Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1917: Composter shed failure

 

Many of my readers have been breathlessly awaiting the results from my composter-shed experiment (e.g. Post 1899).

Unfortunately, that breathlessness is not explained by the stench of rotting kitchen scraps.

In the winter cold, my tumbling composter is not so much a composter as a mausoleum.  It’s the Lenin’s Tomb of potato peels.   Each time I visit it to dump in a new batch of scraps, I soberly reflect upon the perfectly preserved remains of ancient meals resting comfortably within.  I ponder what that means for the future.

Source for title photo, via Wikipedia:  By Russia, Lenin’s Mausoleum or more specifically image, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48098730

Background

Recall the issue here:  I toss my kitchen scraps in a tumbling composter.  Three seasons of the year, that works great, and the compost is really desirable for gardening.  But when the weather turns cold, the composter stops working, for all intents and purposes.  I then have to throw my scraps into the trash, where they eventually become trash-to-electricity “biofuel” when Fairfax County incinerates them.

I refuse to heat my composter with electricity.  And I’m not going to bring it inside for the winter.  So … how about trying a solar-heated “shed” for it?

Bottom line:  Passive solar through double-paned glass, plus insulation, and radiant barrier, together, provides nowhere near enough heat to keep this tumbling composter running during the winter.

I suspect that adding more insulation would be fruitless. 

First, the shed does, in fact, keep the temperature of the compost up, when the sun shines.  But with a fairly large ratio of surface area to volume, a string of cloudy days allows this to cool right down to ambient temperature.

Second, the resulting “cold snap” kill off any insects in the compost.  I like to think of a composter as a place for bacterial decomposition of kitchen scraps.  But in fact, I’ve never really known what fraction of decomposition was insect-drive, versus bacterial.  Typically, when I open this composter to add material during spring/summer/fall, I can see insects (larvae) working on the contents.  But all it took was a few freezing nights to stop all insect activity.

My take on it is that adding an inch of foam board to the existing shed isn’t going to fix that.

What are the other options?

Psychrophilic, qu’est-ce que c’es?

Source:  All pictures in this section are AI-generated with the prompt “cold, hungry bacteria”, using Gencraft.com.

Composting small volumes of organic material in cold weather is a common problem.  Near as I can tell, the suggested solutions are:

  1. Compost a large enough volume that the pile stays warm outdoors.
  2. Store your kitchen scraps over the winter, in some location.
  3. Move to indoor worm composting for the winter.
  4. Give up.

I don’t find any of these options particularly appealing.  I don’t generate a large enough volume of organic matter for 1) above, and the Virginia climate is not well-suited to 2) above.  I can’t depend on the kitchen scraps remaining frozen, outside, in a typical Virginia winter.  And I’m not too keen on having five-gallon buckets of garbage sitting around, even if they are sealed.  I’m guessing my neighbors wouldn’t be all that keen on my digging a garbage pit in my back yard.  At least, not if they knew what I was up to.  I don’t want to get into 3) indoor worm composting, though I am finally beginning to grasp the potential advantages of that over traditional outdoor composting.

Arguably, the smart option is 4) give up, per the recommendation on this website.

(Finally, I’ve already dismissed the idea of an indoor electric “composter”, that is, combination grinder and food dehydrator. Just not my cup of tea.

My last gasp at making this tumbling composter work in the winter is to track down some “psychrophilic bacteria”.  That’s the term, per this U. Mich. website, for the cold-loving bacteria that break down organic matter even in colder temperatures.  (The same website says that a cubic yard of organic matter is the smallest pile likely to continue to hot compost in a Michigan winter.)

First, the idea of cold-tolerant decomposing bacteria is a real thing.  You can find it in the scholarly literature (e.g., this reference, for psychrotrophic bacteria).

I have no clue if spiking my compost with psychrophilic/psychrotropic bacteria will work.  (As you have probably already guessed, the prefix “psychro”- means “cold”.)  Everyone says these cold-adapted bacteria work slowly, but they do continue to work, even in the cold where other bacteria would not.

And that doesn’t matter anyway, until I can figure out where I can buy the little buggers.   

I haven’t found anything specific to composting.  Apparently the approved solution to winter composting is to have a big enough compost pile.  That said, I seem to find two plausible sources.

Pond cold-weather bacteria.  The first thing I came across is cold-weather bacteria for (decorative) ponds.  Apparently, you spike your pond with these to keep decomposition going in colder weather.  Here’s an example.  Here’s another example.  Amazon offers dozens of choices.

Main-line drain maintainer.  It also occurs to me that I can buy stuff at Home Depot that advertises that it spurs decomposition within your main sewer line.  Those lines sit at around 55F in this area (although the incoming materials may be warmer).  So it’s plausible that dumping that stuff, in my tumbling composter, might aid decomposition.

Of the two, I think the pond bacteria would be the better choice.  All of those products appear engineered to break down cellulose.  The drain cleaner, by contrast, is advertised to break down “grease, hair, paper, oil, soap scum”.  The pond bacterial additives appear to be directly targeting the type of organic matter I’m dealing with, the drain cleaners are not.

The proposed experiment.

As it turns out, I’m going to have to shell out something like $30 to buy some fall/winter pond treatment.  And my composter conveniently has two compartments.  So I might as well set this up as a proper experiment.  I’m going to mix up and level out the materials currently in the two sides of the composter.  Add fall/winter pond bacteria to once side.  And see if I notice any difference in the remaining volume of materials, one month from now.

I can’t find winter pond bacteria locally, so I’ve ordered some from Amazon.  This stuff.  Several comments attest to the fact that it works in cold weather.  And stinks.  And that’s, eh, more-or-less what I’m after.

Results in a month.

Post #1916: Messiah 4, COVID 0.

 

On Tuesday, my wife and I completed our 4th Messiah sing-along for the season.  We both seem to be feeling OK, so at this point I guess it’s safe to say that this year’s score is Messiah 4, COVID 0.

Moving right along

Source:  Virginia Department of Health.

