Category: Making

Projects that make or build something.

Post #1672: Does anything really extend the life of a razor blade? Part 1, the setup.

 

Six years ago I decided to start using an old-fashioned (“double edged”) safety razor. 

I got a couple of “blade samplers” from Amazon — collections of maybe a dozen different brands, five blades from each brand.  I then bought a 100-count box of Persona blades.  They got good reviews and, at that time, they were made in Virginia.

Sometime this year, I’ll probably have to buy razor blades again.  So, obviously, we’re not talking about a huge per-diem expenditure, for shaving.  Nevertheless, whatever I buy this time, I’m going to end up living with it for years.  So I’ve been revisiting the market for double-edge razor blades.  And, incidentally, disposable razors. Continue reading Post #1672: Does anything really extend the life of a razor blade? Part 1, the setup.

Post #1666: Cold weather and R-values, from small to large.

 

For some people, cold winter weather brings thoughts of hot chocolate by the fireplace, cozy comforters, or maybe skiing.

By contrast, I find myself thinking about insulation and R-values.

So, in the spirit of the holidays, here are two R-value calculations that I’ve been meaning to make.

Heated outdoor faucet cover.  Sure, it works in practice,but does it work in theory?

Whenever the weather turns cold, I start getting lots of hits on Post #1412, on making an electrically-heated cover for outdoor faucets.  Of late, I’ve been getting more than a hundred hits a day, thanks to this recent cold snap and an offhand reference in an on-line forum for Texas Aggies fans.

One of the interesting findings was how little electricity it takes to keep the inside of the faucet protector warm.  For example, a mere 4 watt night-light bulb raised the interior temperature by 28 degrees.  That more than meets my needs in any cold snap likely to occur in my area.

But is it really plausible that 4 watts could do that?  Or was I (e.g.) mistaking heat leaking out of house for the impact of that small electric light?

Obviously, I could check that empirically by hanging up a standard faucet cover with no added heat, and seeing what the interior temperature was.  But, at present, it’s about 15F outside, so I’m ruling that out for now.

Instead, this is a classic cases of “Sure, it works in practice.  But does it work in theory?”  I’m going to do a theoretical calculation of the temperature rise I should expect, using the R-value (insulating value) of Styrofoam, the dimensions of that faucet cover, and the energy output of a 4-watt bulb.

I’m going to model this as a Styrofoam box with dimensions 4.5″ x 4.5″ x 6″.  That effectively covers the open face of the faucet cover with Styrofoam, instead of (in my case) brick.  So I’m expecting to see more than 28F temperature increase out of this calculation.  The box walls appear to be about 5/8″ thick.

Two final bits of data.  The R-value of Styrofoam is listed by most sources as around 5.0 per inch.  And 4 watts is equivalent to about 13.5 BTUs per hour (BTUH).  (I rounded that down a bit to account for the small amount of energy that escapes from that bulb in the form of light, rather than heat.)

Here’s the calculation, first assuming foam on all sides, and then accounting for one side being brick, with a total R-value (for two inches of brick) of 0.88.  (I don’t show the full detail of the brick calculation, only the bottom-line average insulating value of the combined foam/brick container.)

The upshot is that this does, in fact, work in theory.  The theoretical temperature rise I get from an all-foam box is 41F, much more than I observed.  The theoretical rise I get if I replace one side of the box with brick is 28F, exactly what I observed.

It’s purely a matter of chance that this calculation hits the observed value exactly.  The fact that it’s close shows that what worked in practice, does, in fact, work in theory.

3000 gallon insulated tank in the middle of Montana

I’ve been watching Engels Coach Shop on YouTube for some time now.  The proprietor is a self-employed wheelwright whose long-standing business builds and fixes all manner of horse-drawn transportation.

This has absolutely no practical relevance to my life, but is purely a pleasure to watch.  Not only for the actual work performed, but also because the guy knows how to film, edit, and narrate a video.

Of late, he installed a 3000-gallon above-ground tank for watering his cattle.  To which you might reasonably say, so what?  Until you realize that he’s in Joliet, Montana. To put it mildly, the combination of an above-ground water tank and a Montana winter constitutes a freeze risk.

On the one hand, it’s heavily insulated (reported R50 on the sides, R120 on the top), and the water itself stores considerable heat energy.

On the other hand, it’s in the middle of Montana.

Source:  Western Regional Climate Center

Apparently his YouTube following is deeply divided on whether or not they think this will work.  Mr. Engels seemed kind of amused at the folks who thought he was going to end up with a giant ice cube.  For my own part, I’m guessing it will work just fine, based solely on the guy who built it.  But I don’t quite grasp why he seems amused by the opposite opinion.

