Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G22-065: Round, brown, and slightly moist most of the time.

 

But few people have one.  And that’s a situation I’m trying to change.

A couple of months ago, I put away some seeds from the pawpaw trees in my yard, with the idea of starting and giving away pawpaw seedlings in the spring.  Preserving viable seeds turned out to be quite a process (Post #G22-062).  After a thorough cleaning, the seeds need to be kept moist, and kept cold over the winter.  So a couple of plastic bags of seeds-in-damp-potting-soil have been living at the back of my fridge for the past two months.

Today it was time for a mid-season checkup. 

They’re still brown (no evidence of mildew or fungus).  And they’re still damp, though it’s clear that they have dried out somewhat, so I’m going to top them off with a bit of fresh water.  (In hindsight, I should have weighed them before I tucked them into the fridge.)

But, in general, things are proceeding according to plan.

Except that I don’t actually have a plan.  I started this in response to a request for pawpaw seeds.  I noted how difficult it seemed to be to come by pawpaw seedlings locally. And pawpaws are the only known host of the zebra swallowtail butterfly.

So when you get right down to it, my entire rationale for doing this is butterflies (aw!). 

And thus I have fallen into the classic charismatic megafauna trap.  As humans, we focus on saving animals that are attractive (pandas).   Or noble-looking (elephants).  Or have cultural context (bald eagles).  Or, in this case, cute, and the Virginia state insect (zebra swallowtail butterfly).

The dead of winter is the perfect time to step back and take a more objective look at this effort.  Given that we’re in the middle of the great insect apocalypse, and given that growing trees in suburban yards is more-or-less a zero-sum game (if not a pawpaw, then some other tree), what is it, exactly, that I’m hoping to accomplish.

Is propagating pawpaws the smart thing to do?   Aside from the technical gardening challenge of doing this, and helping one insect (because it’s so cute!), is this really the best use of my time?

A summary of expert advice for an insect-friendly urban environment.

As my first attempt at being somewhat more systematic, let me use Google to find seemingly-serious websites offering advice on how to create an insect-friendly urban environment.

To frame that properly, I need to state clearly that urbanized areas constitute only a tiny fraction of U.S. land area.  So, from the outset, this list is going to be oriented toward personal actions that residents of urbanized areas may take.  My little survey clearly is not going to have the right “weighting” in terms of global impact, because those urbanized areas constitute such a small part of the entire U.S. insect habitat.

You can look at that any number of ways, and arrive at the same conclusion.  The U.S. Census has a formal definition of what it considers to be an urbanized area:

Source:  Census data via University of Texas.

Bloomberg has a nicely detailed summary of U.S. land use.  You reach much the same conclusion from that as you do from the map above.  Urban areas account for a few percent of the total land area of the U.S.

Source:  Bloomberg, Here’s How America Uses Its Land,By Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby,

So, almost beyond a doubt, policies or actions applicable to the other land categories will have a much larger impact than what gets done in urbanized areas.  Pasture/range, forest, cropland, and parks (and other special-use lands) vastly outweigh urban areas in terms of insect habitat.

The easiest way to quantify that is to focus on the diagram above.  Roughly speaking, there’s one acre of crop land and two acres of pasture/grazing land for every resident of the U.S.  Most of the production from that land is consumed domestically.  Adults consume more than kids.  If I had to guess, I’d guess that growing a year’s food for two U.S. adults takes up at least six acres of land.  Compare that to my suburban lot, and, arguably, what I choose to eat is going to matter a lot more than how I landscape my yard.

But you do what you can.

For urbanites.

That said, below I have tabulated the advice most commonly offered to Joe and Jane Urbanite, to help protect and preserve the insect population.  This is literally the first nine reputable sources that showed up in a simple Google query of best things to do to help insects.  The full tables may be a bit tough to read, so scroll down for just the good parts.

Just the useful bit:

When I start from this perspective, I’m pretty sure that displacing other species of backyard trees, in favor of pawpaws necessary for a single butterfly species, is probably not the most effective thing I can be doing to help beneficial insects survive in my yard.

#1:  Overwhelmingly, the first piece of advice is to reduce the area of your lawn, in favor of … well, just about anything else.   Eight of nine sources said some version of that.  Minimally, don’t mow it.   Maximally, return it to more-or-less a wild area.  Maybe plant it with wildflowers.  Maybe plant it with insect-friendly plants.

