Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

DIY Vanilla Extract: Vintage 2013

It seems we go through maybe 1.5 l of vanilla extract in a bit over a year , so a month ago I picked up a pound of Grade B Madagascar Vanilla Beans from the usual eBay supplier, two bottles of low-end vodka (Popov and Crystal Palace), and combined them in a pair of apple juice bottles. Fast forward through a month of daily shaking and we have a still life with chopped vanilla beans:

DIY Vanilla Extract 2013

Having established that running the extracted and drained bean chunks through a blender doesn’t produce anything useful, I dumped the chunks into a pair of plastic tubs with loose-fitting lids and put them in the basement. That ought to improve the ambiance down there something fine!

The net yield looks to be a bit over 1.5 liter of extract from each 1.9 liter apple juice jar filled with vodka + chopped beans. The rule of thumb is a quart (= 1 liter) of hooch for each 1/4 pound of beans, but I figure this isn’t an exact science and those jars came from the stockpile.

To my untrained nose, the Crystal Palace vanilla extract smells better than the Popov brew, but I’d be surprised if that makes any difference in the pancakes.

Verily: nothing exceeds like excess!

2013-06-09
Prototype Silica Gel Bag

A while back I bought a lifetime supply of silica gel beads from Sorbent Systems, with the intent of gradually replacing all of the miscellaneous desiccant packs floating around here. The catch is figuring out how to package 2 mm spherical beads, because the whole point of a desiccant pack is getting moist air in contact with the beads. I’m sure there’s a commercial solution for this out there, but …

Anyhow, here’s what 500 g of beads looks like, captured inside a 12×12 inch square of landscaping cloth folded in half:

Silica gel in landscape cloth bag

It really should be sewn along the three joined edges, but this is a quick-and-dirty prototype to see how it works; I simply folded the edges over twice and stapled through all six layers.

For the record, 500 g of beads occupies 700 ml in the measuring cup I used to weigh and pour them into the end of the bag. The bag + beads + staples weighs 508 g. The can holding the bulk beads has a humidity indicator card that shows the humidity is below 10%, so I’ll assume they’re pretty well dehydrated.

It’s now in the basement safe, presumably soaking up moist air at a frantic pace. I’ll check it in a week or two and see what’s actually happening.

For the record, those old desiccant granules (and their tray) weighed 853 g when they went into the safe and emerged at 916 g, having soaked up 63 g = 2 oz of water over the last five months.

2013-06-05
Hazards of Being a Mouse

Before washing the bedroom windows, I moved the garden tool rack and a bunch of clutter away… only to find a remarkable amount of litter below the plastic base:

Litter under garden tool rack

One of those lumps consisted of tightly packed fluff, much like the mouse nest inside the barbie a few years ago, so this was surely a winter home.

But it seems at least one mouse didn’t make it through the winter:

Dessicated mouse under tool rack

Given its dessicated nature, I think the poor critter probably expired during the depths of the winter freeze.

2013-06-02

Monthly Science: Basement Safe Humidity

A plot of the temperature and humidity inside the basement safe over the last year-and-a-half:

The tray of silica gel (or whatever those granules might be) holds the humidity firmly at 14 to 15 %, at least with a simple masking tape seal around the door opening that dates back to early 2012. Less water vapor gets through the door during the winter, due to the lower basement humidity when it’s cold outside, but it looks like four regenerations per year with just under a kilogram of desiccant in the tray.

Ordinarily, it’d be time for those granules to endure another oven session, but I just picked up a bunch of real silica gel beads and must conjure up some porous bags.

The Bash / Gnuplot script that cleaned the CSV files and produced the plot:

