Oshkosh 2007 and my aviation addiction

Airventure is the ultimate aviation experience. If you find aviation interesting, one of your life’s goals should be to make the annual pilgrimage to the EAA’s Airventure in Oshkosh, Wisconsin before you die. Once you do it, you’ll want to visit every year. This year marks my 16th attendance of Airventure, most of which I’ve flown to in the LongEZ.

I attended Oshkosh for the first time in 1990 shortly after I got my private pilot certificate. I didn’t have an airplane and was too inexperienced to consider renting an airplane and flying into the event, so our visit was a part of a 2500-mile Harley motorcycle adventure that took us from Pennsylvania westward to Illinois, Wisconsin, and eventually through Ontario, Canada and back through Niagra Falls on the return trip.

My wife had purchased an introductory flight as a 30th birthday gift for me in 1989 and I took to flying like a bird to the air. Learning to fly was a wonderful experience which still brings back a lot of fond memories. I was working at HP’s Avondale, Pennsylvania division after having moved back to Pennsylvania from Colorado. We moved to Pennsylvania primarily because Terri was feeling homesick. Both of us had grown up in northeastern Pennsylvania around Wilkes-Barre and had met in high school. I moved to Colorado in 1983 after finishing grad school at Penn State and Terri moved out when we were married in 1985. After a few years in Colorado, she began missing her family. After moving back to Pennsylvania, I was a little out of sorts, probably because I missed Colorado, where I had started my career as an engineer with HP. So the introductory flight was a way for Terri to express her thanks for my willingness to move back across the country and to restart my career. She knew it was one of my life goals to learn to fly.

My very first experience with real airplanes occurred in 1967 when I was 7 years old and my father got us a ‘scenic flight’ around Wyoming Valley, PA in an effort to alleviate my mother’s fears about an upcoming commercial flight we were planning to take to Ireland. It didn’t help my mom at all, and she never flew in a small aircraft again because all the bouncing around had terrified her. However, the effect on me was quite the opposite. I was completely hooked.

After that flight, whenever I met a pilot, I made sure to let him know that I was interested in aviation and that if he ever needed a passenger, I was up for it. My high school classmate and future college roommate, Dave Serhan, got his pilot’s license in high school and gave me a ride when we were students at Penn State’s Wilkes-Barre campus. We rented a small Cessna 150 at the Forty Fort airport. Shortly after gaining some altitude and while flying over the Huntsville Reservoir he pulled out his camera to take some photos, and said to me, “Here, fly the plane.” I couldn’t believe it! Here I was, flying an airplane for the first time in my life! After taking a few pictures, he took control of the plane and demonstrated some stalls and wing-overs. Since I had managed not to crash the plane while controlling it, I felt I must have been a ‘natural’. I looked forward to learning to fly.

When I went to work for HP, one of my recruiters found me leaving the office the first day and asked if I’d like to go flying. He had remembered my excitement when he told me that he was a pilot. I could hardly believe my good fortune. We flew over the front range of Colorado in his Cessna 182 and I got to spend a little time manipulating the controls. It further reinforced my desire to become a pilot.

As mentioned earlier, after we moved from Colorado back to Pennsylvania, Terri was looking for something for my 30th birthday. Buying me an introductory flight lesson seemed to fit the bill. There are not many things you can do in life more expensive than learning to fly. It’s not a rational decision. So having not just the support, but also the complicity of one’s spouse in such a venture cannot be underestimated. From that point on, it was out of her hands and she has never complained about the expense. I went on to get my private pilot and instrument certificates and have been flying airplanes ever since.

About a year after getting the certificate, we bought our first airplane, a 1961 Piper Colt for $7500. That seems pretty cheap now, 16 year later, but it was an expensive toy at the time. I’m sure it’s worth 2 or 3 times that now since, unlike cars, planes have appreciated over time somewhat like a house appreciates. Compared with its sticker price of around $2500 in 1961, it’s doubled in price 3 times in 46 years which gives it an annual average appreciation of around 5%. That may sound like a good investment, but I can assure you that a lot more than its total value has gone into maintaining it over the years. Owning an aircraft is not the road to riches, not unless you can hermetically store them away for little or no cost.

