Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:19 on 23 January 2012

Tankless water heaters probably do not save much energy, either. And may actually even waste it [update: they almost certainly do, see next article] compared to conventional tanked heaters. In short, they are generally overhyped.

After having coped with one for a little over six months, I think I am qualified to make those statements.

When I first took a shower in my current residence (which has such a heater), I was astounded at how much water I had to first run down the drain before it got the least bit warm. For a moment, I even thought the water heater had just broke, then I realized that not only does a tankless heater have to warm the pipe between the fixture and the heater (the reason you have to let the water run with any type of water heater), it also has to first warm up the water heater itself.

Then I learned to my shock that one can’t start showering and incrementally adjust the temperature as the pipe warms up further. Tankless heaters operate in a very delicate and easily-disturbed equilibrium. Adjust the flow of either the hot or the cold water, and you disturb that equilibrium, and it takes almost as long to regain it as it did for the water to get warm in the first place. So you have to let more water run down the drain — heated water, this time — until the hot water running down the drain has reached its maximum piping-hot temperature.

Then you start adjusting the temperature. This takes significantly longer than doing so with a tanked heater, because each time you touch a faucet, you disturb that delicate equilibrium and have to wait for the temperature to stabilize again (typically it will oscillate after you make a change). During that time, you send even more heated water down the drain. If you don’t, you will find yourself being scalded or frozen by a temperature fluctuation.

And forget about taking a “navy shower” to save water. If you shut the water off to lather up, you have just destroyed the delicate equilibrium you spent so much time and water creating. You’re better off just letting the water run and pushing the shower head to the side so more heated water gets sent down the drain while you soap up, because that will waste less water and energy than starting the process from scratch again.

And it’s not just during showers. Want to quickly wash a few dishes? You’ll send several times more cold water down the drain than with a tanked heater. Going to wash another dish after that? Better just leave the water running, because if you turn it off you’ll destroy the equilibrium, the water will get cold in the middle of that second dish, and you’ll waste at least as much water letting it run and warm up again as you would if you didn’t turn the faucet off.

Somehow, I have the sneaking suspicion that the calculations which show tankless heaters saving energy don’t take into account how the different usage patterns they force cause so much water (mostly heated water, at that) to get sent down the drain, unused.

If I were building a “green” house, I’d focus on other solutions, like super-insulating the water tank and putting it on a timer, to minimize energy usage. I bet it wouldn’t be hard to beat a tankless heater with such strategies, simply because I’d be sending far less hot water down the drain.

Published at 17:56 on 22 January 2012

When snow melts here, it tends to melt fast compared to more continental climates. Our winter mildness is driven by marine influence, not ample sunshine. When temperatures normalize, they stay above freezing day and night. Our thaws don’t happen incrementally in daylight hours only, they go on 24/7, often with winds and rain to expedite the process. There is also no thick layer of frozen ground to slow down the melting.

Because the ground seldom freezes deeply, the grass is green when the snow melts. I remember I once had a dream while in my teens of snow melting to reveal green grass, and I thought it unrealistic, because everyplace I had lived where it could snow always had brown grass in the winters. Not here.

Published at 19:28 on 19 January 2012

It keeps going, and going, and going…

Last night’s freezing drizzle intensified through the night, becoming mixed with sleet. From 1/3 to 1/2 inch of ice accumulated, depending on whether you measure it on twigs or on flat surfaces. Around 2:15 this afternoon, the sleet changed back to light snow.

Sometimes, it’s hard to forecast when the arctic air will finally get scoured out, and apparently this is one of those times. I really think it’s going to end tonight or tomorrow morning, though: the outflow winds that have been feeding us cold air from the Fraser Gorge via Bellingham have really collapsed this evening.

But sometimes storm systems have a way of reviving declining arctic outflows: arctic air has high pressure, and storms have low pressure, and the wind blows from high to low. However, it’s noteworthy that this is the first time the northerly winds have abated since this storm began (they never did abate yesterday evening, which made me doubt that I’d awaken to a thaw this morning).

The mild marine air always wins in the end, the only question is when.

It’s still been a surprisingly tenacious and strong storm for a place with a mild marine climate, even if the snow totals weren’t as whoppingly huge for us as forecast (though they certainly were whopping to the south).

Published at 18:52 on 18 January 2012

Probably the worst thing about both is something that most opponents are not focusing on. Yes, such legislation will probably cause economic harm by making life more inconvenient for Internet entrepreneurs.

The worst threat, however, is that such legislation will provide both a rationale and an obligation to create an infrastructure of censorship, one that could later be exploited by the government in ways detrimental to civil liberties. And recent trends in the USA (warrantless searches, incommunicado detention, death squads, torture, etc.) have been worrying enough for civil liberties as it is.

Published at 17:35 on 18 January 2012

The forecasters really couldn’t make up their minds on this one. First it was supposed to be the storm that ends this current cold spell by dragging the normal mild marine air back. Then, it was supposed to start as snow but turn to mild rain and end the cold spell anyhow. Then the amount of initial snow went up to amounts that would create a slushy mess when the rain came. Then it was supposed to be all snow, huge amounts of it.

Those huge amounts of snow went south (Chehalis, a lowland town that gets no more snow on average than Seattle does, got a whopping 17 inches). We ended up with a little over 4 inches here in West Seattle, still a very significant accumulation for the lowlands.

It all wound up as forecast around 2PM. Or so I thought. I woke from the nap I took after my walk in the woods, and looked out at a puzzling sight: tiny little drops on the outside of the window, a haze in in the distance as if it was still snowing, but no flakes falling and no evidence of the least bit of melting.

