Don’t worry, just a little bump - $70 is just around the corner. Short traders just keep making those margin calls, mortgage the house if you have to. Fortunes await you! PO is for pansies and doomers. At $70 short some more ..... it is going back to $22 .... the world is awash with oil ........ reality has nothing to do with it, its all in those charts!!!!!!!!!!
Joined: Apr 04, 2004 Posts: 577 Location: Western US
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 7:05 am Post subject: Bed bugs
I recall seeing a program on the television in which they were discussing parasites on our not so late ancestors. Having run a search here and, not seeing anything on the subject; Does anyone know how to get rid of lice post peak? _________________ You observed it from the start
Now you’re a million miles apart
As we bleed another nation
So you can watch you favorite station
Now you eyes pop out your sockets
Dirty hands and empty pockets
Who? You!
c.o.c.
once a room had been contaminated, people would (after basic cleaning and laundy) smoke the room with cedar smoke (other plants also work) - basically worked as a primitive "bug bomb"
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3428 Location: California, USA
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2004 3:35 am Post subject:
Though, if I'm not mistaken, turpentine is acutely toxic and needs to be handled with care.
I'll second Virginian about sanitation.
Lice can be picked up from the ground, or from others who have them. A good crew-cut and a full body shave will deprive them of habitat, and all your hair & fur will grow back soon enough. (Foofy hairstyles will disappear post-peak:-) Good point about getting steel louse-combs now while they're cheap.
Bed bugs: mostly come in via travel, or via animal hosts. Can be killed by laundering and drying at over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Proper washing of clothes is something we tend to take for granted, but should not be neglected. Modern horizontal-axis washers use relatively little water and energy, so any community sustainability plan should provide enough electricity for their use on a sufficient basis to guarantee sanitation. By heating the soak/wash-cycle water to over 160 degrees Fahrenheit, you can kill most of the nasties out there.
Here's a potential post-peak laundry scenario. Each article of clothing could be washed e.g. three times in a hand-wash or low-tech system and dried on a hanging-rack three times. For the fourth time, wash in hot water and dry in a hot-air dryer at > 160 F. If an article of clothing is worn once and then washed, e.g. on a weekly basis, this is one high-sanitation wash per month. This reduces your energy consumption by as much as 75%, while providing enough high-sanitation washes to stop most hazards.
Vertical axis washers (the kind most of us grew up with) work by circulating the clothing vigorously through the soapy water: the water level must be high enough to permit the clothing to float in it and circulate freely. In contrast, horizontal axis washers (e.g. Maytag Neptune and its equivalents that can cost as little as $400), work by lifting & dropping the clothing through a smaller quantity of soapy water, which saves a considerable amount of water while doing an even better cleaning job.
In both cases the rinse/extract cycle works by a combination of allowing the soap and dirt to diffuse into the rinse water, and by squeezing (through centrifugal force) the rinse water out of the clothing. This has to be repeated a number of times (typically three) to be fully effective. Rinsing can be done in any appropriate container; but extracting without centrifugal force (rapidly spinning perforated container) requires a wringer (or an awful lot of hand-squeezing in a specific pattern).
Hang-drying clothes in an area without sunlight or a dry breeze will result in mould. Either heat or a breeze is necessary, both are better.
Heavy work clothes such as blue jeans, as well as blankets and similar bed coverings, are the most difficult items to process. Particularly in the rinse/extract and drying cycles; they retain lots of water, need lots of water to rinse, need heavier pressures to extract the rinse water, and need longer or more intensive drying.
One potential solution to this issue is to have "outside clothes" and "inside clothes." The latter would be made of lighter fabrics, in layers, to provide adequate temperature compensation (more layers in colder weather, fewer in hot) while at the same time being easy to wash and dry. The former would only be worn outside the house; when you came in at the end of the day, you'd take a quick shower and change back to inside clothes. This would allow you to wear each set for twice as many days before washing (compared to wearing one set around the clock for fewer days), and would reduce the risk of transmission of outside parasites.
Good laundry tips. I once had to wash every item of clothing I owned in a big plastic Garbage can I bought specifily for that purpose.