Looks like we’re starting this year’s winter increase in COVID-19 cases.  The incidence of airborne respiratory illness tends to be on the rise at this time of year.  That includes pneumonia of all sorts, flu, the common cold, and now COVID-19.

Above is what I’d call a horizontal gee-whiz graph of that (per the nomenclature of the the classic “How to Lie With Statistics”).  Without context, you might be tempted to say, gee whiz, look at the increase.

Source:  Virginia Department of Health.

In context, by contrast, it’s not such a big deal.  Currently Virginia shows 14 new cases per 100K population per day.  Just two years back (January 2022), it was more like 214 per 100K.  So, upswing, yes.  Comparable to prior peaks, no.

Conversely, you might be tempted to say COVID is now no worse than the flu, but based on the data, you’d be wrong.  By the numbers, COVID-19 still accounts for about 3 percent of U.S. deaths (per the U.S. CDC).  Whereas prior to COVID, influenza and pneumonia together accounted for less than 2 percent of U.S. deaths, and the most of that was attributable to pneumonia (CDC, Deaths 2019, .pdf).

Finally, not to harp on it, but choral singing is about as good a way to spread airborne disease as exists, owing to the high rate of aerosol emissions when people sing in full voice.  (I’ve been over that in several prior posts).

Regardless, we attended four different sing-alongs.  All were in churches of various denominations.  In each case, the church was full, masks were few and far between, and there was a lot of gray hair in the audience.

When I run the probabilities, it’s a near-certainty that we shared a church space with at least one person who was actively infectious with COVID.  (Again, based on calculations outlined in old posts, I’d guess that with a total attendance of about 2000 in the four sing-alongs, and current incidence in Virginia, there was a 92% chance that at least one person was actively infectious in at least one sing-along.)

So it’s a pretty good guess that somebody picked up a new case of COVID as a consequence of those sing-alongs.  But almost nobody seemed worried about it — despite the advanced age of the average audience member.  No idea who drew the short straw, if anyone.

In any case, based on what has to be a fairly broad sampling, I’d say the market for mass singing of baroque Christmas music has returned to full normalcy.  In so far as that can be considered a normal thing to do.

Finally, you might reasonably ask, why so many sing-alongs?  Straight-up return on investment.  It took us seven years to get our parts (alto and bass) down rock-solid.  Might as well get our money’s worth.

Plus, to a degree, it’s surprising how much variation there is among services.  Some are loosey-goosey, some are run quite rigidly.  Accompaniment ranges from a solo organ to string quartet to full orchestra.  Soloists run the gamut from merely good to truly exceptional, transport-you-to-a-different world singing.

It’s time to put our Messiah scores back on the shelf for another year.  We made it through yet another full season, and enjoyed it.  And we’re looking forward to doing it again next year.

Post #1915: I’m giving spit to 501(c)(3) charities this Christmas

 

I usually make handful of small charitable donations at the end of the year.

I’m not entirely sure why.  As a kid, I was reasonably religious, and considered it a duty.  Now I’m not (a kid, or religious).  Yet I still consider it a duty.  For sure, I don’t get any warm fuzzy feelings from it (Post #1693:  The Life Table … ).

As the twig is bent, I guess.

I often regret it.  Not due to the money.  Due to the endless stream of followup emails, calls, junk mail, and (increasingly) texts asking for more.  I don’t so much begrudge being pestered by the entities that I actually gave money to.  Much.  I expect that.  It’s that giving money inevitably gets me on some general-circulation list of suckers, and I then get a deluge of request from causes I’ve never even heard of.

So this year, I kept it old-school.  For any non-trivial donations, I sent checks, through the U.S. mail.  No cover letter.  No email address.  No phone.  No dealing with those annoying pleas to cover the credit card fee or leave a tip, on top of the donation.  Just a check, folded over, in an envelope.  Pretty sure they’ll cash it, regardless of how I send it.  And I figure, if they’re going to sell my name and contact info, I should at least make them work for it.

It was both oddly satisfying and oddly jarring, which gave me cause to reflect.

Some thoughts on sending spit to my favorite charities.

Accept no substitutes

First off, I’m using up an old box of business envelopes, the kind with moisture-activated glue on the flaps.  And, as is traditional for my generation, without hesitation, or even bothering to think about it, I simply lick the flap, then seal the envelope.

Kids these days a) for sure don’t write checks, b) may never have actually sent anything via U.S. mail, and c) likely would find it both odd and frankly gross to lick something, then send it to a stranger. 

And, objectively, sure, they have a point.  And, to be clear, you could seal those gummed envelopes using a sponge or finger dampened with tap water.  But I’ve been doing it with spit all my adult life. I see no reason to stop now.  Not, at least, until I run down that stock of old envelopes.  Or the next pandemic hits, despite the fact that it does not appear to be possible to spread pathogens this way (e.g., reference).

Mint envelopes

Source:  Etsy

Just in passing — because younger generations likely won’t believe this — this practice was so common that you could buy flavored envelopes.  With mint being the most common one.  And nobody thought it was the least bit odd.

While “gummed closure” envelopes are still widely sold, Bon Appétit claims that flavored envelopes are a thing of the past.  Mint envelopes from mainstream manufacturers are now relegated to the on-line graveyards of obsolete goods (here’s an offering, on Etsy), but they are still available as a novelty item (e.g., from Flavorlope).

I won’t even get into licking postage stamps, except to say that a) is a scratch-n-sniff U.S. postage stamp really coming ahead on the whole postage-as-food concept, and b) in Belgium, apparently you can still buy chocolate-flavored stamps.

Will “checking account” go the way of “cigarette lighter socket”?

Source:  Analysis of data from the Federal Reserve.  This only refers to checks cleared by the Federal Reserve, and does not account checks cleared by private commercial clearing entities.

My children literally did not believe me when I said that the proper term for the 12V power outlet in a car is “cigarette lighter socket”.  It is the last artifact of the days when all cars came with built-in ashtrays, because most adults smoked most of the time, and that included smoking cigarettes while driving.