So rather than just guess, let me do a couple of crude calculations.  From the standpoint of the arithmetic, it’s really no different from my faucet cover.  Just bigger.

First, I wanted to check out the water tower in Joliet, MT.  Just to be sure that a big enough tank, with enough throughput, would not freeze in that climate.  But when I tried a trick that always works for finding water towers on the East Coast — use Google Earth, set the perspective flat, and look for a water tower to stick up above the houses, because they are all 120 feet tall, more-or-less  — that didn’t work.  This, despite the fact that there is a municipal water system with a 160,000 gallon tank.

That’s because the Joliet water tower is mostly underground.  Like so.  I have no idea whether that was driven by economics, or by threat of freezing.

Source:  Laurel Outlook

So, is a well-insulated tank, above ground, a problem or not?

The first hint that it’s not a problem is that the total heat loss of this tank is maybe 16 times the heat loss of my faucet cover.  This tank is enormously larger.  But it’s also enormously better insulated.  The combination of having about 300 times the surface area, and maybe 20 times the average insulation, is that, by calculation (below, highlighted in yellow), this tank only loses a bit over five BTUs per hour per degree F.  That’s just 16 times the heat loss in my Styrofoam faucet cover.

Here, I’ve assumed a tank shaped like a cube, with an average R-value of 60 on all surfaces.  Should be close enough for a rough cut like this:

Well, given that a four-watt bulb would heat my faucet cover, it should be no surprise that even a modest heat input would (eventually) result in a large temperature differential between the inside and outside of that tank.  Where four watts was enough to create a 41F difference in my all-foam faucet cover, here, a typical stock tank heater (150 W) would (eventually) generate a massive 94F difference between interior and exterior of the tank.

That’s a big enough difference that (arguably) this simple linear R-value calculation does not exactly hold.  I don’t think that much matters.  If for no other reason that, given the tiny heat input (about the same as you would use to heat a cup of water to boiling for tea), it would take years to reach equilibrium.

(Well, might as well calculate that roughly.  This is about 25,000 pound of water.  To raise that by 94F, with zero losses, using a 150W heater, would take just over half a year.  With losses, yeah, a couple of years.  If then.)

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, if the tank is well-mixed, running a 150W stock tank heater inside it would, in fact, guarantee that it would not freeze under almost any conceivable circumstances in that climate.

But there’s no electricity at that site.  Instead, the tank has to “coast” all winter, using just the energy embodied in the water in the tank itself.

So, how much energy is there in that water?  How much heat would you have to remove to take water, at a typical late-summer temperature for that area, and bring it down to 32F?

By definition, a BTU is the amount of energy required to raise one pound of water by 1 degree F.  So if (say) the water starts out around 62F (late summer/early fall), it would have to lose over three-quarters of a million BTUs in order to reach 32F.  As shown below, bottom line.

Now I’m going to do a little hypothetical calculation.  Let me plop that tank down in January, in Joliet, MT, and see how much it cools off over the month.  That is, let me start with that tank at 62F, and let it sit for 31 days with an average external temperature of 24F — the actual average temperature for that month and location.  This should be a worst-case scenario for temperature loss, because it’s the largest temperature differential you could hope to see.  Water temperature from late summer, against dead-of-winter air temperatures.

Here’s the simulation.  I just calculate the daily heat loss, and then drop the temperature each day, using that heat loss (in BTUSs) as a fraction of the total heat embodied in the 62F vs 32F water. (That is, I pro-rate the BTUs of daily heat loss over the total 750K BTUs that would take the water from 62F to 32F).

OK, I finally get the joke.  Worst case, this tank ought to lose just over 5F per month, in the coldest month of the year.  And note that the cooler the tank gets, the slower the additional temperature loss gets.  For all practical purposes, the likelihood that the tank will freeze is zero.

(Note that the calculation is linear in temperature, so that it doesn’t really matter if the temperature does up and down in January.  The average heat loss is going to match the average temperature.  There are more refined physics calculations that will add some slight non-linearity to this, but not enough to matter).

Unsurprisingly, this tank isn’t just built for that climate.  It’s over-built.  Some of my assumptions might be a bit off.  The tank is a cylinder, not a cube.  Likely I could have calculated the average insulation value better.  I don’t really know the insulation value for the bottom of the tank.  And so on.  But even with that, this seems to have been built with a huge margin of safety.

I should have expected no less.

Post #1663: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you, the solution

 

The Problem

This is the followup to Post #1661.  The problem is that I frequently have to crane my neck to see traffic lights, in my wife’s Prius Prime, owing to the steeply sloped windshield.

The inability to see stop lights is hardly a new problem in the American auto industry.  In that prior post, I reviewed the century-long history of inventions that would let you see above the top edge of a car windshield.

