Blessed by the Potato

I really like our new house. It’s cute, spacious, quiet, in a decent neighbourhood (from the front), and even has an as yet untested guest room. Renting has an advantage because we’re not responsible for a lot of the big-ticket items, and they even come to mow our lawn. (Plus the hot real estate market still scares me) Our landlord’s a nice enough lady… but man is she useless when it comes to making repairs (and there aren’t that many that are required). Most of her suggestions involve “buy a tube of that yellow expanding foam and just spray it everywhere.” I don’t really mind helping out and putting some work into the house, largely because I plan on being here for a few years, and because I’m a bit of a nonconfrontational sucker, and often find it easier to just fix something myself than harangue my landlord. I’m somewhat handy, but only somewhat.

One problem we can’t fix though is the water that seeps into the laundry room periodically. It lead to a mold problem a few months ago that we spent a fair bit of money trying to control — first we bleached the wall a few times to kill it off, but it grew back. Then we got this mold inhibitor stuff that worked fairly well on most of it, but there was this one brick that kept resprouting. A UVC lamp helped clear the air of spores and made it smell decent. We called her a few more times to fix the root problem, and she tried to pass it off to us to caulk or patch, and fortunately Wayfare was very good about staying on her case and making it clear that the problem was bigger than that. So finally she broke down and called in some guys (including her step son in law, if I got the relation right) to seal the entire wall with this blue foam stuff (she’s big on her foam). The guys did a decent job of sealing up that wall, but to get to it they had to move the washer/dryer out from the wall, and in the process disconnected the dryer from the wall vent, and just left it for me to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to go about it, either. In principle, it’s simple: plug the steel tubey bit into the port on the dryer. The problem is that the port is in the very far bottom corner, and the tube they used for the vent is completely inflexible with no joints, so I can’t connect it to the dryer away from the wall (where I could reach), and then push the dryer back. It has to be done with the dryer nearly against the wall. I don’t know if I should just get some flexible tubing for the job, or call a professional, or try moving the duct from the top to see if I can correctly jam it in the dryer port (blind). Hey, speaking of flexible tubing, I think I saw some in the ceiling of the laundry room, not really connected to anything…

The house, being over 100 years old, has certainly gone through numerous renovations. I’m afraid it looks like the current landlord hired some pretty questionable contractors along the way (from what we’ve seen so far, nepotism seems to be a big factor in her decision making). The newly redone bathroom (apparently finished just months before we moved in — it still had unpainted patches where the toilet paper holder was to go) has a vent, as many modern bathrooms do, to help blow humidity and unwanted vapours out of the bathroom, and ostensibly, outside. Ours has this flexible piece of ductwork (the kind that, IMHO, should be on the dryer) that goes into the laundry room, and just kind of sits there in the ceiling joists, not connected to anything. Likewise, many of the water seeping in problems (there was a problem with the stairs right before we moved in) has simply been fixed (rather sloppiliy at that) with expanding foam and paint. Now, I don’t play a house inspector on TV, but that does seem like it’s only going to do so much to help the problem. I would think that then the water would just pool up behind the new barrier and rot away the wood or brick, or in the winter, freeze and cause some real havoc. On the other hand, it is a much more involved task to get to the other side of the foundation and water proof that. And, as pointed out earlier, some of the plumbing work was “creative”. By the way, we’re still waiting for that pipe to be fixed.

My current theory is that she doesn’t consider the house a big part of the property value any more. Technically, her dental practice owns the house, and uses the “backyard” for parking (there is in fact, no backyard, just a nice sized deck for us, and a paved parking lot). While the house is very cute, has lots of history, and is in generally good condition, it’s now “just” a rental unit for her practice. She has said that she plans to sell the practice soon (and the house with it), so I think she’s already trying not to sink too much money into something that won’t offer her much return (that is, the state of the house is not really going to help her sell the practice for more, she just needs to do the minimum to keep us as tenants). Looking a bit further into the future, I think she might also consider that if the house were to be sold, the lot would probably be valuable enough as a place to build a newer, bigger house (or rental complex) on that the state of this house wouldn’t factor in greatly.

PS: We’ve lived here 6 months now, and the cat still thinks forced-air vents are the coolest, most interesting thing you could put in a house. Far more interesting than ants, for sure.

PPS: We also need the bulb on the security light fixed. It’s on the roof, and when the landlord suggested I change it myself and just bill her for the lamp, I was willing — it’s only a single storey bungalow, how bad could it be? Of course, after getting up on the ladder it turns out I’m more afraid of heights than I thought. I don’t want to start bugging her about changing it, since it’s clearly not the sort of thing she’d do herself, and it seems stupid to make her hire someone to do it… But without the snow to reflect the ambient light around, it’s really dark back there. So is there anyone brave in the London area that would like to climb up on my roof and change a lightbulb? I’ll make you some cinnamon rolls!

