/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>140921
I do not personally know of any but it seems like a ~500 btu heat pump should be commercially available (think something about the size of a residential window A/C unit). You could theoretically hack together a switchable duct system off of a cheap AC unit that would allow you to use it either way, if manufactured heat pumps are too expensive or too hard to find.

Nevertheless, even with the ~150% efficiency of a heat pump, it's probably still more cost-effective to go with liquid fuel.

Properly maintained propane & kerosene heaters don't generate CO, you only have to worry about burning all the oxygen out of the room. Hopefully the van is drafty enough that it won't be a concern, though.

>>140272
This man speaks true. There's a number of purpose-made vehicle heaters that use the vehicle's gasoline supply for fuel. They are VERY popular among owners of air-cooled Volkswagens (the VW bus/transporter/etc), whose built-in heaters are barely functional even with the engine running at full throttle. Google "volkswagen bus gas heater".

If you want to go the super lazy way, and you have electricity available, you can add an engine block heater and electric engine water pump, and then just use the van's built in heater with the engine off. There are VERY cheap block heaters available that splice into a radiator hose, and electric water pumps are available from racing catalogs (Summit, etc) for most popular American v-8 engines. Installation of both is relatively easy, although the missing water pump drive pulley will mean you have to reroute your accessory belts, and you'll need to hook up a battery maintainer.

>>126089
I think this makes sense, now that I think about it. The EPA recently decreed that detergents must all be phosphate-free, which removes a lot of the threat to septic tanks, but I'm sure it's not good for the system.

If they did add an outdoor drain pipe, and left the old septic drain pipe in place, it's totally imaginable that the trap dried up and sewer gasses are venting from it. OP should poor some water down it and see if it stops stinking. If it does, then just cap it properly.

I used to live in a septic house with garbage disposal, dishwasher, and washing machine all hooked up to the tank. We had to have the tank pumped every 5 years or so. I don't know how many of those pumpings were because we generally abused the septic tank, but I'm sure it made an impact.

Of course, a lot of those tank pumpings were incidental - the drain field was probably 10' uphill from the tank, and our submerged drain pump would burn out periodically, necessitating opening the tank to replace it, and while it's open, might as well pump it.

The city I live in (Seattle) has a program for this. All over the city are neighborhood gardens, divided into plots ranging from 100-450 sqft. There's a waitlist of a couple years, but eventually you get a plot in the garden for a minimum of a year, and so long is you keep it in continuous cultivation, you can keep it indefinitely. You lose it if you stop using it.

The Department of Neighborhoods runs it, and the annual fee is $25 + $10/100sqft. You might want to see if your city government has a similar program.

In terms of ease and self sufficiency for electricity, wind is best. There's plenty of relatively cheap wind kits, and they don't use much area. It tends to work well out in the middle of nowhere.

You can use a cheap sub-100w solar kit as a bare-minimum backup for extended calm periods, but you want to be using wind for your heavy lifting.

If you can get the methane setup working, more power to you, but wind will work out of the box, and from your original thread, I recall that there's plenty of wind on your hill.

Oh, and definitely have a solar water heater. Most effective use of solar.

Geothermal can be great if you're lucky enough to tap into a serious hotspot. But that's unlikely.

>>86823
What web browser is currently maintained for windows 9x? There hasn't been a current version of Firefox for it since 2.0, the last IE version that supported it was IE6 SP1 (in Fucking 2002!) and Chrome never worked on 98.

I wouldn't let those outdated browsers touch the internet with a ten foot pole. Even behind a firewall, the first time one of these browsers hits a page with a malicious banner ad, this machine is toast. This is a very bad idea.

If they do not have internet access, disregard this comment.

Most energy-star certified thermostats will have an "auto" mode where you can set both heat and cool temperatures, and just leave it on "auto".

This is the more common situtation. There's no specific thermostat I'd recommend, because most of the new ones will do what you want. Only older or very cheap programmable thermostats will force you to manually switch between heat and cool modes.

However, most won't allow you to set the heat and cool temperatures to the exact same level - most will require a split of around 2 degrees minimum, just to prevent it from rapidly cycling between modes.

Supercharger has pointless, unnecessary parasitic drag at part throttle, because it's been driven even when not needed. However, there's a few electric superchargers now, which will only kick on at full throttle, avoiding the issue. Unfortunately, most of the electric superchargers on the market are crap, and even the good ones can only generate single-digit boost numbers.

Turbocharger is a more elegant solution, only spooling up under load, but has a slower response time. It also requires intercooling at lower levels of boost than a supercharger, because of the heat transfer from the exhaust.

Unless instant power is an absolute necessity, I prefer the effect of a turbo. Supercharger is often an easier install, though, and if I was converting a naturally aspirated engine, I'd probably go that route.

>>86320
Thirded. Teaching them windows 9x is doing them a disservice. Hell, at this point teaching them XP is practically nonhelpful.

