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Category: science kits

Sunday, 10 July 2016

09:38 – We have a mixed day scheduled today. We’ll be doing kit stuff as well as making up cookie and bread dough this afternoon.

Email from Brittany. She finished her Walmart ordering, and is now just waiting for the stuff to be delivered. Yesterday afternoon, she and her husband drove his pickup down to the supermarket and picked up a bunch of sugar, flour, egg noodles, salt, vegetable oil, and other bulk staples as well as large jars of spices, several pounds of yeast, and other cooking/baking essentials. Brittany figures that once the stuff from Walmart is delivered, she has at least a 3-month supply of food for her family. She’s pleased that they got this done in one day, although they still have a lot of repackaging to do. They don’t drink much soda, so she ordered a pack of 250 one-gallon foil/Mylar bags and a couple hundred oxygen absorbers from LDS on-line. They’ll use those with an old clothes iron for packing their bulk staples. I told Brittany she doesn’t need to use oxygen absorbers in the sugar bags.

Email from Dave, who posted a comment yesterday that he thought needed to be featured where people can find it:

Prepping doesn’t have to be expensive. For less than $30 at Sam’s Club, I got 75 pounds of rice ready to be transferred to 2 liter bottles. I got some oxygen absorbers from Amazon. Now I just have to wash, sanitize and dry the bottles and then fill them. I picked up a thing of chicken bouillon and beef bouillon. For about $50 we have enough food to eat rice until we’re sick of it. We need other foods, but we’re better off than we were.

I literally started our in car emergency kits with pocket change. I took a big jar half full of change to a Coinstar machine, bought an Amazon gift certificate, and came home and ordered cheap backpacks, flashlights, water purification tablets, multi tools, magnesium fire starters and space blankets.

The current first aid kits that I added to our emergency kits were literally purchased for $20 at the dollar store including the quart zip top bags they are in. I still need to add to them, but we are better off than we were when we had nothing. They’re also much more useful than two $10 first aid kits from Amazon, and possibly better than two $20 first aid kits.

If you’ve only got $5 to prep, pick up a couple of 12 packs of Ramen
noodles at Walmart. That’s a very small start, but it beats sitting at home hungrily staring at a five dollar bill in an emergency.

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Thursday, 7 July 2016

09:58 – Kit orders have started to ramp up a bit earlier than usual for July. Of course, two of those were small bulk orders, one for four kits going to a guy who’s taking them to Africa to teach science classes there, and a second for six kits going to a state university. Multiple-unit orders are nice but unpredictable. We could get no more multiple-unit orders at all this month, or we could get several, each for 20, 30, 40, or more kits. As nice as those are in terms of unit sales and revenues, they play hob with finished-goods inventory.

Barbara is starting to get involved volunteering with local non-profits. She has meetings today, tomorrow, and Saturday with a charity golf tournament, the library, and Alleghany Cares, which is our local equivalent to Good Will. Between all those, we’ll be working on kits.




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Wednesday, 6 July 2016

10:20 – More bottle filling today, after which it’ll be time to start building subassemblies–regulated and non-regulated chemical bags, small parts bags, and so on–for biology, chemistry, and forensics kits. We’re still in decent shape in terms of finished kits, but we need to get stuff piled up in preparation for building more finished kits as quickly as possible. We shipped five kits yesterday, and we’re getting to the point in the next two or three weeks where we’re going to have a lot of days where we ship 5, 10, or more kits.

Veronica Mars is as good as we remembered. Good cast and excellent writing. Veronica looks and sounds like Buffy, and I’m sure that’s no coincidence. I remember Joss Whedon commenting in an interview that Rob Thomas was a genius and “scary good”. I remarked to Barbara last night that the series still seems fresh to us, but I suspect that the music and pop culture references would date it badly for today’s teenagers.

Jen read the comments yesterday, where one reader commented that three of his four Grape Solar panels had died after only a year in service, dropping from 18VDC nominal output and about 20VDC actual to about 10VDC. Apparently, it’s the panels themselves that are the problem, rather than the charge controller. That scares me as much as it scares Jen.