One of the things I really loved about the apartment was that there were no bugs. Okay, next to no bugs, since there were the tiny, slow crawly ones near the cat food, and in the summer the little tiny flying ones that liked to die in the lamps, but never as many bugs as in a house.

Now that we’re coming into the first spring of the new house, we’re dealing with a lot of bugs. In the basement, of course, are potato bugs. Dead ones for the most part… it seems to be some sort of holy resting place for them. They just come out of the cracks and die in the middle of the floor. Or, they could be chased out of the cracks by something altogether more sinister that we haven’t seen yet, but I don’t like to think about that possibility. Either way, I don’t really mind potato bugs. They’re slow, they tend to stick to the less-travelled parts of the basement, they’re easy to spot, and they don’t appear to have any kind of propensity to actually climb up or touch an unsuspecting human.

Earwigs, I hate. I hate earwigs as much as the hated undead. I strongly suspect that earwigs are in league with the undead, should it come to that sort of conspiracy. Fortunately, I haven’t seen any earwigs yet, and hope I never have to again.

We do, however, have an ant problem. I also dislike ants, for many of the same reasons I dislike earwigs. They can be pretty quick and mobile when they want to be. They climb up walls and ceilings at least as often as they like to be on the floor. They hide in cracks and cupboard doors, pouncing on the human flesh that disturbed them, showing no hesitation to climb on — or given the opportunity, burrow into — a human. They appear in waves, and numbers beyond counting at times… then go into remission for a spell, but only ever long enough to lull you into complacency then attack again. But perhaps most of all, I hate ants because they’re big and black and when you just see a glimpse of them, they look like earwigs.

Anyhow, our ant problem began as soon as the weather turned warm. We had a few large black ants appear in the kitchen, and we immediately took steps to get rid of them. We bought this “perimeter defense” spray that repels and/or kills them as soon as they pass through a crack sprayed with the stuff, and deployed a few of the poison bait type ant traps. It seemed to work, because after about 10 days of ants showing up and scouting out the kitchen, they vanished. It also seemed that they were attracted to the empty coke cans I had stacked up by the sink, since each one appeared to have at least 3 ants inside, delighting in the concentrated syrup residue at the bottom. After getting into the habit of rinsing my cans right away, the problem seemed to get better immediately. We had nearly a week of peace there… but it could have been that they were simply frolicking outside in the pleasant weather, because today dozens of them were back. I don’t know what, exactly, drew them back inside. I had nothing stacked up beside the sink, no food was left out — the only thing inside the sink that they seemed interested in was my cereal bowl, which had a partial ring of sweetened milk on it (I had dumped the left over milk and gave it a quick rinse, but obviously didn’t get fresh water all the way around the rim). Yet today they went crazy, swarming around the one cupboard that’s never had food in it. We couldn’t quite understand it…

Understanding was not required. After slaughtering over 20 of them, the invasion receded, and I haven’t seen a single one since this morning. We’re debating at the moment what to do. If we search hard, we may be able to find all the crevaces they use for entry, and seal them with caulking, or poison them with the perimeter defense spray. The ant traps don’t seem to be working: these ants either don’t care or are too big for the small holes in it. We’ve never seen one go in or come out. Someone at work recommended getting poisoned sugar: basically the same stuff as in the “take it back to kill the queen” trap we have now, except sweeter, and in a form we can place anywhere, not confined to a trap (for example, we could put it inside an empty coke can…) With the exception of leaving very sweet things near the sink, cleanliness doesn’t appear to be a factor. Several times we’ve left crumbs near the stove (much to Wayfare’s chagrin… though I’m not the only one who leaves a trail of crumbs when cutting bread ;), but the ants never seem interested in breadcrumbs. Likewise, the cat has a bowl of food out constantly, and in fact she’s such a messy eater that chunks of her food are on the floor and up the wall around her food dish, and the ants don’t care (only those tiny bugs from the apartment seemed to like cat food — we’ve never had bugs bother with it in my parents’ place either).

Speaking of the cat, she’s been absolutely useless in our time of ant crisis. She was born on PEI, and there she used to hunt and eat flies. After coming back to Ontario with us though, she seems to have completely lost her killer instinct, and if we point out an ant to her, she runs up to look at our finger, totally ignoring the naturally wiggling cat toy. One time, I pointed out a group of ants to her, and said “eat the ants!” and she went up, sniffed them, then rolled in them to show me her pretty tummy.

Stupid cat.

