Category: Environment

Post 2031: Both of my heat pumps have died? This should be interesting.

 

 

My house is heated and cooled by two ground-source heat pumps, installed by the previous owner almost exactly 20 years ago.

Well, “was heated and cooled”.  One died last spring.  The other has one foot in the grave, with its most recent repair involving some burned wiring (never a good sign).  Both heat pumps need to be replaced. 

No-brainer, right? Just replace them.

Well …

The only firm in my area that specializes in ground-source heat pumps quoted me a price of $50,000 to replace my two three-ton (ground-source) heat pumps.  That’s for the basic model.  Bells, whistles, and line sets extra.  I’m guessing the final cost would end up around $60K.

 

At this point, the only thing I know for sure is that no matter what, this home repair is going to be about like buying a new car.  Or two.

Minus the fun.

Follow along for the next several posts, as I get a handle on what to do next.

Am I a heat-pump heretic?

I drive an EV.  Cripes, it’s a made-in-USA Chevy EV, for that matter.

I re-calculate my family’s carbon footprint every couple of years.

And I bought my house specifically because it had efficient ground-source heat pumps.

But the world continues to change.  And I’m not sure I’m going to be replacing those with new ground-source heat pumps.

And the fact that I would consider not doing that makes me something of a heretic.  But I’m still in the process of gathering my facts.

  1. Twenty years ago, ground-source was the undisputed king of heat pumps.
  2. In part, that’s because air source heat pumps of the time weren’t very good.
    1. They worked inefficiently when it was cold out.  To the point of essentially not working.  That caused use of “secondary heating”, meaning, typically expensive and inefficient resistance electric heating.  In winter, your fancy heat pump spent too much time operating as more-or-less a big dumb electric space heater.
    2. And they weren’t any great shakes, efficiency-wise, the rest of the time.
    3. Plus, they just kind of generally sucked.  Comfort-wise.  In the winter, they always seemed to blow air that was, upon careful measurement, slightly warmer than the existing room air.  Or, at least, that’s how I recall my Maryland apartment of the mid-1980s.
    4. Basically, they were air conditioners that, in this climate (Virginia), could also put out some heat, for some of the winter.
  3. My impression is that this changed about ten years ago.  At some point, cutting-edge air source heat pumps appeared to be — by my calculation — at least as efficient as my 2004-vintage ground source heat pumps.
  4. That’s because air-source technology improved rapidly, while the technology of ground-source units … lagged?
    1. Part of the improvement was in finding a way for air source heat pumps to function well even at low outdoor temperatures.
    2. That went hand-in-hand with greater efficiency of operation.  E.g., modern air-source units might now have variable-speed compressors, fans, and so on.
    3. But not much seems to have happened to ground source heat pumps.
    4. The slower rate of improvement in ground source heat pumps is a side-effect of the vastly lower volume of ground-source (about 0.5% of the home market) compared to air-source (the other 99.5%).
  5. As a result, ground-source heat pumps are no longer a slam-dunk winner, compared to traditional air-source heat pumps.

    1. As a matter of basic physics, they should be.
    2. But because they seem to be behind the curve in efficiency improvements, they aren’t.
    3. The upshot is kind of a temporary tie:  The rapid adoption of more efficient technology in the air-source sector has offset (or nearly offset) the inherent physics-based advantages of ground-source heat pumps.  For now.
  6. There is no point number 6.
  7. But the tax laws still grossly favor ground-source heat pumps over air-source.  And the subsidies are large.
    1. For ground source, the Feds pick up 30% of the installed cost, no limits.
    2. For air source, if it meets certain efficiency standards, the Feds pick up a maximum of $2000 (or 30% of the installed cost, whichever is less).
    3. And Virginia offers an incentive system for ground-source that is beyond weird, and must be described in a separate posting.  At first blush it appears ludicrously generous toward ground-source units.
    4. Separately, I’m not sure they were thinking about replacements of worn-out old systems when they wrote the law.  Effectively, what I’m doing is repairing my existing system, by replacing the worn-out heat pumps. But, legally, that’s treated identically to putting in a brand-new ground source heat pump system.
  8. So, something is not right here.
    1. Is the law outdated, and out-of-step with the current state of technology?
    2. Or is the law a closet buy-American plan, as these ground-source units seem to be U.S.-made?
    3. Or am I dead wrong about the near-equivalence of air-source versus ground-source efficiency in the modern world?
    4. Or, some thing even weirder — geothermal versus ground source discussion to be added at some point.
  9. Curveball:  My first floor would be ideal for a couple of “ductless mini-split” systems.  These are little air-source heat pumps, but instead of being designed to hook up to your ductwork, they simply blow air around like a room air conditioner.  You pass the refrigerant pipe and condensate drain through an exterior wall, between the inside air-distribution cabinet, to the outside compressor.
  10. So, why not replace one of the dead ground source heat pumps with two mini-split air source heat pumps, half the size.
    1. Near as I can tell, I’d pay only a modest or no efficiency penalty for doing that.
    2. And it looks like it would be quite a bit less expensive, even accounting for likely shorter equipment life of an air-source system.
    3. Plus, we’d possibly have a warm kitchen for the first time since we moved here, because we could bypass our near-useless 1959 first-floor ductwork.
    4. Plus, it’s lower risk — more like an appliance, and less like a fixture in the house.  If one of those dies, I can just toss it and more-or-less just plug in a new one.  Not quite as convenient as a fridge, but not hugely different.
  11. But … but … but … the very thought of replacing a ground-source heat pump with an air-source heat pump is … heresy.  Particularly given that the actual “ground” portion of the ground-source system — the mile of plastic “slinky” pipe buried in my back yard — still functions perfectly.

Conclusion

That’s as far as I can take it in this first post.  I need to pin down some facts to go any further.

I bought this house in large part because it had an efficient ground-source heat pump.

But the world has changed since I bought it.

The next post takes the two real-world heat pumps — one a ductless mini-split air source heat pump, one the ground-source heat pump for which I have been quoted an installed price — and tries to get an apples-to-apples comparison between them, in terms of efficiency.

That turns out to be stupidly hard to do.

That’ll be the next post:  SEER, SEER2, EER, EER2, COP, HSDF and all the rest of that alphabet soup.  And how on earth they measure that, for ground-source heat pumps.

Post #2010: PFAs, the revenge of Freon

 

Per- or Poly-fluoro-alkyl substances (PFAs).  They’ve been in the news of late.

This post is a quick refresher on PFAs. For me.  I’m just trying to get my facts straight before seeing if a need to change anything in my life to try to avoid PFAs.

Short answer is no, but more from lack of information than for any positive reason.

Part 1:  An easily-digested chemistry lesson.

Source:  An on-line chemistry course from Western Oregon University.

Alkanes are chemicals consisting of nothing but carbon and hydrogen, where the carbon atoms are “saturated” with hydrogen.  (That is, there are no high-energy “double bonds” or “triple bonds” among the carbon atoms.)  The carbons can be arranged in a straight chain, a branched chain, or some form of circle.  You are already know the names of some common straight-chain alkanes, above.

Aside from the fact that we can burn them as fuel, most common alkanes are unremarkable.  These substances are produced routinely in nature (insert fart joke here) and will break down naturally.  For example, the half-life of methane in the atmosphere is somewhere around 10 years.

But if you can take those run-of-the-mill alkanes, and somehow substitute fluorine atoms for hydrogen atoms … magic happens.

For example, the single most-common plastic in the world — polyethylene — found in milk jugs world-wide, becomes the slickest substances in the world — Teflon.

