Snow'd 'nuf yet?

It is light out, about as much light as you can have with full cloud cover and lots of falling snow. The dogs are curled up in a balls and I get to wake them up, usually by this time they've stirred and Mac has come over and started to lick my face.

Then the dogs head toward the door and wait for me to open it. I pass the dogs and open the door. Mac gets to the threshold looks at the snow which is just deep enough under the overhang so the bottom of the storm door scrapes against it. Mac sticks his nose a bit further out, snifs a couple times and retreats, circling around to his sitting position by the cupboard as if he is waiting for a treat when he's just returned from outside. Sorry Mac No Biscuit. We all retreat to the warmth of the house, the dogs curl up on the couch and bed, I go off to take a shower.

Radar seems to indicate a couple hour gap in the storm after a bit. When it lets up I'll shovel the porch and fire up the Cub Cadet to clear the snow.

Winter Romp

Great day out on the trails

Organic Farming Class

Cations, Compost and Innoculants - Oh My!

Honda Insight: The tale of the fair weather Hybrid

A couple years ago upon returning from the Winter Romp on a rather chilly weekend (iirc, the Saturday morning temperature in Waterville, Me. was -17, maybe up to -13 by the time we left the hotel., high for the day was 5F. Cold enough any Land Rover Owner begs, borrows or steals a piece of cardboard to block the airflow through the radiator so that heat can be re-directed to the cabin. Upon returning from Maine, emptying out the truck and all, tuesday even in Southern New England it wasn't much warmer, being in the single digits for lows, and I went to fire up the Honda (which doesn't need cardboard blocking the radiator to produce heat) whereupon the batteries were immediately flattened and half the lights on the dashboard lit up and one might say the car lost its spark, at least the hybrid half of it did.

Now the Honda hybrid design of the Insight, doesn't really operate very well as a car when the hybrid bits go on strike. The petrol engine continues to run, but there isn't enough juice available in the charging system or in the battery to really start the car repeatedly and recover from short trips. This leaves you with all these lights on the dash board flickering on and off as your driving down the road. You sort of have a choice of which ONE electrical accessory you want to use, headlamps, the radio, or the heater -- you don't have a choice with the Electric Power Steering assist, it operates at low speed sucking the remaining life out of you anemic 12V battery system. So at this point the electrical system warming lamp is coming and going, along with the BRAKE lamp, while the IMA lamp is on steady. Not quite the blue-screen-of-death, but pretty darned close, call it 'LIMP HOME' mode.

What is a hybrid less the electric bits? Junk

Now the really fun part of the Honda Insight - at least to the driver IS the Hybrid system. That electric motor tacked onto the end of the petrol engine provides most of the low-end torque - and all of it that matters to make the car fun to drive. Pull away from the line quick? Slurp juice of the batteries and turn it into torque. Accelerate through the gears? Unless you're delaying shifts until the new gear is over 2500rpm, that electric motor makes the car go-go-go.

Two years and 24,000 miles ago, it was not looking well for the car, I figured it was out of warranty and brought it to a local mechanic, where they discovered that Honda had increased the warranty to 150,000 miles for portions of the hybrid's electric components. So off to the dealer. The dealer knew part of it was covered, but it looked like when that covered component failed, it allowed the batteries to be over drawn and trashed the remainder of the power subsystem tucked above the rear axle. Fortunately, Honda decided to cover it and replaced the entire unit. The dealer said the charge back for the repair was $6500. to Honda (at their discounted warranty labour rate.) The cost of that repair was pretty much equal to the value of the vehicle.

Fast Forward to Friday Morning: Deja Vu

The temperature's risen above zero F (-17C) from the overnight low of -9F. The Insight cranks and falls back to chugging on the wee starter - not a good sign. The battery level is same as before - that's a good sign, the check-engine light, maybe not so much. I pull off and get to the first stop light and when leaving, nearly stall it - slip the clutch and pull away but without any contribution from the Hybrid bits - the IMA light is on steady and the other lights on the dash start playing games. Crap. Ring up the local dealer and bring it over a bit later. They'll diagnose it for $109. Two and a half hours later they give me a ring back. The good news, it is only a fuse. No ordinary car fuse, this is one of the 100Amp fuses to the battery pack and is about $100. Phew. sigh of relief... now the bad news - it is located at the bottom of the hybrid bits in the rear - everything needs to taken apart to get to it, and it is 5 hours of labour. That makes it a $800. blown fuse. Only a 1/4 to a 1/5th the current value of the car :-) Like Click and Clack say - still cheaper than a couple months of a new care payment. Maybe I can get another 100,000 miles out of this vehicle. Hmmm. wonder if I can stump the chumps with this problem.

