Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2083: Cold wave, heat pump, wood stove secondary heating.

 

Sometimes, all you need is a warm place.

Cold wave:  It’s going to get cold next week.

How cold?

In Vienna, VA, the National Weather Service is predicting a nighttime low of 4F, a week from now.

That’s rare but not totally unexpected.   

As of 1990, Vienna was at the edge of USDA plant hardiness Zone 6B, and could expected to see (and did see) occasional wintertime lows down to minus 5F

Three decades later, and we’re ten degrees warmer.  (In terms of our expected extreme low winter temperature).  As of the most recent USDA Hardiness Zone map, Vienna has moved into Zone 7B, with an expected extreme low of 5F.

That trend came through clearly in my analysis of annual low temperatures at nearby Dulles Airport.

So, it’s going to be cold, but it’s in line with expectations.

Heat Pump:  Cold weather remains the soft underbelly of air source heat pumps.

 

I fully grasp the irony of heating my house with an electrical appliance that, by design, quits working when it gets really cold outside.

Near as I can tell, all air source heat pumps all do this.  It’s just a question of how low can they go.  What I think of a “standard” home unit, as I recall, shuts down around freezing (32F).  Conversely, the “high heat” versions of heat pump I got will go down to -17F or some such.   This — super cold weather — is where ground-source heat pumps shine, as the ground loop temperature may be quite cold by that time, but nowhere near as cold as it is outside in a cold snap.   So the ground source is starting from much “warmer” material to extract its heat from.  Which, as you might well imagine, is an enviable position for a heat pump to be in.

But.

But 1, I didn’t think I’d hit that lower temperature limit the first winter I owned the thing.  The lower limit for mine is, in fact, 5F.  So, I will be looking at some (brief?) period when this new air-source mini-split may not run.  Not because it’s broken.  Just because it’s cold outside.

But 2, now I have to suss out the secondary heat.  Every heat pump system has secondary heat, I think.  (Or maybe it’s “should have”).  That’s what you use when the heat pump isn’t enough.  (Or to speed up the heating of rooms, when the heat pump alone would raise temperatures too slowly.)

Secondary heat for this mini-split is strictly DIY.  That’s by design.  It doesn’t come with — nor is is capable of activating — secondary heat of any sort, as far as I can tell.

So, just burn some natural gas …

White Clouds in Blue Sky ca. 1996

Secondary heat isn’t really a problem, because I can burn natural gas for heat.

But.

But 1, I can only do that — use the baseboard heating in that part of my house — by jury-rigging what’s left of my (still kind-of functioning) baseboard hot water heating.

But 2:  My fancy gas water-heater/furnace objects to serving as mere house heater.  (Another long story.)  It’ll work, but it’s bad for the device (as in, this is what burnt out the internal pump motor the first time.)

So I’m going with something simpler.

Buying a small quantify of firewood in the dead of winter.

 

I am now that guy.  That guy who is … per the title.

I wanted more than a shrink-wrapped bundle. But far less than a cord.  Where can I buy that, around here?  Preferably to pick up.

The right place for that turned out to be the Reston Farm Garden Market.  Where I paid $85 for an eight-of-a-cord, kiln-dried, stacked (by them) into the back of my hatchback Bolt.

So, $680 a cord, for kiln-dried hardwood, bought in small (one-eighth-cord) quantity.  I thought that was OK, in an area where a cord of kiln-dried hardwood, delivered, from my nearest source, would run $550 plus delivery fee.

Kiln dried or merely seasoned?  We go for kiln-dried now. It guarantees that it’s good firewood, but it’s a little too good. For sure, it burns more readily.  There are no bad logs.  But it burn faster and hotter than it ought, which means messing with the draft and relying on the air-tightness of the stove door gasket.  (FWIW, I’m convinced that the hotter burn nearly makes up for the fossil fuels used to dry the wood.  So the kiln drying step is not quite as much of an energy loser as it might seem at first.  And with all the pests harbored by firewood, it has to be kiln-dried to be moved more than a county or two away, anyway.)

FYI, the various shrink-wrapped or netted bundles of firewood for sale at local retail stores seem to work out to around $1600 a cord.

Apparently, this little out-of-the-way farm store moves tractor-trailer-loads of firewood, per year, through their yard.

That said, local air pollution aside, firewood is an expensive way to heat my house, given prices in my area.

As I recall, this is about what I found the last time I figured it.  Recognizing that for me, electricity is cheaper than natural gas, this means that firewood is my most expensive fuel option.

