Aren Cambre’s Blog

I believe that organic foods and gardening products are a silly and hypocritical fad.

According to Consumer Reports, “There is no definitive proof that organic produce offers a nutritional advantage over conventionally grown fruit and vegetables. Nor is it known how much risk is entailed in consuming the tiny quantities of pesticides on food over a lifetime.” (link to article)

Consumer Reports is a bastion for all causes liberal. If any wacko left wing group wants it, Consumer Reports is trumpeting it. As a case in point, Consumer Reports was an outspoken advocate of single payer socialized medicine in the ‘90s. It’s especially poignant that Consumer Reports says this about organic products.

In the absence of hard proof, how do you justify paying the steep premium for organic products? You use junk science or concoct junk theories. A common premise is that everything synthetic is poison. Go read Howard Garrett’s Dallas Morning News gardening column. He squeals like a girl when anyone mentions synthetic stuff.

Everything synthetic is poison? I’d hate to live in a world without modern medicine, much of which uses synthetic products.

Everything organic is good? Go make some tea out of the cyanide that my (now gone) Carolina laurel cherry produced. Or talk to the residents of Greece , Corsica, and Turkey who use naturally available tremolite to white wash their homes. Tremolite is full of asbestos, another naturally occuring substance. Or go check out the environmental impact of organic chemicals like rotenone, sabadilla, or even soap. (Want to know a good way to kill a tank of fish? Add soap. Read this link.)

Even more humorous, “A study by the Southwest Research Institute found that the amount of produce containing detectable levels of pesticide residue dropped by half with washed samples. Where residue remained, levels were reduced by 29 to 98 percent.” This is again from Consumer Reports. (link to article) This puts the pesticide levels of washed produce on par with organic products, which themselves contain a certain amount of background pesticide levels.

OK, so that argument fails. Aren’t carcinogenic synthetic pesticides and fertilizers causing cancer rates to rise? Not according to the American Cancer Society.

Well, aren’t organic products more environmentally sensitive? Not at all!

A mantra of the green movement is “use less.” Use less food, use less gasoline, use less paper, use less of everything. Inconvenient fact: organic products cost substantially more than traditional foods. It’s in large part because organic farming is substantially less productive than contemporary farming methods. Ultimately the increased price reflects the increased resource consumption required to produce the organic product.

Organic products have no health benefit and are less environmentally friendly. Why do people buy them? I suspect it’s in large part a fad and a social statement. The social statement aspect is severely misguided, like buying a SUV to give the appearance of being in touch with nature.

Congress granted a new deduction for 2004: the sales tax deduction. Taxpayers can now deduct income tax or sales tax–not both. Since Texas has no income tax, the sales tax deduction finally puts us on a level playing field with most states. This deduction only lasts through 2005, so I hope Congress extends it!

My wife went through all of our 2004 receipts and split out each transaction in Microsoft Money so that they had sales tax as a separate line item. Here’s what I mean by “split out”: suppose you spent $4.32 at a restaurant for a meal. Normally you would just enter $4.32 and categorize it all under Food : Dining Out (this syntax means that Dining Out is a subcategory of the Food category). Now that the sales tax is deductible, it needs to be tracked separately. In splitting the transaction, the $4.32 has a $3.99 Food : Dining Out component and a $0.33 Taxes : Sales Tax component.

This splitting screws up our budgeting. A while back I established a monthly spending guideline in Money’s Budget feature for the Food : Dining Out category. Before 2004, the entire $4.32 would go into the Food : Dining Out category. During 2004, with the sales taxes split out, only $3.99 went into that category. Now it looks like we are doing better with our budget than reality.

Anyway…

After going though all of our receipts–we probably lost only about 2% of all receipts–we had Money tell us how much sales tax we spent in 2004.

The IRS allows you to deduct either your actual sales tax expenses or calculate an estimated annual sales tax expense based on your income. You still get to add to the IRS estimate sales taxes on major purchases such as vehicles.

Surprisingly, the IRS estimate was around a third higher than my actual sales tax spending! I figure that either 1. the IRS is generous with this estimate or 2. the IRS figures that the average taxpayer spends far more of his income on taxable goods and services than me.

Given this revelation, I am no longer splitting out sales taxes on each transaction. There is no way I could beat the IRS sales tax estimate unless I radically reduced my savings and non-taxable spending (e.g., charity, mortgage).

