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removing H2O, not just Rn?

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 We did a 3-month test which showed 204 Bequerel/cubic metre of radon in our basement. The threshold for leisurely mitigation is 200. Argh!  And apparently, when selling a house, you must disclose any information you have about radon. So we got a radon mitigation system installed.  Carefree Properties professional installation It depressurizes under the foundation slab, and blows the radon-laden air it collects out the side of the house. A possible  side effect is sub-slab humidity will also get blown out, and stop rising through cracks into our basement. 'Way too early to tell, but this data from the crawlspace humidity sensor is encouraging: The crawlspace humidity dropped slightly when the radon system started, but rose higher than the baseline earlier in the day after I turned off the crawlspace dehumidifier.  But it isn't still rising.  The dehumidifer costs about $250 per year to run, and our experience is the equipment breaks every 2-3 years. The fan in the radon system
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Not a meteor

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  Pretty sure this one is an airplane. It's too long to be a meteor trail. Often, they change course over our house. So maybe it is something falling from outer space. Space junk? We have had about two, good, clear 24 hour periods in the last month. One spanned the eclipse afternoon. Very lucky!
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Totally eclipsed my previous life experiences

I travelled to Fredericton to be within the totality path of the April 8th solar eclipse. My first total solar eclipse. I'm still a bit overwrought, but, feel like it is the best thing I've ever seen.  I recorded my remembrance about an hour after ward as we were driving home:  Google drive MP3 file Currently still have some dysphoria. Will it be permanent?
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Moonbow from the comfort of your saggy office chair

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 I've been playing with getting the excellent allsky software working. Tonight, it captured the image below. I've tweaked the contrast and saturation a bit, but there's definitely some colour there. It's captured some more nice images since, including a good meteor:
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Mysterious debris (deer hair!)

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 I came across these tufts of hair while patrolling the yard. They seem rabbity, or non-domestic cat. I did see some rabbit tracks a few days ago, when we still had snow. Whatever they're from, I don't think said beast was having a good time. No signs of bloodshed nearby, though. Update:  I've had a few fellows opine that this is deer hair. A couple are hunters and have personal close-up experience. We had a pretty good windstorm yesterday. This root mass looks freshly lifted. Nice reflection of the dangling bit of ice: I believe this black spruce is freshly fallen. I did hear a big crack when the wind was howling. Life goes on:
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Rant on units

 We're investigating improving our home heating situation. Electric heat pumps seem to be the way to go. They're rated using SEER (cooling efficiency) and HSPF (heating efficiency). You'd think efficiency would be dimensionless, or maybe in per cent , to move some significant digits into the integer part of the number. Consider my final grade in high school social studies. 67% means I understood two-thirds of the material, or 0.67 as a decimal number.  But no!  Heat pumps use electricity. The only unit anyone knows for electrical energy is kilowatt-hour. Heat pumps pump heat. The only unit anyone knows for heating and cooling is BTU. So both SER and HSPF are in units of BTU/W-h. watt-hour instead of kilowatt-hour, to get rid of those pesky digits to the right of the decimal point. A good heat pump has an HSPF of about 15. That has no intuitive value. Convert from BTU/W-h to just efficiency by multiplying by 0.29307 BTUs per watt-hour. An HSPF of 15 has an efficiency of arou
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Allocating energy consumption

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W e use an oil-fired boiler feeding 180°F water to hydronic baseboards to heat the house. It also supplies domestic hot water ( very  hot water!) for washing dishes and people. I think the boiler has a small, maybe 5 gallon, reservoir, but it might only have a buffer of hot water in the heating coil. I looked at our fuel bills. Taking the timeline of fuel deliveries and dividing the quantity delivered by the number of days since the last delivery gives a rough idea of the consumption per day preceding that fill up. The suppliers like to fill it up, so at the time of every dot in this graph, we have a full tank. The black dots are the total consumption per day estimates, calculated as the amount needed to refill the tank (i.e. what was consumed), divided by the number of days since the last full tank. The dots fall into two bands, roughly - below and above 5 liters per day. We can average those below 5 l/d, assuming that's when it's only making hot water, not heating the house.
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