I think I’m going to take this one to heart next year, as I have a large section of my back yard currently covered in black plastic, trying to kill the weeds.  And a whole lot of saved flower seeds.  I think that’s all going to become a flower bed next year.

#2:  Skip the pesticides and herbicides.  I think I have that one knocked.  The more I grow in my vegetable garden, the less inclined I am toward any type of insecticides.  Herbicide?  I spell that h-o-e.

#3:  Address your outdoor lighting. I had no idea this was quite so much of an issue.  Everyone gives the same advice.  Minimize outdoor lighting.  And if you use outdoor lighting, go toward the red/yellow/amber spectrum, not white.  Apparently, there is some truth to the idea that old-fashioned yellow bug lights attract fewer bugs.  What also appears true, however, is that the switch to LED street lights. however good that is from the standpoint of reducing energy consumption, is a step backward in terms of harm to the insect population.   Apparently, those old fashioned yellow high-pressure sodium lights were reasonably benign, compared to the white light issued by LED or mercury vapor/halide lamps.

For me, this is fixable.  I have exactly two small outdoor lights.  Both have white bulbs in them.  I’ll swap those for bug lights, and problem solved.

#4:  Create bee nests, bug hotels, and other protected habitats.  Or, alternatively, just leave the edges of your yard looking like crap all the time.  That works for me.  I now have a great excuse for leaves, branches, pine cones, etc. along the margins of my yard.  It’s not sloth, it’s environmentally sound policy.  Plausibly the wilder it looks, the more insect-friendly it is.

But you can also buy bits of made habitat.  I bought one of those solitary-bee or mason-bee nesting boxes in Spring 2016.  Never touched it.  Here’s how it looks this morning:

To me, that looks like an underwhelming amount of new-bee production for six years.  A lot of the tubes remain untouched.  Maybe a half-dozen have clearly released a live bee, as evidenced by the hole in the end of the mud.  A few more might hold bees that will emerge this spring.  That said, those bees will re-use those tubes, so it’s not clear exactly how many bees this investment produced. Or, for that matter, whether those bees would simply have laid their eggs elsewhere, absent this cute little device.

That said, I already own a couple, so I guess I’ll get the refill tubes, clean them up, and re-hang them.  What could it hurt?

I’m going to stop there, except to note that planting native plants (such as pawpaws) is pretty far down the list.  And so, as I had begun to suspect, it’s likely that going to all this effort to produce pawpaw seedlings is not very efficient.  Laboriously saving the seeds, to produce the seedlings, so that others may displace some trees in their yard with pawpaws, so that the zebra swallowtail has a place to lay eggs … that’s a positive thing to do, but it should hardly be first on the list.

Best guess, after fixing my outdoor lighting, the single smartest thing I can do is transform large portions of the edges of my yard to wildflowers.  Around here, it takes considerable effort to keep “wild” patches of yard from being overgrown with less desirable plants.  So it’ll take some doing to get a setup that has any hope of maintaining itself, even if I mow it once a year to keep the trees down.

After that, it’s probably a question of being pickier about what I eat.  I’m not sure about the extent to which eating organic produce actually avoids use of pesticides, rather than merely substitutes some classes of pesticides for others.  But I am pretty sure that foods vary widely in terms of the average amount of pesticide and herbicide used per edible calorie.  I think my next step is to see if research can generate any reliable information on that.

Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

 

It seems as if “tripledemic” has finally been dropped by the news media.  For the simple reason that COVID is failing to play its part.  Near as I can tell, there’s still no trend in new cases, we’re way past the point where prior winter waves started, and there’s nothing happening in Canada.

Like so:

Continue reading Post #1646, COVID-19 through 11/30, still no significant trend

Post #1645: Swearing off angertainment for the new year.

 

A recent Washington Post opinion piece used the term “angertainment” to describe the antics and publicity stunts that seem to be the meat-and-potatoes of  Republican politics these days.

The case at hand was the narrow victory by Representative Boebert of Colorado.  While she is particularly noted for inflammatory stunts, I’m sure we can all recall other examples.  You might recall local political ads suggesting that a candidate planned to hunt down and kill Democrats.  On the national scene, surely you remember statements encouraging violence against the vice-president.  Or maybe it’s just a case of using taxpayer funds from one state, to fly asylum-seekers between two other states.  Because, why not?

