Solar Observatory: Part 1

So here is my Solar Observatory. I'm slightly embarrassed to say it cost me $42 in parts. If I had driven another 15 miles or so for the parts, it would probably have been cheaper, but with gas prices what they are...

I still need to buy a compass and an angle measuring device to make it complete. I may mount the bottom in a small slab of concrete. I haven't decided yet.

The board on top has a 1 inch hole drilled in it to allow the sun to shine into the end of the 1/2 inch pipe, while it casts a shadow onto the target board attached to the other end.

The street L at the top of the stand is greased so it will allow horizontal and vertical rotation. When it is lined up with the sun, a round spot of sunlight shows up on the target board as it does in this picture.

There is an incredible amount of flex in the stand pipe, and the tolerance of the sight is so small that it takes a bit of hunting to get it to line up. finally at 10:12 AM I got it to line up.

By 10:14 AM the angle has changed enough to reduce the spot to a half circle, and by 10:16 AM, it was gone completely.

I plan to do my measuring on or near 5 specific days.

#1: The summer solstice, June 21st.
#2: Half way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, August 5.
#3: The autumn equinox, September 22.
#4: Half way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, November 6.
#5 The winter solstice, December 21.

Since the spring equinox is nearly the same as the autumn equinox, I can skip those.

I'll have to find the rest of the parts for it in the next week so I don't miss this years summer solstice.

Vicious Hunters II

At least one of my Vicious Hunters decided she preferred to poop in a corner instead of the litter box, so I'm evicting then during daylight hours. I heard that washing the spot with ammonia will stop them from using a spot again. Since it is a concrete floor, I just went ahead and washed the spot with bleach. When I let them back in, looked at the spot and wouldn't come within 18 inches of it. The other one ran right up against the spot and hissed violently at the spot. They are both find the spot highly offensive now. Their sensibilities have been violated.

Rainy Day and Monday

I woke up this morning to a soaking rain. No, that's not entirely true. I woke up at 4 AM when my two vicious hunters decided to lick me in the face because their food dish had gone empty, but that's a separate subject. As it stands yesterday, we are 1.75 inches short on rain around here. That may not sound like much, but the entire month of June only dumps an average of 1.86 inches of rain, so this morning's rain is a good thing. This is the first rain I've received that allows me to note where the cabin still leaks. I have identified three leaks in the areas I use, so I can now keep important stuff out of those areas. Also good about this rain is that it confirms that putting the tire compost bins under the eve to funnel more than the usual amount of rain into them is working as well.

I got some more information on on Prowler Rebuild this morning from my brother, The Keeper of the Mountain. The windows are Low-E windows from Pella. I'm not sure what their specific stats are, but they aren't your grandfather's windows in that there are more good qualities to them than being able to see through them.

I'm a long way from putting windows in my place, but I've picked out the basic type of window I have in mind. They will allow solar heat to pass right through them (High SHGC), but won't let heat escape through air leakage (Low AL) or heat transfer (Low U). Since each of the four windows I have in mind will point to a different point of the compass, so the they will each have a different sun shade designed specifically for their roles in the house's function.

To build these sunshades properly, I need to build myself a simple solar observatory. While taking my local Latitude line and adding and subtracting the tropic lines to determine the sun's angle at my local solar noon has some value, the value of actually measuring the angles of the sun once an hour on 5 key points in the year is an order of magnitude greater. The summer solstice is coming up in a couple weeks, so I need to get busy with that, or miss my oportunity for the next year. I'll write more about this later.

The Keeper of the Mountain assures me that he has no intention of hauling his trailer around much. Moving it will be a rare but possible thing, not a regular occurrence. This tells me that his use of nails and T-111 are not a big deal as it won't be suffering the torquing, flexing, and shaking a travel trailer would have to deal with. At 8.5 feet by 32 feet he is able to put a lot of quality stuff in it affordably. With lots of meticulous care of the external weatherizing maintenance, this could last 20 to 30 years without serious repairs.

One of the things I over looked, is that early in his project, he performed a spring over axle conversion. This is usually done to 4x4 trucks to provide greater ground clearance. In this case, he did it to get the wheels out of his living space. Both are very good reasons to do this.

I guess if you go to the lumber yard to pick up lumber with a minivan your operation may get called "cute." I recommend going with a pink minivan and nice bows on the lumber for the complete effect.

Umbrellas and Compost

I've started my third stack of tires for my composting. This third stack actually has real household trash in it. The other two are just straw and dirt. I planted 9 pea seeds in the top of each of the full ones. According to the label, they won't produce peas once the temp goes above 75F on a regular basis. Our temps went from freezing to the upper 80s inside 3 or 4 weeks. That means I should see no pea pods from these plants. Pea plants, however, are nitrogen fixers. That means they enrich the soil regardless of whether it produces pods or not. That enrichment of the dirt is primarily what I'm after, so pea pods are optional.

