Solar Power: Clothes Dryer

It seemed like our electric bill was high or getting higher.  At one point it felt like it was climbing 9% per month.  In actuality, it fluctuates wildly month to month, shown below.  The last figure is an out-lier as we were gone for 8 days during that period and the hot water heater, dryer and washing appliances were all off duty during that time.  Just that 8 days saved us 14.5%! 

Household Electric Bill -  9/09 - 7/10

The chart is baselined at $100 to provide more drama, which really needs no help.  While we've started a modest downward trend, it's still up where I would consider it too expensive.  So three weeks ago, having identified what I perceive as the main energy hog in our house, I put together a new solar powered clothes dryer.  In other words, up went a 4 strand clothes line.

I was proud that it only cost me about $36 in new hardware.  I had scavenged some pressure treated 1" x 3" x 44" boards from the Lowes dumpster locally - free for the asking.  Also left over from the garden fence project were two 8' x 4" x 4" pt posts.  Using my miter saw, I made 45° gussets for a cross member from the 1 x 3's and assembled what basically looked like telephone poles with for wires running between two of them. Screws were left over from the play ground kit and scavenged from our old shutters.

The poles went two feet into the clay and the cross members were an inch from the top, leaving room to glue on some old copper / tin post caps.  Max height of line is then 5'-11" so my wife has no trouble reaching.  The poles are 40 ft apart.  I bought 200 ft of steel core green plastic line which has stretched with use.  Fortunately, I anchored it to the hooks on either end with cable thimbles and u-bolts so it is adjustable for tensioning.  I could probably come up with a more convenient tensioner mechanism given some more time... something that doesn't require getting out the socket wrench.

Per usual, till we're satisfied with placement and utility, the post holes are just backfilled with crushed limestone and capped with packed clay.  If we like what we have, I'll cement them next year.  It took about three evenings to put it all together; one night spent shopping for hooks, u-bolts and cable, one night cutting the gussets and one night assembling and installing.  Probably 3 or 4 hours all together in effort.  I installed the whole thing in an area that gets full sun for about 85-90% of the day during summer and should get 100% daily sunlight other times of the year.

I am very much looking forward to what our electric bill is like next month.  I am anticipating a good percentage drop, perhaps 30%.  We'll see.  Also consuming a lot of load here is our Electric hot water heater, two freezers, a refrigerator, a dehumidifier which runs in 4 hour intervals, the clothes washing machine and the dish washing machine.  Lights are almost all now CFL except for the basement which has dimmers so those are incandescent but I took half the lights out of the recessed cans down there.  My desk lamp is a 40 watt... I can't have a cold blue glow of a CFL at my nice warm writing desk... just too incongruitous.

I'm looking closely at other solar powered items, like the food dehydrator I mentioned last month.  A Solar water heater is very appealing to me as it would be something within my mechanical means.  Stay tuned.

Food Storage - Dehydrators

This is not a food blog, but a DIY blog, mostly.  As we continue to see signs that the economy is getting worse, supplies are becoming limited, and things in the future may not as be cheap and convenient as the past, it seems good to me to turn our attention to the well being of our families.  Some religions, I understand, teach long term food storage as a preparation for certain prophetic events.  I'm a Baptist, and the only prophetic event we generally look forward to is the Rapture, which means material needs will not apply.  But, I don't have any doubt things could get much much worse before they get to be on par with the end times discussed in scripture.  
With that in mind, I began my investigation into food dehydration this afternoon.  I found many good resources which appear below.


First, you'll want some general information, hints and tips from an experienced food dehydrator.  Dehydrate2Store has a lot of good information.  There are videos, recipes, hints and tips and apparently an avid following.  The biggest value on this site (to my eye) was the tips section.  I printed and filed that.

There are apparently a number of different dehydrators commercially available on the internet.  Some people say they all amount to plastic boxes with fans.  Some people swear by electric, some swear by solar only.  A few things ran common, however.  Any unit worth the money or time to construct will be made out of food grade materials wherever the food or drying air will be circulating.  Lots of materials you might think are good for a DIY version are actually stabilized with chemicals you do not want leaching into your food.  Good old standards like Stainless Steel mesh, glass and untreated wood seem to be the best and safest components.