In the modern world, the plugs for those 12V power sockets in cars are both comically large and bizarrely complex.  The end pin is spring-loaded to make contact with the “hot” terminal of the socket.  To connect them, you have to shove a couple of inches of plug into the socket.  They are completely unlike any other modern low-voltage plug.  And they only have that size and construction because, once up on a time, the thing you plugged into that power outlet became a red-hot metal coil, when in use.  True fact.

In a similar vein, neither my daughter nor my son has ever written a check.  Neither has an account for which they own physical paper-copy checks.  Yet both of them have “checking accounts”, meaning, deposit accounts from which they may demand withdrawals, at any time, in any amount up to the current balance in the account.  It’s just that all of their withdrawals are done electronically.

If cigarette lighter sockets can be renamed power outlets, at what point will “checking accounts” become “debit card accounts”?  Near as I can tell, that’s the only way anybody under age 30 ever uses them.

Heck, paper checks are no longer even physically “cleared” any more.  Historically, they’d literally ship the paper check back to the bank of origin, and eventually, back to the person who wrote them, as a “cancelled check”, that is, marked as already having been paid.  But these days, “cancelled checks” no longer exist.  Clearing (at least, clearing by the Federal Reserve) is done strictly with electronic images of the paper checks.  So, ultimately, payment by check is also payment in electronic format.  It’s just that you can start the process off with a physical paper check.

Wanna bet they’ll still take your money?

Every charity now discourages checks.  Donation has become synonymous with on-line donation.  Clicking the donation link immediately takes you to some (non-standard) form used for accepting your credit card/debit card/PayPal donation.

But they’re all willing to take your money in almost any format, including by check.  You just have to look.  So don’t be put off by the lack of a paper check option, as you click the donation link on website.  Of the charities of interest to me, 100% of them have at least a P.O. box to which they will grudgingly allow you to give them money by check.

On-line donation forms are inferior

And in the spirit of grudging, I have found that almost all on-line charitable donation forms are inferior to typical commercial vendor payment forms.  And I can’t quite figure out why.  Charities seem perfectly willing to give up 2+ percent of your donation in the form of a credit-card processing fee.  But somehow they can’t be bothered to pay for the software that will auto-fill your address in, once you start to write it.  Or at least fill in city and state, based on ZIP code.

Nope, you have to type every character, of every bit, of your address.  As if it somehow cost them oodles of cash to buy any commercial system that will do that for you.  For the privilege of accepting your money.  Makes no sense whatsoever, to me.

The amount of information required to donate on-line is non-standard

Source:  The SHQ-6, from “Appreciation of humor is decreased among patients with Parkinson’s disease”, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parkreldis.2011.09.004

For non-deductible donations to political candidates, I understand why they ask certain questions.  It’s the law, so that we can pretend that our elected Federal officials are not for sale to the highest bidder.

Some charities allow you to give on-line by supplying only name and address (and credit card).  They then supply an acknowledgement page which you may save or print, to provide a record for the IRS, should you ever be audited.

Others refuse to allow you to donate on-line unless you cough up a valid(-looking) email address and phone.  If you try to give them money, while leaving those mandatory fields blank, their software will rebuke you and return to the form, rather than graciously accept your donation.

And yet, all of them will accept a check, which requires neither an email address nor a phone number.  So, clearly, they don’t actually need either piece of information in order to accept your money.  They need it to make it more efficient for them to go after you for more money.  Or to sell your contact information to others.

Hey, I can still do cursive, and it’s fast

Source:  Clipartlibrary.com

My final observation from this holiday season is that a) I am still capable of doing cursive writing, b) it’s surprisingly fast, once you’ve gotten back into the groove, and c) I can write a check faster than I can fill in most on-line forms.

(OK, I cheat on some of the capitals.  A proper cursive capital Q, for example, looks like the number 2.  Which makes no sense.   I’m not sure anyone would recognize an actual, done-to-spec cursive capital Q in a hand-written document.)

Depending on which sources you care to believe, cursive writing is either disappearing from public school curricula, or making a comeback in public school curricula.  So I can’t say which.

All I can say for sure is that, other than signing my name to the random medical or legal form, the only time I routinely use cursive writing is in this year-end charitable giving exercise.

The crazy thing about flowing cursive writing is that it’s like playing a musical instrument.  Mechanically, it’s all learned reflexes and muscle memory.  You don’t have to think about the details.  Sure, you can write it tediously, one character at a time, as if you were doing calligraphy.

But at 65 years of age, it’s somehow encouraging to see that I can still do actual on-the-fly handwriting.  I can’t (fill-in-the-blank here), but at least I can still write my own name.

For now.

 

Post #1914: Pneumatic tires for wheelchair use, no good solution to the problem of flat tires.

 

This is a brief followup to the just prior post, on the use of non-pneumatic (e.g., solid rubber) tires on wheelchairs.

I’m trying to work out what I should recommend if asked to replace more wheelchair tires.  Traditional tires with air-filled inner tubes are much easier from the standpoint of the installer.  The question is dealing with the drawbacks of those from the wheelchair user’s perspective.

The only way to guarantee that a wheelchair tire won’t go flat is to use a non-pneumatic tire.  That includes solid rubber tires, and solid rubber inserts taking the place of an inner tube inside regular tires.

What I discovered in this post is that many anti-flat products available for bicyclists will not work for most wheelchairs, owing to the wheelchair’s use of narrow, high-pressure tires.

When all is said and done, between the past post and this post, I think I now have a fairly firm set of recommendations.

If you cannot tolerate a flat tire on-the-go, then opt for solid rubber tires (and not solid inserts in regular bike tires).  But mount them using the $35 steel bolt-to-the-workbench device sold specifically for mounting such tires on wheelchair rims.  Mounting them with simple hand tools is just too hard and too iffy.

