The Department of Redundancy Department

I’ve been thinking about redundancy these last few days. The power supply on my workstation computer crapped out. It was (is)a major inconvenience. For instance, all the images of the HVAC system I’d show you were on the virtual desktop, and they’ll be unavailable for a week while I wait for the replacement part to arrive. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy having someone describe a heating system, instead of seeing one. Playboy in braille has nothing on me, man.

But the computer and the heating system are similar in some respects. They’re both relying on the Department of Redundancy Department to keep on keeping on. I’ll explain.

The heating system in our house, isn’t. I heat the house, but it’s not a system.

system /sĭs′təm/
noun

A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole, especially.

OK, maybe it is a system, just not in the way people usually think of a system. It’s not a flow chart. It’s a Venn Diagram. There are disparate elements, and they can be interrelated, or interdependent as necessary, but ultimately they don’t have a lot to do with one another. In some aspects they compete with each other. In others, they work together as required. It’s an ad hoc kind of system.

The heat pump isn’t big enough to heat the house when it’s twenty below. So what? If I put in a unitary system that could handle it, it would cost too much and work poorly as an air conditioning unit in the summer (too big). When it was eighteen below zero last winter, we ran the pellet stove and the heat pump at the same time, and didn’t notice anything but the bill.

If you plan for a worst-case scenario, and then use that as a baseline, you’re overprepared most of the time. And while hoarding, disguised as prepping, is in vogue, it doesn’t work in a world where the apocalypse never comes. It really doesn’t work even if the apocalypse does come, because cataclysms have a tendency to be unpredictable. What exactly do you hoard? Everything? It’s not possible.

Well, you certainly can’t hoard heat. Keep firewood too long, and it rots. Pellets get moldy in the summer from the humidity. Storing electricity for later isn’t such a great idea, either. As the joke goes, electric cars are more reliable than gas-powered cars. Up to 95% of all the electric cars ever made are still on the road. The other 5% made it home.

So making huge, unitary systems and then defending them and backing them up is difficult stuff. I didn’t have a power supply hanging around that could replace the one in my ancient computer. I could have put one on the shelf ten years ago. But how would I know what to hoard? Maybe the mother board would quit. The hard drive. The fans. The RAM. Pretty soon you’re not hoarding parts, you’re hoarding a whole ‘nother unitary system in case the original goes on the blink. But then again, how do you know a stored computer will still work when you dust it off after years in storage. Better get two spares, huh?

People who live where the weather is more than an inconvenience understand the Department of Redundancy Department. Usually because they learned the hard way, like I did. You don’t want duplicates. You want alternatives. If the heat pump goes on the blink, you still have the pellet stove. If the pellet stove doesn’t work, you still have baseboard electric heat. If there’s no electricity, you can’t run the baseboard heat, or the heat pump, but you can run a generator and run the pellet stove. If the generator quits, you hook up an inverter to the car battery and run the engine with an extension cord into the house to run the pellet stove. If that quits, you can swap the extension cord over to backup backup backup backup scheme and burn wood in the wood furnace. If it’s cold enough, you run damn near everything. I’ve done all those things. You would, too, if it was twenty below.

You know everything works because you use it every once in a while. Nothing has to do everything — or else. You end up with less stuff hanging around in the long run, because while you might have two of everything, you don’t have three of anything.

So the computer didn’t work. There were standalone backup drives on the desk. The Department of Redundancy Department strikes again. There are backups held offsite, too, of course, but if you trust an internet company to be reliable forever, I have some CMGI stock to sell you. And a bridge.

The computer that quit a few days ago was the backup. I’d replaced it with something better, that wasn’t, and had to resurrect the old beast from the shelf. So the interruption was more of a nuisance  than might have usually been the case. I fished through all sorts of hardware I had hanging around, trying to cobble together a bridge to a Fedex delivery. I got sort of stymied left and right. Dongle A didn’t mesh with Jack B or fit in Case C, etc. After more than a few hours of messing about in firewalls and pressing the backup backup backup backup laptop back into service, trying to make autofill behave, and get Google to stop freaking out because I was logging in to Google things sitting three inches to the left of the usual spot, I remembered the ultimate time-saving, aggravation-avoiding backup plan of all time. I went and got a stored, eight-page printed paper backup of every login and password I needed, and dutifully typed each one into the browser as needed.

It’s easy to be impressed by companies the size of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco, etc., but they still can’t compete with Johannes Gutenberg yet. Not even close. I’ll raise my hand if they manage to pass a Ticonderoga #2 on the way.

