Geothermal – Digging and Drilling

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by Lisa

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.

Circle Skirts

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by Lisa

I’ve been making a lot of quick circle skirts and matching headbands for Anya. The first step to making a circle skirt for a tiny person is to select a fabric that looks the same from any direction (i.e. you can turn it upside down, at 45 degrees, etc). Solid colors are an easy pick, or a marbled pattern. A “tossed” pattern (the components are at all different orientations) works too. If you have a pattern that doesn’t look the same from all directions, you cannot use a single circle to make the skirt. Well, you CAN … but you’ll also have part of your skirt where the pattern is sideways and another part where it is upside down. Being able to cut a single circle is what makes circle skirts so quick and easy 🙂

I have a reusable pattern that I made myself. I’ve seen a lot of people bemoaning the maths required to figure out the pattern dimensions. I guess a theoretical physicist’s view of “a lot of complex math” is a little different 🙂 But, really, you need to measure the waist size and how long you want the skirt to be. The maths to forming the circles — the circle radius = waistSize / (2 * Ď€) . A skirt for a growing child does not demand precision here. You could use 3 instead of pi – which makes your circle radius close to the waist size divided by 6 — the exact “close to” is not a linear function. In the waist size I’m dealing with, it is about an inch. If I want a 22″ waist for her skirt, I could divide 21/6 for the radius and come up with a 21.99″ waist.

Since I want a stretchy waistband that allows her to pull the skirt on herself, I want something larger than her actual waist size. Depending on how much fullness / gathering I want, 22-25″ is a good circumference for the waist – which is a radius between 3.5″ and 4″. The next thing you need to decide is the length of the skirt – you’ll have two inches at the top for the waistband, but you’ll also lose about an inch to seam allowances.

To draft a pattern, use a trammel set in conjunction with an 18″ aluminum ruler. Draw the inner circle (radius calculated for the waist), then draw the inner circle (waist radius + skirt length) – leaving the pin of the trammel set in the same location as the pencil part was adjusted. Cut the two circles and you’ve got a pattern.

To cut, you can fold the pattern in half or in quarters (along with the fabric) or lay the fabric out and pin the unfolded pattern to the fabric. I align the pattern along two perpendicular sides of the fabric. This leaves me with a very long strip of uncut fabric. Cut a 5″ wide rectangle the length of the calculated waist circumference. I also cut a 2″ or 3″ wide rectangle a few inches longer than Anya’s head size to make a coordinating headband. For the waistband, 2″ strip of non-roll elastic to her actual waist size (plus half an inch or so) and another one to a little less than her head size. The head-sized one I then cut in half lengthwise (so I have two 1″ strips of elastic the length of her head size).

Fold the outside edge of the circle over 1/4″ and press. Then fold it over another 1/4″ and press. Stitch – this will be the bottom hem.

With the serger, finish off all four edges of the waistband fabric. Finish the short ends of the headband. The headband, fold in half lengthwise with the rights sides together and serge the long sides together to make a tube – which then has to be turned the right way around. Attach a safety pin to the 1″ wide elastic band and feed it through the strip. Sew the two ends of the elastic together, fold the ends of the fabric under and insert one side of the tube into the other side and stitch the two sides together. Voila, headband.

Pin the 5″ wide strip to the outside of the skirt, wrong sides together. I use the serger to sew these together – it finishes the top edge of the circle.

Sew the two short ends of the rectangle together. Sew the short ends of the 2″ wide elastic band together. Pull the skirt band through the elastic and pull the skirt band around the elastic. Fold the waistband over to the circle top is sandwiched between the two long edges of the waistband and start sewing. As you get toward the end of the circle, you have to gather the already-sewn waistband casing along the elastic. Done!

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Health Care Cost Comparisons

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by Lisa

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.

Christmas Healthy Snack For Preschool

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by Lisa

Not sure why no one seems to sign up to provide the healthy snack for Anya’s preschool parties … I guess it’s not as much fun as providing the unhealthy snack that you know everyone is going to love. We’ve been volunteering; and it’s an opportunity to find interesting, festive, but still healthy snacks. For the Christmas party, we made pita trees. I found them on the Betty Crocker web site.

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These are pitas cut in sixths (pie-shaped wedges). They are topped with a spinach hummus and finely diced red pepper (we’ve made them with multi-color peppers, tomatoes, carrot shreds … basically any colorful combination of vegetables). A thin pretzel stick is inserted into the bottom to make trunk – but leave that to the last minute, otherwise you have soggy pretzels! You cannot pick them up by the trunk, although pretty much every kid tried.

