Category: Jen

11:14 – I spent the morning yesterday at the dentist, undergoing oral surgery. When Barbara retired from the law firm as of 10/30/15, we elected to continue her dental insurance under COBRA. That expires in March 2017, so I wanted to get done whatever needed to be done while we were still covered for dental. Barbara is volunteering again today to get the public library moved to its new location. She just called to check on me.

It was 14.8F (-10C) when I got up this morning to take Colin out. By the time I did his after-breakfast walk an hour or so later, the temperature had skyrocketed up to 15.3F. It’s not officially winter for another week or so, but winter has definitely arrived in Sparta, NC.

I just ordered another humidifier like the one we’re currently using. The tank holds just short of a gallon (maybe 3.5L), which on high it runs through in about 12 hours. Putting two gallons of water per day into the air helps, but it’s not quite enough. When it’s really cold outside, our indoor humidity starts to drop. Even with one unit running flat-out, the humidity gets down into the 45% range, which is uncomfortable for Barbara. She likes it up around 55% to 60%, which running two units should allow us to maintain.

Email overnight from Jen. They’ve run several readiness exercises over the last couple of years, hunkering down in their home over a long weekend. They decided to run another, longer-term exercise over Christmas, starting Friday evening the 23rd and running through Monday morning the 2nd of January. They’ll have to “cheat” a bit because not all of them can take off the whole week between Christmas and the New Year. Her husband David, for example, has to cover two days that week at his veterinary practice, and her brother Jim will have to go into work for at least half-days most of that week. They’ll both be taking their lunches and thermoses with them, so it’s only a minor cheat.

They haven’t tried to do a week-long readiness exercise before, because Christmas was the only realistic time to run it and the women decided there was just too much going on over that holiday to try a hunkering down exercise. But Jen and David have made some significant improvements to their infrastructure over the last year that’ll make it a lot easier for them. They’ve installed a decent size off-grid solar setup with a high amperage true sine-wave inverter that allows them to run their well pump, basic lighting (which is all LED now), TV, and so on. They also installed a high wattage Honda inverter generator as a backup means of charging their battery bank and driving their refrigerator and freezer directly. Finally, they also did what we just did: installed a large propane tank and a gas cooktop in their basement living area, along with a small propane water heater, which feeds only the sink and bathroom in the basement living area. They didn’t replace their main electric water heater because propane is about three times as costly as electricity, and they use a lot of hot water. Still, as Jen says, that gives them hot water for showers and food-prep/dish-washing downstairs. She can still do laundry upstairs, but she’ll just have to run cold-water washes.

09:07 – The guys got the driveway dug out and graded and got the forms in place yesterday. They were planning to pour the concrete this morning, weather allowing. Yesterday evening and overnight, we got 2 inches (5 cm) of rain, with some hail. Ricky called at 0700 this morning and said the forecast for today was iffy enough that he planned to put off the pour until Monday, which is fine with us. Better safe than sorry.

Email from Jen overnight. She wanted to know what the shelf life of the potassium iodide was and asked if I had any recommendations about storing it. I told her the shelf life was probably about another 4.3 billion years, and that I recommended storing it in solution form to make it easy to measure out doses. A 100-gram bottle of KI is 760+ adult doses, at 131 mg/dose. I suggested dissolving the 100 grams of KI in a gallon (3.8 liters) of water, and then dividing that into four labeled one-liter bottles, each containing 190 adult doses, at 5 mL per dose. That way, doses are easily measured, at one teaspoon per adult dose, a half teaspoon per child dose, and a quarter teaspoon per infant dose.

I warned Jen that potassium iodide is easily oxidized by atmospheric oxygen to elemental iodine, which will give the solution a pale yellow color. There’s no real downside to that–the same amount of iodine is present as before–but some people can’t stand the taste of iodine (versus iodide ions, which have no taste other than a slight saltiness). To prevent that, Jen can add a vitamin C tablet to each bottle to act as an antioxidant.