I noted that in the modern era, you could solve this problem with a $30 dashcam.  But, really, where’s the joy in that?

Instead, I turned my back on that obvious solution and decided to come up with an optical device to let me see above the top edge of the windshield.

The design criteria for this stoplight-viewing device are:

  1. Not hand-held.
  2. Not permanently in the field of view.
  3. Not permanently mounted.
  4. Adjustable.

A new solution to an old problem.

My solution is a negative Fresnel lens, mounted to the sun visor so that you can flip it down when you need it, and flip it up out of the way when you don’t.

In this case, a “negative Fresnel lens” is a flat plastic lens sold as an aid to seeing around blind spots on vehicles.  (Negative refers to negative focal length, meaning this isn’t a magnifying glass, it’s a “shrinking” glass.)  Typically, these are used by large vehicles as an aid to backing up.  The lens allows the driver to see objects that can’t be seen directly through the back window of the vehicle.

Below, note that the top of the cloud is obscured by the roof of the vehicle.  Yet, you can see the top of the cloud in the shrunken image in the Fresnel lens.  This is precisely what I want to happen, for stop lights obscured by the roof of my car.  I want to use a negative Fresnel lens to pull them into view.

Source:  The lens I bought for this project, for about $10, on Amazon.

Some variation of this technology is used on the LightInSight.  This is an aid to viewing stoplights consisting of a long, narrow Fresnel lens designed to be stuck to the of the inside of the windshield.  The product illustration below is completely unclear, but the LightInSight does exactly what the lens shown above does:  It pulls images from above the top edge of the windshield down into the driver’s view.

Source:  Amazon.

From my standpoint, the LightInSight has a couple of drawbacks.  First, it’s permanently in the field of view.  I don’t want that.  I want it out of the way when I don’t need it.  Second, Fresnel lenses fail when viewed at sufficiently shallow angles.  The higher the power of the lens, the sooner that happens.  I feared that the LightInSight, however well-designed, was not going to be usable on the extremely sloped Prius windshield.  Or, if it did, it would have to be a relatively low-power lens, and provide only a modest boost to visibility above the roof of the car.

Instead, I wanted a relatively high-powered negative Fresnel lens, mounted perpendicular to my line of sight.  But mounted so that I could put it away when it wasn’t needed.

Finally, I rejected the use of a cheap positive (magnifying) Fresnel lens.  That would have made fabrication a lot easier and cheaper, but it would have produced an image that was upside-down and side-to-side reversed.  To me, typically facing a string of lights at a multi-lane intersection, that just seemed like a recipe for an eventual disaster.

The rest is just tinkering.

Results

Other than the Fresnel lens, I tossed this together from scraps lying around the garage.  Size, shape, and method of attachment were therefore more-or-less determined at random.

Here are the materials.  The flexible Fresnel lens needs some sort of clear, hard plastic sheet to be affixed to.  I decided to tape the lens to the plastic sheet with clear packing tape.  And I decided to have this rest above the sun visor, held on with a couple of pieces of elastic, run through holes drilled in the hard plastic.

The only thing that is even remotely tricky is that the Fresnel lens is not uniform.  By design, the bottom and side edges do a much better job of pulling images into the field of view, compared to the top edge.  And after you cut it, you want to be looking through that external edge to find your stop light, not through the (much weaker) center of the lens.  The upshot is that you want to cut your piece out of the bottom of the Fresnel lens, and you want to mount that so that the edge of the original lens ends up where the holes are drilled in the plastic.

Below I show the first test.  It sits above the sun visor, held in place with two piece of elastic.  To deploy it, pull it forward and let it hang off the front of the sun visor.  When you are done, slide it back into position above the sun visor.

In the three pictures below, I’ve circled the one-way arrow to keep you oriented.

The first picture is the intersection, as seen when sitting up straight in the driver’s seat.  The light is obscured by the roof.

Second picture show the traffic light from the “slouch and crane” position.  Normally, I’d slouch in the seat and crane my neck to watch the light.

But with the Fresnel lens, I can see the light without slouching.  This may not look like much in the photo, but it was perfectly adequate for monitoring the light to see when it turned green.  No slouching required.

This will win no beauty awards, but it works, and it’s unobtrusive.  When not in use, all you can see of it is the thin pieces of elastic circling the sun visor.

This could definitely use some tweaking if there were any need for an improved version.  First, it’s far larger than it needs to be.  Second, I’d probably glue the lens down, rather than tape it.  Third, I’d probably cut a section from the less powerful portion of the lens (the top), as the lens is far more powerful than it needs to be to provide a clear image of the light.