There are a lot of plans out there.  I found two that I tucked away for a future endeavor.  This one uses just glass, black painted metal, screen and solar power.  It appeals to me for the simplicity and lack of moving parts.  The main draw backs are a dependence on sunlight and a lack of good temperature control.  Dehydrate2store recommends 120 - 125 F.  Most sites agree that much over 130 and you are cooking your food instead of drying it, which can give you a cooked flavor in your dried goods rather than a fresh flavor.  The lower slower temperature preserves the most flavor.

Alton Brown has a lot of good tips and a humorous presentation style.  He talks about energy efficiency, food flavor and practicality.  He also offers a good tip for food prep - lemon juice cut with water as a pre soak to kill bacteria and pathogens and help the food retain better food and color longer.

On the energy efficiency side, there are some folks that like to use light bulbs, and some that suggest you get a gecko warming ceramic element (like Alton does).  To my mind, anything electric means more of the stuff that seems to be going up in cost about 9% per month here.  I'm thinking it won't be long before deep cycle batteries and a hand full of cheap solar panels will be very cost effective.

But I digress.   If you are going to go electric, it seems that ceramic is the best heating element.  Light bulbs produce light and heat and the light isn't strictly useful for drying food and in fact can degrade photo sensitive nutrients.  If you do use a light bulb, make sure it actually produces heat.  CFLs don't produce as much as incandescent, and halogens produce massive heat.  Which brings me back to the temperature control I mentioned earlier.

Temperature control is important in any configuration you use.  Alton and other suggest using a kitchen thermometer.  A cheap meat and poultry thermometer might do just fine.  If you don't have a variable and controllable heat source, you will need a variable and controllable heat exhaust or cool air intermix feature on whatever you build.

My thought for this is if I go solar, I would want to have a sliding slat behind the air inlet holes.  Reducing air flow by sliding the slat over more holes would increase the temperature.  Opening more inlets would allow more cool air into the dehydrator, increase air flow and lower the temperature.  This is strictly a manual, low tech approach that would require some pretty constant monitoring on partly cloudy days.  A mechanical thermostat would be a good way to automate this.  Old thermostat controls (non digital) have bi-metal springs that could be useful here.

So, I think this is definitely on my list of things to do, along with continuing the expansion of my cultivated area in the garden.  The more food I can produce and dry, the more we have that is ready (even out of season) in the winter.  Ultimately, I would need to produce and dry several tens of bushels of food per summer to feed us through the winter and would need to supplement with hunting.  Hopefully, things don't get bad so quickly that I run out of time to ramp up our capacity here.   Cheery thoughts, no?  Chin up - humans are one of the most tenacious and adaptable creatures on the planet.  Little adventures like this will make it all the more enjoyable when hard times do set in.

PVC Cable Minders

 PVC is great stuff.  It's durable, millable, drillable and paintable.   Once upon a time I created a monitor riser for my laptop to sit under.  You can read about that here.

Recently, I moved my desk yet again and it would now have the back facing the room.  That's the side where a waterfall of cables usually drapes to the floor, making it impossible to find a wire for a given device to unplug it and creating problems for keeping the floor clean.  Nobody wants to vacuum if they have to pick up a rats nest every time.

The solution was to make some custom cable minders to hang off the back of the desk to keep things some what tidy and out of the way.  Here's a couple of shots of those which I created from a spare length of 2" PVC.

Here's a single unit.  It amounts to a "C" shape with a hole near one end throug which a 3/8" wood screw holds it to the desk.  With dense fiber board like that used in my furniture, this is sufficient.  If you have a softer material, a longer screw may be advisable - just don't put in more screw than you have wood.

And here's an indication of the spacing.  I created three in all.

The only thing on the floor now is the power strip.  These were pretty easy to make and just took a tiny bit of work.  To start with, you'll want some 2" PVC.  I use schedule 40 for most of my work due to the hardness.  You  get a more rigid structure and thicker walls which means a bit more work cutting but a lot lower incidence of failure.

I don't have step by step photos (apologies) but here are the steps I went through.

