Google earth recently added a “heading” display to their measurement tool, which made me realize I could accurately map out where the sunset will happen from our house on a few important dates – The two solstices and the equinox. 

Steps:

1. Use this page to get the correct date’s for the solstices + equinox
2. Use this page to calculate the azimuth (heading) for those dates for your house (I had to use Concord, NH: About 15 miles from my house).  After getting a “Rise/Set Noon Time” chart, change the columns to “Rise/Set time/Azimuth”
3. Use the measurement tool to place a placemark/pin about 50 miles from my house at the correct headings.
4. Use the Path tool to draw a line from my house to these place marks.  I got “pretty close” at first, then zoomed in and edited the paths to be very accurate.
5. Modiy the paths to have 10pixel width and 50% opacity
6. Delete the placemarks/pins

After doing this I can easily generate a view like this:

Also very kewl is being able to follow the lines out and see that (as observed) the sun sets directly between Monadnock Mnt. and Crotched Mnt. on Winter Solstice.

Very handy info to have for lining up things  sacrificial alters, pyramids, large ceremonial buildings and the like.

Had the piano tuned this week – and it is wonderful to have it playable again.  The past few months I would sit down to play and after a few min find something wrong with the tuning, or more often, a mechanical problem with the action. 

Most mechanical problems I can fix myself, and I had the action out of the piano preparing for such a repair.  Unfortunately I left the room and the children entered it.  I came back in to find them playing with it and one of the hammers was broken off it’s flange.  I repaired as best I could, but it was wiggly and would cause the key next to it to play – so the piano was basically un-playable – if you wanted a C5 in the song anyway.

The piece of wood that part #6 screws into is what was broken.

Enter Mark Dierauf – of NH Pianos. He was able to fix the bad hammer + flange with a new pin – which required having about a dozen different sizes of pins – the tools to get them in and out of little tiny wood pieces – and the knowledge that a new pin would even solve the problem.  In the process he broke and fixed a few other things – and the result was 87 of the 88 keys working enough to be tuned, and the one broken one being the lowest key on the piano so not missed during regular play.

The very kewl part of this visit was the software that Mark uses called TuneLab – which runs on his windows cell phone.  Mark indicated it didn’t run on the iPhone yet because of Apple’s approval process holding up it’s release.  It would, however, run on the little netbook we have. 

The software is currently released as “nag ware” in that it is 100% useable but every once in a while it will freeze up for a couple of min.

So while Mark was tuning I was able to get it running and hopefully getmyself to a point where I can do a maintenance, or “Touch up” tune on the piano if a couple of keys go way out of whack before Mark visits again.

The software costs $340 – and I don’t think I’ll be buying it anytime soon as I’d only be using it to tune my piano.  It did get me thinking about the market for piano tuning software, and I didn’t realize that it’s a semi-popular interview question to ask, “How many piano tuners are there in the world?”  This page claims about 20k.

What caused me to blog about this though is the pleasant feeling I know get when I walk into the room with the piano – compared to the nagging frustration I had when it was broken and out of tune.  It is as if the house is more in harmony with the world then it was before.

We moved a year ago and in that time I think I’ve had to replace about 4 light bulbs in the new house.  In the old house I was replacing what seemed like 2 or 3 a month.  I’m not sure if it’s a property of the wiring, or some quality of service from the electric company. 

I don’t think I’ve had to replace a single CFL bulb in either house.

Our house has at least 10 sliding doors.  I think 2 of them work like they are supposed to.  Last night the sliding door on the shower decided to go off track and I can’t get it back on.  Found out the sliding door in the bedroom is letting mosquitos in.  I’m looking for something to replace all the sliding screen doors, as almost every one I’ve owned in my life has been problematic.

I installed my map in my office back in September, and just read a blog post detailing NatGeo giving the same map to the President as a gift.  Although his is actually a map cabinet that holds lots of maps.  Kinda kewl to have pix of my office and the oval office in the same blog.