That Post opinion piece offered two general descriptions of “angertainment”.  It’s “… an approach to governing that mistakes “owning the libs” for getting things done for constituents.”  Alternatively, it’s behavior specifically chosen to elicit news coverage along the lines of “You won’t believe what this GOP candidate is saying or doing!”

I guess I’d characterize it maintaining political power by appealing to the mob’s anger, rather than actually trying to solve any problems or address issues.

But as I was reading through yet a different Post article — this time on beach erosion in Florida — it occurred to me that the comments sections on most Washington Post articles are themselves nothing but angertainment.  Person after anonymous person, spewing venom and expressing their hatred for fill-in-the-blank.

So I made a comment to that effect.  In the angertainment opinion piece.  As politely as I could.  And was immediately flamed, called names, told I was an agent of Trump, and so on.

Thus more-or-less immediately proving my point.

I think I had a little epiphany, after that.  And after reading through the comments on a story about beach erosion in Florida.  In a nutshell, the U.S is going to lose a huge swath of coastal land as a result of climate change, with all the hardship, displacement, and loss that implies.  And 99 percent of the comments boiled down to “Florida sucks, and they deserve it”.

After reflecting on that a bit, I’ve decided that I’m just not going to read comments sections any more.  I’ll read what the professional journalists write.   And skip the amateur bile.  No matter how entertaining it might be to get all stoked up on the anger expressed.

For newspapers where comments are heavily moderated — such as the New York Times — there is still some climate of reason in the comments sections.  And the comments there are frequently worth reading.

But in the Washington Post — and, frankly, almost everywhere else — the comments sections really seems to be in a race to the bottom.   Just a bunch of angry people, who got stirred up by the newspaper article, and who feel the need to mouth off.

So I’m just not going to go there.  Surely, even in retirement, I can find a better use for my time.

Post #1644: No-salt turkey jerky, the re-run

 

Nothing exceeds like excess.

For this second round, I decided to amp up the turkey jerky processing.  I purchased several more discount turkey breasts from my local Safeway, to try out the idea of making jerky from fully-roasted turkey.

Recall from the just-prior post that the USDA safety guidelines for jerky call for you to cook the meat (to 165F) before drying it.  That being the case, why was I going through the hassle of butchering and slicing raw turkey?  I looked around on the internet and, sure enough, some people simply make jerky out of roast turkey.  No need to cut up the raw meat.

In this round I gave that a try.

It works, kind of.  It’s certainly a lot less messy, and a lot easier.  But the cooked turkey tends to fall apart rather than cut cleanly.  So I ended up with a lot of variation in the thickness of the “slices”.  That’s a bad thing, when making jerky, as it generates variation in the extent to which the meat absorbs the marinade, and variation in drying time.

I used the same marinade as in the last post, but increased the salt substitute by 50% and dropped the liquid smoke.  The final product this time has just enough saltiness to be satisfying, without being spicy.

The whole process yielded two pounds of rather ugly-looking turkey jerky, at a meat cost of $3.50 per pound.  That’s starting from turkey breasts at $0.59 a pound. Compare that to what appears to be the going rate on Amazon of about $1.50 an ounce.

Plus, I get yet another pot of turkey soup out of it.  Because, who doesn’t want yet more turkey soup, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

Judging from what was left in the Safeway meat case, I could probably keep this up for another week or so.  But I think I’ve had enough.  Two pounds of jerky is a lot.

The only thing left to do is to estimate the sodium content of this turkey jerky.  I didn’t use any salt (sodium chloride), but the turkey itself has some naturally, and likely has some from whatever it was injected with by the meat processor.

Near as I can tell, four ounces of turkey contains about 100 mg of sodium.  The rule of thumb is that you get an ounce of turkey jerky for every four ounces of raw meat. So this should end up with roughly 100 mg of sodium per ounce of turkey jerky.  That puts this in the same league as Strollo’s, the lowest-sodium jerky on the market, with just 65 mg sodium per ounce.

Mission accomplished.  It’s completely possible to make a tasty low-sodium turkey jerky at home.  And you can make it from leftover roast turkey.

Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky

Edited 2/22/2024

I made and ate no-salt turkey jerky, and lived to tell the tale.

I added a little salt-substitute (potassium chloride) for taste, at the rate of four teaspoons per cup of marinade.  (See recipe below).  In hindsight, a little more wouldn’t have hurt.  But the only sodium in the jerky is what was already in the turkey when I started.

