Lee Devlin's Weblog

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2009-02-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

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Picture Keeper Demo

2009-01-29T15:04:00.004-07:00

I've been planning to do a demo of Picture Keeper using a video screen capture so I could upload it to YouTube. My business partner, Matt, was thinking the same thing because he asked me about it right when I was getting ready to do it. Picture Keeper is very easy to describe, almost too easy, and it's rare that technology products live up to its 'simple to use' hype but I think this demo will show that PictureKeeper is one of the easiest-to-use computer backup products you'll ever see. The Picture Keeper is a flash device that you plug into your PC (or Mac) that automatically finds your digital pictures and backs them up for safe keeping. I've blogged about it once before.

After putting together a 2 minute demo, I uploaded it to YouTube so you can see for yourself how easy it is to use:

The demo is not intended to be a professional commercial, just a way to quickly show how the product works for someone who has never seen it.

In case you're a geek and want to know how I made this demo, I captured the video screen shots with CamStudio, which is a free download. The video of the actual product was captured with a very simple camera called a Flip. And I am not just the voice over person in the video, but the cameraman and hand model too ;-).

The audio was captured in Goldwave, which allows you to edit and filter the recorded audio and store it as an mp3 file. The video was edited together with Arcsoft's Showbiz DVD that came with the HP DVD Movie Writer. That's one of the products I helped design when I worked for HP and for which I maintain a FAQ.

The price of the Picture Keeper is $39.99 for the 4 GB model and $59.99 for the 8 GB model. For a limited time, with the special discount code 'lee10', you can get $10 off when you place your order at PictureKeeper.com.

Ecopolis and the eJeepney

2009-01-15T17:09:00.004-07:00

I recently watched a series on the Discovery Science channel entitled Ecopolis. The premise behind each of the 6-part series was to showcase 4 promising technologies intended to solve the environmental problems of a hypothetical megacity of the future named, appropriately enough, Ecopolis. There were 5 episodes that each focused on a different issue, such as food production, transportation, energy, and waste disposal. In each episode, Dan Kammen, a Nobel prize winning scientist, would select the technology he thought held the most promise to solve the most critical issues that large cities face today and in the future. The 6th episode was a recap of the previous episodes and of the individual episode winners. Kammen also chose his overall favorite in the last episode.

The winner from the transportation episode was the eJeepney. The Jeepney, which is a portnamteau of Jeep and Jitney is used in the Philippines as a form of taxi-bus that carries about 16 passengers. It is a sort of cross between an Army Jeep and a Jitney. The original Jeepneys were built up from surplus Army Jeeps that the U.S. military had left in the Philippines after WWII. Subsequent models have been built on various Japanese vehicle frames usually in back lot operations, but the name 'Jeepney' remains. It's an iconic vehicle of Philippine cities.

The eJeepney is an electric version of the Jeepney that was designed and built by Robert Puckett with the support of Greenpeace. These vehicles were designed from the ground up to be optimized for an electric motor drive. I was surprised to find that it used only a 5 HP (3.7 KW) motor and yet was able to carry as many as 17 passengers. Its top speed is 40 kph (26 mph). An 8-hour charge costs around 120 Philippine Pesos (PHP) and allows it to travel up to 120 km (75 miles). A PHP is worth about $US .0211, or just over 2 cents so 120 PHP comes out to around $2.50. An equivalent fill of diesel fuel, which is what most conventional Jeepneys require to travel a similar distance would cost about $6.50. The cost of riding a Jeepney is set at 8 PHP for the first 4 km (2.6 mi). This is about 17 cents. The e-Jeepney prototypes were built in China at a cost of around $8000 each.

The advantage of electric vehicles in congested cities can be significant. When an electric vehicle isn't moving, it's not using energy and even when it is moving, it is not polluting the air like the diesel powered Jeepneys. Considering there are 450,000 registered Jeepneys in the Philippines, the pollution caused by their diesel engines is a major health hazard.

I did some research and found that the price of electricity in the Philippines is about the same as the U.S. or $.010/kWh. So I can deduce that it takes about 25 kWh to charge an eJeepney. This is about the daily electricity use of an average U.S. household. Taking into consideration the inefficiencies of charging, I would estimate the batteries to be rated around 20 kWh. They are most likely to be lead acid which would weigh around 500 kg (1100 lbs) and cost in the neighborhood of $2000. The eJeepney has body panels made from fiberglass to save weight. One blogger mentioned that the eJeepney weighs 900 lbs. and I'm quite sure that is without the batteries. In looking at the heavy metal construction and ornaments on the traditional Jeepneys, weight savings were never an important consideration for these vehicles. Assuming that the passengers weigh about 150 lbs each, that mean the gross weight is about 4500 lbs, or about the empty weight of my Dodge Durango.

Accelerating a load of 4500 lbs with a 5 HP engine is likely to quite slow, and I'm not sure how it would get up a hill at gross weight, so my guess is that the routes would of necessity need to be quite level for these vehicles to make sense.

Another proposal related to these vehicles was to generate the electricity for them with organic waste converted to methane by anaerobic digesters, similar what's happening in some landfills in the U.S. With the combination of the electric drive and electricity from a renewable fuel source, the benefits of the eJeepney gave it the nod for the overall winner of the Ecopolis series as well.

Sometimes people think that public transportation is the solution that all that ails modern society. There certainly are instances where taking public transit is more convenient than having to drive yourself. But I have to admit, like many Americans, I have a love affair with my personal vehicles. Public transportation is a hard sell once you've tasted the freedom and exhilaration of being in command of your own vehicle. Now, I'll be the first to admit that a personal vehicle in a congested city is a major pain and I'm grateful for public transportation whenever I visit a bustling city, but when you're located anywhere else on the planet, it's hard to get along without one's own personal ride. So while I can appreciate the eJeepney's value in a huge metropolis, we don't all live in cities, so I'd also like to see some more effort expended on making personal transport more environmentally friendly.

If you can get me one of these at a reasonable price, I'll be very interested.

LinkedIn for the iPhone

2009-01-13T09:00:00.005-07:00

A few weeks ago I was a panelist at NoCoNet on the topic of LinkedIn. In addition to many excellent questions, the audience also provided numerous useful tips on LinkedIn. The tip I found most helpful was the availability of a LinkedIn iPhone application. Like many other iPhone apps, this one is free and can be downloaded in about a minute from App Store. If you have a smartphone with a web browser other than an iPhone, you can use LinkedIn from it simply by going to http://m.linkedin.com. It's not quite as nice as the custom iPhone application, but it is still quite useful.

In my last tip posted about LinkedIn, I had recommended using an RSS feed to keep track of your network updates. LinkedIn has the Network Updates feature prominently displayed on your LinkedIn Home page, but the updates age off quickly, usually in a day or less, especially as your network grows larger. That makes it hard to keep up with them. Thus, one option is to use an RSS feed which can capture and store them until you have a chance to sit down and scroll through them. I have found that the iPhone application works even better than the web-based Network Updates feature, since it captures much more history, although not as much as history as the RSS feed. Still, the ability to scroll through your network updates during a spare moment using your iPhone is a good way to make use of what might otherwise be unproductive time.

The iPhone includes a Safari web browser and it works better than any web browser than I've tried on a 2.4" screen, but browsing the web on a screen that small is something you'll only do when you have to, sort of like driving around on a tiny "space saver" spare tire. As soon as you have access to a larger screen, the iPhone goes back in your pocket. However, if a web application is written specifically for a small screen, it can work very well, and the LinkedIn folks have done an excellent job at repurposing LinkedIn's data for such a small screen. I've included a few screen shots from Jerry Luk's blog posting where he introduced the application.

One of the best features is that you are able to contact anyone in your network from the iPhone, even if you haven't stored their contact information, since it can send the email through LinkedIn's email service. That way you don't have to let your personal contact list swell to a size where it's no longer very useful.

Keeping tabs on what's going on with your network is part of why we network with others in the first place. When you have an awareness of who in your network is changing jobs, or connecting with a mutual long-lost friend, or just knowing what other people in your network are working on, you can be a much more engaged networker.

Look, A Man is Flying!

2009-01-12T07:35:00.001-07:00

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

I've had many dreams of flying (sans airplane) and sometimes it looks a little like what these guys are doing.

Will LED lighting replace CFL lighting?

2009-01-10T09:21:00.006-07:00

One of the frustrating aspects about renewable energy is that it is a highly technical field but it is followed passionately (and sometimes written about) by people who don't know the difference between a watt, a BTU, a volt, or any of the mathematical and technical terms that are critical to understanding energy.

I was reading an article on LED lighting yesterday that had been mentioned in one of my LinkedIn groups and found that it used one of my pet peeves, mentioning CO2 reductions in the same sentence as energy savings. We should not care what the CO2 savings are when it comes to fossil fuels. All we need to know is that if the fossil fuel consumption is reduced by x%, then its CO2 output will be reduced by a similar percentage. Yet percentage saving are almost never mentioned. Some fossil fuels generate a little more CO2 per BTU than others, but it's not important in the grand scheme of things. The important thing is that fossil fuels produce CO2 from carbon that has not been in the atmosphere for millions of years and that has the effect of increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration when they are mined and burned. This is something we should try to avoid, because its consequences could be dire should it change the climate to make our planet inhospitable for humanity. Burning any carbon-containing fuel, including biomass like wood, alcohol, or biodiesel also produces similar amounts of carbon dioxide per unit of energy; it's just that it is carbon dioxide that was recently in the atmosphere, not ancient carbon hidden under the earth's crust, so it doesn't increase the overall atmospheric CO2 concentration. And that is a vital distinction.

Most people have no idea how much a ton of CO2 really is. We don't think of gases in terms of how much they weigh. Here's a hint: If you're an American, your fossil fuel per capita allocation is one ton of CO2 into the atmosphere approximately every 2 weeks. A ton sounds like a lot, but it's not as big as you think when you consider that we each put 24 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Yes, we need to reduce it, and the only way to do that is by decreasing our overall fossil fuel consumption. OK, enough about ranting about my pet peeve, let's get on to the LED lighting claims made by the article.

The article claimed that LED lighting would save $1.8 trillion, or 1 billion barrels of oil, and 10 gigatons of CO2 over 10 years. I wondered if anyone else bothered to do some simple calculations about these claims, like the fact that $1.8 trillion for 1 billion barrels of oil comes out to $1800/barrel, which is about 40 times its current price. Also, a barrel of oil weighs about 290 lbs, and burning a barrel of oil results in about 900 lbs of CO2. If you multiply a liquid fossil fuel's weight by 3, it gives you a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of CO2 it generates when burned. Yet the conversion factor for the 10 gigatons for 1 billion barrels implies a yield of 10 tons of CO2 per barrel, or 20,000 lbs per 290 lbs of oil. This is off by more than a factor of 20.

It's hard to imagine LED lighting saving so much money. For now I'll ignore the fact that oil isn't used very much for generating electricity. I'll assume that the author was thinking in terms of "barrels of oil equivalent". But the money savings don't seem to hold up to scrutiny either.

I wrote an article on CFLs and my findings were that about 9% of electric energy usage in the home is due to lighting. CFLs can cut that by 75%, which means that their overall impact on home electricity use would generate around a 7% savings. That takes the lighting load down to about 2.3% of the total electrical load in a house.

Now that the low hanging fruit has already been eaten, LED lighting can only affect 2% of a typical electric bill. Although the article implies it can reduce that by a factor of 5, I think it would be at most half. I've found that LEDs are about 2 or 3 times more efficient in a lumens/watt metric than CFLs, not 5 times. Here are some typical luminous efficacy ratings of incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs from that article's source:


Incandescent              16 lumens/watt
CFL                       64 lumens/watt
LED                      213 lumens/watt

A typical 60W incandescent bulb produces around 870 lumens of light. To get the equivalent amount of light, i.e., lumens, from LED bulbs it would cost over $100 compared to $1.50 for an equivalent CFL bulb. It would take a very long time to pay back that difference. A 60-watt equivalent CFL bulb uses about 13 watts, and using the more generous ratio given above (3.3), an equivalent set of LED bulbs would use 4 watts. This is a savings of 9 watts. Assuming a cost of $.10/kWh, it would take 110,000 hours or 12.5 years of continuous usage for the $100 of LED bulbs to break even with the CFL's cost. Obviously, the cost of LED technology will need to come down significantly to make it competitive with CFLs.

LEDs have the benefit of using no mercury, unlike CFLs which do, but I covered the mercury issue in my CFL article so I won't repeat it here. I also calculated the beneficial heat that is lost in the winter time when switching from incandescent bulbs. The extra heat generated by incandescent lights helps to reduce the furnace's heating load, although not by much, just over 1%.

I think CFLs will be the heir apparent to incandescent bulbs for indoor applications for quite some time especially when you get above a hundred lumens. LEDs will reign supreme for battery powered applications where light output is less than 100 lumens and where the extra energy savings are vitally important. LEDs will also continue to find their way into applications where environmental ruggedness and long life are important.

Amish Heat Surge Miracle Heater Scam

2008-12-19T12:40:00.006-07:00

I saw a two-page ad in the Rocky Mountain News this week about some new miracle heater called the 'Amish Heat Surge' and it fell into the category of things that sounded to me to be 'just a little fishy'. Later I saw a commercial for the same product. Sure enough, after doing some calculations, I figured out that this is just a scam to overcharge people for a cheap electric heater made in China. Searching the Internet, I found a few unhappy customers who fell for it. Even though the heaters are 'free', you pay $298 for the 'Amish authentic wood mantles' that enclose them. In reality, there's no reason to wrap an electric heater with a wooden box or mantle. It also has some sort of fake fire effect. Oh, and shipping costs $50 EACH. And they'll stick you with an extended warranty for $28 each. So for around $770, you'd get a pair of heaters that do the same thing as a pair of $21 electric heaters you can pick up at Wal-Mart. The people who run scams like this have no shame.

A 5,119 BTU/hr heater generates about 1/20th the heat produced by a household furnace. It will draw 1.5 kW. For every hour this thing runs, it will cost about $.15 in electricity, which doesn't sound like a lot, but over a 730 hour month, that adds up to an extra $108 on your electric bill. Electric resistive heat is the most expensive way to heat a house. It costs about twice as much per BTU as natural gas heat. Just to put it in another perspective, a 2,100 sq. ft. house in my home state of Colorado uses about 6 therms of natural gas a day in the coldest winter months. At the current gas price of $1.20 per therm, a typical gas bill is $216/month during the winter months. To heat your house to the same temperature with this electric heater, you'd need to have 5 of these heaters operating at the high setting 24 hours a day. The additional monthly charges on your electric bill for just the heaters would be $540!

This heater can be yours for only $385

This heater produces the same amount of heat and costs $21 at Walmart

The ad talks about only using it to heat zones, which can save on your heating bill, of course, but only at the expense of having some of the rooms in your home being uncomfortably chilly. And you can't really completely turn off your central furnace without the risk of pipes freezing. In other words, if you put a heater like this in the room that has your furnace's thermostat, and thus your furnace never comes on, you may freeze pipes in a remote part of the house.

The ad is full of nonsense, such as requiring a special savings code that expires in 48 hours, or you'd otherwise pay $587 each! There is a limit of 2 per household and they need to 'turn away dealers' because they can't keep up with demand.

If you're one of the people reading this article who bought an Amish Heat Surge heater, please note that I mean no disrespect to you. I'm just tired of con artists using slick advertising to suck people into buying things that aren't worth even 1/10 the sales price.

In Defense of the SUV

2008-12-17T10:13:00.005-07:00

I've written a lot about renewable energy and so people might classify me as an environmentalist, a tree hugger, if you will. I thought it would be time to address the 4700 lb. elephant in the garage. That's right, like many Americans, I own a Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV). It's a 1999 Dodge Durango that I bought 10 years ago and I hope to be able to keep for at least another 10 years.

It seems that over the past few years, SUVs have been getting a black eye in the court of public opinion so I wanted to write a little about why I think they remain so popular in spite of their status as gas guzzlers.

There are those who think that anyone who drives an SUV is an enemy of the environment and deserves to be vilified for it. After all, most commuting is done solo, and it is wasteful to be carrying all the weight of an SUV simply to move a single person around. It's almost as if SUV critics feel everyone should be required to use either public transportation or a compact vehicle that gets at least 40 mpg? My Durango gets 14.7 mpg average, 19 mpg highway. In warm weather, I ride a motorcycle which gets about 50 mpg and that helps to improve my annualized personal fuel economy. In the past few years, I've used the motorcycle for nearly half my annual miles driven. A small economy car could provide a similar fuel economy as my combination of SUV/motorcycle, but that solution doesn't work for me. I prefer having an SUV and a motorcycle to having a small economy car.