Got it into my head shortly after we moved into a house with a bar that a tap would be nice to have.    I spent the next 6 months thinking about it, and the last month doing the research into how I could make it happen.  Most people purchase completed systems for this sort of thing, or modify an old fridge by sticking a tap through the door.  These devices are called kegerators and there is no shortage of images of them on the internet.

My first thoughts were to modify the existing fridge under the bar – but it’s a pretty nice fridge and I realized I’m still going to want some cold beverage storage at the bar.

I found an Internet forum of people who discuss these systems and dole out tons of advice to noobs like myself.

A few days searching on craigslist and I found a pretty standard old fridge for the project, sold by a guy right around the corner from us.  I brought this home and got a keg in it to make sure my CO2 system still worked.

Next I started to drill the holes in this fridge.  I could not find a diagram of where the coolant lines were inside the old fridge – but my drill bit found one.  A loud HISS and the fridge was garbage.  It’s possible to repair a coolant line and recharge the coolant system – but it would end up costing about 5 times what I paid for the fridge.  So, that fridge is garbage now.  So much for this being a “green” project.

This crisis however turned into a beautiful opportunity.  While killing the fridge I was doing more reading online and decided that a chest freezer was probably a better choice for the system.  Craiglist to the rescue again – a little further away this time – but I acquired a Kenmore C675 freezer with I think a 13 ft^3 capacity.  It will easily hold 3 kegs + CO2 tank vs. the old fridge only holding a couple.

I spent a night drilling holes in the bar and floor and garage ceiling.  Had to cut out more than I planned on becuase my 2.5 inch drill bit wasn’t close to long enough for the whole job.  This was probably a good thing as I was able to explore what was in the various layers between the bar and the garage before drilling through them.

I convinced my friend Chris to come help on a Thursday night – he’s very willing to help with beer related projects – and we assembled the various parts of the system in one night with only a single additional trip to Home Depot.

The main design goal of the system aside from delivering carbonated beer to the tap is to keep that beer cold all the way to the tap.  If it gets warm in the lines it will come out as foam and then settle into flat beer.  There are a couple of ways to do this – the expensive way: coolant lines and a compressor in the fridge, and the cheap way: a blower motor blowing cold air from inside the fridge up a pipe with the beer lines in it.  I chose the cheap way. 

Here’s the freezer chest in the garage under the bar:

There’s a 2inch PVC pipe coming out the side insulated with foam.  The 2×4 skirt around the top is there to raise the lid a little (some homebrew kegs are to tall) but mostly to avoid having to cut into the freezer – which I was more than happy not to do.

Inside the freezer are the kegs and the CO2 system:

There’s a blower motor attached to a blower hose that goes up into the 2in PVC pipe.  The beer lines go inside this blower hose.  The blower pulls cold air from in the freezer and blows it up the hose alongside the beer lines.  This air goes to the tap on top and then returns to the freezer on the outside of the blower hose inside the PVC pipe.  There’s a little spill in the freezer from a mistake I detail below, and I plan to clean it all out after I kick these two kegs.

There are two lines run up to the taps – but I only have one D coupler (keg tap) so I only have one beer online at the moment.

The interface between the freezer and the outside world:

Here we see the external thermostat – becuase beer is very sensitive to temperature and the freezer doesn’t have a setting warm enough for beer. 

Inside the tap tower:

Here is where a mistake was made – I used a thin walled hose to deliver the beer initially (all they had at Lowes) and it leaked. The hose clamp just wasn’t able to get a good seal no matter how tight it was. So when we first turned it all on the beer leaked back down the hose all the way down into the blower motor.  A quick trip to Home Depot and I got 20ft of nice thickly walled 1/4″ hosing.  This new hose sealed perfectly.