Trilia made some interesting comments on my fruit juice diatribe:

As someone who has been paying a lot of attention to healthy foods in recent days, I have to disagree with this assertion. Soft drinks generally do contain less calories per ounce than an equal amount of fruit juice, but as you show, the difference is about 50-100 calories. This amount can easily be compensated for with about 20 minutes of moderate exercise.

Also, soft drinks provide no nutritional benefit, carbonated drinks can make acid reflux and fluid retention worse, and their added caffeine has been linked to bone loss (possibly by not allowing calcium absorption). Juices, although stripped of a majority of the fruit’s nutritional content, still contain vitamins and aren’t going to bloat you like the Goodyear Blimp. I’m not saying skip the fruit for a juice, but if I have a choice between Coke and orange juice, I’ll take the juice.

It is true that fruit juices contain nutrients that soft drinks don’t, but these nutrients come with problems. If you eat reasonably, you already get “enough” nutrients and do not need supplements. So by adding fruit juices to your diet, you may be getting “too many” nutrients. I have yet to see convincing data suggesting that the average person benefits from more than “enough.” In fact, studies pop up here and there saying that more than “enough” can harm you.

Trilia suggested you can exercise an extra “20 minutes” (a day?) to counteract the fruit juices. Suppose you normally exercise 30 minutes a day, every day. That mean the first 20 minutes has no net benefit; it just counteracts fruit juice. Why not quit drinking fruit juices, thereby making all 30 minutes of exercise a productive effort?

I guess I wasn’t clear on one point. The absolute best hydrating substance for almost every situation is plain water. My point in comparing fruit juices to soft drinks is to show that fruit juices make you fatter than a form of junk food.

This morning the City of Dallas briefly caused a geyser while an employee fixed a defective water cut off valve for my house. I am glad I have neighbors that look over my place!

This repair introduced a lot of air into the pipes. Even the toilets burped air.

Edited on 1-31-06: Old article links is broken (thanks, CNN!), added new article link.

A highly ignorant belief is that fruit juice is better for you than soft drinks. Consider the following chart, showing how many calories are stuffed into a 12 oz serving of each kind of drink:

(Figures from http://www.nutritiondata.com/. Note that 12 oz is the size of a traditional can of soda.)

The trend is obvious: fruit juices are packed with far more empty calories than soft drinks.

Some people justify fruit juices because they are supposedly full of vitamins. In fact, fruit juices’ vitamin concentration can be inferior to that of whole fruits. But suppose it isn’t inferior? Believe it or not, there is such a thing as “enough.” If you get “enough” vitamins, additional vitamins aren’t any help. Fruit juices are an unnecessary vitamin source because you can get more than “enough” vitamins from a reasonable diet.

Another common justification of fruit juices is that they are “natural.” Well, guess what, smarty pants? A calorie of fruit sugar makes you just as fat as a calorie of refined sugar.

Fruit juices are clearly not a healthy alternative to soft drinks unless your health goal is to maximize your waist size.

Except for the rare time that I give my toddler some juice, I haven’t regularly stocked any kind of fruit juice in my house in years. We just eat whole fruits. I already have a hard enough time controlling my weight without juices.

Recently Texas started reducing soft drink availability at schools. Unfortunately, Texas politicians still pretend that fruit juice is good for you, so fruit juice remains as available as ever.

Recent CNN article about fat preschoolers and fruit juice.

Newer CBS article about sweet drinks, including fruit juices, and flabby kids

Yesterday my father-in-law and I spent 12½ hours replacing my water heater.

Our water heater was old. My house’s previous owners did not report changing the water heater on their house condition form. Given their move in date and the apparent date code on the water heater, it was at least 14 years old.

It was showing its age. It couldn’t keep up with a 10 minute shower using a 2.5 gallon per minute shower head. I figure that the dip tube may have gone out or the heat transfer was exceptionally poor.

Fortunately this old heater had not leaked yet.

Here is that old piece of garbage:

In a recent article, Consumer Reports cut open several water heaters and found that, in general, the longer the warranty term, the higher quality the water heater. For gas heaters, a longer warranty means “bigger burners and better heat transfer for faster water heating, along with more anode material and thicker insulation.” The width of our old heater suggests that it may have just been a 6 or 9 year warranty version, so it was probably on borrowed time before we moved in.