Why are SUVs still outselling hybrids more than 10:1 and were doing so even when recent U.S. gas prices climbed to over $4/gallon? I'd say that much of the reason is because the SUV has fewer limitations than most other vehicles. They just seem to be able to 'do it all'. For example, there have been several instances where the Durango has allowed me to get home in snow storms that would have been unthinkable in a 2-wheel drive vehicle. Each time that's happened, the peace of mind that 4WD provided more than paid for its increased operating cost. Many critics of SUVs will point to the fact that SUV owners rarely, if ever, take them off the road. But if you live in any state that gets regular home delivery of snow, you will likely put your SUV in 4WD at least a few times per winter season. For a one-week period around Christmas a few years ago with well above average snowfall, SUVs were the only vehicles with enough ground clearance to make it out of our neighborhood. The Durango also can hold 7 adults, making it possible to leave an extra car in the parking lot when carpooling. I have carried 4' x 8' sheets of plywood in it and filled enough wood to rebuild a deck. I carried the fuselage of my airplane inside it as well as its 300 lb. engine and each of its wings, one at a time, of course. I've towed a camper with it. I've actually driven it off-road along with a 4 person crew to repair a ham radio repeater at the top of a mountain. It's truly a versatile machine with its only limitation being its fuel economy when compared to a compact car.

A 300 lb. aircraft engine fits in easily...

...and so does an 11-foot airplane wing

When I was younger I was a boy scout. The boy scout motto is 'be prepared'. An SUV helps its owner to be prepared for virtually anything. Sure, there are many missions where I could use a more fuel efficient vehicle, but I don't want to own multiple cars, one for each potential mission. Our garage is only big enough for two cars and a motorcycle. And just owning a vehicle costs money, even if you don't drive it. Each vehicle has a capital expense, which needs to be amortized over the miles driven in its lifetime, along with insurance, ownership taxes, and periodic maintenance. Sitting parked in your garage, a vehicle costs money whether it's used or not. And the capital expense of owning a vehicle usually constitutes a larger per mile expense than its fuel bill.

My wife has a BMW 328i sedan that gets 28 mpg, about twice the fuel economy of the Durango. It's a great car and a lot of fun to drive. When we go on long trips in nice weather, we often take it instead of the SUV. Recently, we flew to the east coast for a week and when contemplating which vehicle to leave at the airport, we both independently arrived at the same conclusion. Since it was winter, and we didn't know what kind of weather to expect when we returned, we chose the Durango. Sure enough, when we returned we landed late at night in a blizzard. But it was no problem to get home in the Durango. It would have been a harrowing, white-knuckle, 2-hour drive if we had instead chosen the sedan, and it could have ended up in a ditch in need of a tow, like several others we saw on the way home.

The major costs of owning a car can be divided into the categories of purchase price and operating costs. Operating costs are comprised of items such as insurance, taxes, maintenance, and fuel. The annual fuel cost for most vehicles is surprisingly low in comparison to these other costs. Compared to the purchase price, fuel may be just a small percentage per mile. That's why people who can afford to spend $60K on a 10-mpg Hummer H2 are not deterred by having to spend $5K per year for the fuel. They could instead have a 45-mpg hybrid along with a $1000 annual fuel bill but it's a not an issue if they can afford the Hummer's gas. Now I know there are some who think that fossil fuels belong to everyone and it's not fair for someone to use more than their 'fair share'. I have to wonder when a resource is finite and irreplaceable, what would constitute a reasonable 'fair share' per person. Because I use my motorcycle in the warmer months, my SUV has been averaging less than 5,000 miles a year, and so it's actually burning less fuel annually than a compact car racking up 15,000 miles a year. A vehicle's fuel economy isn't the only factor that determines how much of an impact someone is having on the environment. A person's transportation-related carbon footprint also includes the amount of travel one does annually.

If your job requires you to travel frequently by jet, you may be using large quantities of fossil fuels even if you don't own a car. I've known people who fly more than 100,000 miles a year and don't seem to realize that it also impacts their overall energy consumption and hence their carbon footprint. I find it particularly ironic when energy efficiency evangelists jet all over the world spreading the gospel about conserving energy as they themselves seem to be unaware that their air travel is generating a huge carbon impact. It's a case of 'do as I say, not as I do'. Sometimes they buy carbon credits, thinking it makes up for their 'unavoidable' energy use. That seems to me as nothing more than purchasing indulgences to assuage their guilt.

Public transportation vehicles use fossil fuels in large quantities, although many public transportation proponents don't seem to realize it. Commercial jets typically average 50 miles per passenger per gallon, buses around 80, and trains around 200. These are typical values, not the maximum theoretical numbers, which would assume 100% seat utilization (source). Most public transportation vehicles need to have excess capacity and thus travel many miles with empty seats. A person who flies enough to make it to an airline's annual 100K club uses more oil than a Hummer driver racking up 20,000 miles per year.

Sometimes when people talk about hybrid cars and public transportation, they seem to feel that if everyone would just start using these modes of transportation exclusively, both the fossil fuel depletion and global warming problems would be solved. They won't. Better fuel economy just pushes the problem out a few years since those modes of transportation consume fuel too. And since these more efficient modes are often erroneously considered to be virtually carbon-free, people may be induced to travel more miles annually.

We all like to have our mobility. Our modern society is defined by it. If we had to travel exclusively by foot or on horseback, you can rest assured we'd do a lot less of it. I've certainly done my share of traveling and so I'm in no position to criticize others for their travel habits.

So if you own an SUV, I recommend you keep it. If you feel guilty about it, you can try to drive it fewer miles per year, if possible. You can augment your travel needs with a motorcycle, scooter, or bicycle. Or work from home when you can. Having an SUV will allow you to be prepared for anything and keep you from joining the ranks of those who smugly berate SUVs and their owners with adjectives like 'revolting, insidious, and despicable'. :-)

Micro Combined Heat and Power Proposal

2008-12-09T16:49:00.002-07:00

Someone asked a question on LinkedIn and it reminded me of a topic I wanted to write about in this blog. I'll use the opportunity to post my response and elaborate a little about it. The question was related to the electrical grid in this country and what can be done to improve it. I think that instead of increasing the capacity of the grid, we should focus on adding electrical generating capacity closer to the point of use. This would save the need to have to construct new power plants which cost billions to construct and transmission lines, which cost as much as $500,000 per mile, and make the system more resistant to wide spread outages.

National electrical grids are among the largest and most complicated machines ever to be constructed by man. Their inter-connected nature has made them vulnerable to cascading failure effects when a problem strikes just a small portion of a grid. There have been several instances in just the past few years in the U.S. where a fallen tree branch or sagging lines in some remote area has caused outages for hundreds of thousands of customers in multiple states.

A more robust solution would be to have power generated closer to where it’s used but this is not typically done because it’s more profitable for utilities to build large scale generating plants and deliver electricity to many customers over the grid. There's no profit motive for them to have other sources competing to provide electricity to their customers.

Electrical power generation equipment has three principal costs: capital, operating/maintenance, and fuel. The ratios of these costs vary considerably depending on the type of generating equipment. For example, nuclear plants have low fuel cost relative to other generating equipment, but higher capital costs. Renewable sources such as solar and wind turbines have no fuel costs, but they also have fairly high capital expenses, as well intermittent generating characteristics. Natural gas plants have lower capital costs, but have some of the highest fuel costs per kWh generated, especially when used for peaking loads.

Fuel availability and delivery cost often drive the decision on where to locate power plants. This is especially true in the case of coal because it is heavy and must be delivered by rail thereby adding to its cost, sometimes significantly. And, of course, pollution concerns tend to make it difficult to locate coal plants near the populations they serve. In some instances, power plants have been built near coal mines to reduce the cost of fuel delivery.

More than half of the energy in nuclear, coal, and natural gas is lost as waste heat when used to generate electricity. Because these plants can’t easily distribute this waste heat, which could otherwise be used for space heating, they dump it into the atmosphere. Instead of adding more generating plants, I would propose that homes be equipped with small 1 kW natural gas-powered electrical generators which, during the winter, generate electricity and utilize the unavoidable waste heat for space heating needs. About 50% of U.S. homes use natural gas for heat and the ratio is even higher in colder climates. This way, the natural gas energy used for electrical generation could be more efficiently utilized while reducing the need for adding capacity to the grid in the form of extra power plants. In addition, the homes could be equipped with solar panels for generating electricity in the warmer months when there is no need for space heating and when sunshine is at its maximum. In addition to connecting each home with a grid tie inverter to sell back any excess electricity to the grid, a battery bank (~24 kWh) could store a day’s worth of electricity for use when the sun wasn’t shining and to help level the effect of overloading the grid when the sun is shining but demand is low. Overloading the grid will become a bigger issue when grid-tied solar installations grow in popularity. The natural gas electrical generator would also be available when the electrical grid goes down.

This concept is similar to micro combined heat and power (Micro CHP) and is not really that new. There are more than 50,000 home installations of Micro CHP in Japan already. My proposal adds a local storage battery bank and solar panels. This forms a sort of redundancy in the event of a grid outage, helping to guarantee that electrical power and heat will be available even when the grid goes down. It also helps to compensate for the reduced sunlight conditions in northern climates during the coldest months when solar panels tend to generate at their annual minimum.

The cost for a small generator is not that much. I purchased a new 1.4 kW gasoline powered generator recently for $300. Since a grid tie inverter is already part of the solar system, the gas generator could easily tap into it as well. My reason for getting the generator was because I realized that if the electricity goes down in the winter, my furnace will not operate. My gas furnace uses a computer to control it, in addition to a 750 watt blower motor, so with this generator, I'd be able to keep my house warm and prevent my pipes from freezing in the event of a prolonged power outage. There are a few complexities with this system, the primary one which is to make sure not to 'back feed' electricity into the grid during a power outage. This is to protect the safety of the electric utilities linemen. But I know how to disconnect my furnace and plug it into the generator without back feeding electricity into the grid, so I'm comfortable with this solution.

In pondering about it, I began to wonder if it wouldn't make sense to equip every household with a small backup generator that fed off of the natural gas line so that a power outage wouldn't pose as much of a threat. I realized after looking around the web, that it was already being done in Japan and is available in the U.S. Granted, it's not cheap, at least not yet, but in light of the costs of a solar system, it seems like a small cost adder to solve several other problems at the same time. The battery would be useful to level the solar output to the grid. The utility company can't easily throttle base load generating equipment such as nuclear, coal, and combined cycle gas generators, so they will likely start objecting to having too many grid-tied solar customers. The household battery could level out solar output and also provide the necessary emergency power during the time when the grid went down and before the natural gas generator was started. The battery could even connect up to a network and decide when to put the energy out on the grid to help offset peaking loads, thereby making it unnecessary for utilities to keep standby generators to handle the peaks. This concept is related to the smart electrical grid which we have been hearing more about lately. The utility scale standby generators are very expensive for the utility companies to own because their capital costs can only be amortized over a small number of hours of operation per year and gas peaking generators are single cycle, which means they have lower efficiency than combined cycle generation and thus much higher fuel costs per kWh as well.

I realize that natural gas is not a renewable energy source, but it is cleaner than coal both from a pollution and CO2 standpoint, and it's already in place in many neighborhoods. I had previously been thinking about figuring out a way to go 100% solar, but then December rolled around and I started looking at the number of days that the sun is not available. It reminded me that all renewable energy systems still need to have backups, particularly in the winter, and natural gas seemed to best fit the bill. Natural gas can work as both a fuel for generating electricity as well as space heating and with this proposal, it would be about 85-90% efficient, and that is considerably better than even utility scale power generation. The overall effect would reduce not just natural gas consumption which is used to produce 20% of our nation's electricity, but it would also reduce coal consumption which produces 50% of our electricity.

Biomass Articles

2008-11-24T14:20:00.003-07:00

As you may have noticed, I like to write about energy related topics in my blog. But I've been publishing most of my biomass articles over at BiomassAuthority.com because it has a higher likelihood of being discovered there. I just published an article today that was inspired by Peak Oil and whether biomass fuels can save us. There are some who think oil production will peak and then begin to drop off soon at a rate so sudden that society will not be able to handle it. I've read books on both sides of the subject and will list them here within the next few weeks and my take on Peak Oil.

Over the past several months, I wrote the following articles for BiomassAuthority.com:

A cellulosic ethanol plant near Denver, and whether beetle kill trees could be used as a feedstock

The potential restorative impact on the environment from burning hydrocarbons

Burning Corn as a Fuel

Comparing Biodiesel and Ethanol

Pondering on why corn is so cheap

Making Biodiesel from Algae

I've also written a some articles for a few related sites, SolarPowerAuthority and WindPowerAuthority

How much does it cost to install a solar PV system?

What's better, Solar Thermal or solar PV?

Working with a Wind Developer to get wind turbines installed on your land

I like writing about energy related topics because when I simply read about them I forget. If I do something about them, I remember. And when I try to explain them to others, I understand. And then, if I ever do forget, I can always go back and read what I wrote ;-).

Introducing Picture Keeper

2008-11-04T14:10:00.010-07:00

My friend Matt, who found me through my various HP support sites that I set up for the products that I helped to design when I worked at HP, contacted me a few months ago and asked if I'd be interested in working with him on a new backup product that he had invented. He needed some help in getting the software developed as well as finding a hardware partner to help bring it to market. I thought I'd be able to provide some assistance and so I agreed to help him. The product that resulted from this effort is called Picture Keeper and it's the simplest way I've found to safeguard your irreplaceable digital pictures.

Matt does computer support as a sideline and he noticed that as people began replacing their film cameras with digital cameras they were not backing up their digital images. They'd download images from their digital camera to their PCs and then just let them sit on their hard drive without a backup. My own involvement with supporting the HP Media Vault also made me aware of a disturbing trend. Although we had designed the Media Vault as a backup device, customers were taking data from their PCs, moving it to the Media Vault and then deleting every other copy of it to 'free up space' on their PC's hard drive. It's hard to overemphasize how wrong that approach is, yet I periodically get panicked emails from people who moved all their data to a single hard drive and then need help to retrieve it after the hard drive crashed. Storing your data all in one location is dangerous even if it is on a RAID device, since if there's some glitch on a drive that corrupts the data, the corruption could be copied to the redundant disk, which makes the data impossible to retrieve. You should always have two or more copies of your important data, preferably in separate locations.

Of all the data you can lose from your hard drive, the most heart wrenching files to lose are your digital pictures. People will run from a burning house and forgo grabbing their valuables and take their photo collections instead. Virtually every other possession in a home is replaceable or insured, but photos are not.

As good as the HP Media Vault is at protecting data, it's not a panacea. For example, if your house is burglarized, your PC and Media Vault may get stolen. Also, if you have a fire or flood, a hard drive will be unlikely to survive. Quite simply, you need a device that stores the photos and can easily be taken off site or put in a location that is safeguarded from fire, theft, or flood.

Of course, you can use optical media for this purpose, but it's a pain to set up and run periodic backup jobs to optical media and so it doesn't get done. It's also impractical to make incremental backups on optical media and so people tend to just make periodic full backups which are time consuming and wasteful since you end up with old media that needs to be securely destroyed and replaced with a whole new set of optical media. That's very wasteful and harmful to the environment. Writing to optical media generally also requires special software to be installed on each computer.

Now that USB flash memory devices are becoming available in sizes that can hold a complete digital photo collection, they are a perfect solution for backing up digital pictures. Flash memory is very compact, has no moving parts, and doesn't suffer from degradation like tape and optical media. It also can survive a run through the washer and dryer cycle, an experiment that both Matt and I have inadvertently run several times.

I know that Internet 'cloud storage' is all the rage now but it requires a perpetual monthly fee. If it doesn't require a monthly fee, then it's probably not a viable long term business. If an on-line backup service shuts down or if you forget your user password, your data is gone forever. So there is a very good reason for storing your data on a small, secure, portable device that you control.

No one is very excited about installing and learning yet another software product to make periodic backups. But with the Picture Keeper, that's not a problem. The software to find all of your pictures and back them up is included on the device and requires absolutely no installation. It works both on Windows PCs (XP and Vista) and Macs (OS X). When you plug it in, a pop-up screen comes up and lets you launch the program directly from the device. It will scour your hard drive for your digital pictures and then safely store them on the device. If you add more digital pictures to the PC, you can just repeat the procedure and it won't have to re-save previously backed-up files because it knows which ones are new, which ones have changed, and which ones have already been securely saved.