Short of this:

With the understanding that I’ve already shown that electricity remains my least expensive fuel, almost regardless of the outside temperature.*

* As long as the heat pumps will run.

Conclusion

My wife and I agree that there is just something comforting about having a full rack of dry firewood.

It’s not rational, practical, economical, or conducive to the public health.

But it is comforting.

And firewood is going to provide our secondary heat through this cold snap.  For the occasional night or two when we hit the extreme winter lows for this climate zone, it seems like the easiest solution.

Post #2082: One-in-1000 Californians just lost a home?

 

I started off trying to get the LA fires into perspective.

I just want a back-of-the-envelope number

 

I hate to sound blase, but, OK, parts of LA have burnt.

Not wholly unexpected.  Surely more likely to happen as climate change progresses.

But, it’s, you know, California.  Stuff happens in California.  Earthquakes.  Mudslides.  Wildfires.  Excess rain and snow events.  Droughts.

I’m from the Mid-Atlantic region, where the worst we typically face is 17-year locusts and the occasional dry spell.

And this is in no sense a slam on California.  California is about as good at dealing with stuff like that as can be.

I just want to know something along the lines of “how does the value of the damage from the current LA fires compare to other disasters?”

I’ll settle for a count of homes lost to fire

Source:  fire.ca.gov.  Cal Fire?

As of 1/16/2025, the overwhelmingly quoted number in news coverage is 12,000.  That appears to be from 12,300+ “structures destroyed”, from Cal Fire.  As I understand it, that’s a number from the government of the State of California.

At the same time, a couple of big local banks (Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, cited by ABC News) have already projected $30B in insured losses.

If that projected $30B cost is close, these LA fires will be by far the most expensive fire event in California history, more than twice as expensive as the (now) second-most-costly fire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire.

Source:  Cal Fire statistics page, this is their top 20 list.

By the numbers, it’s clear that a high cost per structure contributes to the overall higher cost of the LA fires, compared to the Camp fire.  To know that the loss estimate for the 2018 Camp Fire was $12B (reference).  That the works out to a $600K cost per structure for the 2018 Camp Fire — the costliest California fire until now — versus about $2.4M per destroyed structure for the LA fires.   I’m not sure I fully understand why the difference would be that large, but that’s what the simple arithmetic says.  Bear in mind that the $30B estimate is just a preliminary estimate by a couple of big banks.

 

13.4 million households in California

So says the U.S. Bureau of the Census (reference).

If the Los Angeles area just lost 12,300 plus structures, and if all of that was housing, and assuming (the equivalent of) predominantly single-family homes, then, roughly speaking, (12,300/13,400,000 =~) 0.1% of California households just lost their place to live.

If I had to take it further, it looks like Californians on average pay about 0.4% of the value of housing as insurance premiums each year.  Inverting that, this one event — a total loss of 0.1% of California housing — would seem to amount to about a quarter-of-a-year’s property insurance premiums for the entire state of California.  But because those LA properties appear to be so expensive per dwelling, it’s entire possible that this one even could cost … about a year’s worth of property insurance premiums for all of California.

Conclusion

A plausible scale of insured costs of U.S. natural disasters puts 2005 Hurricane Katrina at #1 with more than $100B (reference).  That’s in current (2025) dollars, roughly speaking.

The $30B projected insured losses for the LA fires would put them 10th on that list, just past the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the one that shook down a section of freeway.

It’s California.  I’m sure they’ll deal with it about as well as it can be dealt with.

Post #2081: Eighty pounds and still a loser.

 

This morning I reached 205 pounds.  In my underwear, admittedly.  But it still counts.  So I’m calling it 80 pounds lost, since September 2023.  BMI is now just under 28.  If I can lose another 20 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.  Something that I honestly never thought I would ever see.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

And, while I’m at it, how helpful or not Google’s AI would have been, in dealing with these changes.

They are, in order:

  • My mattress is too hard.
  • My sneakers are too stiff.
  • My balance is much better.
  • My weight loss remains on trend.

My mattress is too hard

Google AI score, 50%.  Good solution, totally wrong reasoning.

I never considered body fat to be part of the overall mattress-comfort equation.  But apparently, this is well-known, at least in the sense that Google’s AI knew about it.

After a couple of months of waking up with numb patches of skin on my hips and thighs, it finally dawned on me that, together, my mattress and I have lost a lot of padding.  And, as if the AI read my mind, the addition of a 2″ memory-foam mattress topper has solved the problem of a too-hard mattress.