By far the biggest drawback — totally unanticipated — is that you have to focus your eyes on the Fresnel lens, not on the road.  Beyond being an annoyance, that means you aren’t focusing on the roadway in front of and around you.  When the light turns green, you then have just a split second to refocus on the roadway and check conditions.  This strikes me as a significant safety drawback to this device.  Enough that maybe I want to rethink the whole thing.

But the bottom line is that this does what it’s supposed to do.  It provides a usable image of a stoplight that would otherwise be obscured by the roof of the car.  Thus, I carry forward the century-old tradition of ad-hoc “signal viewing devices” that let you avoid craning your neck to see traffic lights.

Post #1661: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you. Part 1, the setup.

 

Briefly:

  1.  I frequently have a hard time seeing stop lights, if I’m first in line, due to the steeply sloped windshield of the Prius Prime.
  2. This is, apparently, a fairly common problem on modern cars.  Good aerodynamics require a sleek, low-profile shape.
  3. The common solution is to crane your neck as required, and get on with life.
  4. There are devices that address this problem, but I find them lacking.  They are either antique designs, finicky, provide barely-usable images, permanently intrude on field of vision, or all of the above.
  5. I’ve come up with my own solution, but I’m waiting for the parts from Amazon.  I’m going to try a visor-mounted flip-down cheap Fresnel lens.  Total cost, including zip ties to attach it, about $3.  Alternatively, I’ll need to buy a “wide angle Fresnel lens”, which will likely cost around $10, but will give me an upright image.
  6. I believe there’s so little potential profit in this that I’m putting the design in the public domain.

Continue reading Post #1661: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you. Part 1, the setup.

Post #1651: My mice need aroma therapy.

 

 

I’m just about to order some essential oils for my mice.  Along with an essential oil diffuser.  The poor things seem a bit stressed of late, and I figure that a bit of aroma therapy might help them more nearly align their chakras and generally improve their auras.

That’s sarcasm.  Mostly.

Mice are vermin.  Full stop.  Yet I am, in fact, purchasing an essential oil diffuser and some essential oils for my mice.

It’s as logical as 1-2-3. 4 maybe 5.

1:  Mice like my garage.

Source:  Clipart library.com

I’m now into Swedish Death Cleaning, the Garage Phase.  Just another in an ongoing series of attempts to get rid of stuff.

Currently I’m going through my detached garage.  Figuring out what can be given away.  What’s good for scrap metal.   What’s trash.  What has to go to the household toxic waste station at the local dump solid waste transfer station.  And so on.  The idea is to return this space to its original intended use a hobby woodshop.

But for now, the main issue is that it’s filthy.  Just filthy.  And the principal source of the filth is mice.  And all that mice do.  And do.  And do.  In every conceivable location in that garage.

So, as long as I’m cleaning it out, I want to add some rodent repellents.  Ideally, some effective rodent repellents.

2:  Mice hate peppermint.

Or so they say.

It’s not as if I haven’t tried rodent repellents before.  It’s just that what I’ve tried has failed.  And, I suspect that, as with my long and winding road for deer repellents, what will and will not work will be highly dependent on circumstances.

In any case, there appears to be some research suggesting that, if given alternatives, mice will stay away from areas heavily scented with peppermint, cinammon, wintergreen, and similar.  Let me just summarize that by saying that mice hate peppermint.

3:  Commercial mouse repellents are expensive, per unit of peppermint.

So I go to the Home Depot website and look up their top-rated mint-based rodent repellent.   They will cheerfully sell me a gallon of it for $34.  Reading the fine print, I see that what they are selling me is a gallon of water, with a little squirt of peppermint oil in it.  Above, the first ingredient is soap, followed by 0.5% peppermint oil.

So I’d be paying $34 for a little over half an ounce of peppermint oil.  Call it $60 an ounce or so.  Plus some other stuff.  Of which, arguably, the cinnamon oil has value as a rodent deterrent.

(I note, parenthetically, that I have tried “sachet-style” rodent repellents before, without notable success.  Hence my focus on liquids.)

4:  Peppermint essential oil is cheap, but volatile.

Source:  Amazon.com

Meanwhile, on Amazon, I can buy four ounces of peppermint essential oil (of unknown quality) for maybe $12.  Plus, it’s Energizing!

That price strikes me as about fair, as the stuff is more-or-less a weed.  My wife has mint patches established in several flower gardens, and it’s not so much a question of cultivating it, as keeping it in check.

As a bonus, the comments show that people do, in fact, use it as mouse repellent.

The drawback is that you need to keep reapplying it.  Recommendations seem to be to strew oil-soaked cotton balls around, and re-soak them once or twice a week.

That’s way too much work.  There has to be a better way to do this.

