Category: Environment

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.

Post #1901: Artificial Xmas Tree

 

Three key things I didn’t know about artificial Xmas trees:  Fluffing time, branch tip count, and storage.

I knew nothing about artificial Christmas trees.  So I started my research where I usually do, on Amazon.

When I started, I assumed you pulled the tree out of the box much like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.  Reach in, give a tug, and out comes the tree, fully-formed.  The branches must “sproing” into place, or something.  And at the end of the season, you stuffed it back into the same box, the branches neatly folded back into rest position, and you were done.

Five minutes on Amazon, and I realized I had no clue how modern artificial Christmas trees actually worked.  The twin keys to my ignorance were frequent mentions of “fluffing time” and “branch tip count” on Amazon.  Use of these terms made choosing a tree kind of difficult, as I had no clue what either one of them was about.

Fluffing time:  The big branches of the tree do fold up and down against at the trunk, but all of the little branches are just stiff wire, with plastic “pine needles” embedded.  Turns out, all those little branches are packed flat against the main branch.  You have to bend each individual branchlet into place, by hand, one at a time, in a process termed “fluffing” the tree.

Branch tips:  And this is where the “branch tip” ratings come in.  A six-foot artificial tree might have anywhere from 1000 to 2500 “branch tips”.  Which more-or-less equates to that many little stiff pieces of wire that must be bent, by hand, into some approximation of a real tree.  More branch tips (per unit of tree volume) leads to a fuller-looking fake tree.  On Amazon, time and again, the manufacture would say something like “45 minute assembly time”, and the Amazon comments would say something along the line of two to three hours of “fluffing time”.

The upshot is that “fluffing” is the industry euphemism for spending hours of time bending little stiff wires covered in bristles, so that your myriad branch tips approximate the look of a real tree.  The near-universal advice on Amazon was to wear gloves and take your time.  In fact, many of the trees on Amazon come with a pair of gloves thrown in.  Presumably because you’ll need them.

And the third key thing?  Storage.   Because, although nobody say this explicitly, fluffing appears to be a one-way street.  I get the impression that nobody packs their tree down into anything like the original size.  As a result, you need somewhere to store your fully-fluffed tree — possibly in pieces, possibly slightly compressed — for the off season.

The upshot is that a new artificial tree requires several hours of “fluffing time”, wherein you take 1000’s of branch tips and bend them into shape.  After which you must store the tree in its fluffed condition.

 

Purpose and summary of this post

In our family, we’ve always gotten some type of real Christmas tree.

But this year I’m going artificial.  I think.

As usual, before I buy a consumer durable, I do my homework.  This post summarizes what I’ve learned so far.  Starting from a point of complete ignorance about artificial Christmas trees.

Briefly:

  • Artificial trees are overwhelmingly the U.S. norm, with roughly 85 percent of households with Christmas trees opting for an artificial tree.
  • Families with little kids tend to favor real trees, and tend to transition to fake trees as the kids age and the parents retire.
  • The main reason cited for buying an artificial tree is convenience, which I think dovetails with the use of artificial trees by age.
  • Artificial trees last about a decade, on average.  So the decision to go artificial kind of locks you into it for a while.
  • Environmental concerns for real-versus-fake trees are more-or-less a wash,
    • But the longer you keep the same fake tree, the better.
  • For a newly-purchased fake tree, “fluffing” the tree — bending thousands of wire branch tips into position — seems like a major pain.
  • Fluffing is a one-way street, so you need a place to store your fluffed tree in the off-season.
  • Trees with embedded lights don’t last as long as plain, unlit trees.
  • White trees tend to discolor over time, particularly if stored in non-climate-controlled areas.
  • The more “branch tips” per unit of tree volume, the fuller your tree should look.

The upshot is that I’m looking for a plain, un-lit, un-decorated green tree.  With a reasonable number of branch tips per unit of volume.  (Which, of course, I have worked out a formula for.)  And the first thing I’m going to do is scour the local thrift shops, because the thought of spending hours “fluffing” a tree is unappealing.

