Category: Environment

Post #1918: Falling Leafs, fallen Bolts: The trend in used EV prices in my area.

 

I don’t drive much.  I haven’t had a car for a couple of years now, and have gotten along  by borrowing my wife’s car, when convenient.

I’d like to get my hands on a nice, used EV.   That’s a good choice, given that I’m going to use this for a grocery-getter and little else.

Depending on the price, of course.  And I’m clearly in no hurry to buy one.

Back in July I looked at my local market for used EVs and narrowed my best option down to a 2018 or later Nissan Leaf.  That’s laid out in a series of posts around Post #1837, and the posts just prior to that.  The year cutoff was due to a change in the Leaf battery chemistry that year, to a much more stable (long-lived) battery.

I have been checking back occasionally ever since.

And I’ve been reading articles suggesting a steep decline in the price of used EVs.  I see talk about price declines on order of 30% per year.   This is almost always attributed to the fact that most used EVs are Teslas, and Tesla made some steep price cuts to their models this past year.

In other words, a falling tide sinks all boats.  Those Tesla price cuts are rippling through the entire used EV market.

But in addition, Chevy cut the price on the Bolt last year.  Both to spur sales, and maybe because the Bolt was plagued by a significant recall due to battery fire issues in a handful of vehicles.  Chevy claims that’s taken care of, but they ended up replacing the batteries in tens of thousands of cars.

In any case, when I went back to re-assess my local market for used EVs, it sure did seem like prices were down.  So I did my best apples-to-apples comparison between what I looked at back in August, and now.  As shown above.

By my estimate, asking prices for a used late-model Nissan Leaf fell 14% in the last five months of 2023.  Or … on-order-of a 30%/year rate of decline. 

More interestingly, I can now get a used Chevy Bolt for about the same price as a used Nissan Leaf.  This is a change from the prior analysis, where my back-of-the-envelope on a Bolt of this vintage, five months ago, put the average asking price at $21,000.

But now, consistent with the decline in the Leaf price, there’s been an even steeper decline in the Bolt price.

Objectively, the Bolt looks like a lot more utility for the money.

  • The Bolt has about 90 more miles of range than the leaf (about 250, versus about 160 for the base Leaf)
  • It uses a standard (J1772) plug, instead of the soon-to-be-obsolete CHADMO plug on the Leaf.
  • It has active battery temperature management, compared to the Leaf’s passively air-cooled battery.

The sole drawback from my perspective is that the Bolt looks like a tiny little car, where the Leaf does not.  To me.  They have roughly the same interior volume, and the Bolt actually has a higher curb weight than the base Leaf.  But the Bolt is shorter by about a foot-and-a-half.  Just enough that I notice how small it is, compared to (say) the 2021 Prius that my wife drives.

For either car, if you had little enough income in the year of purchase, Uncle Sugar will give you a $4K tax rebate for purchasing that used US-made EV.  (Yep, for purchasing a used US-made EV.  Part of the Biden Administration’s buy-American industrial policy intersecting with its global warming initiatives. So, thanks, Joe Biden. I guess.)

Rumor has it that the big drop in the Bolt price is due to Chevy rehabbing and re-selling a lot of those recalled vehicles.  I’m not sure how much that is true.  What I am sure is that the Bolt looks like a pretty good option, if you trust Chevy to have fixed that rare battery issue.  If you pick and choose, you can plausibly pick up a three- or four-year-old car, with about 10K miles on it, for a net $13K or so.

This, where the only expensive component — the battery — comes with a mandatory eight-year/100,000 mile manufacturer’s warranty. Which should, in theory, take a whole lot of the risk out of this used-car transaction.  Roughly speaking, you pretty much have to get at least five years of driving out of the car, or the manufacturer (not the seller!) has to replace your battery.

As used cars go, that seems like a pretty decent deal, regardless of the fuel source.  The fact that this is the low-carbon alternative is almost gravy, at this point.   To me, based on what I’ve been looking at, this now looks like it’s just a pretty good deal on a used car.  Period.

I have to confess that the first and last Chevrolet product that I ever bought was a Chevy Vega.  It was a traumatizing experience in many regards, as those of you familiar with the history of the Chevy Vega will understand.

I guess, going on 40 years later, maybe I can find it in my heart to forgive, and give Chevy another try.

Post #1917: Composter shed failure

 

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

I suspect that adding more insulation would be fruitless. 