I went outside and the mystery was solved: the leaves on the laurel bush out front were becoming glazed with ice. Freezing drizzle. It’s sundown and there’s now a distinct crust on the snow, and the tree branches are making that creaking sound in the wind that they do when encrusted.

Up until this week, I had been worried that this was going to be a dud of a La Niña winter. No longer.

Published at 19:40 on 15 January 2012

Was planning to go to the foothills for a hike in the snow, but minutes after I left it started really dumping (after half-heartedly snowing off and on all morning and not amounting to much), so I quickly changed plans and took a walk in Schmitz Park instead.

Up until today, it’s been a real dud of a winter for those of us who like interesting weather, which has been something of a surprise, given that La Niña years tend to have below-average temperatures and above-average precipitation. Maybe that pattern is about to change.

Published at 11:34 on 11 January 2012

While looking at The Guardian’s website this morning, I noticed an ad for an on-line auction company called QuiBids, which listed some about-to-close auctions with temptingly low bid amounts.

Realizing that it might be too good to be true, I decided to investigate a little. Because, on the other hand, if it’s not some sort of sleazy ripoff site that charges you simply to place a bid (whether it wins or not), even if only a small fraction of the items go for pennies on the dollar, it could really pay to keep an eye on things and slap bids on anything that looks like it’s going to sell for a song. I probably wouldn’t win every time, of course, but at those prices it would be worth celebrating the wins and ignoring the ones that got away. It’s hard to do this sort of thing on eBay anymore because that site has simply become too popular, but perhaps this site is new enough that such opportunities can still be found. Or so I thought.

Was I ever prescient. Turns out it is a sleazy ripoff site that charges 60 cents per bid, whether or not the bid wins. Worse, you have to buy a ridiculously high number (100, $60 worth) of bids up-front before you can use the site. And the shit icing on the cake is that you have no choice of bid increments: you can only make pathetic, penny-ante bids at a fixed amount dictated by an algorithm on their site.

I know enough about how “baby bids” work on eBay when you make them (or rather, don’t work) to know that this makes the site a complete ripoff. How much do you want to guess what the odds are that once you give them your $60, you’ll find that mysteriously there are no items about to sell for a song like their ad shows? My guess is pretty darn near 100% odds.

Published at 20:03 on 9 January 2012

At the headwaters of Longfellow Creek in West Seattle is what used to be an extensive peat bog. It was then partially mined for peat, filled, and turned into a park. Except that much of the park never was very successful, because it was still in a low area and its lawns tended to be mushy and squishy. Worse, there was still peat under all that fill, meaning the land had a tendency to subside.

So about 10 years ago, it was decided to try and bring the bog back, at least in the lower part of the park. Except that it’s no longer a coniferous forest in the surrounding area; it’s mostly lawns. Lawns that get a fair amount of lime and fertilizer dumped on them in order to keep them healthy.

Alas, what keeps a lawn healthy is the same thing that kills a bog. Bog plants can cope with extreme acidity and low nutrient levels just fine. What they cannot generally cope with is non-bog plants, because the latter grow faster and out-compete bog plants in non-bog environments.

And so it is that, ten years on, the “bog” is not really bog at all; it’s an open, marshy wetland in the process of evolving into a forested, swampy one.

Wetland (as opposed to bog-specific) plants were in general doing just fine. Swamp roses were growing in great profusion, and black cottonwoods and willows were volunteering everywhere. The Sitka spruces which had been planted generally looked very healthy.

However, most of the specific bog species plantings I found were sickly and barely surviving. There were a fair number of stunted bog laurel bushes, and an even smaller number of very sickly-looking Labrador tea shrubs. Hardly any of the bog sedges remained; invasive grasses had pretty much universally displaced them. Sweet gale was an exception to this rule; I saw a number of vigorously-growing, very healthy specimens, which had obviously spread significantly to form large clumps since they were planted.

It was, in total, less of a complete weed patch than I had expected. Perhaps there’s enough remaining bog acidity in the soil there to keep a damper on the worst of the weed overgrowth.

Sorry, but I don’t have any photos to accompany this article. I did have a camera with me, but I spaced and forgot to use it.

Published at 12:41 on 6 January 2012

I’m beginning to suspect my prior (and to some degree, current) experiences are a victim of the Connector Conspiracy. When I made a new antenna cable using parts salvaged from a defunct cell phone headset, I had much better luck receiving HD signals.

It’s still not perfect; reception drops out every so often and stays that way until I reseat the antenna connector. This makes me suspect that JVC deliberately chose to use a somewhat nonstandard 3.5 mm connector, one that fails to mate well with anything but the connectors on their (overpriced) accessory kits.

It is at least a partial fix, one that’s good enough to enable me to receive the BBC static-free on one of the digital channels of a KUOW. That will come in handy on the next big news day (forget about the Internet when a big story breaks; any streaming programming instantly becomes overloaded to the point of uselessness in my past experience).

Published at 12:21 on 6 January 2012

To Apply: Please send portfolio URL and resume to [e-mail address deleted]. Subject line should read “Your Name: Backend Developer.”

Really, now? A portfolio? For a back end developer position? Isn’t that about as relevant as asking an electrician or plumber for a set of pictures showing external views of new buildings he helped work on?

This one cuts particularly close to home for me because my last job involved fixing the horrible mess the back-end code was on a site that looked absolutely beautiful when viewed on a browser. Interestingly, this job has been advertised regularly since last autumn, so it seems this employer is having trouble filling it.

Gee, I wonder why…