That said, the rest of the AI’s “reasoning” was wrong.  The problem has nothing to do with firmness — the tendency of the mattress surface to sink downwards with weight.  The firmness of the mattress is just fine.  And putting a mattress topper on doesn’t affect the firmness, and can’t fix a mattress with the wrong level of firmness for the sleeper.

It’s the level of padding on top of that structure that’s the problem.

I give the AI partial credit on this one.

My sneakers are too stiff

Google AI score, 0%.  (I’d give it a negative if I could).  On this question, Google’s AI hallucinated the reasoning and offered really bad advice.

You expect to buy new clothes when you lose a lot of weight.  And I have, right on down to my underwear.  But I didn’t expect to have to buy new shoes.

For the past couple of decades I’ve worn Nike Air Monarch shoes.  These are plain-Jane sneakers with lots of padding, heavy construction, and very thick soles with the Nike Air technology.

These were, effectively, the perfect shoe for an obese-but-active person.  The thick air-cushioned heel was more-or-less exactly what a fat person needs.

As a bonus, buying new sneakers was a no-brainer, because Nike kept these in production for decades.  I think that’s because Nike has a steady market of devoted wearers consisting of a) heavy people, and b) people who spend a lot of time on their feet, like nurses.

The thick soles were comfortably flexible for my old, 285-pound self.  But at 205, they’re like walking on padded boards.  To the point where it became almost comically difficult to, say, run on a treadmill while wearing them.

Though, to be fair, I don’t think the average purchaser of Nike Air Monarchs does a lot of running.

So, for the first time in two decades, I bought an actual running shoe.  One with lightweight construction and flexible soles.  I’ll never be a graceful runner, but running feels a lot better with a more flexible shoe.  At least I no longer have to hear “slap-slap-slap” as I plod along on a treadmill.

My balance is much better.

Google AI score:  33%.  From what I can tell, the only point it got right is that it’s easier to maintain control when you have less mass.  The rest of it appears to be imaginary.

My balance is vastly better than it was.

To test your static ability to balance, just stand on one foot.  In medical parlance, this is the “single leg stance” test.  Health care providers assume that this measures something about your neurological health.  Eyes open, hands on hips, standing on one foot, if you can’t count to five before you fall over, you’re at enhanced risk of falls.  But if you get past ten seconds, apparently, you’re good to go (reference).

Near as I can tell, at 205 pounds, I can stand on one foot until I get bored.  That was not true of my 285-pound self, to the point where Wii Fit always told me that, physically, I was ancient, because it could sense how much I wobbled around when standing on the Wii Fit scale.  At any rate, I just now stood a minute, on one foot, and while it requires concentration, it seemed like muscle fatigue would set the limit there, not balance per se.

But I think this is entirely explained by physics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of my nervous system or musculature.

First, fat people — or at least those with a lot of belly fat — have a higher center of gravity.  Most of the weight I lost was from the waist up.  That, for the simple reason that I never had much fat on my legs (or arms), typical for “central obesity” in fat males.  And I had a big gut.  This means that my center of gravity is now lower.  That by itself, makes me more stable.  (Apparently, the whole story is more complex, and involves both lowering the center of gravity, and moving it closer to the spine.)

Second, I now have a better power-to-weight ratio.  By reducing my fat, the ratio of muscle mass to total weight has risen.  This means that for any given off-balance situation, I’m more likely to be able to bring myself back to an upright position.  (Crudely, 40% more power, reckoned as 285/205=~1.4.  That assumes neither loss nor gain of strength, for the muscles used for balance.)

In any case, it’s not rocket science.  Consider loading a backpack with 80 pounds of bacon, putting that on, and trying to keep your balance.  That was more-or-less the situation when I started on this course back in September 2023, compared to where I am now.

Improved balance is no surprise.  And it required no improvement in nervous system or musculature to achieve it.  It just required taking off the backpack.

My weight loss is on trend.

Google AI score:  100%.  Google simply repeats the conventional wisdom, which is that long term weight loss inevitably proceeds by fits and starts, not smoothy.

If you read about people who’ve lost a lot of weight, all you seem to hear about is how hard it eventually gets, how they plateau, how tough it is to keep the weight off.

For some reason, none of that seems to apply to me.  I have lost weight at a weirdly steady rate of 5 pounds per month.

I can only guess why I’ve had this unusual experience.

  • As I’ve lost weight, I’ve lowered my daily calorie target.
  • I monitor my diet, separately from counting calories.  Simply put, if I don’t wake up hungry, I know I ate too much the day before.
  • I eat a very simplified diet, so “cheating” isn’t really possible.