The long and the short of it is that you don’t need salt to make jerky safely.  But it helps.

If you skip the salt, you’d be well-advised to do exactly as the USDA recommends for the rest of the processing steps.  Mostly, that means cooking the meat before drying it.  And then drying it quickly and thoroughly.

Below you see the results of an experiment with jerky made from ground beef heavily contaminated with e. coli.  The bars show how much live e. coli remained in the meat.  Shorter bars are better.  (Note that this is a log scale, so every tick mark on the scale is a ten-fold increase in the concentration of e. coli.)

Source:  Taken and substantially modified from:  Judy A. Harrison, Mark A. Harrison, Ruth Ann Rose, Survival of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Ground Beef Jerky Assessed on Two Plating Media,Journal of Food Protection, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 11-13, https://doi.org/10.4315/0362-028X-61.1.11. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22014806).  Annotations in red are mine.

By eye, cooking the meat (right half versus left half, above) matters more than adding salt/nitrite curing mix to the meat (white bars versus black bars).  Though, if you want the absolute minimum risk of contamination, you should do both.

After contemplating those results for a bit, I don’t think I’d try no-salt with anything but solid meat jerky.  As shown below, using turkey.  Ground meat seems a little too bacteria-friendly to allow you to slack off on any aspect of the processing.

Depends on your tolerance for risk, I guess.  But that’s true of all home-preserved food. Continue reading Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky

Post #1642: Hallelujah! The report.

 

Background

As I sit down to do my legally-mandated Cyber Monday shopping, I’d like to talk about a somewhat-less-commercial aspect of Christmas.

Last night, my wife and I attended the 51st annual Messiah sing-along at Clarendon United Methodist Church. For those of you unfamiliar with this tradition, Messiah is a baroque oratorio about the birth and death of Christ.  The words are straight out of the King James Bible (ca. 1611).  The music is straight out of the early 18th century (ca. 1741).

Despite these handicaps, the Christmas portion of it is still widely performed at this time of year (ca. 2022). The phrase used last night was “it’s been running longer than Cats”.

Talented soloists do the hard parts, while the audience serves as the chorus.  The audience ranges from excellent singers, to people like me (I can usually make it through the notes), to folks that are mostly lost, most of the time.  But it’s all good.  If you can’t sing the 16th notes, no problem.  Just sing what you can.

In a typical year, in the Washington DC area, there are easily a half-dozen Messiah sing-alongs to choose from.  I suspect the same is true for most cities across the U.S.

I’d like to say that it’s a way for us to kick off the holiday season on a more spiritual note.  But, really, for us, it’s more about the music.

My wife and I agree that, should we ever have access to a time machine, our first act would be to go back in time and kill Katherine Kennecott Davis, thus saving the Western world from untold billions of mind-numbing parum-pa-pum-pums.

The report

We attended this sing-along for several years ending in 2019.  Every pre-COVID-year, the church was more-or-less packed.  To the point where we’d come early to make sure we could get a parking place.  There was a lot of gray hair in the audience.  And a large portion of the audience had been attending that Clarendon UMC Messiah sing-along for years, if not decades.

Choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID that we hesitated to return to it.  Even after calculating the odds (I crudely figured a 1-in-300 chance of picking up a COVID infection there), it still felt a little iffy.  I had to wonder if we were just being wimps about this.  Seems like almost everything is back to almost normal,despite continued new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that would be considered high during any other part of the pandemic.

We’re going back to this one, in the era of endemic COVID, because they require masks.  Near as I can tell, none of the other sing-alongs in the area do that.  I briefly went over why choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID-19 in my last post on this (Post #1638).  So the masks seem prudent, to me.

Turns out, we are far from alone in hesitating to return to mass choral singing.

I would guess that the church was less than half-full last night.  In addition, the church had set up a broadcast for those who wished to attend virtually.

Moreover, the composition of the audience had changed.  By eye, there was less gray hair.  By show of hands, more than half were there for the very first time.  Only a handful of persons in the audience were multi-decade veterans of this event.

In hindsight, I interpret that as showing that many of the church’s aging, veteran singers decided not to attend in person.  Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about who is most at risk.

