Month: December 2010

Hand-me-down technology


Bought on eBay: $24.99

I love old technology. Sometimes old technology is better than new technology. It sure is cheaper.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been making some improvements in my telephone situation. I did not rush out and buy the newest telephone toys. Instead, I defined my needs, did some research, and then shopped for bargains on eBay.

Those who sell technology, of course, are always trying to convince us that we must have the very latest. Verizon, my cellular carrier, has a program called “New Every Two.” Every two years, Verizon will give you a new cell phone — for free, as long as you sign a new contract. This serves two purposes: It helps teach us that technology is obsolete after two years, and it keeps people locked into contracts.

Do I need an iPhone? No, I do not. If I were still in the corporate world, maybe it would make sense. But here in the sticks, and as a retired person, my needs are different.

Now that I have dial tone on the phone wiring in my house (thanks to a Telular SX5T bought cheap on eBay) and can connect any telephone I want, this is how I saw my needs for one of the three phones in the house: 1. Cordlessness; 2. I wanted a phone compact enough to carry outdoors, since people my age have been known to fall or otherwise need to call 911; 3. I wanted something that would speak the name of who’s calling, so I that I know who’s on the line before I answer the phone.

There is one device that meets all three of these criteria, and they don’t make them anymore. That’s the Uniden ELT560 cordless phone. I believe it’s the only clamshell “flip phone” ever made for cordless (as opposed to cellular) service. It can be loaded with customized ring tones that you can record yourself, and it uses caller ID to select the appropriate ring tone. I made recordings of myself saying the names of my regular callers, so instead of ringing, the phone repeats the name of whoever is calling. As a clamshell, it will fit in my pocket with its keys safely covered, and it has the range to work pretty much anywhere on my property. The cost on eBay for “new old stock” was $24.99.

I’m a gadget freak, so this is how I keep my gadget costs under control. I buy old stuff when old stuff will do the job. Often, the old stuff is superior.

On being warm

The low temperature here last night was 11.3 degrees F. To those who live in northern latitudes, this may not be a big deal. But, here in the South, it is a very big deal. It’s also dangerously cold for any warm-blooded creature.

Ken Ilgunas’ recent post on how he stays warm while living in his van got me thinking about how important it is to stay warm and how our houses, in cold weather, are not just about comfort. Without shelter and warm clothing, you die.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I worked on the phone desk of the Winston-Salem Journal typing up the obituaries phoned in from the funeral homes, you always knew if there was a severe cold spell that the number of obituaries could easily double. Mostly this was old people. My elderly mother will be 88 next week. When she visits, she complains of being cold if the temperature is not above 70 degrees. With the thermostat at 71 degrees, she will sit bundled up in front of the fireplace.

And yet it is amazing how brave and resourceful human beings have been in dealing with brutal cold. My Celtic ancestors migrated north into the British Isles at the end of the Ice Age, almost 15,000 years ago. Soon they were as far north as the Faroe Islands and Iceland. I don’t think such a feat would have been possible without young warm-bodied adventurers like Ken. They must have been extremely good at managing fire and building shelter.

In the northern latitudes, cold and hard times seem to go together. Cold is an important theme of the literature of these northern latitudes. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the word “cold” appears more than a hundred times. Sometimes she is describing the cold and hunger of the miserable students at Lowood School. Sometimes she is talking about the coldness of which the human heart is capable. Hugo, Dickens: Most of the writers of 19th Century northern Europe have a great deal to say about cold. In the history of human misery, hunger is the constant companion of cold.

When it’s cold here, my chickens huddle together inside their chicken house. Sometimes, walking past a big cedar tree at dusk on a cold evening, I’ve startled a dozen or more doves out of the tree. They were huddled too, no doubt, inside the cedar tree. I’ve read that squirrels, high up in their leafy treehouses, huddle together so closely that sometimes their tails become tangled together. My cat, Lily, with the thermostat lowered at night to a balmy 59 degrees, creeps under the covers with me, snuggles her head between the pillow and my shoulder, wraps her paws around my upper arm, and purrs before she falls asleep.