The Greek Goddess of Open Toed Sandals

Let’s get hysterical about hysteresis for a moment. If you’re new to this HVAC game, you might think hysteresis was the Greek goddess of open toed sandals or something. Or maybe hysteresis is that problem that sends your wife to the pharmacy at 11 PM on Saturday night, wearing sweatpants, because, you know.

No, hysteresis is a somewhat less interesting subject than that. Technically, hysteresis can apply to all sorts of things, like magnetism or the gas pedal in your car. In short, it means a lag between what you want, and what you get. The only place you’ll probably ever encounter it as a topic of conversation in the wild is when you’re talking to the dirty HVAC installer who leaves handprints all over your wallpaper while adjusting your thermostat. He’ll say, “How much hysteresis to you want, anyway?”, and you’ll mumble and dissemble and try to remember Greek legends to no avail.

I’ll try to explain it. Let’s say you want your house to be 72-degrees. With the panache of Canute, you command your furnace, if it’s winter, to make it so. Of course you’re a bit of a coward, and are justifiably afraid of confronting your furnace face to dial (it’s dark and scary down there), so you send an envoy instead. This envoy, your thermostat, sends a strongly worded communique via a twelve-volt DC tingle through a tiny wire or two to your furnace. But your furnace isn’t afraid of you. It knows that if given a Sophie’s Choice between the furnace and her husband, any sensible woman would choose central heating every time. So the furnace tells you to wait, tough guy, until it’s ready to give you some heat.

That’s a form of hysteresis. It’s related to inertia. In the same way your teenage boys on the couch respond to stimuli, your furnace doesn’t jump to it immediately when ordered to do things. It’s a smart policy on their part. People fumble around with the settings on the thermostat constantly, and hysteresis helps them sit shiva on the current settings until you make up your mind, or your thumb, if you have a touchpad. Some time passes, and it finally decides to trust you, and the furnace clicks on.

But you’re not done with hysteresis. Not by a long shot. Let’s say it’s 66-degrees in your dining room, and you want 72 in there. With most furnaces, they’ll hit 72 and keep going. They figure you’re an excitable sort, and if they halt the heating proceedings exactly at 72, the temperature will drop to 71 pretty quick, and you’ll start banging on the thermostat again right away. So the furnace is set to over shoot the temp you want. That’s hysteresis. By the same token, if the low temp is set for something like 66, so you can sleep at night with more than a sheet over you, it likely will not rouse itself until the temp reaches 64, and then click on. Coming or going, that’s hysteresis.

Of course the modern electronic thermostat has many, many settings that adjust hysteresis. They involve calling up fourteen menus on a tiny screen and interpreting and entering more codes than it takes to launch missiles from a Trident sub, but it can be done. In practice, whatever comes from the factory is good enough, whether it is or not. Our thermostat stops a few minutes after reaching the desired temp, before it adds an additional degree, and won’t come on again until a short while after the temp is two degrees below the desired. It actually tells you to WAIT on the screen when it hits a set point. Mighty haughty, your thermostat is. Your mileage might vary.

So hysteresis is smart and stupid at the same time. It’s smart, because the furnace hates cycling on and off over and over over minor changes in temp, so it overshoots a bit when it runs, and waits a little before it runs, or doesn’t run. That last sentence is kinda confusing, I admit, and doesn’t explain a lot, but how many chances does an author get to write “on and off over and over over” and still make the sentence parse? I couldn’t resist.

So that’s the smart part. The dumb part is that the ideal heating appliance would run continuously, so hysteresis would be out of a job. It would adjust itself continuously to the conditions and keep everything steady-state. The Amalgamated Brotherhood of United Hysteresis is a very powerful union, though, so this ideal heating device is rarely discussed, never mind invented.

Modern houses are usually much better insulated than in the past, and weatherstipped until a firefly in a peanut butter jar with holes punched in the lid has better ventilation. The heating (and cooling, of course) devices are better at doing their thing, and the thermostats are more accurate than the big clunky dial on the wall of our utes. But there’s still a fair bit of hysteresis involved, especially if you have too much money, and are the impatient sort.

Let’s say you’re building a new snouthouse and you’re determined to finally have things your way and you’re not scrimping on anything this time around. You inform the General Contractor to inform the HVAC guy to put in the HeatSmiter Megaladon furnace or the the COOLpro Ice Station Zebra model AC blaster. You’re not going to wait for the house to warm up, or cool off, ever again. You tell him you want your hair to be blown back like a biplane pilot when the thing comes on.

