sat, 13-dec-2008, 16:43

Heat gun, vent pipe

Heat gun, vent pipe

Last winter our vent pipe froze solid and I spent a couple hours in the attic with a heat gun melting the blockage. A couple days ago I noticed that flushing the toilet was pulling water out of the traps in the sink and bathtub, so I knew the vent was getting plugged again. My attempt at a fix over the summer was to put a larger pipe over the vent on the roof so the condensation might happen in the outer pipe, which could be easily removed and cleaned out. Unfortunately, when I got up on the roof today, not only was it impossible to get the outer pipe free, but the growing constriction wasn’t in the outer pipe anyway. Mid-summer my neighbor suggested replacing the section of the vent in the attic with a much larger diameter pipe (6” was his suggestion) and then insulating it. I never got around to it; almost frozen vent pipe; a priori.

The total freezing degree days to this point in the winter season has been 2,258, which ought to give me a pretty good way of estimating when I’ll have another problem. Thus far we’ve had 74 days with an average daily temperature below freezing, and the average temperature for those days was 1.4°F. That’s below normal for the year: nine of the last eleven weeks have been below average. But the heart of the winter is approaching, so it’ll take many fewer than 74 days to double our freezing degree days for the season.

My first attempt to fix the clog was to insert a heat gun into the clean out and let the warm air from the heat gun melt it (shown in the photo). I don’t think this had any real effect. I kept it going for a little over an hour, monitoring the backside of the pipe to make sure the heat gun wasn’t melting it. But it was around -10°F this morning, so I’ll bet the hot air was pretty cold by the time it rose to the ice. The second attempt was using a pipe snake from up on the roof, but it couldn’t go past the constriction, and even if it had, I’m not sure it really would have cleared out much ice. Finally, I dragged a five gallon bucket filled with hot water up onto the roof. I got about three gallons into the vent before it was filled to the top. At first I was nervous that this wasn’t going to work and I’d have three gallons of water turning to ice in the vent, but the water started dropping slowly, and after a minute, the blockage gave way and hot water came plunging down the pipe. I poured the final gallon or two through the pipe, and came down off the roof.

Tomorrow I’ll put some 2” fiberglass insulation around the part of the pipe that’s exposed in the attic, which should help. And I’ll be keeping my eye on the total freezing degree days for the rest of the winter. Once it gets up to 4,000, I may want to go back up on the roof with another bucket of hot water.

SQL query from my weather database: SELECT sum(32.0 - t_avg::double precision) FROM daily;
sat, 25-oct-2008, 17:16

Twenty-below

-20°F

Today I brewed my 80th batch of beer, One-eyed Squirrel (named after a one-eyed squirrel that showed up at our feeders this fall). I decided to brew beer earlier in the week and last night I got the brewing water from Water Wagon (a coin-operated water depot where many people in Fairbanks go to get their drinking water). It’s more convenient to brew out by the red cabin than near the house, so I haul a 55 gallon drum of water out there. The water is normally around 40°F when it goes into the drum, and that’s a perfect temperature for the cold water supply used in my plate chiller which quickly chills boiling hot wort down to yeast pitching temperatures; around 68°F. When we went to bed last night it was a balmy 2°F outside, so I wasn’t worried about leaving the water out on the red cabin’s deck.

This morning, as you can see in the image on the left, it was -20°F, and the temperature of the water in the 55 gallon drum had dropped to 32°F. As soon as I started pumping it into the pot for the mash it froze in the lines to the pump. I wound up using a heat gun to keep the pipes and lines thawed while I pumped the water into a drum inside the red cabin where it’s warm. Six hours later when I was using the water to chill the wort, the water temperature was still 32°F. There’s a lot of energy between 32°F water that’s frozen and 32°F water that’s about to be 33 degrees, and I had 50 gallons of water somewhere between those two states all day today.

The brew went well. I double-ground the grains last night, and it paid off, giving me an 82% mash efficiency. Hopefully the yeast will take off later tonight or tomorrow and the beer will be good. It’s the first time I’ve used Cascade hops in several years and I’m hoping they don’t disappoint. In the past I’ve found the flavor to be somewhat soapy, but with the worldwide hop shortage, there’s limited selection when it comes to whole leaf hops. I’ll take what I can get.