I have paid my dues in cold houses. Back in my days as a young hippy, I lived in several houses with no central heating. I’ve seen water glasses freeze on the hearth, and I’ve dealt with frozen pipes and wet firewood. I’ve gone to bed in unheated houses on snowy evenings, between flannel sheets and under a heavy down comforter. No more of that! Only young adults generate enough body heat to manage such austerity.

To all us poor, fragile animals, whether feathered or furred, old or young, warmth is a wonderful thing. Particularly to children and to old people, cold is dangerous.

According to the Department of Agriculture, 15 percent (and growing) of Americans don’t have enough money for food. Those who can’t afford enough food also can’t afford enough winter fuel. It is disturbing to think about how much more frightening the prospect of foreclosure must be in cold weather.

Where are the Charles Dickenses and Charlotte Brontës of our era? I strongly suspect that, in the wasteland of our media — which glorify the rich, the beautiful and the powerful and stigmatize the poor — there are stories we are not hearing.

Why all this Arctic air?


The dark blue area can expect cold weather through Dec. 19. Graph by NOAA Climate Prediction Center

Newspapers used to do a pretty good job of covering the weather. Today’s lazy, downsized local newspapers don’t bother much anymore. Even with the Internet today, you have to search long and hard to find out what might be causing unusual weather. Meteorologists on local television stations may provide more information, but I don’t watch television.

The cold snap that brought last night’s low here of 14 degrees is affecting a large area of the East Coast, from Florida up through Pennsylvania. I finally found a story in a Florida newspaper for which the reporter bothered to call someone at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

It seems the data is too scant to know for sure, but one theory is that this is caused by the melting of the Arctic ice, which leads to cold air being pushed farther south. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it — the idea that global warming actually can cause colder weather under certain circumstances.

And, by the way, I can’t recommend the Climate Prediction Center too highly for those of you who are weather watchers. I find their 10-day, 14-day, 30-day and 90-day trend forecasts to be quite reliable.

A check from Blue Cross??

In the mailbox today I found an envelope from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. In red letters across the front were “Open Immediately.” This was terrifying. My health insurance is the biggest item in my monthly budget, even though I have one of those high-deductibule policies. I, like most people, am accustomed only to being knocked around by health insurance companies.

But inside was a a check for more than three hundred dollars. This refund was announced back in September, but I missed that news at the time. The insurance commissioner in North Carolina, it seems, did some math and found that North Carolina Blue Cross had overcharged some of its customers by $156 million. Blue Cross agreed to refund it before the end of the year. This USAToday story explains it.

Let’s hear it for regulations on corporations and regulators who do their jobs. That’s the only thing that protects us from gouging.

The regulators must still be watching, because my premium increase for next year is only about $6 a month.

Managing your heat pump

The low temperature last night was 14 degrees F. When it’s that cold, I obsess about how to keep the house decently warm as frugally as possible. I also obsess about wear and tear on my heat pump.

Heat pumps are an efficient source of heat — except when it’s very cold. Heat pumps don’t create heat. Rather, they extract heat from the outdoors air and move the heat into the house. When it’s relatively warm outside — say, when the temperature is in the 40s — this doesn’t take much work and thus doesn’t use much electricity. However, when it’s 14 degrees outside, there’s less heat in the outdoor air to move inside, so the heat pump must work much harder. All heat pump systems have a backup form of heat that kicks in when the outdoor unit can’t keep up with the indoor thermostat’s request for heat. Most heat pumps, like mine, have electrical coils that heat up (like a toaster) and provide this backup heat. This is called resistive heat.

If the temperature outside is in the 40s, then the heat pump is up to three times more efficient than resistive heat, an energy savings ratio of almost 3 to 1. If the temperature outside is 14, then the heat pump is no more efficient than its backup resistive heat, a ratio of 1 to 1. This relative efficiency is called the coefficient of performance. It can be graphed as a curve in which efficiency rises with the outdoor temperature. (See graph below.) At low outdoor temperatures, when the heat pump is no more efficient than its backup heating coils, then you might as well use the heating coils and save the wear and tear on the heat pump.