We’ll see where it goes from there.

Background:  Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia

My father, who shouldered most of the labor, once suggested buying an artificial tree. We called him out for the vulgar suggestion of convenience over tradition, and he never brought it up again.

Aryn Baker, in Time Magazine, December 2022.

I can relate to the quote above.  As the family member officially tasked with Getting The Tree, I’ve been lobbying for an artificial tree for years now.  The stopper has always been my family’s refusal to consider an artificial tree.

In particular, my wife was clearly and firmly against buying a fake tree.

Or so I thought.

Our Christmas tree traditions have been sledding downhill for decades.  Once upon a time, we’d make a big outing out of taking the kids to a cut-your-own-tree farm.  That lost its charm as the kids got bigger, so we went with the trees offered by a local charity.  We’d go to the lot, make a fuss over getting just the right tree, then overpay the local charity, all in the spirit of the season.  After a few years of that, we got to buying our tree so late that my only option was to shanghai whichever child was available for a last-minute run to pick up a tree at the local big box hardware store.

So we were already at the point of real-Christmas-tree-as-industrial-commodity.  Which it has been, all along, in reality.  But buying one in the garden section of Home Depot just hammered that home.

Deck the Halls and scan the barcode?  Not very Christmas-y.

But last year I hit rock bottom, with an exotic tree species, the brown pine.  On a whim, I picked up a little live tree, figuring to plant it after Christmas.  It had some species name on the label, but as it turns out, it was actually a member of the brown pine family.  This was only revealed a few months after putting it outside.

And so, in the spirit of the holidays, I once again asked my wife if she still objected to artificial Christmas trees.  And the answer was not merely that she had no strong objection, but that she’d never had any objection to artificial trees in the first place.

And just like that, I’m in the market for an artificial tree.

Environmental impact of artificial Xmas trees?

In a nutshell:  It’s no big deal either way.

First, If I’m an environmental sinner for buying a fake tree, I’ll surely have a lot of company in hell.  Households with real Christmas trees are a small minority.  In 2021, about three-quarters of American households displayed a Christmas tree, and of these, 84 percent have an artificial tree (reference).  That’s figure varies a bit from year to year, but is in the low 80 percents in all the surveys shown on the cite referenced above.

A different (yet seemingly credible) poll shows just 71% of surveyed adults (who were having a Christmas tree) planned on having an artificial tree (reference).  That’s a huge discrepancy (versus 84 percent, above), for a simple yes/no question.   The same article cites the association representing Christmas tree growers, which puts the number around 75 percent, but should be treated as a number from an advocacy organization.

So which estimate is more likely to be right, 71% artificial or 84% artificial?

Don’t be mislead by statistics about annual Christmas tree sales.  Based on the survey cited above, the median life of an artificial tree is about ten years.  Accordingly, each year’s sales of real trees top the sales of artificial trees.  But that’s only because the typical artificial tree user buys a new tree just once a decade.

That said, annual sales data, coupled with a typical 10-year lifetime, suggest the 84-percent-artificial estimate is correct.  In a typical year, about one-third of Christmas tree sales are artificial trees (reference).  With an average 10-year lifespan, in the steady state, that (via simple math) implies that about 83% of Christmas tree used in any given year are artificial trees.

The upshot is that real Christmas trees are not exactly a relic of the past, but they long-ago lost the bulk of the market to artificial trees.

Further, and without citation as to source, my decision to switch to an artificial tree late in life is typical, as is my reason for doing so.  As people age, and no longer have young children in the home, preferences shift toward an artificial tree.  And the most-cited reason for going with an artificial tree is convenience.  Both of which describe my situation.  And so, my family’s long downhill slide toward fake-tree heresy is apparently normal.  Young families with small kids more frequently opt for a real tree.  Retirees, less so.