This is dumb. HVAC doesn’t work (well) that way. You may want a machine that does the trick, but a machine that does the trick+10 is a worse machine, not a better one. If you select a bigger air conditioner than you need, the condenser outside becomes a block of ice. The heat inside your house that you’re trying to get rid of isn’t enough to warm up the circulating refrigerant to keep it from freezing up. By the same token, if you have a ginormous furnace, the hysteresis will be notable, because it will blast way past what you actually require before it can stop. It will run a lot, just for very short periods of time. If you know anything about machinery, you’ll know that starting and stopping is what wears them out quick. And you’ll be too hot and too cold over and over anyway.

So we couldn’t afford a bigger heat pump, or to run it even if we could. Good. The bigger one would have frozen up solid when we ran the A/C, because we don’t need very much here in Maine. And the bigger heating capacity would have been nice, but bankrupting yourself to run a bigger thing less often wouldn’t help us. We were going to achieve the closest thing to steady state HVAC we could cook up.

[To be continued]

Beware RFRoT. Stick With BTNRoT

Fair warning: All my rules of thumb have a black fingernail where I hit it with a hammer. In my experience, most rules of thumb about house construction are devised by an engineer, not an architect. If you ask an engineer how strong something needs to be to keep if from falling on the occupants, he’ll tell you triple what’s really necessary. Can you blame him? He doesn’t want to get sued, and he knows that whatever he specifies is going to be installed by a guy whose lips move when he reads street signs. If you ask an architect how strong something needs to be to keep it from falling on the occupants, he’ll first wonder aloud why anyone would worry about the occupants, and then tell you to ask an engineer if you’re that interested.

I do know how to do things correctly. I can follow the building code to a T, and have. I can ladle customer money all over a budget with triple what’s necessary to get the job done. But unfortunately, I’m the customer, and a budget is some sort of bird that looks like a canary, I think. I need poor people rules of thumb. I need Better Than Nothing Rules of Thumb (BTNRoT).

Designing an HVAC system from scratch required many, many rules of thumb to be concatenated and then basically ignored. Plumbing and heating guys are maybe the most nuts about spending your money to amuse themselves. If you’ve ever watched This Very Expensive Nominally Old House That Is Definitely Not Going To Get Any Cheaper, you’ve seen their HVAC homunculus standing in what looks like the engine room of a nuclear sub, explaining why you NEED a $175,000 heating system. You know, to save money.

So while I’m forced to use rules of thumb, I’ll be shaving points off them like I’m a power forward on a college basketball team with money riding on the game. I’m going to make it work, not make it work plus 200%.

Now, the heat pump air handler says it puts out 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of handled-air goodness. The compressor is rated for 36,000 BTUs. Both of those numbers are exactly half what the RFRoT (Rich Folks Rule of Thumb) say they should be to heat a house in western Maine. And that’s after I’ve shaved off the fudge factor. I’ve seen 100,000 BTUs mentioned here and there. Yikes.

You can buy a larger versions of the heat pump/air handler we purchased. They’re terrifying. They have frightening price tags and use horrifying amounts of electricity just to increase the output from 36K to 48K. And you couldn’t lift the condenser without mid-80s Schwarzenegger to lend a hand. And even if our electrical service could handle one (it can’t), we couldn’t possibly afford to run it. So I used my ultimate rule of thumb: If I can’t afford it, it doesn’t exist.

So rules of thumb say if I have a 1,000 CFM air handler, and maybe 36,000 BTUs, I can heat half my house. I know I can do better than that using BTNRoT.

So how do we make the CFM work? By making it easier for less to do more. We’ll put the shortest possible duct runs into the house, instead of running them all over the place to achieve all sorts of weird rules of thumb that matter to the RFRoT HVAC homunculi but no one sane or poor. We won’t use anything but smooth, round, metal ducts, instead of the moderately less expensive insulated flexible duct, which is essentially a slinky with a garbage bag wrapped around it.

Everyone uses it nowadays, and everyone needs more CFM because of it. Air doesn’t like passing through a bendy, crinkled, corrugated tube, so you have to push harder. We’ll use a lot of these instead:

Speaking of crinkled, this is a photo of a delivery during a somewhat amusing interlude where the Orange Place tried sending things without boxing them first. The delivery drivers treated them pretty badly, but honestly, no worse than the average HVAC journeyman would while taking them off the truck and throwing them down the bulkhead stairs. Short, straight runs with smooth metal tubes can almost heal up that black thumbnail on your BTNRoT. And we’ll be avoiding elbows like the plague, because they slow down airflow a lot, and they cost a relative fortune.