Not only is this heater “old and busted,” whoever installed it was a complete moron. Look carefully at the hot water connection:

This is where the installer sweat soldered a ¾” pipe into a ¾” female threaded adapter. The excess solder sitting around the place makes it look like the soldering happened after the adapter was screwed in. The same thing happened on the cold water line. If this is the case, then the nipples that this female copper piece screws into also got extremely hot. What’s on the other side of the nipple on the cold water inlet? The plastic dip tube. What happens to plastic dip tubes when they get extremely lot? Premature failure. So this water heater could have been “damaged goods” for years.

Back to the story.

On Friday night we pre-purchased a 40 gallon 9 year warranty Whirlpool natural gas water heater from my nearest Lowe’s. Lowe’s did not sell a 12 year warranty 40 gallon natural gas water heater.

Side note: of all the water heaters Consumer Reports tested, the only oddity it found was with the Whirlpool 40 gallon ones. CR reported that the 40 gallon 9 and 12 year water heaters’ internal stuff was identical, suggesting you don’t get a better heater by buying the Whirlpool 12 year unit.

On Saturday morning I stopped by a Home Depot and found that an equivalent water heater is $40 cheaper. Lowe’s refused to price match—even though the product was equivalent, it wasn’t the same brand—so I canceled my Lowe’s order. In the end I got a 12 year warranty 40 gallon GE water heater for only $21 more than Lowe’s 9 year version.

I feel better about the GE water heater anyway. Unlike Whirlpool, GE actually mentions water heaters on its site, suggesting they want to be associated with their product. The GE may really be a Rheem unit, the same brand that I have right now.

Getting the water heater was a fiasco. My father-in-law and I had to go to two Home Depots before we found the one I needed. Then when we got there, we spent about an hour figuring out the right parts to hook up a drain line to my drain pan. More on that later.

Here I am wheeling the new heater into the house:

It’s “ Superior ”. Oooh, aaah.

Next we drained the old heater:

This was way fun. I drained this water heater over a year ago without a problem. This time the heater would not drain even though I had hot water valves open in the adjacent bathroom. If I opened the water heater’s cold water inlet valve, the pressure would force water through the hose just fine. But when I shut off the cold water valve, it quit flowing. I even drained the entire house water system and reopened the cold water inlet. That didn’t work. I finally messed with the temperature and pressure (T&P) release valve. It came apart, allowing air to enter the tank and defeating the vacuum. Eureka ! 10 minutes later and I have an empty water heater.

It turns out that there may have been a check ball in the hot water nipple. That would prevent hot water from back-flowing into the heater.

Here’s the T&P valve ripped apart with its guts off to the left:

Next we cut the copper lines on top and disconnected the gas line:

The water heater wheeled out effortlessly with a dolly. Here’s the aftermath:

That’s the T&P drain line to the right. The chimney was taken down and put to the left.

The floor was a mess!

All that gray stuff is dust. Knowing I wouldn’t have access to this area again, I thoroughly vacuumed the floor and wall.

Next I cut off the 90° bend from the hot water line and the valve from the cold water line:

Then I prepped these lines with some fine sandpaper and flux and sweat soldered ¾” copper to male adapters:

Look carefully and you can see where capillary action pulled the solder through the fitting. They show up as those bright spots on the seam where the supply pipe bottoms out in the fitting.

Even though I only had a propane torch, the sweat soldering went fine. It just took a little while to heat up the pipe.

Here are some more views of the sweat solders:

This is the bottom of one of the fittings.

This is the bottom of the other fitting. You can barely make out where my sanding ended and where solder pooled up.

The pipes just goes to a 90 degree fitting and then drops down through the wall to connect to other pipes in the crawl space. It’s not secured very well.

Whoever re-plumbed the house 20 or so years ago did a mediocre job on the plumbing. That’s why I had such a fun time with my shower a few weeks ago.

This may not have been apparent in the earlier picture, but the flooring under the heater was warped. I think that the pre-1991 water heater back could have had a huge water leak. Fortunately we had extra 12×1 lumber in the garage, apparently an old closet shelf. After a few measurements and cuts with a circular saw, we have a makeshift, semi-level floor:

A reasonably level floor was important. These days you need to put a pan below your water heater. That’s a smart thing: if the heater has a small leak, you have something to contain and carry away the water instead of damaging your house. The pan is made out of aluminum, and the water heater’s weight may have bent the pan pretty badly had I put it directly on the warped floor.

