Modern Geekery

Last year, I decided to plant fruit trees. Most folks would have chosen a nice dwarf apple and called that done. I wanted something a little bit different. After all, there are a ton of apple orchards in the area and we’re no strangers to them. One of the most delightful fruits that I’ve ever encountered happens to be one that is native to this area – the pawpaw. They’re like a tropical fruit that grows in a temperate climate. The better ones are large, custardy, and delicious, while the wild ones are highly variant in quality. None of them survive handling very well, which is why its next to impossible to find them commercially, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live near a farmers market graced by someone with a few pawpaw trees. The pawpaw is enjoying something of a renaissance, with a research program active at Kentucky State and several growers associations. After reading up on the fruit, I decided to try growing them.

Continue reading ‘Digging holes’ »

I’ve started digging the holes for my pawpaw trees. On the first hole, I got down maybe 4-5 inches before I hit asphalt. Yes, asphalt. I continued to dig, and eventually excavated an asphalt covered block of concrete and brick about 12″ x 8″ x 6″. My only guess is that it was a fragment of the house’s old driveway, before they upgraded the sewer line. I also dug out corroborating evidence in the form of about 3 linear feet of terra cotta pipe, in pieces. I also dug out the better part of a piece of automotive glass that was amazingly whole – at least until I hit it with the mattock – and several old shingles. Apparently, the previous owners of the house used the the back corner of the lot as a junkpile. Fabulous.

I called around yesterday to see if any place in the area had an auger that I could use when the fruit trees arrive. While I still have a vague sense that using a mechanical tool to dig the holes for the trees is somehow cheating, I’ve worn myself out two weekends in a row now trying to dig out the privet stumps that dot the area in which I want to plant. The auger rental is not terribly expensive – 75$ for the weekend – and the time saved may well be worth it.

That all aside, Elder Daughter and I had a good afternoon working in the garden. We extended the garden bed by another foot in width (east-west) and about 4 feet in length. This involved digging up and transplanting the grass, adding about a 40 lbs of mushroom compost, and then covering it over with a tarp to kill the remain grass and weeds. Then, we worked another scant 40 lbs of compost into half of the original garden bed and planted a row of radishes and a row of kohlrabi. We also mixed up compost and a little potting soil and filled several cell trays. In those, we planted more kohlrabi and radishes, to transplant into the new area of the bed later, and some of our flowers – zinnias, purple coneflower and statice. We also planted two different varieties of sunflowers into peat cups, since sunflowers don’t transplant so well. The cell trays went under the new cold frame, since its a bit early for all but the radishes and kohlrabi.

Once we got all the bed preparation and planting done, Elder Daughter played in the sandbox and around in the backyard while I dug out two more stumps. What I didn’t get done was sheet mulching the area in the west side yard that will become the flower bed. There’ll be time for that later.

Technorati Tags: garden

This year, I decided to build a cold frame to start seedlings in, considering the havoc that last year’s April freeze wrought. After checking out designs and plans across the ‘net, I decided that most people were way more ambitious than I was. I saw designs with storm windows built in and automatic louver adjusters connected to thermostats and more.

I decided that simple was best. I went down to the lumber yard and got 4 equally sized pieces of 1×8s – each piece is a hair under 4′. Then, I stopped by Lowes and bought a $2 polyethylene drop cloth, 1 mil thickness. Then, with Meg’s help, I used wood screws to fashion the frame and sealed it using a water-borne acrylic coating. At this point, the frame looked like this:

I let this dry and then used a staple gun to attach two layers of the plastic sheeting. I figured that by doubling it over, I could create a warm pocket of air between the layers that would provide good insulation for the plants beneath. The sheeting was pretty fragile to the staples, so I wound up having to roll up the edges of the polyethylene to get enough material to fasten. That seemed to work pretty well, though, and the result is this:

Now, I need to measure how much heat I can trap underneath it. I’ll borrow a thermocouple from work one day after it gets cooler and measure how warm it gets under there at the end of the day. With any luck, it’ll trap enough heat to keep the germinating seeds happy during the early spring chill.