We flew that Colt to a lot of places around the east coast, including New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyannis, Nantucket, Ocean City, (NJ and MD) as well as Bar Harbor, Maine and lots of little grass strips and airports up and down the east coast. We also flew it to Colorado and took some trips to New Mexico and Idaho. It was like a little magic carpet, capable of landing on big airports as well as secluded grass airstrips. After about 2 years of flying the Colt in Colorado, I began looking for something a little faster to better deal with the west’s high altitudes and vast distances.

I’ve always had a fascination with canard airplanes. Back in 1983 I saw one fly overhead during a company celebration and my heart skipped a beat. It was like seeing a vehicle from another planet. It was just so beautiful and futuristic. I knew that day, somehow, I would pilot such an aircraft. Years later, after joining the EAA, I learned that the airplane I saw was probably a Varieze or a LongEZ designed by the legendary aircraft designer, Burt Rutan.

At the New Garden Airport where I was learning to fly, I noticed a local pilot had purchased a LongEZ and I worked up the courage to tell him how much of a fan I was of the design. He told me that next time I saw him there to ask for a ride. I was thrilled at the prospect.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, I saw the owner fueling his LongEZ and asked if he’d take me up for a ride. He told me he would. My expectations of it were exceeded not just by its performance and handling, but also by its outstanding visibility and comfort. It’s compact, but in the reclined seating position, you can be comfortable in it for hours. The owner, a trained military pilot, asked if I’d like to do a positive-G roll. I said I would. With his expert flying skills, he accelerated the plane to 160 mph indicated speed, set it up for a 20 degree climb, and gave it full left stick. Over we went, turning the horizon from blue to green and back to blue. I will never forget that experience and how it made me feel. I was hooked on the LongEZ.

By early 1995 we had moved back to Colorado and I had embarked on the building process for a Cozy, the follow-on 4 place derivative of the LongEZ. The LongEZ plans had since been withdrawn from the market due to liability issues. After spending a few years and about 300 hours building to the point where my Cozy looked like a boat, I realized that at the best case, it would take at least another 8 years to finish the Cozy and I wanted to have a canard aircraft as soon as possible. I figured I already owned an airplane (the Piper Colt) and thought that selling it and buying a LongEZ wouldn’t seriously hamper the progress on the Cozy. I had many words of discourageme
nt from pilots/aircraft builders who knew that once I got a flying canard airplane, the progress on the new one would grind to a halt. I realized they were probably correct, but I didn’t care. I wanted to experience the flying characteristics of this futuristic airplane without having to wait for another 8 years.

Throughout the first part of 1996, I began to learn all I could about buying a used homebuilt airplane, an exercise I found could be fraught with peril. Indeed, I had talked with some homebuilt aircraft owners who had grossly misrepresented the aircraft they were selling. But I likened it to bragging about one’s own child. A parent can be excused for a slip-up like that. Lesson learned: always inspect the aircraft yourself before taking the builder’s word for it.

Finally, in July of 1996, I found something that looked like it was at the right price and met my needs. We attempted to ride the Harley from Colorado up to Sun Valley, Idaho, but turned back when weather intervened in Wyoming. We got in the Colt the next day and flew to Hailey, Idaho and parked it amongst the jets owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other famous people. The next day we went to a restaurant in Hailey owned by Bruce Willis and we were sitting there having our breakfast. I couldn’t help but hear that the seller was in the booth behind me, because I could tell by the gist of the conversation that he was talking about the plane and about me. I decided that rather than continue to eavesdrop on the conversation, I’d stand up and introduce myself. From that point, everything went well and we eventually decided to do the deal.