Spinach Hummus Recipe

1/4c tahini
1/4c fresh lemon juice,
About a cup of dry garbanzo beans
Package of frozen spinach (thawed)

Pressure cook the garbanzo beans for 45 minutes on the high pressure (yes, that’s massively overcooked – I get a much smoother hummus by overcooking the beans), then allow to cool. Blend the tahini and lemon juice in a food processor until it is smooth. Add the drained garbanzo beans and run the processor until smooth. Squeeze the spinach to dry it out, then slowly add to the hummus and blend to combine. I was going for color – I wanted a bright green.

Project Stack

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by Lisa

Quick Projects:
Owl skirt – a quick circle skirt using a tossed owl print that Anya liked – we cut the circle, need to hem it and make the waistband

Underwear – I found a pattern to make underwear for Anya. I also happened across a place with  fold over elastic on super sale for Black Friday. I’ve got a lifetime supply of FOE.

Christmas season circle skirt – same as the Halloween one … nice to have but not essential.

 

 

Long Projects:
Christmas dress – I’ve got a basic plan courtesy of the Oliver & S Block Dress pattern drafting book, I’ve got the fabric ready to go (although I may be using some lace trim).

Oliver & S Pinwheel dress – I have the pieces cut and the bias tape made, need to stitch everything together. This is a summery dress, so not a high priority.

Table runners – I got a couple of quilt table runner kits that I want to make. A modern one for every day use, a Christmas one that probably won’t get done in time for this Christmas. A birthday one that definately won’t get made in time for this coming year’s birthdays, and a Halloween one.

Quilts — Anya’s tulip quilt and star quilt are very long term projects. I’d also like to make a quilt for my bed and our guest room.

 

Wrap-Up:
Blanket – still working on tying it

Sleeping bag – I’ve got the zipper stitched in (double-stitched for strength) and the batting cut. Still need to get the batting stitched in place and the edge sewn.

 

Completed:
Owl packpack – Finished and in use

Halloween bag – Finished and used
Halloween costume – Finished and used
Halloween circle skirt – Finished and used
Art smock – Finished and awaiting a non-sleeping bean to test it out

Art Smock!!

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by Lisa

Anya’s art smock is finally done!  One yard of the laminated fabric (54″ wide) was enough for the interior of her owl backpack  and this smock. I learnt to fold bias tape properly — unfortunately too late for this project. I had always seen it folded very carefully in half and then each raw edge folded in half toward the middle. You actually want one side to be a little longer than the other. The shorter side is stitched to the front of the fabric, folded over the raw edge, and then you top-stitch just off of the edge of the bias tape (and since the portion on the back is a little bit wider, these stitches catch the back of the fabric. The top-stitching is barely visible (depending on how well you can sew along a defined line). This should save a LOT of time applying bias tape in the future.

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Geothermal Phase 1

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by Lisa

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 🙂

Active Directory: Custom Password Filtering

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by Lisa

At work, we’ve never used the “normal” way of changing Windows passwords. Historically, this is because computers were not members of the domain … so you couldn’t use Ctrl-Alt-Del to change your domain password. Now that computers are members of the domain, changing Active Directory passwords using an external method creates a lot of account lockouts. The Windows workstation is logged in using the old credentials, the password gets changed without it knowing (although you can use ctrl-alt-del, lock the workstation unlock with the new password and update the local workstation creds), and the workstation continues using the old credentials and locks the account.

This is incredibly disruptive to business, and quite a burden on the help desk … so we are going to hook the AD-initiated password changes and feed them into the Identity Management platform. Except … the password policies don’t match. But AD doesn’t know the policy on the other end … so the AD password gets changed and then the new password fails to be committed into the IDM system. And then the user gets locked out of something else because they keep trying to use their new password (and it isn’t like a user knows which directory is the back-end authentication source for a web app to use password n in AD and n-1 in DSEE).

A long time ago, back when I knew some military IT folks who were migrating to Windows 2000 and needed to implement Rainbow series compliant passwords in AD – which was possible using a custom password filter. This meant a custom coded DLL that accepted or rejected the proposed password based on custom-coded rules. Never got into the code behind it – I just knew they would grab the DLL & how to register it on the domain controller.