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

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

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

What are the other options?

Psychrophilic, qu’est-ce que c’es?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proposed experiment.

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

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

Results in a month.

Post #1912: What the watt?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post #1911: LED Christmas light life expectancy.

 

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

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

Intro:  The ghost of Christmas lights past.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

But …

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

And yet …

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

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

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

Then you ship them back their broken jar of jam.

Do be do be do

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

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

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

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

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

What to do about the broken jar of jam?

Amazon returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shipping it is, then.

Nesco to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus, damnit, they owed me a new one.

Will I ever see this jam again?

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

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

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

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

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

Closure

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

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

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

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

Post #1906: Twinkle lights.

 

I am a huge fan of energy-saving lighting.  Even (or perhaps particularly) Christmas lighting.

But one aspect of the transition from energy-hog incandescent lights to modern LED lights has been unsatisfactory.

My wife misses true “twinkle lights”.   Not flashing lights, or chasing lights, or color-changing lights, or lights that appear to drip, or any of that stuff.  Just strings of lights, where each bulb blinks on and off independent of the others.

So this post is about finding energy-efficient twinkle lights.

Turns out, there are plenty of options that provide some semblance of the incandescent twinkle lights of old.  You just have to look.

The resurrection of the twinkle?

In the incandescent world, twinkle lights were easy.  For each bulb, you ran the electricity through a little bimetallic strip.  The heat of the bulb made the strip bend, which then opened the circuit and turned the bulb off.  Once cool, the strip would bend back, completing the circuit, and turning the bulb on again.  (The same principle was used in automobile blinkers and some home thermostats.  Even today, the same technology remains in use in (e.g.) Mr.-Coffee-style coffee makers, where the slight clicking noise you hear as coffee stays warm is a bimetallic disk turning the electricity to the warming pad on and off.)

For the longest while, as the march toward miniature incandescent and then LED bulbs went on, it seemed as if true twinkle lights had been lost.  Any blinking that went on with LED strings was centrally controlled, so they don’t so much twinkle as flash.  Sure, it was showier.  Sure it was eye-catching.  But you lose the soft innocence of hundreds of bulbs, each making up its own random mind as to when to turn on and off.

But it appears there has been something of a twinkle light renaissance.

Yes, Virginia, you can buy twinkle lights again.

Miniature incandescent strings with twinkle.

Source:  Amazon

First up, Amazon offers a string of miniature incandescent bulbs advertised as twinkle lights.  Could it really be this easy?

Alas, no, based on the comments.  In addition to being essentially unreliable, a) the twinkling is controlled by one special bulb in the string and b) near as I can tell, only about one in five bulbs actually twinkles.  The rest stay lit.  A common description is that the lights “barely twinkle”.

The other drawbacks are that these bulbs burn out fairly quickly, including the special bulb that creates the twinkle effect.  I don’t think replacements are available.  So this is something that you buy, fully knowing that it’s going to end up in the trash soon enough.

I remain baffled by the technology, and might want to order one just to tear it apart.  How can one bulb in the string make some of the remaining bulbs twinkle?

I also note that you can buy individual mini-incandescent twinkle bulbs.  If you look closely at the picture, you can see that these appear to use old-school bimetallic-strip technology, just in a tiny package.  Brutally expensive if purchased per the each.  The same manufacturer sells strings of miniature incandescent bulbs, but only 12 out of 100 bulbs twinkle.

One advantage of these bulbs is that they will “twinkle” by turning on and off.  This is unlike the LED twinkle bulbs below, which basically ramp up and ramp down, without a sharp on-off.  Thus, these incandescents twinkle as did the twinkly bulbs of our youth.

Miniature LED strings with twinkle bulbs

Source:  Amazon, but there are much cheaper sets that also have some twinkling bulbs.  Home depot has sets in the $8 range that have a handful (12 or so) twinkling bulbs per string.

There are many brands of these offered, but all of the cheaper ones are much-of-a-muchness.  All of them say twinkle.  At least some of the descriptions make it clear that each individual twinkling bulb works independently of the others.  But, again, reading the comments on Amazon, only a small minority of the bulbs twinkle.  Some, like the ones above, reveal that fact.  Others you only learn it from the comments.

I’m again baffled by the technology.  But this demonstrates that independently-twinkling LED bulbs are a real thing.  It’s just a question of finding somebody selling an all-twinkle light string.