The LongEZ I bought was by no means a show plane. However, it was well tested with about 800 hours on the airframe and the engine had a recently-replaced crankshaft along with 3 of the 4 cylinders, making it into an ‘almost rebuilt’ engine. The finish on the plane had a number of cosmetic problems including bumps on the strakes and a history of paint blisters on the surface which stemmed from the original finish process of incorporating a polyester material called ‘Featherfill’. This polyester material was originally recommended as a filler material but was later found to be incompatible with epoxy. It takes a few years, but polyester and epoxy begin to separate and as a result, the wings and canard have continued to have blisters that I’ve had to sand and fill with epoxy-based filler. But so far, other than not winning any show plane awards, it’s been quite reliable and I’ve been enjoyed more than 450 hours of flying with it. It’s taken me to Oshkosh and back 11 times as well as a few trips to the West coast.

On the way back from Oshkosh this year, I crossed the 1000 hour mark in total flying time. I know that is not impressive for those who fly for a living, but for those of us who do it as a hobby, it feels like quite an accomplishment.

I periodically get requests to update the progress on the Cozy. Thanks in large part to the efforts and prodding by my friend Don, the project continues to move forward. Last week we set the main spar in the fuselage which is a big milestone. I’ll need to get some pictures of it when we hang the wings which we hope to do soon just to see how everything is fitting together. Part of the time I spent at Oskhosh this year was to finalize the components to go into instrument panel, and I’ve narrowed down the options, which is never and easy task in light of all the new glass panel choices that are available now, but I’m a lot closer to finalizing it than I had been for a while. In another posting, I’ll put together a list of companies that make ‘glass panel’ cockpit displays which is now all the rage in homebuilding.

As for posting pictures of Oshkosh, I really didn’t take that many this year but I will put a link in here for Tony Garcia’s photos when I get it since he photographs planes like a pro and did a great job posting pictures from last year’s Oshkosh as well as this year’s Sun-n-Fun. I also got a great link to a few European RV-7 builders who put together an extensive collection this year, including photos of vendor displays that will give you somewhat of a virtual tour of Oshkosh if you go through all the slideshows.

Full scale electric aircraft?

Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in remote controlled aircraft as they have shifted from internal combustion engines to electric motors. This has expanded the RC hobby significantly since electric-powered aircraft are more economical, quieter, and more reliable than their internal combustion counterparts. Can a similar revolution be in store for full-scale aircraft?

In the case of remote control aircraft, a series of technological advances in batteries, motors, and further miniaturization of electronics combined to make electric flight practical. The question I have is: Does the technology scale to full-sized aircraft?

Today we’re flying around with 60-year-old engine technology, with very few updates, unless we add them ourselves. This is only possible in the experimental aircraft category, of course. It would be nice to see a quantum leap in technology applied to airplanes that we can climb in and fly. Here is a video of a company producing an example of a full-sized (albeit small) electric airplane:

Granted, there are a number of limitations such as the amount of charge it can hold (1 hour) and the time it takes to charge it (24 hours). But if those limitations can be overcome, it would be a very interesting alternative to conventional power plants.

Back from Oshkosh…

I got back from Oshkosh this weekend and was relieved to find it to be a rather uneventful return trip, unlike last time. It was pretty nice weather, overall, but when I landed in Algona, IA, I did notice that there was some weather across most of Nebraska, and planned to travel north of it. I was getting tailwinds, which I know threatens the credibility of this writing since I was traveling westward and having tailwinds in that direction is pretty rare. I had them going to Oshkosh too. OK, I know my credibility is shot because getting tailwinds in both direction on a single trip pushes the limits of believability.

There were a number of interesting things to see and do at Oshkosh, and I’ll see if I can find some YouTube videos to give you a better sense of what it was like. To start off, here is one of the new Eclipse Concept Jet, which looks remarkably like the V-Jet that was the genesis for their first plane, the Eclipse 500, which morphed into a more conventional-looking aircraft as it got closer to production.

Oshkosh bound

I’ll be heading to Oshkosh for Airventure tomorrow. I won’t have email access for about a week, so if you need me, you can contact me on my cell phone at 970-978-6188.

I got a call today from one of my cousins who was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States. He had heard the news of my recent ‘retirement’ and was calling for confirmation. That could only mean one thing. One of my relatives is reading this blog. Why, I had no idea!