 

The quick upshot is that whenever you substitute fluorine for hydrogen in these long-chain carbon compounds, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with something that’s pretty cool.  Something that is:

  • completely inert (Halon). or
  • works as a refrigerant (Freon), or
  • produces a nearly-frictionless surface (Teflon), or
  • makes fabric waterproof and oil-proof  (Scotchguard)

The root of all of that is this:

Source:  Chemtalk.

All these magical properties — inert, un-wettable, nearly frictionless — derive from the same source.  Fluorine is the most electro-negative element in the known universe.  That is, among all the elements, fluorine has the strongest attraction to electrons held by other atoms. 

The upshot is that if you can manage to get fluorine to bond with carbon, it stays bound.  It takes a large amount of energy to break that bond, precisely because fluorine wants to hold onto those carbon electrons more than any other element does.  Better yet, that property of being tightly bound spreads to the adjacent carbon atoms, to some degree, so that much of the entire molecule is really strongly stuck together. 

It is no small trick to create fluorocarbons in the first place.  It takes more energy to get a fluorine atom hooked onto a carbon than it takes to get any other suitable element to do that.

This is why there are almost no naturally-occurring fluorocarbons.  I just read that the count stands at 30 such, in all of nature.   And many of the naturally occurring fluorocarbons are produced by a single family of exotic tropical plants.  You are guaranteed scientific publication if you discover a new one.  Correspondingly, nothing in nature has evolved to digest or decompose or otherwise deal with fluoro-carbon compounds, which is why all the plants in that family are incredibly toxic.

Sometime, when you want to feel uncomfortable, read up up what happens if you have any significant contact with hydrofluoric acid.  That intrinsic property of free fluorine is part of the problem.

In short, once you manage to substitute fluorine for hydrogen in a carbon compound, you end up with something that doesn’t want to interact with any other chemicals.  Not water.  Not oil.  Not nothin.  The very properties that make PFAs desirable as industrial chemicals — inert, waterproof, oil-proof, slick — make them virtually indestructible in the natural environment.

In any case, given their properties, it’s not too surprising that we use a lot of them.  I see a 2021 estimate from the EPA that we produce at least 85,000 tons of PFAs in the U.S. annually (Source:  EPA-821-R-21-004, Page 5-3).  If I did the math right, that’s (85,000 x 2000/330,000,000 =) at least a half-pound per person per year, in the U.S.  And I’m pretty sure that was a partial inventory.

 

2: PFAs: The best of Freon and DDT.

Source:  Socratic.org

“If those chemicals don’t break down under ordinary conditions”, you might reasonably ask, “then where do they end up?”

Seems like modern industrial society has asked that question a number of times now.  And, somehow, the answer is never good.

Start with Freon.  Any flavor of Freon.  If Freon is inert, where does it end up?  The answer for Freon is that it only diffuses into the air, until, some decades after it was released at ground level, it gets broken up by high-energy UV-C radiation in the upper atmosphere.  There, the fragments of that former Freon turn out to be quite good at thinning out the earth’s protective ozone layer.

The twist for PFAs is that they start with the same near-indestructibility of Freon, and tack on the food-chain-accumulation properties of DDT. And in this case, we’re squarely at the top of that food chain.  In addition, PFAs are eliminated from the body quite slowly — I see casual estimates of two to ten years.  Given all that, it’s no surprise to find that 97% of Americans have detectable levels of PFAs in their blood, based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey circa 2007.

Having high levels of this stuff in your blood — say from occupational exposure, or consuming something heavily contaminated — is undoubtedly bad.   I’m not so clear on what the expected health effects would be at typical population exposures.

Part 3:  Action items?

To cut to the chase, no, not really.

You can find advice in this area, but it all appears to be, of necessity, total guesswork.  The fundamental problem is that there is no good assessment of where typical population exposure comes from.  Not that I could find, anyway.  Which means that you have no way to know what’s actually worth avoiding, and what’s somebody’s list of things that might contain PFAs.

For some of these, though, it’s clear that when the Feds started getting them out of consumer products, the average concentration in the blood of Americans began to fall.  Like so, from the CDC, showing U.S. population blood levels of PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate, top line) after the EPA orchestrated a phase-out of use of that chemical in the US.

Source:  US CDC

On the typical list of things to avoid, you’ll see Teflon frying pans and stain-proof/waterproof fabrics. I’m not sure about the extent to which the PFAs in those types of products actually end up in your blood.

But there’s a surprising amount of common skin-contact and food-contact material that may have more mobile sources of PFAs in it.

Waterproof cosmetics and sunblocks are on everybody’s list.  Although I sure can’t find any that plainly contain -fluro- chemicals listed.  I just checked a couple of bottles here, and many examples on Amazon, and I see nothing that I would recognize as a PFA.  Plausibly, if those contain PFAs, they are inactive ingredients, and so typically aren’t listed?

But also grease-resistant food packaging, including pizza boxes, french-fry bags, hamburger wrappers, paper plates, microwave popcorn bags, and so on.  Basically, a whole lot of stuff associated with take-out food.  All because a lot of grease-proof paper/cardboard coatings contain PFAs. This Consumer Reports article was illuminating, and names names among fast-food restaurants.

Some cooking parchment paper has PFAs to make it extra slick.  Some cleaners and waxes have PFAs.

But aside from “don’t eat fast food”, none of that seems terribly actionable.

For drinking water, of course this stuff is in drinking water.  At least here, where around 10% of what’s flowing past the water intakes here in the Potomac River at Washington, DC came out of some sewage-treatment plant somewhere upstream.

It appears that either activated-charcoal or reverse-osmosis filters will remove PFAs.  (That makes sense, because both of those technologies are good at removing large organic molecules.)  No pitcher-type water filters remove PFAs.  Oddly, I read that distilling water doesn’t remove PFAs either, though I have no idea why not.

4:  Conclusion

My interest on PFAs was piqued by NY Times reporting that sewage sludge used as fertilizer passes PFAs from the sewage stream onto the land, to the plants grown on the land, to (in this case) the cows that eat those plants, and ultimately to people.

This is not news, really.  There have been several EPA actions on PFAs, including cajoling industry into phasing out what appeared to be the worst PFAs. Even a cursory look shows a long history of EPA interest in monitoring these chemicals.

What caught my eye is the case of a farmer whose land was condemned for food production, due to toxic levels of PFAs in the soil, toxic enough to sicken the cattle grazing on that land.  This, where the only plausible source for those PFAs is sewage sludge that has been spread on that soil.  And since PFAs don’t break down, for all intents and purposes, the land is forever condemned for food production.

That’s unusual.  Or, at least, you rarely hear of that out side of EPA Superfund sites.

But in terms of action items, for avoiding eating and drinking PFAs, I’m not seeing a lot of quantitative advice on what to do.

So, in the absence of any better information, I’m just going to put this one on my list of all the things I dislike about the modern world, but that I can’t do anything about.

Post #2004: Switching to sugar-free credit cards. I mean cutting boards.

 

This post is briefly explains why I’m tossing out my worn plastic cutting boards and mats, and rehabbing a few wooden cutting boards to take their place.

This, based on two absolutely ridiculous research findings regarding the amount of microplastic in the diet, as measured in credit cards per year.

This will all make sense by the time I’m done.

A ratio of credit cards.

A few weeks back,  you may have read that the average American eats a credit-card’s-worth of micro-plastic a week, on average.  The obvious click-bait potential for such a bizarre and gross assertion meant that it got lots of attention on the internet.  (The research has been around for a while, but for some reason, there was a recent resurgence of reporting on it.)

I’m not giving a reference for that, because, as discussed below, that’s total 💩.

