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teflon tape hell
Friday, September 2 2005
So many things to scream about, so few ears to hear! George W. Bush making his obligatory tour of the Gulf Coast was full of scream-worthy moments. How about the concern he showed for Trent Lott's house, and the certainty he had that it would be rebuilt better than before. That's the home of a guy who expressed the view that a segregationist federal government would have prevented "all the problems we've had over these years." Meanwhile the would-be segregated of Lott's segregationist utopia were, well, pretty much segregated in the miserable funk of drowned New Orleans, craving drinking water while their dead lay amongst them. And whenever one of their starving numbers waded into a grocery store to get something to eat, some right wing blogger indulged a Jim Crow fantasy of shooting him in the head.
Somewhat earlier in this disaster an attempt was made by the Bush administration to cling to a shred of remaining American Exceptionalism, stating that we are strong enough to handle our own problems and that foreign aid would not be accepted. But when it was clear that to tough it out in this way, especially when the ones doing the toughing out were not the ones deciding to tough it out, Condoleeza Rice relented. (With Colin Powell out of the picture, she's also the one to whom they give the "we really care about black people too" talking points.) So now we've decided to condescend to accepting the charity of other lesser nations. That whole series of events, and what they all mean and imply, are all things that cause me to want to scream.
Nevertheless, it feels sort of like a revolution is happening. The downtrodden of New Orleans are acting like what, in some other country, we'd recognize as a severely-oppressed infra-class, and for the first time in many years, they're getting a little press, much of it sympathetic. Waiting in line for their $3.40/gallon gasoline, members of the middle class are having to ask themselves, "Could this really be happening in the blessed land that brought us the cheeseburger and the T.V. dinner?" It's shocking and it's embarrassing.
Of course, the middle class has to actually feel threatened by the poor for anything to actually be done for their benefit. It took the 60s riots to get a War on Poverty. Given what an easy powderkeg New Orleans proved to be, the dangerous poor might be just another of our country's many approaching tipping points. The fact that the right wingers are suddenly obsessed with them must indicate something.
Today was another day spent mostly down in the basement boiler room. I completed all of the basement solar mechanism plumbing and the only plumbing remaining to do is the articulation of the long set of pipes connecting the boiler room to the solar deck. Then, of course, there's the solar panel itself, which exists only as a swirling CAD diagram in my head.
Still, the completion of the basement plumbing is a substantial milestone on the road to free solar heat. Much of what I did today wasn't even really progressive; it was more in the vein of testing and debugging. After getting the final details of the system in place, I tried charging it with water from the household water supply. This was simply a matter of closing certain valves and opening others, often in ways that wouldn't make any sense once the system goes live. Immediately, though, I detected leaks. The first was easily fixed: a flawed solder joint. (I almost never encounter these, but when I do they're always in cases involving very large fittings or appreciable amounts of nearby water. ) The other problems all involved threaded connections and teflon tape. I found that the bigger the diameter of the connection, the more likely it was to leak. I spent hours tearing out installed equipment for the cause of fixing tiny leaks: first the cartridge circulator pump, then the air scoop. Finally I took the time to do things right, which is the way I should have done them to begin with. I carefully cleaned the fittings, reapplied the teflon tape, and screwed the fittings in again, carefully at first and then ending with as much torque as I could muster. Huge amounts of torque proved to be the winning formula here. Still, the process made me nervous; in the past I've had copper pipes fail when rotating them into or out of threaded fittings.
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