-Lee

Colorado’s Wind Farms

About 5 years ago wind farms started popping up in Colorado. They are easy to spot from the air and can be seen for many miles because the structures are so enormous. A modern wind turbine can reach well over 400 feet into the air.

Over a span of less than 3 decades wind turbines have increased from an average rotor size of 10 meters generating 25KW to a rotor size of 112 meters generating up to 6 MW per turbine. The 3+ MW turbines are generally installed in the ocean about 5-10 miles off shore where the wind is steady. Land based wind turbines are generally rated at less than 2 MW. Each 1 MW of wind energy is enough power for approximately 300 households based on an average U.S. household consumption rate of around 900 kWh per month. The average power available from wind turbines, also called their ‘capacity factor’, is about 1/3 of their rated generating capacity because the wind is not constant. They make their rated power in winds about 20-25 mph and will not generate any more than the rated power even when the wind increases above that speed because it would over stress the system. Above about 55-60 mph, the wind turbine will protect itself by locking its rotor so that the blades will not get damaged.

Here in Colorado there are many locations where the wind is nearly always blowing on the plains and there aren’t any obstructions on the ground to slow it down. Other than the trees along the Platte river, there is virtually no vegetation taller than a cornstalk between here and Nebraska. And Wyoming has even higher wind and fewer trees than Colorado in the eastern side of the state.

I was out flying today and took a few photos of the Ponnequin Wind Farm up near the border of Wyoming to take a look at Colorado’s first wind farm which was built about 6 years ago. You can see a photo of it below.

If you’re curious about the Ponnequin wind farm you can read a little about it here at the American Wind Energy Association website. If you have Google Earth, you can get a satellite view of it here. Or here on Google Maps.

About 60 miles east of the Ponnequin Wind Farm, the largest wind farm in Colorado called Cedar Creek is currently under construction. During the past few months I’ve been monitoring the progress of it since it’s not far from Greeley, at least not as the crow (or LongEZ) flies, and I’m astonished at how fast it’s getting built. A few months ago, there were only a few towers standing and now they have more than 200+ towers erected. I timed how long it took me to fly from one end to the other and it was 5 minutes, flying at 160 miles an hour which means it stretches 13 miles from east to west. It’s on land that previously didn’t have much use due to sparse population and lack of water for irrigation. I did some quick calculations and realized that this wind farm will generate more than $80M/year in electricity from its 273 wind turbines, based on the average of around $.10/KWh currently paid in the U.S. by consumers. That’s not a bad return since the fuel, a major cost for conventional power plants, is free in the case of wind power.

Looking down from above on these structures, it’s hard to fathom how big they are. In the picture above, the closest wind turbine has a large truck parked near its base which is virtually invisible in the photo. That gives you an approximate idea of the scale of these structures. Go ahead and click on that image to get a higher resolution photo of it and a better idea of the relative size of the truck and the wind turbine.

One of the biggest logistical issues with constructing these wind farms is getting the materials to the site. The tower sections take up most of the highway when transported and are nearly 60 feet long per section. It takes 3 of them to make up the tower. Similarly, the rotor blades are enormous, over 100 feet in length. Can you imagine trying to get that to go around a corner?

Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark is currently building a turbine blade plant in Windsor, CO, just about 10 miles from where I live. This will better accommodate the delivery of large turbine blades to wind farm sites in the western U.S.

In talking with a rancher in Wyoming recently, it appears that a lot of site surveys have been underway over the years to construct wind farms there, turning what was very marginal land into a valuable resource to provide clean, renewable energy for future generations. Even though the Cedar Creek site seems expansive, and it is, there is so much land in eastern Colorado and Wyoming that would be ideal for wind farms that it’s easy to imagine building them for the next 20 or 30 years. That’s about the average life expectancy of the wind generating equipment, so after they’ve done that, they will get to do it over again.

Buying an Experimental/Homebuilt Airplane

This week I got a few emails from people asking me about a LongEZ that is for sale in Loveland and is listed in Trade-A-Plane. It just so happens that I know the owner, since I purchased an engine from him a few months ago and wrote up the experience in my blog. I did not know his airplane because I had never seen it close up. I’d seen it from a distance, and while purchasing the engine we had some discussions about it, but I had never seen it up close so I couldn’t comment on it. Yesterday I arranged to meet with him at his hangar so I could assess it for the people who had emailed me.