But, because normal isn’t newsworthy, you’d be hard-pressed to find any internet mentions of the the debunking of that credit-card-a-week.  Other scientists have taken the same (~) underlying data and calculated a weight of microplastic in the diet of around one-millionth of a credit-card a week.  Just under five millionths-of-a-gram per week, not five grams per week.

(How?  To be as charitable as I can, it turns out to be difficult to take counts of a few dozens of microscopic plastic fragments, in a few samples of food, and extrapolate those data to come up with the total weight of microplastic in the diet.  As I read the scientific debate, the authors of the various “credit-card” studies simply made an exceptionally poor choice of extrapolation method.)

Now, you personally may have thought that that “credit-card-per-week” figure was implausible.  And yet, because “microplastic in the diet” is such a squishy entity (starting with, invisible), you really had no way to prove that your instincts were correct.

Now, thankfully, somebody has jumped the shark.  There’s a  new study claiming that, in addition to plastic in the food chain, the use of plastic cutting boards adds a further ten credit-cards a year of plastic to the diet.(?)(!).

FWIW, this is the cutting board analysis refernce  The piece that points out the problems with the 52-credit-cards-a-year analysis is this reference.

The cutting-board estimate estimate is also total 💩.  But it’s useful 💩

💩 ?  Yep.  Same reason as the credit-card-a-week study.  See above.

But its useful in the following ways.

First, this most recent “credit-card-consumption” study is self-debunking for the average user.  Because, while I’m not exactly sure what “microplastic in the diet” looks like, I for sure know what a plastic cutting board is.

Do the math, and at 5 grams per credit card, ten is just shy of two ounces a year.  This research is claiming that the average person’s plastic cutting boards erode from knife cuts at the rate of (~) two ounces/year/household member.

Really?  For your consideration, I offer Orange Cutting Mat (below), weighing in at a svelte 1.1 ounces:

If the erosion rate really were two ounces a year, the mat above would have been worn to shreds a decade or two ago.  It’s old.  Origins are lost in the mists of history.  It’s used more-or-less daily.  It’s obviously scratched from use.

And yet  this venerable cutting mat continues to serve.

Worse — and for shame — the authors of this 10-credit-cards-a-year study could have convincingly debunked their own finding with a day of work and a kitchen scale.  Weigh a cutting mat (per above, 32 grams).  Chop vegetables on that mat for five hours (300 minutes) to simulate 30 days of typical household chopping.  If the estimated two-ounces-per-year is correct, you’ll have lost about one credit-card’s-worth of plastic, or about 5 grams.  At the end of the day, if the erosion rate was as-stated, that plastic mat ought to weigh just 28 grams.  That amount of plastic weight loss should be easily detectable on a gram kitchen scale.

In other words, you can literally check their work by subtraction.  With a kitchen scale.  And a month’s worth of vegetable.  And some manual labor.  Just weigh the cutting mat pre- and post-  a marathon cutting session.

But as importantly, this study makes you realize that, yep, some of the plastic from those scratches is exiting as tiny fragments.  And you’re eating those tiny plastic fragments.  Some of them, anyway.  There’s no reason to think that the authors did their lab work incorrectly.

And, if you follow the thread here, because 10/52 =~ 20% based on the well-known Universal Law of Credit Card Accounting, using plastic cutting boards ups your dietary consumption of microplastic by 20%.  Or so.  Under the assumption that both studies embody the same degree of (gross) overstatement of the actual weight of plastic.

I don’t know whether the actual amount of microplastic in the diet causes significant harm or not.

On the one hand, humans have been using copious amounts of plastic for decades.  If there is some health hazard from microlastic in the diet, chances are good that it has already occurred.  I suspect we’re hearing a lot about microplastic due to some change in technology that makes it easier and cheaper to detect.

(Take that cynicism with a grain of salt, as my entire house is carpeted in cut-pile polyester wall-to-wall (Post #1943, carpet fiber burn test).  And, accordingly, I must surely live in veritable airborne-microplastic-polyester-fiber-fragment miasma.)

On the other hand, you at least have to recall the mechanism of action of asbestos for lung cancer.  My recollection is that it was a micro-fiber disruption argument, The fiber in question, thought to spur generation of lung cancer, was an eensy asbestos fiber fragment that got inside the lung cell.  And proceeded to screw up the works just enough, when that cell next divided.  That’s how I recall the theory of it.

So, durable microscopic fibers (or other plastic bits) can’t be readily dismissed.  Plausibly, it only takes a tiny amount of that stuff to cause whatever havoc it’s going to cause.

Conclusion:  Putting the ick in clickbait.

The upshot is that while the jury’s out on the dangers of microplastic in the diet, there’s no sense in force-feeding yourself with it.

Not when you can easily cut your food up on something else.

As final insult to injury, I note two things.

First, as I read it, based on the underlying data used, that 10-credit-cards-a-year from use of plastic cutting boards would be in addition to the estimated 52 credit-cards’-worth already supposedly in the diet.  So the purported total now stands at 62 credit-cards a year, for those who both eat food and use plastic cutting boards. 

Second, I infer from this glimpse of the literature that there’s a whole slew of scientific papers in the pipeline that use minor variants on this same (bad) extrapolation methodology.  So, changes are, there’s now going to be a string of articles showing the mind-boggling amounts of microplastic you eat due to fill-in-the-blank.  These will, of course, be rapidly popularized on the internet, because they put the “ick” in clickbait.  Literal accuracy is not required, only some plausible (i.e., science journal) source.

Post #1999: Power outages aren’t what they used to be.

 

A couple of days ago, we lost power for a few hours in the the aftermath of hurricane Debby, as it moved up the coast.  I took a walk during a break in the rain and found that a tree had split, bringing down some power lines a couple of blocks from my house.

Here are a few observations, sitting on my back porch, waiting for the power to come back on.

1:  It’s noisy around here when the power goes out.

Source:  Electricgeneratorsdirect.com

Used to be, power outages brought some quiet to the ‘burbs.  If nothing else, in the summer, all the AC compressors shut off.

But now, I can barely hear the wind in the trees over the droning of home emergency power generators in my neighborhood.  Instead of a bit of idyllic quiet, it suddenly sounds like I’m in the middle of a busy construction site.

All it lacks are the back-up beeps.

Unsurprisingly, these are all attached to the gi-normous McMansions that have sprung up in my neighborhood over the past decade.  (See my prior posts on the “tear-down boom” in Vienna VA.)  I’m guessing that about one-in-three of these new houses came with a permanently-installed natural-gas-fired generator.

The instant the power goes out, instead of quiet, you hear generators kicking in all over the neighborhood.   I can hear at least three, from my back porch.  Those turn on automatically, and won’t shut down until the power comes back on.  No chance they’ll run out of fuel, because these are connected to the natural gas supply.

It’s not as if my neighbors suddenly had some sort of preparedness mania.  They didn’t rush out and buy big home emergency generators in anticipation of the next snowpocalypse.  It’s that if you’re going to pay $2 mil for a house with all the extras (home theater room, sunken walk-in closets with windows, wine room, and so on), the $10K cost of an installed generator is rounding error.

So this is how power outages will sound in my neighborhood, for the rest of my life.  And as more small houses are torn down and replaced by as-large-as-the-law-allows McMansions, the density of emergency generating units is only going to go up from here.

2:  What is the sound of one reefer idling?

Now we get to the truly annoying part.

Near as I can tell, these new-fangled generators all seem to be old-school direct-drive units.  That is, an internal combustion engine (burning natural gas, in this case) is directly coupled to a generator creating alternating current (AC).