But at this point, I think that’s mostly due to having an incredibly simplified diet.  This makes it easy to keep track of how much I’ve eaten each day.  And, more importantly, it keeps me away from food that gets me off track or amps up my sense of hunger.

Breakfast is a cup of coffee with a serving of protein powder in it.

After that, I eat five (or so) 300-calorie (or so) meals a day. Typical meals include:

  • A garden salad with a nice high-fat salad dressing.  (Without the salad dressing, my body does not seem to register salad greens as any type of food, hunger-wise).
  • A bowl of frozen berries, topped with “protein pudding” (Jello no-sugar chocolate pudding mix made up using whey protein powder).  Tastes like ice cream, gives you as much protein as a quarter-pound hamburger.
  • A bowl of home-made soup of some sort.
  • Peanut butter sandwich on a “slider roll”.
  • A breaded fish filet on a slider roll.
  • A 300-calorie piece of cheese.

All of that is fine, tasty food.  None of it is stuff that leaves me begging for more.  Some of it is from-scratch cooking, some of it is disgusting mixes of chemicals (no-sugar Jello).  None of it includes a large amount of carbs at one time.

Anyway, after a lifetime of obesity, this is what works for me.  I eat a very limited diet, the upside of which is that I never have to think much about what I eat.  And, after a year-plus of this, it doesn’t even occur to me to eat something outside of that narrow range.

Nor do I crave the foods I used to eat.

Weirdly, it now feels wrong to eat a full meal, as one might at a restaurant, or over the holidays.  And from the standpoint of weight loss, that’s a really good thing.

Interestingly, when I deviate from this — over the holidays, say — it takes me the better part of a week to get back on track.  I think it’s the combination of readily-available calorie-dense foods (e.g., stuffing from the turkey), and a lot of foods rich in simple carbs (e.g., desserts) that disturb blood sugar and insulin levels and set off a fresh bout of hunger a few hours later.

Conclusion:  My diet and my new tastes evolved together.

Here I am, where I thought I’d never be:  Within striking distance of having a “normal” weight.

If I can achieve that, it’ll be for the first time since I went off to college.

I cannot say, exactly, why I’ve finally been able to lose weight.

But in the end, now that I know what it takes, I think that in the past I just under-estimated what it took to undergo sustained weight loss. It more-or-less required a complete revision of lifestyle.  Giving up alcohol was a big part of it.  Giving up refined-carb meals (e.g. spaghetti and meatballs) was part of it.  Finding a convenient fat-free protein source (whey powder) helped.  Giving up all pretense of “normal” eating patterns helped.

But the bottom line is that what and how I eat now bears almost no relation to how I lived in the past.  And, apparently, for me, that’s what it took, to get significant, sustained weight loss.

Let me emphasize how this is not like I’m a different person.  I still find all that stuff appealing.  (“That stuff” being “all those yummy foods I used to eat”.)

Hand me a Dorito right now and I’d snarf that down.  No questions asked (other than those directly related to hygiene.)

But it’s as if I no longer find that stuff compelling.  Or something.

In any case, I never even consider buying a bag of Doritos.

But that’s been gradual.  A few months into this weight loss, I might stroll the chips aisle at the Safeway occasionally, to pick up something.  But to dole it out. By the countable-small-hundreds of calories.

Later in the process, I’d stroll the aisle and buy nothing.

Now? I never go down that aisle.  Never think to do so.

Never’s a strong word.  Maybe one of those single-serving size bags at the 7-11?  There’s another habit that I’m out of.  Gotta be a couple of years since I visited a 7-11.

My change in diet and … tastes? occurred gradually.  And to some large degree, mutually.

If I’d gone from my previous diet, to how I eat now, in one step, I don’t think I could have stuck with it.

It’s very much that when I gave up my excesses with drink, I gave them up for food as well.

Either that, or I felt so crappy being sober all the time that I didn’t eat as much.

Take your pick.

The only real point here is that I didn’t clean up my act all at once.  I never “went on a diet”.  It’s just that the longer I was on this track, and the more weight I lost, the narrower and more simplified my diet got.

The bottom line is that I didn’t intend to get to this point. Things just kind of evolved.  And what you see above is (so far) the final product of that evolution.

The nice thing is that it’s not my tastes, by my cravings, that have evolved over this diet.  I progressed more-or-less by tossing the worst offenders out of my current eating habits, metabolically speaking.  And then, just vowing to drop the weight and clean my diet up further as I went a long.

I still like all that stuff I used to like.  I just don’t eat it.  And I’m fine with that.

How screwed-up is that?