Despite artificial trees being the clear winner in the Christmas tree war, there seems to be a robust and highly-opinionated debate over the environmental impact of real versus artificial Christmas trees.

Which I find just shy of hilarious, given the context.  Kind of like obsessing about the environmental impact of plastic straws, as you sit in your Hummer waiting your turn in the McDonald’s drive-through.

In any case, as I contemplate buying a bunch of gifts that my family doesn’t need, I find it hard to get exercised about the impact of the Christmas tree itself.  Virtually every material Christmas gift will have been made overseas and shipped here in single-use packaging.  Which I will then re-wrap using yet more single-use wrapping paper.  Because it’s Christmas, and that’s how we do things here.  In that context, the difference between a once-a-decade purchase eventually destined for the landfill (fake tree) and a yearly purchase of some custom-grown compost (real tree) is lost in rounding error.   It’s just too small to matter in the grand scheme of the season.

Even more than that, the choice between real and artificial is more-or-less a wash, for the average purchaser, in terms of overall environmental impact.  Depending on whom you listen to, for the typical user, if you keep your artificial tree for enough years, you’ll have about the same environmental impact as the equivalent string of real trees.  The break-even point is five years’ use of an artificial tree (see this seemingly-competent .pdf life-cycle analysis).  Some say ten.  This one says 7 to 20.  Pick a number.   Some wing it and say never, based on what amounts to moral or emotional or other (e.g., fear) considerations.  But of the serious life-cycle analyses of the issue, somewhere in that five-to-ten year span, your N-year use of a steel-and-plastic artificial tree will have about the same environmental impact as growing, shipping, and disposing of N real trees.

YMMV.

So, for once, I just don’t care enough about the environmental impact to bother to look into it.  It’s just too small to matter, in this context.

 

Narrowing it down

My only environmental takeaway is that the longer the artificial tree lasts, the better.  But this immediately gives me three guidelines as I start to sort out what’s available locally and on the internet.

Unlit.  You can buy fake trees that are just fake trees, or you can buy trees that have Christmas tree lights already embedded in the fake tree.  Data pretty clearly show that trees with embedded lights have a shorter lifetime than unlit trees.  I’m not sure whether that’s literally due to lights breaking and burning out, or whether the persons attracted to the convenience of a pre-lit tree are more likely to dispose of a tree sooner.  That said, the (sketchy) fake-tree longevity data argue for buying an un-lighted artificial tree.  Plus, I already own lights.  And putting the lights on the tree is part of the Christmas tradition.

Green.  You can buy fake trees in a variety of colors, including ones that mimic snow on the tree.  Heck, you can buy them with the ornaments already (permanently) attached.  My take on it is that anything other than green is going to get old pretty fast.  And that, literally, the white plastics on white trees tend to yellow over time, particularly if stored in areas that are not climate-controlled, such as an attic or garage.

Better quality.  One huge drawback to buying a fake tree is that it’s a commitment.  Once you buy one, you’re pretty much stuck with it for the next decade or so.  You can’t in good conscience try it one year, decide that you’d rather have a real tree, and toss it in the trash.

Given that, even though I’m not quite sure how to judge this, I think that purposefully shopping the low end of the market might be a mistake.  In theory, all these trees are made from steel wire and PVC plastic.  So I’m not that worried about having a cheap tree fall apart.  It’s more that if the tree doesn’t look really nice, I’m less likely to want to keep putting it up.

The upshot is that I want a better-quality, un-lit, green Christmas tree.

Step 1:  Hitting Amazon as prep for hitting the thrift shops.

At first glance, it’s hard to make sense of the pricing of artificial Christmas trees on Amazon.  The price per foot, for the same model of tree, rises steeply with the height of the tree.  Below, increasing the height by 66% (from 4.5′ to 7.5′) increased the cost per foot by 180% (from $13/foot to $36/foot).  By contrast, I think that real trees are priced more or less the same, per foot.  You’d expect an 8-footer to cost about twice as much as a 4-footer, or zero percent change in the price per foot.  So the pricing structure of these artificial trees seems grossly at odds with what I’m used to, for real trees.

