January 21, 2020 Night

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Good evening! Partly clear and 19 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a west breeze at 5 mph. 🍃. There are 2 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️Things will start to thaw out at tomorrow around 1 pm. 🌡️

I decided to stay home tonight, ride the exercise bike 🚲 for a while, have some dinner and read 📖. There are other things that I could have done but I was tired 😴 and decided to call it a night early. Almost done reading that book on Storm Lake Iowa. 🌽 Reminds me a lot of the colorful people I knew growing up in a small town.

Sink seems to have freed itself up but I’m going to avoid using it and will go out tomorrow and get more drain solvent after the Guilderland Planning Board meeting I’m attending. No need to make multiple trips. 🛀 I got a little paranoid when I opened my mailbox 📬and saw an add for a plumber – they’re reading my blog – and marketing to me but the truth is I only mentioned it in the morning and it came as a large flat in the bulk mail. At any rate, if it was a serious problem I’d call my landlord 📞 and he’d have it fixed quickly. Nice thing about renting although the plumbing is constantly problematic here.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌤, with a low of 12 degrees at 1am. Two degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around 11 at 8pm; West wind around 5 mph becoming light and variable in the evening. In 2019, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 0 degrees. The record low of -20 occurred back in 1984.

Tonight will have a Waning Crescent 🌒 Moon with 7% illuminated. The darkest hour is at 12:07 am, followed by dawn at 6:49 am, and sun starting to rise at 7:20 am in the east-southeast (117°) and last for 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Sunrise is 40 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌄 The golden hour ends at 8:03 am with sun in the southeast (124°) at an altitude of 6°. Tonight will have 14 hours and 24 minutes of darkness, a decrease of one minute and 57 seconds over last night.

Tomorrow will be sunny 🌞, with a high of 36 degrees at 4pm. Six degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around February 19th. South wind 3 to 5 mph. A year ago, we had light snow in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 18 degrees. The record high of 62 was set in 1906. 12.9 inches of snow fell back in 1987.❄

It really kills me how much paper garbage I get in my mailbox 📮 every day. Yeah, I have a milk crate where I toss all the non confidential paper trash into and I take it to the recycling dumpster at the park and ride ♻ every few weeks but by then the bin usually is already overflowing in my apartment and the paper recycle dumpster is pretty full most of the time too. And while they pulp and recycle the waste fiber a lot of it still ends as residue taken to the Colonie landfill. Recycling produces a lot of waste too. Even if I heat with wood when I eventually own my off grid property and use paper every night to start the fire I’ll always have an unlimited supply of waste paper for starting the wood stove just from the junk mail. 🔥 And half of that mail ✉ is the glossy stuff that is half clay and produces a ton of ash when burnt and is not good with the glossy coating to burn inside in a woodstove. I guess that the burn barrel can take care of it when I have my own land but it seems like such a waste to cut down all those trees just to burn off the carbon for no real reason. At least no Time Warner Cable ad today but I’m sure there will be one tomorrow.

In four weeks on February 18 the sun will be setting in the west-southwest (255°) at 5:30 pm,🌄 which is 36 minutes and 26 seconds later then tonight. In 2019 on that day, we had snow showers, partly cloudy and temperatures between 26 and 13 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 35 and 18 degrees. In another month, it definitely starts to warm up a bit. The record high of 63 degrees was set back in 1981.

Looking ahead, Don’t Cry over Spilled Milk Day 🥛 is in 3 weeks, National Drink Wine Day 🍷 is in 4 weeks, St. Patrick’s Day 🍀 is in 8 weeks, 7:30 PM Sunset 🌇 is in 11 weeks, Cinco de Mayo 🤠 is in 15 weeks, Primary Day 🗳️ is in 22 weeks, Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 41 weeks and Election Day 2020 🗳️ is in 41 weeks.

Pond

I ran outside in the cold in a t-shirt on a ten degree night to check

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I ran outside in the cold in a t-shirt on a ten degree night to check. 🔋 

12.77 volts on the starting battery, 12.82 on the two accessory battery, both with no load. Figuring a little line drop and the fact it’s ten degrees out, I’d say those batteries are about as charged as you will get them. I usually don’t see voltages like that on the starting battery except after a full day on the road. 

To be fair, I think the batteries were close to full when I parked last night but it’s still a cold night and the various vampires (always on loads) have been nibbling away at the electrons since I parked yesterday. 

Yes, I know it’s not normal to run outside on a ten degree night to check battery voltage down to the hundreds of a volt on a truck your not planning to start. But it’s so fun to see that mess of wires, relays and brain boxes is working properly.

Environmental Implications Of Lead-Acid And Lithium-Ion Batteries

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Environmental Implications Of Lead-Acid And Lithium-Ion Batteries

Alex Pisarev, the CEO of California-based lithium-ion battery supplier OneCharge responded to a query on the question of lithium-ion battery recycling: 

“Our batteries are highly recyclable – based on our Bill of Materials on average we have 83% of steel and copper, by weight. They are close to 100% recyclable. There are technologies being developed to recycle the rest, which is Li-ion cells themselves. Some companies already claim 50%, which takes OneCharge batteries to around 90% recycling rate. It is important to mention that we plan to repurpose the batteries after the end of their useful life in lift trucks. Around 80% of cells usually can still work in less demanding applications, such as home energy storage. There is a lot of potential here, we just have not accumulated enough old batteries, they just keep working!”

And while lithium itself isn’t of great concern from a pollution angle, these batteries do contain metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese. While these metals aren’t as problematic as lead, they are considered toxic heavy metals.

Great Lakes microplastics may increase risk of PFAS contaminants in food web – Great Lakes Now

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Chemical Hitchhikers: Great Lakes microplastics may increase risk of PFAS contaminants in food web – Great Lakes Now

Lab-based studies show that when both contaminants are in water, PFAS will stick to the surface of microplastics. John Scott, an analytical chemist at the University of Illinois, wondered if the same thing happens in a real lake.

“I haven’t seen anybody else look at this in the natural environment,” he said.

Scott’s study showed that not only does it happen, the effect is magnified. More PFAS sticks to microplastics in lake water than in the lab, where researchers use simulated lake water. This simulated water is deionized water to which researchers have added the calcium, sodium and chloride that would normally be found in lake water. But unlike real lake water, it does not include organic matter and polluting compounds.

Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill | Here & Now

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Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill | Here & Now

Many Americans go through great pains to recycle plastic.

But much of that plastic isn’t recycled at all. In fact, the idea that plastics are refashioned into new products is largely a myth, Sharon Lerner writes in The Intercept.

“The vast majority of plastic that has ever been produced — 79% — has actually ended up in landfills or scattered around the world or burned, but not refashioned into new products, which is what we hope for when we talk about recycling,” Lerner says. “For plastic bags, it's less than 1% of tens of billions that are used in the U.S. alone. And so overall in the U.S., our plastic recycling rate peaked in 2014 at 9.5% so that's less than 10%.”