5:  Essential oil delivery systems are cheap.

Source:  Amazon.com

People who are into essential oils as room fragrances use some sort of system to deliver the scent.  You can simply warm a puddle of oil.  You can mix the oil with water and run it through an ultrasonic humidifier.

Or, you can buy a gizmo that will periodically spritz the essential oil into the air.  Said gizmo generally being called an “air freshener”.

In the end, I went with the $11 Air Wick Essential Mist.  It’s a battery powered air freshener that uses a small bottle of essential oil, and spritzes that into the air every few seconds, eight hours a day.  Again, per those useful Amazon comments, you can pry the lid off the bottle and replace the contents with the essential oil of your choice.  Each fraction-of-an-ounce bottle should be good for about a month.

As mice are nocturnal, I’ll set that up to spritz at night.

The only obvious negative is that, by reputation, these eat batteries.  But with an exposed battery compartment, that can be easily fixed by hard-wiring a wall wart to replace the three AAA batteries.

Edit:  Contrary to what The Internet told me, pure peppermint oil does not work with this device.  It won’t atomize it, or, at least, not at unheated-garage temperatures.  I redid this, mix pure peppermint oil roughly 50/50 with vodka.  That now seems to be working.  The upshot is that you need to thin the oil, and it looks like vodka (water and alcohol) will work OK.

Ergo, my mice need aroma therapy.  Q.E.D.

As I said, completely logical, linear and rational.  My little air-freshener-as-mouse-repellent costs about $25 to set up, and the four-ounce bottle of peppermint oil should last for maybe half-a-year.  That’s all plus-or-minus battery replacements.  And it will require monthly maintenance to refill the essential oil container.

If nothing else, the garage is going to smell a whole lot better than it does now.

It might even keep the mice away.  We’ll see.

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

 

Nothing exceeds like excess.

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

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

In this round I gave that a try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post #1643: No-salt turkey jerky

Edited 2/22/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post #1628: More on making a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Chump change.

After Post #1620, and Post #1625, I’ve followed through on stashing a few emergency-use items in my wife’s Prius Prime.  This follows the realization that if there is any sort of mass evacuation in my area, the inevitable result is that we’ll end up living in the car for a day or two, as we negotiate the resulting traffic jam.

This is, in effect, my quick-and-dirty emergency #vanlife kit.  I need to be able to drink, eat, excrete, and stay warm, in the car, for a day or two.

The trick here — as in so much of life — is not to be an idiot.  Don’t spend a ton of money.  Don’t interfere with day-to-day use of the car.  Make it easy to maintain.

But don’t skimp, either.  Keep this in perspective.   This is just another bit of of insurance, in a world where you already buy insurance.

Insurance?  For private insurance, I currently pay roughly:

  • $14,000 a year for high-deductible (“never-pay”) health insurance.
  • $1,500/year car insurance, two vehicles.
  • $1,200/year homeowner’s insurance.
  • $300/year for general liability (“umbrella”) insurance.

And I would guess that 35% of my federal taxes support Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and other government-mandated forms of social insurance. Most of which boils down to a subsidy of the less fortunate.  But some of which may benefit me.

It’s no exaggeration to say I routinely pay $20K per year for insurance.  That I hope I never get to use.  Hence the title of this.  (Which I stole, by the way, from a friend who was, at the time, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, who used that line when people started talking about health insurance providing poor value.)

In that context, a one-off expense of $150 worth of stuff, for the car?  That’s not exactly rounding error, in terms of my overall insurance expenditures.  But it’s close.

Without further ado.

Water.

Below:  Vacuum-packed four-packs of half-liter bottles, hanging at the back of the cargo area.

 

Sure, water is more-or-less required for long-term survival.  But bottled water sells out rapidly in any U.S. evacuation.

You can buy bags of emergency water supplies, but they seem a) ridiculously expensive, and b) too small.

And yet, off-the-shelf bottled water comes in rather fragile packaging. Even off-the-shelf gallons will eventually leak, in my experience.  How can you take that cheap grocery-store bottled water and carry it safely in the car?

My solution is to seal four half-liter bottles inside a gallon poly bag, then hang those bags behind the back seat of my wife’s Prius Prime, hung off the rear headrests, over the all-weather floor mats.  If they leak, they’ll leak into the bag.  And if the bag leaks, it’ll leak onto the weatherproof floor mat.

This gives me 6 liters (1.5 gallons) of single-serving water bottles, with minimal risk of damaging the car interior via leaks.

Too much water?  Too little water?  Beats me.  Looks like a lot to me, but seemingly reliable sources say that you need to consume about three liters of water a day, in all forms (Reference:  Mayo clinic). More for men, less for women.  Given that everything else in the car is dry food, by that standard, this is a one-night supply of water for two adults.  I guess that’s about right.

