BoxHenge

 

This month’s mystery photo start with this clue.  I call it BoxHenge:

That’s the only clue you get.

Oh yeah, almost forgot the mystery photo:

Ok, one more clue.   They photo is from a follow-up project related to a video I did last month on monitoring air quality:

  http://misterhouse.blogspot.com/2015/01/monitoring-air-quality.html

In people news, Aya had a fun and productive time on a business trip to Paris.   This is a Skype call with her not not falling in love with a Frenchman, for which travel wary us are grateful:

We Ebayed Dad a nice only slightly used powered wheelchair from Texas.  It has 4 different motorized chair adjustments, which Scott had our brave test pilot test out before delivering it to Dad:

This is another test pilot (son of some friends) getting flying instructions from Doggy.  Not that Doggy has flow before, but he thinks he knows how to help out in any situation:

I tested out my telephoto on the 2 mile wide Kennecott copper mine, 30 miles away.   They are still removing 100 million tons of slide rock/dirt from 2013 slide, should be back in full operation in 2016:

Spring has sprung here already, so the Box Elder bugs are out in full force:

I’ve been swatting them, and Bantik has been licking them.  That gives him the power to climb walls and ceilings:

The object of that mystery photo came last week in these BoxHenge boxes:

Ten 18” x 10’ x 0.06” fiberglass tubes, $280 each with shipping from NH.   Each holds 132 gallons of water, so that is 1320 gallons total, which works out to be 5.5 tons!

It took me 1/2 a day to fill them.   That mystery photo is looking through 10’ of water to the bottom of one of them.   They idea is to use the water as a thermal mass heat battery to lower the night –> day temperature swing we get on sunny days from the passive solar heat we get from all those south facing windows:

I’m experimenting with different water dyes for better heat absorption:

I finally convinced Doggy that they were (relatively) safe … no leaks yet!

Plants on the south side, and a walking corridor on the north side:

I’ve put 6 temperature sensor at various places in and out of the tubes, collecting the data here:

   http://brucewinter.github.io/plots/temps_waterwall.html

Will do a more detailed how to post on that after I’ve collected more data.  

If anyone has a use for 4 10’ foot boxes, let me know:

Last photo shows our latest indoor lighting fun.   I bought a few more inexpensive LED lights, using a 4 watt spot light on the chandelier, much more energy wise than the 10*30=300 watt bulbs built into the chandelier: 

Bruce