With that setup, the speed of the gas engine determines the Hertz (frequency) of the AC voltage.  The gas engine must therefore run at constant high speed to maintain 60 Hertz (cycles-per-second) AC.  That’s achieved by a governor that tightly regulates the speed of the engine.  At low electrical load, the engine runs just as fast and as loud as at high load, it just strains less to keep the generator spinning.

To a close approximation, these things are every bit as loud at idle — with no significant electrical load — as when they are putting out their maximum rated load.

The upshot is that each one is about as loud as a refrigerated truck.

So, instead of a bit of quiet, a power outage now means that my neighborhood sounds like a bunch of big diesel trucks are parked here,running at high idle.

3:  Where was I?  Ah yes, thrum-thrum-thrum.  Quiet emergency generators, explained.

So, as I sit on my back porch, enjoying the breeze and listening to the throb of my neighbor’s emergency generators,I figure I should explain the concept of “quiet” inverter-generators.

With an inverter-generator, the gas (or natural gas) engine turns a generator that generates DC electricity,  which feeds a piece of power electronics called an inverter, which then electronically generates the required 120 volt 60 hertz AC.

For that style of generator, there is no link between the speed of the gas engine and the frequency of the resulting AC (house) voltage.  This means that under light load, the internal combustion engine can slow down, and for any power demand, can be run at the speed/torque combination that most efficiently produces the required power output.

So inverter-generators are both more efficient, and on average quieter, than old-school direct-driver generators.  Though you will hear the engine speed change if there is a material change in the electrical load placed on the inverter.

Old-style direct-drive generator units are simpler to make than inverter-style generators.  But they are inherently less efficient, and, it seems, intrinsically louder, on average.  In any case, modern inverter-style generators have taken over the small-portable-generator market, specifically because they can be marketed as “quiet” generators.

4:  Direct-drive generators, inverter-generators, and three-legged-dog generators.

But my neighbor across the street, and one house up, seems to have purchased the worst possible kind of emergency generator.  It’s a maintenance-free natural gas generator that nevertheless runs like a three-legged dog.

The engine on that has kind of a ragged one-cylinder miss.  Which means that the engine speed and sound are constantly changing.  Which means the noise doesn’t fade into the background, but is constantly noticeable.  Particularly if you know anything about how an internal combustion engine is supposed to sound.

The result is an impossible-to-ignore loud thrumming noise, originating about 50 yards away.

Worse, while it sounds like it has a fouled spark plug, if I listed closely, a) the miss is a little bit too regular, and b) it seems to stop briefly from time to time.  I’m guessing this may be how the engine is supposed to run, and that it purposefully shuts down a cylinder under low load.  (I recall that GM tried such a strategy with some V8s, where fuel flow to half the cylinders could be cut off (e.g., when cruising at speed on the highway, where horsepower demand is low.)

So I think that not only am I being treated to the relentless thrumming of this generator for this outage.  I think that’s actually the way the thing is supposed to run.  So that I will be treated to this delightful noise every time the power goes out, from here on in.

I guess if I don’t like it, I can just hole up inside.

I may be without power for a while.

Maybe I need a my own whole-house generator.  That way, I can sit inside, in the AC, during a power outage, like all my neighbors.

4:  Quieter emergency power?  Hybrid-or-EV-plus-inverter, and USB-tethered Wifi hotspot.

For my emergency power source, I keep a 1 KW inverter on the shelf of my garage.  Hook that up to the 12V battery of a Prius, turn the car on and leave it, and run a heavy-duty extension cord from car to house.  The car will start and run the gas engine occasionally, to keep the battery up.  The only sound it makes is the occasional few-minute stretch with the Prius idling.

If the power isn’t back on in a couple of hours, I can set that up so that up so I can run the fridge.  In the meantime, I got around the loss of my FIOS internet by attaching my phone to my laptop, and using my phone as a Wifi hotspot.

5:  Aside:  Of magnetos and bike speedos.

Source:  Amazon.

Weirdly enough, I just installed a generator of sorts the day before this storm.

Old-school direct-driver backup generators are alternators.  That is, they directly convert mechanical motion into alternating current.

New-style inverter-generators are generators.  That is, they convert mechanical motion into direct current.  Which is then converted to alternating current by an inverter.  (Well, technically, a generator is anything that generates electricity, AC or DC.  But if it generates DC, you have to call it a generator, not an alternator.)

And then there are magnetos, something most have only heard about in the context of piston-engine-driven aircraft.  A magneto generates pulses of electricity used to fire the spark plugs of the engine.  It does this by passing a rotating magnet near a densely-wound coil of wire.  A common example is a typical gas lawn mower, where a magnet embedded in the flywheel creates the spark for the spark plug is it whips past a coil mounted a hair’s-breadth away from the flywheel.

And, oddly enough, an old-fashioned wired bike speedometer uses a magnet on the spokes, and a coil of wire on the front fork, to generate pulses of electricity in time with the turning of the wheel, which it then translates to speed.  Not exactly a magneto, but definitely in the magneto family tree somewhere.

6:  Final aside:  Just say no to GPS

Finally, apropos of nothing, bike speedometers are yet another area where the tech changed when I wasn’t looking.  And, in so doing, converted bike speedometers to just another class of disposable electronic devices.

Old-school wired bike speedometers work as described above.  They are, in effect, little magnetos, counting the rate at which a magnet on your spokes creates a tiny little electrical signal as it passes a fixed coil of wire.  In addition to wired bike speedometers, there are old-school wireless ones where the magneto signal is sent via radio waves.  Near as I can tell, these have all the drawbacks of wired ones, and none of the advantages.

But, because these are both old technologies, typical units come with easily-replaced standard button-cell batteries.  Buy a good one — I am partial to the Sigma brand — and they’ll last for decades.  Just change the battery every few years.

And then there’s GPS bike speedometers.  The latest thing.

In theory, this is a step up from magneto-based bike speedos, because there’s no need for any cables.  The speedometer captures a GPS signal, so it knows your location, and can infer your speed.  All for about the same $30 cost as a name-brand wired bike speedometer.

OTOH, owning one of those means that your bicycle now makes a permanent, downloadable record of exactly where you rode your bike, and when.  Presumably, this appeals to people who don’t mind all the involuntary electronic surveillance we already undergo.

But I simply didn’t want to buy yet another device that tracks me.  So, despite the ease of installation (no cables), I took a pass on a GPS-based bike speedometer.

If you immediately got to that punchline as soon as you saw “GPS”, then you get an A.

But, in addition, if you also inferred that these all inexpensive GPS-based bike speedometers have non-replaceable batteries, change that to an A+

And so, as with so much modern small electronics, these devices are disposables.  They come with an embedded USB-rechargeable lithium-ion battery.  When (not if) the battery reaches the end of its life, your sole option is to chuck your old one in the trash, and buy a new one.

Worse, there is clearly no engineering reason for this.  The previous generation of bike speedometers all had replaceable batteries.

It’s just that times changed.  User-replaceable batteries on cheap electronics had already become a thing of the past by the time low-cost bike GPS speedometers came on the market.  And so, if you want a cheap GPS-based bike speedometer, your sole option is to buy a disposable one.  Though, of course, none of them are labeled that way.

Which is how I ended up installing a little magneto-based wired bike computer on my wife’s bike.  It keeps no record of where I’ve biked.  And when the battery wears out, I can replace it.

Conclusion

When one house in a neighborhood has an automatic backup power generator, that’s an oddity.

When every third house has one, it’s cacophony.  As soon as the power goes out, the neighborhood is full of the sound of many loud, small, internal combustion engines, each powering an old-school direct-drive alternator.

I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten in my neighborhood until I tried catching some breezes on my back porch, during this most recent power outage.  A power outage now makes my neighborhood sound like an overnight truck-stop parking area.