Although it's set up by default to safeguard your digital pictures, Picture Keeper has a lot of flexibility that allows you to customize the backup job so that it can look at alternate folders for your images, or even backup other file types besides jpeg (.jpg) images. You can use Picture Keeper on multiple computers and it will keep the photos in separate folders based on the computer they came from. That's an important feature for those of us who tend to have photos spread across multiple computers.

If this sounds like a product you need or perhaps know someone for whom it would make the perfect gift, head on over to Picture Keeper and use the code 'lee10' for a $10 discount.

And please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about it.

Update: Jan-08-2009

We're getting some great reviews on this product:

Qwowi

"I could spend another 500 words trying to explain how simple the PictureKeeper is to use, but perhaps the best way to explain it is this: Simplified IT products has made the PictureKeeper so incredibly simple to use that my mother could use - and that’s no simple accomplishment."

Miserly Moms

"All I had to do was say "go!" It stored everything in the same folders and categories that I had sorted them into on my hard drive. And all my pictures only took 15% of the available space! So it was the PERFECT tool for me! Each time I plug it in, it automatically searched for new pictures and copies them over. No more wondering if I already have copied this one or not. "

Deal Seeking Mom Blog

"...I was thrilled when Picture Keeper sent me their little gadget to try. It’s a fantastically simple way to safeguard irreplaceable digital photos. You just plug the little USB device into your computer, and it does all the work for you. It finds all of the pictures stored on your computer and saves them safely to the device. The next time you plug it in, it only pulls in new photos so you never had to worry about duplicates! You can even schedule back up reminders on their site, which this busy mom definitely needs."

Amazon.com

"Just What I Needed - After both my wife and I lost digital images due to problems with our current backup system, I am delighted to find a device that automatically takes care of preserving our images. And it's PC + Mac-friendly. Why didn't someone think of this before?"

My 2-minute infomercial on YouTube:

Calculating One's Carbon Footprint

2008-11-04T05:20:00.009-07:00

You've no doubt been hearing more and more about carbon emissions and may wonder what it means. You may even be curious about how to measure your contribution to the humanity's collective carbon footprint. Simply stated, carbon emissions is the sum of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated by society's use of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas which, when combusted to produce energy, ends up in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absolutely essential for life. All plants depend on it. They take it in through respiration and use it to produce the carbohydrates that we eat either directly or indirectly as part of our diets. The plants also convert CO2 to produce the oxygen we breathe. The problem with CO2 is that its atmospheric concentration has been increasing steadily starting around the time we began using fossil fuels that previously had been sitting there buried for millions of years. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone up by about 25% in the past 50 years and since CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas by trapping heat, there is a legitimate concern that it may change the climate to a point where the earth may undergo a positive runaway effect, triggering another mass extinction event. I know that there is some debate about this issue, but the consequences are so dire it's really not worth arguing about anymore. Combined with the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels, it means we must find alternatives to replace the energy society uses on a daily basis and the sooner we can do it, the better off we'll be.

There are a number of websites with carbon calculators that try to accurately compute an individual's carbon footprint. An individual carbon footprint is the amount of CO2 a person's activities generate on an annual basis. The easiest way to estimate an individual carbon footprint is to look up your country's per capita number on the Internet and assume yours is in that range. But if you're curious how to you might modify your own personal carbon footprint, the calculator may be helpful, particularly if it explains the methods it uses to compute its values.

In the case of U.S. residents, our country's annual CO2 emissions are 6 billion metric tons (13.2 trillion pounds). Divide that by our population of around 300 million and you get 20 metric tons per capita per year (about 44,000 lbs. per capita). I began to wonder where all that CO2 allocation was coming from and if there's anything I could do to reduce my contribution to it. By the way, Americans have a much higher carbon footprint than most other countries and significantly more than third world countries. There are some who feel that we should be profoundly ashamed of our lifestyles and that we need to get our carbon footprint aligned with that of the rest of the world. In the meantime, some of the countries with the lowest per capita carbon footprints are desperately trying to get their lifestyles to more closely match ours which will have the effect of increasing world carbon emissions overall.

The largest personal carbon contributors are due to household energy use and transportation. Depending on the website you use, it will ask questions such as the state where you live, the size and age of your home, the type of vehicle(s) you drive, your annual mileage, and many other questions. I wanted to know more about the assumptions that were made and so after doing some of my own research, I came up some simple rules of thumb. They involve converting one's energy consumption into BTUs and then converting BTUs into CO2 emissions depending on their carbon source. Otherwise, you may not know how clever the calculator is trying to be with all the questions it's asking. For example, if you live in a state that gets most of its electricity from hydropower like Idaho does, you may get a reduction on your electrical carbon contribution, which isn't quite right since electricity works a bit like a shared resource whose carbon emissions should be recognized by the combined sources of electricity on a national basis.

I like to use British Thermal Units (BTUs) to measure thermal energy. BTUs have more meaning to me than the metric units for energy like calories or Joules. A BTU is defined as the amount of energy required to raise one pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit. The equivalent unit in the metric system is the calorie, which is defined as the amount of energy required to raise one gram of water 1 degree Celcius. The calorie such a small unit of energy that almost no one uses it. You may think that it's used to measure food energy, but it's not. A food calorie is actually 1000 thermal calories. In fact, it is really a kilocalorie (kcal). But for simplicity's sake, everyone just calls it a 'calorie'. Can you see a problem there? I sure can. Getting calculations wrong is very easy when you use the same name to refer to vastly different amounts of energy. For example, I once was reading a book called Games for the Super Intelligent and in the book the author calculated that the ice in each Scotch and soda he drank required his body to raise the temperature of the drink, presumably at 32F, up to his body's internal temperature. He reasoned the energy his body needed to do that would more than offset the calories in the Scotch and soda. He should have been able to lose weight like mad with each and every drink. He tried it and concluded it didn't work. It would have, but only if he had increased the ice water by a factor of 1000. Imagine drinking 50 gallons of ice water with each 7 oz. Scotch and soda! That would certainly require your body to work overtime to maintain a normal core temperature. So even people who are super intelligent can get tripped up by the food calorie vs. thermal calorie confusion. I find it best to stick with BTUs, because they only have one meaning.

The metric system can be pretty convenient when you don't have a calculator because everything is expressed in powers of 10. However, once you bring in calculations that involve time or energy, much of the mathematical elegance falls apart, and you're not much better off than any other system. So that's why I don't mind using the antiquated, yet convenient, British system when discussing energy. You'll also notice that the world uses other non-metric units when discussing energy such as barrels for oil (which are 42 gallons each) and cubic feet for natural gas. So it's pretty hard to get away from having to know all the conversion factors when dealing with energy. Fortunately, in the U.S., we are multi-lingual when it comes to measurement systems out of necessity. I'm just thankful I don't have to know 4 languages like many of our friends in Asia and Europe need just to get through the day.

It's pretty easy to get the values for BTUs since most fuels have pretty well-established BTU ratings. In fact, in the U.S., items like fuels and furnaces are more likely to be specified by their British system ratings than their metric equivalents.

Here are some common BTU ratings for typical fuels:

Ethanol 84,000 BTU per gallon
Gasoline 124,000 BTU per gallon
Jet Fuel 134,000 BTU per gallon
Natural Gas ~ 1,000 BTU per cu. ft.
Wood 7,000 BTU per lb. (average)
Coal 10,000 BTU per lb. (average)
Garbage 5,000 BTU per lb. (average)

I then did some calculations based on this data that allowed me to convert BTUs into lbs of CO2 emissions using these conversion factors:

Coal/Wood ~ 1 lb of CO2 generated per 5000 BTU
Oil/Gasoline ~ 1 lb of CO2 generated per 6500 BTU
Natural Gas ~ 1 per lb of CO2 generated per 8700 BTU

Once you know how much of each type of energy you use, you can more accurately determine its effect on the overall carbon footprint. Incidentally, I included wood only for comparison's sake in the list above. If you use wood for heating, you get a pass on CO2 emissions because it's only ancient carbon we're worried about. However, if your wood burner is stinking up the neighborhood and stinging your neighbors' eyes, you might want to keep your smug factor down to a minimum. :-)

The best way to compute gasoline consumption is by knowing how many miles you drive each vehicle per year and the fuel economy of the vehicle. The U.S. average distance per vehicle per year is around 12,000 miles and the average fuel economy is around 25 mpg. So knowing those two numbers, an average car's carbon footprint can be computed with this equation:

12,000 miles / 25 mpg x 124,000 BTU/gal x 1 lb CO2/6500 BTU = 9,156 lbs of CO2/yr

Similarly, a typical 2100 sq. ft. Colorado home uses about 90 MBTU for home heating per year and so dividing that by 8700 BTU/lb, assuming natural gas, which is the most common heating fuel in Colorado, gives 10,344 lbs of CO2/yr. for home heating.

Flying can also contribute significantly to one's carbon footprint. A commercial jet effectively gets about 42 passenger miles per gallon so you can figure out if you fly 4 trips totaling 12,000 miles per year, the CO2 generated due to that activity would be 5890 lbs of CO2. Please note that the maximum theoretical values for fuel economy with public transportation are rarely reached due to capacity factors. Modern airliners can get 60 passenger miles per gallon if they are 100% full and fly only long routes, but 42 passenger mpg is closer to the average fuel economy.

To get the contribution for electricity, I used the fact that 30% of the electricity produced in the U.S. is from non-CO2 generating sources, primarily nuclear and hydroelectric and a small, but growing, amount from renewables like wind, solar, and biomass. The other 70% comes from burning fossil fuels.

A coal plant has about a 33% thermal efficiency and coal accounts for 50% of the electricity in the U.S.. One kWh of electricity is equivalent to 3412 BTUs and dividing that by .33, I get 10,236 BTU of coal to generate a kWh of electricity. Using my conversion factors above, it means a typical coal plant generates about 2 lbs. of CO2 per kWh of electricity generated. Since coal accounts for 50% of total U.S. electricity production, I will use 1 lb. of CO2 per kWh as the average carbon contribution due to U.S. electricity generation from coal. Likewise, natural gas is responsible for about 20% of the electrical generation in the U.S., but it has better efficiency due to the fact that most of the gas-generated electricity uses combined cycle and it also generates less CO2 per BTU and so its overall contribution is about .2 lbs of CO2 per kWh. Some electricity is also generated by oil but it's down to less than 2% of the total and declining, so I'll ignore that contribution because it doesn't affect the overall picture very much. This means that the fossil fuel contribution in the U.S. to electrical generation is about 1.2 lbs per kWh, on average. Since the average household energy consumption is about 8760 kWh per year, this adds another 10,512 lbs. of CO2 per household.

So, now I will add the major contributors to an individual's CO2 footprint:

2 cars = 18,312 lbs
home heating = 10,344 lbs
air travel = 5,890 lbs
electricity = 10,512 lbs

Total = 45,058 lbs

CO2 per capita 11,264 lbs (assuming a family of 4) for electricity, heat, and transportation.

This only appears to add up to about 1/4 of the per capita number you get when you divide total U.S. CO2 emissions by its population. But I left off contributions due to food and other consumer items as well as energy used by commercial and industrial customers.

Food and consumer goods all include some amount of embodied fossil fuel energy. What I mean by that is that if I eat an apple, there is fossil fuel energy attributable to the apple grower, the trucking firm that delivered it, and the supermarket that sold it that is embodied in that apple and thus that energy should be attributed to my personal carbon footprint.

The food to sustain a human for a year, based on a diet of 2400 kcal/day is 876,000 kcal per year. There are 4.2 BTUs per food calorie so this is equal to 3.7 MBTU. However, the carbon content of food is based on recent CO2 absorbed into plants. So this CO2 would not count toward CO2 emissions from ancient carbon in fossil fuels, which is what we're trying to measure here. However, some studies have found that every food calorie produced in the U.S. requires about 10 kcal (42 BTUs) of fossil fuel energy. So if you look at it like that, then you would get another 37 MBTU of embodied fossil fuels due to food consumed per person per year. This would add about 5500 lbs of CO2 per capita due to food. For that calculation I used an average of 1 lb. of CO2 per 6700 BTUs to give the embodied fossil fuel energy in food an average somewhere between coal, oil, and natural gas. This was a real eye-opener for me. I had assumed that my car consumed significantly more fossil fuel that my body did, but the number is only a factor of 2 higher for my car or my furnace compared to my body, if you take into consideration that the 10 x multiplier effect of food on fossil fuel energy. Not all food calories embody the same about of fossil fuel. It ranges from about 3 x for some foods to 35 x for meat according to that study. This is why many of the on-line CO2 calculators will ask how often you eat meat or whether you buy organic foods. I will reserve judgment on whether this embodied fossil fuel energy in food is accurate since many people unknowingly quote a study by Pimentel that corn ethanol takes more fossil fuel energy to produce than it provides as a fuel, and that study has been contradicted by every other researcher on that topic. Not surprisingly, the studies that allocate 10 kcal of fossil fuel per kcal of food extensively quote Pimentel's publications.

I had done calculations many times in my head and had been ignoring the value due to food because I knew intuitively that the daily consumption of 9600 BTU of food is equivalent to about a pound of coal, and that is only about 1 kWh ($.10) of electricity which is tiny compared to the amount of energy we use for household electricity and heating. I hadn't really thought that food could have impacted my carbon footprint very much until I considered the embodied fossil fuel energy in it. Similarly, you can imagine that the energy required to produce other items we use daily such as clothing, furniture, appliances, etc., all have some contribution from fossil fuels.

It's also important to realize that after the kids are grown and move out of the house, it becomes a household of two adults, and the per capita energy consumption goes up proportionally. The tendency for fewer people to live in ever-larger houses is also causing per capita carbon emissions to rise as well.

To figure out where the rest of the per capita energy comes from, there are other energy consumers such as retail stores, private industry, schools, government offices, etc., whose energy consumption all gets allocated to each U.S. citizen.

So what did this exercise show me? It showed me that to significantly reduce my carbon footprint to a level where I should no longer feel shame and guilt, I should grow my own organic food, live in an unheated hut (probably closer to the equator), use wood and dung for cooking, and get rid of my car. In other words, I would need to swap my lifestyle with someone who lives in a third world country. Actually, "swap" isn't really a good term to use, since if I simply swapped lifestyles with someone else in the third world, the person who got my house would likely want to keep it heated and use the electric appliances, cars, etc., so that wouldn't work. Instead it would be better if I dismantled my house and buried it or recycled it along with the cars, and let the prairie re-grow in its place. It sounds a little absurd, but there are some who think that is the correct approach.

I've already written about the difficulty of trying to substantively cut carbon emissions with minor steps like replacing incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs. To make a real difference in a carbon footprint, we'll need to cut consumption by significant amounts and at the same time start generating more of our energy with renewable sources. Can it be done? I think it can. But I'll leave that for a future posting.

Are CF bulbs really a good idea?

2008-10-22T10:51:00.009-06:00

I've been using compact flourescent lights in my home for a few years and feel like I'm 'doing my part' to help save the planet. My wife assures me that I'm being an exemplary 'Treehugger'. I purchased these bulbs on my own without any inducement to do so other than curiosity. But I recently heard that some misguided do-gooders are trying to outlaw incandescent bulbs. Even though that might not affect me too much since I'm already 'with the program', so to speak, I'm not a big fan of government intervention, unless it's for a really good cause and unless it can be proven to solve a problem without introducing some other unintended consequences.

Not everyone is 'on board' when it comes to CF bulbs. A friend had asked me whether CFs light bulbs really have much of an impact on global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 that our fossil fuel-powered electric plants spew into the atmosphere each year. He wondered whether anyone had taken into account the beneficial effect of the heat incandescent bulbs generate in the winter time that offsets the load on the residential furnace. I had to admit, I had never heard of anyone who had taken that into consideration. So I decided to do some calculations myself.

An incandescent bulb converts only about 2% of the input power in usable light. A CF bulb produces about 4 times as much usable light per watt than an incandescent light bulb. At this point, if I were on the usual trajectory of discussing energy savings, I'd be ready to start gushing about the number of tons of CO2 that could be avoided if everyone were all to switch to CF bulbs. But I'm not going to do that because talking about tons of CO2 doesn't really tell anyone anything. Why even bring up the CO2 number at all? It really boils down to how much of a percentage impact you can have on a problem. Mixing pounds or tons of CO2 reduction when talking about energy efficiency is a complete non sequitur and does nothing to put energy savings in perspective. If I can tell you how much of a percentage savings you can expect with CF bulbs, then you can tell if it's a big deal or a little deal and draw your own conclusions about its impact on CO2 reductions.

If an incandescent bulb is 2% efficient at converting electricity to light and a CF bulb takes about 25% of the energy to produce an equivalent amount of light, then it follows that it's about 8% efficient. So, you might ask, where does all that other energy go that is not being converted into beautiful lumens of light? The answer is that it is converted into heat. Actually, even the lumens of light also end up as heat too, which means that after it has bounced around the room a few times, all the objects, including your retinas eventually turn those lumens into heat as well.