Jen says they bought two 100W panels individually and two more that were each bundled with a cheap PWM charge controller, on the theory that the good MPPT charge controller they bought separately would be their primary, and the two PWM’s would be spares. But if the panels themselves can suddenly drop dead with no obvious explanation, what are the implications for depending on solar electricity?

A quick Google search for solar panel failures turns up several very interesting links, including more than a few scholarly papers. I had been proceeding on the assumption that a PV panel, once assembled and tested, would work essentially forever other than the gradual degradation that anything sitting out all day long in the sun will experience. Apparently, that might be a bad assumption.

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Tuesday, 5 July 2016

10:55 – Back to work on science kits today. We actually did some work yesterday, despite it being a holiday.

Barbara finished watching season six of Blue Bloods last night. It’s a corny, predictable melodrama. Fortunately Tom Selleck has significant influence on it, and his libertarian tendencies keep it from being a typical prog PC propaganda piece. It’s still prog/PC, but not as much as would be without Selleck’s influence. After the final episode, we went from hideously bad writing to good, sharp writing when we started re-watching Veronica Mars. So much of episodic TV is utter garbage that we’re always in danger of running out of things to watch. Fortunately, Barbara is now willing to re-watch good stuff in preference to watching new garbage.

Email from Jen. She and husband, brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews ran another readiness exercise from Friday evening through last night. She didn’t have much to report, because they encountered no real issues. Jen says the first couple times they did these exercises it was pretty much like camping out, but in the house. Now she says it’s not much different from just having weekend guests. She and Claire have been accumulating and testing recipes, and are getting quite good at cooking from LTS food.

They used their generator because their solar setup is still in boxes. They bought four 100W panels, three charge controllers (one MPPT and two cheap PWM for spares), and two high-capacity true sine-wave inverters. After some discussion, they decided not to install them, but to keep them stored in Faraday cages just in case. They do intend to install and test them, David doesn’t want to roof-mount them. Instead, he intends to build frames for the panels that will allow them to track the sun manually in azimuth and elevation. He believes (correctly, I think) that by re-orienting the panels as the sun moves to keep them pointing perpendicularly at the sun he can do better than the typical 300 Watt-hours per day from a typical fixed-mount 100W panel. I told Jen that I wouldn’t be surprised if David’s mount got them 500 or even 600 Watt-hours from each 100W panel on a sunny day.

While he’s in the shop, David also plans to knock together a simple box solar oven from 1X12’s and Masonite so they can experiment with solar cooking. He’s also salvaged a Fresnel lens from a friend’s dead 50″ flat-panel TV, and intends to build an altazimuth frame for it as well. With that and cast-iron pans, lids, and a Dutch oven, he thinks they’ll be able to get heat equivalent to a standard gas or electric stove and oven. I suspect he’s right. A 50″ Fresnel lens gathers a lot of sunlight and can focus it pretty tightly.

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Sunday, 3 July 2016

10:54 – We may take some downtime for the holiday tomorrow, but today is just a regular workday. We got a bulk order for FK01ABC (full) forensic kits yesterday, which we’ll ship Tuesday. But that order takes us down to uncomfortably low inventory levels on the FK01A and FK01C kits and runs us completely out of the FK01B kits. So I know what we’ll be working on this coming week. Fortunately, we have most of the bottled chemicals we need to make up another eight dozen each of the biology and chemistry kits, and we’re not all that much further from having what we need to make up 15 dozen each. Sales always start ramping up in mid- to late-July and then go crazy from early August through late September or early October. I think between what we have now and what we can build on-the-fly during the crazy period, we should be okay.

I just added another item to my Walmart cart:
Armour Lard, 64 Oz. If you remember years ago when McDonalds fries were famously good-tasting, that was before they shifted from using lard to using vegetable shortening. Their fries have never been the same since. Stuff fried in lard just tastes much, much better than stuff fried in vegetable shortening. Lard has a very long shelf life. Armour even says on the label that refrigeration is not required before OR after opening. The best-by date is typically 18 months out, but that’s as meaningless as it is for any other LTS food. Even on the shelf, I’d bet that the stuff would be just as good five or ten years down the road as it is when it’s new. In the refrigerator, it’d last even longer, and in the freezer it’d be essentially immortal. Think that 2,000 year old ball of butter that was still edible. As far as I can judge, saturated animal fats like lard or butter are much healthier for humans than vegetable oils and fats. After all, we evolved eating those fats, which are much easier to come by than vegetable fats. Finally, pig lard makes excellent musloid repellent.