If you can tolerate the occasional flat, the best option seems to be puncture-resistant tires and tubes.  All the rest of the anti-flat products available for bicycle use — chemical sealants, anti-puncture tire liners, tire “wipers, and the like — either won’t work with typical wheelchair tires, or are not available off-the-shelf in the right size or configuration for that use.

Background

Solid rubber tires and solid rubber tire inserts definitely will not go flat.  There’s no air in them in the first place.

But those tires have some drawbacks.  Per the just-prior post, both of those non-pneumatic options are difficult to install using ordinary hand tools.  In addition, solid inserts are difficult to purchase as they must match the tire fairly exactly.

Both types of non-pneumatic tires offer a harsher ride and higher rolling resistance than high-pressure pneumatic (air-filled) tires.  And there are relatively few options available in the correct size for typical wheelchair rims.

By contrast, traditional pneumatic bike tires (tire plus inner tube) are easier to purchase and install, but they have two big drawbacks.  They require frequent, routine re-inflation to maintain the correct pressure.  Otherwise they go soft, and that raises rolling resistance.  And they can go flat, unexpectedly, while you are out-and-about.

The latter is not just a problem for the high rolling resistance you get with a flat.  It’s all too easy to roll a flat bike tire right off the rim, or to damage both the rim and the tire if you keep going on a flat tire.

This post is my research into minimizing the hassle from both of those drawbacks:  routine periodic inflation, and flat tires.

Caveat 1:  In the particular case I’m looking at, my options are  24″ x 1″ or 24″ x 1-3/8″ tires.  This puts a lot of limits on the types of bike-tire solutions that can be adopted for wheelchair use.  You might have other options available if your rims can accept wider tires.

Caveat 2:  My only qualification for writing about this topic is that I’ve changed a lot of bike tires in my life.  And I happen to be friends with someone who uses a manual wheelchair.

Routine inflation:  An electric air pump can solve this problem.

Source:  https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-120-Volt-Inflator-H120N/325096203

Best guess, $20 and a trip to Home Depot gives an adequate way to maintain tire air pressure up to 100 PSI.

I don’t think it’s worth belaboring this.  All pneumatic bike tires lose air over time.  It’s not a leak, per se.  It’s that air diffuses through the rubber.  (The same thing happens to rubber balloons and car tires, just much faster and much slower, respectively).  The higher the tire pressure, and the thinner the tire/inner tube, the faster the tire goes soft.  There’s no way to stop it that I have ever heard of.

This means that pneumatic tires have to be topped up on a routine basis.  And in the modern world, the obvious solution for routine tire inflation is an electric air pump.

A standard full-sized manual bike tire pump doesn’t do the average wheelchair user much good for routine use.  Not only are they designed to be used while standing up, they are designed to be fast, that is, to move a lot of air with each stroke.  They do that by using a piston with a relatively large surface area.  But wheelchair users often prefer high-pressure (e.g., 140 PSI) tires, for the low rolling resistance such tires provide.  Even if a full-sized manual pump can achieve pressures like that, it takes a lot of force, owing to the large piston area.

The typical manual mini-bike-pump — the kind you take with you on a bike ride — is both slow and awkward to use.  They are slow because they have tiny little pistons, suitable for pumping tires to high pressures using only your arm muscles.  And they are awkward because they either clamp directly to the valve stem, or have just a short attaching hose, either of which essentially dictates exactly where the pump must be held, relative to the tire.  In essence, those pumps are made for emergency on-the-road use.  You can use them for routine tire maintenance, but I sure don’t.   

Compressed C02 cartridge pumps are expensive for use in keeping tires routinely inflated.  The poorly-designed ones appear hard to use, based on Amazon comments.  But even for the well-designed ones, depending on the pump and the tire, you’d be spending $1.50 and tossing away a metal C02 cartridge every time you topped off your tires.  Plus, based on what I read, C02-filled tires deflate more rapidly than air-filled tires, owing to something-something-something about the ability of C02 to diffuse through butyl rubber.  You’d turn your routine tire maintenance into a $100-a-year habit, for no particular reason.

The efficient solution is an electric tire pump. 

These days, you have your choice of 120 volt plug-in, 12 volt plug in, and rechargeable battery-operated pumps.  You only have to check a few things:

  • How loud are they?
  • Can they do high pressures?
  • How awkward are they to use?
  • How long will they last in routine use?
  • Is the battery replaceable?

And, of course, how much do they cost?  Because, near as I can tell from reading Amazon comments, the cheaper pumps tend to fail several of the checks outlined above.

I have no specific recommendation to make, other than the Home Depot offering shown above.  All I can suggest is (e.g.) reading the comments on pumps offered on Amazon.  In particular, a lot of cheaper battery-operated pumps cannot produce high pressures despite what the Amazon listing might say.  When in doubt, get one that plugs into the wall.

Avoiding flats:  Nothing is bulletproof

If you absolutely, positively must not have a flat tire, the only real option is solid, non-pneumatic tires.  In this section, I’m shooting for two things:

  1. A tire and tube setup that minimizes the risk of catastrophic flats.
  2. A simple, no-maintenance pump that can be kept on the wheelchair for emergency use as needed.

The pump is easy.  Any C02-cartridge inflator that fits comfortably in the hand should be adequate, as would a standard bicycle mini-pump with the addition of an extension hose.  Either would be small enough to be stored long-term on the wheelchair itself.

But finding a combination to minimize the chance of a wheelchair flat is hard, owing in part to the small size and high pressure of the typical wheelchair pneumatic tire.  Puncture sealants (e.g., Slime (r)) do not appear to work at high pressure.  Puncture proof tire liners do not appear to be available in the narrow widths required for wheelchair tires.  The only options that work for typical wheelchair rims combine relatively expensive “puncture-resistant” tires with relatively expensive “thorn-resistant” inner tubes.  Even with that, neither of those is likely to stand up to an ill-placed tack, nail, or screw.

So the bottom line is that there is no good anti-flat solution for pneumatic wheelchair tires. The best you can hope for is that any puncture is small enough that you can inflate the tire, on the go, enough to get you someplace where you can swap out the wheel.