Of course you’re going to need plenums, coming and going. If you’re not familiar with moving air in a house, you have to understand that big fans don’t matter if you don’t take as much air out of the room as the amount you’re trying to put in. That means you need cold air return ducts going back to a cold air return plenum, and a hot air plenum to distribute your warmed air back to the octopus of ducts you have serving all your rooms. Ours looks like this:

Sheet metal work like these plenums is amazingly expensive if you hire it done. I bought a return air plenum kit to cheat a little. I had to modify it a lot, but it was still a lot easier than making one from scratch. It acts as a filter box and a stand for the air handler. The hot air plenum on top I made from sheets of galvanized metal. It’s not that hard with a few cutting shears from Harbor Fraught and a box of bandaids. It’s bigger than it looks. Part of it extends out over the back to accept large pipes nicely.

In the picture, you’re looking at two hot air ducts, and one cold air return (it goes down under the air handler to be pulled through a big filter and up into the air handler to be, you know, handled). There’s another very large cold air return hidden behind the cabinet. The floor grate in the dining room floor has a filter box I built slung under the floor (the tan thing), which has a pipe leading straight down to the back of the filter box. Two big ones in, two big ones out. You know, like a date at a Sizzler.

[To be continued]

So Simple, Even a Cave Man Can Do It

I’m considered somewhat hidebound by a lot of people. That’s OK. You develop a thick hide after a while of being hidebound. I like traditional stuff more than is popular right now. As a matter of fact, more than is allowed right now. On further reflection, more than is legal right now. My family has been referred to as “The Amish” by some of our relatives, not entirely with affection. They came to our house and they couldn’t watch broadcast television. That’s all it took to earn the sobriquet. Needless to say, they only came once.

On the other hand, we’re fairly cutting edge on many fronts, although it might not seem so to many. I get asked about my heat pump heating system by people who regard us as barely walking upright, for instance. One can’t help but notice that several of my cro-magnon relatives installed heat pumps in their caves when they found out we neanderthals had central air conditioning, and they didn’t, even though their houses cost twenty or thirty times what ours did.

The true reason for this disconnect between our image and reality is a confusion about what true progress is. In many ways, our family is trying to live in the future, and peevishly waiting for technology and culture to catch up with us. It’s not our fault that society has decided that a Dickensian lifestyle of dissipated illegitimate subsidized squalor should be called progress, as long as the workhouses have a Facebook page. That’s not progress. Progress is when things get better. Period. It’s not when things get more complicated. It’s not when you need a phone to turn on your light switches or buy a cup of coffee.

So for example, we had to wait around for manufacturers to figure out how to make a heat pump that worked in our climate, make it affordable, and make it so I could install it myself. I wanted one long before they existed. Fixing the existing oil burning boiler in our dilapidated house would have been an exercise in nostalgia, if you ask me. The same people who call us Amish would understand it, but honestly, it’s a barbarous way to make heat. We bided our time and made do with firewood and pellets. They weren’t exactly cutting edge technologies, but we were selecting from the tallest midgets in the circus. They seemed less crazy than paying through the nose every month for a giant tub of black Venezuelan goo in the basement to heat our house.

So I was more than ready for another answer, a better answer, and lo and behold, it showed up. I’m skeptical of everything to the point of cynicism, but I assure you I know a good thing when I see it. I found this video:

Now, let’s call this what it is. It’s marketing. This video is made by Mr. Cool, and they didn’t make it out of the goodness of their hearts. But it wasn’t a commercial. It was very old school marketing. They wanted to convey important information about their products to A: Increase brand awareness, and B: Overcome conventional attitudes about heat pumps using factual information. It’s way, way more honest and informative than anything that’s been published or broadcast in the news media since the Maine was sunk.

They’re not stupid, and while the better angels of their marketing department might have made this video, elision is still a form of fibbing. They’re not just in Grand Forks North Dakota because it’s cold there. I get suspicious, and poked around, and found out Grand Forks has some of the cheapest electrical rates in the country. This thing will work wherever you are in the US, but your mileage will most definitely vary when the electric bill comes. But still, it is what it is.

If you’ve ever been in a position to purchase materials and equipment for a large organization, you might be familiar with this form of marketing. Big companies hire outside salespeople to visit other big companies in order to increase brand awareness and overcome price and delivery hesitancy. These salespeople were good at hail-fellow-well-met handshakes and golf. They knew good restaurants to plop your tired purchasing manager ass in, and they knew enough to pick up the check, too. They generally knew every damn thing about the products they were trying to sell. If they didn’t, they didn’t sell much. They had an effective mixture of information and personality.

