C. Letellier

On desert trays at social events maybe once  a year.(very much self limiting).  Actually buy them maybe once every 5 or 10 years. (an open package is an empty package)

Are you sure it is pure hydrated lime instead of quick lime or a mixture of quicklime and hydrated lime?

chert.  Probably came out of a limestone.  The rock cracks or does solution cavities and the quartz silica rock is slowly deposited/concentrate by solution inside the limestone to form silica inside limestone or dolomite.  Cherts and flints are all silica.  generally cherts are lighter and flints are darker.  But they have slightly different crystal structures and it takes a true expert to tell them apart. Agates, Jasper, etc are forms of the chert/flint determined by color patterns and crystal structures.  And the naming gets more complicated.  In my area we have moss agate that has a dark dendritic pattern in the lighter agate.  But there is a form of moss agate specific to a single hill called spanish point agate that the dendritic pattern looks like a forest with a particular banding pattern in colors look like sky.



Way back as a teenager I spent lots of time trying to make arrow heads with no success.  Learned just a year ago at a class, at the museum, that most cherts need to be heat treated before they will flake right.  Apparently there is a real art to getting them to the right temperature and it varies because of their trace mineral content making it harder still

I have been studying in depth and personal opinion is that solar thermal done correctly still wins.  If you are going to go buy a collector, heat exchangers, glycol etc then the answer is no.  But if you adhere to KISS and truly keep it simple solar thermal still wins.  DYI collectors built as drain back, non pressurized storage tanks etc that solar thermal can still win for cost effectiveness.  The key points are 60% to 80% efficiency gathering heat vs 20% for solar panels along with being something I can build nearly totally from scratch.  The other major key point is water while space consuming is a really cheap battery.  Remember that you need storage too.  Where you already have the storage(pressurized I asssume) you may be better off with PV.  But if you were buying batteries too then I would argue solar thermal can still lead.  I have about 2/3 of my write up ready on this for people to check my thinking.  Will try and get it finished and posted.

We need to do a better job of asking how we work with human nature.  The biggest single mistake most of the people pushing for change make is ignoring it.

Lets take a simple example.  The clothes line vs the drier.  The labor difference is small and the energy savings is fairly solid.  How many will make the change unless forced to it?  Personally I want at least socks and towels run thru the drier because of how they feel.  And in mid winter it is way more work to line dry.  But other than those exceptions I am mostly doing it.

What is going to happen when the sacrifices are larger, the appearance of difference is bigger, etc?  When it means starvation, going without air conditioning or going with reduced heat or other real sacrifices.

This house is passive solar and was built in the summer of 1984 by my parents.  It is what I spent my entire summer between HS and college working on.  It was fully closed in but far from done when I left for college.  From when they moved in, my mother offered to show it and explain to anyone who talked like they might even be thinking about building a house.  She had a full set of posters explaining how it worked made just for those opportunities.  For the next 27 years that offer was made probably 80 to 100 times.  About 2/3 would say yes.  Many would express interest.  But when push came to shove and it was actually time no one actually made much effort to build for passive solar.  From those I know from visiting with them, one of the problems is the fact that this house doesn't look "normal".  The second "fact" that seemed to be stopping them was it wouldn't work.(even when we could show it was working)  Don't know how to over come that bias.  My hope is if I can get it so the house stays old lady comfortable while requiring no auxiliary heat maybe that will be enough to convince people?  For now I will just keep pointing people at my collector write up here in hopes of finding the right one to get one more convert.  After all 30% of US homes have a basement.  Thus the mass battery is already built in.  If even 1/4 of those are viable for solar thermal air, looking at only single family homes that is still 6.1 million homes that could potentially benefit.

Another thing we might want to look at in the message and how it is shared: if you go to the Brigg-Meyers poll  here on permies the 4 top categories are 66% for the results but checking against google those same 4 are just 11% of the population at large.  Meaning we have roughly 6X as many of those 4 as the normal population represented on permies.  So is the message being framed properly to interest those other types?

Poll

Anyone who has been on Permies for a while knows there are a bunch of broken links.  Especially on older stuff.  Fixing all of them manually would range from huge man hours to impossible.  But can an AI bot be taught to find the links and check the internet way back machine site for the post closest in time to when the post was made.  Will probably still require some human checking work product.  Maybe add a simple notice with any such link replaced, what was done saying the link was broken and asking if the new link seems to make sense with the post.  If 5 people respond yes with no more than say 2 no votes then the people actually reading could help filter it.  After all if the link is long term broken, even a bad link is very little worse and a simple yes no check box added to the code when a replacement link if put in would let humans serve as a verifier without costing much of the users time.

Second part of same thinking.  On all new posts create a database of links to this as a backup so it is possible to check the link quickly for change.  Would serve as a later verifier and allow easily replacing broken links into the future with very little cost in storage space.

Judson Carroll wrote:

C. Letellier wrote:would thin stainless steel cable be a better answer for this purpose as it would rust way less?  For use in a remote control stove pipe damper I got something like a 350 foot roll for $21 a few years ago off amazon. (1/16"?)  It does cable loops nicely braiding it back into itself.  working load on the one I got was 105 lbs and breaking something like 300 or 400 lbs.

Probably not, because I need a strong spring to set the hook. But, that is a great suggestion for some of the mods I'm considering!

If you just need the spring you might look at high tensile fence wire.  I have several fairly tough spring mechanisms built out of it.  Would be way cheaper than piano wire and probably locally available.

would thin stainless steel cable be a better answer for this purpose as it would rust way less?  For use in a remote control stove pipe damper I got something like a 350 foot roll for $21 a few years ago off amazon. (1/16"?)  It does cable loops nicely braiding it back into itself.  working load on the one I got was 105 lbs and breaking something like 300 or 400 lbs.

No apples indicates you probably had a freeze at just the wrong point.  Last year we had almost no fruit of any kind because of a late hard freeze that hit many types of fruit trees.

If fruit is falling off early that is normally a sign of low water conditions.