Tire and tube setup.

An important restriction is that the only tires that I know will fit the rims I’ve been working with are 24″ x 1″, and 24″ x 1-3/8″ tires, designed for use with inner tubes.  These are narrow by bicycle standards, and that limits choices quite a bit.

Puncture-resistant tire liner:  No off-the-shelf option in this size. 

Source:  Amazon.com

These are (typically) just a tough piece of flexible plastic, designed to turn aside (e.g.) thorns.  Note what the original Mr. Tuffy tire liners don’t say:  Nails, tacks, screws, staples, and similar.  Given that I’ve had nails go right through the tread of a steel-belted radial car tire, I’m pretty sure a piece of plastic isn’t going to stop them in a bike tire.

But it’s moot anyway.  Near as I can tell, all the ones made for bicycles are too large for 1-3/8″ tires, and are certainly too large for 1″ tires.  For the Mr. Tuffy brand, 24″ wheel sizing starts at 1.95″ and goes up from there.

At best, I could cut them down and use them.  But I’d have to sand down the edges to be sure that the tire liners themselves didn’t cut the tube.

Tire sealants:  Dubious in higher-pressure tires.

Slime (r) does not make ready-made self-sealing inner tubes sized for a 1-3/8 tire.  That said, the original Slime (r) sealant was sold in bottles, to be squeezed into a bike inner tube after removing the valve core.  So it’s easy enough to make self-sealing 1″ or 1-3/8″ tubes from standard tubes and a bottle of Slime (r).  By reputation, this will stop (or greatly slow) leaks from small punctures for about two years.  After which, I think you have to remove and replace the old tubes.

So that’s an option.  Based on what I read on the internet, Slime works, somewhat.  Won’t stop a rip or tear in the tire.  May not seal fully.  But gives you enough sealant to get home on a tire with a small puncture.

This seemingly-knowledgeable user provides a major caveat:

Tire pressures above 45 psi are less effective at sealing, and above 60 psi, don’t expect any effectiveness at all.

Oddly, Slime (r) itself does not mention this limitation.  But now that I Google Slime (r) and tire pressure, I see warnings in multiple locations that Slime (r) and similar sealants will not work well in high-pressure tube tires.  I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is, but until proven otherwise, that’s a caveat for tires in the 100 to 140 PSI range.

FWIW, a competing product in this segment — Flat Out — specifically says “fat tire bikes” (reference).  The implication there is that this sealant would not work in (e.g.) road bikes with high-pressure tires.

Beyond that, Slime has a reputation for sometimes causing problems such as blocked valve stems.  All things considered, Slime (r) may be reasonable for low-pressure (“fat”) bike tires, but whether or not it will work well and without issues for thin, high-pressure wheelchair tires is an open question.

A final issue is the use of Slime (r) in mounted tires that might be stored, unused, for a considerable length of time.  Rumor has it that Slime (r) can “pile up” in the low section of the tire.  If you’re getting close to the point where the Slime loses its ability to flow, you may end up picking up a replacement wheelchair tire only to find that the low section of the tire (as stored) is now solidified Slime.

Puncture-resistant tire:  Expensive and somewhat effective.

As with tire liners, these aren’t a bulletproof solution.  It’s puncture-resistant, not puncture proof.  Near as I can tell, the only puncture-resistant tire marketed in the 24″ x 1-3/8″ size in the U.S. is marketed as a wheelchair tire.  Hence it costs two or three times as much as a regular tire.

Puncture-resistant tube:  Expensive, effectiveness unknown.

There are a handful of “thorn-resistant” (that is, extra-thick) inner tubes marketed in the 24″ x 1-3/8″ size.  These appear to cost about two to four times as much as a regular inner tube.  As with puncture-resistant tires, these are unlikely to stop a tack, nail, or screw.  Whether they provide any additional resistance to punctures from man-made objects, I don’t know.

Run flat tire:  No option in this size.

There are now foam inserts for bike tires that provide some degree of run-flat capability.  These are oriented toward tubeless tires typically used by (e.g.) bike racers.  Near as I can tell, there is no run-flat tire option available for something as small as 24″ x 1-3/8.

Tire wipers:  Maybe, but requires D-I-Y mounting.

A final offering for minimizing punctures goes by various names, but probably “tire wipers” is sufficiently descriptive.  These are typically wires that ride lightly on the tire, and knock off any solid debris that has stuck to the tire, including tacks, nails, and thorns.  The idea is that it typically takes several tire revolutions for such debris to penetrate the tire, and if you can knock it away, it won’t puncture the tire.  These typically mount (e.g.) the same place as the brake calipers on a bike, which means that you’d have to device a custom mounting for use in a wheelchair.

Emergency pump:  C02 inflator or Standard bike mini-pump plus long adapter hose.

Based on what I read on the internet, plenty of wheelchair users adopt standard bike mini-pumps for tire inflation.  These pumps are capable of reaching the (e.g.) 140 PSI required for high-pressure tires, but tend to be slow to inflate a tire, because of that.

The main drawback that I see, for on-the-go use, is that most of these pumps require direct attachment to the valve stem. That means that the user would have to hold the pump to the side, stabilize it on the wheel, and pump up the tire in that awkward position.

I think it’s far easier just to add a two-foot air hose, readily available from Amazon.  That would allow a person seated in a wheelchair to inflate the wheel by holding the pump comfortably in the lap, rather than leaning over to manipulate a pump directly attached to a valve stem.

But by far the most obvious solution is a C02 inflator.  These are compact enough to be held in one hand, and so should be readily usable by a seated wheelchair user to inflate a low tire on-the-go.  A single small (16 gram) C02 cartridge should be adequate to bring a 24″ x 1-3/8 tire up to a reasonable working pressure.

A battery-operated rechargeable tire pump is a distant runner-up.  Most of these are relatively bulky.  Many of the less expensive ones cannot generate high pressures.  And even with that, the batteries would slowly self-discharge, meaning that the user would have to remember to charge the pump periodically.  That’s just begging to find that the battery is dead, just when you need it the most.