With any luck, maybe this is just a phase these houses are going through.  These days, you can buy a power wall or similar large home storage battery, which then serves as your backup power source.   So that maybe the next wave of oversized McMansions will come with quiet emergency power.

But for now, as small older houses in my area are steadily torn down and replaced by McMansions — where the built-in emergency generator seems to be a popular option at the moment — it’s only going to get louder.

Post #1997: Fixing a resin-cased watch with a broken lug

 

If you are reading this, you probably have a resin(plastic)-cased wristwatch with a broken lug.  The lug being the place where the watch band attaches to the watch case.

The question you need to ask yourself is, how much effort do you want to go to, to fix a cheap resin-case watch?

In my case, I was so irked by the thought of tossing a functioning wristwatch into the trash that I started small and just kept ramping it up until I finally got a repair that stuck.

What finally worked, for me was to glue the steel watch band to the steel case back, using a thin patch of baking soda and superglue that spanned the watch back and the first links of the metal watch band.  In effect, I bypassed the resin case and broken lug entirely.

Edit 9/1/2024:  This repair is not waterproof.  Which, in hindsight, should not be a surprise, as regular superglue isn’t waterproof.  After about a month, the repair separated cleanly from the underlying stainless steel following several hours of outdoor exercise in the Virginia summer heat.

The obvious solution would be to use dishwasher-safe super glue, but that’s too thick.  Neither one I tried would soak into the baking soda.

So I redid the repair using the same regular liquid superglue as I used the first time. 

I wear the watch every day, and the second repair is holding up fine as of 11/19/2024.  Based on that, I’m going to claim that this makes a permanent repair, as long as you don’t get it soaking wet. 

The original post continues below. 

Ultimately, I chose this method because superglue has a reputation for adhering well to stainless steel.  I’m not sure how well it would adhere to a plastic (resin) strap.  But I wouldn’t rule it out.  If nothing else, the mix’s adhesion to stainless was way above my expectations.I’d be willing to try the same repair with a resin strap.  Certainly if the alternative is to throw the watch away.

You can’t see the repair when wearing the watch (a Casio A158WA).

And you don’t want to see it, when you take the watch off.

Despite the looks, the watch is still comfortably wearable, and the repair seems to be holding up well.

But the reality is that nothing else even came close to working.

Plus, it’s cheap and easy.  My only cash expense was for a new battery, because it seemed prudent to change the watch battery before doing this.  Once I figured out what to do, the repair itself took just a few minutes.

If that’s success, what were the failures?

Source:  WalMart. 

The best way to understand why I ended up with this expedient repair is to see what didn’t work.  In particular, these four approaches failed:

A drop of superglue on the lug takes essentially zero effort, but was a total fail.  Couldn’t even get the watch back onto my wrist before that gave way.

A drop of two-part liquid epoxy on the lug, ditto.  The act of buckling the clasp broke that free.

A small amount of JB Quik (two-part epoxy paste), applied between watch body and watch band, failed after a few hours.  It didn’t stick well to either the plastic case or the stainless watch band.

A larger amount of of two-part epoxy paste (JB Weld’s Quik Weld), applied as a patch across the stainless watch back and stainless watchband, held for almost a day.  But the JB Weld adhered poorly to the stainless steel, e.g., it was easily removed with a knife.

Why did this repair work?

To summarize the failures:

  • Glues don’t stick well to plastics, no matter what anybody tells you.
  • If you try to fix the lug itself, the surface area you’re working with is tiny, so there’s little area for the glue to adhere to anyway.
  • The resulting piece of hardened glue/epoxy is so tiny that it has little physical strength.

All of which told me that I needed to:

  • Glue to some surface where I could get some adhesion.
  • Glue to a much larger surface.
  • Use a much larger patch, so that it has some physical strength.

The breakthrough was in realizing that a) this was a $20 watch, b) the battery lasts seven to ten years, and so c) there was really nothing to stop me from literally gluing the watch band to the watch back.  Basically, just take the plastic case and plastic lug out of the equation entirely.

I chose superglue because it has a good reputation for sticking to stainless steel.

But I also needed a physically strong patch, because it needs to keep the watch band rigidly attached to the watch.  That way, the broken lug simply doesn’t matter.   All the force between watch and watch band is transmitted through the glue patch.

That suggested trying the baking soda and superglue hack.  I had always thought that was just internet-based nonsense, but in fact, there’s some good chemistry behind it (reference).  Assuming that reference is correct, the baking soda isn’t merely a filler, it actually 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.

Instructions, such as they are.

In any case, the repair was simple.  In concept.  The tricky step is wetting the powder with the glue, which turns out to be a timed test, as the superglue sets rapidly under these conditions.  If you try this, and read nothing else, read the paragraph below on wetting your baking soda with superglue.

  • Scrub the watch back and the watch band to remove dirt and oils.  Dry them.
  • Gently re-attach the watch band to the watch, using the broken lug.  This doesn’t have to be physically strong, it just has to look OK.  The repair itself is concealed on the back of the watch.
  • Set that face-down in a position that approximates the curve of the wrist.  (Because one or two links of the watch band will end up rigidly attached to the watch case, if this repair holds.)
  • Lay and sculpt your baking soda.  Spoon on and smooth out a bit of baking soda, being sure to cover a large area of both the watch back and the watch band, and making it thick enough that it will have some physical strength.  And yet, not too thick, or it’ll be uncomfortable to wear.  I was shooting for something about as thick as the pad portion of a band-aid.
  • Wet your baking soda with superglue.   Slowly drip on liquid (not gel) superglue until the baking soda is saturated.  I used most of a one-gram tube of Ace Hardware Future Glue liquid super glue.  See below for greater detail.
  • Dust a little more baking soda on, to cure any liquid glue remaining on the surface.
  • Let it sit for five minutes or so.
  • Clean up any excess glue using a sharp knife.
  • Use a bit of sandpaper to smooth out the surface that will touch the wrist.

In hindsight, cleanup would have been a lot easier if I’d taped over the parts where I didn’t want glue to stick.  But it wasn’t hard to remove the excess glue with a knife.

I don’t know if this baking-soda-and-superglue patch will stick to a resin band.  But it should be easy enough to try it and find out.

Wet your baking soda with superglue, some details. 

The tricky step in this repair turned out to be wetting the baking soda.  It’s a timed test, because the baking soda/super glue mix sets up fast.  And it’s critical to wet the baking soda patch thoroughly with superglue, because where you don’t, it won’t stick.  For sure, you need to get the full depth of the patch wet with superglue, all the way down to the substrate (e.g., stainless steel, in this case).

On the plus side, you’ll be done with it before you know it.  Because it behooves you to move fast.   Once I figured that out, I essentially paved the top of the baking-soda patch with closely-spaced drops of superglue.

I can tell you from experience that you pretty much can’t go back and fix any mistakes.  So if you (e.g.) get too little glue on a spot, by the time you go back to re-wet it, the top will already have skimmed over with hardened superglue, and you’re out of luck.  For a couple of “dry pockets”, I ended up using the tip of a knife to pierce the thinnest part of the dried layer of the superglue, then added fresh superglue.

Separately, in the end, I wish I’d done more (or, really, anything) to prevent adhesion of excess glue and excess glue/baking soda mix.  I wish I had used some tape, or light oil, or similar.  As it was, I ended up using the tip of a sharp pocket knife to scrape off excess glue and glue/soda mix.  FWIW, that’s a task that you should do as soon as feasible, e.g., before the mixture has had hours to cure.

An irrational repair?

To be clear, this is a cheap watch.  I could replace this watch — literally a more-recently manufactured clone of the unchanged model — for about $20.

