Craig McKie wrote:
Americans do not have electric kettles within the intended British meaning. They tend not to know what you are talking about. The product is absent from the shelves at Target and Walmart.
Really? I bought my electric kettle at Target, although I bought my son's at a fancy cookware shop called Wire Wisk at the mall. I use mine for tea, he uses his to boil water for both coffee and tea.
Most Canadian households would have electric kettles where gas cooking is not involved. Something about tea-making perhaps?
O>>I think "furnace" is "boiler" in English.
No, furnace is furnace, boiler is boiler.
Bear wrote:
Hm. Not all furnaces are boilers. Basically we use the word "furnace" here to mean the heating unit for a house. One kind of furnace is a boiler, which heats liquid that then gets circulated through radiators.
No, that's a mis-use of the word furnace. Furnaces produce hot forced air heat. Boilers are boilers, either steam or hot water.
Other types of furnaces are electrical, or fired by gas, coal, oil, or wood. Sometimes they heat a gigantic rock that then radiates heat for days (this arrangement is popular in arid northern and northwestern states). More often they heat air, channeled through a heat-exchanger by a fan and then circulated directly through the rest of the house via ductwork.
Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and I haven't seen a coal-fired furnace since I was a child. They're still out there, though; although they are now illegal for pollution reasons here in CA, there are places in the midwest where once in a while you still find them in use.
Good grief -- "boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US", eh? You ought to come up north sometimes. Hot water or steam boilers are extremely common in homes. I wouldn't have anything else -- in fact, a house with forced air heat wouldn't even be looked at by my wife or I for potential purchase, they give really lousy,drafty performace which dries out your skin and shrivels house plants and generally makes you miserable all Winter. Hydronic heating is the only way to go. Not only is it better heat, but it also lends itself more readily to heat storage if you have a combo wood and gas/oil boiler, where you use a large insulated tank to even out the heat from the higher temp wood fires. With a wood furnace, the wood burns up, the house gets overly hot, then the fire goes out and you're cold.
Amazing what passes for cryptic comments these days. -- Harmon Seaver, MLIS Systems Librarian Arrowhead Library System Virginia, MN (218) 741-3840 hseaver@arrowhead.lib.mn.us http://harmon.arrowhead.lib.mn.us