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just one tool
Tuesday, May 20 2008
Today was another cloudy, dreary day with occasional periods of sun. If this is what global warming has done to the Catskills' May, I'm hoping we still get to keep the old May, even if it's stuck in the middle of winter. (Don't laugh; Januaries have become very springlike here, although February has remained as much of a bitch as it's ever been.)
I'm a very tool-oriented person, though it's only recently that I've started fetishizing discrete tools that can be physically held in the hand. I like to have all the familiar tools I remember from my childhood, along with their electrically-powered descendants as well as the car-oriented tools (particularly socket sets) my father had been proud not to have. With the complexity of my solar hydronic array, though, there has been a steady need for custom tools, ones unavailable in the marketplace. The most spectacular and useful of these has been the antifreeze resupply system (which is now so well-integrated that it actually resupplies itself, collecting the outflow from the pressure relief valve and automatically pumping it back into the system as needed).
Today I built a couple of funnels for use in adding antifreeze to the solar hydronic system from the top. The advantage to doing it this way is that it allows for the rapid replacement of air with antifreeze, an essential capability when adding back antifreeze after draining the pipes for maintenance or expansion. In the past I've used conventional plastic funnels, the kind used in the kitchen or when adding oil to a car. But these take up a hand just being held in place, which is a tricky requirement when you're standing on a ladder with a gallon of antifreeze in one hand. The funnels I built today included female hose threads that could be screwed over the spigots where either fluid is added (or air is allowed to escape). Both funnels included copper and brass components, although for the second one I added the top part of an empty half gallon gin bottle to serve as a wide transparent funnel. This one tool should prove crucial for all future solar hydronic projects because of the aggravation it eliminates from the task of refilling the pipes with antifreeze. When a tool acts to eliminate the difficulty of just one tricky step in a process (particularly one whose attendant psychological barrier discourages tinkering), the effect is to open up a whole new range of flexibility for the entire system.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?080520 feedback
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