If all goes well, based on the graph, I’ll achieve “normal” weight sometime late this spring.   We’ll see how it plays out.

Post #2080: Vienna, VA sidewalks in the snow.

 

In Vienna, VA, we are religious about shoveling the snow off our sidewalks.

God put the snow there.

God will remove it when he’s good and ready.

I tried to take a walk yesterday morning …

… without walking on snow and ice.

But, because I live in the Town of Vienna, that meant spending a lot of time walking in the road.

There’s no requirement to shovel your sidewalk in the Town of Vienna.  Unsurprisingly, some sidewalks are shoveled, some aren’t.  Which means that you typically can’t walk the length of a block without either walking on an un-shoveled sidewalk, or walking in the road.

This got me to thinking about what the snow-clearance laws are in Northern Virginia.  I know there’s no ordinance requiring it in Vienna.  But what about the rest of Northern Virginia?

Turns out, Vienna is in the minority.  Most of the jurisdictions around here require residents and business owners to shovel their sidewalks promptly after a snowfall.

I find that to be an oddly mixed bag.  Loudoun County is in general far more rural than Fairfax County, yet they require snow shoveling while Fairfax does not.

In all cases, the penalties for failure to clear a sidewalk are nugatory, so it’s not clear whether any of the laws are or are not effective.  I considered taking a field trip to the People’s Republic of Falls Church to see if their sidewalks really do get cleared or not.  But it hardly seems worth it.  Give it another few days, and the snow will be gone.

In the end, it’s just another oddity of living in No. Va.  These jurisdictions all have the same weather and have pretty much the same population demographics.  I’m guessing that the presence or absence of a shoveling ordinance is mostly a matter of historical accident.

In any case, in Vienna, we clear our sidewalks the old fashioned way, via religious observance.

Addendum:  Businesses in Vienna VA?

I know there’s no ordinance requiring homeowners to shovel their sidewalks in Vienna, but I was immediately questioned about businesses.  You can, and many places do, have different shoveling laws apply for business versus residential.

Old news reporting says that Vienna Town Council turned down any sort of shoveling ordinance in 2011 (Reference The Patch).

And that’s the last Google seems to have heard of it.

A search of MuniCode for Vienna VA for snow yields 13 mentions, none of which have to do with requiring businesses to shovel snow.

A search of the Town Website yields nothing useful, but that’s never definitive.

For sure, the Maple Avenue sidewalks were cleared around here.  Here’s Pleasant and Maple, looking west and east.

So, I don’t know.  There doesn’t seem to be an ordinance requiring it, but something resulted in the clearance of the Maple Avenue sidewalks in my area.  This is distinctly different from (say) Nutley, also a multi-lane road, but with large sections of un-shoveled sidewalk.

If it’s due to an ordinance, that ordinance appears well-hidden.

Post #2079: So, when will Greenland be ready?

 

To use, I mean.  For us to use.

Now that it’s on order.  Once we buy it, or take it, or whatever.

How long before we get to use it?

I appreciate the sentiment.

Republican policy, if I can infer such, is not merely to ignore global warming, but to encourage the consumption of fossil fuels.

And yet, even as they deny it, they seem to realize they’ve got to have a place to put people.  You know, once Florida is under water, the Great Plains have reverted to sagebrush desert, and so on.

But, we’ve got this big empty island, just offshore.  Kinda.

Buy the big empty island, set up resort destination with a few casinos, and problem solved.

It’s a no-brainer.

Plus, if we’re tired of NATO, there’s no better way to do away with it than to attack a NATO country.

It’s a no-brainer and a two-fer.

But I digress.

How long for the ice to melt?

At present, Greenland is 80% covered by a remnant of the North American ice sheet.  It’s a relic from the most recent ice age.  I vaguely recollect that the ice is two miles thick in places.

But on average, it’s under a mile-and-a-half thick.

 

Based on all sources available to it, Google’s AI thinks it’ll take at least 1000 years for the ice to melt.

If I specifically narrow it to the IPCC, Google tells me “a few thousand years”.

Admittedly, some real estate will open up before the ice melts fully.

But given the overall time line for global warming, and certainly the likely remaining lifespan of the USA, I don’t think the ice up there is going to melt in time to do us much good.

 

Post #2077: I opened the hood of my car.

 

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.

Post #2076: Snow day.

 

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.

Can you keep yourself warm by burning sticks in your wood stove?

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.

Conclusion

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.

Post #2075: Eyeglass frame repair with baking soda and superglue.

 

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.

Post #2074: Coffee chemistry Christmas, part II: Aeropress.

 

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.