Austin Shackles

the other aspect of drive though, the drive wheel is on the center line of the trike and has all your weight on it.  Cheap deltas tend to be 1-wheel drive, and thus the drive is off-center and your weight is split between the 2 wheels.

Better ones have either a double-freewheel or a differential.  There are advantages and disadvantages in both systems.  

The cargo trike was a prototype I built but sadly never had the funds to develop fully.  It would've allowed for carrying large items and shopping, or fitting child car seats to the front so you could carry small children safely and where they could be seen.  With modern systems now available it could easily have had electric assist as well.

Per the "tadpole" thing, My father and I used to make the Newton tricycle which was that format.  It was based on the Kendrick trikes which were made in the early 20th century although in fact Kendricks weren't that good as the steering wasn't well adjusted.  My father had a background in automotive design and built a trike with stable Ackermann style steering.  Eventually I took over the building until we had to sell the farm where the workshop was.  My father decided to pursue this after he got a "normal" delta trike and wasn't impressed with its performance.

"Tadpole" vs "delta" is a debate at least 100 years old  However, I can make a good argument based on physics for why tadpole is better:

The most unstable condition for any trike is when going fast around corners.  The biggest risk for tipping any trike is cornering fast downhill when braking.  Now, consider the trike when it begins to tip.  When the inside wheel on the turn leaves the ground, the machine begins to tip over, pivoting around the line between the 2 wheels that are still on the ground.  With a delta layout (2 wheels at the rear) that line is inclined towards the front, and so weight of the machine and rider try to tip on a diagonal which is partly sideways, partly forwards - and in the downhill-cornering scenario, your weight is trying to go forwards anyway.  Now if we consider the tadpole layout, that tipping line is inclined backwards so the forces tipping the trike over act partly in the opposite direction to the force of cornering and braking.

There's another aspect: it's easier to transfer your body weight to the "light" side of the trike with a tadpole.  If you watch racers on deltas, when they are cornering hard they have to get off the saddle and hang off the side of the machine, which is all very well if you're young and athletic.  With a tadpole you can lean your upper body over and put your weight more on one handlebar.

That's a great build, I like that you incorporated a water tank as well.  That's one thing I didn't do on ours, although we do plan a heated bench alongside it.  Intrigued that you put the chimney base at the side, which makes it stick out into the room a whole lot less.  For use the space isn't a problem but in a small room that's a very worthwhile alteration.  

paul wheaton wrote:The "long life incandescent" died today.  Day 3705.  It had a total "on" time of 17,784 hours.

The LED is still going.

Furtling around in these old threads now basically CFls are dead and gone and lighting has moved on to LEDs in large part...

I'd just like to say top marks to Paul for running the light bulb test for over 10 years, and coming back to report the result 10 years later!

One thing that's happened relatively recently (probably in the last 5 years or so) is ready and reasonably priced replacements for regular tube-type fluorescent lights.  I recently got one for the 4ft one I have in the kitchen.  

O'course another thing that's come along is lighting fixtures wherein the LED light source is not (easily) replaceable and those I think are an abomination.  But the LED "bulbs" and now strip lights have come on a heck of a lot since 14 -odd years ago when Paul first posted about CFLs being crap (and in hindsight, they were: but at that time LED tech hadn't progressed to where it is now).  I well recall the first ever commercially available CFL which Philips sold which was as dim as heck for the first couple of minutes.  Now we have LEDs that make instant light, we can to a fair extent choose the color temperature of the light for different applications and provided you avoid ultra-cheap ones form dodgy stores, they are reliable.   I have had a couple that failed prematurely, likely due to being el-cheapo.  But that was always a thing even with incandescent bulbs - if you bought el-cheapo brand from the bargain store, a percentage of them failed on first switch-on.

Jay Angler wrote:Austen Shackles wrote:

That's a total of 12 signals on that one junction, and all of them have 1 light illuminated 24/7* for an ongoing consumption of 72KWh per day, or 26,280KWh per year for just ONE road junction.

The technology already exists for vehicle activated lights. I wonder if that technology used to only light up the signal light when there are cars approaching from that direction, would use more or less power?

Maybe not in big cities with traffic round the clock, but in many smaller communities or housing development areas, I suspect you could manage a net gain. We appear to have already done that with some of our people lighting for paths in my area. The people paths are also making more of an effort to keep the light pointed downward to minimize light pollution.