Buying a used homebuilt, that is, an experimental aircraft, is not for the faint-of-heart. Even the most beautiful specimens may contain fatal flaws, as was the case with the LongEZ that John Denver purchased. That LongEZ sold for the highest price I’d ever seen paid for a LongEZ at the time, around $55K and that was 10 years ago. From what I understand, the plane was quite stunning in appearance, and appearance more than any factor, seems to drive the price, particularly if it is in ‘showplane’ condition. However, in that aircraft’s case, the fuel valve was installed in such a way that the ergonomics were absolutely terrible. Ironically, the decision to make this modification was presumably to enhance the safety of the fuel valve, but it created several other more serious problems in the process, namely, that the pilot had to turn around to use it and that the direction of the valve stem with respect to the selected tank was counter-intuitive. In addition, it used a valve that had long been known for its tendency to gall and stick and it was at the end of a long torque tube, which greatly exacerbated the sticking problem. While fiddling with this valve after having run a tank dry and the engine stop, John Denver became so distracted that he crashed the airplane. It was completely unnecessary because an engine outage is no reason to crash vertically into the ground, or, in his case, into the water, at nearly a vertical angle. When the engine stops, the plane is effectively a glider which can be landed in a gentle manner on a level surface like water without killing the plane’s occupants.

Each homebuilt aircraft is unique. Some production planes tend to become more unique over time as their instrument panels tend to take on a life of their own as they get ‘upgraded’ over many decades with a whole host of oddities. However, in the case of a homebuilt plane, the ability to customize knows no limits and so you can’t just purchase one without examining it carefully to know how everything is arranged.

When building an airplane, deviating from the plans must be done with some degree of caution. For example, if one person makes a modification and calls it an improvement, it’s not a good idea to follow suit until you know of several dozen who were able to repeat this modification with similar results. If it’s truly an improvement, then many of the builders will eventually adopt it and it will add to the value of the aircraft once it’s universally recognized as an improvement to the design. In the case of a LongEZ, the improvements that are generally considered improvements over the original plans include the Roncz canard, larger rudders, heavy duty brakes, brake cylinders installed in the nose, and an O-320 engine. Each of those will enhance the value of the plane.

If you really want to diminish the plane’s value, you can install an automotive engine, and you’d be lucky to get any money over the cost of the airframe when you sell it, which generally accounts for about 60% of the typical value of a similar airplane with an aircraft engine. In other words, about 40% of the value of an aircraft is in the engine, but only if it has an aircraft engine. Even though automotive engines are cheaper to purchase and maintain, it will require a fair amount of time to adapt it to an airframe. For some homebuilders, this challenge is its own reward. Having an automotive engine decrease of the aircraft’s value may not be fair, but it is a testament to the uncertainty factor of having an unknown, unique engine in a plane and not having a statistically significant sample of other similarly equipped aircraft. It really makes the airplane earn its ‘experimental’ moniker.

In the case of the plane I examined, I found it to be a solidly built plane, with over 450 hours on the airframe and good workmanship throughout as well as some nice upgrades. There were some areas that need to be further upgraded or repaired, but overall it looked like a pretty good deal to me.

It’s important to have someone with experience in the type of aircraft you’re considering to look it over before committing to purchase it because there are many potential pitfalls in buying a used homebuilt. Builders often can be overly fond of their creations and are not impartial judges when describing them so you need to get an independent assessment. In many ways, an aircraft one builds is like a child, and it’s hard to judge one’s own child impartially.

When I was in looking for a LongEZ about 10 years ago, I talked with some people who had the ugliest planes I’ve ever seen try to tell me that they were in ‘showplane’ condition. It really made an impression on me that you should never buy something without seeing it first. And you should definitely bring someone along who will talk you out of it when you’re in the mode of thinking that some material possession is the ‘one thing separating you from true and everlasting happiness’.