But I like this watch.  It’s lightweight.  The only material that touches skin is stainless steel.  The quartz works are guaranteed accurate to within 30 seconds a month (or about twice as accurate as the best mechanical watches.)  This particular watch only gains seven seconds a month.  This makes the watch low maintenance, in that it stays within a minute of true time as long as I set it twice a year for the change in daylight savings time.  It’s waterproof enough that I can scrub the schmutz off of it.

And it’s simple.  Unlike any other digital watch I have owned, I can use all of its functions without reading the manual.

It has some faults.  The LED back-light is comically dreadful.  And the clasp is insecure in several ways.  And, as I now know, the plastic case is a potential failure point.  But Casio does not put this works into a metal case.

Anyway, I already own it.  And I hate tossing stuff that’s still (mostly) working.

Once I made my mind up to try to fix it, I was just too stubborn to give up.

Boiled down

How much effort are you willing to go through, in order to keep wearing a cheap plastic-bodied watch with a broken lug?

If you already own baking soda and liquid (not gel) superglue, it will take you just a few minutes to try this repair.

The big surprise was how strong and adhesive the super-glue-and-baking-soda patch is.  Before this, I had assumed that was all internet hype.  But, in fact, there’s good science behind it. And in this instance, it worked better than JB Weld epoxy, which is high praise indeed.

And when you get right down to it, what have you got to lose?  If it doesn’t work, then you are left with a broken wristwatch.  Which is what you already have.

 

Post #1995: The Green New Deal. Like getting underwear for Christmas.

 

I heard that the presumptive Democratic candidate for President had co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation, back when she was a U.S. Senator.

And now, she’s being pilloried for that, by the usual suspects.

So I got kind of excited.  As in, cool, maybe somebody in the Federal government has a well-thought-out plan for dealing with climate change.  How did I ever miss this dramatic step forward in Federal climate policy?

Unfortunately, instead of doing the normal thing and reading what people say about the Green New Deal, I actually read the Green New Deal legislation.

Only, there was no legislation.  It was a resolution, not a piece of legislation.  That is, an expression of some noble sentiment.  It’s the kind of document that starts off with a bunch of “whereas” paragraphs. So you know it doesn’t really serve any serious purpose.

Here’s a Google link to the Green New Deal resolution, as-introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019 (link).  Turns out, the 2019 Green New Deal resolution had about 80 co-sponsors.

It has been re-introduced in various forms since that time. I can only assume that (now) Vice-President Harris was one of many co-sponsors of one of the later, re-introduced version of it.  She was not a cosponsor of the 2019 House version, as she was a Senator.  Presumably, she was a cosponsor of a similar resolution in the Senate, at some point.

I checked out the 2023 version, and at least the first couple of pages were every bit as breathtakingly overblown as the original.  So I’d say it’s fair game just to quote the original.

There’s no there, there.

It’s an empty shell.  You may or may not consider it a nice-looking shell.  But it’s empty.

As soon as I started reading it, I realized there’s no there, there.  In the main, it’s platitudes, strung together, seasoned with grievance.  And it ends up being everything but the kitchen sink.

It’s not properly “a manifesto”, that is, a mere declaration of goals.  And least it didn’t sit that way to me, because a lot of those goals were given specific timelines.

But that’s it.  No details.  No hint of how to pay for it.  No hint of where to start.

Worse, to me, it seemed to call for miracles.  That is, things that appear to me to be absolutely technically infeasible, now, at least, no matter how much money you throw at them.  For example, converting the U.S. electrical grid to 100% renewable energy within ten years.  I’m pretty sure that no informed person thinks that’s possible.  I could be wrong.  I will eventually look to see if anyone has seriously asked and answered that question.

(Do I hear a voice complaining that Vermont’s grid is already there?  See Post #1952).

Edit: I stand corrected.  Maybe.  Turns out, the National Renewable Energy Labs studied what it would take to make the grid carbon-free (not the same as 100% renewable, due to nuclear power), in response to the Biden Administration’s bills investing in clean energy.  Near as I can tell, they consider it feasible to have a carbon-free electrical grid by 2035.  That’s not so different from what the Green New Deal calls for. The cost appears to be well under $1T.  Call it under $100B a year for a decade.

But, if you read the detail, you see phrases like ” Nuclear capacity more than doubles”,” … the potentially important role of several technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale, …”, and so on.  I think they also assume, in some scenarios, a more-than-doubling of electrical transmission capacity. 

If there were just one cutting-edge assumption, that would be one thing.  But I think if you look at everything that has to come together, my take on it is that, yeah, you could do it, maybe.  The notion that we’d have double our current nuclear generation capacity, on-line, in ten years, seems particularly far-fetched. 

But the point is, NREL is a serious source, and they have a serious analysis that says it could be done. And they say it would cost well under a trillion dollars.   Call it $100B a year for ten years, and done.

Plus, apparently the Biden Adminstration has a stated goal of a carbon-free grid by 2035.  So the Green New Deal isn’t the only place where that’s been called for.

And it kind-of calls for miracles routinely.  It’s full of little-bitty (/s) one-off items.  Like this one:

 (E) upgrading all existing buildings in the
5 United States and building new buildings to
6 achieve maximum energy efficiency, water effi-
7 ciency, safety, affordability, comfort, and dura-
8 bility, including through electrification;

All?  Sure, we’ll just upgrade all the buildings in the U.S. Just by-the-by.  I don’t see any problems with that.  (/s)

Or, even better:

 (O) providing all people of the United
13 States with—
14 (i) high-quality health care;
15 (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate
16 housing;
17 (iii) economic security; and
18 (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and
19 affordable food, and access to nature.

So let’s create national health insurance and a government-guaranteed annual income (?).  As an afterthought?  While we’re at it?

OK, in fairness, they did lean on the Depression-era New Deal when they thought up a name for it.  That said, it’s not clear why you need to guarantee affordable food, if you provide economic security.  But I don’t think that logic is the strong suit of this document.  Or I don’t understand the cant.

Finally, there’s this:

 (E) to promote justice and equity by stop-
23 ping current, preventing future, and repairing
24 historic oppression of indigenous peoples, com-
25 munities of color, migrant communities,
1 deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural
2 communities, the poor, low-income workers,
3 women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with
4 disabilities, and youth (referred to in this reso-
5 lution as ‘‘frontline and vulnerable commu-
6 nities’’);

Those are all noble sentiments.  But a) do they really think that there’s not enough on our plate just trying to deal with climate change, and b) how, exactly, do they propose to do that?

But my negative reaction to that closing paragraph may be leaning a bit too hard on the green part of Green New Deal.   That’s where my focus is.  So to me, the purely non-environmental parts of the document often come across as just so much extra baggage.  Just something else to be objected to.  But that’s at least in part a product of my bent, and clearly not the intent of the drafter(s).

The fact that this document is so heavily laden with such items tells me exactly what this is:  It’s a feel-good document.  That’s it.  The Green New Deal is not and never was any sort of practical plan for moving the U.S. forward in terms of climate policy.  

Not that I can see.

But Democrats can say they’re for it, and Republicans can say the opposite.  So it gives us yet another meaningless thing to squabble over, without accomplishing anything.  As if we didn’t have enough meaningful things to fight over.

Conclusion

Sometimes, the Christmas present looks better before you tear off the wrapping paper.  The tree of knowledge is not necessarily the tree of happiness.

Before I read it, I could at least imagine that somebody in the Democratic side of the Legislative branch of government had a plan for dealing with climate change.  Now I’m sure that nobody on Capitol Hill does.

I was hoping for a shiny new bike.  I got underwear.