But is nevertheless a shame.  It suggests to me that if the current new-case levels really are the “endemic” or long-term level of COVID in the population, then this event will never fully recover from the pandemic.  It’s an event that largely catered to an elderly audience, but now carries an inherently high risk of COVID-19 infection.  That’s just not a winning combination in the era of endemic COVID.

Whether or not the newcomers will eventually repopulate that sing-along, it’s far too soon to tell.  I give Clarendon UMC credit for soldiering on.  I dropped a wad of cash in the collection basket on my way out, because it can’t be cheap to hire a small orchestra plus soloists.  But unless the level of COVID in circulation falls greatly, I suspect that this will only survive in its current, greatly reduced, form.

As for the other sing-alongs in the area, my wife is uncomfortable attending unless masks are required.  The science says that singing generates as much aerosols as coughing.  In this era, do you really want to stand in a big room full of people continuously coughing, and none of them wearing masks?

Ah, yeah, I think that’s where we draw the line.  At least at the current level of COVID-19 incidence.

The issue of mandatory masks for mass choral events cuts both ways.  We wish some other Messiah sing-alongs would follow Clarendon’s lead on the issue of masks.  But, I guess, it’s a question of whether the organizers of those events figure they’d lose more audience by requiring it, than not.  Maybe with a younger audience, no mandatory masks is the attendance-maximizing decision.  Last night, though, I’m pretty sure that masks were key to the modest level of attendance that was achieved.

Post #1641: Of Freon and Schrader Valves

 

Let me get to the punch line first, and tell the story second.

Yesterday, I found out that:

  1.  I own about $5,000 worth of R-22 refrigerant, a.k.a., Freon.  That’s at full retail, the price I’d have to pay currently to replace it.
  2. That $5K worth of refrigerant is held in place by a less-than-reliable $1 device that was invented in the late 1800s.

As an economist, I goggle at the mismatch.

But there appears to be nothing I can do about it.  Except to wait for the inevitable leak.

Now I’ll tell the story.  And try go get up to speed on modern refrigerant options.  And try to plan ahead.

My world and welcome to it.

My house came with an exceptionally quirky HVAC system.

The key elements are a pair of ground-source heat pumps.  That sounds pretty eco-friendly and high-tech, right?

As actually implemented, my home HVAC is a Rube Goldberg machine.  There’s a mile of plastic pipe buried in the back yard. Two pumps circulate water through that mile-long loop, terminating at two commercial (not home) AC compressors.  These grumble away in the basement, feeding refrigerant lines running to air handlers — the things that actually blow the hot or cold air around the house.  Those air handlers were clearly part of an earlier system, and to reach the one in the attic, the installers ran about 100′ of refrigerant lines outside, up the side of the house, and over top of the roof.  The whole mess is controlled by a mix of wired and wireless thermostats of dubious reliability.  These, in turn, interface with the 65-year-old three-zone baseboard hot water heat via a high-tech high-efficiency gas furnace and electronic interface, that actually turns the hot water baseboards on and off via valves than run on melted wax.  (That’s not sarcasm, that’s a Taco (pr. Tay-co) valve.)

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

In any case, we fired up the heat pumps this past weekend, only to find that one of the two heat pumps wasn’t.  Pumping heat, that is.

A service call later, and the diagnosis is that the unit is drastically low on refrigerant. 

Normally, that’s not much of an issue.  Find the leak, fix it, and refill the system.

But in this case, it’s a problem.  That’s because the bozos who installed those heat pumps less than 20 years ago cheaped out and installed units that use R-22 refrigerant, also known as Freon.  Of ozone destruction fame. That can no longer be made in the U.S. or imported into the U.S. 

(At the time they installed these, it was already well known that Freon was on its way out.  When I replaced the AC in my prior house, years before, I opted for the newer “Puron” (R410-A) refrigerant.  Buying a new R-22 unit at that time would have been foolish.  But now I own two of them.)

Normally, that’s not much of an issue either.  There are now drop-in replacement refrigerants like R-421A.  These don’t destroy the ozone layer, and in most cases you can simply vacuum out the R-22, replace with R-421A (or similar), and get on with your life.  (They have a huge global warming potential, though, as discussed below.)

But in this case, it’s a problem.  Apparently those replacements won’t work in every system.  My HVAC guy assures me that mine is one such.  Maybe the 100′ long refrigerant lines have something to do with that.  Maybe it’s the fact that these are oddball commercial units, not home units.