Before you start, remember safety rules.  I use un-powered hand tools for most of my work except when impractical. They are safer and cheaper and often times work just as well.  Use your brain and don't blame me if you get cut up doing this.  PVC is a bit stiff but will work easy enough if you are patient and careful.  Alway cut away from yourself, look both ways before crossing the street, and wear clean underwear for the love of Pete.

1. Mark your segments on the pipe with a grease pencil, crayon or sharpie.  Allow for blade width if you are picky about uniformity.  I'm not in this case.

2. Make a line parallel to the pipe along one side.  This will be your center line for drilling the screw holes.

3. I used my baby drill press to drill a hole on the center line in each of the segments I had marked out.

4. Cut the segments free from the pipe as a group if you only have two or three.  If you are making a lot, you'll want to do them in groups of three, four at most....

5. ...because next you'll want to head to the miter saw.  I have an old fashion one that my fingers don't fear too much.  Make a set of lines parallel to the screw center line about 1/4" away from the center line and about 1/2" or slightly more apart from each other.  You will remove this material with your saw.  I used my biggest wood block clamp and a sacrificial bit of blocking to get this set on the saw.  Clamp, cut one of the lines through one side of the pipe, unclamp, line up the second cut, cut through one side and then remove the waste material and burs.  A pocket knife or box cutter is handy for getting the burs off.

6.  Turn the piece 90 degrees and cut each cable minder free.  You might need to block and clamp your last one for finger safety.

7.  Decide where you want your cable minders and drill a small pilot hole if you have very hard material.  I did and so I put in three 1/16" pilot holes. 

8. Insert screws through the inside of the "C" and into your pilot holes and tighten till snug.  Don't over tighten as you may strip out the wood and have to move your cable minder to a new pilot hole.

9. Run your cables.  You can see from the pictures that I just fed them through the gap in the "C" and then looped the excess back and forth so all the cable was up off the floor.

Now, as a bonus step, if you are really anal like I can be sometimes, use zip-ties to tie the cables that must run to the floor to find the power strip to the legs of your desk.  In the past, I had done the revers and mounted the power strip up under the desk, but then the power button is hard to get to.

There you go.  If you already have scrap lying around (like every good shop hog should), free cable minders for little effort.

Custom Built Reading Lamp

I've been wanting to get this written up for a while now.  Sometime last October I was having a less that perfect day and stopped by Lowe's on the way home to hunt around for a couple of pieces I had been wanting to get for a lamp I wanted to build.  I picked up some 8x10 sheets of clear lexan, a copper post cap, some copper tacks and headed home.  Then I set about scrounging up the parts I needed to build the frame for what is pictured below - a sort of lantern style table lamp.

Assembly

I took a piece of red oak I had left over from making a bench seat and squared it up with the table saw.  Then I pulled out an old piece of quarter round left over from making my root cellar and used the table saw again to segment it into four 10" pieces and then put slots for the windows in them.  These went together with a spacer made from 1/4 plywood which I had used to line some cabinets with.

To make the corner notches, I just set the rail on the table saw the width of the quarter round away from the blade and then cut the corners by flipping the piece over and rotating it 90 degrees each time.

I also used the table saw to size the lexan sheet.  Lexan is very hard and tends to chip, so I had to go slowly cutting it.  The top spacer was made the same way as the bottom but has one side cut short to allow the lexan on that side to be pulled up to maintain the bulb.  The quarter round was toe-nailed into the spacer with a nail gun and then glued with Tight Bond III wood glue.  This assembly was clamped and glued to the heavy oak base.  The base, I should mention, almost broke my hand.  I was drilling it with a flat drill bit on the drill press and had forgotten to clamp it down.   BAD.  At one point the bit locked up in the wood and it turned into a whirling wheel of death giving me some pretty awesome sub-dermal abrasions and bruises.  If I had decided on a rectangular base, I would probably have a broken hand or wrist.

Update 2/23/2011 - The Lexan has had a rattly sound in the slots for a long time, making the lamp noisy to turn on and off and seem cheap and fragile.  The other night I put a dab of hot glue in each corner inside the lamp where the lexan fits into the slots, top and bottom.  The whole structure is much more solid feeling now and sounds a lot more stable and sturdy when turning on and off.