Before you sink ANY more money into this build, RAM/CPU/Whatever, do consider that there are extreme budget, all-inclusive motherboard/cpu combo setups that can be had for $39.99, like this Atom board here: http://5z8.info/peepshow_arpf
Pair it up with a $10 1gb stick of DDR2 and you're ready to rock with XP. Bump it up to a $20 2gb stick and you can run 7.

Just the stuff you're talking about buying for that PII board is going to take you close to that price point anyway.

>>85982
Vancouver BC or WA?

The core routes on the frequent service maps are decent, but everything else is weak sauce - half hour service, falling to hourly after dark, if they even run after rush-hour.

There are a few decent eastside routes (pictured), and two or three in the south suburbs.

>>85112
Seattlite here.

FYI, the east-west Amtrak route into Seattle ("Empire Builder") is notoriously unreliable and infrequent. We have stellar N/S service ("Amtrak Cascades") from Portland on up to Vancouver BC, though.

Honestly, for the money, I'd either pay for airline tickets and save time, or ride the big grey dog and save money. For cross-country trips, rail isn't worth it.
Here's some fares I just internet'd up for an arbitrary date (First wed in jan)
Contintental Airlines: $220, 19 hours
Amtrak: $271, 75 hours
Greyhound: $126, 85 hours.

I'm not sure what your financial situation is, but you should know that there's a rental shortage in the Seattle area, and rents are pretty tough (I'm paying $900/mo for 690 sqft in a run down duplex, and most people consider that a hell of a deal for a 2bd). Luckily you don't seem to have a lot of baggage, so that helps. There are a handful of tiny, furnished efficiency apartments in downtown seattle for around $450 a month - the Alps is one apartment building that comes to mind. They are usually tiny, one room jobs, just enough for a bed, fridge, and stove, with a little closet-sized 3/4 bath.

Otherwise, if you're on a budget, you're going to have to share an apartment with roommates, rent a room in a shared house, or be looking at upwards of $600/mo for your own 1 bedroom.

If you're carless, do not take an apartment far from the transit routes shown on this map. Transit service in the suburbs is utterly terrible - there's a couple of frequent routes but for the most part it's rush-hour commuter service only. And all the in-city routes not shown on the attached maps run every half-hour at best, and usually stop running early in the evening.

>>74332

I just noticed last night that the chip has hardware h.264 acceleration. But the real question is what's the current state of software support for this chip? This would make an ideal media PC if video acceleration Just Works out of the box.

(continued)
$3000 per day in sales is often sited as the break-even point for a typical storefront. That works out to about 600 customers a day at a $5 ticket average. However, given that you should have a much lower overhead, you can probably cut that in half.

I recommend a coffee/espresso cart, with a limited selection of hot food (hot dogs or grilled sandwiches, something simple and quick to assemble). Drinks are high demand, people are TOTALLY willing to spend $5 on a mocha or a smoothie, and the margins are a lot fatter. As such, they make FANTASTIC add-ons to a lunch order, and can keep your business afloat.

Health codes where you run into difficulty. Depending on jurisdiction, your cart will probably need to be equipped with AT LEAST sanitary running water, refrigeration, and a utensil washing/sanitizing station (check with your local health board for specifics). For this reason, it's usually more painless to buy a purpose built cart. Used, preferably, because manufacturers of new ones charge highway robbery prices.

If your local board of health is lax in what they require, though, you can probably build one from scratch pretty cheaply.

Location is everything. You need high pedestrian traffic volume to make anything work. If possible, be in the traffic flow from a busy transit stop.

Take it from someone who spent a long time working in foodservice management.

It is damn hard to turn a profit on foodservice.
Because your average sale is so small, you need to have extremely heavy volume to cover your fixed costs, even with a typical markup of around 100%.

There's really only two business models that are particularly viable for this right now. One is the high-end restaurant. If your starter pricing is around $40 a head, you can make due with much lower volume, and get in.

The other end is the food cart, with low overhead and low fixed costs. The ticket averages are low so you need high volume, but you don't need as much as you would to pay for a storefront.

The entire market territory in-between is a no-mans land for the independent entrepreneur. You cannot compete with the likes of McDonald's, Denny's, and Dominoes. They have the awesome wholesale supplier contracts guaranteeing them lower costs and fatter margins than you will ever see, and the national marketing muscle guaranteeing them the constant customer volumes necessary to make the business model work.
(continued)

AGM batteries will die forever if overcharged. The water boils out of the glass mats and there is no way to replace it. Only charge them on automatic chargers to avoid this fate.

AGM batteries aren't meant to be completely discharged repeatedly, even the deep cycle ones, but they can be taken down to %50 over and over again (where as conventional flooded deep cycle batteries don't handle going below %75 well, and staring batteries don't like being below %90)

It may be dead. Use an automatic charger for a long period of time to be sure. Your 2a charger probably didn't have enough time to fully charge it anyway in 10 hours.