So in my case, the options were to fix the leak and top up the leaking unit with R-22, or throw it away and get a new one.  Which, owing to the unique setup, is almost certainly going to cost a mint.  Assuming my HVAC guy is giving me the straight story.

So I had my HVAC guy repair the leak and top up the system.  Which is when I found out that this company now charges more than $300 a pound for R-22.  I expected it to be expensive — that’s been in the works since 2010, when the decision was made to phase it out in the U.S.   Which means my replacement cost for the 14+ pounds of R-22 in my two units is somewhere around $5000.

(But I didn’t expect it to cost me more than $300 a pound, but it was a decision that I made on the fly.  I now see that the wholesale price of R-22 is around $40 a pound.  As shown below.   So my HVAC guy apparently took a roughly 800 percent markup.  Because, hey, my system wasn’t going to run without that additional R-22.  So they got me.  But this definitely means I’m looking for a new HVAC firm.  And I’m also wondering whether I got the straight scoop regarding whether or not drop-in replacement refrigerants will work.)

 

 

And what caused the leak, for which I had to purchase about $1500 worth of R-22?  That was due to a faulty Schrader valve.  Which is a roughly 70 cent part, using a design patented in 1893.

And that’s just the way it is.  The valves that made sense when they were holding in the (then) $1 a pound Freon are now are all that stands between the atmosphere and my precious antique R-22.

Looking ahead.

Given the dollars involved, I probably ought to think through what my next steps are.  As opposed to panic-purchasing something the next time there’s a problem.

There are a lot of considerations.

Source:  US EPA

First, with no new production or import allowed in the U.S., at the current price, it’s a pretty good bet that R-22 is now a zero-sum game.  That is, everything currently residing in appliances will get reclaimed and re-used, until it all eventually leaks into the atmosphere.

(In theory, per the EPA, you can ship your R-22 off to have it destroyed at a certified destruction facility.  Or you can plan on storing it safely, indefinitely.  But I don’t see that happening if you can re-sell it to your customers at $300+ a pound.

This means there is no environmentally benign way to get rid of the R-22 that came with my house.  If I opt for new equipment, the HVAC techs will, by law, recover (pump out) all the R-22  in the current system.  But surely they’ll sell that to be reclaimed and re-used.  Which means that it will be used in somebody else’s leaky system.  And one way or the other, it’s going to end up in the atmosphere.

I should mention here that in addition to R-22’s destruction of the ozone layer, all these refrigerants — even the ozone-benign ones — have a horrifically high global warming potential (GWP).  R-22 isn’t the worst, but it’s bad enough, with a 100-year GWP of 1850 (reference).  Or, in other words, a pound of that stuff has as much impact as 1850 pounds of C02.  My little R-22 leak had as much global warming impact as releasing about four tons of C02.  That’s about the same global warming impact as an entire year’s worth of electricity use, in my house.

I think that gives me my first and most obvious decision point:  As long as my current heat pumps don’t leak, I should make every effort to keep them running.  Even though the equipment is old, it’s still a reasonably efficient heating and cooling plant because it’s a ground-source system.  I don’t think any marginal efficiency improvements from new equipment could plausibly offset the GWP from the earlier-than-necessary release of my 14 pounds of R-22.

The fact that I own this R-22 is nothing for me to feel guilty about.  I’m not the one who installed the R-22 heat pumps.  But now, I’m the custodian of it.  It’s on me to address any leaks, to try to keep this crap bottled up for as long as possible.

Conversely, as soon as a unit develops an irreparable leak, I should decommission it.  With one caveat.  My HVAC guy actually gave me the option of just refilling the system, and not bothering to find the leak.  With a slow leak, plausibly I could have kept this running for years on maybe a pound of R-22 per year.  But if I could not fix the leak, it would be better that the R-22 go into somebody else’s system, with the chance that it doesn’t leak, than to keep it in a known leaky system.

(And so, that’s the first benefit of thinking this through.  Because, had this occurred in some sort of emergency situation, such as a deep cold snap, I’d probably have opted to keep the system running at all costs.  Now I have my head screwed on straight regarding the environmentally sound(er) thing to do.)

The caveat is that the systems you can get today all use refrigerants with high global warming potential.  So much so that refrigerants that were cutting-edge replacements for R-22 twenty years ago are themselves now being phased out.  Puron (R410-A), for example, has a GWP of more than 2000.  It came on the market in 1996, and it’s slated to be phased out sometime in the 2030s.