Next we threw a new valve on the gas line:

Remember the T&P relief valve line? That line is ¾” copper that runs to the outside. I wanted to use that line for the pan drain, with the T&P valve of the new heater just draining into the pan. (This is apparently standard now.) The drain pan came with a 1” male PCV adapter like this: It also included a large rubber washer and large metal nut. The drain pan has a cutout that the threaded end of this PCV part fits through, and the rubber washer and nut tighten against the cutout to make a water-tight connection.

As mentioned earlier, my father-in-law and I spent about an hour at the Home Depot scratching our heads trying to figure out how to connect the drain pan to this ¾” copper line. It wasn’t easy because we had to go from PCV to copper and also do a sudden 90 degree turn into this line, and it all had to be done in a very short distance. The best that Home Depot staff could recommend was some kind of compression fitting that they didn’t carry. Eventually we stumbled across this solution, which worked very well:

What you see is, from bottom to top, is the stub of the T&P valve drain line (I cut it off about 2” above the floor), a 90° street ¾” copper fitting, and a 1” female threaded to ¾” female sweat copper reducer. We also found a piece that’s like the PCV adapter pictured above but without the long, smooth part to the left of the threads. This helped us with water heater clearance. Here’s a picture of the final assembly:

I thought we would pretty things up a bit and cover holes on the wall with flanges:

This can prevent bugs from getting inside.

Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures for the next few scenes. We put the drain pan in place and then got the water heater situated. Manhandling the water heater into the closet was an adventure. The closet opening was only 2” wider than the water heater, and we had to lift the unit up high enough to clear the pan. Fortunately the water heater was shipped on a cardboard base that was approximately the same height as the drain pan. We slid the heater on the base up to the drain pan and carefully rocked and rotated it up and over into the pan. It took about 15 minutes for us to figure this out and do it. Once the heater was in the pan, further positioning was easy.

Given how difficult that was, I am very glad we chose against a 50 gallon water heater. We almost thought about doing it. The 50 gallon unit was only ¼” narrower than the closet and taller.

Here’s a later picture with the heater hooked up to the water lines:

I put 600 PSI forged brass ball valves on top of the dielectric nipples. Then I used male-to-male couplers to hook up those flexible copper lines that run from the house plumbing to the water heater. Man, those flexible lines make me nervous. Instinctually, flexible stuff shouldn’t be on a critical part of the house’s plumbing!

Notice a problem with the above picture? Hint: where’s the chimney gonna go?

Oh, no! The hot water line blocks the chimney! If that’s not bad enough, we also discovered that the new water heater’s chimney is not in the same position as the old heater’s chimney. Another Home Depot trip!

An hour and a half later, I cut the hot water pipe back and installed a new male threaded fitting:

This clears the chimney great. That’s a wet rag below the pipe. It insulates the heater from my torch and catches solder.

The new chimney fits perfectly:

We made sure the new chimney is the same ultimate height as the old one. The old chimney was a 5’ piece and a 3’ piece. The new chimney is two 3’ sections and two 1’ flexible sections. The old water heater was 3½” shorter than the new one, but the bends in those two 1’ flexible sections took out about 2”, so it was close enough.

I also installed a long copper pipe from the T&P relief valve to the drain pan:

Take a closer look at the gas valve on the above picture. Notice how close it is to the heater? The flexible gas hose won’t fit. So when we went back to Home Depot, we got a 90 degree black steel ½” elbow. Now the valve mostly faces up:

We cranked the black steel pretty tight and used plenty of pipe dope.

Everything’s ready for action!

We thought we were done, but we found several small leaks in the brass fittings. I cranked down those fittings tighter than I thought brass should be cranked. With a 12” adjustable wrench, I was really pulling hard at one point. But they still leaked. A quick call to a contractor in Oregon (a member of my Nova listserv) cleared it up. I wrapped one layer of Teflon tape around all the fittings, but he says I should have used 3-4 layers. All my life I had just wrapped one layer of Teflon around fittings. Until now the only Teflon I had really ever used was for fittings on my old Chevrolet Nova’s cooling system, which at most had 16 PSI of pressure. Municipal water pressure is a few multiples of that.

I took all the fittings off, re-taped them with 4 layers of Teflon, and put the system back together. I ended up with one very slow leak, and I corrected that leak with a little more tightening. Here are the fittings after the re-Tefloning:

Next we turned on the gas and leak tested with our noses and with soapy water. We found no leaks.