Update: I added some corner supports to the frame. While I was going for the “cheap, simple hack” version, without the corner supports, it was hard to lug about. See this post for details.

I’m in Chicago this week on business. Things started off with a cancelled flight for both me and one of my teammates (two separate flights). Then, our first trial completely bombed, forcing me to revise the experimental plan somewhat. And to top it off, the 4th guy on the team who was coming had 3 flights cancelled or delayed, making him 24 hours late. Go Chicago-O’hare!

We’re up and going now and I’m sitting in the lab working on a new model for the data we’re collecting while I watch the equipment run.

Last fall, when I was at MRS, the 40 year old oil furnace that had heated our home finally died. The diagnosis: cracked heat exchanger. We’d discussed this possibility a few times, trying out some scenarios. At the time of the incident, our current thinking was either a high-efficiency oil furnace capable of burning biodiesel or a heat pump. The folks at McNutt Service Group, the contractor we decided to work with, quoted us around $4000 for the oil furnace and about $6300 for the heat pump. The heat pump we had selected was a slightly above-average Trane model (16 SEER, 9.0 HSPF), which (along with the new air-handling system) we felt would give us the best deal in terms of efficiency and cost. After much debate, we decided to go with the heat pump for a variety of reasons. the most salient of these was the operating cost. I ran some rough numbers and estimated that over a 20 year lifespan of each unit, I should save around $6000 using the heat pump, based on a 3% per year increase in the cost of heating oil and a 1.5% increase in the cost of a kWh of electricity.

After receiving my first electrical bill that included a full month of the heat pump, I realize I may have underestimated the savings. The amount had only increased by about $35. At first, I thought that this month might have been warmer than usual, and in fact there were some warm days in the month. There were also several nights of temperatures in the teens. The National Weather Service’s climate data page did not indicate that the highs and lows during the month were excessive in either way (average temperatures 3-5 degrees above normal in December and a roughly equal number of days above and below in January.) With that, I was reasonably satisfied that the bill represented a typical January bill. A quick check back through my financial records showed me that from Oct. 2006 to Oct. 2007, I’d spent $766 on heating oil.

Going back to my spreadsheet, I plugged those differences in. Still not trusting the $35 number, I assumed that over the 6 month “winter” period, I’d average $50 more a month, for a total of $300. This number I assume is the cost of heating with electricity. Plugging in the growth rates I mentioned earlier, I set about determining my time to payback over an oil furnace. It’s less than 5 years to save the $2300 difference between the two units. But this really isn’t a good comparison – the new oil furnace would be much more efficient than the ancient Lennox furnace we had. The oil furnace we were quoted on was 90% efficient. Though I don’t have the numbers for certain, I’m estimating that the old furnace was no more than 70% efficient. Using that to adjust the cost of fuel oil, I recomputed the time to payback and got 7 years. Still, not bad at all. Assuming the growth numbers hold, I’ll save around $9000 (in today’s dollars) over the lifetime of the heat pump. And this doesn’t even count the savings in the summer of the 16 SEER heat pump over the old 11 SEER air conditioning unit that came with the house.

Bottom line for us was that the heat pump is looking to be a very good investment. And if folks like Nanosolar make it ultra cost-effective to put photovoltaics on every roof, the heat pump will be an even better decision.

Technorati Tags: energy, heat pump, home, oilheat

If you’re an SF geek like me and you haven’t heard of them, I highly recommend the io9 blog and Steve Eley’s Escape Pod podcast.

Escape Pod, in particular, is worth your time because Steve has a really keen eye for picking good fiction for the podcast, a keen ear for picking great readers for the stories, and a really great attitude about SF and podcasting.

Technorati Tags: escapepod, io9, SF