On a more serious note, anyone who treats the Green New Deal as a blueprint for anything — e.g., a way to address climate change, a way to create millions of jobs, or whatnot — is being just being dishonest.  It is no such thing.

The next time I hear somebody tout the Green New Deal as “a plan for creating millions of high-paying jobs”, I’m going to mark that person down as an outright liar.

Because this isn’t a plan for anything.  It’s an expression of some noble sentiments, some of which you may agree with, some of which you may not.  Amalgamated into a document.

If that’s the extent of thinking, of the only major U.S. party that even admits that climate change is real, we are in some deep, deep shit.

Addendum:  Clean Up Your Own Damned Mess.

So, put up or shut up.  What’s my plan?

1  Whereas Adults of all races, creeds, national origins, sexual orientation, and economic status realize that cleaning up after yourself is a necessary part of being an Adult.

2  Whereas the exhaust gasses from fossil-fuel combustion are making a mess of the earth, via global warming and climate change, in ways that will be fairly important to future Americans, such as (say) being able to eat, and having a coastline that stays in roughly the same place …

3  Be it resolved that the Federal government’s response to climate change is to require all Americans act like adults and clean up their own damned mess. And to use all tools at our disposal to encourage other nations to do the same.

4  To enforce this new CUYODM policy, the Federal government will:

4.1  Solicit bids for industrial-scale removal and sequestration (permanent removal from the biosphere) of atmospheric carbon.

4.2 Use those bids to find the market-determined price of carbon removal, per ton.

4.3  Impose a tax on fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gasses, per ton of carbon content-equivalent, in that market-determined amount, so that each new sale of fossil fuels automatically generates enough funds to clean up the mess that combustion of those fuels will create.

4.4  Dedicate the resulting funds exclusively for paying for actual removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

4.5  Sequester any unspent funds until such time as carbon-capture-and-sequestration capacity increases to the point where all such funds are used.

4.6 Re-bid additional rounds of carbon capture at five year intervals, and adjust the amount of the carbon tax accordingly, until the U.S. has put in place adequate capacity to clean up all of the mess that we are creating.  (That is, carbon-neutrality.)  Any natural, provable carbon sinks, within the U.S. shall be included in the net-carbon-neutrality calculation.

4.7  Anybody who wants to extract and burn fossil fuels in the U.S. is free to do so.  As long as they pay enough to clean up the mess that creates.

Commentary:

When you step back from it, much of the history of U.S. environmental policy is just a case of asking that you clean up your own mess, rather than dump it in a public space.

There was a time, in the U.S.A., where anybody was free to dump pretty much anything, in any river or lake, or into the air.  I can recall, for example, that as a child, I attended a Catholic grade school that incinerated its own trash, on site.   This was private, industrial-scale garbage burning, in the middle of a large city (Philadelphia).  That was, apparently, a completely normal thing for the 1960s.

But, collectively, that any-mess-you-care-to-make policy led to such bad outcomes (reference Cuyahoga River fire), that we got the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, passed with bipartisan support.  The EPA, as I think I recall, was created under President Nixon.

In any case, if it’s not feasible to create that much carbon sequestration, at least we’d know that, and could quit pussyfooting around this issue.  If we literally can’t pull it back out of the atmosphere, the only real option, in the long run, is not to burn so damned much of it in the first place.

Post #1994: East Coast forest fire smoke. Again?

 

Update 7/26/2024:  Well, this is a puzzler.  Maybe I have mistaken some massive local fire for a plume of remote wildfire smoke. 

As of 2 PM today, it’s back, and worse.  Very strong smell of smoke, PM 2.5 readings in excess of 100 (in whatever units that is) in my yard, and the haze is visible when I look down the street. 

And yet, official AQI readings for my area don’t show anything out-of-line.  There are no reported wildfires near my home. I don’t hear any fire trucks.

In any case, the only thing I’m sure of is that the air in my neighborhood is smoky.  By sight, by smell, and confirmed by a reasonably-accurate PM 2.5 meter.  Either a house is burning down somewhere upwind of Vienna, VA, or we’re back to breathing forest fire smoke.  We’ve had more than enough rain in the past few days to suppress any sort of local massive wildfires.

I have no idea why the only coverage I can find, of this most recent forest fire smoke plume, is in the New York Times.  Perhaps I have mistaken some local source of smoke for a national issue.  But a PM 2.5 reading of 100, visible haze, and noticeable smell all add up to some materially unhealthful air.

Original post follows:

Yep.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that it smelled like burning wood outside.

As did my wife.

Uh, notice the smell, that is.

I then went through a routine of checking my local Air Quality Index (AQI), which was in fact unhealthy due to high levels of PM 2.5 (particulates).

Then went to the map (above, from the NY Times), to see that, sure enough, I was smelling some “light” smoke from forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

Maybe I never much noticed this in years gone by.  Maybe.  But the trend for U.S. annual wildfires is clearly pointing up.

Source:  National Interagency Fire Center.

Normally, I’d blather on about global warming.  And, for sure, increased incidence of forest fires is a likely outcome of that.  And yet, I think we’re still waaay too early in the game for this to be driven by climate change. 

And, indirectly, the U.S. EPA seems to agree.  While they show the same trend that I showed above, they attribute it to cyclical climate factors that have led to a drying-out of U.S. western forest lands (reference EPA).  (I read “cyclical” to mean that those factors are expected to reverse.)  Though, obviously a general warming trend doesn’t help, even if the U.S. has seen only a slight degree of warming so far.

I’d say that the (sketchy) Canadian wildfire data seems to back that up.  To a degree.  If you include the period just prior to that shown above, the Canadian data show no strong upward trend.  At least, not  if you exclude that record 2023 season.

Source:  Natural Resources Canada.

In any case, I invite you to fill in your favorite rationale for this strong recent upward trend in U.S. wildfires, as long as you find some way to blame the libs/eco-freaks for it.  Including those wily Canadians.

Here’s the odd thing from this most recent experience:  These smoke plumes appear to have highly variable density at ground level.  Even after traveling across the country.

I really shouldn’t have been able to smell “light” smoke, from 3000 miles away.  But at that time, my PM 2.5 meter showed almost three times the particulate level outside, as did various on-line AQI sites.

I believe that these smoke plumes have that much small-scale variability in them, even after crossing the country.  They are a lumpy amalgamation of smoke, not a uniformly-dispersed smoke.  This is among the many things that makes predictions of daily smoke hazards, from remote forest fires, difficult.  My AQI forecast seems nowhere near as accurate as (say) the rain or temperature forecast, during wildfire season.

It was just last year that the air in New York was orange, for several days running, from Canadian forest fire smoke. And was merely hazardous to breathe, for a few more.  Both the data and my hazy recollection say that this is a new phenomenon.

No matter how you slice it, and no matter whom you blame for it, poor air quality from remote wildfire smoke appears to be the East Coast summertime normal now.

Post #1989: What fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption is for lawn mowing?

 

I should preface this by stating that I drive an EV and heat my house with a ground-source heat pump.  So I’m hardly against substituting electricity for direct combustion of fossil fuels.

But the data are what they are.

Best guess is that all types of lawn-care type activities, both residential and commercial, including mowing, leaf blowing, and so on, together account for as much as 2% of U.S. gasoline consumption.  Residential (non-commercial) yard care of all sorts accounts for maybe 0.6% of U.S. gasoline consumption.

Since C02 production is directly proportional to gasoline use, that means residential lawn mowing is rounding error in terms of global warming impact.

For the average American, using an electric lawn mower in no material way offsets the global warming impact of driving an SUV, truck, or car.  Choice of car is more than 100 times as important as your choice of lawn mower.