Design Temperature Difference

We've finally hit that portion of the New England Winter where the temperatures drop down below 20F and when one again experiences something about the thawing temperature water it seems wonderfully warm, even when accompanied by snow. The snow underfoot squeaks when you tread upon it - volume and pitch increasing as the mercury decreases. The northern portion of the deck, deprived of sun in the summer, is coated with ice from the previous freezing rain a week ago. The boards no longer bend or squeak but sound as gunshots when the ice fractures allowing them to move independent of their neighbors. Meanwhile, inside, any bits of water in the air can now be found condensing on the lower edges of the upper window sashes. Spare those two small windows, where the outer edge has gone to frost not to mention the storm door which even yesterday's mild +8F temperatures only had condensation, today is fully frosted. The dogs are less eager to go out and quick to return. The weather station recorded a low just past -9F while another sensor shielded from ground radiation reported a low of -14F in pre-dawn hours.

Normally one doesn't give a lot of thought to walking over to the thermostat and spinning the dial to change the temperature, but hopefully, someone long before figured out how much heat would need to be available to satisfy that request - even when it is something like 14 below 0F outside. The difference between the coldest outside temperature and warmest inside temperature for a heating system is then something like 80F - from -14F to 66F. That 80 degrees is called the Design Temperature Difference (DTD.) Through the end of the summer, while the orchard was soaking up sun and water, yours truely was giving a lot of thought to the DTD not to mention everything else about the heating system, as after Labour Day everything between the thermostat and cast iron radiators was removed from the house as the post-war (WWII) oil-fired boiler and possibly older iron pipe, was upgraded to a modern Natural Gas-fired boiler and controls. Somewhere in there were calculations about how much heat was put out by the old system (given the size of the cast iron radiators and operating temperature), the probable heat lost of the mostly under or un-insulated house, as well as the potential heat dissipation of all the fixtures (existing and proposed.) Now that thinking's been done, in that early morning haze I wake up to a slightly warmer house thanks to the programmable thermostat, all I need do is find my slippers and can wander off to let the dogs out and then can wander into a bathroom which is 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house, thanks to these wonderful little devices called thermostatic regulating valves.

Happy New Year 3 !

(Well, the third New Year of Wee-Farm!)

This is actually the first post, though if Blogger lets us screw with the post date, maybe we will go back in time...

The days are still too darned short, with the temperature regularly well below freezing "mild" has disappeared from the vocabulary.   Seems every day where the temperatures nudge freezing is associated with precipitation.  As we break open that new Ducks Unlimited or California Responsible Pet Owners Coalition calendar, it is time to reflect on the progress of the old year and start planning for the one ahead.   Start organizing the receipts for tax time, check that time sheets have been completed.

The five dozen second year dwarf fruit trees have for the most part survived the best of my intentions or lack of attention, as have the four dozen first-year stone fruit & pear dwarfs from the spring.  The former are for the most part protected by rodent guards, while that fall chore ran afoul of home improvements later in season - hopefully the harrowing of the field and raking away of dead grass will leave enough barren surface the voles won't dare to venture out and become fodder for the hawks and feral cats.

Fortunately at our lower elevation South Berlin escaped most of the damage from the recent ice-storm which deprived many neighboring communities of power for many days.

First Monday of the new year and the mail box is full of catalogs from Johnny's Selected Seeds and other nursery / garden vendors.   Stark Bros. beat the rush and arrived before the turn of the year. The quest this year will be to complete the pears and stone fruit - about another 50 trees, as well as starting in on the berry patch with blueberries, thornless blackberries and perhaps aronia berries. A sprayer needs to be sorted out, as well as starting on longer term irrigation plans - not to mention finishing off the existing stock with weed-control cloth & pea gravel and turning the in-row gaps over for buckwheat planting.

Back to the books and seed catalogs.

TTFN.