The finished project:

There’s probably a drip tray in my future – and I’m currently running the beer through 20ft of hose.  The advice is to get the hose too long and shorten it to get the flow rate you want.  It’s currently pouring a little slow, but there’s very little foam and I’m afraid to mess with it.  There are also probably some tap handles in my future.

We had some folks over for my son’s bday party and the tap worked perfectly.  Spent a lot of time outside with the kids this weekend as well and it got me thinking of having a quick-change tap system to dispense beer inside the freezer.

All in all – it was a lot of plumbing and the biggest thing I would have done different was to get the right hose from the start.  I also will probably seal up/insulate the 2×4 skirting a little better as it get’s warmer – but currently the outside temp is colder than what I want inside the freezer.

I also need a name for the whole thing.

Cheers!

Stumbled on a very kewl web site called degreedays.net – it allows you to pull up a spreadsheet of heating degree days for locations all over the world.  I was able to quickly generate a spreadsheet for a weather station not too far from my house – and use it to calculate the heating degree days in a specific time frame. 

I’ve been keeping track of how much oil we use to heat the house – but it’s pretty difficult to use that information to predict things because of the constantly changing temperature.  For example: I had calculated gal/day based on the data I had – and realized that this number is going to fluctuate wildly throughout the year and it isn’t a really useful number because it doesn’t take into account the outside temperature.

Enter heating degree days (HDD) – which allow me to calculate how many gallons of oil I use based on the outside temperature.  There’s a very good explanation of HDD on this website.

I’ve only had 3 oil deliveries, so I only have 2 periods to measure.  Right now I’m averaging 0.14 Gallons of Heating oil Per Heating Degree Day. 

The real goal is to know that 0.14 number today, and work on lowering it for tomorrow. 

Here’s my journey through the storm.  I want to write it all down before I start forgetting it, and so I can point people who’ve been asking to a central place.

2008-12-11: Thursday night I was walking a Netflix movie to the mailbox during the beginning of the ice storm.  I heard several branches fall in the woods – and since our driveway goes under many trees I turned around.  I worked on the computer until around 11:30pm and went to bed with the power still working.

2008-12-12: Friday morning we awoke to no electricity and rainy weather.  We could see some big branches down on the lawn, but the house seemed intact.  Everything was encrusted in inch-thick ice.  You could stand on the front porch and listen to trees falling – sometimes seeing them but mostly not.  The house was cold, but not too bad yet.  The kids made snowflakes and I started making some calls.

Talking to my sister in Amherst, I discovered her grid power was off but their generator was running and they were inviting those in need to come stay with them.  I told her to hold us a spot, and that I’d call her back later after some surveying.

The sun came out around noon, and I headed out to see what I could see. 

My first concern was the driveway.  There were a few birches down blocking the first half – pretty sure I could just bend those over and drive around them.  I didn’t want to cut them because I was pretty sure they would recover completely.

The real driveway problems were at the end.  A couple large pine branches had fallen.  That’s the mail box at the end there – the one I decided not to walk to the night before.  Through out the day I was exposed to falling ice in this area.  I had bought a very nice hand saw just a few days before.  It came in very handy cleaning up this mess.

At the end of the driveway I discovered a larger problem.  One of the pine branches had fallen on the top of the utility pole where our power comes from.  I learned how this worked a few months ago when a squirrel short circuited our transformer and tripped this line, so I knew once the main power lines were fixed, it might be a while before we got our power back.

We took a few pictures of various things covered in ice.  There are a ton more of these kinda shots.  They’ll be in a Picassa album eventually.

Having made the driveway passable – and doing some research on the internets via the iPhone (which proved to be a powerful tool during the whole ordeal), I came to the conclusion that our power wasn’t coming back any time soon, and it was going to be getting very cold in the next couple of days.  So we packed up and headed to Amherst for the shelter called Valvanostan (aka My Sister’s House).  We ended up taking a bit of a tour of Bow and surrounding areas as the main roads had several blockages.  We were one of three families staying there. 

