Well well well, I wonder who's idea the sightglass was! Just for the record here folks, I told them that a cheaper G series was a bad idea 2 years ago, I preferred fixing the small issues on the older model first and making it better,I see issues right out of the gate from the pics on this one and will at this point take the wait and see attitude!
I for one and at least in our area feel that having a more affordable model isn’t such a horrible ideal.
Years ago about the time our last fearless leader took office our area was hit very hard by the “economic downturn”. Just to the east of us is a very large Amish population, with that able workforce we were known as the RV capital of the country. Motor coaches, popups, fifth wheels, bumper pulls, utility trailers, snowmobile trailers, just about any kind of recreation trailer you could imagine was built in that area, next town over same thing. Once things slowed down a lot of those factories shut down, to this day you still drive by empty buildings.
When things were booming people were getting all the overtime they wanted, so they bought toys, and a lot had a horse or two even for the kids, over 60% of my hay production went to feed horses, I was even delivering at a premium to a guy who was raising and selling miniature horse, he must of had 40-50 miniature mares at one time for breeding purposes, last time I went buy he may of had 15 on the whole place. These days I’m making half as much hay as I did pre 2008 as there just isn’t a market for much more.
A lot of small cabinet shops were around the area supplying cabinets for all those RV’s went under as well, as did a lot of small welding shops that may have been building the frames or even the LP tank holders.
If it wasn’t for Notre Dame constantly expanding or upgrading a lot more union jobs would have been lost as well. Even AM General is slower than they used to be with a lot of guys taking early retirement when it was offered.
Things have picked up some since then, but like I pointed out before a lot of empty buildings still in those towns. Then of course the county governments in all their wisdom instead of cutting spending when revenues fell instead raised taxes on those still working. County and property taxes never did go back down (of course) and a lot of temporary taxes were put in place that are still “temporary” according to the county governments but have become permanent.
Doesn’t matter how well something is made if people just can’t afford it, a lot of those small welding shops are now sending boilers out the back door claiming since it’s “homemade” it’s exempt. Indiana passed their own laws on OWB’s, even if federal is revoked I can guarantee Indiana will keep their’s, maybe once the IDEM (Indiana Department of Environmental Management) pays em a visit and the first guy needs to visit a proctologist afterwards then the boot leg boilers will stop when the message gets across homemade only applies to your own use.
Most potential sales end rather quickly when people ask the price and that doesn’t include installation, underground line, labor, etc. Being able to arrange financing hasn’t helped either as a lot of people took advantage of easy credit when the money was just rolling out of the RV factories, then a lot of em got caught with their pants down when they got laid off.
If a more affordable boiler will actually get people to purchase a legal unit then so be it, I think there could be a rather large market for em in my area. If it’s affordable enough then the ROI is better. I built my first one as for just heating the house a commercial unit didn’t pencil out at all, would have been like paying my monthly heating bill year round for five years, however once the shop and sidewalk was added things changed. I have natural gas here at the farm, still make more sense to heat with wood, we have our own 250 acres to keep the fencerows cleaned up and over a 1000 acres of rented ground to keep up with, if we weren’t burning it, then we’d be shoving it in piles to rot. If the initial investment goes down maybe more people will become more self sufficient.
Of course, actually having winter here again would help tremendously, set several new highs this past one. People have already forgotten when several years ago that winter when we had polar vortex after polar vortex that LP hit $5/gallon and you could only buy a hundred gallons at a time as the supply was that short.
People and their short memories is why tax day and election day are roughly half a year apart, the people running the government might be idiots, but they make up for it in guile.