Cost, if you have a vacuum-sealer already, is maybe $3.  If not, use zip-locks.  So, no problem if I have to toss these every couple of years.  Also uses space that doesn’t interfere with the everyday use of the car.  I might add a piece of black plastic over them to slow any UV damage to all that fragile plastic.

 

Sanitation. 

Well, there’s a reason they’re called SHTF bags.  God willing, I will never see this again in my lifetime.

Source:  Amazon.  References for other supplies are in prior post.

After looking at my off-the-shelf options, I decided that a stainless steel bedpan was my best choice for sanitation.   It’s a tried-and-true design.  And I’m fat enough that plastic likely wouldn’t do.  I bought one with a lid, and stuffed it with the items listed below.  Note that this takes up no useful space in the car.  It sits under the front passenger seat.  And, God willing, it will never come out from that hidey-hole.

  • Lidded stainless steel bedpan, containing:
    • Short bungee to anchor back of bed pan to seat belt.
    • One roll TP, compressed
    • 4 potty liners (blue, absorbent fill)
    • 3 urinals (pink, absorbent fill)
    • 8 small trash bags
    • Sanitary wipes
    • Disposable gloves
    • Water purification device
    • Water purification tablets

This is probably $85 worth of stuff, all told.  All of which should be a once-in-a-lifetime purchase.  And should never have to be touched, short of an actual emergency.

Seems like a lot, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Food 1:  Emergency rations.

Source:  Amazon and Amazon.

This is a brick of emergency food, plus some individually-wrapped emergency food bars, from Amazon.  Stuffed in a bag, to sit under the driver’s seat.  The main point is that you’d only eat these out of a total sense of desperation.  Ideally, these need to be replaced no more frequently than every five or ten years.  If then.

Cost, about $25. Should last anywhere from half-a-decade to a decade.  Call it insurance at five bucks a year.  Hope to see it again a decade from now.

First aid.

If you’re shopping for a first-aid supplies, it’s important to judge whether or not you have the moxie to deal with what I would term a trauma kit.  Something  for major injuries.  As opposed to first-aid kit, which is basically for minor injuries and common maladies.

I think the upper limit of what I can plausibly handle is a butterfly closure.  Maybe some gauze and tape.  And, e.g., aspirin, Tums, and similar off-the-shelf remedies.  So that’s what I pack.  If I manage to sever a major artery, I’m out of luck.  I think that’s the nature of insurance.

Tourniquets?  Sutures?  Splints?  Do you know you to use them?  If not, buy a first aid kid, no matter how appealing a trauma kit might be.

I have no clue what my first-aid kit cost, because I repackaged a bunch of first-aid supplies that I’ve had sitting around for years.Some elements (e.g., OTC medications) will have to be replaced every couple of years.  This sits under the driver’s seat, alongside the emergency rations.

 

Emergency tools.

The Prius Prime has one narrow, deep compartment under the floor of the trunk.  This is a place for storing (e.g.) tools for changing a tire.  I am adding, in one small bag, all the tools that might be useful in an emergency, and will never need to be refreshed or updated.  These include:

  • Multi-tool
  • Can opener
  • Space blanket x 2
  • Emergency poncho x 2
  • Compass
  • Work gloves, handful of misc car-related tools.

Note that this isn’t at all what is normally sold as a vehicle emergency kit.  Those kits focus on having a breakdown in your vehicle.  That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m more worried about a breakdown of civil society.

In any case, despite having worked on a lot of cars over my lifetime (e.g., replaced the engine on my first car), the idea that I could diagnose and fix a serious problem on a modern fuel-injected computer-controlled engine is just laughable.  Maybe if I win the lottery, I’ll throw a high-end scan tool in that bag.  That way, if I’m stuck, at least I’ll know why.

Food 2:  Routine long-trip stuff, including snacks and the tools required to eat them.

Finally, in a small bag sitting in a little alcove in the trunk, I’m putting all the stuff that needs to be refreshed roughly annually.  That boils down to food and batteries, and a few pieces of equipment that might come in handy on any long trip. Things that you might just routinely tap into, on a long trip.  Or need to grab in a hurry.

  • Flashlights x 2
  • Spare batteries
  • Water heating device, insulated mugs
  • Tea bags x 10, other hot drinks
  • Ramen x 6
  • Plates, cups, utensils,
  • Misc dry food snacks (e.g., peanut butter crackers)
  • Cash.

The last item, because I’ve never been in a situation where having some money around made it worse.

The water heater, discussed in an earlier post, is about $30 and will take like-onto half an hour to boil a cup and a half of water.  Such is the tyranny of physics.  Otherwise, this is maybe another $10 worth of food.

