Category: Miscellaneous

Delusions

A friend of mine sited the The Economist/YouGov Poll December 17 – 20, 2016 – 1376 US Adults that says 58% of Trump voters agree that what is good for Donald Trump’s business is good for the country. Charles Wilson said much the same thing about General Motors back when he was the CEO/president/whatever they called him. I understand the sentiment (a rising tide and all that), but where I disagreed with the statement about GM is half of what I fear from Trump.

What’s good for the country *may* benefit GM/Trump/Whomever, but it could also harm them. And what’s good for them may or may not benefit the country. Relaxing safety regulations on construction would be good for Trump’s business and bottom line, but *really* suck for the people buried under a collapsed tower.

My other fear is that Trump made an amazing amount of money screwing over other people. He may make another amazing amount of money screwing over the country. My father-in-law says Trump is going to be a boon for the country because he screws over other countries to “our benefit” … which, viewed in a short-term and one-sided fashion could be considered awesome (to me a bit like stealing food from a homeless dude ’cause you get a little hungry on the way home from work, but I acknowledge that some people would like to benefit our country to the detriment of others). I just don’t see it as a sustainable policy, and I think history backs me up. The sun never set on the British Empire … until it did. Even if you’re not trying outright colonialism, I’ve seen enough of South and Central America to know how welcome American exploitation was — “yankees go home”, “fuera yanquis de America Latina”, etc. I remember seeing Michael Franti not long after Spearhead was touring Iraq and he said the message he got from speaking to Iraqis was “thank you for getting rid of a really horrible guy, now get the fuck out of my country!”. I don’t see countries being screwed over as particularly happy with the situation, nor do I expect them to express their discontent with sternly worded letters to the editor. And that’s REALLY bad for the country.

Geothermal Is Online!

We’ve got a functioning geothermal HVAC system running! They finished up the piping from the exterior wall to the furnace.

I was rather excited to see the containers of methanol — filling the tubes is the last step before bringing the system online. I like a nice fire … but it’s a cold way to heat your house.

The loop filling contraption – hooks up to the domestic water supply, mixes the methanol, and pumps it into the loop field. Over a hundred gallons – since we know the diameter (3/4″ in the loopfield, 1.5″ to the house) and the length (8x 200′) … we’ll calculate the volume of the cylinder some day. But for now … we’re got HEAT!!!

About as messy as a bean can be …

She managed the full Glastonbury experience without leaving home — shoes stuck in the adobe-eque mud, clay mud coating everything. We’re going to turn the geothermal dig site into Anya construction play land next year — take the toy excavator & dump truck out, make some roads, and generally get filthy.

Geothermal – Digging and Drilling

We have construction equipment! They just finished up with the previous job, and the equipment has been delivered to our property.

The geothermal system — WaterFurnace Series 7 — is installed in our house. There’s a pump mounted to the wall, but nothing is plumbed together because the loop field has not yet been installed. That’s what this equipment is for – they are going to dig a big hole in the yard (maybe 8 foot by 4 foot). A whole bunch of 3/4″ tubes will run into this hold & connect to a manifold. There’s another hole dug next to the house, and 1.5″ tube will go from the manifold to the exterior wall, through the exterior wall, through the pantry, and into the furnace room to attach to the pump.

The fluid that’s run through the loop field is run through the WaterFurnace unit, and heat is extracted into the refrigerant. And that’s what will heat our house. There are a lot of good non-technical write-ups of how geothermal heating works, but I found a decent somewhat technical write-up from a geothermal installer in Western PA.

This heat will be used to heat the house … and as long as the loop field temperature stays fairly reasonable (upper 30’s, I think), we should be able to sustain a comfortable temperature without engaging the heat strips. We’ve talked to quite a few people who use new-ish geothermal units that have only used the heat strips in extreme temperatures (it was -20 for a week a few years back) or when they increase the thermostat by more than two or three degrees. If you lower the house temperature to go away on holiday, don’t set the thermostat back to normal immediately upon returning home. Slowly increase the set-point by a degree or two every few hours a day before you plan to return – by slowly increasing the temperature, you’ll avoid using the heat strips.

Health Care Cost Comparisons

I recently happened across a cost comparison tool on my health insurance company’s web site. It isn’t something they advertise or promote … and I’m not sure why. You answer a bunch of questions (I really wish I could enter the diagnostic code for the procedure instead of navigating through questions), then you pick what service you need. It provides a list of covered providers in an area and the estimated cost of service. The difference in the cost of an MRI is HUNDREDS of dollars. I expected there to be some variance – real estate costs more in some areas than others if nothing else. But I was seeing some services – physical therapy for one – where the low price was a third of the high price.