This is my first batch using our old refrigerator as a fermentation chamber instead of the chamber I built several years ago. We keep the red cabin pretty cold in the winter, so the fridge is set up with an enclosed light bulb as a heater (just like the old fermentation chamber), but using a fridge allows for the possibility of cooling it down if the fermentation heats up the interior too much (a problem I’ve had in the past with the old fermentation chamber). I’ll also use it to brew lagers at some point. After 80 beers, maybe it’s time to give a lager a try.

tags: beer  brewing  house  weather 
sun, 12-oct-2008, 10:29

Station in the snow

weather station, dog yard, snow

A week or so ago we got a weather station (it’s the thing at the top of the pole on the left side of the dog yard fence in the photo) so we can keep track of the weather at our house. We’re one of the coldest places in the Fairbanks area, so we’re excited to see just how different our weather is. We’re sending the data to the Citizen Weather Observer Program where it’s ingested, analyzed, and disseminated by NOAA. I don’t know if they use it in their forecasting, but we’ve already shown up in a few Public Information Statements from the local forecast office.

Full details on the station, with some plots and other data reports (I’m still working on most of these…) are at http://swingleydev.com/weather/dw1454/. The station code is DW1454 and shows up in MADIS as D1454.

sun, 28-sep-2008, 07:27

First snow by shed-light

first snow of 2008

We got our first real snowfall last night, about two inches at our place. It probably won’t last (the second week in October is normally when we get the snow that stays until April), but it means the roads will be dangerous for the next couple days or weeks. Last week we saw our first great horned owl of the fall, and the snowshoe hares are rapidly turning white so winter is just about here. We’re hoping for a bunch of early season snowfall this year to get the trails set up for skiing and mushing.

What’s cool about the first snowfall of the year, especially when it’s a lot of snow like last night, is how totally different the world looks. You go to bed and it’s painted in yellows and browns, but when you wake up, it’s all cleaned up in black and white and blue. I know it’ll melt, probably later today and turn brown again, but as the sun comes up on the new wintry world, it feels fresh.

I finished wiring the shed yesterday afternoon. I was surprised at how long it took, but since everything is connected in series, each connection has to be perfect or nothing down the line will work. I’ve lived in enough cabins with funky wiring to know that it’s better to do it right the first time. The shed now has an outlet on each wall, an outdoor GFCI outlet on the outside of the building, a pair of lights in the ceiling, and an outdoor motion-detecting floodlight (that’s what’s lighting the photo on the right). The lights are wired to a switch next to the door. All that’s left is to clean up the inside and build what we need to store stuff in there. We’d planned on painting the floor, but I think it’s too late in the year for that now.

tags: house  shed  snow  weather  winter 
fri, 01-aug-2008, 20:05

Rosie Creek Flooding

rosie creek flooding

We’ve had four days of nearly constant, heavy rain here in Fairbanks, and the levels of the Interior rivers and streams have come very close to the levels they reached in the Flood of ‘67. So we’re currently experiencing a 30-year flood event. The Tanana, Salcha, Chena and Nenana Rivers have all reached flood stages and many residents in low lying areas near these rivers have been evacuated. The photo on the right, taken by the National Weather Service, shows some of the flooding in the Rosie Creek area. Most of the larger rivers in town are six or seven feet above their normal summer levels.

The following plot shows the hourly and cumulative precipitation from the Small Arms Range (SRGA2) weather station over the past four days. Just under three inches of rain in four days doesn’t sound like a lot when you're from other parts of the country, but Fairbanks gets an average of less than two inches a month in July and August, and our total annual precipitation (including snow) is only 10.87 inches of water. Much of the lower elevation and north-facing areas in the Tanana Valley are permanently frozen and this permafrost is quickly saturated with water. That’s why the region is so lush and green in the summer, despite almost desert-like summer rainfall totals. But once the ground is saturated, there’s nowhere for the water to go except into the streams and rivers. Usually flooding happens during breakup when all the melting snow runs off the frozen ground into the streams and ice jams in the rivers block the flow. Summer floods are more unusual.

Precipitation, Summer 2008

precipitation, summer 2008

Goldstream Creek high water

goldstream creek high water, red cabin

Since Labor Day, 2007, we’ve been living around 30 feet away from a small stream, Goldstream Creek, which has risen between four and five feet since last week. If you look at my previous post, the log I’m resting my hand on in the photo is now completely submerged, which means if I were swimming out there today, the water would be over my head. The outside bank has slumped into the Creek in two places, but so far we haven’t lost any trees. The photo to the right shows the current water level, but even with the dramatic rise, it’s quite a bit below what it looked like during breakup this spring.

It’s really exciting living next to something that’s changing all the time like the Creek (plus, Kingfishers!). And now that we seem to have survived a 30-year flood event, I feel a little bit more secure that we’re not going to get inundated in the next high water event.

I’m looking forward to the Tanana Valley Fair, followed by a warmer, and drier August and September.


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