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environmentalist argument for hacking your oxygen sensor
Saturday, September 15 2018
Gretchen had an obligation to attend a gala in Brooklyn this evening (a benefit for Positive Tails, a charity providing health care to rescued and abused animals). While down there, Gretchen would be doing a day of organizing work for her WASPy Upper-East-Side friend Wendy (aka "the old bitch," a term Wendy herself uses). Gretchen got up early enough for us to have our Saturday morning coffee, but then she had to go and it was my job to walk the dogs.
I took the dogs down the Farm Road and then up the Chamomile Headwaters trail. I'd brought a bag in case there were edible mushrooms to be collected, and I was not disappointed. I found numerous chanterelles in the sedgy-undergrowth beneath the small trees just to the south of the trail. The slope was somewhat steeper here than chanterelles usually prefer, but the proximity of a much steeper slopes probably provided the necessary subsurface water chanterelles require. These particular mushrooms were a bit long in the tooth: fraying around the edges and there were some bad spots needing to be excised, but the worst thing about collecting them here was the presence of so much sedge. Sedge resembles grass, and here it grew like a lawn beneath the trees. It was hard to gather chanterelles without contaminating them with blades of sedge that I would then have to pluck out. (You don't want sedge in your burrito; it's worse than grass.) Nevertheless, I was able to gather a great number of them.
I spent much of the day working on the Subaru. The first order of business was to stop up an exhaust leak between the intermediate pipe and the muffler pipe. I hadn't bothered to install the gasket one is supposed to insert between these two parts, using a mix of fiberglass mesh and furnace cement instead. But apparently when I jacked up the exhaust pipes to give myself more clearance, I'd opened up a gap between the pieces, and I could hear tell-tale noises echoing off of vertical surfaces I passed as I drove. To fix that, I loosened the bolts holding the pipes together, liberally worked in as much furnace cement as I could into the gap all the way around, and then embedded pink fibreglass insulation (the kind used between studs in houses) to make it less likely to develop cracks. Then I torqued those bolts down tight.
The other Subaru fix concerned the oxygen sensor and all the P0420 error codes I keep getting. I'd realized the other day that I'd hacked the wrong oxygen sensor and, after reversing that hack, I continued getting errors, indicating that the rear oxygen sensor still required hacking. Today when I climbed under the car, I was surprised to find that the Subaru actually has two front oxygen sensors. As for the rear one, the cable from it was so lost in the bundles of underbelly wiring that I decided to do the hack underneath, near the sensor itself. This time I tried installing a diode on the blue sensor wire, following some instructions I'd found online. If that doesn't work, I can go back to trying a voltage divider. I should say that the only other car whose oxygen sensor I hacked was a Honda Civic, and that time I hacked the correct oxygen sensor on the first attempt, and the "fix" worked immediately. For those who are concerned about what these hacks say about my commitment to the environment, my position is as follows: to replace the catalytic converter on an old car likely would result in a greater negative environmental impact (especially when you calculate the mining and refining costs of the necessary platinum) than that caused by the amount of air pollution the car has left to produce. Similarly, to dispose of the car and get a new one (or even a used one) would also be the environmentally expensive path to take. From an environmental perspective, it makes the most sense to drive the car into the ground, even if it does produce somewhat more pollution for its final couple years of relatively infrequent use.
Clarence the Cat continues to have old cat syndrome, with a very thin frame beneath a disturbingly-bony spine. For weeks now, Gretchen and I have been giving him large additional lumps of wet food throughout the day. This has turned him into a monster; all he thinks about is wet food, which he begs for constantly. But why isn't all that food turning into cat meat? Perhaps his digestive system isn't extracting nutrients as efficiently as it once did. For the first time ever today (at least since he was a kitten back in 2003), I saw Clarence take a poop. He did so in the yard, and then tried to cover it up (though there was nothing nearby to cover it with). I went and looked at what he'd produced and it was big for a cat turd. It was the color of peanut butter and fairly dry, though it didn't look abnormal in any way.
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