Weird News

[glatt]

Not a good time to own stock in Columbia Gas of Massachusetts.

When your workers fuck up doing a gas line replacement and blow up 40 houses, displace 8,000 people, and kill one person, you're doing something wrong.

Can you imagine? They must have turned off the gas, all the pilot lights in town went out, and then they turned it back on again. The gas flowed through all those appliances with no pilot lights to ignite it, and then the houses blew up when the concentrations got high enough.

I wonder if hackers can hack the municipal gas valves remotely and do a terrorist attack that way?

Makes me wonder exactly how gas appliances work. Do modern ones only open the gas valves when certain ignition temperatures are confirmed? I know my oven works that way, but my 70 year old furnace doesn't. How about water heaters? Is there some sort of pilot light confirmation system?

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

Do modern ones only open the gas valves when certain ignition temperatures are confirmed?

Even all 1950 furnaces and water heaters had a thermocouple that would not permit gas flow if the pilot light did not heat that thermocouple.

Starting a pilot light meant holding a button for maybe 30 seconds while lighting the pilot. So that the thermocouple got hot enough to not cut off gas. That was standard even in 1950.

Part that failed most often was that thermocouple.

Appliances, since the 1980s, no longer use a pilot flame. If electricity does not ignite gas, then gas is cut off.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by glatt

Makes me wonder exactly how gas appliances work. Do modern ones only open the gas valves when certain ignition temperatures are confirmed? I know my oven works that way, but my 70 year old furnace doesn't. How about water heaters? Is there some sort of pilot light confirmation system?

Turns out that I was wrong. Our 1946 boiler has a thermocouple in the pilot light.



And! There is a cute little wolf spider down there that's hunting camel crickets. I tried to capture the reflection of his eyes, but it didn't come out so well. You can see it a little bit.