Wiring

I had most of the wire and couplings on hand, but bought the switch and the socket.   The switch was a threaded push button model so I was able to tap the oak with my tap and die set to accept the thread on the switch.  I thought that was pretty cool as it made for a very snug fit.  The cord was salvaged from an old alarm clock, which rests in pieces in a cardboard box on my desk with an array of other discarded items.

I soldered couplers onto the wires and crimped them.  The couplers are friction fitting and set up pretty tight when you jam them together.  Not wanting to expose the dust bunnies to the raw ends of the couplers, I sealed all the connections with some multi-temp hot glue which has to get pretty hot to melt and is generally non-flammable at low to moderate temperatures.  It does however seep into all the crevices, making an air and water tight seal.

Finishing

The wood lamp frame was given a once over with some ebony polyurethane.  The lexan was treated with a coat of Testers Dull-coat spray to create light diffusion.  I tried a number of approaches to diffusing the lexan and the Dull-coat was the most uniform.  Plus, it can be cleaned off the lexan with goof-off or similar if I decide to try something different.   I put some of the copper tacks in the base for accent - not much but a nice touch, and then seated the copper cap on top.  Last of all I glued some sections of corner molding on the bottom of three corners to make feet to match the depth which the switch protrudes from the bottom.  This also allowed the wiring to not be crammed into the base but just tacked to the bottom with hot glue.  I had wanted to use white LEDs for the light element but wound up finding a 3 watt florescent tube bulb that was the same wattage and better illumination once it warms up.  A socket extender helped loft it into the middle of the lamp cage. 

 

I'm pleased with the final result.  Things I would do differently next time: pick a switch with less mechanical resistance.  I would also frame the lamp differently.  This thing is not going to suffer much abuse as built, but it looks nice.  I would make the top and bottom spaces thicker and dove-tail the rails into them for a solid fit.  I would also probably try to get tempered glass.  The lexan is fine for what is essentially a prototype, but it rattles and sounds cheap, and scratches easily.  I might also try to incorporate some brass next time.  Tempered glass and brass have a complimentary look to my eye.

I really enjoyed this project.  It gave me a lot of tiny challenges to figure out how to get certain things accomplished and let me put some of my meager skills to use which normally don't get a workout.   With a simple table saw, clamps, wood glue and some creativity, I think this project is doable by just about anybody.  Just be careful with that table saw (and the drill press!!).

Get that dust out!

I was *this* close to getting a new computer this weekend.  Then I remembered some advice a friend of mine had given me that I had just recently passed on to others.  If your computer is very slow as of late and it once performed very well, don't just blame Windows or a fragmented hard drive.  Check the dust bunny quotient.

I tore my computer down last night and found: dust caked on the CPU cooling system, dust caked on a memory stick, dust all over the fans.

Dust on the fans makes them less efficient due to drag.  Air moving over the blades of the fan is slowed, reducing the amount of hot air, and hence heat, which can be displaced.  Displacing heat from your computer is essential to keeping the chips running in peak condition.  Too much heat in the chips causes electron flow to literally slow down as resistance is increased.

Dust on the heat sink for the CPU also contributes.  Not only can the fan not move air past the fins on the heat sink if dust is in the way, the dust acts as a blanket helping the heat sink to retain more heat.

Now this one I did not expect.  Dust on my memory sticks.  The fan for the CPU in my setup blows right on a memory module.  Dust was caked up to the point that I suspect it was causing a short on the surface  - just enough for the module to test bad on Boot.  So, after cleaning it, I got half my Gig of memory back!

To clean my system, I used the soft brush attachment for my vacuum cleaner AFTER removing the components from the case.  Trying to put a vacuum in your case could damage things, so be careful in there!

Happy computing!

DIY Saw Blade Efficiency Boost

I spent a good part of the late summer preparing our stash of firewood for the wood stove that had yet to arrive. As a consequence of not knowing the maximum log length I would be able to stuff into the stove, we wound up with a good pile of stick and such that were just too long. Many of them were too thick to break (I have some slightly messed up ankles from foolishly trying to break a piece of hickory by jumping on it). So, I employ a pruning saw to cut them down to size.Well, I noticed right off that when the blade was about half way through a log or thick branch, the blade would begin to bind up and would stick. It made it very hard to cut straight through a log. I had been having the same problem with my chain saw cutting particularly hard wood or wood with a twisted grain, like Black Locust.