Next I lit the heater. I had to hold down the red pilot button for a while to let gas flow through the line. The pilot lit perfectly. Here is a picture of the flames taken through the peep hole:

The red hot part is probably the ceramic part around the igniter. I kept the camera’s shutter open for 0.6 seconds to get this.

After we got it lit and let the burner fire up, we heard tapping sounds and noticed an orangish flame. The manual explained it: cold water entering the heater caused condensation. The orange flame and tapping was from water drops falling onto the burner. The tapping stopped within 10 minutes.

This water heater’s dielectric nipples seem cheap:

Inside this is a little rubber flap and no moving parts. Contrast this to my previous heater which completely blocked back-flowing; its nipples may have had a check ball. Already I can feel that the cold water inlet line gets hot as the hot water naturally migrates out. Hopefully this won’t cause too much heat loss.

Other than that issue, I am satisfied with the new water heater. I didn’t have to repeatedly adjust the faucets during today’s shower. It also runs a lot quieter than the previous one. Hopefully this new unit will cut down on our gas bills.

I am pleased to report that I am typing this blog entry a full trouble-free day after the installation.

I am not sure whether I need to correct this later, but the heater leans just slightly:

This picture exaggerates the lean. I will probably correct this with some wood or plastic shims.

One final point: note carefully my wording. Not once did I type “hot water heater.” Water heaters heat cold water, not hot water. It would be technically correct to say “cold water heater,” but I just say “water heater.”

UPDATE: We spent $513.12 on this whole heater replacement. That is more than $300 less than a quoted replacement price, and we got a much better water heater out of the deal.

I am skeptical about global warming and the garbage coming from all sides of the issue.

Prior predictions at world-wide environmental problems have often been hokey, incomplete, grossly overstated, or sometimes just wrong. Take global cooling from the ‘70s (wrong), acid rain from the ‘80s (grossly overstated), ozone depletion from the ‘90s (where are the disastrous effects that were commonly predicted?), and so on.

Now the “big bad evil environmental problem” is global warming.

You’ve got a lot of hysteria, from a recent study presented at a conference called by Tony Blair to another recent study that seemingly involved more politicians than scientists.

Then you’ve got the fact that nobody knows what’s really going on. As a case in point, see the multiple predictions pictured at right. They are from the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report – Climate Change. If we knew enough about the climate to accurately predict temperatures 100 years from now, shouldn’t we have astoundingly accurate day-to-day weather forecasts? I’m still waiting.

Then you have the fact that global temperatures have been rising naturally since the 1700s, so a portion, even possibly the majority, of currently-observed warming trends are not man-made.

Then you have professional global warming skeptics like Sallie Baliunas. Sometimes they give reasonable critiques of global warming promoters, but they are often dishonest and biased. (Unsurprisingly, many are funded by the oil industry, which would be severely hurt if carbon cuts were put into place.)

Then you have the fact that humans are highly adaptable and the world’s ecosystem is adaptable. Whatever land we could lose to desertification and so on, new croplands will open up as formerly unusable land that was frozen over clears up. Certain marginal species will go under, but other species will thrive.

Then you have the fact that socialists and communists are salivating at the idea of emissions controls. Every economically productive human activity produces emissions, so global warming controls are a back door way to allow governmental control of our entire lives. That’s why these controls often reek of covert Marxist plots.

Then you have the fact that the most popular carbon control method, the Kyoto Protocol, will badly hurt developed economies. Taxes on or rationing of carbon-producing activities, mainly transportation, will have to skyrocket, and your quality of life will plummet. Forget about your ability to travel cheaply! Forget about detached single family homes! Forget about commuting from outlying suburbs! Forget about being able to afford to live in the country!

Kyoto , however, allows “developing” countries like China and India , the two most populous countries in the world, to increase carbon emissions unfettered. Some projections show that China ’s probable increase in the number of coal powered plants will more than wipe out any Kyoto-based carbon reductions.

My fear is not temperature change or its effect on nature. My fear is the changes in my lifestyle and a reduced quality of life that will be forced down my throat by governments.

This whole global warming boondoggle is confusing, paradoxical, frightening, and involves many wrong-headed motivations from all ends of the spectrum. It’s often difficult to figure out which side to take.