an improvement something is when it generates its own novel series of maintenence issues that offset the savings in fuel consumption.
Eta: case in point, the water heater I pictured upthread currently has a flammable vapor sensor prove failure and won't fire. It smelled paint fumes and the sensor itself has shorted out, requiring the stupid thing to get a $100 new one- because we had painted nearby.
For U.K. folks who couldn't stay up for whatever reason, the repeat happened early the next morning. Una specifically says she arranged with her friends to watch the repeat "the next morning." It went out early enough that you could get up, watch it over your eggs 'n' bacon, and still make it to work just a bit late.
But in Western Australia, the "scheduled repeat" was that evening. Australians whose professors decided to still hold lectures could see the full moonwalk after their own dinner. "Una Ronald" didn't have to wait until any morning. If she watched it live, she watched it at lunchtime. If she watched the repeats looking for the Coke bottle, she could have done so that night.
All the time-and-place details are consistent with the U.K. experience (i.e., that of the authors) not the Western Australian experience (i.e., that of the witness). Kind of suspicious. And the authors are preventing us from fact-checking their witness. Even more suspicious. We have legitimate questions about the veracity of the claim. Saying we can't try to resolve them by asking the primary source because we're nasty, ill-intentioned debunkers is about as obnoxiously self-serving as an argument can get.
That’s why Alan Shepard on went to the moon once.
He neglected to rake the sand trap.
Perhaps the longest golf shot ever. Claimed to be twice as long as the longest official shot at a PGA event, 1000+ for Shepard and 515yards for Mike Austin .
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