Cade Johnson

when I was 6, and starting elementary school, mom started grad school and had to leave about a half hour before the school bus arrived. She started baking a chocolate sheet cake every weekend and we had an automatic coffee maker; so I began eating a piece of chocolate cake and a cup of coffee for breakfast and I still have that breakfast 60 years later. Oh, I have had all the other sorts of breakfasts, but I always come HOME. Nowadays it is not really chocolate cake as such, but a chocolate-banana scone recipe of my own invention - with whole wheat flour, corn meal, oats, raisins, molasses, a little bit of sugar, a healthy scoop of cocoa powder, and a few mashed up bananas. A half pecan on top of each of 12 units baked every six days; and accompanied by two cups of black coffee, no sugar. let me know if you want the recipe!

I used to have a diesel engine under the kitchen sink on my sailboat, and the admiral ordered me to "soundproof that thing!" I learned that the art of soundproofing is "decoupling" - so you alternate high density and low density; what will transmit easily through one density will often be attenuated or blocked by another density. If the wall is dense, add a foamy layer and then another dense layer. But if you also want to block wifi signal, then before anything, simply wallpaper the whole wall with aluminum foil; radio signals will not go through it. If there is any signal after a wall of aluminum in place; it is going over the top or reflecting from outside.

I had an avocado farm for about a decade in the Dominican Repermies. Avocado varieties are not true to the fruit; so trees grown from seed will produce "criollo" or wild fruit; generally with a relatively round shape and relatively little fruit mass compared to a cultivated variety. Also, the criollo form of an avocado tree is very tall with few low branches surviving - they are predominantly a forest species and saplings won't survive unless they surge to the canopy.

So, what good is a seed-grown avocado? Well, they tend to produce good roots. The common practice is to graft a desirable avocado cultivar onto seed-grown rootstock sooner or later. You'd let the seed grow as it will until it is well-established in soil, and then cut the trunk and graft a branch from a variety that is desired. If you plant the seed and let nature take its course, then you will have a very tall skinny tree and the avocadoes that fall will smash to bits when they hit the ground. Then you can cut that tree down and the stump will produce many new sprouts around the cut; you can graft to some of those and cut away the others - but ever after you have to be on guard against low sprouts from the root that will compete with the grafted branches.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1800-studies-later-scientists-conclude-homeopathy-doesnt-work-180954534/

The American psychologist B. F. Skinner studied animal behavior and in particular he famously studied pigeons. His pigeons were trained to peck a target to receive food. He manipulated the system so they had to peck many times to receive food - so they pecked much faster. When he made the reward time-random, they pecked fastest of all! When he took away the target and continued the random reward, they developed all sorts of odd behaviors which (apparently) they associated with some reward stimulus -- so one bird might be found hopping around on one leg and another might be standing with wings extended and a third might be pecking on a favorite cage bar. This is the very same model psychologists apply to human superstitious behaviors. If we try <something> and <favorable outcome ensues>, we are highly inclined to think the thing we tried is what caused the success. Once we know what works, we tend to be dismissive of counterfactual evidence because - as is absolutely true - life is complex. Fortunately, most of us do not become ill very often. Our individual opportunities to test remedies are mercifully few - so few as to be statistically insignificant on their own. But a well-designed scientific study can really cut through the fog of complexity in life. Such studies show no benefit to homeopathy, as such. But if my partner were to think <anything> made them happier, and I could do it; I would. It is not up to me to disabuse anyone of their firmly held beliefs. Life is complex.

Not to answer the question absolutely, but to give a structure for thinking about it; I'd say that soil storage of heat involves three factors: the heat capacity of the soil (how much thermal energy can be stored per unit of mass), the heat conductivity (how quickly heat will move through a given area of soil under the influence of a temperature difference), and the heat transfer efficiency - how heat in one medium moves to another at a different temperature. The first two properties depend a great deal on the moisture content because water has a relatively high heat capacity and also a high heat conductivity. When one "charges" the heat storage volume with warm air circulation, one may indeed raise the temperature, but also deplete moisture. Thereafter, recovering that heat may be quite less efficient.

If the soil heat conductivity is low due to low moisture, then it is relatively difficult to extract heat - a more intimate contact between soil and piping is needed, so the pipe system becomes quite expensive in one way or another. And of course, this piping is buried and inaccessible. Blowing sometimes warm and sometimes cool air through the pipes may give rise to issues of condensation in the pipes, and associated corrosion. Corrosion is the enemy of good heat transfer because while metal conducts heat well, metal oxides generally do not. Industrial heat exchanger equipment is regularly maintained by various means of cleaning to prevent the accumulation of "scale" or "fouling" on heat exchange tubing.

I have heard of people building Wofatis with "earth storage", but it has always sounded like one of those things that seems good in theory but difficult to achieve. If a wofati design is working well, it is because the earth is serving as good insulation. If it is good insulation, it is poor heat storage. Better to provide some buried water mass for the heat storage than to depend on soil, imho

geologically speaking, clayey soil has low hydraulic conductivity. The conductivity is measured as flow per unit of area. So like others have said, if you can change the soil conductivity by making it more porous and less compacted then more flow can go through. But if the clay is extensive in area and depth, the water may eventually saturate the more-conductive region you have made and be stopped by the low conductivity material at depth. Increasing the area is also helpful; and making a porous zone around the swale has that effect to some degree, but making the swale bigger is also going to help (the ditch in the photo is pretty small). Another option may be to dig through surface clay and find more conductive soil below. You might be able to find some "lithology" at a local agricultural extension office or public library (possibly easier than digging, possibly not!).

Swales are often built with a fairly gentle slope of 1:3 between the bottom and surrounding surface. Because the swale can be better-watered than other areas, it can grow more luxuriant vegetation and a gentle slope can be mowed. Also, a gentle slope is less prone to erode.

oh yeah, and if you are going to let someone do projects on your land, become at least slightly acquainted with the US Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). You are liable for environmental problems on your land. If your tenant dumps old solvent out behind the shed and it contaminates the groundwater (or even MIGHT contaminate the groundwater), and the Fed discovers it, they will make you clean it up. You can sue the tenant to try and get some money back.

Better is to always have a safe and well-managed way to handle wastes that you control and can instruct tenants how to use, so no problems come up later.

my Schneider 4048 inverter bricked on its first birthday, and mercifully Schneider replaced it in warranty despite that I had not known of the need to register for warranty coverage - no mention of that in their warranty paperwork or any other accompanying literature. Anyway, the replacement is still working after 2.5 years so that is something. I have a control panel add-on, and a Schneider MPPT controller too. The integrated system does have pre-baked lithium battery settings. I use it with 12V-style battery units in series.

The thing with split phase is that an inverter does not really want to have mis-matched phases and yet most households do not have very good matching. One hour all the load is on one leg running a washing machine and the next hour it is something on another leg; not synchronized. It still works, but it introduces some inefficiencies. There are some features of the inverter that simply don't work as well with imbalanced phase legs.

I notice that most large towns in Spain have one or more "horto" - where you can rent a 25 square meter plot of land for a garden at about $30 per month. They will plow it for you for a fee, tend it in some ways for a fee if you are on vacation, and they provide a shed with hand-tools; bring your own gloves and get to work. That seems like a pretty nice model for high density city-dwellers. The hortos are generally near a city bus route too.

having had boats, I can report an old saying about the price of wooden boats: "a wooden boat is always free" - so if you are thinking of wooden boat building in that shed, keep this in mind. Though, if you are thinking of charging rent to wooden boat builders, I think that could be profitable perhaps.