The LoLee Planet

I’ve set a new personal & professional goal: I will only visit a developing country if I can give back in return. Giving back in return means I’ll work (for profit) on projects that have net positive environmental/social impacts or volunteer on projects that reach the same goal. The exceptions will include going to conferences (if I must), getting invited for special occasions, and stopping-over countries.

Now this is an extremely hard decision because I may not get to travel for a long time, and I may NEVER get to go to to some countries! And that’s in conflict with my other goal of seeing the whole world with my own eyes and walking all over the world with my feet! I hope I can have a good strategy to accomplish both in the future. If you have any idea you let me know.

The reason why I have set this goal is because I want to do more than just visiting these countries!  I want to do something while appreciating the sceneries, history, and culture.  I guess I want to act rather than just understand their challenges?  Most importantly, I believe that having a more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable community will be beneficial economically and socially for these countries.

Well, I’ll check in after I have a action plan =p

We got Laifu when she was about 5 months old. Before she moved to Kingston from Vancouver, she lived her first 5 months in an outdoor fenced yard with her parents Shiji and forgot-mom’s-name, and Laifu’s old name was Mimi. Much has changed since she came over, but she’s relatively good with simple commands (when food is involved) and has been a very clean dog. One thing she has always been good with is doing her business outside, but we need to go to a new “low” point for her.

Well we can not blame her completely. It really is due to the snow storm!

We’ve got a lot of snow in Kingston this year and we’ve had our share of woes. Especially since Jason and I have moved, we’ve experienced many incidents related to snow/winter. Our Prius and her awesome low-friction tires are NOT fit for snowy winters like this one. We’re buying snow tires next year.

So back to Laifu! To say that the weather yesterday was atrocious is an understatement. It snowed hard, had continuous high wind, and hailed for a good hour or two. Laifu had no interest of going out at all! And if you know Laifu, you know how much she loves staying out. But she’s been a good dog, i’m sure she can hold…

This morning when we got up, we heard some licking sound. What’s laifu licking?! I didn’t have my glasses on but Jason said Laifu’s eating her poo-poo!!!! The funny thing is Laifu was SO EMBARRASSED that she wanted to clean up after herself before we wake up!!! What’s funnier is that she got so embarrassed and hid underneath the bed for a good half an hour! Luckily we’ve been feeding her good dry food that her poo doesn’t smell and is very firm n easy to pick up. But i’m just so amused to see how embarrassed a dog can be! I missed a good Kodak moment but these will do….

Oh, and she’s back to her spoiled self this afternoon. that tells you how much memory dogs have….

This Tuesday Gary and Larry came to complete the last two pieces of the geothermal system puzzle - the “real” duct work and a desuperheater. Now “desuperheater” sounds like a funny word, what does it do? In short, it is another heat exchanger that pre-heats the domestic hot water. It re-routes the cold water intake from the source and pre-heats that cold water when the geothermal unit is running. It works the best in the summer time when the geothermal unit works as an air conditioner. Most systems can provide 100% free hot water in the summer time! This is because the heat removed from the house would otherwise be lost into the ground if not used to heat up water. In the wintertime, the desuperheater pre-heats water by using a portion of the heat that would otherwise be used for space heating, which means it’s not free. But this process is significantly more efficient than using an electric hot water tank (which is what we have). Although a desuperheater may not be sufficient to provide enough hot water to a family of 5 in the winter time, Jason and I have actually unplugged our electric hot water tank and we’ve been having enough hot water for shower, dishes, and other uses just from the desuperheater. We’re pretty amazed!

Now an important note is that the desuperheater does NOT work when the geothermal unit is not running, therefore we still have to heat our hot water tank with our hot water tank in those seasons. Overall, heat pump desuperheaters can save up to 50-60% hot water heating bill. For comparison, a high efficiency electric resistance water heaters can reduce heating bills by only 10 - 20% over a minimum efficiency one. You can read more about them on NRCan website.

Alright, enough boring stuff, here’s our sleek new geothermal, completed in style! You can also find them in the Picasa Album.

WOW, everything was in place yesterday and today!!

Monday Feb 25
Gary Porter (Porter’s Refrigeration) showed up with his electrician buddy Joe Lewis this morning, to run a couple lines to the heat pump. It kind of sucks that our service is only 100Amp, but we made it work. We may need to upgrade to 200Amp service down the road, but we’ll see…..

Just as Joe was leaving, Dave Archer (Archer Pumps) called to let me know that he and his guys will show up in about an hour. The pump we’re putting in is this Berkley continuous duty one. We originally got a quote from another plumber in town but the price was a lot higher than what we had expected. That being said, this plumber was quoting me a top of the line variable speed pump that would be much more energy efficient because when the heat pump is not running, you don’t really want to pump water at full speed for domestic use. But we don’t have that much budget for this system, and we unfortunately have to trade-off with lower efficiency. It only took about 2-3 hours to get the old pump out and the new pump in, and the old pump surely looked beat up! The old pump is 19 yrs old, apparently could go anytime. I’m impressed that the well is only 6″ and the flow rate that the water in the well report indicated a 20GPM flow! that seems like a lot of water from the little well!