Conclusion

For pneumatic wheelchair tires, periodic maintenance of tire pressure isn’t much of an issue.  Reliable plug-in electric inflator pumps capable of 100 PSI are readily available.  These can be had with reasonably long air hoses, allowing the user considerable leeway in hooking the pump up to the valve stem.  All that is required is remembering to use it on a regular basis.

The big problem is flat tires while out-and-about.  There, many of the off-the-shelf solutions available to bicyclists — in-tire sealants, puncture-resistant liners, run-flat tires, and “tire wipers” — are not available (off-the-shelf) for narrow, high-pressure pneumatic tires typically used on wheelchairs.

That only leaves puncture-resistant tires and tubes.  Those may slow down the rate at which flats occur, but neither of those will stop sharp metal objects such as tacks, nails, or screws.

I guess my bottom line is this.  If you can tolerate the occasional flat tire, then go with high-end “puncture resistant” tires and tubes.  Forget Slime (r), tire liners, tire wipers, and similar makeshift solutions.  If not, I’d go with solid-rubber tires (not inserts), along with the steel bench-mounted tool used to install those tires safely on wheel rims.

Post #1912: What the watt?

 

A few years back they tore down the modest house across the street from me and built a house in the Vienna Modern style.  Which is to say, the biggest possible house that would legally fit on the lot.  That’s all they build in this Town, and has been for at least the past 15 years.

Having watched this house (and many like it) go up in my neighborhood, I can tell you that it isn’t a particularly energy-efficient design.  It’s standard 2×4 construction with fiberglass batt insulation.  Not significantly different from the way houses were being built half-a-century ago.  There was a Tyvek wrap put on under the siding, which is good from an energy consumption standpoint.  But that’s far more than fully offset by the large amount of glass area, which is bad for energy consumption. You can’t see it here, but most of the northwest-facing back of the house is glass.  Which is a dead loss for energy consumption.

Consistent with that, none of the several vehicles associated with the house is fuel-efficient.  I think I’ve spotted a couple of full-sized SUVs, plus the obligatory shiny new truck.  All old-school straight gas engines.

This neighbor has a penchant for having the exterior of his house decorated with lights and gizmos to suit every season.   In the Christmas season, his professionally-installed lighting outshines the adjacent street light.  As you can see from the photo above, it stands out on what is otherwise a fairly low-key street.

Since I’ve been spending some time researching Christmas lights, I got to wondering just how much energy that light display requires.  Just for lighting the eaves of the house.  (I’ll ignore the bushes and fences, which are wrapped in what appear to be mini-LED strings.)

So, what’s your guess?  Only the two sides shown here are lit.  The other side and the back are dark.  Does that much lighting require roughly:

  1. 100 watts
  2. 250 watts
  3. 500 watts
  4. 1000 watts
  5. Over 1000 watts

It’s easy enough to estimate.  Count the bulbs, and multiple by an estimated watts per bulb, given that these are almost certainly LED C9 bulbs.

The correct answer is b. That’s about 320 C9 LED bulbs, and each such bulb takes somewhere between 0.6 and 1.0 watts.  So the whole set consumes somewhere between 200 and 320 watts.  Call it 250 at a guess.

Plus the lights for the shrubs and fence.  Arguably somewhere around 400 watts for the entire display.

That strikes me as remarkably little electricity, for that over-the-top amount of lighting.  But I grew up in the era of incandescent lighting.

I reckon that the carbon footprint for that light display, for the entire season (it was put up a couple of weeks ago), is no more than 100 pounds of C02.  (Calculated as 28 days x 14 hours per day x 0.4 kilowatts x 0.65 pounds C02 per KWH.)  Or roughly what you’d get from burning five gallons of gasoline.

Obviously, even if you wanted this sort of over-the-top, brightest-house-on-the-block display, you could cut the energy use in half with the addition of a $5 timer.  Just turn the lights off from (say) midnight to dawn, when nobody is out-and-about to see them.   The fact that he doesn’t bother to do that demonstrates exactly how much he cares about the consequences C02 emissions in the modern world.

If a tree falls in the forest, where no one can hear it, does it make a sound?  You can philosophize over that all you want.  But for sure, a light display that no one can see still uses energy.  That makes this all-night lavish lighting display a poster child for just how little effort some people are not willing to go to, to rein in their C02 emissions.  Not worth five bucks for a timer.

Once upon a time, you could make a “base load” argument for the relative harmlessness of nighttime energy use.  It’s difficult or impossible to throttle down coal-fired and nuclear power plants on a daily basis.  Where coal is still the backbone of the electrical grid, electricity use in the dead of night (when demand is otherwise down) required minimal or no additional fuel consumption beyond that “base load” floor that must be maintained.  But with the transition of the grid from coal to natural gas turbines, where power plants can be fired up or shut down relatively quickly, that’s an increasingly obsolete argument.  Shifting electricity consumption to off-peak periods may reduce the total amount of generating equipment (capacity) that a system requires, but I don’t think it has much impact on the amount of fuel burned.

But I think this extra-bright light display underscore that the future is electric.  Some people are simply programmed to be energy hogs.  I’d bet it never even occurred to my neighbor that he could have his installers add a timer to the system.  But modern LED lighting makes up for his indifference to energy waste, effectively putting a cap on the amount of energy that even the most determined energy waster can use.

Sure, he could waste more energy if he tried.  But the point is, he’d have to go out of his way to do that.  If he doesn’t give it a thought — and I’d say that’s likely here  — LED-as-default acts to moderate the environmental impact of the resulting excess.

The upshot is that, courtesy of LEDs, this entire “brightest house on the block” lighting display turns out to be … fairly harmless, environmentally.  In the grand scheme of things.  And since old people are set in their ways, and aren’t going to change even as global warming progresses, we need more of that sort of self-limiting process.