As you move away from the equator it's necessary to use more interior lighting in the winter than in the summer due to the fact that the nights are longer in winter. If we need to use our lights longer, and all the energy used by the bulb eventually becomes heat, it begs the question, "Are these lights helping to offset the amount of work my furnace has to do?" For about 6 months out of the year my furnace runs at least a little bit each day, so yes, you can assume that the heat generated by my lights, and for that matter, my refrigerator, TV, computer, etc., all help to offset the amount of work that my furnace would otherwise have to do to keep my house at a comfortable temperature.

It would only be fair to acknowledge that in the summer, the opposite would be true, i.e., all my electrical loads counteract the work that my air conditioner needs to do during the time I'm running it.

But the winter months are when a typical house consumes most of its energy primarily for space heating needs. So, how much 'help' does my furnace get from my lighting, and how does it offset the cost of heat when compared with the cost of natural gas that handles the bulk of that task?

In a previous article I wrote for another website, I showed the effective cost of producing 1M BTUs using various fuels based on current prices and conversion efficiencies. There is a table in that article that shows that natural gas effectively costs about $14 per MBTUs based on a furnace with 85% efficiency. For a similar amount of energy from electric resistive heat, which is 100% efficient, the cost is about $26 per MBTUs assuming a $.10/kWh electricity cost.

A typical household in the U.S. uses electricity at the rate of 1 kW. This results in an average electric bill that is 720 kWh per month or 8760 kWh per year. You can multiply those numbers by $.10/kWh to figure the monthly and yearly average cost of electricity in the average U.S. household. Please note that U.S. kWh rate varies considerably by geographic area from as little as $.06/kWh to $.25/kWh with the average being around $.10. Prior to the widespread use of CFs, about 9% of residential electricity consumption was attributed to lighting according to the U.S. Department of Energy's website. Since heating values are typically measured in BTUs (at least here in the U.S.) I will convert the electricity used for lighting into heat using the standard conversion factor of 3412 BTU/kWh. It gives a value that the lighting load in an average residence of about 7400 BTU/day. In the winter, we can assume this is higher, and in the summer, it would be lower due to the difference in the length of the days. I will use 10,000 BTU/day for winter months and 5,000 BTU/day in the summer for simplicity's sake.

A typical household in the U.S. uses about 90 M BTU per year for space heating and most of it is consumed during 4 months in the winter. That would be a heating load of 750,000 BTU/day on average. This means that a typical furnace consumes about 75 times as much energy during the winter as all the lighting in a house. Heat generated by lighting will thus offset the furnace load during the winter months by about 1.3%.

In the summer, the heat load that lighting generates will need to be offset by the air conditioning, and thus will increase air conditioning cost, and using the numbers from the same DOE website shows that 16% of annual electricity consumption attributable to air conditioning. In the event that all 16% of the air conditioning bill was generated during 4 months in the summer then the monthly average consumption would be 350 kWh during those months. This corresponds to 12 kWh per day. Using a conservative SEER of 10 means 12 kWh translates to cooling of 120,000 BTU/day. (See my article on Heat Pumps for the definition of SEER and other efficiency ratings.) With the 5000 BTU/day of heat generated by lighting in the summer, the air conditioner has to work 4% harder to compensate for the heat generated by the lights.

So, what are savings associated with compact fluorescent lights? Assuming you can cut down on the thermal heat generated by 75% over incandescent lights, which, as I mentioned average about 9% of a typical electric bill, you should be able to save about $59/year in electricity if you could convert all your lights to CFs. This amount comes from a calculation of:

.75 x 8760 kWh/year x .09 x $.10/kWh = $59.13

You'd have to buy about 1% more natural gas to compensate for getting 75% less heat from CF lighting in the winter. This will cost an extra $12.60. (.75 x .013 x 90 MBTU x $14.00/MBTU)

In the summer, you'd get a 3% break on your air conditioning bill which, using $.10/kWh, would come out to $4.20 annually. (.75 x .04 x .16 x 8760 x $.10)

CF bulbs are more expensive to purchase than incandescent bulbs, about $1.50 vs. $.50 each for a 60W bulb. But they last about 8 times longer, so even with the higher purchase price, you will spend 63% less per bulb replacement cost overall. Again using the 9% of an electrical bill over a year, the lighting consumption comes out to an average of 788 kWh per year. That's like having 1.5 60-watt incandescent bulbs burning all the time. If you did that, each light would need to be replaced about 8 times per year (assuming an 1100-hour life) for incandescent bulbs vs. 1.5 times per year with CF bulbs (assuming an 8800-hour life). So the bulb replacement cost savings are an additional $1.75/yr.

The calculation I used for that was:

8 incandescent bulbs x $.50/bulb - 1.5 CF bulbs x $1.50/bulb = $1.75

So lets add it all up:

$59.13 +$4.20 + $1.75 - $12.60 = $52.48 annual household savings to going to CFs

So it appears that the electricity savings + reduction in air conditioning + reduced in cost of replacement bulbs - loss of heating in winter still makes it more economical to use CFs over incandescent bulbs. It's interesting to note that the savings in electricity is by far the dominant contributor to the savings calculation.

But in the grand scheme of things, a reduction of $52.48 in a combined heating + electricity bills of around $2100 annually is less than a 2.5% household energy savings and thus isn't going to make a big dent in global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels very much.

It would seem that passing a law to make incandescent bulbs illegal is just something to make people who are unable to do math feel good about themselves. Maybe they can express it in tons of CO2 savings and obfuscate its contribution even further. Let's just call it what it is, a potential 2.5% energy savings which is not nearly enough incentive to pass a law when the simple economics should provide enough of incentive, not to mention cutting one's bulb replacement workload down by 87%.

Now I know that some may want to take me to task for my criticizing CF bulbs for making minimal contributions to the goal of overall energy reduction, but I am a tired of people saying things like, "But if everyone just did a little, we'd save a lot". No, we really wouldn't. If all 100 million households in the U.S. save 2.5% of their electricity bill by switching to CFs, the overall savings are not 250,000,000%, as some math-challenged people may think, they are just 2.5%, overall, period. Savings like this would get eaten up in about 3 years with a population increase which is occurring at nearly 1% per year in the U.S..

I wish that everyone would just talk in terms of percentages when it comes to reducing energy consumption and not obfuscate the issue by introducing tons of CO2 emissions or some other unrelated metric into every energy discussion. One of my favorites is using an seemingly impressive expression such as 'equivalent to taking 100,000 cars off the road'. Just to put that in perspective, there are 600 million motor vehicles in the world, so, although 100,000 sounds like an impressive number, it's less than .01 percent of the total. Just in case there's any doubt, I consider a .01 percent improvement to be a insignificant contribution that is hardly worth talking about. So I think we should stick to percentages when it comes to energy improvements.

To eliminate modern society's dependence on fossil fuels, we will need to find ways to significantly reduce energy consumption as well as simultaneously figure out how to augment and eventually replace nearly all of our current energy production with renewable energy sources. I don't think we can legislate a solution into existence by targeting small contributors like residential lighting. If we want to be a good "energy efficiency fascists" so as to modify people's behavior with legislation, then we've should be attacking energy consumption on a larger scale while simultaneously replacing massive amounts of generating capacity with renewable sources. A 2.5% reduction that already has an economic incentive would be unlikely to benefit from further legislation to outlaw incandescent bulbs. Besides, there are some applications that incandescent bulbs can do where CF bulbs would not work well, such as lighting the inside of a refrigerator. CFs take about a minute to warm up and so a refrigerator is much better served with an incandescent bulb. It's only on when the door is open, after all.

I guess I should also mention the controversy of the mercury in CF bulbs. Mercury has been used in fluorescent bulbs ever since they were invented in the 1930s, and no one gave it much thought. Commercial and industrial lighting applications converted over to fluorescent bulbs years ago and have had methods for their proper disposal going back decades. The disposal method for a burned out CF bulb is to put it in a sealed bag and bury it in a landfill so that it doesn't end up in our water supply. One source of methyl-mercury that ends up in fish comes from burning coal, which goes into the atmosphere, comes down in rain, and can concentrate in fish. Since CF bulbs require less electricity, hence less coal is burned to generate electricity, the overall effect of the mercury contamination concern is reduced with CF bulbs, but this is often neglected because of the hysteria about what to do if a CF bulb breaks, a topic that has been answered by the EPA.

So in conclusion, I think that CFs are a good idea that need no further government legislation to get them to be more fully adopted. There's speculation that they may even be replaced with LED technology in the future which will eliminate the mercury concern, but I think that may take a while. I've been using a white LED for reading lamp and it is 1000 times more efficient than using a 60W incandescent bulb, but that's mostly due to a behavioral change, since I'm lighting up just the reading material, not the whole room with the reading light. Those are the types of changes it will take to get off the fossil fuel gravy train. In reality, the number of lumens per watt for a white LED are only about 50% more efficient than CFs today. Even with the further LED technology improvements in the number of lumens per watt, it won't be quite the 4x jump in efficiency that we made by going from incandescent bulbs to CFs, but perhaps another 2X improvement over CFs, which would be worth switching if they can get the multi-watt LED lamp costs to be competitive with CF bulbs. Today, for limited power requirements such as flashlights, the switch is already happening which is why you are seeing more and more flashlights switching to LED technology.

Heat Pumps and Net Zero Energy homes

2008-10-20T09:06:00.005-06:00

My friend Jack asked me recently about geothermal heat pumps. I have been looking into heat pump technology for a while and wanted to write about it, so I gave him a longer-than-usual reply and figured I'd put some of what I wrote in my blog for anyone else who was curious about ground source heat pumps and net zero homes in general.

Heat pumps are like air conditioners running in reverse. You can use a heat pump to either heat or cool a building by reversing the flow of its refrigerant. Just as air conditioners become less efficient when the outside temperature gets too high, heat pumps get less efficient when the outside temperature gets too low (like around 30F). Of course, this is the worst time for a heating system to start losing its efficiency, that is, as the outdoor temperature gets colder, because it's precisely when the maximum output from it is required. This is one of the reasons heat pumps have not been as popular in colder climates as they are in mild climates.

The benefit of adding a geothermal source to a heat pump is that the heat exchange loop stays at a consistent temperature. This allows the heat pump to maintain its efficiency because the earth below the frost line at most latitudes in the lower 48 states stays at a consistent 50-60 degrees F year round. This constant source of temperature allows heat pumps to maintain a high 'coefficient of performance' (COP). The COP is similar in concept to an air conditioner's SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio). Basically, the COP is a ratio of watts of electricity input to watts of heat output you get. A typical heat pump has a COP of around 3 if the difference between the indoor and outdoor temperatures is within about 40 degrees F. The less the temperature difference, the higher the COP and conversely, the larger the temperature difference, the lower the COP. A COP of 3 is like getting 300% efficiency compared with simple electric resistive heat which is 100% efficient. A 100% efficient heater has a COP of 1. However, when the outdoor temperature approaches freezing, a heat pump's COP can drop down below 1, at which time a resistive backup heater takes over. The primary drawback of an air source heat pump is that just when you need heat the most, a heat pump starts to get much more expensive to operate due to the reduction in its COP. For geothermal (i.e., ground source) systems, the COP is closer to 3.5 all the time and so it doesn't suffer from the problem with air source heat pumps that vary with outdoor temperature.

An air conditioner's efficiency is measured by its SEER which is basically the COP averaged over a range of typical outdoor temperatures and multiplied by 3.413. Typical values for an air conditioner's SEER are around 10-15 which corresponds to an COP range of 2.9 - 4.4 . It's been improving over the past few years, mostly due to government mandates. In Japan, they are now producing heat pumps with COPs as high as 6.

To add a geothermal heat sink to a heat pump system, you need to bury the heat exchanger loop below the frost line. This can be done using a loop in a vertical bore hole or in a horizontal trench. In general, a ground source heat exchange loop for a typical house would be between 1500 to 2500 feet long depending on the size of the system, and buried at least 6' deep. The costs to install the heat exchange loop are similar to those of drilling a well in the case of a vertical system, or digging a 6' deep trench several hundred feet long and two feet wide. So the installation of the heat exchange loop can get quite expensive. If the loop is arranged in a coil in a trench, you need about 1 foot of trench length per every 4 feet of loop. As you can imagine, this would not be easy to do unless it's done during the construction of the house and prior to any landscaping. Also, if anything goes wrong with the loop such as having a leak, it would be very expensive to isolate and fix the problem once it's buried.

If heat pumps are 300% efficient, why doesn't everyone use them? After all, a gas furnace is only abut 80% efficient. One reason is that generating electricity from coal, gas, or nuclear power is only about 30-40% efficient. As much as 2/3 of the thermal energy created at an electric power plant becomes wasted heat. So the overall savings due to the multiplicative effect of the heat pump are offset by the losses of converting the fuel to electricity back at the power plant, not to mention the losses of delivering energy over the electrical grid. That's part of the reason that electricity tends to cost about 3 times as much per unit of energy as buying natural gas and burning it in a furnace to heat your house. The capital and installation costs of a geothermal heat pump system are also significantly more than a gas furnace (about $25K vs. $3K).

I currently spend about $800 per year to heat my home with natural gas and a similar amount on electricity. I figure if I were to use electricity and a geothermal heat pump for heat, it would cost about the same as what I currently pay for natural gas, but I'd have an extra $22K in capital cost for the heat pump over the cost of a gas furnace. Now, if I had a total solar electric home then it would make sense to consider a heat pump, but to do that, I'd need to have about 12 kW of solar panels installed on my roof (at a cost of $86K), based on my annual gas and electric consumption. Even with generous solar rebates (currently $4.50/W by my utility company, up to $45K) and the new solar tax credit just passed by the U.S. Congress (up to 30% of the net solar system cost) that could take my cost of the solar system down to around $29K. But it still would be hard to justify because of the additional capital outlay for the heat pump, bringing the system cost up to $54K.

To get to net zero energy with my existing home using PV solar and a ground source heat pump, it would take about $111K in capital expenditures of which $57K could be foisted off on to my fellow taxpayers and utility customers. But that's still too expensive to justify it based on its economic return. It would take about $54K in personal expenditures to save $1600/year in utility bills. Ignoring the cost of financing a $54K expenditure, the amortization of the system would be $2700 per year assuming it needed to be replaced in 20 years. But if energy prices doubled, which is certainly possible, it would begin to look much more attractive. They'd need to quadruple for it to be attractive without subsidies.

Energy efficiency initiatives don't get a lot of attention because most of them have negative economic returns. This is usually due to the low cost of energy in the U.S. which is about half of what Europeans pay due to higher energy taxes. However, if you use energy efficiency as a way to reduce capital costs of a renewable energy system, the picture is quite different, primarily because renewable energy capital expenses are so high. My electricity and heating bills are currently on par with the U.S. average. If I could figure out how to reduce them by 50%, it would allow me to reduce the size of a renewable energy system proportionally to be half the cost. This is usually when efficiency becomes a much more attractive proposition. Getting by with a 6 KW solar system for all our electric and heating needs would cut the previously mentioned $86K pre-rebate cost in half.

If energy prices go up significantly, and there's good reason to believe they will as oil and gas production peak, you'll likely see a lot more uptake in the technologies that help create net zero energy homes.

Channeling Steve Fossett

2008-10-10T18:25:00.006-06:00

Because I'm a pilot, I often get asked to speculate on the causes of plane crashes where there's not enough evidence to know for sure what really happened. Such is the case with Steve Fossett where I get periodic requests to give my opinion about what happened in his mysterious disappearance in a borrowed airplane. Just for those who haven't been paying attention, Steve Fossett was a wealthy adventurer who set numerous aviation records including traveling around the world solo in a balloon as well as flying an airplane solo without refueling around the world. He took off on a sightseeing flight from Barron Hilton's Ranch in Nevada last September and was never seen again. Just a few weeks ago, more than a year after he disappeared, some of his personal effects were found by a hiker about 80 miles from the ranch where he had departed. Shortly after that, the crash site was discovered in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

A recent Avweb newsletter linked a set of pictures on Flickr posted by one of the SAR team members who helped clean up Steve Fossett's crash site. There are about 10 pictures in the middle that show parts of the plane that start right around the one with the newspaper clipping image.