If there was a problem in the wall it would most likely be tripping with nothing plugged in.

It's highly unlikely that a wiring fault is drawing exactly 14.9999 amps, needing you to plug in an alarm clock to push it over 15 and trip the breaker (assuming a 15a breaker).

Most likely it is a failed breaker. Replace the breaker with a new one from the hardware store (or simply swap it for a known-good breaker off of a different circuit), and see if that fixes the problem.

If the problem still exists with a known good breaker, then you can call in the cavalry.

>I noticed that eventually it says the fridge and freezer are at the target temperatures of 2 degrees and -16 degrees respectively but then when I reset it, it will read a different temperature.

WTF kind of crazy european fridge do you have? That sounds like some sort of computer controlled shit right there. This here is the extent of the controls on my Kenmore 14. An adjustable bimetallic thermostat that turns the compressor & fan on and off. (inb4 clean your fridge)

So how warm does it get before it kicks on again? For a new-ish, well insulated fridge, it's not out of the ordinary for the compressor to stay off for hours at a time if the doors have not been opened. It's possible that there's actually nothing wrong, and that the temperature display just only updates a few times an hour. A temperature variation of 5ºf between compressor shut-down and start-up is almost typical, you might just be expecting too precise temperature control out of this appliance.

Do this experiment: Wait for the compressor to shut off, and then prop the door open for a few minutes. See how long it takes to turn back on once all the cold air is let out. It should cycle back on within a minute or two of having the door wide open. If it does, there's nothing wrong.

If you just want a leaf vacuum out of it, you could replace the existing blade with an automotive radiator fan.

However, much depends on how the exhaust from the chipper area is oriented. In the only wood chippers I've dealt with, the output is on the SIDE of the chipper area, and the woodchips are hurled out by centrifugal force alone. If this is the case, a radiator fan wouldn't work, you'd need something more like a squirrel cage fan, which would easily clog with leaves. You'd need to fab something up with flat blades oriented 90º from how the chipper blades were.

>>66766
If your baseboard heaters are designed and installed right, they should be quite effective (even though they bolt up against the wall). Something's probably wrong with your installation. There should be a constant updraft through the heater, thanks to convection, and fans should be unnecessary. There should be a heatsink attached to the heating element, with the fins vertically oriented to assist in the convection. And the heating element within the heater should have at least an inch of open air between it and the wall, to keep all the heat from being wasted.

The vents on both top and bottom need to be unobstructed. Check to make sure the bottom inlet of the baseboard heater isn't blocked somehow. Sometimes these heaters have inlet vents underneath instead of on the front, which can be blocked if the heater is (incorrectly) mounted hard against the floor. If so, remove it and remount it an inch higher.

Inspect the heatsink fins and make sure they're not crushed/blocked. Often they're made of very thin aluminum and can be accidentally flattened, completely blocking airflow through the heater. You can straighten them with a variety of implements, like tweezers, needle nose pliers, tiny screwdrivers, or small nails. They can also get clogged with dust & lint (and you may find old socks / junk mail / etc within), it's worth sucking them out with a vacuum cleaner.

One other thing that might trip it up is the safety shutoff. Often modern heaters have an temperature probe, and will shut off the heater if it thinks it's getting too hot (like if the vents are blocked). If that probe's been bent/moved close to the heating element, it could be causing problems.

If you inspect all these things and it looks like it should be in working order, then it might be a 240v heater wired to a 120v circuit.

>>65333
Gotta jump in here.

Absolutely every electric heater is 100% efficient.
A 1500w oil filled radiant heater will heat just as well as a 1500w ceramic heater, and even just as well as a 1500w toaster with the lever jammed down. They will all heat equally well and use the exact same amount of power.

I do like the oil-filled heaters, though. They're silent and absurdly dependable. However, they do take up a lot of room and tend to come with crappy thermostats.

I'm currently using a small fan-blown 1500w heater with conventional coiled-wire elements and a nice accurate thermostat. I keep it set on "low", the 800w setting, though, so it doesn't cycle on and off so much while I sleep.

I've been through a few of them, though - the fans tend to burn out in them after a few years. I just switched brands, though, from De'Longhi (sold at Lowes) to Pelonis (sold at Home Depot), and this one seems to be holding up much better in the long run - on it's 3rd year with no sign of fading. The thermostat is much nicer, too

In my opinion, the most important feature of any space heater is the thermostat. Check to make sure it's calibrated in degrees, not just a lo-hi sweep or some arbitary 1-9 numbers. Cheaper thermostats will allow huge temperature swings, often 5° between cycles. Overshooting the set temperature means more heat lost through the walls, and letting it drop so far below means you're contantly bumping it up to compensate. Even the ones marked in degrees aren't always much better, there's a wide variance between companies. Shop around to find a good one, don't be afraid to return bad ones. Some of the nicer ones will even have timer functions, that let you automatically bump up the temperature before your alarm clock goes off.