Summary.

I’m not a nut.  I think. 

I’m just a fairly prudent guy.  Who, as a self-employed person, got used to paying for all of my insurance, including health insurance.  And once you’re in the habit of shipping off $1K+ per month for health insurance, while simultaneously fervently hoping that you are pissing your money away (because if not, that’s not good) …

Maybe out of all that, I ended up end up with a different attitude toward small insurance expenditures.  Which is, at root, what this is about.  This is about fitting out my wife’s car with a bit of insurance against (e.g.) what happened this past January, on I-95, in Virginia.  Let alone some greater catastrophe.

So the goal is to set up some supplies that:

  • don’t cost an arm and a leg (appropriately amortized over their expected lifetime).
  • don’t interfere with the day-to-day use of the vehicle.
  • cover the basics of existence (water, food, sanitation, light, warmth)
  • in a way that is easily maintained.

I think I’ve hit the brief on this one. 

I’ve made a one-time investment in sanitation supplies, packed so they’ll easily fit under the front passenger seat.

Thrown in some food and water, some first-aid supplies, and a few tools.

Separately, all the stuff that’s likely to need to be refreshed annually is in one bag, ready to go.

In the end, this is like having a will.  You aren’t buying happiness.  You are buying peace of mind.  If the unthinkable happens, you’ve done what you can reasonably be expected to do.  Having settled this, there’s no sense worrying about it further,  Just get on with the rest of your life.

Post #1625: Tyranny of physics, or still more on a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Emergency preparedness.

I’m in the middle of repurposing some old backpacking equipment into a set of bug-out bags (Post #1620).   To me, the big surprise is that mass evacuations in the U.S. almost always generate horrendous, days-long traffic jams. 

You can pretty much bet on it.  Which means that you ought to be prepared for it.  Which I was not.  As a result, my most pressing need wasn’t for camping gear per se.  It was for the supplies that would allow me to live in my car for a day or two.

Basically, to be prepared to bug out, in an urban area, I need a mini-#vanlife kit.  Ideally, without spending a fortune, and without having to replace critical supplies every year.  (Because I’m not that organized, and I’ll forget to do it.)

It’s not rocket science.  You need to take care of water, food, warmth (maybe), and sanitation (maybe).

In my last post, when I looked at options for the critical sanitation category, I found plenty of good choices for #1, but not such great options for handling #2.  In both cases, I’ve gone with some version of special-purpose plastic bag lined with super-absorbent gel.  I picked this and this, for starters, both of which I expect to last indefinitely and be once-in-a-lifetime purchases.

Research reveals some constraints on food choices for an emergency kit kept in the car, driven by the harsh environment of the car’s interior. Some mainstays of camping (e.g., chocolate bars) are obviously inappropriate.  Less obviously, experts frown on most canned foods and high-fat foods because the heat and freeze/thaw lead to rapid deterioration.  Even foods packaged for stability, like MREs.  In particular, the “best used by dates” of those foods cannot be trusted, if kept in a car, because those dates assume the foods were kept at normal room temperature, not at the often blistering-hot temperature of a car interior.

So I’m putting together a little kit of dried foods.  Starting with a brick of true emergency rations and some emergency food bars.  Both of those ought to last five years, even if kept in a car.  And then I’m adding things any camper would consider, and that have exceptional shelf life.  Or at least won’t kill you, even if they don’t taste so hot after a decade in the car.  These include ramen noodles, oatmeal, dried potato flakes, maybe some tea, and coffee, hot chocolate, and other dry foods.

But this brings up a new need.  My ability to eat anything tasty, out of that emergency stash, depends on my ability to boil water in the car.  I expect that the emergency ration bars taste awful, and while you can, in theory, just cold-soak ramen noodles and potato flakes, nobody claims that the results are palatable.

And that’s when I started running into the tyranny of physics.

Pick an option for boiling water in the car:  Asphyxiate, spend tons of money, electrocute, void your new car warranty, or wait a really long time.

The task is to come up with a modest amount of boiling-hot water, on demand, as the car is creeping along the freeway.

Seriously, how hard can that be?

Asphyxiate. First, I’m going to rule out any traditional flame-based camp stove.  Even clean-burning fuels like butane.  Burning anything in an enclosed space is just a bad idea.  Couple that with notion that a) you’re going to be doing this while in dense traffic, and b) whatever fuel you use, it’s going to get stored long-term in the car.  Aside from Esbit — of which I am a fan — I can’t think of a refined stove fuel that I’d even consider keeping in a hot car in the summer.