I don’t know whether the part-twinkle norm is driven by technology, esthetics, or economics.  A lot of times, LEDs are wired in series, and you count on the voltage drop across the each LED to keep the entire string from burning out.  Perhaps it’s not possible to fit a 100%-twinkle LED string into the existing miniature light form factor.   Maybe it’s just costly.  And maybe it’s visually overwhelming.

That said, I’ve found one set that clearly states the twinkle ratio is half twinkling bulbs.  And that set is quite pricey.

Source:  Amazon.

And an all-twinkle set is pricier still.  Near as I can tell, based on description and comments, all of the LEDs in this set twinkle independently.

Source:  Amazon.

The upshot of all that is if you’ve got the dough, they’ll sell you the twinkle.  In energy-efficient LEDs.

Individual LED twinkle bulbs for old-style C7 and C9 strings

Source:  Amazon

These appear to tick most of the boxes for me.  Based on the comments, these give very nearly the same effect as old incandescent twinkle bulbs.  (Which can still be found on Amazon).  And videos posted in the comments seem to bear that out.  These pretty much blink on and off, rather than fade in and out.  The only negative comments seem to be that they blink faster than the old incandescent twinkle bulbs did.

That said, I own no C7 or C9 light strings, so I’d have to factor that in.

On the environmental side, these consume about 0.6 watts each.  That’s trivial compared to the same-sized incandescents (at 5 watts each), but still quite a bit of juice, compared to minature LEDs.  I think a string of 100 LEDs takes about 5 watts, while 100 of these would take about 60 watts.

One thing in their favor is that these would make a much more robust light setup.  First, the bulbs are replaceable.  Second, the old C7/C9 strings, designed for high-wattage incandescent bulbs, are built to a far beefier standard that modern LED strings.  In short, this would solve the problem of tossing light sets out every few years after they cease to function.

Note the wires the size of lamp cord for the C7 string above.  So, buy one of those, toss the antique incandescent bulbs, replace with LED twinklers, and never have to buy one of those again.

Oddly, even the strings sold with LED bulbs have that same beefy construction.

 

I suspect that the same factor is at play here as in modern table lamps.  Old lamps, designed for incandescent bulbs, are hugely over-built for handling the electrical load of LED bulbs.  And yet, new table lamps appear to be built to the old standard, I guess under the assumption that somebody might yet screw in an old-fashioned incandescent bulb.

Conclusion

The upshot is that I have many options for twinkle lights.

The most robust option is to buy an old-fashioned C7 light string, with LED bulbs, and change some of the standard LED bulbs for twinkle bulbs.  Those are a bit big for inside use. And use more electricity than is strictly required.  But with lamp-cord sized wiring, and replaceable bulbs, they should last indefinitely.

Alternatively, it looks like I have at least one option for strings of miniature LED lights, all of which twinkle.  Those are a better size for indoor use, and require less electricity.  But they would be of modern construction, with thin wires reflecting the low current draw of LEDs, and with non-replaceable bulbs.  Those are eventual landfill material, absent my willingness to excise dead bulbs and solder in replacements.  And they do not so much twinkle as fade in and out independently.

There is an option for miniature incandescent twinkle lights, but that seems both expensive and largely D-I-Y.  I can find the bulbs, but I can’t find entire strings of incandescent twinkle lights.

For me, full-sized (C7 C9) incandescents are off the table.  Sure, you can still buy twinkle bulbs for those.  But they seem to clock in around five watts each.  That’s a stopper as far as I’m concerned.

I think I’ll leave it up to my wife as to which direction she’d prefer to go, to more nearly re-create the twinkle lights of her youth.

Addendum:  There’s an app for that.

Source:  Amazon.

In the modern world, you can buy strings of app-controlled color-changing LEDs.  Because of course you can.  But in addition to being able to do animated stripes around your Christmas tree, these can be programmed to be twinkle lights.  So I must add these to my twinkle light options.

Post #1905: All I want for Christmas is an economically efficient fake tree

 

This post continues my attempt to transition my family from real Christmas trees to an artificial tree.

Between this, and my two just-prior Christmas tree posts, I think I’ve finally gotten fully up to speed on artificial trees.  Today I summarize what I learned from a trip to Home Depot, and an article from the NY Times Wirecutter.