I truly wish we would do more publicity about the damage of light pollution to all living creatures, including humans, and work on reducing it. One downside I have observed about the supposedly 'cheap' LED's is the proliferation of outdoor lighting when none is really required.

A signal activated by an approaching car might be hard to make work reliably at a long enough distance.  Signals which change when a car approaches have been around for years - but if we're talking about a stop light, it needs to be on when the vehicle is far enough away to see it and stop safely.  I daresay that could be made to work.  

As for the street lighting, that reminds me:  When I first moved here about 5 years ago, looking out over the plain from my mountain there were orange sodium street lamps all over the place.  The plain has lots of little villages dotted all over it.  Fast forward 5 years and many of them including the one near our house which I'm not 100% convinced we need have been swapped to LED.  From where we are we're looking down on the plain from a few hundred feet up and there's way less light shining upwards than there used to be.  The remaining clumps of sodium lamps stand out from the rest.

I think once you get it dried out well it will settle down and behave.  Not seen any issues with condensation here recently, even with damp wood it's been burning well if not making quite the same heat so fast.  The wood's not green just damp from all the rain.  

I've been stacking the next load on the hotplate to dry out once the stove's up and running. Couple of fattish logs, a few thinner ones and some smallish stick-sized bits which I put up against the hot coals to make it restart promptly.

which reminds me, need a photo of the Tool I made.

John Wolfram makes an excellent point.  I've been avoiding those kind of lights for precisely that reason. In my house though there's not one incandescent light.  For my work spaces I like a cool or daylight light and that's inefficient to do with incandescent, even with the modern ones with a halogen lamp inside: There used to be special "northlight" bulbs for artists with a blue glass envelope and you needed about twice the power rating to get the same amount of usable light.  

Other lights are a mix of cool or warm, depending on what was to hand and where they are fitted.  My partner prefers the warm one for a bedroom light. In the kitchen I have a 4000K 4ft fluorescent tube replacement which uses less power than the original 4ft tube did to give more light, it doesn't have a starter (it comes with a plug-in "starter replacement" which I guess simply connects the power to it) and has the added advantage of instant full power light just like the other LEDs.

Going back to Paul's original point about altering other, much more power-hungry aspects of your life such as using a washing line or clothes rack vs. using an electric dryer, or washing up by hand in a sink and putting the dishes on a drainer vs. using a dishwasher: I think the point is that swapping out the lights is a low-effort thing that most anyone can do at more or less zero inconvenience.  Making those other changes would have much more effect but many people don't do that because they don't want the extra effort.

There is one aspect of LED lighting where I can see a definitive benefit in electricity cost and that's traffic signals.  Some years back they began converting all the traffic signals in the UK to LED lamp units.  The old signals used a 250W incandescent bulb in each of the 3 lamps (I know because I asked a chap who was changing out a bad bulb once).  Consider a simple 4-way cross road.  In the UK that will have 3 signals facing each direction: one either side of the road at the stop line, and one on the opposite side of the road so you can see it when parked at the line.  That's a total of 12 signals on that one junction, and all of them have 1 light illuminated 24/7* for an ongoing consumption of 72KWh per day, or 26,280KWh per year for just ONE road junction. 26MWh of energy for ONE road junction!

Now consider the same junction with LEDs. Even if the LED lamps are 25W which I doubt, that would still cut the power consumption by 90%.

It's not the same everywhere as the lights differ: for example, I believe US rail signals use a mere 35CP bulb due to clever design of the lamp.

However I found this webpage about traffic signals in the city of Yakima.  They had 100W bulbs in their signals and their LED replacements are 15W, and the bottom line is that they cut the energy use per 100 intersections by about 80%.

* OK in the UK they have a red+yellow phase, but that just makes the consumption higher.  Other places only have 1 lamp lit at a time

We seem to have been a bit quiet on this thread, mainly because until we're ready to build the bench, the build is basically complete.

The stove is running well now, having dried out and the outside temperature being a bit lower, and the taller chimney and all that.  I still use the bypass to start it, but on a good day it would start without but would take longer to get going.  By making the initial starting fire with full bypass it gets roaring nice and fast, can then load it up, shut the bypass down to about a quarter, then wait a bit until the oven door gets to about 27°C, at which point shut the bypass and let it get on with it.

The initial burn loses a bit of heat up the spout as a result but the ease of lighting and absence of smoke means I think that's acceptable.  