How to make mailing labels with Excel and Word

I’ve done mailing labels over the years when I was the local chapter EAA newsletter editor and then a few times for Christmas cards, but each time I do them now, it seems that I can’t remember the steps it takes to repeat the process and as a result, it feels like I have to learn it all over again. So today I carefully went through the procedure because I’m helping out with my high school reunion and we will need to print out mailing labels several times in the next few months. I figured other people might want to know how to do it, so I will give the step-by-step method here in the blog.

First of all, you will need to put your mailing database in an Excel spreadsheet. Even though you’ll use the MailMerge function of Word, a spreadsheet is much easier for manipulating lists of data compared with trying to work with tables in Word. You should title the columns with intuitive names such as, LastName, FirstName, Address1, City, State, Zip code because if you do, MailMerge will usually correctly guess the order to arrange the data when it comes time to put them into a mailing label format.

I like using type 5160 Avery adhesive labels which are arranged in 8.5″ x 11″ sheets with individual labels 1″ x 2.625″ spaced 3 across and 11 down for a total of 33 labels per page.

[Note: When I first wrote these instructions, I was using Office 2003. Now that I have Office 2007, I can see that some of the menus have been changed. I'll add some extra instructions below for those with Office 2007.]

Here are the steps for producing labels using the Mail Merge program in Microsoft Word:

Launch Word and use File->New to create a Blank Document

Tools->Letters and Mailings->Mail Merge Wizard

[Office 2007: Mailings -> Start Mail Merge -> Step-by-step Mail Merge Wizard ]

You’ll see Step 1 of 6:

Choose the option ‘Labels’ then select ‘Next’ at the bottom of the menu.

Step 2: Make sure ‘Change document layout’ radio button is selected and then and select ‘Label options…’ below it.

This will take you to a Label Options menu that allows you to select a label type. I use ‘Avery Standard’ and type ’5160 Address’. Then select OK. Office 2007 asks you if it’s OK to overwrite your document at this point. Select OK.

In Word 2003, a grid should appear in your document that shows labels borders spaced in 3 columns, 11 rows per sheet. This grid doesn’t appear in Word 2007.

Step 3: Now select ‘Next: Select recipients’

Make sure the option to ‘Select/Use an Existing list’ is selected and the select ‘Browse’ and find the .xls file on your computer with your database and then open it. Select the spreadsheet page you wish to use. If it has just one page, you will see $Sheet1 and you should select it. In Word 2003 you may select ‘entire spreadsheet’ if you have only one sheet. You will then see a list of names from the spreadsheet. Select OK. You may have to select OK again. A list of <> entries will appear in the document.

Step 4: Now select ‘Next: Arrange your labels’

Select ‘Address Block’. Look at the preview field to see if the example label has all the information you want. Because of the layout of the heading row spreadsheet, it should be correct. If it’s not, you can fix it by selecting the ‘Match fields’ option and editing them. Now select OK. You should see <
> in the first label and <> in all the other labels. Select ‘Update all labels’. This will cause the text <
> to be added to all the labels that previously had just <> in them. So the first field will have <
> and all the others will have <
><>.

Note: If you wish to have more control over your labels, instead of selecting ‘address block’, you can select ‘More options’ and this will allow you to apply the exact amount of spacing, carriage returns, etc., around each field. I’ve found this helpful if you have international addresses mixed in.

Step 5: Now select ‘Next: Preview your labels’

Now you will see a sample page of the labels.

At this point, you can select ‘Print…’ which will walk you through the steps of printing out the labels on a local printer, or you can select ‘Edit individual labels…’ If you select that, it will create a Word document file that you can edit or store away for future use or print from another computer. I usually use that option.

I should mention that there was an issue with the zip codes that started with ’0′ (zero). You should format that field in the spreadsheet as a ‘special’ zip code field, which is an option in the format command of Excel. Then during the import to MailMerge, I had to use these steps.

