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increasing a closet door's R value
Sunday, December 28 2008
So now I had this closet door I'd modified by adding a large pane of insulated glass. No longer could it be used for hiding, say, marijuana cultivation or homosexuality. I knew that inside the part of that door I hadn't modified was a matrix of air pockets separated by cardboard dividers. Each of these air pockets was diamond-shaped and had dimensions of about two by four inches. Since I wanted my greenhouse to be well-insulated, it seemed prudent to inject foam into these pockets. I had a bottle of spray foam; all I'd have to do was drill holes in a random pattern and start squirting. What happened, though, was that I sprayed too much in and the foam didn't just come spewing out of the holes as if they were little volcanic hot spots; eventually the pressure inside the pockets was enough to force the door's thin wall out in bulges as much as a quarter inch at variance with the plane of the door's surface. Periodically I'd scrape the erupting foam from the holes and smear it across the door's surface, where it formed a foamy layer that might ultimately add to the door's R value.
Later I spent a long time down at the greenhouse lining the door well with rocks and gathering necessary fill cobbles from the temporary stream that babbled just below Dug Hill Road. The water, being freshly-melted snow, became painfully unpleasant after prolonged skin contact (the kind that happens when one is scooping up handfuls of submerged sand). But I found I could reach into it briefly for individual cobbles indefinitely without experiencing much discomfort. It seems that the body knows when the hands are being applied to extremely cold task and is able to adjust circulation to support it. That said, it's essentially impossible to handle snow barehanded for more than a couple dozen seconds; the heat-absorbing capacity of melting ice is no match for a biological system.
This evening Gretchen and I watched Slumdog Millionaire on a pre-release (only for the Academy) DVD. The movie opens on an airstrip in Bombay where some slum children have broken in and are playing a rousing game of Cricket. This scene is intercut with the Guantanamo-style interrogation of one of those children, now a young man who is suspected of fraud for his ability to answer questions on India's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (where the maximum prize in 20 million rupees, or about half a million US dollars). The movie cuts back and forth between the interrogation in the present and flashbacks into our hero's life as we learn how he came to know the answers to each of the questions. It made for a clever plot-organizing conceit (although the fact that he learned the answers in the same sequence they were asked was nothing short of magical realism). The movie was probably the best I'd seen since, I don't know, maybe The Forty Year Old Virgin. My only complaint was that the subtitles for the non-English parts of the dialog (mostly in our hero's early years) were too tiny to read. It's assumed that everyone has a big screen these days, but ours is an eleven year old 26 inch CRT.
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