Source: Bunn Coffee Basics Brochure (.pdf).
Let’s use Mr. Coffee to validate the Bunn diagram.
What do those parts of the brew cycle look, smell, and taste like, coffee-wise?
Thanks to Mr. Coffee, I can find out, so you don’t have to. Continue reading Post #2078: A Mr. Coffee Try-at-Home Experiment.
Finally. I finally opened the hood of my 2020 Chevy Bolt, a year after I bought it (Post #1924).
I never saw a reason to look under the hood, figuring I’d have no idea what I was looking at. It being an EV, and all.
Now that I’ve opened the hood, I was not disappointed.
Not ringing a lot of bells with me. I think I recognize a brake master cylinder and tan plastic reservoir mounted to the firewall, driver’s side. But all those big metal thingies? No clue.
Luckily, one can be ignorant and still drive a car. That, proven daily, I’d say.
Even now, I wouldn’t have bothered to open the hood, ever, except that with the recent winter storm, and the resulting sloppy roads, I figured I should top off windshield wiper fluid. Seeing as how that hadn’t been done in a year.
I was able to do that without reading the manual. The hood release was in an obvious place, the hood emergency latch was easy to find, and (shown below) the right place for windshield wiper fluid is pretty clearly marked. Even had a hood prop where I expected to find it.
So thumbs up to Chevy for making that much obvious.
Weirdly, I swear there’s a fan and radiator in there somewhere. For sure, there are several little reservoirs that look like they hold coolant. Plausibly that’s all part of whatever manages the temperature of the battery and the electronics.
It’s magic, as far as I’m concerned.
Plus it runs at a lethal 350V DC. As long is to works, leave it be.
And pour carefully.
Today, Monday 1/6/2025, is a snow day.
From the sound of it, at 7:45 AM, we’re getting wintry mix here in Vienna.
It’s our favorite form of winter precipitation.
Yes. Give me enough sticks, and I will stay warm indefinitely. Proven.
But no, I’m never going to do this again.
Above left, note wheelbarrow full of (dry) sticks. I started this winter with several such, along with a few trash cans and plastic totes full of similar material. That, courtesy of taking down a couple of small trees in my yard this past summer.
Above right, is the modern wood stove insert, with blazing fire made out of sticks. Sticks, obviously, broken small enough to fit into the firebox.
Above, between, are the almost-empty firewood racks. So there’s no doubt that it’s the sticks I’m burning. And note the two fire extinguishers. Because nothing says fun-at-home like a blazing fire right next to a big, loose pile of kindling.
I have no problem bringing my wood stove (insert) up to a good operating temperature by burning loads of sticks, instead of nice chunks of firewood. In fact, dry sticks burn too well, so some of the work is keeping the fire down to a reasonable size. No problem keeping it that hot for hours, with the circulating fan pumping hot air out into the room.
It’s just a real pain in the butt to maintain that fire. Not quite a full-time job, but hardly a relaxing fire. I have to toss in another handful of sticks every 15 minutes or so. And it’s fiddly, with a handful of sticks being a less stable fuel source than a solid chunk of firewood. Keeping a fire going with nothing but sticks is nothing at all like putting a couple of logs in the firebox once an hour.
I’m going to burn through the rest of my stock of sticks in the next couple of nights. Then I’m never going do to this again. This, being, burn up a large amount of small branches in my wood stove. Not worth the effort, the indoor air pollution, and so on.
But, if I had to stay warm, and had no firewood, it’s good to know that a wheelbarrow of sticks will get me two, maybe three, hours of usable fire. Burning it an open handful — call it a 5-inch bundle — at a time.
My wife and I were both reminded of that part of Little House on the Prairie, The Long Winter, where the Ingalls family stays alive by constantly feeding sticks of twisted straw into their wood stove.
I absolutely can produce a fine quantity of heat by feeding a steady stream of bundles of sticks to a modern (air-tight) wood stove.
Or, I could just turn up the heat pumps.
In any case, as a way to get rid of nuisance wood, to some good purpose, this is fine. Or, if it were an emergency, likewise fine.
But doing this on purpose, now that I’ve done it once? Nah. Too much work, too much indoor air pollution.
I’ve thought about buying in more firewood, but for a lot of reasons, I’ve decided not to use my wood stove as a serious source of heat any more. Not here in the ‘burbs of DC.
Maybe it was the Canadian forest fire smoke of (now) two summers ago, maybe it’s that I have a much-reduced need to “balance” heating and cooling from my ground-source heat pumps.
I will still burn wood occasionally, I guess. And it’s nice to have as an ultimate back-up heat source. But I’m no longer going to do what I used to do, which is burn through a couple of cords of wood over a winter.
But now I know I can keep my house from freezing, by burning sticks in my wood stove.
Yay? I hope I never need to know that, practically speaking.
I first tried the superglue-and-baking-soda trick back in Post #1997, where I made an expedient repair to a plastic-bodied wrist watch with a broken watch band lug.
FYI, the baking soda isn’t merely a physical filler, it interacts chemically with the superglue and cures the superglue in a completely different fashion from what would normally happen. The result is stronger than superglue alone, and has better adherence to whatever you’re trying to glue to (reference).
When my wife snapped the plastic frame of her eyeglasses last week, that method was the first thing that came to mind. Like the wristwatch lug, you have a tiny surface area of plastic to glue to, and yet the part has to take a lot of mechanical stress.
And, in fact, that same superglue-and-baking-soda method worked exceptionally well to hold her eyeglasses together until the replacement frames arrived.
As common sense suggests, first wash and dry both parts to clean the plastic surfaces. (Just dish soap and water).
Then, first super-glue the plastic parts back together, to get the alignment right. If the snap was clean, this should look good when re-assembled. But super glue, by itself, isn’t strong enough. Lot of leverage on this part.
And note that, for this next part, you need liquid superglue. Gel won’t properly “wet” the baking soda.
I then added a thin layer of baking soda and super glue all around the broken plastic. For a thin layer, just wet the plastic with superglue and quickly heap on baking soda. Give it a few seconds to harden. Brush off what remains loose. Use sandpaper to smooth the surface.
Alternatively, you can build the thicker part of the patch by first laying down a thin, shaped layer of baking soda (make a “wall” of masking tape around the edge to keep the powder from spilling over), then quickly wetting it with liquid superglue. That was shown in Post #1997, the broken watch lug post. When fully hardened, file it down and shape it with careful use of a common (flat bastard) metal file. Sandpaper to remove any rough bits.
The result is an unobtrusive and surprisingly sturdy repair. I didn’t try to match the frame color or otherwise make it blend in.
Better than a piece of tape, for sure.
It’s now been a week, and the replacement frames have arrived. I doubt that this repair is going to survive having the lenses pulled out of the old frames. But it was more than good enough to hold the broken frames together, until the new frames could get here.
I believe baking-soda-and-liquid-superglue is is now my go-to method for unavoidable repairs on rigid plastics.
On the path to coffee snobbery, there is no better starting place than Walmart.
That’s where I just bought a made-in-USA Aeropress single-cup coffee maker.
In the end, coffee is all about chemistry. Chemistry and physics. Chemistry, and physics, and ruthless efficiency … and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Continue reading Post #2074: Coffee chemistry Christmas, part II: Aeropress.