I sat down and worked out a typical roof truss construction for my house roof. There are several ways to do it, buy I've decided to go with the Japanese Umbrella look. At the peak, the rafters will be every 2 inches at the peak and every 24 inches out by the eve. There will be about 80 of these.

I worked up a model for an 8 foot peak and a 10 foot peak. Considering my observations of roofs around here, I think I will go with the steeper 10 foot peak, as steeper roofs tend to survive long enough to qualify as old.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Finishing

The prowler rebuild marches on toward the finish line. Here you can see wood paneling installed in the bedroom. He is choosing a mixture of Hickory, Pine, and Mahogany for the place.

I want to say the star on this door indicates that it is an energy star product, but I haven't found the particulars on this symbol. Windows come with 3 different ratings. There is a rating for air leakage (AL), Visible Transmittance (VT), Condensation Resistance (CR), Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC), and U-factor. I recommend visiting mapawatt for more information and use this handy selection tool to guide you. Any investment you make on energy conserving products in you home have a better payback rate than the stock market.

It takes a special kind of awesome to put a vaulted ceiling in a single wide. To me, this almost makes up for it being a trailer built with nails and T-111.

Trash: Compost

While I am neither a tree huger nor a Earth worshiper, I do value land and resources and I see landfills as a waste of both. To act in harmony with this, I am looking to handle all my trash on my own land. To do this, I am composting all my biodegradables.

The bottom tire got only one sidewall cut out. I cut the side wall out right near the tread. With the other three tires, I cut one sidewall next to the tread and cut the other one a couple inches away from the tread.

Cutting the sidewall out is quite easy. You take a 1/2 inch or larger wood drill and drill a hole in the side wall right where you plan to cut. Then you take a jig saw with a wood blade, stick it in the hole you drilled, and saw away. Keep in mind that the treads have steel threads in them and the bead of the tire has a steel cable embedded in it. These are made of very hard steel and should only be taken on out of necessary.

I placed the tire under the eve so it will receive more than the standard amount of rain water. I stuck a piece of a sheet metal in the bottom to prevent voles from burrowing up into the stack.

I started filling the tire with a shovel of straw and a shovel of dirt. This straw has been setting on the ground for over a decade. The straw has been wet for about 3 months of each year and then dehydrated for the rest of the year. The straw is in pretty bad shape, but still identifiable.

I had originally expected that it would take weeks or months to fill these four. The clean up efforts I engaged in filled it up inside a single day. I have at least that much straw again laying around. I'll keep the top tire 1/2 to 3/4 full and keep it wet and cut up four more tires.

Prowler Rebuild continued - Utilities

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, drove his "testosterone sucking minivan" to the hardware store and bought more supplies for his Prowler. Those are his words, not mine. I drive and older version of the same make of minivan and do the same thing.

He's run the plumbing,

electricity,

R-13 insulation, interior studs,

and HVAC.

Vicious Hunters

This is now a legitimate blog now. It has cats in it. I got these two vicious hunters on May 24. They are still frightened by my size, but if I catch them unaware, they are willing to suffer to suffer a petting. They have grown used to my place enough to start romping around at night.

This place is quiet enough that you can hear snow hit the ground. So when kittens charge across my carpeted plywood floor, it's loud enough to wake me up. I turned on my white noise generator on to drown them out last night. It worked up until the bolder of the two, the one with white feet, crawled up on top of me.

I have started putting their food up on the top of the fridge from morning until 7PM. The Idea is to connect 7PM to food in their minds. I want to reintroduce them to the out doors, but I want to close them indoors for the night to protect them from the coyotes until I can by a Mossberg and drop the local coyote and errant dog population a bit.

Mailbox of Doom

About 16 years ago, when I lived in Lake Stevens, Washington, we had trouble with people smashing our mailbox and knocking it over. I got some 1/4 inch steel plate and welded up this 76 pound mailbox. I mounted it on a 7 & 1/2 foot steel I-beam cemented in the ground. Several people that decided to turn around in our driveway left some paint from their cars on the box.
After moving here, this box has gone through a variety of posts. The biggest risk to the post here is the snow plow. It will both knock the post sideways and up as it shoves snow up against it.

This is my latest post. It is double hinged so it will go up and down and side to side and the springs on the back will push it back.

The bad news is I didn't have any numbers on the support springs so I couldn't determine if they were strong enough to hold it up until it was installed. Worse, I came down with Cave Troll Flu right then and it sat there hanging for almost 2 weeks.

Now that I am mostly recovered, I proceeded to fix the problem. Since the Post office tells me they want it 42 inches from the ground, I stuck a 42 inch stick under the end of the box and measured the length of the springs. I cut two pieces of pipe 12 inches long and slid them inside the springs. This held the box up right at the correct height while still allowing the post hinge up when the plow goes by.

With it structurally sound, I got some paint and painted the whole thing white. The other mailboxes now look pretty sad.