What I found interesting was the caption on the photo 43 that mentioned that the plane impacted the ground climbing at about a 10 degree angle on a slope that was at a 20 degree angle leading me to think that Fossett may have had a problem with the airplane and so he tried to land by attempting to climb uphill and get the aircraft to stall right around the time it contacted the ground. A 'roll out', if you want to call it that, on a 20 degree slope uphill would be pretty short. However, there were a lot of rocks and trees and so it appears that the plane broke apart on landing and then was consumed by fire. To make that maneuver work, you would have to do it 'just right'.

At an EAA chapter meeting last night, someone mentioned that Bob Hoover performed this maneuver where he knew he was going to crash and so he did it going up hill and he and his passengers walked away from it. Here's that story, excerpted from my (autographed :-) copy of Bob Hoover's autobiographical book "Forever Flying".

One of the more frightening experiences I've had occurred after an air show in 1989 at San Diego. It was held at Brown Field, which is located just a few miles from the Mexican border.

I had completed my performances in the P-51 and the Shrike Commander. I told the line boy who drove the fuel truck to service the Shrike quickly so I could leave right after the show was completed.

The young man asked how much fuel I needed. I told him I wanted precisely sixty gallons. I added, "That's hundred octane."

After my performance, I went to the manager's office, where he received a phone call from the same young man. The manager told me the boy wanted to know if 100 LL (low lead) was all right for my airplane. I told him it was. He relayed the message.

Normally I like to be present when the airplane is being serviced, but I was held up when I came out of the airport manager's office. By the time I got to the airplane, the truck was pulling away. I said, "Fueling done?" The boy replied, "Yes, sir. It was sixty gallons precisely."

When I taxied out, probably at least a hundred airplanes were waiting for takeoff. But as soon as I called in, the tower said, "Mr. Hoover, we want you to taxi to the head of the line."

I did not like to leapfrog ahead of other pilots. However, since time was scarce that day for me and my two passengers, I accepted the tower's kind offer.

The takeoff was smooth. Everything was normal and checked out perfectly. All of a sudden, at about three hundred feet, I realized I didn't have any power in the Shrike. I started losing airspeed.

I dumped the nose, but I couldn't understand what was happening. Everything checked out. The manifold pressure was right where it was supposed to be. The rpm were at the right setting. The fuel pressure and oil pressure were in good shape. Even though the gauges indicated that nothing was wrong, I knew something was. I started looking for a place to land. That would not be easy.

Brown Field is located on a plateau. To the north where I was headed, there were deep ravines. I could try to recover and head back to the airport, but I knew I wouldn't make it.

My two passengers tried to remain calm, but they were obviously frightened. Both thought we were going to crash and die. "Mr. Hoover," they asked more than once, "are we going to make it?" I assured them we would.

As I have mentioned before, each time potential disaster strikes, I rely on my experience of anticipating trouble to help me out. I had flown the P-51 cross-country for many years. I'd often considered what might happen if I had to put it down over the Rockies.

Recalling those thoughts, I dumped the nose of the Shrike. I kept my best glide speed until I reached the very end of the ravine. Landing in the bottom of the canyon meant no survival. Our only chance was to pull up and land on the side of the ravine.

As my airspeed bled off, I dropped the landing gear and flaps. I wanted to be at a minimum forward speed on impact. The landing gear would cushion the impact along with the tires and struts before the impact hit us square on.

I was down in a V-shaped ravine. A thousand feet wide at the top, it narrowed down to nothing at the bottom. I went right to the bottom to maintain the best glide speed. I then pulled the plane up and landed into the side of the ravine. I didn't travel very far at all before I hit a rock pile that caved in the nose. The instrument panel was torn out of its mounts and dropped down on my shins.

Neither of my passengers was hurt, but there was one fatality. We ran over a rattlesnake with the belly of the airplane when the gear tore out from under it.

We sat there awaiting rescue. I considered what had caused the lack of power. Only one thing was possible: the plane had been serviced with jet fuel instead of gasoline.

To confirm my suspicions, I went around to the side of the airplane and opened the drain valve. I leaned down and took a whiff. Sure enough, it was jet fuel.
My mind flashed at once to the young man I had asked to service the airplane. He must have known by then what had happened as I had informed the tower of the emergency.

Within minutes, rescue helicopters were on the scene. My passengers and I climbed up the ravine and were transported back to Brown Field.

After making sure the Shrike would be protected from theft, I asked, "Where is the line boy who serviced the plane?"

Everyone seemed reluctant to tell me, apparently afraid that I wanted to chew him out or be unkind to him. Finally, someone said, "He's outside."

An article in the Fullerton (Calif.) News-Tribune the next day quoted me regarding what happened next:

When I got back to the field, I saw the boy standing by the fence with tears in his eyes.

I went over and put my arm around him and said, "There isn't a man alive who hasn't made a mistake. But I'm positive you'll never make this mistake again. That's why I want to make sure that you're the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won't let anyone else on the field touch it."

Just as I said, I had the boy refuel my P-51 for the final two days of the air show. Needless to say, there were no further incidents.
Shortly after that, I received a wonderful letter from a doctor in Palos Verdes named William Snow.

He wrote:
I wanted you to know that I was quite touched by the apparent casual way in which you treated your unfortunate incident. Thank goodness it was just that and nothing more! However, what really impressed me was your genuine concern for the young man who had serviced your plane.

It is rare to find a person who has just experienced such a close brush with death and yet feels such compassion for his fellow man. God surely must be your copilot!

I could have just cut off that excerpt at the part where Hoover crashed, but I was so impressed by how he treated the line boy, that I'm sure you all wanted to hear how it ended.

Another interesting photo is of the Google Earth map below that shows where the shirt and ID were found. They appear to be about .7 miles from the wreckage. I can only assume that those items may have gotten carried away by animals.

The NTSB report has very few details so far, but I'm sure that it will accumulate more details about the crash as they start to examine the wreckage.

We may never know what happened, but it's obvious a fire ensued after the crash. Had the fire started while he was flying? If so, was he attempting to get the airplane on the ground as quickly as possible using the famed Hoover maneuver? We may never know, but I am eager to see what the NTSB has to say about it after they spend some time examining the wreckage.

The Kindle

2008-09-30T10:13:00.004-06:00

My friend Peter cares deeply about climate change and so he includes a line at the bottom of all his emails that admonish the reader:

Please consider the environment before printing this document.

As a consultant to HP and prior to that, an HP employee for 24 years, I worry about the prospect of people no longer printing out documents on paper and depriving HP of the profits that come from selling ink cartridges. But I can certainly understand Peter's sentiment since, with the exception of photos, much of what's printed ends up as trash a short time later. The same happens with newspapers and magazines. For me, books create another problem. I tend to hang on to many of my books after I've read them just in case I want to re-read them or refer to them in the future and this requires finding space to store them all. And it doesn't help that I read books on an intermittent basis, sometimes abandoning a book half way through only to pick it up a few months later to finish it and then give it its rightful place in my ever-growing number of bookshelves and boxes. It's not unusual for me to read several books at the same time. This drives my wife crazy in her efforts to keep our house neat and orderly. So I've long hoped for the day when I could have books that take up no space and yet are instantly accessible whenever the mood struck to read one of them. In short, I needed a practical electronic book reader.

E-book readers are not a new idea, but like many nascent technologies, they appeared on the scene well in advance of cost effective technology or even a convenient way to purchase content that would have allowed them to compete favorably with traditional books. In the past year, Amazon.com launched what is arguably the first mass-marketed e-book reader called the Kindle. The Kindle appears to have achieved a level of success that had eluded previous e-book reader products, including several competent designs from well established companies like Sony.

A few essential features for an e-book reader are ease-of-use, portability, and long battery life. Thanks to the introduction of high resolution e-ink displays, which draw very little power, a new generation of e-book readers has emerged that has allowed the e-book a better chance to gain market acceptance.

Another important e-book feature that had been lacking previously was the ease of content acquisition. Amazon has done a great job in this area thanks to their significant offering of more than 140,000 e-book titles in addition to many popular magazines and newspaper subscriptions. But the biggest breakthrough for Kindle, in comparison to its competitors, has been the content acquisition and delivery method. Amazon decided to take on the considerable challenge of installing a cellular modem in each Kindle. The logistics of this undertaking are significant. By partnering with Sprint, Amazon can get wireless data coverage over most of the U.S. which alleviates the need for a customer to install any software on a PC or even physically connect the device to a PC to periodically load content on to the Kindle (although it is still an option). The books and magazines can be purchased directly from and delivered to the Kindle, lending considerable temptation for customers to buy books on impulse. Kindle owners are even able to download significant samples of books that include a 'buy it now' button at the end of the sample thus eliminating much of the friction of an e-book acquisition. After all, who wants to stop reading a book after you've already read the first 20 pages and can't wait to see what happens next?

I've downloaded books previously and attempted to read them on my laptop or PC but I found it difficult. Part of the problem was that I wanted to take the book with me, from room to room, or with me when I traveled. That's not easy to do with a laptop computer because it's awkward and heavy to carry around a notebook computer for reading. It also takes a while to boot, and with each program I install on the laptop, the boot process slows down even more. Secondly, the battery life on my notebook is only 100 minutes, hardly enough time to make it a convenient reading device. All rechargable batteries lose capacity as they age. And it costs about $120 for a new battery pack. So, like many others, I tend to live with this continually decreasing battery life rather than replace the battery every year. But the biggest downside of reading something like a downloaded book on a laptop has been that there was no easy way to keep my place in the book. Each time I rebooted the computer, I needed to re-find my place in the book. That's just not acceptable. Granted, things are getting better with software e-readers, but the other disadvantages of laptop computers as e-book readers are just too hard to overcome.

E-book readers have done a lot to get around these problems. The Kindle will last for several days of reading on a charged battery that is 1/10 the size of a typical laptop battery (6 Wh vs 60 Wh). And when the battery loses its capacity over its life, Amazon offers a replacement battery for $20. I can change the battery myself, something that I can't do very easily with my iPod. Instead, Apple recommends I return their products to a service center at considerable inconvenience and significant expense to replace the battery. So I congratulate Amazon for making the Kindle battery easy to replace and offering it at a reasonable price.

After using the Kindle nearly every day for a few weeks, I like it more and more, particularly the ease of acquiring new books at a reduced cost over conventional books. Best of all, these e-books take up no space around the house. The only downside is that I can't borrow or lend the Kindle books like I can with a physical book. And sharing the Kindle with Terri is not easy since only one person can use it at a time. Amazon allows up to 5 Kindles on a single account that would all have access to my growing e-book library, but that would be expensive. I guess that's the downside of digital media, it's so easy to copy that if they don't protect it by locking it to each customer, then no one will pay for it. In some ways, that's more fair to the author too, since a book that gets passed around means that there is less compensation for the author per book. But unlike physical books, you can get free books that are out of of copyright. There are about 20,000 books, including many classics, available for free on feedbooks.com in a 'mobi' format which is compatible with Kindle.

I couldn't wait to tell Peter about my Kindle because I thought he'd be interested in a 'green' reading device which will save a few trees. Also, it consumes so little energy that I can recharge it with a small solar panel. But instead, he seemed somewhat suspicious of the newfangled gadget and asked me how it 'felt' and how it 'smelled' indicating that these are important sensory experiences when it comes to reading books. Terri is equally suspicious and cannot imagine replacing her paperbacks with this gadget. She's agreed to run an experiment by reading a book of her choosing on it. However, her patience for new technology is limited and for her to be pleased with it, it would have to be superior in every way to a paper book, so I'm not holding out much hope that she'll become an e-book convert.

I generally don't buy the first generation of a new technology product. In fact, I had planned to wait for Amazon to offer a second generation Kindle prior to getting one, figuring that it would have many improvements over the first generation. But after learning that the Kindle design would not be refreshed this year, I decided to get one. It also helped by getting an offer for a $100 discount through a credit card promotion Amazon offered, so I got one for $259. I see they are back up to $359. If I continue at the rate I've been buying books, Amazon should make a good profit from me. I've already read 6 books in 3 weeks, 2 free ones and 4 that I purchased from Amazon. I also converted several large 100+ page industry reports to a Kindle-compatible format and read them on a plane trip to California. So I've really been getting a lot of use out of it.

I think that the e-book reader market shows great potential and after a few false starts it just may be poised to catch on and allow people do their daily reading without killing as many trees in the process.

National Renewable Energy Lab visit

2008-08-06T08:03:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago I visited the National Renewable Energy Lab open house in Golden, CO with a few other members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network. I'd wanted to see this facility for some time, and figured that an open house on a Saturday would allow some of our members who normally are unable to attend our energy tours during the week to join us. As it turned out, we only had 4 members of our group show up. Despite the low turnout, we had a good time carpooling there and back because we got to chat for a few hours about renewable energy topics.

The NREL has a visitor's center and there was a presentation in progress when we arrived about how to do an energy audit on one's home. Several of us had just been to an NCRES presentation on this topic recently so we did not sit down to listen to the presentation. The presentation took up much of the visitor's center display area, making it impossible to talk without disrupting the presentation so our ability to wander around inside was a bit limited.

The exhibits were very nicely constructed and a docent explained the various renewable energy programs underway and the purpose of the various buildings on the campus. There are numerous projects going on all over the facility, but unfortunately they are off-limits for visitors. Only the visitor's center is accessible. I had expected this to be the case, and so I tried to gather some information about what would be necessary to get a tour of the actual laboratories in the hope that some future visit would allow us to get better access to what's going on in the labs. I can see that it will be a challenge as they are not set up to handle tours of the actual labs.

The docent who was our guide had spent most of his career in the power field, and I had a long discussion with him about transmission of power over high voltage DC lines. Transmitting power over DC lines is counter-intuitive for most engineers who were taught that you can only transmit utility scale power on AC lines. But thanks to advances in high power semiconductor components to handle utility scale power, DC power transmission lines are becoming more common to deliver electrical power long distances and to help isolate grids through interties. This method of transmitting power will become more important in the future as some of the best potential sources of renewable power generation such as wind and solar tend to be far removed from population centers. HVDC power transmission has the advantage of being able to isolate the grids so that the need to control the phase of the AC power over long distances is not required. The largest DC line in the U.S. is the Pacific DC Intertie which takes hydroelectric power from the Columbia River in Washington State and delivers it to customers in the Los Angeles area.

My favorite Visitor's Center exhibit was the section of the GE 37-meter wind turbine blade. I've seen these blades up close during our Ponnequin Wind Farm tour, but was curious about the materials of construction. With the section exposed, I saw that the materials looked identical to those used in my LongEZ and Cozy. They consisted of wood, foam, fiberglass, and epoxy albeit on a much larger scale that what is used in my planes.

Me and Ed Miccio standing next to the GE blade section

You can see that the spar and caps are very thick on these blades.

The Cozy uses the same materials and construction techniques as the wind turbine blades.

The NREL visitor's center is open from 9-5 Monday through Friday and I'd highly recommend that if you ever find yourself in the vicinity of I-70 at exit 263, you should stop by for a short visit and self-guided tour.

Midnight Engineer's Forum

2008-07-22T22:19:00.004-06:00

Each year I attend a conference in Denver that grew out of a magazine called 'Midnight Engineering'. The magazine was dedicated to engineers that loved the work so much they could be found doing it at all hours, even in their spare time, hence the magazine's name. Many of the readers were entrepreneurial types engaged in moonlighting activities. A yearly conference called Entcon was started that became like a 'real-time version of the magazine'. It was a great networking event with lots of interesting people that kicked off with skiing in the Rocky Mountains followed by a weekend of presentations and informal networking sessions.

The magazine is out of print, but a conference which is now called Entconnect is still going on each year in Denver around the last week of March. Next year's conference is scheduled for March 26-29, 2009 in Lakewood, CO.

We don't get a chance to talk much with the other conference participants throughout the year, so I've put together a forum on Yahoo Groups to see if it will help. If discussions about entrepreneurship, tech startups, and free agent engineering appeal to you, perhaps you'd like to join the group.

Remembering Geoff Peck

2008-07-18T08:09:00.006-06:00

A few weeks ago, my friend and helper on the HP Media Vault Yahoo Group, Chris, was asking me some questions about taking his first trip to the EAA convention in Oshkosh this summer. Chris found me through my Media Vault website and it turns out that we share a lot of interests. He was the first Media Vault owner to compile the Linux kernel which impressed me because he had no prior Linux experience and was only 14 years old at the time. He's been a highly valued source of help in providing product support and also runs his own Yahoo Group called Hacking the HP Media Vault. He even runs his own computer repair business. Look him up if you're in the St. Louis area and need some computer help.