Preparing DDE settings in Microsoft Word:
If you perform a mail merge in Office 2003 and use Excel as the data source, some of the numeric data may not retain its formatting when merged. To resolve this:
1. Open Word
2. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the General tab.
3. Click to select Confirm conversion at open check box, and click OK.
4. Continue creating the mail merge as explained above
5. Open Data Source.
6. In the Confirm Data Source dialog box, click MS Excel Worksheets via DDE (*.xls), then click OK.

You may have to answer a few questions when you import the .xls file but it will fix any issues with the zip code field, especially with those starting with ’0′ (zero).

Another trick to making labels is printing a single sheet of labels out on plain paper first to make sure the alignment is OK. You can hold the sheet of labels up to the light with the printed paper labels behind it and insure that the text will all end up inside the sticky label borders. You don’t want to be making mistakes on the label stock because it’s much more expensive than plain paper.

Clever Alternative Energy Commercial

I’ve been writing a little about energy lately and have a few more blog postings related to the topic but I found this clever commercial on YouTube that I thought warranted its own posting.

Hybrids require more energy than Hummers?

I’ve read several references to a report that alleges that the total energy costs per mile of a hybrid vehicle exceed that of an H3 Hummer, and by a significant margin too, more than 50%. I decided to look up the source of this information and found a 450+ page report filled with spreadsheets on various costs it takes to run a vehicle over its life expectancy and beyond. There was a lot of interesting information in the report, like how many miles a typical vehicle is driven before being recycled, how much money is spent on repair, how much it costs to recycle, as well as a lot of feedback and industry reports attached to th end of it.

Manufacturers estimate that the energy used to produce a vehicle is about 20% of the amount of energy it burns in fuel over its lifetime. The fuel cost over the life of a vehicle is easy to compute. For example, if a car gets 25 miles to the gallon, and is driven 180,000 miles before it’s recycled, it would use about 7200 gallons of gasoline, and at a cost of $3.00 per gallon, this would come out to $21,600 or $.12 per mile, which seems quite believable. Add to that another 20% for the energy required to produce the car ($4320) or $.02/mile and you have a total energy cost of roughly $.14 per mile. This value seems plausible, although it doesn’t include the recycling energy cost which one might assume is on the same order of magnitude as the energy cost to produce the vehicle.

However, the report, available for free from CNW Research, estimates that most of the energy used by a vehicle comes not from the energy to produce it and to power it over its lifetime, but rather from the recycling cost and that accounts for most of their $3.238 per mile estimate for a Honda Civic Hybrid and $1.949 per mile estimate for an H3. A Honda Civic Hybrid is one of the most fuel efficient vehicles on the road whereas an an H3 is a very large SUV and gets about a quarter of the fuel economy of the Hybrid. So it’s hard to imagine an inverse relationship in energy cost per mile, and why would the real energy costs exceed the ‘apparent’ energy costs by not just a factor of 2 or 3, but more than 20 times? The report suggests that the amount of energy used in recycling is related to the ‘complexity’ of the vehicle and that the complexity of hybrids makes them much more expensive to recycle than a simpler vehicle that has been in production for a longer period of time.

After combing through the entire report and seeing numbers calculated out to such a high degree of precision, yet showing no calculations for the actual recycle costs, I can only conclude that they must be a guess.

A manufacturer has to have a pretty good idea of how much energy goes into a vehicle’s manufacture. After all, they have to sell the car for well more than just the energy that goes into it or they’d go broke in a hurry. The same is true for their part suppliers. Similarly, a recycler wouldn’t take a car for recycling if the value of the material derived from it would be completely be overshadowed by the energy cost it would take to recycle it. Much of the material gets recycled from a vehicle simply *because* it’s cheaper to used recycled materials than it is to process the material from scratch. If this were not the case, these materials would end up buried in a landfill, end of story. So saying that the recycle cost exceeds the original vehicle’s cost and all of its apparent energy usage by an order of magnitude or more simply makes no sense.

The research seems to indicate that the recycle costs are somehow hidden in the operating costs and profits of other businesses but that similarly makes little sense. Surely the report wouldn’t intend to count the energy cost to produce a single car as somehow having to include the costs of other cars that may be produced by that same material after it’s recycled. That would would be not just double or triple counting energy, but counting the energy for each recycling operation against the original vehicle for all eternity. Again, that would make absolutely no sense.

