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nineteen years takes its toll on thin planks of treated wood
Monday, October 21 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
[REDACTED]
I took a rare late morning bath and then caught up on a few things while intermittently playing my version of Spelling Bee. This included using Bittorrent to download the latest episodes of Jeopardy!, downloading a Netflix movie for Gretchen, and filing for unemployment for the past week (it's looking like I will collect a whole second round of it!)
The day ended up being positively summery, with temperatures climbing as high as 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Neville joined Charlotte and me on a walk up the Chaomile Headwaters Trail and then over to the Stick Trail via one of my many off-trail shortcuts that take be down a very steep slope. Today I slipped and fell on my ass and slid for ten or fifteen feet before managing to come to a stop, and fortunately I was not injured.
Over the past couple weeks I've noticed that the top of the homemade solar panel (the one I'd built back in the fall of 2005 from treated one-by-six planks arranged to form a shallow box) had begun to sag so much that I could now see daylight coming underneath a piece of metal trim. Today I climbed up on the solar deck to get a better look at what was going on. I soon saw that the 12-foot-long plank forming the top of the solar panel box had not only twisted almost 90 degrees (something that had begun years ago) but was now sagging on either side of the two remaining two by fours propping it up at roughly 50% angle. The third two by four prop is a longer one that goes all the way down to the deck planks (instead of to the deck rails) and it had come completely loose and was doing nothing. It seemed the wood at the top of the solar panel was now in the process of accelerating decomposition and was losing its ability to hold its original shape. It looked like it still had some tensile strength, but in places it was sagging as if it was little more than very stiff rope. There were also places where screws and lag bolts had pulled out of it completely. From the way things looked, it was only a matter of time before the material of the topmost plank gave way and the supports holding it up had nothing left to push against, which would cause the panel to fall backwards onto the solar deck, likely breaking some of the plumbing in the process or causing other damage. I had trouble imagining the panels surviving the winter in the state it was in. But I also had trouble imagining how I was going to replace that topmost plank without the whole panel disintegrating as I did so. Still, the panel had lasted for nineteen years, which is impressive for a structure made of slender planks of treated wood placed in such a punishing environment.
Before going to bed tonight, I put some effort into adding a useful new feature to my ESP8266 Remote Control system. This one is on the weather data page, which typically shows all the plotted weather data for a given location across various time spans starting at various dates in history. The feature I added allows you to pick a specific weather data column (such as temperature) and plot it for several different locations on the same graph. That way, one can see how, say, temperature changed in several different places across the same span of time. Getting this to work is going to be a little tricky, since some weather data probes lack data for some time periods that other weather data probes have data for.
Neville rests near a shaft of low-angle October sunlight hitting the stone wall today while I added a few rocks to it this afternoon while walking the dogs.
Click to enlarge.
Charlotte at the edge of a large forest meadow of dying Japanese stiltgrass just north to the Chamomile this afternoon. This is a fire hazard we didn't used to have.
Click to enlarge.
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