Re-starts are generally without hassle unless we do a Paul* and rarely need anything beyond using the special tool to shove the embers to the back of the box by the secondary air tube.   Unlike the J tubes that Paul mostly favours, we find a burn runs approximately an hour from filling the box until it being ready to re-start.  I suspect maybe if we used really small sticks it'd be faster and we'd get faster heat but a 1 hour stoking cycle compares well with the conventional wood stove: the difference being that we run this for at most 3 hours, whereas in winter the woodstove had to be run flat out for 6-8 hours to get the house warm on a cold† day , using more wood and more effort.

It's now quite well established that more than 3 consecutive burns without a bench or other additional heat storage starts to get wasteful as the majority of the stove is by then nice and warm and you start sending warmer-than-optimal gases up the chimney.   To solve this until we DO have the bench, we burn it a couple of times a bit earlier, then leave it a few hours and re-light it later once some of the heat has gotten into the house.

On the topic of the clay mortar, there have been issues with the top layer of bricks coming loose.  It might be I needed different sand: the sand I used is what is sold here as "yellow" sand and would ordinarily be used with cement or lime for rendering, not bricklaying.  It just doesn't bond that well to the bricks and yes, I know that makes it easy to take it apart, but I don't want on-going maintenance requirements sticking it back together, either.

* in the Xmas podcast about RMHs, Paul mentions that he gets distracted and returns to feed the beast only to find that there're just a few small embers left, not enough to start the next batch of sticks burning.

† where cold mostly means in the 0-10°C range (32-50°F) .  Not COLD like in, say, Montana

Burra says I should mention the idea of using the Walker stove as a pure cookstove, and she's right, I should have .  On an otherwise warm or hot day we might want to use the stove for cooking, if for example we were out of gas or the electricity was off. (we normally cook in a mix of gas stove and combi microwave/convection oven)

By having the bypass available, it would be possible to light a fast fire with small sticks, and leave the bypass fully open, so minimal heat would stay in the house.  Under those conditions, half the hotplate on the stove would heat up quickly.  We also have lids we can open in the hotplate, one of which is right above the outlet from the core and would be great for boiling water or for setting a wok on to stir fry stuff.

I built a bypass into our Matt Walker tiny cookstove, and I wouldn't want to be without it.  However, I can see Paul's issue that if you have different people with no experience lighting the stove, it offers another way for them to get it wrong.

Here we live in a warm climate (compared to, say, Montana) and it can be chilly and damp so you want the fire alight but it's not ideal conditions for starting a rocket and then the bypass is a big help.  The bypass opening is approximately 6" x 3½" and is at the back of the core directly into the top of the brick flue just under where the chimney connects.  You can see it in my build thread

My normal lighting procedure is as follows:
1) make a small kindling fire (with cardboard or a pine cone or other tinder and thin, 6"-long or so sticks) right at the back of the box just in front of the secondary air tube.  With the bypass fully open it normally takes less than a minute to start that roaring nicely.
2) add full length fatter sticks and some larger pieces on top of those until the box is mostly full.  Those catch light at the end from the small starting fire, and in turn start roaring nicely.  As soon as that wood has caught I mostly-shut the bypass.
3) monitor the stove for a few minutes, especially the lower oven door, which is a plain 3mm steel.  When that door gets to about 26-27°C (78-80°F) the bypass can almost always be shut fully.

If, on a marginal day (e.g. bad wind direction or too warm outside), I shut the bypass completely too soon it can stall and belch smoke into the house which nobody wants.  This stall is unmistakeable: it will be burning fine and then quite suddenly will stop and clouds of smoke blow back from everywhere.  From what I see, this is due to the colder air in the lower spaces of the stove getting into the flue and reversing the temperature gradient.  

The other thing I would have built into my stove had I thought about it is flue priming access.  This would be a removeable plug of some kind at the bottom of the brick flue space near the back of the stove, and would allow for placing a small amount of cardboard or other tinder at the bottom of the flue.  I have a means to do that which is a small shovel on a long handle, which I can insert through the lower oven door into the bottom of the flue but that's more hassle.  Priming the flue like that makes a difference on marginal days when the outside temperature makes it hard to get the flue drawing.  Likely in a colder climate you'd find less use for that feature though.  In the same way, we don't generally burn the stove enough that it stays all that warm 24/7, so we do more cold starts than you would if you have freezing weather outside.