If you read some heat pump forums online, you’ll find lots of debate about how to manage your heat pump with this efficiency in mind. Most people will say that you should just set your thermostat lower at night but otherwise leave things alone. The heat pump’s control mechanism, they say, can decide for itself when to switch on its backup heat.

I disagree.

Last winter I followed this just-leave-it-alone advice. On a night when the outdoor temperature dropped to about 11 F, the heat pump ran almost all night. In the morning, its coils were covered with ice. This is regarded as normal. If the outdoor unit ices up, the heat pump will “reverse” periodically and melt the ice.

But I can’t help asking myself, why should I let my heat pump grind all night when it’s severely cold, and ice itself up, when at those temperatures the heat pump is no more efficient than its backup heating coils?

I’ve been experimenting. All heat pumps (at least the newer ones) have a position on the thermostat called “EMHEAT,” or emergency heat. The so-called emergency heat is the heat from the backup heating coils. But why should I think of it as emergency heat? It can be used as emergency heat, of course, if the outdoor unit fails and you’re waiting for repair. But why not think of it as heat to be used when it’s so cold that the outdoor unit’s efficiency drops to 1 to 1 (the same as the emergency heat)? There are clear advantages: The outdoor unit just stops — no wear and tear. A heat pump struggling to produce heat in severe cold will grind on and on, and the air coming out of the ducts will be barely warm. Whereas the “emergency heat” will be toasty warm and won’t have to run very much.

Last night, knowing that it was going to be really cold, I set both my thermostats to EMHEAT. I set the downstairs thermostat for as low as I could bear — 55. I set the upstairs thermostat (my bedroom is upstairs) for a bit warmer — 60. During the coldest part of the night, the heating system would start up about every 20 minutes or so, run for three to five minutes, then switch off. I found that much more acceptable than having my heat pump grind and blow cold air all night.

This morning, when the outdoor temperature climbed back to 26 degrees, I put the system back to normal. Right now, at 11 a.m., I’ve brought the temperature up to 65 degrees upstairs. It’s 59 degrees downstairs. I won’t bring the downstairs up to 65 degrees until later this afternoon, when the temperature is higher outside and providing heat is cheaper.

I have no doubt that the “experts” on the Internet forums would say that I’m diddling and that I should just let the system use its own logic. But the problem is, the system’s logic is very crude. It doesn’t even know what the outdoor temperature is. I don’t know what the system’s rules are for when to resort to the “emergency heat,” but it may be as simplistic as “if the thermostat is requesting heat, and if the temperature in the room is still dropping, then turn on the ’emergency heat.'”

I can imagine much smarter algorithms that would consider the outdoor temperature, the unit’s efficiency at that temperature, the difference between the outdoor and indoor temperature, the temperature of the air blowing through the ducts, the actual temperature of the room, and the temperature requested by the thermostat. This could produce a nice balance between the competing factors of efficiency, cost, and human comfort. I’m sure that large commercial systems do have more sophisticated control systems. But until residential systems do, I’m going to diddle with the controls.


The green line shows typical heat pump efficency as outdoor temperatures rise. Note that the heat pump isn’t significantly more efficient than resistive heat, or emergency heat, below about 25 F. The COP scale is the coefficient of performance, described above. Graph by Colorado Springs Utilities

Guess who's coming back…


Ken in Durham

Ken Ilgunas will soon return to Acorn Abbey. He’ll arrive on Dec. 17 or 18 and remain all through the next semester at Duke. He doesn’t have any classes next semester. He only has to write his thesis, and Acorn Abbey is a nice, quiet place for writing.

We’ll also have some outdoor projects to blog about. We’re planning a big vegetable garden next year, new wildflower patches, and we may even get started with beekeeping. The beekeeping project just depends on how much the start-up costs add up to. I’ve bought and read Beekeeping for Dummies, and frankly it all seems rather complicated. But Ken joined a beekeeping club at Duke and has gotten a bit of experience with bees. We’ll see.