They’re at the end of a dirt road, so they got a generator several years ago.  It’s an 8000W model, so it powers pretty much everything in the house except the hot-tub.  Thus begins my rapid education of generators – something I was mildly interested in before, and now know far more than I wish I did.  The house had a gas stovetop, so it was a very comfortable evening spent talking about other family’s situations and the fact that it was going to be impossible to buy a generator for a few days at least. 

We celebrated my niece’s birthday with a larger crowd than expected.

2008-12-13: Saturday started sunny and warm at my sister’s house.  Here is where I ran smack into the biggest inconvenience of all. 

At 10am Red Sox tickets went on sale – and it has been my yearly ritual to purchase most of the tickets I use through out the year on this day.  The real prize here is “Opening Day” – and I had 3 iphones trying to get passed the virtual waiting room, but never got a chance to buy a single ticket.  Typically I open hundreds of browser windows and usually end up with a few good games – but this year I totally struck out.

We packed the family back into the van to go and check on the house and basically get out of everyone’s way for a spell.  (It’s the living without electricity that makes me use spell as a noun).

We were only able to make it a little ways down our driveway, and found everything pretty much as we had left it.  I bought some anti-freeze at the Home Depot in Merrimack and poured it into every drain in the house.  We opened the cupboards with pipes behind them, and I drained as much water as I could from the system.  Headed out to lunch in Goffstown and then back to my sister’s for a 2nd night.  We were able to pay back a little by babysitting all the children in the house while their parents went to an office xmas party.  I taught the two older girls to play chess while the rest of the kids watched a DVD.

2008-12-14: On Sunday I awoke to the gental hum of the generator once again and began a day of board games.  We discovered that my sister’s internet connection was back – but all it really told us was that it might be a while before we got our powerback.  My sister in law called me and bought me a couple red Sox tickets for Sept games, but opening day tickets were long gone.

I spent some time shopping on line for generators, selecting stores as far south as Baltimore – only to find them all unavailable.  I was considering it – and at my brother-in-laws suggestion, I tried craigslist and found excatly what I was hoping for – someone who bought a generator then got their power back and wanted to unload it.  He’d posted it on the NH craigslist – and sold it to me for $100 less than he’d bought it the day before.  There were issues about getting cash from an ATM and writing a check for the remainder.  My brother-in-law dutifully drove me down to Andover, MA and then back to my house and we installed the generator in about an hour.  It had 20hrs on the hobbs-type meter.  We wired it directly to the dryer jumper on the circuit breaker (with phone assistance from an electrician)- which meant the generator was in the garage – and the 20ft cord it came with wasn’t long enough to get it outside and close the garage door.  I sealed the inner door as well as I could – and drove to Lowe’s to buy a couple carbon monoxide detectors.  We now had the house powered, and the family returned.

We’d received news that there would be no school on Monday.

The kids in bed – we started watching a movie in the room above the garage – we had a CO detector at our feet, and one at the top of the stairs.  After about 2 hrs the CO detector went off – so we ended the movie and put the detector at the bottom of the stairs.

2008-12-15: At 1 AM Monday morning the Carbon Monoxide detector at the base of the stairs started going off.  The one at the top of the stairs hadn’t gone off, but I knew I had to fix things.  I opened doors at the front and back of the house and started planning the generator move.  I didn’t have any wire that would handle the load – so my options were to drill a large hole beside the circuit breaker – or feed the wire through the dryer vent and wire it directly to the dryer outlet.  I opted for the latter.

I woke Suzy up to help and together we got the generator wired such that it was completely outside the house.  I reset the CO detectors and went back to bed.

Awoke the next day to a warm house and Suzy headed off to work.  The girl was complaining of a stomach ache which sounded a lot like what the boy had the previous day – so we had a slow morning watching DVD’s.  We had a bunch of stuff on the Comcast DVR – but you can’t access it when the cable is down, which I don’t understand.