Wirecutter’s top seven artificial trees were all “fir” or “spruce”.  No pine.  That’s because they use branch tips made out of relatively expensive molded polyethylene to provide a realistic simulation of fir or spruce branches, not the cheaper metal-and-plastic-PVC-strip branch tips meant to mimic pine trees.

(Why no pines?  Fir and spruce have individual short, thick needles directly attached to the branch.  By contrast, pines have bundles of multiple long, thin needles.  I’m guessing that the molded PE technology works for the former, but not the latter.  Thus, my provisional rule:  All high-end fake Christmas trees are now spruces or firs.  Not because people prefer them, but because those are the only ones that can currently be manufactured with the hyper-realistic molded polyethylene process.)

This cost-versus-appearance tradeoff is what leads to the “Frankentree” (below).  It’s now common for manufacturers to use the cheap, not-so-realistic-looking square-cut “pine” PVC needles on the tree interior, twisted in wires like a bottle brush.  And then add the more-realistic-looking molded polyethylene (spruce/fir) branch tips at the outer ends of the branches.

And thus we end up with a symbol of goodwill toward mankind that is entirely determined by the interaction of plastics technology and market forces.  Apparently, the fact that it looks like a tree, but when examined closely is deeply and disturbingly unlike any tree actually found in nature, is irrelevant.

In the end, what I mostly learned from this last deep dive is that artificial trees basically creep me out.  The dominance of the Frankentree in the mid-range market was the plastic straw that broke the Bakelite camel’s back.

With that in mind, I’ve bought a fake tree that’s obvious fake.  Silver, as an homage to the tin-foil trees of my youth.  An indoor Christmas decoration, not some PVC strips (or even molded polyethylene needles) trying to look like an impossible pine-fir-spruce tree.

 

Home Depot stocks Frankentrees

After looking over the marketplace for artificial Christmas trees (Post #1901), and checking out my local thrift shops (Post #1902), my next stop had to be Home Depot.

Home Depot used to stock a mind-boggling array of Christmas … eh … stuff.  Lots and lots of big plastic things to sit on your lawn.  To the point where, in the distant past, I used it as a kid-friendly pre-Christmas destination.  I’d take the kids out to see the Christmas kitsch.  They loved it.  I’m sure they had no idea what “kitsch” meant.

Home Depot has definitely cut back their Christmas stuff over the past decade or so.  They’re down to lights, ornaments, a few lawn doodads, and half-a-dozen artificial trees.

That’s where I found a Frankentree.  I was taking pictures to share with my wife, and I realized something was not right about the tree I was looking at.  From a distance, it appeared to be a … spruce (?), but up close it was clearly stitched together from many different tree species. 

This tree mixed (at least) three different types of needled evergreens.  Apparently the manufacturer was not the least bit bothered that the tree was completely unnatural.  Upon inspection, several of the trees on the floor at Home Depot used this same mixing of different species.

It’s a realistic-looking yet fundamentally unnatural evergreen.  Why did they do that?

Wirecutter highlights fake fir

Wirecutter (owned by the NY Times) rates various types of products and services.  Their annual article on artificial Christmas trees is apparently one of their most popular.

I learned a few things from that article.  You can, in fact, pay well over $1K for a fake Christmas tree.  You should expect to pay several hundred dollars for an acceptable-looking tree.  All of the trees Wirecutter chose were either pre-lit or “flocked” with artificial snow, neither of which I wanted.

In the end, what jumped off the page is that all of the trees Wirecutter liked were marketed as fir or spruce.  That struck me as odd, as pine trees are commonly sold as Christmas trees. And the overwhelming majority of fake Christmas trees I’d seen to date appeared to be modeling pines.

Why were none of the seven Wirecutter winners in the pine family?

I thought back to my Home Depot trip, and the penny dropped.

Fake tree tech has changed yet again.  The flat, square-cut PVC needles of the fake trees of yesteryear are a thing of the past.  Today’s high-end trees use a far-more-realistic-looking fir or spruce arrangement of the needles.

These “fir” trees appear to be made using a completely different technology, compared to the flat-needled PVC-strip “pine” trees.  Based on some of the Home Depot descriptions, those spruce/fir branch tips are made of “molded PE” (polyethylene), not the flat square-cut bottle-brush strips of PVC that are used in lower-end trees.

