Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Samsung Vacuum Cleaner Floor Brush: Wheel Retainers

We still haven’t exhausted the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Samsung Quiet Jet vacuum’s bag supply, so when a wheel fell off the floor brush again, I had to come up with a better fix than a twist of wire. Obviously, those delicate little retaining latches need more persuasion.

Capture the wheel in the Sherline’s 4-jaw chuck on the rotary table and drill four holes just below the end of the latches:

Samsung wheel – drilling

The wheel is 20 mm thick. The holes lie 9 mm back from the open end of the wheel or 11 mm from the closed end at the chuck face. Drill maybe 6 mm down; I did it by eye, jogging slowly downward until the tip of the drill touched the latch.

Tap the holes and install four 8-32 setscrews:

Samsung wheel – setscrews installed

I don’t have a bottoming tap, but an ordinary plug tap was Good Enough; the incomplete threads should hold the setscrews in place.

Reinstall the wheel, tighten the setscrews, and wrap festive silicone tape around the whole affair:

Samsung floor brush – wheel installed

I heroically resisted the temptation to pry the other wheel off for a preemptive repair …

2014-06-16
Eco-Friendly Firewood?

These seem to be ordinary birch logs, cut into short chunks, sporting a top crosscut loaded with fire starter:

Light-n-Go Bonfire Log – stacked

The front of the label makes them seem wonderfully eco-friendly, but the fine print on the back shows that they’re from the Old World:

Light-n-Go Bonfire Log – origin label

There’s surely a universe where shipping heat-treated firewood from Estonia to Poughkeepsie makes perfect sense. I just didn’t realize I was living in it.

2014-06-14
Monthly Science: Basement Safe Drying

Back in early May, I swapped in a new bag of silica gel, which (as always) immediately punched the humidity down to the Hobo datalogger’s 15%RH minimum reading:

Basement Safe – 2014-05-26

A closer look at the very beginning of that data shows the humidity dropping for an hour after the door closes:

Basement Safe – 2014-05-09 Detail

The logger is on the bottom of the safe, with the desiccant bag on the shelf above it, and there’s no mechanical air circulation: it’s all done by air currents, driven by whatever drives them. I have no idea what that bump in the middle means.

2014-06-01
Sencha Green Tea: Japanese vs. Chinese

I recently ordered a pound of genuine Japanese Sencha Green Tea from Harney & Sons (who turn out to be a long bike ride away at the Millerton end of the Harlem Valley Rail Trail), having had entirely enough of the rather bitter Chinese Sencha from the local grocery store.

Guess which one is which:

Japanese vs Chinese Sencha Green Tea

Yup, Japanese on the left, Chinese on the right. The latter comes from the bottom of the container, hence the larger proportion of flakes, but it’s obviously different stuff.

Based on the first few cups, the new tea has a much better taste.

From what I read, the price of Japanese teas has taken a real beating in recent years, because everyone (else) fears Fukushima Daiichi fallout. My feeling is that a Chinese tea plantation could be downwind of Smiling Face Heavy Metal Refinery Complex Number 5 and you’d never know it.

For reference, the Japanese Green Sencha was $40 for 1 lb delivered.

They tossed in a few sample packets, including “Paris: Black tea with Fruit and Caramel”, which was horrible…

2014-05-25
Stirrup Hoe: New-to-It Handle

Mary (not the spammer) uses a stirrup hoe for most of what little weeding she does, so it spends much of its life outdoors in the Vassar Farms plot. The bottom of the handle disintegrated and she brought the business end home for repair:

Stirrup hoe – replacement handle

That was easy: a suitable handle lay on the top of the rods-and-tubes rack; I’d harvested it from a defunct rake a while back. Although the wood is weathered, we think of it as well-seasoned. The errant hole marks came from a first pass, before I realized there was no point in having the handle extend beyond the outward-bending part of the brackets.

The bolts and locking nuts are original!

Ya gotta have stuff…

(And not a trace of 3D printing anywhere to be seen. Imagine that!)