So my conclusion is that the research is flawed and the only reason it gets any attention is because it alleges something that anti-environmentalists find so outrageously compelling, i.e., that H3′s are more environmentally friendly than hybrid vehicles. And I write this not as a hybrid car owner, but as an owner of a 15 mpg SUV. I just don’t like research that gets so many references without being critically examined.

Removing a hot tub from a deck

Last weekend Terri asked me to work on finding a new home for our hot tub. The hot tub came with the house that we purchased in 1994. We enjoyed it for a while, but then got out of the habit and thought it would be best to sell it or give it away to someone who would use it. Paying to heat and maintain a hot tub can be expensive, particularly when it needs repairs. Our last repair bill was nearly $800 because it required replacing the heater box, recirculating pump, and some of the tubing. It was also leaking and that was repaired at the same time too.

I put an ad on Craigslist and attached the picture above letting anyone know that if they wanted the tub, they could have it for free if they moved it themselves. Prior to placing the ad, I had called the hot tub store and asked what it cost to have it professionally moved and they told me it would be around $300-$500 depending on the complexity and about $100/hour for every hour extra they need to spend. They also told me the model of hot tub I had weighed about 900 lbs. In about 4 hours after placing the ad for a free hot tub, I had 9 responses from interested parties. That evening a guy stopped by to look at it and while he was here another guy showed up also wanting to take the tub. I suggested a coin toss to which they both agreed and that resulted in a winner. The coin toss winner said he’d come back with some friends and equipment to retrieve the tub a few days later. I told him I’d work on removing some of the decking to make it accessible.

The main problem was that the hot tub was built into our redwood deck. Actually, the deck was built around it like a jig saw puzzle because the hot tub was installed on a concrete pad before the deck was built. The floor boards on the deck are attached with long wood screws, so I didn’t anticipate a problem removing them…. until I actually tried to do it. Most of the screws were screwed well below the wood surface, up to a half inch deep in some places, which caused the screw head to disappear below the surface of the deck. This also caused the holes to fill with dirt and wood, so before I could remove most of the screws, I had to first excavate them. I used a drill with a Forstner bit to remove the wood above them, then an exacto knife to clean out the dirt in the screw heads and then a right angle screw driver to provide enough leverage and get them started so that I didn’t strip out the heads. It took me a good 5 hours working in the heat to get enough boards out of the deck to find out that a much bigger challenge lay ahead. The hot tub had a massive frame built around it and I would have to remove that frame before the tub could be lifted because we couldn’t get anything under the tub to lift it out with the frame in place. I removed a few more floor boards and then used a Sawzall to cut the joists, which worked for the stringers, but there were a few parts of the frame that required cutting through stringers that had been doubled or tripled, so I pulled out my chainsaw. A chainsaw is an interesting tool to use for working on a beautiful redwood deck. But in a surprisingly short time, I had severed enough joists and members in the frame so that Terri and I could lift the frame away from the hot tub.

After we got this taken care of, our buyer showed up with 3 friends along with a flat bed trailer and a pair of flat dollies. He was well prepared with various tools, and yet we were still unsure of how we would lift the 900 lb tub up out of the hole it was set down in. One guy suggested we just try to lift it as he had done with his hot tub. I thought that couldn’t hurt as long as we took it easy so between the 5 of us we found that it was in fact possible to lift the tub. We got one end of it up on the deck only to find we forgot to remove the wiring. Oops. We put some wood under the dangling end of the tub while one guy took care of unwiring it. Then we tilted it up on end, on to the dolly, so it would fit out through the gate which was about 4 feet wide. One guy had built a small ramp with bricks and plywood to roll it safely down the one step between the patio and the sidewalk and then we wheeled it out to the flat bed trailer. The whole ordeal took less than 20 minutes and would have take half that had we remembered to unwire it first. It was quite a relief.

Now the tub is on its way to a new home where it will no doubt see much more use that it had here. And I have a large hole in my deck to fill in.