The nicest thing about it is that as renewables’ share of electricity generation increases, and the carbon-intensity of the grid falls, displays like this should become ever-more-harmless in the future.

And so, if that all proceeds according to plan, at some point in the future, our kids can look at a display like this and only think of Christmas, and nothing else.  Which would be an improvement over their parents’ generation.

Post #1911: LED Christmas light life expectancy.

 

This post goes way over the TL;DR line.  If you want to get to my summary on buying LED Christmas lights that will last a while, go to the Conclusions section in red, below.

Source:  Except where noted, images in this post are from the Gencraft.com AI with a prompt of “Christmas lights”.

Intro:  The ghost of Christmas lights past.

My parents had the same sets of Christmas tree lights for my entire childhood.  And then some, given that I was the youngest of four children.

I, by contrast, am getting ready to toss (recycle) yet another couple of strings of dead Christmas lights.   In this case, some elderly miniature incandescent light strings that started off the season dead.  Again.  And for which I am finally throwing in the towel. Continue reading Post #1911: LED Christmas light life expectancy.

Post #1910: Twinkly® lights: Amazing, but not twinkly.

 

Recall Post #1906.  I’m trying to find a modern energy-efficient version of old-fashioned Christmas tree “twinkle lights”.  That is, light strings where each bulb turns on and off, randomly, independent of all the other bulbs.

After reviewing the options, I bought a set of Twinkly Strings®.  While these are waaay cooler than any Christmas lights I’ve ever owned, they do not, in fact, faithfully reproduce old-fashioned twinkle lights.

The sad but colorful story ensues.  The twinkle quest continues. Continue reading Post #1910: Twinkly® lights: Amazing, but not twinkly.

Post #1909: Never eat at a place called Mom’s.

 

And don’t trust Grandma.  Or the Amish.

This evening my wife strongly hinted that I ought to replace the broken jar of black raspberry jam that was the focus on my just-prior post.  No fool I, I immediately got on-task.

So this is my second attempt to buy her some black raspberry jam, as a Christmas present.

This time I looked at every black raspberry jam offered on Amazon.

After my nth jar of jam, I came to a firm conclusion:

The folksier the name, the lousier the product.

Grandma’s Old-Fashioned Amish® homemade black raspberry jam.

You typically can’t find black raspberry jam at the grocery store.  The berries themselves are small and fragile.  That makes it an expensive crop to grow, per pound, compared to other berries.  As a result, black raspberry jam is typically priced at several multiples of (e.g.) strawberry jam.  And I guess that’s a non-starter for the grocery store shelf.  Which is why I’m ordering it off Amazon.

But not all jams are created equal.  They are some combination of fruit, sugar, water, pectin, and maybe an acidifier like lemon juice.  And sometimes other stuff.  Some are primarily fruit, with just enough of the other ingredients to sweeten it, hold it together, and keep it from spoiling.  Others are closer to berry-flavor sugar.

All I wanted, in my first cut, was to restrict this to jams for which black raspberries were the first-listed ingredient.  Ideally, I’d like jams where they were the majority ingredient, but unlike some European labeling, U.S. labeling law does not reveal percentages.  The U.S. simply requires that ingredients be listed in order of weight.  So I’ll settle for jams where sugar and water are listed after the berries.

(That’s assuming I could actually find the ingredients listed somewhere on-line.  It was surprisingly common to find jams listed on Amazon, but never showing the legally-required list of ingredients.)

So here’s a little quiz.  Based on the look of the jar, which of these do you think have the berries as the first-listed ingredient?

Source:  Amazon.

The trick is to toss out anything that says “Grandma”, “Amish”, or “Homemade/Homestyle”. Those are all the lower-quality jams where sugar outweighs berries.

We all know that none of these were actually made by Grandma, at home.  (Then sold in huge quantity on Amazon.)  The fact that the makers felt compelled to call them “Grandma’s Homemade” should have been a clue that they were compensating for something.

But as for the Amish, this is not to imply that the Amish make bad jam.  The issue is that “Amish” isn’t trademarked.  Anybody can make anything, anywhere, and label it “Amish.”  In fact, the last product (Kauffman’s) is made in Bird-in-Hand, PA, and so plausibly actually is Amish- (or maybe Mennonite-) made.  It just doesn’t try to sell the product based on that association.

Anyway, the ones with black raspberries as the first-listed ingredient are below.  Only for the two French ones (Chantaine, St. Dalfour — really, the same company) can you tell that black raspberries make up 51 percent of what’s in the jar.  For the rest, all you know is that there’s more black raspberry than there is of any one other ingredient.

Conclusion

Never eat at a place called mom’s.  And never buy jam made by Grandma.

Post #1908: I returned a broken jar of jam to Amazon today …

 

… and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that.

I packed it in something leak-proof and put a Post-It on it saying “broken glass”.  But I didn’t even need a box, as I dropped it off at the Amazon returns counter at my local Whole Foods.

But …

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

And yet …

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

I will now outline the whole series of events, so that I may justify to myself what I just did.  But it boils down to “there’s no way to tell Amazon that I should just toss this in the trash”.

So … you want your money back, you want to play by the rules?

Then you ship them back their broken jar of jam.

Do be do be do

Amazon gives you the option of having a week’s packages all delivered on one given day.  Friday, for me.  That’s instead of having different orders arriving throughout the week.

Trying to be a good do-bee, I take them up on that option. Particularly at this time of year, when I’m ordering Christmas presents.  I do it because I think it’s (ever-so-slightly) more environmentally friendly, but mostly because it cuts down (for Amazon) the total work involved in delivering my packages.

I’d guess that means a greater likelihood of getting a large carton packed with multiple unrelated items.  (Compared to having items arriving on different days.)  But I’m not sure about that.

At any rate, today’s shipment had a $10 jar of fancy jam, broken, inside a multi-item carton.  The carton had a lot of empty space with no filler material.  Not a good plan when you’re shipping glass jars.  The only thing that prevented that jar from painting the inside of the carton with jam was a single layer of bubble wrap taped around the jar.  As it was, I had to sponge smears of jam off the rest of the items in the box.

