Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Proper house insulation is the first prerequisite for the effective use of any energy-saving device. The newly designed $1,400 Blueray furnace, for example, captures as much as 90% of the energy that is locked in a gallon of heating oil, vs. the 70% recovered by a conventional furnace. But it makes no sense to install highly efficient equipment in the basement if all the additional heat generated escapes through leaky baseboards, wall sockets, attics, exhaust fans and chimneys, where up to 85% of a home's heat loss occurs...
Vent dampers. Before a furnace or boiler can heat a house, it first must heat itself. Only after the inside temperature climbs to about 130° F does the furnace begin transferring warmth. Yet whenever the system shuts off, much of the accumulated heat within the furnace escapes up the flue. The vent damper is an electrically operated plate that blocks the flue during an oil-or gas-burning furnace's off cycle, thus retaining the heat. The plate then rotates to an open position when the unit trips on again. Department of Energy studies show that dampers...
Last week briefcase-toting oilmen gathered at a Fairbanks hotel to bid for drilling rights in the first small part of the U.S.'s Beaufort Sea sector to be opened to exploration. Offers by the companies totaled $2 billion for some 500,000 acres of tracts, but when the leases will be awarded is uncertain. Just four days before, a federal judge had ruled that the lease sale could not be completed until the courts resolved an environmental suit brought by the National Wildlife Federation and other groups calling for a ban on Beaufort Sea drilling...
...nine months after the new employee-owned company, Republic Hose Manufacturing Corp., took over the one-story plant, productivity is up 40%, and the rate of rejected products has dropped from 8% to 1%. The firm, which today employs 130, estimates that for its first complete fiscal year it will earn a pretax profit of up to $600,000 on revenues of $7 million; that is less than the approximately $12 million in revenues of Aeroquip's final year but at least double the new owners' initial projections...
...took a combined pay cut of $71,000 a year. With union support, Broadwater dropped hourly wages to a flat $5, from as much as $6.50. Paid holidays fell to eight from twelve. Vacations, which had averaged five to six weeks annually, were reduced and dropped altogether for the first year. Also axed: the costly pension plan, which had been chewing up $900,000 a year, or between 6% and 7% of the operating budget. Instead, the shareholder-employees chose a combination of improved insurance benefits, bonus and profit-sharing plans, and the promise of eventual stock dividends