I was later informed that Mr. Cool has an enormous presence on broadcast TV. They run the same sorts of information-free, aspirational sales pitches with unfunny jokes ladled all over them and women in low-cut dresses that all companies foist on television audiences. Of course I’d never see them, but everyone who called us Amish had seen them 10,000 times. They didn’t reach for their checkbooks until they heard about ours, though.

Sometimes pioneers are those skeletons you see by the side of the trail with arrows sticking out of their bleached rib cages. Sometimes they’re the guys with A/C in August. They’re never the guys who stay home and watch TV.

Even Tantalus Wouldn’t Drink That

Even back before I knew I wanted a heat pump, and a pony, I knew I wanted to handle some air. In HVAC, this is usually handled by an air handler. Duh. That’s a big cabinet-looking appliance with a big fan in it in most people’s houses. If you have a standard furnace, the unit itself usually functions as the air handler too. You burn some sort of gas or goo to heat up some air and then you blow it through some ducts hither and yon around your house. Boilers do the same sort of thing, but they heat water instead of air, and circulate that around.

Well, I was producing hot air without the goo already. I”m nor referring to blogging here. I was burning pellets in a big stove and dumping the hot air in the dining room. Luckily, the dining room was more or less centrally located, but heat takes some persuasion to get it to go to where you want it. The little 200CFM fan in the back of the pellet stove wasn’t going to spread it around 2,000 square feet of house. We didn’t (don’t) have the money for a proper central heating system, so we resorted to our default guerilla warfare approach to the problem.

Way back when, I outlined our scheme to get heat from the dining room upstairs into our children’s bedrooms in The Tin Man’s Autopsy. We couldn’t afford an air handler, but we could put some tin pipes between floors to coax the heat upstairs.

Then I painstakingly explained Eight Things That Won’t Happen in Heating, to outline why I was doing what I was doing in the manner I was doing it, but I freely admit I did a lousy job explaining what I wanted a pony for. This HVAC explanation was roundly ignored by several people in the comments, who love them some ceiling fans, and the rest of the internet, more or less. After a somewhat charming lagniappe filled with my children’s music videos and earnest pleas to my wife not to leave my sorry ass even though I didn’t get her a pony for our anniversary, I finally got around to Let’s See if Sippican Can Tie His Heating System Into His Sewer System.

Of course everyone immediately lost interest in my ersatz air handling explanations and glommed onto the Geyser of Excrement tale. I know I did. In the world of construction triage, fixing a problem with not enough BTUs floating by comes well after stopping merde floating by in the basement. You can read all about it at the link, if you like. Lots and lots of people have. It’s a testament to what’s important in this online world that the most notable thing I ever wrote was about just how full of shite my life had become.

But ignored in the scum scrum was the fact that we did actually solve our air handling problem, albeit incrementally, not exponentially. We installed ducts up high in the dining room wall, and ran them up into the second floor. It’s all achieved inside of closets, a happy accident of floor layout. The inlet pipe was up by the ceiling in the dining room. There were two outlets upstairs, one for each kid’s bedroom. We simply stood a regular tabletop fan on top of the big cabinet that once stood there, and it blew the heated air upstairs. It wasn’t a pony or anything, but the kids still liked it.

I had bought enough tin to make a cold air return as well. I planned on recovering cold air near the floors in the bedrooms upstairs, and dumping it through the floor directly over the pellet stove. It would make a nice convection loop, and make it easier to force air up the ducts into the rooms in the first place. It was a great idea that was not to be. When the geyser hit, I had to return the remaining HVAC ducts to the store to get a credit to apply to the cost of some of the plumbing supplies we were going to need tout de suite. I was Tantalus, but I wasn’t up to my knees in water, exactly.

But the seeds of inspiration were sown. I went into my closet and looked up, and saw ductwork heading upstairs. Then I looked straight down, and realized the furnace was directly below in the basement. From the inside of that closet, and the closet above it upstairs, I could picture ductwork coming straight up from the basement and serving the living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and the hallways and staircases on two floors.

It would take years of scrimping and saving, but I could see a way to heat the whole house with a central heating plenum and ducts running straight up through the center of the house, and not lose an inch of livable floor space in the bargain. It wasn’t a pony, but central heating would still be pretty good. Besides, I’m not sure a pony would taste all that good, even if we got our hands on one.

[To be continued]