2014-05-24

Family Energy Cold Call: The Key Number

A cold call from Family Energy, completely in violation of our presence on the FTC Do Not Call registry, produced an offer: “lock in” a rate of 8.9 ¢/kWh for two years. My experience has been that anybody cold calling me does not have my best interest in mind and a few minutes of search-fu showed that, while Family Energy may not be a scam, they certainly employ unique marketing methods for an “energy supply company”.

For reference, the last two years of Central Hudson supply charges:

Central Hudson Gas & Electric
	Dollars per kWh
Date	MFC Supply Ch	Market Price	Market Pr Adj	Net Supply Ch
2012-03-08	0.00190	0.05982	0.00635	0.06807
2012-05-09	0.00190	0.05665	0.00524	0.06379
2012-07-12	0.00191	0.06396	0.00532	0.07119
2012-09-10	0.00196	0.07805	0.00260	0.08261
2012-11-08	0.00196	0.05206	-0.00100	0.05302
2013-01-12	0.00196	0.05027	0.00322	0.05545
2013-03-12	0.00196	0.08340	0.00241	0.08777
2013-05-09	0.00196	0.07359	0.00116	0.07671
2013-07-10	0.00197	0.05458	0.00397	0.06052
2013-09-09	0.00203	0.08143	0.00420	0.08766
2013-11-05	0.00203	0.06634	-0.00368	0.06469
2014-01-08	0.00203	0.05816	0.00061	0.06080
2014-03-12	0.00203	0.14779	-0.00534	0.14448

			Average	0.07514

That’s the only part of the bill Family Energy (and other suppliers) can replace; the remainder pays for delivering the energy to our meter.

Family Energy’s marketing obviously plays off the staggering price spike in the most recent bill, but the CHG&E rate is lower than their “locked in” offer. In fact, if you exclude the last line, the CHG&E average is 6.9 ¢/kWh. The price spike came from the 2014 midwinter natural gas shortage and, assuming no simultaneous equipment failures, prices should return to the normal pattern.

We may be building / upgrading pipelines, but expect the usual stalling, because environment.

Family Energy does offer a $25 cash-back if your annual bill exceeds the CHG&E rate, up to a maximum of $75, but that’s chump change compared to the size of our bills…

All I know is what I read on the Intertubes, but it seems the Family Energy door-to-door sales droids have even less interest in overall customer satisfaction.

2014-05-18

Princess House Nouveau Ceramic Pan Handle Locking Button

We bought a replacement for the CorningWare casserole (that a raccoon broke when I put the rice out on the deck to cool) at a tag sale:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – assembled

According to the information on the bottom, it’s “Nouveau A Princess House Exclusive” that’s no longer in their listing. Evidently, they’ve gone to metal stovetop cookware these days. Anyhow, it has a separate handle that latches onto a cleverly shaped tab molded into the pan:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – handle released

Latching the handle in place is simple: put the end of the handle over the tab and squeeze the lever until it snaps into the handle. Well, I managed to latch it quite easily, after which nobody could figure out how to release it. That slotted button cries out to be pushed, but it wasn’t push-able.

That’s a condition I call “being outwitted by inanimate objects”…

After bringing it home, I discovered the secret: the slot must be exactly vertical (equivalently, maximally counter-clockwise) before you can press the button to release the latching handle. Turning the button so the slot is horizontal (maximally clockwise) locks the button out, so that you cannot press it and release the handle:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – handle locked

The button locks out when the slot is almost imperceptibly clockwise from vertical; if you don’t know what to look for, you’d never notice the difference.

Which makes perfect sense to me. You want the handle to latch securely and require a deliberate action to release, lest the pan fall and release hot stuff all over your front. Any errors should leave the handle securely latched in place.

FWIW, World Kitchen, the current owners of the CorningWare brand, no longer make stovetop-rated ceramic cookware; it’s evidently easier and cheaper to make microwave-only ceramics. World Kitchen also owns the Pyrex kitchenware brand and, true to form, replaced the original borosilicate glass with cheaper tempered soda lime glass. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that…

2014-05-14