One of the interests we share is aviation. The annual EAA convention at Oshkosh, called Airventure, is coming up next week and Chris is planning to attend it with his dad. He was asking some questions a few weeks ago about the byzantine pricing schemes the EAA uses for admission and was having some trouble trying to figure out if his junior membership qualified him for a guest admission pricing for his dad. He wasn't getting anywhere with the folks at the EAA since it was an unusual request. Most junior or student members have at least one parent who is a member of the EAA and so the people who staffed the help desk hadn't encountered a situation like this before. I figured that I would call upon someone who I knew who helped write the Airventure admission software for the EAA, Geoff Peck, to help sort things out.

Geoff Peck and I go way back. Geoff was the originator of Usenet's rec.aviation subgroups back around 1992. Prior to that, there was a single rec.aviation group of which I was an avid reader and occasional contributor. I always admired the way Geoff answered aviation-related questions. His responses were always so well-reasoned and professional. Always calm and authoritative, his writing style was what I aspired to sound like when I wrote.

It had been a few years since I had communicated with Geoff. At one time, he used to organize daily meetings for lunch at Oshkosh, with everyone meeting at the base of the control tower around noon. He'd also help organize a dinner at the Granary, and he'd pass around his laptop for people to use to make a rec.aviation posting entitled "Live from Oshkosh". This was back in the early 90's, which was long before the Internet and Web became mainstream. It was even before Deja News (now Google Groups) began archiving the Usenet postings, so much of this history is lost to time. I would look forward to seeing Geoff each year, manning the booth for his flight planning company, Enflight, patiently talking with customers and eager to help other pilots.

So, I did a quick Google search on his name to get to his personal website and make sure I had a good email address for him. You can imagine my concern when the first hit Google returned was entitled: "Remember Geoff Peck" at his personal website. I read with dismay that he had died in a plane crash in Colorado on his way back from Oshkosh in August, 2006. There has been a wiki set up for people to contribute their memories of Geoff. I read the NTSB report with astonishment that Geoff, a highly skilled 4400-hour ATP-rated flight instructor, would perish in a classic box canyon trap.

Today I was reminded about the incident again when I got an email from the AOPA describing his accident. Here is the text of it:

"On Aug. 7, 2006, the pilot of a Piper PA-28R-201 Arrow was returning to California after attending EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wis. While attempting to navigate through mountainous terrain northwest of Salida, Colo., the pilot made a wrong turn and flew into a box canyon. Unable to outclimb the terrain, the aircraft struck a stand of pine trees and came to rest inverted. The crash killed the 4,400-hour airline transport pilot and seriously injured his passenger.

Making their way west from Oshkosh, the San Jose-based pilot and his passenger had arrived at Harriet Alexander Field (elevation 7,523 feet msl) in Salida around 8 p.m. on the day before the accident. The following morning, the pilot used his laptop computer to obtain a DUATS weather briefing and file a VFR flight plan to Milford, Utah. The density altitude in Salida that morning was about 9,400 msl, meaning aircraft flying in the area would perform as though they were about 2,000 feet higher than their actual altitude.

According to the airport manager, the pilot asked which route he should take to Utah. The pilot wanted to fly west across Monarch Pass (elevation 11,312 feet msl). The manager suggested that he instead fly south through the lower-elevation Poncha Pass before turning west. The pilot ignored the advice. The airplane took off around 10 a.m. and turned toward Monarch Pass.

The Arrow flew west along U.S. Highway 50, which eventually runs through Monarch Pass toward Utah. Over the town of Maysville, however, the pilot began following County Road 240, which runs northwest through a box canyon for about 10 miles before dead-ending near the canyon’s terminus.

Several witnesses saw a low-wing, single-engine airplane flying northwest up the canyon. One witness, located about two miles from the accident site, went to investigate when the aircraft failed to fly back out. He discovered the wreckage and the lone survivor sitting on a rock nearby. The injured passenger had no memory of the events leading to the accident.

The Arrow crashed at 10:20 a.m. at an elevation of about 12,000 feet msl. Terrain surrounding the accident site quickly rises to between 13,000 and 14,000 feet msl. The aircraft’s throttle was found in the full-forward position. The vertical speed indicator showed a climb rate of 130 fpm. NTSB investigators estimated the Arrow’s groundspeed at the time of the crash was 59 knots.

The board concluded that inadequate preflight planning and preparation caused the accident. Contributing factors were the pilot’s lack of familiarity with the geographical area, his becoming lost and disoriented, his decision to disregard the advice of local pilots, and the high density altitude, which reduced the airplane’s climb performance.

This accident illustrates the unique hazards of mountain flying. Summer temperatures can push the density altitude to heights that approach or exceed a light aircraft’s service ceiling, despite what the altimeter might be reading. Moreover, to a pilot unfamiliar with the terrain, the mouth of one canyon can look very much like another. Is it a mountain pass leading to the relative safety of lowlands beyond—or a dead end? Like the proverbial blind choice between the lady and the tiger, picking the wrong door can end very, very badly."

I tried to imagine the decision-making that had led up to the accident and I have begun to wonder if Geoff had a weather issue like mountain obscuration and chose to fly northward to see if he could get around it. In doing so, he inadvertently followed a box canyon that he was unable to climb out of. I'm surprised that despite the mention of the AWOS weather conditions at Monarch Pass, weather was never mentioned in the cause of why, instead of flying over Monarch pass, Geoff would fly north and end up in a box canyon. The Monarch Pass AWOS reported at 9:50 a.m.:

Wind, 210 degrees at 14 knots; visibility, less than 1/4 statute mile, light snow; ceiling, 100 feet overcast; temperature, 7 degrees C.; dew point, 6 degrees C.; altimeter, 30.82 in. Hg

The accident investigation seems to indicate that he was lost, believing he was over Monarch Pass when in fact he was 8 miles north. After looking at the AWOS report, I can't help think that Monarch Pass was not safe to fly through with a 100' ceiling and so Geoff headed north looking for a more favorable weather conditions. It surprises me that there was no mention of the mountain obscuration as being a factor in this accident. Also, not taking the advice to use Poncha Pass is understandable too. Poncha Pass doesn't cross the continental divide. So even after crossing Poncha Pass, it would be necessary to immediately turn west and cross the continental divide at an elevation similar to that of Monarch Pass (11,312 feet MSL).

I can attest to the fact that the Rockies can be difficult to climb over, especially in the summer when density altitude becomes a bigger factor, and with any amount of westerly wind, there will likely be down drafts making the climbing more difficult as you fly from east to west. Also, trying to squeeze under some low ceilings to clear a mountain pass can be a particularly bad idea.

We will miss Geoff, but not the final flying lesson he taught us and that is to be careful flying around the Rocky Mountains, especially when attempting to cross over them.

San Diego trip

2008-07-09T12:28:00.004-06:00

A few days after I returned from the Rutan Brothers Birthday Bash in Mojave, Terri and I were scheduled to go out to San Diego for a vacation. I had investigated various methods of travel and decided that the LongEZ was still the most economical and by far the most adventurous mode of travel for us. Terri has accompanied me on several trips in the LongEZ. She has the dubious task of squeezing into its compact back seat beset with our baggage. It's a good thing she's svelte.

We've taken several LongEZ trips together to Illinois, Seattle, and Lake Tahoe. She also accompanied me on many trips in our Piper Colt including a 1500 mile trip from Pennsylvania to Colorado, but that plane had side-by-side seating so it was more comfortable for the passenger. It takes Terri time to get over the discomfort of long distance traveling with the LongEZ and so we don't do it all that often, about once every 2 years. The primary motivation for finishing the Cozy, which has side-by-side seating and much more baggage space, is to make our traveling more comfortable. The seating position and visibility in a canard airplane is much better for the front seaters than for the rear seaters because they have better visibility and can stretch their legs out a lot more. It's also a lot easier to communicate with someone who is seated along side you than it is with someone sitting behind you.

I try to break our trips up into 2 to 3 hour legs so that it doesn't get too uncomfortable. When I fly with a passenger, I need to keep the fuel load light, no more than half full, so as not to put the plane over its gross weight and to help maintain a reasonable climb performance.

The night before we were scheduled to leave, we had a Rush concert at Red Rocks amphitheater in Denver. That meant we wouldn't be getting home until nearly 1:00 a.m. and so we didn't expect to leave until around 9:00 a.m.. The concert had been rescheduled from earlier in the month because of a weather cancellation so there wasn't much we could have done short of missing it, and that wasn't going to happen.

When flying a small airplane, if you can start your traveling at the crack of dawn, you can reduce the amount of time flying in the bumpy air that generally starts around 11:00 a.m. Unfortunately for us, it would have meant getting little or no sleep, so it wasn't an option. We managed to get in the air about 10:00 a.m.

The climb performance of the LongEZ at gross weight with the 108 HP engine is not great and the continental divide is the first and highest part of the Rockies we needed to clear. It's just about 15 minutes travel to the west. I have a policy that I won't fly toward a mountain pass until I can see over and clear it by at least 500 feet well before I arrive at it. Too many pilots get in trouble as they try to out climb a mountain and that's a formula for disaster, especially when you figure that the service ceiling for many small planes is around 14,000' and there are mountain peaks taller than that in the Rockies. It's possible to fly a northern route up around Laramie, WY or down around Albuquerque, NM if the plane can't safely climb over the mountains and that would be my advice for anyone who hasn't done much mountain flying and wants to cross the Rockies. The density altitudes tend to be very high around here because the ground warms the air at these high elevations, so a 12,000' mountain pass may have a density altitude much higher than its elevation, possibly beyond the service ceiling of an aircraft, so you have to be aware of that when crossing the Rocky Mountains in a small airplane. Even taking off from high altitude airports can be a very strange sensation if all of your experience has been close to sea level. Planes tend to accelerate and climb much more slowly when the density altitude reaches 8000' or more which is a very common occurrence in Colorado and other western states with high altitude airports.

We climbed over the Rockies just to the north of Long's Peak and got a nice view of Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. Our first fuel stop was in Grand Junction, near the western border of Colorado and as we approached it, the afternoon thermals were already starting to make the ride bumpy. I knew we were in for a rough ride across Utah and Arizona. We were planning to spend the night in Sedona, AZ because we had heard so much about it and had never been there. We were eager to see if it lived up to its utopian reputation. After fueling up at Grand Junction, we headed off toward Moab, Utah and then turned southward. I was hoping to cross into Arizona near Monument Valley to get a good look at the famous formations that have appeared in many western films. The terrain below us for much of our journey across Utah was a series of canyons and rugged formations made by the Colorado River drainage. It eventually turned into Lake Powell, which was visible off of our right wing. Monument Valley was just to the left as we crossed into Arizona. We were too far above and to the west of the formations to get any good pictures of them, but they all looked very familiar.

As we got further into Arizona, the thunderstorms had begun to appear on the horizon. I called up Flight Watch on 122.0 and asked about weather developing along our route and the weather briefer suggested that we fly directly west to the Grand Canyon Airport and then head south to get around some cells that had formed just east of Flagstaff and Sedona. I decided that it would be good to land at Grand Canyon Airport and take a break while we looked at a weather radar screen, just to make sure we'd be clear getting into Sedona. This allowed us to fly over the Grand Canyon, which was fun to see from the air. Terri and I had visited the Grand Canyon in 1985, just a few weeks after we got back from our honeymoon. I can still recall how hot it was driving across the Painted Desert in a car that had no air conditioning. The Grand Canyon airport had many commercial aircraft on the ramp taking tourists for scenic flights over the canyon. There were at least a dozen twin turbo prop aircraft parked there and they were leaving at a very regular rate. Most of the visitors appeared to be from other countries. After recovering from our bumpy ride, we got back into the plane for our short flight to Sedona. Flying into Sedona is visually stunning. It's surrounded by red rock cliffs and formations of all shapes and sizes and the airport is like the deck of an aircraft carrier sitting up on a butte with 400' dropoffs on all sides. There are many scenic overlooks around the airport and people drive up to it just to take in the 360-degree views of Sedona.

We had reservations at the Sky Ranch Lodge at the airport, and I'm glad I made them a few days in advance, because they were completely booked when we arrived. We also ran into John Lambert and his wife at the terminal. I recognized his name when he introduced himself because he had put together a slide presentation at the Rutan Birthday bash I had attended the previous week. He and his wife were on their way back to Arkansas from Mojave via automobile and had stopped in Sedona for the night. John built a Varieze but had since sold it.

There is a restaurant at the Sedona airport that serves dinner, but we wanted to see some of the town and to do that, we needed to get a ride into town. As we were walking to the hotel, we had been offered a ride into town by a kind stranger who was driving by but we only needed to walk a few hundred yards to the hotel. John Lambert had already offered us a ride to the hotel, but we opted to walk since it was so close. I figured getting a ride into town would be easy. However, the first 2 taxi services we called didn't have any drivers available to take us to a restaurant so we called up a car service operated by 'Gator' who gladly showed up in a unique vehicle with horns on the hood and gave us a ride into town. After an enjoyable meal on the outdoor patio of the El Rincon restaurant along Oak Creek in Tlaquepaque Village, we started walking back to the center of town, figuring our odds of getting a lift back up to the airport might be better there. As we were walking, I turned to ask a woman who was walking behind us if she could direct us to the center of town. She asked where we were going and we said we needed to get back to our hotel at the airport. Without hesitating she said she was going that way and offered us a lift. It was the third ride we had been offered since our arrival.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the airport restaurant and took off around 9:00 a.m. The airport elevation is 4800' and the temperature had gotten high enough that the density altitude was already 8000'. With an uphill departure, we used most of the runway to get airborne and I was grateful that by the time we flew off of this aircraft carrier of an airport, the town was already 400' below us. We had to turn west to avoid the 6000' tall cliffs just north of town.

From Sedona we flew over Prescott, then just south of Lake Havasu, Palm Springs, and on to San Diego. Upon arriving near the busy airspace around San Diego, I attempted to contact SoCal Approach to get clearance into the Class B airspace that covers most of the airports around San Diego. The controller was not responding to me and when he finally did, he told me he'd call me back in 5 minutes. My alternate airport was Ramona, which is just outside the Class-B airspace and so I started circling toward it waiting for my call. After 5 minutes with no response I called him again, and got a response that he'd call me back in another 5 minutes, all while sounding overworked and flustered. This appears to be a stall tactic used by controllers that means, "Don't bother me, I'm busy with more important traffic right now." The airspace over Montgomery Field, which is downtown in San Diego, was very hazy with only about 5 miles of visibility. By contrast, Ramona was clear and right below me, so I decided to land there and see if we could get the rental car delivered there instead. I called the Ramona tower, got a clearance to land and then taxied over to Chuck Hall aviation. After a few minutes on the phone with Enterprise, they agreed to pick us up and drive us to Poway to pick up a car. So that made the decision to park the plane there instead of at Montgomery Field. Even though it would have been more convenient, Montgomery Field often gets fogged in for several hours each morning in June. Ramona is far enough inland and higher in elevation that it's not as susceptible to those conditions so I was fine with parking the airplane there while we visited San Diego.

Our Starwood Four Points hotel was next to Montgomery field and with the GPS, we were able to find our way there without difficulty. I should mention that during this trip I used my HP Travel Companion running Anywhere Map software for aerial navigation and then switched to its built in Tom Tom Navigator in the car. We found this gadget to be invaluable both in the car and plane during the trip. We used it constantly. I was even able to send email with it from a free wireless connection at the hotel.

The hotel is undergoing an extensive remodeling project and so we got a new room with a nice soft bed. It reminded us of our the bed we had at a Sheraton in downtown Chicago this past March. Later we'd find out that this bed is called a 'Heavenly Bed' and we've since put it on our shopping list.

Terri is a beach person, and one of our major goals was to visit the beaches around the San Deigo area, so after a short rest, we headed off for Mission Beach. I've only been to San Deigo once before, in 1984, and had visited Mission Beach so I was a little familiar with it. We strolled along the beach and took in the sights. Later that evening, we ate at a restaurant in 'Old Town San Diego' and did some sightseeing there as well.

Prior to arriving in San Diego, I had emailed my college roommate, Dave Serhan, who has lived in San Diego since graduating from Penn State to tell him that we'd be visiting the area. Whenever we travel in the LongEZ, I generally try to avoid setting up any meetings that would make us feel like we have to be in a particular place at a particular time. When I visit fellow pilots, they tend to understand the unpredictability of private airplane travel and so I don't mind telling a pilot in general terms when I expect to be around, because if I show up late or not at all due to weather or some other reason, he'll understand. Dave was the first person I knew who had his pilot's license and he took me for an airplane ride at Forty Fort, PA airport when we were both teenagers. I still remember it vividly because he let me fly the airplane while he took some aerial pictures. It was my first experience at the controls. I guess in some ways, I have him to blame for my aviation addiction. Dave also spent much of his military career flying F14 fighter jets off of aircraft carriers, so he parlayed his investment in learning to fly small airplanes into flying multimillion dollar jets before retiring from the Navy a few years ago. I had visited Dave during my last trip to San Diego and he gave us a tour of Mirimar Naval Base and we got to see his F14 fighter jet. It was very impressive.