While the well pump was getting installed, Doug with his bobcat on a trailer showed up. He’s going to dig a trench for us to drain used water from the geothermal system. And the digging wasn’t as easy because we got some limestones inches below the grass! He spent all afternoon, but a part was broken around 4pm and he had to stop. He’s coming back tomorrow to finish it.. He’s a very nice guy, and it’s pretty cool watching him operating the bobcat. i’d want to try it one day! Our backyard looks like it’s in a real bad shape right now, and Laifu’s not allowed to go there as part of the fence was taken out…

Unfortunately we didn’t end up having heat today, and we go back to the space heaters/timers like we’ve been doing for the past 3 weeks. we’re really getting used to that life!

Tuesday Feb 26
Gary showed up around 8:30AM, and he put in the new fancy touch screen thermostat. The old programmable one wouldn’t work because the geothermal has 5 stages fan which is uncommon for typical furnaces. And then, they drilled a hole in the wall, connected the line where the geothermal waste water to the 6″ plastic drain pipe in the backyard. As the duct connecting the geothermal and our original duct still need to be made, we needed a temporary solution. So here it is….. don’t you love the cardboard boxes and duct tape? OK, in this case, it was aluminum tape.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT…. AT AROUND 1:30PM, WE GOT HEAT!!!!!

Now that’s the most exciting thing today, since Canucks didn’t make any crazy trades, and the Government hasn’t released the new budget…. Wow, can you believe it? I almost thought we’d be living by space heaters till the spring! As I’m writing this blog entry, Doug is still working in the backyard, but it won’t look pretty when he’s done. We’ll have to manually move most of the limestone when the weather warms up, and get him out again to help us remove the extra stuff that’s there right now.

I’m grateful that everything worked out and guys working in the cold weather for us…. Next time if I buy a house and knowing that I’m going to get a new heating system, i shall get everything installed BEFORE i move in =P.

Here are a couple pictures…. and more in the Picasa album

Yesterday we walked onto Colin’s Lake, which is the lake that’s real close to where we live. It was frozen solid as there were trucks and minivans parked on it while families were ice fishing. It was actually a really nice day! Sunny and calm. Jason said this was his first time on a frozen lake, and i think it’s also Laifu’s first. We took lots of pictures that you can check out here, but as you can see right here, Laifu needs more socializing…. she’s grown too anti-social since we moved to the country!

Just a little update on our cold lives. It’s been three weeks since I left Winnipeg which was -50oC with wind chill but I got to stay in the warm hotel room most of the time that I wasn’t working. It’s also been three weeks that our furnace stopped working (and 2 weeks+ since it completely stopped working). Now three weeks later, we still have no heat and we’re kept warm by a few ceramic and oil space heaters kindly lent by friends.

How hard is it to put in a new furnace? You’d think that a new furnace can be put in within a few hours! Well, we did not just get a new propane furnace, we decided to go with a ground source geothermal heat pump.

What is a geothermal heat pump? There’re lots of good articles to read about, such as this one from the Office of Energy Efficiency of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The bottom line is that it is much more energy efficient to heat/cool one’s house with the help from the earth, which is a great heat insulator and thus has a constant temperature throughout the season. In the winter time, this temperature is about 10oC in Kingston Ontario. Due to the dullness of the earth not changing it’s temperature just a few metres below grade, it would be great to use this energy. So how do we get that 10oC “heat” from the earth? There’re several methods detailed in the above link. What we do is using our well water and pumping that water into a heat pump, which is at a similar size and outputs hot air magically like a furnace. This is the physics behind it: the heat from the well water is transferred into some refrigerant through a heat exchanger, causing the refrigerant to boil (at a very low temperature). Then, this vapour is compressed and becomes hot due to compression. Now the “hot” refrigerant vapour goes through a condensing coil and heats up air passing through which then goes into the duct work like a typical furnace. Now the refrigerant releases most of the heat it has, and becomes a liquid again. The well water we pumped into the heat pump is discharged. This cycle continues and that’s how we heat up our home. In the summer time, the process reverses and we get air conditioning.

Back to reality, it’s been more than two weeks since we ordered this Water Furnace heat pump from a local geothermal heating company in Kingston. Along with the furnace, we also need to do a few things: upgrade the well pump to supply enough water for both geothermal and domestic water usage, extend the electrical lines to the geothermal unit as it runs on electricity, and dig a trench where the used water from the heat pump is discharged. The heat pump finally showed up last Friday (yes, 7 days ago), but the coordination with the electrician, plumber, and digger seem to have taken longer than expected. Most recently, we were blown away by a plumber who wants to charge us almost $3,000 for a new well pump. You know $3000 can almost buy me a new normal furnace!! Anyway, I think i’ll get the pump installed this weekend by a friend’s friends, and the digger and electrician will show up next Monday. So next week I should be real happy.

At the mean time, the heat pump is in the house and the old furnace is out, and we have grown much thicker skins to fight the winter.