But just a little analysis shows that this steep increase with tree height makes sense.  For a given manufacturer and model of tree, pricing is pretty much a case of “you get what you pay for”.  The reason that costs rise so steeply with tree height is that the total volume of the tree rises faster-than-linear with tree height.  And the manufacturers more-or-less have to fill the volume of the tree with something.

 

To a close approximation, for this “family” of trees (same model, same manufacturer):

  1. The cost is about 7 cents per branch tip, more or less.
  2. The density of branch tips per cubic foot is roughly the same for all but the smallest tree.
  3. The actual height/width ratio falls as the height of the tree rises.

I think this, along with a look at a few similar trees, tells me roughly what I need to know as I go looking for a tree in my local thrift shops.

Mostly, there’s no free lunch.  The pricing of these trees seems to be almost entirely a function of the volume of materials used.  Count the branch tips, multiply by a few cents per branch tip, and that’ll be the price.

In addition, it appears that manufacturers of a given model of tree shoot for some more-or-less uniform density of branch tips per unit of tree volume.  Turning that on its head, for a given desired density of branch tips per unit of volume, I should be able to select any size of tree, and still be able to meet that goal.

So, with Amazon as the baseline, I think I ought to be able to look at trees and tree prices, across thrift shops, and make some sort of informed judgment.

Post #1900: The USDA released a new map of U.S. plant hardiness zones this week …

 

Source:  Maps are from USDA.  I added the line marking the boundary between hardiness zones 5 and 6.

… and nobody cared.

Which is a good thing.  I think.  On balance.

On the one hand, it’s good that they released it.  That’s my take on it, knowing the controversial history of the USDA hardiness zone map.

On the face of it, the red lines on the map above simply mark a data-defined boundary. Below that line is the area where winter temperatures should be expected to stay above -10F.  That’s based on the 30 years of local weather data, prior to the map date.  As the U.S. winter nighttime temperatures have warmed, those lines are moving north about 5 miles per year, in Missouri.  And, as I understand it, at roughly that rate, averaged across the entire U.S.

Back to the here-and-now, if you look at the illustration above and immediately say, hey, what happened to the circa-2002 map?  Why did they skip a decade?  Then you get an interesting story.

The answer is, Republican administration.  The Bush Jr. administration just somehow couldn’t quite seem to get around to allowing the public to see the updated version of that map.  The widely-held presumption is that they withheld the information precisely because it showed what I’ve highlighted above:  the USDA hardiness zones are migrating north.  That’s easily-grasped evidence of the early impact of global warming on the U.S.  And so that information was suppressed.

(This, despite the nonsensical CYA language that the USDA insists on including in the footnotes to the description of the map methodology.  They seem to say that “climate change” requires 50 years of data, and since each individual map only covers 30 years, you can’t infer that this is the impact of climate change.  Despite the fact that the underlying span of data across the full set of maps is now more than 50 years.)

On the other hand, I think those changes ought to get more press coverage.  This isn’t natural variation.  This is a clear and understandable signal of global warming’s initial effects.   And as slow as these changes are, relative to a human lifetime, there’s nothing on the horizon to suggest that they are going to stop any time soon.  Five miles a year doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the U.S. is only 1000 miles north to south, and that things will move a lot faster once global warming really gets rolling.  And that it’s fairly hard to grow corn and wheat in a sagebrush and cactus desert.

So, even though I’m still in Zone 7, I think this deserves more press than it has gotten.  And I think that the Bush-administration suppression of the circa-2002 map needs to be remembered, right alongside the temperature data.

What are we talking about?

Source:  USDA.  I removed some details from the map (e.g., degrees C scale) to make it clearer.  Thus, I must say that: a)  the map is not the official USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, and (b) the USDA-ARS and OSU logos are eliminated.  If you want to see the full official map, follow the link.