The following day we decided to visit Coronado Island and I gave Dave a call on my way to see if he was around or if he was off traveling for his job. Dave was home when I called and told me he only checks his home email address once a week and so he didn't get my message. He invited us over for dinner and to meet his family. I saw Dave last year at our high school reunion, but hadn't met his wife or daughters.

We spent the afternoon in Coronado Island and even rented a pedal-car called a surrey to travel around the island to get a better feel for the place. We really got a good workout as a result of our 6-mile pedaling adventure. Previously, I had thought that Coronado Island consisted of just a Naval base, but quickly realized that it had a beautiful beach and surrounded by many quaint neighborhoods. We ate lunch there and then went to walk on its beautiful beach that had sparkling golden flakes mixed in with the sand as it washed in on the beach. We also took a quick tour of the The Hotel del Coronado which was built in 1888, and it was quite spectacular. Terri has decided that on our next visit to the area, that's where she'd like to stay.

After a day touring around Coronado Island, we headed up to Dave's house north of the city. Our GPS led us right to his door. We really enjoyed getting to meet Dave's lovely wife, Anita, and his two beautiful daughters, Lindsey and Kristina who are ages 19 and 15 respectively. Dave and I spent some time catching up while Terri and Anita became engaged in lively discussions on topics involving pets, furniture, and clothing. Anita is an expert in furniture and when we described our Starwood hotel bed to her, she immediately knew that it was called a 'Heavenly Bed' and that you can order one for your home. Part of its incredible comfort is a result of the high thread count sheets and blankets.

I learned that Dave has become quite a skilled pool player and is top ranked in his league. He recently built a billiard room and so I played a few games of 8 ball, all while feeling quite outclassed as he demonstrated his considerable skills. In a few hours, it was time for us to leave, but we hope to get back in the area and pay them another visit. I am confident it won't take us another 24 years to get back to San Diego again.

On Sunday we decided to visit the aircraft carrier, the USS Midway, which is docked at a downtown pier. First launched in 1945, the ship has undergone several retrofits and saw action right up until Operation Desert Storm in 1992. It's been a museum/tourist attraction since 2004. An aircraft carrier is an engineering marvel and neither Terri nor I had ever seen one up close. I've seen plenty of TV programs that describe them on the Military Channel, but getting to walk through one is quite an experience. It took us about 3 hours to take the full self-guided tour which included an audio recording of many of the ship's features. I won't go into all the details of what we saw, but there are some pictures linked below and about half of them are of this tour. If you're ever in San Diego, I suggest you spend a few hours to tour this ship.

There were still a few beaches we wanted to check out, and so we spent the rest of the afternoon comparing the beaches in Del Mar and La Jolla with the ones we saw closer to downtown San Diego. I had ventured into La Jolla during my first visit to the San Diego area, up in the hills and was astonished at how beautiful all the homes looked. So Terri and I took a short ride up Hillside Drive to see if my recollection fit what I had remembered. We found a dream home there offered for $12.1M which looked quite nice, but a bit out of our price range.

We liked all of the San Diego beaches, and Coronado was our favorite because it seemed the most accessible and the least crowded.

On Monday morning we headed home, taking off around 8:00 a.m. and heading to Falcon Field in Phoenix as our first stop. I knew that it would be hot in Phoenix, but it also has a low elevation at only 1400' MSL and so the density altitude would be more manageable in the heat of the midday than most other Arizona airports. It was close to 100F when we arrived, and we had enjoyed a pretty smooth and comfortable ride at 9500' prior to our descent. After leaving there, we headed to Albuquerque, so that we could cross the Rockies at a lower altitude and to better avoid the isolated thunderstorms that form just about every summer afternoon in the Rockies. When we landed at Double Eagle airport, there was a jet getting ready to take off. It looked like an Czech L39 Albatros military jet trainer and had a very loud jet engine to match. I was surprised to see the name 'Eclipse' on its tail. Last year Eclipse surprised everyone at Oshkosh with a small single engine 'Concept Jet' now called the model 400 and so I was wondering if they had some new aircraft they'd be showing this year. I searched the Internet for any mention of this new single engine jet and could find nothing. Eventually, I found out that Eclipse uses an L39 for training and as a chase plane, so that was what we saw.

We borrowed the courtesy car from the FBO and drove a few miles north to get something to eat since the restaurant on the field had closed at 2:00 p.m.. I checked weather upon returning and it appeared that if we flew toward Las Vegas, NM and then east of Pueblo, we'd miss some monster thunderstorms forming over the mountains. In a little over 3 hours after our departure from Albuquerque, we were descending through Denver's Class B airspace showing a ground speed of nearly 180 mph. We were getting our first significant tailwinds of the entire trip.

It was a great relief to land back in Greeley after a long day of flying. Terri is a great sport for spending all that time in the back seat with hardly a complaint, although I think it may be another year or two before I can convince her to take a trip like that again in the LongEZ. But.... maybe if I can just get that Cozy finished ...

You can find some photos of this trip here.

Rutan Brothers Birthday Bash 2008

2008-07-04T09:55:00.007-06:00

I flew to California in the LongEZ twice last month. I'll write up the experiences in two separate blog entries.

The first trip was to attend a birthday bash in Mojave, CA for the Rutan brothers. This was a huge event with more than 500 attendees. I had seen pictures of the last birthday celebration event that took place in 2003 and thought that if they were ever to do that again, I must try to get out there. A few weeks ago I received an announcement through one of my canard mailing lists that a big birthday bash was planned for Saturday, June 21st, 2008 and mentioned it to Terri. "You should go!", she told me, so that I could participate in this historic event. That's all the encouragement it took. Soon I was planning the trip and looking forward to flying there.

I had some other things that I wanted to do and see in California, including a business meeting with a potential client at Van Nuys airport just north of LA. I also wanted to visit my friends Marc and Deanie Zeitlin, who live in Tehachapi a few miles from Mojave. Marc and I met in 1996 after he had started the Cozy mailing list which has been going on every since. He and Deanie have been out to visit us a few times and we usually see each other at Oshkosh each year. Marc moved from Massachusetts to California when he went to work for Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites about 3 years ago and has been busy working on the SpaceShip 2 design. He and Deanie just completed building their dream home in Tehachapi and so I was eager to visit and see it firsthand, after reading his report on his website about the design and construction of the house. Seeing it up close and staying with them for the weekend gave me a whole new appreciation for this beautiful home with its fabulous view and many unique features.

Marc Zeitlin standing next to Matt Steinmetz's beautiful LongEZ, Deja Vu

I launched on the morning of June 20th about 7:45 a.m.. My friends Curt and Gail were also flying their Varieze to the gathering and planning on stopping in Grand Junction, CO for their first fuel stop after climbing over the Rocky Mountains. I figured I'd be able to raise them on the air-to-air frequency and hopefully catch up to them in St. George, Utah for lunch. Shortly after takeoff, I heard a familiar voice on the frequency of Rob Martinson who flies a Varieze out of Denver. He was also planning to stop in St. Geroge for lunch so it was comforting to have some company that I could chat with on the radio enroute. Rob just won the prize for the most efficient airplane at a new contest called FuelVenture where he managed to get 66 mpg from his Varieze while flying along at 137 mph.

I cleared the Continental Divide just to the south of Long's Peak at an altitude of 12,500' and stayed at that altitude for the majority of the trip across Colorado and Utah. Rob took a more circuitous route so he could fly over Lake Powell in southern Utah. By the time we got near Moab, Utah I found Curt on the frequency as he and Gail had just taken off from Grand Junction after their first fuel stop. I should mention here that the LongEZ carries twice the fuel load of a Varieze and could easily make it to California with no fuel stops, but I generally only fill the tanks half way to give me better climb performance and because I like to land and take a break every 3 to 4 hours. I've only rarely taken advantage of the full 52 gallon fuel capacity which gives the LongEZ a 1150 mile range.

The scenery across Colorado and Utah was beautiful and I've linked a few photos below. We touched down in St. George, Utah around lunch time and Rob, Curt, Gail and I all walked over to a restaurant at the north end of the field for lunch. There were already 4 other canard planes on the ramp that had arrived about an hour before we did and they were fueling up and getting ready to leave. Everyone at the airport was curious how so many canards had landed at the same time. I generally run into at least one person at each fuel stop who has never seen a canard aircraft, despite the fact that more than 2000 of them are flying today. So having 7 come in at once to a remote location like St. George is a very rare sight.

After eating lunch and refueling, we headed out again. Rob and Curt were going to go directly to Mojave, but I was heading to Van Nuys. However, we needed to take the same route to get around the restricted airspace near Edwards Air Force base in Mojave. We flew directly over the top of the Las Vegas airspace at 10,500' which gave us spectacular views of the entire city. Nevada is exceptionally dry with hardly any vegetation from one end of it to the other, as is western California where it borders on Nevada. It's a very stark landscape to see from the air. At 10,500', the air was cool and a little bumpy. The flight went quickly and in a few hours I bid my goodbyes to Rob and Curt and headed into the busy airspace over southern California. There was a heat wave in progress and when I landed at Van Nuys and the temperature was 43C on the ramp (109F) and it felt unbelievably hot. Even a stiff breeze didn't seem to help, except to make me feel very parched and in need of some lemonade. I met with my client at the Airtel Plaza Hotel restaurant and discussed a project over dinner. After we finished up, I picked up a little more fuel and headed up north to Tehachapi. In just over 30 minutes from the time I took off, I was threading my way through the mountain passes that had hundreds of wind turbines of all sizes. The wind through Tehachapi pass is some the most consistent and steady wind you'll find in the U.S.. Marc tells me that it's rare to see the wind turbines standing still.

I had a very enjoyable evening with my friends Marc and Deanie and caught up with what had been happening with them since the last time we met. The new house exceeded all of my high expectations of it. It has numerous features that would fit right in at Architectural Digest. It has gorgeous views in every direction and I stitched together a view from the deck that seemed to go on forever which you can see below. Perched up on a slope, it has a consistent breeze that cools down at night so that the air conditioning was hardly needed despite the heat wave going on all around us in southern California.

The spectacular view from Marc and Deanie's deck. Click on image to get the full view.

The next day we headed down to Mojave by car since it was faster and more convenient to cover the 20 miles than it would be to use our airplanes. The ramp at Mojave was hot and so I was happy to be in an air conditioned car upon our arrival, despite not having my LongEZ parked among the dozens of other canard aircraft lined up on the ramp. The celebration went on for 4 hours with lots of stories being told by the guests of honor, Burt and Dick Rutan, who turned 65 and 70, respectively, this summer. There was a lot of good food and camaraderie amongst the loyal following of canard builders and fliers and I got to see a lot of folks who I run into each summer at Oshkosh. One lucky guy and 4 of his friends won a 30-minute ride in a Rutan-designed Beech Starship, which was parked on the ramp. I also got to go in it and take a look around its interior which was very spacious.

At the party, we were joined by Bill and Marilyn Seibold, who had flown their Cozy from Bisbee, AZ that morning. They also stayed with the Zeitlin's that evening.

It's always fun to be immersed in a group of fellow aviation enthusiasts. I never grow tired of talking about airplanes and the adventures we have in them. After a nice dinner, I went to sleep, knowing that I would to wake up early the next day without rousing the other guests or my hosts so that I could have the maximum amount of smooth morning air for flying across the desert. Marc let me borrow his car for the drive to the airport and so I left the house around 6:20 a.m.. By 6:50 a.m., I was in the air and on my way to my first fuel stop in St. George, Utah. I had hoped to get fuel at the self-serve pump at Tehachapi, but it was out of service. After doing some calculations, I figured I'd still be able to get to St. George with a reasonable reserve.

Upon landing at St. George, I ran into Curt and Gail again, who had just finished fueling their Varieze. We took off at about the same time and flew together for a while. They only had about 2.5 hours of fuel, so they'd need to stop before getting home to Longmont, CO, but we weren't sure of our route because we knew that there would be thunderstorms over the Rockies by the time we reached them, which may have required us to divert north or south of a direct route. They decided to stop in Grand Junction and I pressed on figuring I'd land at an alternate airport if the thunderstorms grew too dense to fly around. Fortunately, the thunderstorm coverage was only about 50%, leaving a lot of room to fly around them, although it was a bit bumpy as a result of the convective activity and virga nearby. I have some pictures linked below and the last 4 photos show the various thunderstorms in the area as I was crossing the Rocky Mountains. After looking at the radar picture on the ground at Grand Junction, Curt and Gail decided to spend the night there. I couldn't blame them since the storms are not predictable and what looks passable one hour may grow in intensity the next hour. Had I seen the radar picture, it might have been enough to convince me to wait for the clear and smooth morning air to pass over the Rockies.

It was a great trip. I've never had the LongEZ over that part of the country and found the experience to be a wonderful way to take in lots of beautiful scenery in a very short time. The entire flight time to and from California was just over 6 hours each way. If I had driven the route instead, it would have been more than 1100 miles and would have taken 16 hours of driving each way and used twice as much fuel. It was a good warm up for the follow-up trip that I took a few days later to San Diego, CA with Terri. I'll write up that trip later.

If you'd like to see some photos I took on the trip, you can find them here. I removed a lot of my pictures from Birthday Bash because Mike Massee published a much nicer set of photos which you can check out here.

Update 2008-07-09: Chris, who was flying as part of the 4-canard flight out of Colorado Springs, posted some more great pictures including air-to-air shots on the way to and from the Birthday Bash.

LinkedIn's RSS Feed

2008-06-14T10:03:00.005-06:00

Last week at a NoCoNet meeting I gave a tip on using RSS feeds. I have been using RSS for several years to keep track of websites without having to go out and visit them on a regular basis. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It works a little bit like a newsclipping service where you can direct a website's updates into a common 'aggregator' so you can have awareness of what's new without having to go out and visit the website every day. If you haven't used RSS yet, you should give it a try. I recommend Google Reader for getting started. I've tried several other RSS aggregators such as Yahoo, Bloglines, and Newsgator, but Google Reader works the best for me.

I've found that RSS works best to keep up with blogs that are only updated periodically, possibly just once a week or less. It would be time consuming to visit a site like that each day because I'd usually find no new information. After doing that a few times, it's easy to get out of the habit of visiting the site, which results in me losing touch with the website.

Just about all blogs have RSS feeds. You can recognize it when you see RSS
or this symbol which has become sort of a standard for indicating that the site has an RSS feed. If you scroll down the list over on the right of this page, you can find this blog's RSS feed. Generally speaking, the URL for the feed has to be pasted into your aggregator's list of feeds for it to work. Otherwise, you'll just get a page of XML code which will just confuse you.

There are some uses for RSS feeds that do not work well for me. I have not found RSS useful to keep track of a high volume blog by subscribing to its feed. These blogs are all about volume, not necessarily quality or trying to provide unique content. In order to monetize blogging activity these days, it's necessary to get people to keep visiting the site it all day long, and to do that, they serve up hourly content that appeals to society's collective Attention Deficit Disorder. It seems that the topics of gadgets and gossip are a veritable cornucopia of fresh content assurance. Those topics seem to really create a lot of traffic on the web for some reason. Gadgets and gossip are the primary fodder for uberblogs like Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing-Boing, TMZ, and Valleywag. I've tried reading a few of those sites on RSS but gave up after a while because the content was so non-stop that it was life crushing. And that crushing feeling was not just because of the sheer volume of postings, but also because of some of the vitriolic writing style on a few of those sites and its effect on one's psyche. Controversy sells. If you fail to read the RSS feed for any of those sites for a few days, it takes too long to catch up. It's better to just tune out that noise. The same is true with political blogs. They just have too much noise and foment, and not enough useful information.

Recently I noticed that LinkedIn has an RSS feed for the Network Updates. These network updates appear on your LinkedIn Home page. As your LinkedIn network grows, network updates tend to increase in volume, so much so that it can sometimes look like chatter. Sometimes you really have to click a lot of links to get to the substance. And if you didn't get around to it that week, it ages off of the home page, gone forever. I occasionally ran across some very interesting information on this page, such as a member of my network starting a new position, but much of the traffic was just hypernetworkers acquiring another 20 or so contacts that day. I wondered if the RSS feed might be a better way to wade through this torrent of activity. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, I'm happy to say that it is a great way to keep up with one's LinkedIn network. I've found that funneling LinkedIn Network Updates RSS feed into my Google Reader makes short work of finding out about who's uploaded a new photo, joined a new group, made a recommendation, or made a new connection. Best of all, LinkedIn had the good sense to filter out the hyperactive connectors from the feed, which I think most people will appreciate.