But that greater realism comes at a higher cost.  An economically efficient tree would combine the cheaper, older, less realistic tech with the more expensive, newer, more realistic tech.  It would only use those expensive molded PE branch tips where they matter, and use the cheap stuff for filler.

And so was born the Frankentree, as observed at Home Depot above. It’s the tree equivalent of wood-veneer furniture.  It’s a good-looking shell of molded PE tips over a core of cheap square-cut PVC bottle-brush branches.

Even weirder, to me, Wirecutter isn’t at all bothered by Frankentrees.  At least one of their top picks turns out to be a mix of spruce and pine needles.  Or whatever those are.  Clearly from two different species, per the picture of that recommended tree on the Home Depot website.  Wirecutter notes the mix of materials, but doesn’t even mention that such a tree never existed in nature.

Conclusion:  Bah, humbug.  The market for artificial Christmas trees.

Bearing in mind that I was looking for an un-lighted green tree, then,  leaning heavily on the Wirecutter article, here’s what you can get for a six or seven foot artificial tree.

  • >$1000: Mostly molded PE fir/spruce branch tips, lighted.
  •  ~$500:  Molded PE fir/spruce over flat-cut PVC needle core, lighted.
  •  ~$150:  Flat-cut PVC needles, high density of branch tips (~2000 tips/6 foot tree).
  •  ~$100:  Flat-cut PVC needles, low density of branch tips (under 1000 tips/6 foot tree).
  •   ~$10:  Used old-tech (separate branches) tree in a box (local thrift store).

Wirecutter more-or-less stated what I’ve been slowly figuring out:  No artificial trees actually look real once you get within about six feet of them.  Some are realistic from a distance.  Above, that would be the $500 and up trees, mostly.

But now, in addition, the most realistic fake trees combine (simulations of) different species, in the same tree.  And everybody seems to consider this normal.

The upshot is that in order to get a realistic evergreen, economics and plastic technology dictate that I must buy a Frankentree, fundamentally unlike anything found in nature.

That’s the point where I’ve more-or-less lost the thread.  What am I looking for again?  What’s my conclusion?

Bottom line is that I opted for none of the above.  I went in the other direction entirely.  I searched Amazon for the simplest, cheapest silver artificial tree I could find.  The answer was a pop-up tinsel tree.  It doesn’t even remotely resemble a tree, other than being vaguely skinny-Christmas-tree outline.

No fluffing the branches.  No finding a place to store it.  The plastic and metal parts separate completely, making it feasible to recycle most of the weight of this two-pound artificial Xmas tree.

Basically, it’s a convenient piece of decor around which we can pile the Christmas loot.  Isn’t that the essence of a modern Christmas tree?

Post #1902: A few lessons from thrift shopping for a Christmas tree

 

This continues the prior post, in which I attempt to transition my family from real Christmas trees to an artificial tree.

In this post, my wife and I hit the local thrift shops to see what artificial Xmas trees were on offer there.  This is a good way to see a wide variety of artificial evergreens, side-by-side, in person.  We didn’t buy one, which is no surprise.  But we learned a lot.

(Unfortunately, I did not think to take pictures, so all the pictures here are fakes — AI-generated from Gencraft.com.)

Takeaways:

1:  There is a thriving secondary market for artificial Christmas trees.  In one shop, they went so far as to apologize for the limited selection.  They’d mostly sold out prior to Thanksgiving, but that they’d be getting fresh stock in over the next month as people in the area “traded up” to a new tree and gave them the old one.

This is helpful not just for buying a used tree, but also for getting rid of one in case I buy something that I end up disliking.  Before this, I figured that donating a used fake Christmas tree was like donating trash.  But now that I know that thrift shops actively deal in used artificial trees, I have a way to dispose of any potential bad purchase.

2:  There are some butt-ugly artificial Christmas trees out there.  Even acknowledging all the limits of thrift shopping, we came across several trees where my only reactions were a) I can’t believe somebody sold that as a Christmas tree, and b) I can’t believe somebody bought that as a Christmas tree.

3:  The fine detail of the needles matters a lot.  Some artificial pine wreaths, in particular, were indistinguishable from real, to me at least.  Others just screamed fake.  The most obvious difference was specular reflections (shiny spots) on the needles.  Broad, flat, shiny needles look like nothing in nature.  They look like plastic, full stop.  Narrow needles with a dull surface appeared real.  In addition, for reasons that escape me, some artificial pine needles were made in shades of green that just aren’t found in nature.  (Or, as my wife puts it, they are found in nature, but only on dying trees.)