Spend tons of money.  Second, there are cooking systems that rely on exothermic chemical reactions.  You chuck a packet of chemicals into water or salt water, and the resulting chemical reaction generates the heat to cook your meal.  These include Army MRE heaters as well as commercial systems such as Barocook.  The only downside here is the expense.  Near as I can tell, it would cost me a $2 disposable every time I wanted to heat up a cup of water for tea.  And you should ideally buy the right equipment first, the sole use for which is to heat foods with these chemical heaters.

So, those would work, and those will keep indefinitely.  But there’s a lot of dedicated equipment and expense, and I would never get any utility out of them except as a component of this car emergency pack.

Third, seriously, it’s an electric car.  The motor/generators can put out tens of thousands of watts of power.  Why not just plug in an electric kettle/coffee pot and be done with it?  That’s where the choices boil down to electrocution, voiding the warranty, or waiting a long time.

Electrocution:  Although the Prius Prime can literally run on electricity, Toyota didn’t think to bring much of that inside the cabin.  The power sockets (“cigarette lighter sockets”) on the Prius interior are rated for a maximum of 120 watts.  The upshot is that if you plug in an inverter and a typical home electric kettle, you’ll instantly blow the blow the fuse on the power socket.  A typical US home electric kettle draws 1500 watts.

In fact, that’s so little power than you can’t even run this device:

Source:  Ebay.

The Kenner Easy-Bake toy oven above draws way too much wattage to be used inside a Prius Prime.  “The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, …”  (source:  Wikipedia).

Heck, I already own one of these little immersion heaters:

 

And even the lowest-power version of that device draws far too much power for the Prius power outlets to handle.

Void your warranty.  There’s an obvious way around this, which is to wire up a socket or an inverter directly to the battery (fused, of course).  That way you could use much heavier wire, draw more current, and use an electric kettle capable of heating a pint of water in a reasonable amount of time.  Even then, as discussed in Post #1020, you probably wouldn’t want to exceed 1000 watts.  That’s the size of inverter I hook up, when I used my older Prius as an emergency generator.

That said, on an almost-new car, still under warranty, with a rather delicate 12V electrical system, I’m not sure I want to attach cables to the battery.  Let alone try to find a way to get them through the firewall.  For fear that if something goes wrong in the 12V electrical system, the deal will point to the modifications as an excuse not to fix it under warranty.

So while I have no problem hooking up a 1000-watt inverter to our long-out-of-warranty 2005 Prius, I’m not quite comfortable doing that with my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime.  Particularly not as a permanent install, to be ready in case of emergency evacuation.

Wait a really long time.  At this point, all remaining electrical solutions fall under the tyranny of physics.  If you input few watts, the water heats slowly.  And there’s no way around that.  That’s just basic physics.

If you want to heat a pint of water from room temperature to boiling, using the limit of 120 watts, assume zero losses, and assuming you don’t blow the fuse on the power socket, that will take you 22 minutes.

That said, of all the ways I could heat water in the car, a little low-powered cup-sized electrical heater seems to make the most sense.  For one thing, if I’m using it while stuck in a traffic jam, I’ll have nothing but time.  For another, I can actually use that on normal road trips to make a fresh cup of coffee or tea.  So I will get some utility out of it, beyond its value in an emergency.  For a third, they are designed to fit in a car’s cup holders, which would be handy if I’m going to use one while stuck in traffic.

When all was said and done, I ordered one of these:

Source:  Amazon.

This is an 80-watt device that should be able to bring 12 ounces of water to a boil in about 25 minutes.  That’s far enough below the power socket’s limit that I don’t risk blowing a fuse.  That’s enough boiling water to cook at least a single serving of ramen noodles.  And if I’m stuck in the car for 24 hours, the 25 minute wait will just give me something to look forward to.

Conclusion

For emergency rations to be kept in the car, experts say that a lot of your normal choices for emergency food are off-limits.  Canned foods, high-fat foods (including nuts), and MREs are all poor choices due to their rapid and unpredictable spoilage rates when subject to high temperatures and freeze-thaw cycles.

For my car kit, I am going with some ultra-stable commercial emergency foods, and a selection of dried foods and beverages.  The latter require me to boil water, in the car, possibly while moving in extended stop-and-go traffic.  After looking over my options, to boil water I’ve decided to go with the simplest plug-and-play setup I could find.  For the Prius Prime, that’s a small (12 ounce) low-wattage (80W) water heater built to sit securely in a cup holder.  The sole downside is that, assuming it works perfectly, it’s going to take roughly half-an-hour to bring 12 ounces of water to boiling.

Seems like a lousy choice.  Until you realize that all the other choices involved significant risks (flame-based cookers), expensive disposables (MRE heaters and similar), or blown fuses or possibly a blown warranty for higher-powered electrical devices.