#!/bin/sh
#-- overhead
export GDFONTPATH="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/"
base="${1%.*}"
echo Base name: ${base}
ofile=${base}.png
tfile=$(tempfile)
echo Input file: $1
echo Temporary file: ${tfile}
echo Output file: ${ofile}
#-- prepare csv Hobo logger file
sed 's/^\"/#&/' "$1" | sed 's/^.*Logged/#&/' | sed 's/ ,/,/' | sed 's/\/\([0-9][0-9]\) /\/20\1 /' > ${tfile}
#-- do it
gnuplot << EOF
#set term x11
set term png font "arialbd.ttf" 18 size 950,600
set output "${ofile}"
set title "${base}"
set key noautotitles
unset mouse
set bmargin 4
set grid xtics ytics
set timefmt "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S"
set xdata time
set xlabel "Date"
set format x "%y-%m"
#set xrange [1.8:2.2]
set xtics font "arial,12"
#set mxtics 2
#set logscale y
set ytics nomirror autofreq
set ylabel "Temperature - F"
set format y "%3.0f"
set yrange [40:90]
set mytics 2
set y2label "Relative Humidity - %"
set y2tics nomirror autofreq
set format y2 "%3.0f"
set y2range [10:60]
#set y2tics 32
#set rmargin 9
set datafile separator ","
#set label 1 "label text" at 2.100,110 right font "arialbd,18"
#set arrow from 2.100,110 to 2.105,103 lt 1 lw 2 lc 0
plot    \
    "${tfile}" using 2:3 axes x1y1 with lines lt 3 title "Temperature",\
    "${tfile}" using 2:4 axes x1y2 with lines lt 4 title "Humidity"
EOF

2013-06-01

Garden Sprayer: End of Life

The hose attached to this garden sprayer had failed last season, but the hose fitting had become one with the sprayer. Soaking it with penetrating oil for far longer than seemed necessary didn’t help, so I tried brute force:

Garden sprayer hose fitting

After convincing myself that wasn’t going to work, I cut the fitting off and tried the old standby of collapsing the threaded shell inward with a small punch:

Garden sprayer – rolled-in fitting

That didn’t work, either: the shell really had become one with the sprayer.

As it turned out, the plastic sprayer body had begun to crack in several high-stress locations and would shortly become Yet Another Project. I cut my losses and tossed the hose and the sprayer.

2013-05-25
Miniblind Mounting Brackets

Quite some years ago I installed miniblinds on the southern windows in the living room, which keep the afternoon sun off my upstairs desk. Time passes, they collect a generous layer of dust, and it’s easier to just replace them than to give them the thorough cleaning they deserve; they’re under $10 each.

Miniblind center clip

With the new blinds in hand, the job turned out to be not quite as simple as one might expect(*). The new blinds have their middle support bracket on the right side of the central ladder, which means they’re not a drop-in replacement for the old blinds with their support on the left. That’s OK, I can just unscrew the adapter I made that fits the intended-for-a-flat-window-frame bracket to our mid-1950s curved moulding frames, drill another hole in the right spot, and screw it back in place.

Too bad about that paint, but we agreed that because it’s invisible from inside, we’re just not going to worry about it.

The adapter is a slice of bed frame steel that turned out to have exactly the right length for the job.

Of course, the new bracket has a completely different and incompatible screw hole pattern than the old one, but due to some bizarre slipup, the old bracket fits into the slot in the new blind. I have no explanation for that.

Miniblind mount adapter bracket

I also replaced the sun-faded end brackets, which were essentially identical to the new ones and perfectly fit the existing screw holes.

We had to return and replace the first two blinds, though, as I’d managed to pick up two identical packages with different manufacturing dates. They both had white miniblinds inside and sported the same SKU, but one blind was definitely white and the other a very light gray. This wouldn’t normally matter, but when they’re installed in windows just a few inches apart, the mismatch became painfully obvious.

The new-new blinds come from the same manufacturing lot and had a slightly different shade from both of old blinds and each of the old-new blinds.

(*) Full disclosure: I knew it wasn’t going to be simple, but hope springs eternal.

2013-05-19
Capping a Sink Drain Pipe

We put the new furnace (replacing the old one) closer to the wall with the flue pipe, displacing an ancient slop sink (which vanished from the end of the driveway in about an hour) in the process. I “plugged” the drain with a twist of paper towel until the installation was done:

Corroded sink drain nut

The overexposed blue-hot glow comes from the LED worklight on the right.

Despite being chrome-plated brass, the nut at the base of that vertical chrome pipe was firmly corroded to the short nipple emerging from the iron tee. After a few minutes of fruitless wrenching, I deployed a Dremel cutting wheel, slit the nut, gave it a shot with a chisel, and it popped loose. A rubber cap clamped around the nipple finished the job:

Sealed sink drain pipe with split nut

Next case!

2013-05-18