So the caveat boils down to this:  If we’re only a year or two away from new units that use a truly benign refrigerant (no ozone destruction, minimal GWP), it might make sense to limp along for that year or two, rather than install new equipment with soon-to-be-outdated refrigerant.

Right now, as I read it, the world of low-GWP refrigerants is in flux.  For heat pumps, Carrier now makes a large commercial ground-source unit using R-1234ze, with claimed GWP of less than 1 (reference).  Looks like some other manufacturers are jumping on that bandwagon.  So, plausibly, if that trend continues and they enter the home heating and cooling market, by the time I have to replace these old R-22 ground-source heat pumps, I ought to have a fairly efficient and environmentally benign alternative.

In the meantime.

Meanwhile, I remain appalled that the same century-old tech that keeps my car tires inflated is all that stands between my precious R-22 and the outside world.  When my HVAC guy comes back for a routine maintenance visit in the spring, I’ll be grilling him about options for making sure I never get another Schrader valve leak on these systems.  Maybe I can have him replace those prophylactically (there are tools for replacing them with out losing the R-22).  Maybe it’s a question of putting gas-tight caps over them.

One way or the other, there has to be a more secure way to keep this particular genie in the bottle.  The valves that made sense 20 years ago seem ridiculously out of place for a gas that’s going for hundreds of dollars a pound.

Post #1640: Humidifiers, first fill of the season.

 

Why humidify?

Among the many things I wish I’d never had to learn, but did, because of COVID, is the term “mucociliary clearance”.  And, hand-in-hand with that, I now understand that the standard advice to “drink plenty of fluids” when you have a cold has nothing to do with your kidneys.  That’s actually for the health of your lungs.

Your entire upper respiratory tract is lined with mucous membranes, and in addition much of the surface is lined with little hairs (cilia).  Mucous itself has substances that fight pathogens, and the cilia sweep the mucous toward the top of your throat, where you (ahem) eliminate that mucous in some fashion.

This is the primary mechanism by which your lungs protect and clean themselves.  Of anything that lands on the surface of the lungs.  Mucous traps things before they can actually get to your lung cells.  And then your lungs continuously sweep the mucous lining up toward your throat, where it gets disposed of.

And so, the whole point of “drink plenty of fluids” is to keep your mucous loose, per WebMD.

To today’s point, dry air inhibits mucociliary clearance, and humid air increases it.  (Also referenced halfway through this review article.)  And it’s not exactly rocket science to understand it:  Dry air dries out your mucous.  That slows down the rate of transport.  And so your entire upper respiratory tract functions less well at cleaning itself, and protecting itself from pathogens.

That’s why four out of five HVAC engineers agree:  Keep your indoor relative humidity between 40% and 60%.  That recommendation is based, in part, on studies like this one, of mice and flu, literally out of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) handbook:

Source:  ASHRAE.

See Post #894 for other studies, including ones using guinea pigs, and ones effectively using school children as guinea pigs.

With this latest bout of cold weather, the relative humidity in my house has finally fallen to 40%.  So I’m firing up my first humidifier today. 

After having tried many different types of humidifiers over the years, I’ve decided that I hate them all (Post #895).  Noisy, dusty, stinky, and/or expensive. Take your pick.  I have grudgingly settled on a pad-type humidifier with removable tanks as the least-hassle approach to maintaining indoor humidity.

I’ll be toting 2-gallon jugs of water for the next few months, keeping that filled.

All that, just to keep up my mucociliary clearance.

Post #1639, COVID-19 still 13/day, maybe an East/West split?

 

And, as of today, the U.S. is at 13 new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day, more-or-less the same as it has been for the past three weeks.  There’s a visible upward trend for most of the Mountain states.  And maybe the current pattern of increases and decreases mirrors the weather we were having a couple of weeks ago, with a very warm East and a fairly cold West.  (Recall that the seven-day-moving average reported today reflects infections that were occurring about two weeks ago, on average.)

Finally, data reporting has gotten so sketchy that I had to write a new algorithm to gap-fill the periods over which states fail to report.  Nobody ever cares about the statistical methods, but I figured I should state it.  In most cases, the new case counts with the new method will differ only slightly from what I was showing under the old method.

 

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