Jen also asked if there were any other chemicals I’d recommend storing in bulk. I told her that other than the obvious–salt and baking soda–the other one I store in bulk is magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts), which has several uses, notably as an effective laxative. We keep about five kilos of it on the shelf.

10:20 – The guys showed up this morning to start work on the driveway. They’re prepping the surface and building forms today. If the weather tomorrow is favorable, they’ll pour. Colin has been barking continuously since they arrived, shouting, “Bob! Bob! They’re stealing our driveway!”

Email from Jen overnight. She has one pack of commercial oral rehydration salts in stock, good for making up 15 liters of ORS solution. She and her husband started with the Wikipedia article and then read the other references it links to. They’re prepping for at least the six of them and possibly for two or three times that many, and they decided that 15 liters was grossly insufficient.

They didn’t want to depend on the makeshift sugar/salt solution mentioned in the article, which has much worse outcomes than the formal ORS solution, but neither did they want to spend $300 or $400 on the commercial product, so they decided to order what they’d need to make ORS solution up in bulk. As Jen said, in the larger scheme of things, it’s a very cheap prep. So she multiplied out the quantities stated in the article to determine that for each 100 liters of ORS she needs:

1350 grams (~48 ounces or 3 pounds) of anhydrous glucose
290 grams (~10.3 ounces) of trisodium citrate dihydrate
260 grams (~9.2 ounces) of sodium chloride (table salt)
150 grams (~5.3 ounces) of potassium chloride

She and her husband decided that it’d be a good idea to have at least 300 liters’ worth on hand. They obviously have table salt stored in quantity, so Jen ordered 10 pounds of anhydrous glucose, two pounds of trisodium citrate dihydrate, and a pound of potassium chloride, all food grade. She also ordered a couple bottles of zinc sulfate tablets to use with the ORS. The total cost came to well under $100. When it arrives, they’re going to repackage all the powders in foil-laminate bags with oxygen absorbers, but first Jen is going to use a scale to determine how much of each is needed by volume to make up each liter. As she says, they may not have a functioning scale when they need it, so they’ll label the bags with quantities of each component needed in teaspoons/tablespoons per liter. She also ordered a 100 gram bottle of KI, just in case. That took the total to just over $100.

11:01 – It occurs to me that I should have mentioned that Jen did not fully take my advice about buying bulk components for ORS. I actually recommended that she order them from Soapgoods, a vendor that we buy a lot of stuff from. They used to describe many of the chemicals they offered as “food grade” (FCC) or “USP”, but they discontinued doing that a couple years ago. Most of the items they sell start out as food-grade or USP, but they buy stuff by the trailer load and repackage it into smaller containers. Since their repackaging facility is not certified FCC or USP, they can’t legally describe the repackaged products as either FCC or USP. I told Jen that in my opinion it didn’t really matter, but she was more comfortable buying certified food-grade stuff. If she’d taken my advice, it would have cost noticeably less:

twelve pounds of glucose (dextrose) @ $15.18/6-lb = $30.36
two pounds of trisodium citrate dihydrate @ $3.70/lb = $7.40
one pound of potassium chloride @ $7.62 = $7.62

Or a grand total of $45.38 plus shipping, just over half of what Jen spent ordering all food grade stuff. The citrate salt is in fact the trisodium dihydrate form, which is important. (Sodium citrate, normally described just that way, may be the mono-, di-, or tri-sodium version, in various hydration states, all of which are used in foods, and the “tri” part is particularly important for ORS. The glucose (“dextrose”) sold by Soapgoods doesn’t specify hydration state. It may be anhydrous, but my strong guess is that it’s the dihydrate form.

I understand Jen’s decision. She’s not a chemist, and stuff that I’m comfortable juggling she probably isn’t. I don’t think she was particularly worried about the food-grade stuff from Soapgoods being contaminated. As I said, if she’s worried about it, she could just mix it up in boiling water, which’ll kill any biological contamination. I think it’s extremely unlikely that the product would be contaminated with other chemicals to any significant extent. But comfort level is important, and Jen was obviously more comfortable spending an extra $40 or so to get certified food-grade components.