Why isn’t this information available to everyone? Would our health care costs be reduced if people were somewhat cognizant of costs at different facilities? (Either because they’d select cheaper facilities or because the more expensive facilities would have to lower their prices or justify their exorbitant cost). I see the same kind of cost inflation in other insurance-covered verticals — car repair, dentistry, eye care. As soon as the price becomes hidden … there’s a fairly logical assumption that it’s not that much different from provider to provider. I don’t know how much a service is going to cost until it’s already been completed, the provider bills insurance, and insurance provides the explanation of benefits. Not exactly conducive to comparing costs!

There are other “not my money” situations that don’t lead to out of control costs. SNAP comes to mind – although the percentage of people buying food with SNAP may be low enough to not impact prices … I can look at grocery store fliers, decide if it’s worth the extra time and travel to hit multiple shops, and plan my meals for a week or two around what’s on sale. There might be a special price for a loyalty card holder (i.e. someone willing to trade some privacy for savings), but there aren’t a dozen different prices for different customers. And you know the price BEFORE you eat the food. Could you even imagine shopping if you only knew the price as you checked out?! And even then … you could still put it back.

Hopefully UMR’s price comparison tool becomes a common thing within the insurance industry — emergency situations may mean uninformed decisions … but if I’m going in next week for some tests, the order can be written a day or two later whilst I research the options and decide on the best value for me.

Geothermal Phase 1

We have heat! Well, we’ve had heat – when we were house shopping, fireplaces were a big thing to some people. Kind of a ‘whatever’ to me – not like I’d refuse to consider a house because of a fireplace, but I didn’t care if there was no fireplace either. The house we purchased has this Lopi Freedom Bay wood burning insert. More of a curiosity to me when we were house shopping, but it’s allowed us to make non-hasty decisions about HVAC equipment twice now. We got a super high end (and super expensive) air exchange heat pump in November of last year. It didn’t work well for us — 20kW of heat strips kicking in for a few months gets expensive. The service from the company that installed it, however, was right abysmal. Things we reported in November of 2015 were still unresolved during the summer of 2016. And, yeah, we could have been ringing them every day to force some action … but few of the issues were worth that level of effort. The thermostat software locks & the system is in the state is was at lockup (i.e. you wake up shivering in mid-summer because the AC has been running full-blast for hours). It reboots and works for another month or two. The air handler leaked. Until they patched it and our lower level got ten degrees warmer, I didn’t realize how MUCH it leaked. The list goes on. We’d bother them every month or two, sometimes get some action and sometimes not. The installer, though, had a one year 100% satisfaction guarantee. Without a bunch of fine print or conditions. Which, really, is why I was OK getting an air exchange heat pump from them.

On several levels, we were not satisfied. The company tried adding some conditions to their written guarantee after-the-fact, but they eventually relented and removed the system from our house and refunded the full contract price. They were not, however, able to restore us to the original condition … not that I wanted an old gas Trane with a cracked heat exchanger … but the circuit breakers and copper wire they pulled would have been nice. They were willing to leave the NEW circuit breakers and wiring in for the > 900$ line item from their bill. But, seriously, 200$ of stuff from Home Depot is not something for which I’m keen on paying near a grand.

Initially, I wasn’t sure how much more a geothermal system would cost … until we got some quotes and discovered that we could get a fully variable geothermal system for 500$ less than we payed for the air exchange heat pump. WOW! The configuration we chose ended up being 100$ more – we added an additional 200′ bore. Because it is going to take about three weeks before the drilling can commence, they installed the HVAC equipment without connecting it to the earth loops & set it up to run in emergency heat mode — which is essentially a really expensive 20kW electric heater. But it keeps us from freezing when the fire goes out overnight 🙂

I is for … huh?

There’s political correctness and then there’s silliness. Anya’s preschool newsletter said they would be introducing the letters “H” for harvest and “I” for Native Americans in the first half of November. Wait, “I” for Native Americans? Took me a second to realize that they mean Indians. To some extent, I get removing controversial terms – especially at a young age where you just don’t want to get into the discussion around why some people find whatever-it-is to be offensive. But why wouldn’t they pick another word for the letter?! Ice, Ink, Inside, Incredible, Imagine, Infinite, Island … thousands of words that start with ‘i’.