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Creative Fancy

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Category Archives: Emergency Preparedness

Blowing Hot and Cold

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Rohvannyn in Cooking and Home-making, Emergency Preparedness

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energy efficiency

Originally posted on December 6, 2012 at 12:05 PM

American homes were never particularly designed for energy or water efficiency. Party of this is because in the wake of World War II with a national manufacturing industry ramped up for war and needing new customers for output, electrical appliances came cascading off the assembly lines in hitherto unheard of quantities. Energy using units such as refrigerators, stoves, water heaters, furnaces were manufactured as isolated entities without regard for anything else which might be going on in the modern home. So things stand mostly today.

Whether or not you’ve ever thought much about the efficiency of appliance design or the logic of operating household energy functions as an integrated system, you may have noticed certain illogics in how our appliances operate. For instance a refrigerator on a hot summer day, while chilling drinks and ice cream for us, blows hot air (usually out the bottom or radiating out the back) at an altitude calculated to be most irritating. Refrigerators used to have their radiating coils on top where the heat would rise toward the ceiling and the system wouldn’t need to labor to counteract it’s own waste heat. Bottom-blower fans were more aesthetic though so fridges were redesigned. During winter we fight against heated room temperature to chill our leftover turkey and cranberry sauce when there’s all that lovely cold outside, doing doing much but sucking heat out through the walls!

A note about how refrigerators work.  A compresser squeezes a fairly large volume of working fluid, formerly Freon, but many other substances also work, into a much smaller space. This makes the substance heat up. The heated up substance or Working Fluid is cooled (hence the hot air out of the fridge vents) and when allowed to expand again the substance is much colder than before. This uses up around six KWH of energy per day, costing around sixty cents. Meanwhile our water heaters electric or gas, are independently turning out heated water for showers, dishwashing, laundry.  The colder the groundwater coming into the home, the harder the heater must work.

It’s possible to combine the functions of refrigeration and water heating. Patents to this effect go back to at least 1975. Remember our substance going through the compressor and the heated output which must be cooled before reexpanding? The basic idea is to run the heated substance through coils located in the bottom of a water heater tank. Waste heat from the fridge goes into the bathwater then the working fluid is reexpanded to cool the fridge. The colder the ground water the better the fridge would operate. The warmer the ground water is, the less the heater needs to operate so if we can accept somewhat warmer fridge temperatures we can run our fridge with less power. Either way we save money.

The idea is an integrated stand-alone unit with the fridge on the bottom and a water tank on top. Insulated hoses could run directly from the tank to hot taps in kitchen, bathroom, laundry room. The same electricity which heats your water also runs your fridge. Such units would be ideal for vacation homes as well and could save a lot of money in new construction and would also be very appropriate for old construction. A unit such as this could be built by a small manufacturing firm or even by a sufficiently skilled do-it-yourselfer. The fridge/water heater would actually be an “intelligently designed” integrated household system. I want one; in blue. Why blue? Well according to my ceramic materials processing Prof Osgood J. Whittamore Jr. the “slip” or liquid clay used to enamel steel which forms the body of fridges or stoves, is most commonly blue in color but because most home makers preferred white appliances, several coats of white material must be added to cover the blue, bringing up manufacturing costs due to successive firing and making things heavier besides. Blue is good enough for me!

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18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Rohvannyn in Emergency Preparedness

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preparation for emergency

Originally posted on December 4, 2012 at 12:55 AM

In the wake of Katrina and other hurricanes, reinforced by the widespread meteorological disasters this Fall, people are talking again about emergency generators and other survival technologies.

Back in 1999 when the Y2K was looming I had a conversation with a friend who told me he was going to buy a generator and some canned food. I told him generators consume around a quart of fuel per hour so just buying a generator and trying to plug one’s house into it was hardly a solution. He asked what he should do then and I began talking about charging batteries to be used for modest lighting, communication and the like. I told him to examine the hook-ups on his car battery and he’d get an idea how to hook it up to a generator-powered battery charger. My friend said he didn’t really have any idea what I was talking about. The scary thing about that was my friend at the time was a Captain in the U.S. Army Infantry and I guess I sort of assumed those folks would have some basic techno-survival skills. (Evidently not.)

For those who want to build a generator-based power system you should keep several things in mind.   First, though generators often have a battery-charging circuit available they are often not all that efficient in terms of gas consumption. It’s generally better to plug in an off-the-shelf battery charger (10 amps or greater) to your generator to charge a battery. You can do other stuff like run a couple lamps, a radio, a laptop while you’re charging your battery.

A deep-cycle storage battery (ask your automotive department person) holds about one kilowatt hour of energy. You can get a lot of stuff done with 1KWH if you use low-energy bulbs, a radio instead of a TV and shut things off when not in use. There are a lot of DC (Direct current or batterypowered) devices which will run right off your battery though some of them will require some voltage regulation. In general it’s easier and probably cheaper to buy a little Inverter from Radio Shack or Walmart again in the auto section, which can hook to your battery and will make household-type current.

The problem with generator systems is though they throw off a lot of heat, the heat is usually made unusable for winter survival purposes because the exhaust port tends to put carbonmonoxide and gasoline fumes wherever the heat goes. Spending a quart an hour to keep wam isn’t too terribly expensive but running a generator around the clock just for lighting and communication is preposterous.

As an alternative I’ll suggest survival-minded folks investigate a propane heater with a 5-galloon tank and a propane light and cooking burner. You’ll need some ventilation in the room you’re heating but you’ll be able to stay warm and even heat some wash water on the cooking burner. For laptop or radio power get a storage battery with a plug-in battery charger (a low-powered one is fine) along with one of the inverters previously mentioned. Top up your battery every week or so. A system like this will give you a decent prospect of surviving in Winter for a few days without outside assistance. In a couple of days I will write some more about energy in general and how we can help ourselves survive on a more long term basis.

-Glynda

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