The map above shows the coldest wintertime temperatures in each year, averaged across 30 years of data.  The 2023 map literally uses weather data from 1991 to 2020.

The map provides guidance as to what perennial plants can usually be expected to survive the winter, unprotected, in each location. 

That’s guidance, not certainty.  As the owner of a lime tree, I am acutely aware that citrus trees will typically die back to the ground if they go below about 28F.  Plausibly, you need to live somewhere near Zone 10 or higher (e.g., Florida) before you can expect your citrus trees to survive reliably, out-of-doors, unprotected.  Even so, the occasional freeze will hit Florida, so significant frost damage to Florida citrus groves seems to occur every few decades or so (reference).

More generally, if you ever buy a perennial plant from an on-line nursery, they’ll let you know the hardiness zones in which the plant is expected to survive.  Or they’ll give you information such as “hardy down to 0F”, and leave it up to you to know what USDA hardiness zone you live in.

It’s not hard to get your hands on the underlying data from which these maps were created, for example, via NOAA.  I’ve plotted the annual wintertime lows before, for the weather station at Dulles Airport.  Here’s 60 years of wintertime lows, as recorded at Dulles.

The obvious upward trend that you see above is pretty much the norm for most of the U.S.  So it’s no surprise that the revised USDA map shows those plant hardiness zones creeping northward.

In fact, my location (Vienna VA) graduated from Zone 7A (expected annual low of 0F to 5F) to Zone 7B (5F to 10F).  I was firmly in the middle of 7A, now I’m barely at the edge of 7B.  That’s reasonably consistent with the increase in wintertime minimums shown in the Dulles data above.

Footnote:  Hardiness zone creep exaggerates average warming

One final footnote is that, due to the nature of C02-driven global warming, the northward creep of the hardiness zones exaggerates average warming.

The reason for this is simple:  The largest impact of global warming is on nighttime temperatures.  (E.g., via Scientific American).  And on winter temperatures (E.g., via Axios).  By inference, the biggest impact of all should be on nighttime winter temperatures.  And, typically, the annual low temperature in an area is set during the course of some winter night.

If nothing else, knowing this is a quick way to dismiss denialist arguments that, somehow, the observed warming on earth is due to changes in the sun.  (That, despite direct satellite measurement of solar irradiance, dating back to the 1970s, showing no such thing.)  The fact is, the warming is more pronounced at night, and in the winter, both times of limited sunshine.  Heuristically, if enhanced atmospheric C02 is a blanket, that blanket matters more when it’s cold and dark.

Conclusion

The real lesson here isn’t the map, per se.  Anyone who cared to analyze the publicly-available weather data — as I did above — would already have a strong expectation that the official USDA climate zones would continue to move northward, in this most recent update of the USDA map.

Really, the big lesson here is the missing circa 2002 map.  There was a time when Republicans so thoroughly insisted in keeping their heads in the sand, on global warming, that they found excuses not to update this map.

Has that changed?  Are Republicans on board now, with the idea that global warming is real?   I doubt it, but there’s no way to know.  The last two iterations are both dated to periods with Democrats in control of the administrative branch of government.  So, as to whether or not a Republican administration would allow this to be updated on a once-a-decade schedule, I guess we just won’t know until we see it.  Or not.

Post #1899: Composting shed, testing

My tumbling composter doesn’t work in the winter. Which is ironic, given that it was made in Canada.  But it’s a common problem.  Winter composting is a problem for anyone who tries to compost small amounts of material outdoors, in a cold climate.  Composting stops as the temperatures drop.

So I made a little insulated shed, to fit around the composter. 

The upshot is that, so far, it seems to keep the compost around 16F warmer than it would otherwise be, without the shed.  On average.

I’m not sure that’s going to do the job. Continue reading Post #1899: Composting shed, testing