A little before noon the girl was really complaining – and I was also feeling pretty sick – so I looked up carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms and the margin of error was too small.  We packed into the Jeep and headed to the ER.

We signed into the ER about noon – and at 12:15 we were being screened.  They used a new device that can measure carbon monoxide in the blood with out taking blood, they just put a little thing with a light on your finger – so they measured both children and they both came up with zero.  Three hours later, and moments before they were going to draw blood, the doctor came in – verified the gizmo’s CO reading and told us we could go home.

We got notice that once again, there would be no school the following day so we watched Wizard of OZ on the projector screen after I drove into Concord to get gas for our generator and chicken soup.

2008-12-16: Tuesday morning Suzy went off to work again while I kept the home fire burning.  All sick people were better, and we had hot chocolate for breakfast.

The kids and I cleared the driveway and some of the branches on the lawn.  I shut the generator off and we headed to the store.  At the end of the driveway there was a crew working on the lines.  We hoped maybe by the time we returned we’d have power.  There was a detour at the other end of our road – but once you got into Concord, it was as if nothing had happened.  The ice damage seemed to follow an elevation pattern.  We still had plenty of ice on the trees.  Donuts purchased, and gas can filled, we returned home to find the power still out.

At around 7pm I noticed another line crew at the end of our driveway so I whipped up a couple hot chocolates and went out to see what was going on. 

They were fixing the problem on top of our utility pole and said we’d probably be back up in a few hours.  The two utility workers were glad to get some hot chocolate, and soon two more people arrived – one to direct traffic and the other a supervisor.  I went back in and made a couple more hot chocolates for them- and it was here that the draw on the generator got too high – the heating system, the fridge and the microwave all at the same time tripped it.  For a second I was worried I’d left the main breaker on and was sending power to the pole and something horrible had happened – but it was just the breaker on the generator tripping due to too much load. 

Got the hot Chocolate delivered and thanked them for the days they’d all been up working on the problems.  One of the workers gave me an email address to send the pictures to him.

2008-12-17: Late Tuesday, technically Wednesday morning – I was watching a DVD.  The DVR box normally shows the time on its front display – but since the power went out it had been showing an “805″ meaning it was trying to get a channel to resolve. I glanced down and noticed it said ‘12:53′ – and jumped up.  The cable modem was now showing a connection and sure enough we had power back.  I shut down the generator, unwired all the changes I’d made and tried to buy Red Sox tickets.  I failed.

Awoke to 3 inches of snow and both the snow blower and the tractor mounted snow thrower failed.  It feels very much like a Monday as I type this.

I’ve had a hard time keeping the skis organized over the years – and it’s only getting worse with the kids acquiring equipment now.  My friend Bob had this rack setup, and it looked like it worked well.

This is the 2nd attempt – the first try I had bought a pretty crappy 2×10 and it was split pretty much down the middle so it fell apart as I made the cuts.

On the 2nd try I was able to build the whole thing in under 2 hours.  The real key was some clever geometry that made the measuring go fast.

In it’s current configuration it holds 8 pairs of skis and 8 sets of poles, only a couple of the slots are holding more than a single pair of anything.

The wood from the first attempt was used for the cross members.

I did some measuring of our skis to see how tall the bindings were and the smallest skis (from where they’d be resting in the slots)  and the largest bindings to determine the dimensions.  Because of this I won’t even post the measurements as you should repeat the exercise for your gear.

Here’s a Sketch-Up 3D model of the rack.

We started the process of buying a house, as detailed in this post, just over a year ago.  We sold the old one, bought the new one and are almost done. 

One last thing is the storage facility.  I went to get a load this weekend and was just shy of getting everything into the van.  Had I considered putting things on top before loading it I might have been able to get it all in one load.

Here’s what’s left, which we’re paying something like $50 a month to leave there.

We’re SOO close to being done… I can taste it.