This functionality was exactly what we needed — and Microsoft still has a provision to use a custom password filter. Now all we needed was, well, a custom password filter. The password rules prohibit the use of your user ID, your name, and a small set of words that are globally applied to all users. Microsoft’s passfilt.dll takes care of the first two — although with subtle differences from the IDM system’s rules. So my requirement became a custom password filter that prohibits passwords containing case insensitive substrings from a list of words.

I based my project on OpenPasswordFilter on GitHub — the source code prohibits exact string matches. Close, but not quite 🙂 I modified the program to check the proposed password for case insensitive substrings. I also changed the application binding to localhost from all IP address since there’s no need for the program to be accessed from outside the box. For troubleshooting purposes, I removed the requirement that the binary be run as a service and instead allowed it to be run from a command prompt or as a service.  I’m still adding some more robust error handling, but we’re ready to test! I’ve asked them to baseline changing passwords without the custom filter, using a custom filter that has the banned word list hard coded into the binary, and using a custom filter that sources its banned words list from a text file. Hopefully we’ll find there isn’t a significant increase in the time it takes a user to change their password.

My updated code is available at http://lisa.rushworth.us/OpenPasswordFilter-Edited.zip

 

Pumpkin Pie Recipe

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by Lisa

We made some pumpkin pies yesterday – one of which is for Anya’s preschool “Feast”. I wanted a lightly sweetened, creamy, pumpkin pie. The recipe makes two *deep* dish pies (the Emile Henry ruffled pie plate)

Ingredients – Pie:

58 oz tinned pumpkin puree

36 oz whole milk, simmered down to half

4 oz cream

6 eggs

9 T Penzey’s pumpkin pie spice

1/4 cup blackstrap molasses

Incredients – Crust:

16 oz gingersnap cookies (make sure they are good gingersnaps)

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

2 T flour

2 T sugar

Ingredients – Apple Caramel:

2 cups apple cider

Method: Preheat oven to 425.

Making the pie crust – run the ginger snaps through a food processor to make a sandy powder. Mix in the flour and sugar. Melt the butter and add to the crumbs. Make sure the mixture is moist enough to compress into a crust. If it isn’t add another tablespoon of butter. Press the mixture along the bottom and sides of the pie plates. Bake crust at 425 for five minutes, then set aside to cool while you mix the pumpkin filling.

Making the pie – Combine the milk, cream, and eggs and whip together. Whip in the spices and molasses. Fold this into the pumpkin puree. Gently transfer the pumpkin mixture into the cooled pie crusts. Bake for fifteen minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350 and bake for 50 minutes. Remove pies from oven and allow to cool for several hours (if you pierce the pie to test it, it is apt to crack … I made two pies so I was able to test one and have an un-cracked pie for the party).

Making the Apple Caramel – Put apple cider into a pan on high heat. Boil, stirring constantly, until it is almost all evaporated and very foamy. Remove from burner and let it sit a few minutes to cool. It will thicken as it cools.

Pipelines And Registries

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by Lisa

A few weeks ago, requests to “check in” around the Standing Rock protest was circulating Facebook. It presupposes that one shares such information with strangers – perhaps that is the norm. It also presupposes that law enforcement peruses those check-ins. The whole thing reminded me of a discussion of ghosts that I had whilst touring the Bryn Mawr College campus — the student with whom I was walking casually crossed the street, pointed to a house a few houses down on the side of the street that we had been strolling down, and mentioned that the house is supposed to be haunted. Of course, she continued, being a worldy University student she didn’t believe in such things. Just the same, it  didn’t actually take effort to walk down the other side of the street … worst case you did something for no reason, best case you avoided the ghosts.

Checking in at Standing Rock sounded pretty much the same to me – didn’t cost me anything, aside from potentially confusing someone who saw my location it didn’t harm anything … may have been a pointless action, or maybe it stopped police from being able to use social media data to research protesters.

I keep seeing a Muslim registry being suggested — in seriousness, not in the Godwin’s Law / serial numbers tattooed on arms sort of way. I wonder how many people who are willing to check-in at Standing Rock would also be willing to volunteer for the additional scrutiny that I’m sure membership in the Muslim registry gets you. The efficacy of the registry is a question of resource allocation  — if a few thousand people register nationwide (say, Imams who are already well known), then the resources involved in making their lives miserable are relatively few. If half of the country registers as Muslim … either our new government will solve unemployment (double the national debt in the process, but who cares about a debt ceiling when it’s your party doing the spending?) by hiring a few million people to monitor self-professed Muslims or “additional scrutiny” becomes an increased probability in the IRS audit flag algorithm.