I was young (ok, younger) and did not even think about the Hot water /Sanitation issues.
But if I had no electricty, or at least no workable washer, I could still wash in Hot water if i had a bath tub. (Using boiled stove top water to make the water hot / or even hotter..)
Or one could just start wearing whites and use bleach in the wash. But whites are real stinkers when it comes to hard work and dirt.
-----
Now about those bed bugs, how are you gonna wahs that bed? Unless you use a satsumi matt (a real Japanese Futon) it's almost impossibali to wash a bed.
Smoking it w/ ceader was brought up by another poster...
For me, I still say burn it. A smokey bed would make better tinder than a bed..unless of course that's all ya got. _________________ Eickhorn Daggers!
www.pistolanddagger.com
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3428 Location: California, USA
Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2004 4:52 am Post subject:
Re. matresses: Basically they can't be washed; if the matress is infested, out it goes, replace it.
However, no one in their right mind sleeps on a bare or even nearly-bare matress (yech, talk about filthy habits!). You can use a plastic matress cover, but that doesn't let air circulate, which means trouble. Better to use a fitted cloth cover or something similar. The more tight layers of cloth one has between one's body and the matress surface itself, the better for sanitation.
For example, two light blankets benath the fitted sheet that you sleep on. Any sweat etc. that gets through the sheet, is absorbed in the blankets below, before it has the chance to reach the matress cover. If you have breakfast-in-bed or a midnight snack and spill your milk or coffee or juice, chances are you can strip all the layers off before the liquid gets into the matress (thereby preventing growth of mold, bacteria, etc.).
You can strip off those blankets and wash them regularly, and dry on high heat. Or hang-dry (until completely dry) in the sun, followed by ten minutes at 160 degrees in the dryer (to kill nasties).
If you're, uh, not monogamous, and you sleep with someone who's carrying buggies, and you discover the trouble the next morning (look closely!), the buggies won't have had a chance to get through all the layers into the matress.
So here's the complete "sandwich" from bottom to top: matress, two light blankets, fitted sheet (under you), you & your sweetie, top sheet (over you), one or more blankets, quilts, or whatever, and bedspread.
Re. laundry:
I actually did a fairly thorough empirical study of handwashing methods to seek alternatives to the ol' 1/2 horsepower electric motor. The point being that laundry equipment is one of the highest-load items in a household, so replacing the motor with muscles would not only save energy overtly but reduce peak load and thereby enable more economical PV systems.
First attempt (back in college) was a 25-gallon drum with a fitted lid, a drain valve at the bottom, and an agitator consisting of a brand new clean plunger on a longer dowel, which one worked up & down like a butter churn. This worked decently in the wash cycle, didn't work well in the rinse cycle, and consumed a ton of water.
The latter sin was atoned for by turning the tank into a storage tank for graywater pumped from the shower and used to flush the toilet. That worked exactly as planned, saved lots of water, but didn't solve the laundry issue.
Second attempt was a couple of years ago, thinking about life in ecological crash scenarios. 5-gallon bucket with clean plunger: no go, not enough space for water circulation. Rubbermaid tub with plunger: aha, enough space to work the stuff around. Rinse cycle entailed slow-trickle of water through this tub at a slight incline (which I used inside the bathtub so the water had somewhere to go), with intermittent agitation. This worked admirably but again, high water consumption.
A friend who heard about my experiments gave me one of those $50 Wonder-Wash things, which look like a big plastic cookie jar with a lockable lid, mounted on bearings on an A-frame stand, turned end-over-end by a crank. This worked quite well for light to medium garments, but blue jeans were a bear: high effort to rotate the device, multiple repeat rinse cycles needed, too labor-intensive for everyday use. We did (a housemate and I) use this setup successfully for better part of a year, until the crank was torqued off by one of those loads with a couple pairs of jeans in it. In theory it's fixable with a carriage bolt and some locking nuts.
The key to the operation is the lift-and-drop action. The Wonder Wash is a bit small unless you want to wash a day's clothes at a time (one pair of pants, one pair of undershorts, one undershirt, one shirt, is about the usable capacity). But an asymmetrical container rotated end-over-end is inherently problematic: it will have an asymmetrical torque curve to rotate, and it will put a high intermittent load on its bearings.
