Electricity to repel insects.

Just a bit of a personal story. One of the locals here is a 63 year old guy who had a stroke when he was 50. He lost his house to medical bills and had to start over at 52 years old. He lives in 3 shipping containers because it's all he has. He's been trucking for the past several years and since he wasn't home much, he shut off the city water. So he retired this year and went to turn his water service back on and they want >$1200 to turn him on. They say he has to pay for the minimm bill for the months he didnt' have service because they have fixed and variable costs and those are the fixed costs. So he showers at a nearby truckstop despite being retired now.

Let's flash back 14 months ago. He doesn't want to risk having another medical episode and loosing his acre of land and shipping containers so he got a lawyer involved and "sold" me his land for a dollar. So it occurred to us today that I'm the new owner of the land and not responsible for the previous owner's bills... so I went to the water company today with the deed of the property in hand to get the water turned on. They agreed that I'm the new owner and said since it's been >12 months that I've owned this land and I never turned on the water , I owe $800 to get it turned on. FWIW, the base water bill is $24.50 / mo... That would be $343 if I had maintained water service the whole time... but they want $800.

So if any of you know of any social programs for limited income old folks that can give him some relief on getting his water hooked up or those fees waived, let me know. It must be something specific for South Carolina USA. Of course that might be a little tangled as well because I'm not elderly and I am the owner of record now.

In the mean time, we're getting him setup with a small water pump and an IBC tote to place in his yard. He'll use a 2nd IBC tote to ferry water from my house to his.

Sms from a neighbor.... the power company cant believe he isnt using any power.

Thinking more about the minisplit post I made yesterday and working the subject around to insulation. American homes are just stick built with a veneer of vinyl siding or maybe red bick on the face. But the structure is wooden cavities with fiberglass batts of insulation or spray foam.

The building codes have long required vapor barrier and insulation but only recently did the codes start to look at air penetration. Spray foam helps a LOT with this but on the other hand I know two homes that are spray foamed 6" thick wall cavities and they still have troubles.

But there's more....

Insulation is part of hte story. Air ingress is another part. The third part is thermal mass. I've mentioned this before but my house is ICF... 3" of styrofoam, 6" of concrete and 3" more inches of styrofoam. This solves all three issues in one whack.... 3+3" of insulation, 6" of thermal mass and vapor barrier too. A few months ago we calculated the cost of ICF as $10/sqft of wall area vs $6/sqft for stick built. This is ONLY the exterior wall, and in the scheme of an entire house the exterior walls are what 3% of the cost of the house? You'll spend more on nice cabinets than the cost increase of ICF exterior walls.

From another friendly chat

Just for grins... I just looked at the total production for our first AC coupled inverter... it's made 60megawatthours since it was new. That's $7800 in electric and it did not cost that much to buy. It's a 3.8kw inverter that was new in 2017.

looks like squash bug eggs to me. Look for the bugs crawling around, as they can lay more eggs. Squish or Scrape off all eggs into soapy water. https://www.almanac.com/pest/squash-bugs

One of my neighbors had a well put in just for his cows about 4 years ago. recently the pump stopped working. Turned out the switch failed from arcing and this lead to questions about short cycling. We replaced his switch and I noted that it takes 19 seconds to fully charge the pressure tank. The tank has a drawdown of 7 gallons at 40-60PSI, so that's 21 gallon a minute flow rate. I measured the amps with an amp clamp and it's 9.8amps. So 240v x 9.8amps / 768watts / hp, gives us a 3hp pump.

So his well driller gave him a 20 gallon pressure tank (7 gallon draw down) with a 3hp pump. Holy smokes.

Recently his wife started watering the garden from this pump and it would cycle about once a minute for an hour each day. She's putting far too many "miles " on that switch.

Ideally, when you have a continuous flow like watering the garden or irrigating a pasture, you need to know the flow ahead of time and size the pump so that it comes on and STAYS on for the duration of your use. Starting it hardest on the pump and swtich due to the start surge.

But a pump running will be cooled by the flow of cool water around it... pumps love to run, they don't like to start as much.

So... bigger is not always better. for his application a 1/2hp or 3/4hp pump would be a much better choice and certainly a larger pressure tank.

Fun stuff. My power company says that up to 20 days a year they may charge 3x as much for peak power. It means that 13c/kwh becomes 39c. They are legally obligated to tell us 24 hours in advance of these special times.

Guess who won't care? My house won't be connect to the grid at all during this time.

learnings... We installed my minisplit heatpump 4 years ago and I guess it's got a slow leak. 4 days ago the house gained 2degrees F and I noted the compressor was drawing 1600w instead of 900. All this gauging I had here is paying off. The hvac tech touched the line set and said there wasn't enough refrigerant in the system to do a phase change to liquid. It was 25% low. He added some gas and the duct temperature in the house dropped from 60F to 48F instantly.

he and I were getting a kick out of someone knowing an HVAC system wasn't working right because it went from 900w to 1600w. My old HVAC system used to run at 3500w.

For today I am officially a retard!
Just so that nobody else here makes the same mistake I'll share this diagram and relay the story......

I had a hedge cutter carburettor diaphragm problem.....a generic new carb with pipes, filter, and a spark plug thrown in for good measure cost less than a Walpro diaphragm......so new carb it was.

Stripped it down, left it for a few days waiting for carb delivery, left it again for a while because I didn't need the machine.

Threw everything together today and it started but didn't stay started for long!!
Anyway, as it turned out I had made the schoolboy error of forgetting that the priming bulb was supposed to suck fuel through the carb rather than suck it directly from the tank and push it through the carb.
So remember, the priming bulb should suck from the carb....not from the tank!