I wrote a short rant not too long about about the ban of indandescents in Nunavut. I think that reducing the use of incandescents would be a step in the right direction, and taxing incandescents (or subsidizing CFLs) so that it becomes easier for consumers to choose the “right” one without having to do a long-term cost-benefit analysis is a good thing. Banning them, though, is not such a bright idea, since there are a small number of situations where fluorescents are not ideal (see previous rant or below for details).

After writing that rant up, I rewrote it as a letter to my MPP, kicking myself after I sent it since there was no way Ontario would actually follow Nunavut’s lead and ban incandescent lighting…

Whoops.

I was happy at least to see this paragraph in the CBC report (the other news sources I skimmed didn’t have it — the Toronto Star even said that Ontario was “the first… jurisdiction in North America to commit to such a ban” — perhaps technically true, since the legislation hasn’t passed in Nunavut yet, but a somewhat disingenuous statement):

The ban, part of a wider energy conservation program, would allow for exceptions, such as the use of incandescent bulbs in fields like medicine.

This is the letter I sent my MPP last month. I never got a response (at least the last time I went crazy-go-nuts on my MPP, she sent me an acknowledgement!).

Dr. Matthews, I recently saw the news that Nunavut was planning on banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs in the territory to save power and reduce emissions. (story: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/03/22/nu-lightbulb.html)

I am writing you to encourage the province of Ontario to not follow Nunavut’s lead in this matter — a ban on incandescents is not the way to go.

Taxing them however is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even those with a short-term focus can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the initial costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in nearly every room in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option:

* CFLs can not be used in completely enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights.
* Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (though some specific models can be).
* Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
* Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some uses such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments).
* A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (though CFLs don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
* CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
* Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, CFLs are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Now, it looks like while you won’t be able to buy an incandescent in Ontario under the current plan, you could go to the States or Quebec and bring one over without any trouble, if you had to (so they’ll be unavailable, but not illegal).

With the coming of spring came the biannual changing of the smoke detector batteries. This lead us to actually try to find our smoke detectors, since this is the first time we’ve had to do it since moving in. It turns out they were in less than ideal locations: the one for the centre part of the house is behind a drop ceiling concealing the bay windows, and the one for the back half is in the back closet. Not just any closet, of course: to it’s credit it doesn’t have a door we never close the door, so at least the airflow — and smoke detecting properties — aren’t completely inhibited; but it’s also a sloped-roof room, and the detector was right up at the top, in the dead space that the smoke detector manuals say never to place one. The basement, which was just recently renovated to be livable, had none (which is against the firecode, the part of the lease saying there were sufficient detectors notwithstanding).

So, having just got some coupons in the mail for rebates on smoke detectors, I went out to supplement our arsenal. First off, I picked up a photoelectric detector, which is good for placing in or near the kitchen (the two we had were ionization). I should back off a second to elaborate: there are two basic types of detectors: photoelectric and ionization. Different types of fires are detected more efficiently by the different types. The fast-burning fires that occur in most homes, especially bedrooms, (my smoke detector literature says 70% of home fires) are best detected by ionization type detectors, and recommends one of those outside the bedrooms. Slow, smouldering fires are better detected by a photoelectric type; the photoelectric types are also less likely to go off from steam and regular cooking particles (fewer kitchen false positives), so they’re recommended for use near the kitchen.

Anyhow, I bought this detector for the kitchen, and had this rebate form for spending $25 or more on a detector; of course, it came in at $24.99. Which was a bit of a bummer, but even moreso was the realization that the detectors we already had required two batteries each to refresh. So after changing the batteries and putting in the new detector, we decided that the one in the back closet really wasn’t ideally located, so it would have to be moved to someplace that wouldn’t be the absolute last part of the house to fill with smoke. I got up on the ladder, and started to unscrew the base. And unscrewed…. and just kept unscrewing. The thing was held in by 3″ wood screws! I just couldn’t understand why they would go and use screws like that, especially since the detector itself should have come with a pair of much more reasonably sized screws.

In fact, the entire house seems to be constructed from comically large screws. They’re not even all the same length, so it’s not like they bought a bulk case of 3″ screws and just started using them everywhere. The cabinets in the kitchen all have screws coming out the sides and bottoms, the legs for the laundry tub in the basement are maybe a quarter-inch thick, and are held together with 1.5″ screws. Even the picture hangars have nails and/or screws holding them up that are far larger than the task requires.