I hope nobody is surprised by that, despite the ludicrous estimates of the environmental impact of lawn mowing that can be found on the internet.

Source:  Saint Philip Neri and the chicken, 16th century, as quoted by Pope Francis.

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Often attributed to Mark Twain, circa 1900.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Jonathan Swift, 1710

Lawn mowers, yet again.

The point of this post is to estimate what fraction of U.S. gasoline use is attributable to lawn mowers. 

Each gallon of gas burned creates roughly the same 20 pounds or so of C02.  Therefore (ignoring NOx, nitrogen oxides), the fraction of gasoline consumption attributable to lawn-mowing will tell me the contribution that gasoline-based lawn mowing makes to global warming, relative to gasoline-driven passenger vehicles, in the U.S.

In other words, residential lawn mowing’s share of gasoline burned is lawn mower’s share of C02 released.  And that shows how U.S. gas lawn mowers (in aggregate) compare to our passenger vehicles (in aggregate), in contributing the world’s warming.

In previous posts, I showed how a modern (overhead-valve) lawn mower engine stacks up against a typical car, in terms of pollution per hour (Post #1775 and related posts).   (Pollution being defined in various traditional ways (e.g, particulates, nitrogen oxides.)  In round numbers, an hour of mowing produces roughly the same pollution as an hour of driving a typical car.  

While “pollution” as used above includes particulates and smog-forming emissions, it doesn’t include C02 at all.  Yet, while most smog-forming emissions are relatively short-lived, the increase in atmospheric C02 from fossil-fuel combustion is a nearly-permanent addition to atmospheric greenhouse gasses, in the context of a human lifespan.  (As in, like, forever — here’s a little something published in Nature Climate Change to brighten your day REFERENCE).  Most of it will still be affecting climate 300 years from now.  A good chunk of it — say a quarter — will still be warming the climate millenia from now.

(Separately, the big shocker to me was finding out that gas in gas cans is major source of pollution. Per my actual test, old plastic gas cans (“Blitz cans”) are ridiculously permeable to gasoline, and gas stored in old plastic cans is a large source of smog-forming gasoline vapor.  This, apparently, is why the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has such stringent standards for gas cans.  And why, until recently, “CARB-compliant gas can” was synonymous with “awkward to use”.)

Post #1773: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 3: Why do all gas cans suck?

For the estimate above, I did my own number-crunching, with clear documentation as to sources of data and details of calculation, because estimates on the internet are all over the map.  The plausible estimates were mostly published by state governments.  The ludicrous ones appear to come from fanatical but innumerate environmentalists.

And, of course, it’s the ludicrous ones that get recirculated the most.  You might think that’s something unique to the internet, but per the quotes above, the internet merely speeds up and amps up long-noticed aspect of human nature.  Lies are juicer than the truth, and propagate accordingly, seemingly regardless of the medium of propagation.

In any case, to validate my prior estimate (an hour of mowing is like an hour of driving), I decided to look at estimates of the fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption that goes to lawn care.

And — no big surprise — those estimates seem to have the somewhat the same bullshit nonsense level as the estimates of the pollution generated by an hour of mowing.  So I thought I’d take an hour this morning and try to separate fact from fiction, on this question.

Some calculations, and some citations, regarding the fraction of U.S. gasoline use attributable to lawn mowing.

Crude per-household use calculation, lawn mowers: 0.6%.

Source:  OFF-HIGHWAY AND PUBLIC-USE GASOLINE CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION MODELS USED IN THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION Final Report for the 2014 Model Revisions and Recalibrations,Publication Number – FHWA-PL-17-012 June 2015

The U.S. consumes about 136 billion gallons of gasoline per year, of which 91% is for light cars and trucks (Cite:  US Energy Information Agency).

The U.S. has about 130M households (Cite: U.S. Census Bureau, via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

Ergo, by the magic of long division, average annual U.S. gasoline consumption works out to be a nice round (136B/130M =~) 1000 gallons per household.

(Separately, this squares with survey-based estimates showing about 650 gallons of gasoline consumed annually per licensed U.S. driver (CITE), and, based on harder statistics, about 230M licensed drivers (CITE).  (That is, 650 x 230M drivers /130M households =~ 1150 gallons of gas per year, per household).

I use about 2 gallons of gas per year, mowing my large suburban lawn, using a mower with a modern overhead-valve Honda engine.  I’m guessing that’s an upper bound for per-household use, as my yard is larger than average.

This suggests that gasoline use, attributable to household lawn mowing, accounts for somewhere around (2/1000 =~) 0.2% of total U.S. gasoline use. 

But, per the EPA graphic above, households only account for about a third of all gasoline use, for all types of lawn care (e.g., mowing, leaf blowing, snow blowing, and so on).  So total U.S. gasoline consumption for lawn care, of all types, by all sources, would therefore be about 0.6% of all U.S. gasoline consumption.

EPA, 2015:  2.7B gallons for all lawn care activities, residential and commercial, about 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption. 

Separately, the same EPA source (for the graphic, above, Table 42) directly estimates 0.9B gallons of gas used for residential lawn care activities annually, and a further 1.8B used for all types of commercial lawn care, for a total of about 2.7B gallons of gasoline use for all types of lawn-care type activities.  This would therefore amount to (2.7B for lawn care/137B total =~) 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption.

U.S. Department of Energy (2011):  Mowers alone, residential and commercial, 1%.

” Mowers consume 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline annually, about 1% of U.S. motor gasoline consumption.”

Source:  Clean Cities Guide to Alternative Fuel Commercial Lawn
Equipment, U.S. DOE, 2011.

Conclusion

Source:  RC groups.com

I’d say that’s more than enough research to get a usable answer.

Almost all gasoline in the U.S. is used for private on-road light vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs).  Per the EPA cite above, 91% of it.

From the perspective of global warming, that’s the problem.

The amount of gas used by household lawn mowing is regrettable, but it’s rounding error in the big picture.

Buying an electric lawn mower in no way expiates the sin of driving a gas-guzzling car.  Or, really, any car, for that matter.

Keep your eye on the ball.  Despite what you may read on the internet.

Addendum:  Lawn services that do residences are classified as what, exactly?

I never did find a direct answer to this via the U.S. EPA.  By looking at the earliest versions of their work, I infer that the original split between residential and commercial yard work is by ownership of the equipment.  Initially, it was referred to as “privately owned” versus commercial equipment.

The upshot is that if a commercial service cuts somebody’s yard, the EPA likely counts that as commercial use.  So to get apples to apples, I likely need to move some part of the EPA’s commercial use back to the residential sector.  That is, if I really intend to assess the impact of mowing one’s yard / having one’s yard mown, relative to the impact of cars.

This will increase my initially-cited estimate of 0.6% of using gasoline being used for mowing. But, by how much?

Best I can tell, something like three-quarters to four-fifths of Americans mow their own lawn.  (You know what I mean: Of those who have a lawn … e.g., CITE).  But that really ought be to weighted by lawn area, as it’s almost certainly true that the larger the private lawn, the more likely it is to be cut by a professional.  I did not find that information anywhere, so …

If I stick with the lower cited number and pretend that only three-quarters of residential lawn mowing is done by individuals (that is, using privately-owned mowing equipment), because three-quarters of people with lawns mow their own,  I need to adjust the initial 0.6% upward to 0.8%. (The EPA residential sector estimate omits about a quarter of U.S. residential lawn mowing, because a quarter of private lawns are commercially mown.)

The conclusion is unchanged.  In the U.S., gasoline used in lawn care is trivial compared to the gasoline used by passenger vehicles.