My father-in-law recently had his chain saw blade sharpened and the craftsman that did the work also added an alternating camber to the teeth of the blade, which creates a cut that is wider than the chain bar. This virtually guarantees enough room to wiggle a bit while you cut and the bar doesn't bind in the process, meaning you cut more easily and efficiently.

I thought about that while I was taking the pruning saw to task again the other night. Why not add an offset camber to the teeth on its blade? Just a millimeter aside on every other tooth would make the cut 3 mm instead of the 1 mm the steel ribbon blade is on its own.

So, using a Vice-grip style pliers and a needle-nose pliers, I systematically bent each tooth in the opposite direction, leaving the double point teeth straight to make sure I had sufficient blade clearing the cut.

It took me about 10 minutes and was pretty easily accomplished. And, as I surmised, the blade now cuts much more easily and rips straight through thick branches with ease. The cut is only a bit wider, but plenty wide enough to keep the blade from binding up. I love it when a plan comes together.

Update 11/28/2012:  Christopher Johnson, whom I met via Google +, shared the following additional information which greatly enhances the above tip.

This is called "setting" a saw.  A good saw always has its teeth set correctly.

For example a crosscut saw has two types of teeth, cutters and rakers.  The cutters are set side to side and are filed on the "inside" to make sharp cutting points.  Their job is to cut the fibers of the wood, scoring it, on both sides of the actual blade.  The rakers are filed like a chisel and are set in line with the blade.  As the rakers move across the wood they shave the wood from between the score marks made by the cutters.

If the set of the blade is wrong it just does not work well.  It can take upto an hour per foot of cross cut saw to sharpen and set the teeth.

I will have to double check my bare blades to see if they are set correctly.

But binding isn't the problem I'm working on with a hand made bow for a bow saw.  You have to control the blade from twisting.  And having thought about it I think I need to add a steel peg (nail) to my saw blade kit.  Then I can take the bow, cut a slot for the blade, use the nail to hold the blade at that end.  A couple of wraps of the inner thread of paracord to form a whipping will keep the bow from splitting.  The other end is just for tension so it can be a simple line to the other end of the bow.

Time to go test all of this out.

P.s. the old timers using crosscut (and bow saws) used kerosene as a lubricating agent which will greatly reduce binding and pitch build up.  The National Forest service uses an Orange product that does mostly the same thing but costs more.  But it does protect the environment from the few drops of petroleum  product that might escape. 

The Monster - 2009 Garden Stunner

So, I followed the guidelines for soil preparation put forth in "How to grow more fruits and vegetables" using the "grow bio-intensive" method. It was a lot of hard work as the soil here is just about 100% clay. But, judging by the pictures below, it was worth it. Not only did I have a bumper crop of radish seed pods, tomatoes and acorn squash, my carrots, which never do well in the clay, were phenomenal!

Check out this ginormous specimen.

2 inches wide...

16 1/2 inches long.

What's most interesting is I did have some of the short carrots I usually get - notably orange. The Big Carrot of 2009 and many of its lanky brethren were quite pink on the outside and yellow on the inside, and much sweeter than the usual orange carrots. And the seed all came from the same package.

While preparing the soil was a lot of work this spring, turning the garden under by hand today was a dream. The texture of the soil is so rich and light from not having been walked on all summer. It's going to be amazing for our next year garden. I'm toying with the idea of putting in some winter wheat but I don't know where to get it in seed form.

Some things did not do well in the dense planting plan used with the double dug soil. Beats, swiss chard and onions did not quite take to the soil. In the past, with mostly just tilled clay, we've had tennis ball sized beats. This year produced only acorn to ping-pong ball sized specimens. The swiss chard I think cares more about space around it than the depth the soil is dug to as they typically put down very deep roots even in hard soil.

Other good performers were lettuce and Basil. Lettuce I planted from seed and the basil from starts. I took the opportunity to harvest a good about of the basil seeds so maybe we can grow it from seed next year.

Another great performer was the purple bush beans. We had plenty to eat from 20 bushes and I was able to get a good number of seeds from what dried on the vine to start us out next year. Will probably put in 60 plants next year and try to put them on the menu more often.