Having company also is the only excuse I need to decorate the house for Christmas. And having just read his most recent post on his blog, it’s clear what I need to get him for Christmas — some laundry soap and extra clothespins.

Fixed-position cell phone service


The Telular SX5T fixed wireless terminal

Because I’m a communications nerd, and because of the problems that go with being well wired when you live in the sticks, the communications devices I use are not typical. Though I could get an ordinary land-line telephone easily enough, I’m too far from the central office to get DSL, so I figured, why bother getting a land line and putting up with yet another ditch across my yard if I can’t get Internet service on it?

I’m very happy with my 10-pound Motorola M800 digital bag phone. It’s on the Verizon network, and for more than two years it has been my only telephone. Its audio quality is almost as good as a land line, and with its external antenna, etc., it will get a strong signal where more portable cell phones fail. But a 10-pound cell phone is not exactly convenient as a home phone. I have to run up and down the stairs to answer it. I also wanted a telephone that visitors can use that behaves exactly like an ordinary telephone. For safety, in my opinion, visitors ought to be able to dial 911 from a familiar phone. And of course I’d like to have telephone extensions in the kitchen, bedroom, and radio room.

A company named Telular makes excellent products for this, and I knew that the Telular SX5T was what I needed. The concept of how it works is simple enough. It’s a cell phone, with a good transmitter and a proper external antenna, but there’s no handset and no buttons. Instead, you plug it into your house’s telephone wiring system. The Telular SX5T then puts a dial tone onto your house wiring, and any phone in the house can then make and receive calls. It works just like a regular phone. You can even use it with fax machines. You can have up to five telephone extensions on the house wiring that the device plugs into.

I’ve kept my Motorola bag phone active. I “added a line” to my Verizon service, so the bag phone and house phone share minutes on a Verizon family plan.

The retail price of the Telular unit is $700 or more. However, they often can be bought on eBay at a very steep discount.


My vintage, cinnabar-colored Bell System telephone, which I used for many years in San Francisco, is now working again. It doesn’t even know that it’s now a cell phone.

Chickens and grass

Every morning when I let the chickens out, they head straight for the grass and start grazing. I had never really thought of chickens as pasture-loving grazing animals — they’re scratchers. But they love to graze.

I tried to do some research on chickens and grass to try to understand how they can digest grass and what part grass plays in a natural chicken diet. Authoritative sources were scarce, but one source says that chickens will eat up to 30 percent of their calories in grass. They cannot, apparently, digest the cellulose in grass the way cows and other ruminants can. But if the grass is young enough and tender enough, then the chickens can get a lot of food value out of it. Obviously their gizzards grind the grass very effectively and their digestive systems break it down, because there is no sign of grass in the chicken poop.

Grass has a lot to do, it seems, with the nutritional superiority of eggs from pastured hens vs. commercial factory hens. According to Mother Earth News, eggs from pastured hens have much more vitamin D, 1/3 less cholesterol, twice as much omega-3, 2/3 more vitamin A, 1/4 less saturated fat, and 7 times more beta carotene.

I’m hoping that the winter rye grass I planted as a cover crop for the garden will supply the hens with greens for most of the winter.

Part of the miracle of farm ecology is the way farm animals can make human food out of things that are inedible by humans — cows make milk from grass, for example. But chickens, as long as they can run free, can work this magic as well. It’s nice to think about how some of the energy and nutrition in my eggs comes from the grass growing up the hill and not just from laying mash bought at the mill. Even in December, the chickens are still finding plenty of their own food inside the fence around the garden and orchard — about 10,000 square feet. Right now they eat only about half as much laying mash as they do if they’re kept in the coop. During the summer, when bugs were plentiful, the hens’ mash consumption dropped by probably three quarters. Clearly they’ll eat what they can find first and resort to laying mash only as necessary.