Despite this, I still think having all your Amazon packages delivered one day a week is the do-bee way.  When feasible.  But I might reconsider that after this event.

What to do about the broken jar of jam?

Amazon returns

So I go on-line, to get Amazon to send a replacement or refund for that $10 jar of fancy Christmas-present jam that got smashed.

Amazon says, sure old buddy, no problem.  When are you going to return the first one to us?

And I’m like, return it?  God no.  That’s just plain stupid.  It’s a mess.  Its a smashed jam jar, held together by leaking bubble wrap.  It needs to go straight into the trash.

On the Amazon on-line form, there’s no check box for that.  Or anything like that.  No option for “trust me, you don’t want this back”.  If I want a replacement or a refund, I need to return it.

I know that, in theory, I can somehow get in touch with somebody at Amazon and they may OK a refund without the stupidity of returning the jar of jam.    But I didn’t want to go to that effort of working my way through their customer service process trying to find somebody to do that for me.

(I once had an empty package delivered from Amazon.  You think it’s tough returning a broken jar of jam, try returning the contents of an empty package.  That’s how I know that if you can find a human, you can at least sometimes get an exception to what’s shown on the return form.)

And as an economist, I can see that’s its an open invitation to criminal abuse if you let people easily claim a refund without returning the items refunded.  So I have no problem at all if Amazon wants you to have to jump through hoops to do that, as a matter of course.  I just wasn’t up to hoop-jumping today.

What to do?  To get my money back,  I have to ship a broken, oozing jar of jam as if it were merchandise.

Either that, or cut my way through Amazon customer service.

Shipping it is, then.

Nesco to the rescue

One uses the gizmo pictured above, plus special plastic bags, to produce vacuum-sealed food.  Or, in this case, vacuum-sealed garbage.  The bags are heat-sealed (i.e., melted shut), and so are leak-proof as long as the seal doesn’t fail.

I duly sealed the broken jar (bubble wrap, oozing jam, and all) inside a seal-a-meal bag, along with two big sticky notes saying “Broken Glass”.  This, to prepare it for its journey back to Amazon.

I then drove to my nearby Whole Foods, and handed that over the Amazon return counter there.  If you return it that way, you don’t have to pack it in a box.  Whole Foods staff handle that in some fashion.

The guy at the counter was, I think, the biggest person I had ever seen working a counter at Whole Foods.  Big and tall, like a college linebacker.  Neither here nor there, merely unexpected.  The Whole Foods clerks in this area tend to be fit 20-somethings.  This was like seeing a bear onstage among the ballerinas.

I let the clerk at the return counter know I was returning a broken jar of jam, with my apology for shipping back something that stupid.

He didn’t bat an eye.  Took the package, scanned the QR code Amazon had given me (displayed on my phone), and said I was done.  As far as Amazon was concerned, it has been returned.  They’ll send an email shortly.

The entire return transaction took about ten seconds.  He practically had to shoo me away, as I stood there in disbelief.  I thanked him profusely, and walked off to pick up a few grocery items while I was at a grocery store.

In any case, when I decided to return it, I was betting that this ridiculous return has relatively modest environmental impact, relative to just tossing it in the trash.  The fact that you don’t have to box your item probably means that they fill a bin with returns, at Whole Foods, then everything gets trucked to some Amazon return center.

I probably used no more than one KWH for the in-town round trip to the store, which would equate to about 0.65 lbs C02 emissions here in Virginia.  Full trucks, by contrast, are vastly more efficient than empty autos, for moving freight, on order of 100 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.  Pro-rated to my 12 ounce jam jar, the fuel cost from Whole Foods back to Amazon was nugatory.  So I’m hope-guessing that the entire return trip “to Amazon” resulted in release of less than a pound of C02.  If I’d decided to toss that $10 item in the trash and take the loss, for environmental reasons, that would have worked out to a ludicrous $20,000 per ton C02 avoided.

That in no way suggests that it’s smart to return a broken jar of jam to Amazon.  It remains fundamentally stupid.  It’s just that if I’m going to burn up $10 to save the environment, there are for more effective ways to burn it.

This takes no account of the effort and energy expended after this broken jar of jam gets back to Amazon.  I have no firm idea of what happens after I hand my return over the counter at Whole Foods.  Presumably, between my reason for return, the big yellow stickies inside the package saying “Broken Glass”, and the purple goop encapsulated in the vacuum-seal bag, oozing around the bubble wrap, somebody along the line will have the good sense to throw this away.  It’s just a question of how much effort it takes to do that.

The upshot is that, no matter how stupid it seems, returning the smashed jar of  jam to Amazon was not a particularly bad thing to do.  (Assuming my sanitary packing holds up.)  It turned out to be almost no hassle, given that I owned a vacuum sealer (though a zip-lock might have been acceptable too, for all I know.)  Tossing it in the trash, solely to avoid C02 emissions, would have been ludicrously inefficient.

Plus, damnit, they owed me a new one.

Will I ever see this jam again?

It got me to wondering.  In Amazon comments, you will frequently (enough) read of somebody who claims to have gotten an obviously used item sent to them as a new item.  The presumption is that the vendor got a return, and sent them a returned item instead of a brand-new item.

I now wonder about the extent to which this is an urban legend.  Or not.  I see it enough, from a wide enough variety of people, that I’m thinking it’s true, and not an urban legend.

And sure enough, here’s what a CNBC article says about those returns.  Amazon will return the merchandise to the seller, at the seller’s option.

When an item can’t be sold as new, Amazon gives the seller up to four options for what to do with returns: each with a fee: Return to Seller, Disposal, Liquidation, or (by invitation only for now) Fulfillment by Amazon Grade and Resell.

Presumably, the original vendor can tell Amazon (for a fee) just to dump this particular return.  And this whole sad episode will come to a close.

Closure

Is it any wonder that I am increasingly baffled by the modern world.

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

In any case, it’s Amazon’s problem now.