Another benefit is that if I don't get to my RSS aggregator for a few days, the updates don't age off the system like they do on the home page of LinkedIn, but will queue up for me until I've had a chance to read them. If you haven't checked out the Network Updates RSS feed on LinkedIn, it's time to give it a try. There's not much point in having a network if you don't keep track of it. By monitoring your network's RSS feed, you'll continually be aware of what's happening in your network.

After finding the LinkedIn RSS feed so useful, I began to wonder if craigslist's RSS feed would work equally well. Since job hunters can spend a lot of time on the Internet visiting the same websites each day looking for new postings, I thought that NoCoNet members might use the RSS feed on Craigslist jobs to achieve some time savings. I've been impressed with the number of people I know who have found jobs through Craigslist and so funneling job listings into an RSS reader seemed more efficient than visiting the site daily. After a week of experimenting with that feature, I've found it works very well in notifiying me about what's available on a regular basis without having to make a special trip to Craigslist to find out. You can limit it to just a particular geography and job category since each category has its own feed.

RSS feeds are an effective way to set up a 'virtual software agent' to sort the Internet's wheat from the chaff. Sure, RSS feeds can be misused by overwhelming the reader with too much information, but feeds are very easy to turn off when you find that the information source is no longer useful to you and so they have an advantage over email subscriptions where remembering the secret code to disable them can sometimes be a challenge.

Colorado Water Resources

2008-06-07T11:15:00.005-06:00

A few months ago I did some research and wrote some blog postings about hydroelectricity in Colorado. I had been asked by my friend, Bevan, whether we were failing to take advantage of the hydroelectric power that was available from the rivers in Colorado simply because of the political issues associated with damming our beautiful river canyons. In doing this research, I found that we do, in fact, harvest some of the hydro power and, due to the fact that the flow rates of these rivers are not large or consistent, we would not really gain much power generating capacity even if we extracted all of their theoretical hydroelectric energy.

One of the most fascinating public projects I read about during my hydroelectric research is the Colorado Big Thompson water diversion project. Using a series of tunnels, pipes, canals, reservoirs and pumping stations, this project collects and diverts water from west of the continental divide and brings it to the eastern slope. About 70% of the population of Colorado lives along the Front Range, yet 70% of the precipitation falls on the western side of the continental divide. The C-BT project provides about 213,000 acre feet of water to the eastern slope each year. Nearly all of this water has its energy extracted through a series of electric generating stations with a combined capacity of 162 MW. That's enough electricity for about 80,000 homes. It also provides enough water for about 425,000 homes. To put it in perspective, the C-BT project delivers more water to the Front Range than both the Big Thompson and Cache la Poudre rivers combined.

An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons. Each household in Colorado uses about .5 acre feet per year which about 13,600 gallons per month. This is about 30% more than the national average, which is due to the need to irrigate our lawns. Colorado has a very dry climate and in order to have a lawn and shrubbery, they must be irrigated. It made me wonder how much water we use for things that are essential compared with uses those that are not essential, such as growing lawns.

A general rule of thumb is that each person in the U.S. uses about 50 gallons of water per day. You can estimate your daily consumption by visiting a USGS site and using their calculator. The calculator uses the following values for personal water consumption:

Bath: 50 gallons
Shower: 2 gallons per minute
Teeth brushing: 1 gallon
Hands/face washing: 1 gallon
Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon
Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load
Dishwashing by hand: 5 gallons/load
Clothes washing (machine): 10 gallons/load
Toilet flush: 3 gallons
Glasses of water: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)

Another way measure your household's water consumption is to look at one of your water bills from a winter month. I found that our water consumption comes out very close to the estimate of 50 gallons/person per day. The real shocker for me was looking at a summer water bill and comparing it to a winter water bill. Our summer water consumption goes up by a factor of 10! For about 4 months out of the year we need to run the sprinkler system and its water consumption dwarfs the amount of water for personal use during those months. Overall, watering our lawn for those 4 month accounts for more than 65% of our annual water consumption!

I began to wonder what this is costing us so I began to study our water bills. Interpreting utility bills is not always easy. There are sometimes so many charges that it's hard to tell what drives the overall cost. I had to call our city's water department to figure out how the charges are computed. In the case of our water bill, there are three charges. The first is for the storm sewer, which is based on the size of the property. The second is for the regular sewer bill, which is determined by water consumption during a winter month to eliminate the effect of irrigation water, which doesn't return to the sewer. The last is the cost of the water used based on a meter reading to measure actual water consumption. Included in the water charge is a flat connection charge, which is around $8/month. When you combine the two sewer charges of $18 with this $8 charge my water bill is already at $26/month before I've purchased my first gallon.

The cost per 1000 gallons of water in Greeley is $2.41, which is about the average in U.S.. That's up about 40% from what we were paying 6 years ago, so it's been increasing faster than inflation. For those of you in other countries who measure water in cu. meters, there are about 264 gallons per cu. meter.

I visited the manufacturer's web site for my sprinkler system and found out that each 360-degree sprinkler nozzle uses about 3 gallons per minute. The quarter and half nozzles use proportionally less water per minute. I have 9 sprinkling zones each with a total of about 5 "360-degree equivalent" heads, so when I'm watering my lawn, I'm using about 15 GPM. My watering cycle takes 3 hours so that comes out to 2700 gallons. At the $2.41/1000 gallon cost, it costs about $6.50 each time the sprinkler cycles. We're restricted to 3 days a week that we can water the lawn, so that adds about $80/month for watering the lawn in the summer time. Now that I know how much each watering costs, I'm being more vigilant about using the timer's 'rain' button to suspend watering when we've just gotten some rain. I've even been looking at the weather forecast to see if it makes sense to skip a cycle if rain is predicted.

Sometimes people have asked if we can do something more intelligent when it comes to watering lawns, such as using 'gray water', i.e., the water that would normally be sent to the sewer and directing it to water the lawn instead. That might work for water that is lightly contaminated such as water from a shower or dishwasher, but there is no easy way to separate that from the other contaminated water that you (and your neighbors) wouldn't want on your lawn. We also need to consider that waste water from inside the house is eventually treated and put back in rivers where it can be used downstream. Also, now that I know that it takes 10 times as much water to keep the lawn green as the amount we need for personal use, I can see that recycling gray water would hardly put a dent in one's overall water consumption.

How about collecting rain water from the roof and other surfaces and storing it? In my case, only about a third of our 1/2 acre lot has grass on it. The rest is covered with impervious surfaces like the house, concrete patios, the driveway, and landscaping rock. If it were possible to capture the rain water, would this work to offset or even eliminate a watering bill? I did the calculations and there does appear to be enough precipitation that falls on this lot (about .5 acre-foot per year) to supply all of our watering needs. However, to store and treat this water would not be practical. A single lawn watering takes 2700 gallons which comes out to 8000 gallons per week. Since it can sometimes go for weeks without any significant rain during the summer, we'd likely need a 20,000 gallon storage tank to store $50 worth of water. Then you have to consider that it would take chemicals to keep it from turning into a bacteria pond and it's easy to see why cisterns have never proved to be very popular when tap water is available. There are even laws about capturing one's own rain water in Colorado since water rights and property are separate and so it is against the law to capture and hold your own property's rain water. Here's an article about water harvesting in Colorado that contains more information about it.

The other option is xeriscaping which means having a lawn with plants that can survive with no supplemental irrigation water. However, this is not always possible and the attractiveness of this approach will no doubt vary with the eye of the beholder. My friend Peter lives in a subdivision where the covenants require the residents to have a certain percentage of green grass in their lawns. Some people say that they love the look of natural desert, but to be honest, it's only beautiful at a distance. The natural ground cover on Colorado's Front Range is mostly noxious weeds full of pointy things that will pierce your skin. There is not much attractive about what grows on Colorado's Front Range naturally. Most people think of Colorado as beautiful mountains filled with Aspen and pine trees. That all starts about 30 miles to the west. Most of us live on the plains.

The availability of water is starting to limit growth in this area and if we get a serious drought, it will likely cause a further restrictions on new growth. The new water tap connection fees are already in excess of $14,000 per home in Greeley.

People like living in dry climates because it's almost always sunny and there's very little humidity. But we all need water to survive and to create an attractive environment. We all like having green grass and shade trees nearby. We have plenty of land in Colorado for future growth, but not enough water to support unrestricted growth. Every gallon of water I conserve will likely get used up by some new construction project that is enabled by the water's newfound availability. It's quite a dilemma about what to do when it comes to water conservation. Everyone wants to do their part, but if the reward for it is more growth and more people, then that takes some of the incentive out of it. We could grow the population of Colorado until we're all walking around in stillsuits, but what good would that be?

Having said that, I do realize that certain industries like construction depend on new growth to survive. I hate to be like the people who, once they have found a promised land, put up a no trespassing sign and tell everyone else to stay out. That's not an uncommon sentiment to hear people express in this area. The city of Boulder has had an anti-growth policy for many years. Everyone wants to be the last one in.

Colorado is somewhat unique among the dry western states because we have areas in the state that get in excess of 50 inches of precipitation per year and areas that get less than 10 inches per year. Most of the areas where people live get between 10 to 15 inches per year, which is not enough to grow much more than cactus, thistles, and tumble weeds. To put it in perspective, states east of the Mississippi get between 40 to 50 inches of precipitation per year and it's quite consistent throughout the region. When you get over about 40 inches per year, it's usually not necessary to irrigate one's lawn. In Colorado, most of the high precipitation areas are the mountain peaks, which tend to hold the precipitation throughout the winter in the form of snow and release it gradually during the spring runoff. This runoff is captured in a number of reservoirs and used during the dry summer months for residential, commercial, and agricultural use. It's a very delicate balance that requires carefully matching the supply with the demand.

The problem with precipitation is that it is local and seasonal. In other words, it's difficult to match the amount of precipitation you get with where you need it, when you need it. And that problem is compounded in states like Colorado where the population and seasonal effects of precipitation are not matched very well. We need to be very resourceful about how we collect, distribute, and use the water resources we have. And one must not underestimate the beneficial environmental impact of paving corn fields and constructing strip malls in their place, an activity that has continued unabated in Colorado over the past decade.

That leads me to my last observation. Is agriculture on a high desert plain an intelligent use of land and water? I'm sure that for people who are involved in farming that they'd consider it to be the most beneficial use of the land. They'll no doubt maintain that attitude until someone offers them several hundred years' of annual farming profits for the property to construct a residential neighborhood or a strip mall on the land. In the case of high density living where one builds apartments, this would definitely qualify as a net water savings. Irrigated crops in this region take about 1.3 acre-feet of irrigation water per acre on the average, whereas if you put about 12 people on that acre, it would take less than half of the amount of water, especially if you pack them in so that you don't have much lawn to water. If you pave the parking lot and streets around the neighborhood, all the better, because the water that falls on it can be collected and used elsewhere. Similarly, virtually all the water that crops use evaporates, but most of the water people use gets treated and put back in the river just a few miles away, so it can be used downstream. I do realize that water that evaporates will eventually get recycled, but unlike a river, it's a lot harder to maintain claim to it once it goes into the sky.

So it would appear that for every acre of agriculture we give up, we can jam another 12 residents into Colorado. Then all we need to do is find some jobs for them.

Geocaching

2008-05-30T07:07:00.004-06:00

During my first year at Penn State's Wilkes-Barre campus, I took a physical education class called orienteering. The PSU Wilkes-Barre campus is located near Lake Lehman, PA in a rural, wooded area surrounded by fields and farms. The main building on the campus, called the Hayfield House, was previously a country estate that has been converted into classrooms and offices. The campus is visually breathtaking.

The Hayfield House at PSU's Wilkes-Barre campus

The orienteering class required us to use a topographic map and a compass to find a series of flags hidden in the surrounding woods and copy down numbers from them. It was essentially a timed race to see who would find them all and get back to the starting point in the shortest time. It was great exercise, because you covered a lot of terrain in a short time and it had an element of fun to it because you had to think at the same time you were running. Plus, it was all outdoors in a beautiful setting. I still have many fond memories of exploring the countryside around the PSU W-B campus during that class.

A few weeks ago during one of our regular neighborhood walks, Terri and I found a couple looking for something using a GPS. I asked them if they were geocaching and they told me they were attempting to find their very first geocache. I had heard about geocaching a few years ago from my friend Kyle, but I had never seen anyone doing it. We helped them for a few minutes, but we didn't find the cache. GPS units are accurate to about 30 feet, and so it can sometimes be a challenge to find a small geocache, especially if it is well concealed. I learned later from a geocaching website that they eventually located it. It was knowing that they found it that convinced me to give it a try.

GPS signals were not always so accurate. Or, I should say, they were not so accurate for civilian GPS receivers. At one time, civilian GPS receivers were only accurate to about 300 feet. The military intentionally added random noise to the GPS signal which only military receivers could remove. On May 1st, 2000, the Clinton administration turned off this random noise, called 'selective availability', and over night civilian receivers had their accuracy improved 10 fold. The removal of SA along with the availability of inexpensive handheld GPS receivers and geocaching websites has made geocaching possible.

The brief description of geocaching is that someone hides a cache, which is usually a weatherproof container. The cache can be as small as a bullet-sized container or as large as a metal ammo box. The person who hides it posts the container's GPS coordinates on a website that contains a database of geocaches. The first and largest of these websites is geocaching.com which was started in 2000. It contains the locations of more than 500,000 caches around the world. The person who hides the cache includes a 'log book' in it to let those who find it log their username along with the date and a comment. In the small containers like the ever popular 35 mm film canisters, (which are usually covered with camouflage tape), the log is just a small scroll rolled up inside. Some of the caches contain trinkets and, if you're so inclined, you can take a trinket and leave one of your own. There are also some special serialized tags and coins that are unique to geocaching that you can move from cache to cache and the website can keep track of the object's whereabouts. Each cache has a unique identifier that starts with the letters 'GC'. The subsequent characters are assigned by the website at the time the cache is registered. The person hiding the cache usually gives it a clever name and possibly a clue to help locate it. When you set up an account on geocaching.com, you select a unique user ID and you are able to log your discoveries of the geocaches. The geocaching.com website accounts are free, but you can also get a paid account for $3/month that has more features.

The website allows you to download the cache coordinates to your GPS which is a great convenience. I downloaded a free program called EasyGPS and that will take a file of geocache locations and put them on my Garmin eMap GPS. You can enter the coordinates by hand too, which is what I did for the first few caches, but it takes much more time to do that and can be a source of error.

A screen shot of EasyGPS along with a route I uploaded from the GPS on a recent bicycle ride. Click on the image to get a full screen version.

Inside the city of Greeley, CO which has a population of around 87,000 people, there are more than 70 caches hidden. Some of them are elaborate 'multicaches' which have clues in them so that you may have to find 3 or 4 caches before you can find the coordinates to the main cache. Some even have quizzes based on subjects like math or history that makes finding the final cache that much more challenging. Within a 10 mile radius of my home, there are nearly 200 geocaches hidden.

Terri and I have been looking for caches lately and we've managed to find 14 just in the area where we take our regular walks. I've put a GPS handlebar mount on my bicycle and now that we've found most of the caches within easy walking distance of our house, I've been planning to venture out to find the more of them on the bicycle and to get some exercise in the process.

Garmin eMap mounted on my mountain bike's handlebars

People who like to work with technology can spend an inordinate amount of time indoors, often sitting in front of a computer. Geocaching requires you to get outside, get some exercise, and do some exploring. If you have a GPS, I'd recommend you give it a try. Will you feel funny doing it? Oh yes, you'll feel like an idiot at times, especially if there are any 'mugglers' in the area. A muggler is a non-geocacher who will stare at you and make you feel odd, and who among us can't use a little more of that? You'll get to learn a whole new language too, such as abbreviations that you will put in your on-line log like 'SL' (signed log), and 'TFTC' (thanks for the cache), and 'TNLN' (took nothing left nothing), and it's hard to put a price on knowing an obscure lingo like that. :-)

Colorado Tornado Damage

2008-05-24T18:31:00.005-06:00

A tornado came through Northern Colorado and missed our house by 3 miles. It touched down and destroyed some farms just west of Greeley and then went on to Windsor where it did a tremendous amount of damage. Terri took this photo from the LongEZ today and if you click on it, you can get the full resolution image. If you zoom in, you can see the devastation it caused in this Windsor neighborhood.

I wanted to post this entry to the blog to let everyone know that we are fine and didn't sustain any damage at our house. Please accept our sincere thanks to those of you who emailed and called to check in on us.

Update: I've posted a few pictures of the tornado damage.