Real Goods sells a hand-washer that uses a pendulum agitator, and can be had with a crank-powered wringer. About $400. I haven't tried this, though a friend who did said it worked well enough but took a lot of time and muscle power.
The ideal solution is a larger-diameter cylinder with lifting paddles, as used in the Maytag Neptune and its cheaper relatives.
I've heard someone tried modifying an electric cement mixer for this, but I wouldn't recommend that route. First, you have to replace the mixing blades with something smooth (not sharp) unless you want your clothes shredded & full of holes. Replace them with 1x2 hardwood strips, or perhaps even 2x4s installed such that the 4" dimension is sticking out into the drum. Second, you have to have a way of squirting water at the back of the drum during the rinse cycle (for example a nozzle on a fixed mounting, aimed correctly), while the outgoing rinse water water simply sloshes out the front while the drum is turning. The latter point puts water and soap into the ring gear and drive pinion, washing out the lubricating grease, causing these gears to wear out prematurely. You can't overcome this problem by keeping the drum horizontal (capacity is too limited, and puts too much strain on the main drum bearing). So yes, you can rotate it with a pedal-power chain drive, but no, not good for washing clothes.
There is probably a way of adapting the Maytag Neptune or equivalent to run on pedal power and manual valves. "All you have to do" is provide a gearing that turns pedal power into approx. 1400 RPM, and that replaces the motor drive shaft (AC motors typically run at that speed), and there you go.
Now you can see why these things were called "labor saving devices" when they were first introduced. Certain jobs are too arduous to do regularly by hand or human power.
This is why I think it's best to use a "whole systems approach" to this issue. Start by designing your house to stay warm in winter and cool in summer with minimal external energy input (i.e. efficient design is sensible for many reasons). Then wear minimal clothing indoors, which is made of light fabrics, and alter the number of layers to suit temperature. Change into a set of "outside clothes" when you go out (light fabrics & layers unless doing heavy work that requires jeans). Change back to your "indoor clothes" when you come back in. Doing this lets you wear each set for twice as many days as if you wore it 'round the clock. In fact, you can probably get 3x or 4x on your "indoor clothes" if you take a quick shower before putting them back on again.
Then hand-wash the indoor stuff 3x by hand methods alternated with 1x by machine. Wash the outdoor stuff 2x by hand methods alternated with 1x by machine. The hand-wash can use whatever hand system is available, e.g. the Real Goods $400 machine. The machine wash should use the highest quality horizontal-axis machine you can buy (assume it has to last for the rest of your life).
Virginian, re. whites: Actually, cold water is better than hot at getting whites clean, because hot water catalyzes changes in the stain chemistry that tend to lock the stuff in (spilled grape juice, blood, mud, car grease, baby's poop, etc.). Cold pre-soak with plenty of detergent, followed by hot water wash for sanitation. Or use a bit of bleach, though too much or too often will tend to break down fabrics prematurely.
As for detergent, not to worry. If we run into a soap shortage, we're so screwed it's pointless to speculate. I suppose at that point we all have to get used to smelling like cave men.
For intentional communities, the ideal case would be for someone in the community to develop specialized skills at doing laundry in the most efficient and most garment-preserving ways possible, and then either teach the techniques to everyone. Or they could run a central laundry service that does everyone's laundry for them, much like a dry cleaner but muscle powered most of the time. In any case, take care of the equipment, since replacement parts will be getting expensive.
Never put sneakers in the dryer. High intermittent load on bearings, and pounding, which can cause other damage to the machine. Someone who stayed at my place for a while (not my close friend who resembles DaVinci, but someone else who more closely resembles a freeloader) did this and caused the heater in the dryer to stop working. For that matter, no sneakers in the washer either. General rule is, if an item is likely to cause a pounding sound, it's bad for the machine.
Last but not least: Anyone who takes the time to do a practical research project on alternatives to modern technology for common tasks, will rapidly discover a deep appreciation for those technologies. You may discover alternative methods that work, but either way, you'll appreciate the fruits of your (and others') labor far more than before.
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