In any case, with a bunch of different wreaths in a pile, or an array of trees in one corner, some simply jumped out as being fake.  Others did a much better job of mimicking real evergreens.   And that all boiled down to fairly subtle variations in color, reflectiveness, and shape of the needles.

4:  Fake tree technology has evolved over time, for the better.  Thrift shops let you see older and modern versions of the same goods, in one place.  Old tech trees had removable individual branches that fit into a central trunk, and tended to look only vaguely like a real tree.   All the modern trees had branches that are permanently affixed to the central trunk with steel pivots, and in general looked far more realistic.

After seeing a few, it was clear that I didn’t want an old-tech tree with removable branches.  Modern trees appear to be significantly better.

4A: I think I finally understand the fashion for having artificial trees that look purposefully artificial.  White, say, or metallic-looking.   Back in the day, if your options were to have an artificial tree that tried but failed to look real, or to have a purposefully artificial-looking tree, artificial-looking was plausibly the more stylish option.

4B:  On a tech side note, the old technology of removable branches meant you could, in theory, put the tree back in its original box.  We saw two like that — re-stuffed into the original box — both old-tech trees with removable branches. I’m guessing that’s not typically possible with a modern tree, with permanently attached branches.  So modern trees require something to store them in, other than the original box.

4C:  Old tech trees with removable branches seem to preclude the possibility of a pre-lit tree (that is, one with built-in lights).  So the “pre-lit tree” goes hand-in-hand with the change in the basic technology of how these artificial trees are put together.   It’s really only possible once you go to the permanently-attached branches approach found in modern trees.

5:  Most of the trees in the thrift shops were pre-lit trees.  (That is, trees with the Christmas lights attached.)  I’m not sure whether that’s because a) those trees are better sellers originally, or b) those trees break more quickly, or c) people who want the convenience of a pre-lit tree are more likely to “trade up” more frequently.

5B:  For sure, the preponderance of pre-lit trees in the thrift shops screws up my ability to find a bargain there.  Pre-lit trees have substantially higher original prices compared to plain, un-lit trees.  Accordingly, they sell for substantially higher prices in the thrift shops.  But since I don’t want a pre-lit tree, all this meant to me is that the typical discount-from-what-I’d-otherwise-purchase-on-Amazon was small.  Trees that, for me, appeared functionally equivalent to a an unlit $100-$120 tree new, from Amazon, were on offer for $60 to $70, because they were pre-lit trees.

Conclusion:  Buying a tree from Amazon now looks riskier.

Going into this, I figured I could quantify what I wanted in a fake Christmas tree.  Height, density of “branch tips”, and so on.

What I learned is that the hard-to-quantify aspects of an artificial evergreen have a big impact on how good it looks.  Little details like color, surface finish, and shape of the needles have a big impact on how realistic the tree appears.  Some trees and wreaths were instantly and obviously recognizable as artificial.  From a good distance.  Others were, to my eye, at a reasonable distance, indistinguishable from real evergreens.  And it wasn’t necessarily the build quality or the density of the materials.  It was that some of the needles just plain looked like plastic.

That’s a problem, because I don’t think there’s any way to quantify that on Amazon.  Sure, I can specify a minimum density of branch tips per cubic foot, and so on.  But that’s not going to guarantee a realistic-looking tree.  Instead, how good the tree will look will depend in large part on those little details of the needles.  That’s going to be very hard to judge from a few photos on Amazon, or even from purchasers’ comments.

Now add to the mix all the ugly trees we saw today.  Plausibly, once upon a time, each of those was the apple of some purchaser’s eye.  At least until they opened the box.

You’d think that would argue for buying locally, but my local selection of un-lit, green, artificial Christmas trees is extremely limited.  My local Home Depot has, I think, one that fits that description.  My local Ace Hardware has none.  I didn’t see anything meeting that description at my local Target.  And so on.  I’m guessing Amazon and other on-line retail has pretty much chased the low end of the market — where un-lit plain-green trees would be found — out of bricks-and-mortar retail.

It’s not clear what my next rational step would be.  Probably, I’m going to gamble on something that’s highly-rated on Amazon, sight-unseen.  And if that turns out to be a dog, then off it goes to the thrift shop, post-Christmas, to make way for another try next year.