On the other end of the spectrum is the bed frame we just assembled for the guest bed (and it’s a comfy bed: if we don’t have anyone out to visit soon, I may swap it with my own) and the bolts for it were only about 1/4″ longer than the minimum length needed to get the nuts on…

Canada should be a world leader when it comes to issues of the environment, if for no other reason than because we have so much of it. Our record on Kyoto and greenhouse gas emissions has been rather shameful, though we do have a succession of uncaring minority governments to partially blame for that, as well as a relatively uncaring public (until quite recently, that is). It is long time past to fix that, though, and I’m surprised that while the election-hungry neocons have identified the environment as a key issue, they haven’t yet actually done a whole lot about it (the funding announcements of the last few days notwithstanding). Mostly, they’re throwing around as much rhetoric and mud as they can, hoping to survive the issue in the next election (which they’re desperately trying to bring for the summer, by all accounts). So the Europeans really showed us when they recently announced plans to go above and beyond their Kyoto commitments.

Of course, our leaders are always faced with tough choices. Global warming looks to be a very real threat, and could be potentially very devastating. However, it’s also a long-term, global problem, so it’s very difficult to face with our local, short-term perspective. After all, there’s tax cuts to be had, health care to bolster, and all manner of other problems to ignore, everything from homelessness to defense, space exploration to public transportation, basic research to primary education.

Something not a lot of people are talking about is that a lot of these initiatives are needed for another problem all together: peak oil. Thanks to advances in new technology, we aren’t going to run out of oil for a long time to come. Which is a good thing, because alternatives (hydrogen, biofuels, electricity, etc) are still uncomfortably far off into the future. However, we’re already starting to see evidence of tightening supply. The thing with something that is in such high demand, such as oil, is that even modest declines in supply can lead to huge swings in price, since demand is so very inelastic (and I may be abusing my economic terminology, so forgive me here). We saw this quite clearly recently in Ontario: a fire at an Imperial Oil refinery caused fairly widespread shortages, station closures, and an increase of roughly 20-25% in price. And this was at a time when demand was relatively low due to the bad weather keeping many drivers off the road. The thing is, that refinery was nowhere near responsible for 20+% of our refining ability (one report says it was just 6% of Imperial’s capacity, just one of several major companies operating in Ontario). So a relatively minor drop in supply lead to a relatively large increase in price. Imagine that sort of situation even just 10 years from now if world oil extraction drops just a bit… But if we have developed technologies at this point in time to battle greenhouse emissions and use less oil, then we will simultaneously tackle that problem.

It’s a lot like hybrid cars in that regard: the combination of electric and gasoline power make hybrids more efficient in their use of oil, especially for stop-and-go city driving. Some people have slammed them as not solving the root problem of oil dependence, since they do still run on gas, however they are actually very good bridge technologies. Not only are they effective at saving gas right now, they also serve to develop the electric motors and batteries (and underlying manufacturing base) that will likely be needed for any future technology car.

I was glad to see the hybrid car rebate included in the federal budget, and the increased gas guzzler tax. One person recently was hailing the Cons for this move, saying that they’re clearly a pro-environmental party, and that this was a very pro-environment budget. To that I just have to say that this is, as many commentators are saying, a pre-election budget. It’s a pro-everything budget. The Cons have been very reticient to make any of these moves, and have only done so because currently these issues are at the forefront of Canadians’ minds. I have no doubt that if public focus shifts (as it does quite often), the Cons will stop all further progress. They haven’t lead us to these measures, they’ve been driven to them. A release today in the CBC has some good rhetoric, and it’s a lot further along than they were a year ago… but they’re still using this double-talk of a “balanced approach” and continuing to think that anything that’s good for the environment must be bad for our way of life.

Another environmental intiative making the rounds lately is the idea of banning outright the sale of incandescent bulbs. This is one move I can’t get behind. Taxing them is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even short-term thinkers can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in a lot of rooms in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option (though perhaps we should stop using them as our main source of home lighting):

• Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are more costly overall if they do not manage to live out their whole life-cycle. They also contain trace amounts of mercury. Combined, these two issues mean that CFLs should not be used in areas where lights are more likely to be smashed than wear out from old age (places like batting cages, say, or where small children throw rocks at them).
• CFLs can not be used in enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights or other recessed/indirect lighting conditions.
• Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (be sure to check the package before putting yours on one!).
• Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in fridges, stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
• Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some applications such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments), and lightswitch raves.
• A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (including CFLs, though they don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
• CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
• Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, they are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Finally, another recent story said that because conservation efforts have started working so well, Toronto Hydro is losing money, and wants to hike electricity rates. I don’t know what to say to that. On the one hand, more expensive electricity encourages people to conserve, and brings it closer to the true cost to produce. But I don’t want to see peoples’ bills go up because they were conserving (the net bill will go down, but you know many people won’t see it that way). I’m also not so sure Toronto Hydro is really too hard up if they’ve got the cash to spare to get into the telecom business…