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Friday, 24 June 2016

09:35 – Good news overnight. The UK has voted to leave the EU, and that prog POS Cameron has announced his resignation. Apparently, Boris Johnson is likely to become leader of the Tories and probably the next PM. It would be more fitting if Nigel Farage became PM. He is, after all, the leader of the UK Independence Party.

I have a modest proposal. I think we should rename the North American Free Trade Agreement to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, eject Mexico (which is in Central America anyway), and invite the UK to join the new NAFTA. Eventually, we could invite Denmark and Holland, most of whose citizens speak English anyway, and of course Australia and New Zealand. But the UK is most important. As Europe continues being muslimized, the day may come when we again need the UK as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

I didn’t do much prepping this week, other than ordering half a dozen boxes of Krusteaz cinnamon crumb cake and a pail of Augason Farms brown rice from Walmart. I note that the Krusteaz product has gone up from $2.14/box to $2.25. Eleven cents may not seem like much, but it’s more than 5%. At least that’s not as bad as the Augason powdered eggs. The last time I bought them, they were $17/can. They got up over $50 last year, but are now down to $34.50, only twice what I paid.

More science kit stuff today, of course.

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Thursday, 23 June 2016

08:42 – Filling and labeling more containers today. We’re getting to the point where we have enough of everything to start putting together chemical bags for the science kits 20 to 40 sets at a time. Right now, Barbara is baking a Krusteaz cinnamon crumb cake while she shreds newspaper, which we use to pad the contents of kits. I just loaded and ran the dishwasher, started a load of laundry, and transferred two 4-pound boxes of iodized table salt to recycled Mason jars from Bertolli spaghetti and alfredo sauces.

The garden is coming along well. Nothing has been munching on it, as far as I can tell.



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Wednesday, 22 June 2016

09:33 – We got several hundred containers filled and labeled yesterday. More of the same the rest of this week. And another 3,000 bottles and caps showed up yesterday, just in time.

We’re getting a bit concerned about Colin. He turned five in February, which makes him a young middle-aged dog. We’re playing a lot of frisbee with him, and I noticed the other day that he was sometimes running with his back feet together. That may be just the way he chose to run that time, but it may also indicate hip problems, which Border Collies are prone to. The other night when I took him out last time to pee, instead of lifting his leg on the well casing as usual, he squatted like a girl dog. It may be nothing, or something minor like a muscle pull, but we’re going to keep an eye on him.



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Tuesday, 21 June 2016

11:36 – We’re labeling and filling more containers, mostly in batches of 120 or 150 at a time. (The labels we use come 30 to a sheet). We’ll be doing this for quite a while, as each kit contains from 25 to about 50 containers. Then we’ll go back and do it all over again until we have thousands and thousands of containers ready in preparation for the summer rush from mid-July to mid-October.

Bonnie, our 90-year-old neighbor, called Barbara yesterday evening to report that black bears had been seen in the vicinity. Bonnie was concerned about Colin. Black bears are unpredictable, certainly, but they’re also very smart. A bear puppy learns by the time it’s in kindergarten that wolves and humans are a threat, and to a bear Colin with his prick ears and stalking behavior looks very much like a wolf. Bears certainly know that humans are a deadly threat to them. Human young are tasty and easy to catch, but adult humans often have thundersticks, which are a Very Bad Thing. Sure, they’ll come in close to human homes to find food but they really don’t want to confront people. I’ve seen dozens of black bears over the last 50 years, but in nearly every case I saw only the south end of a bear running north. The closest I’ve ever come to confronting one happened 30 years or so ago, when Barbara and I were tent camping. Barbara heard a noise outside in the middle of the night. She opened the tent flap, looked out, and said it was a big dog. I put my flashlight beam on it. It was, of course, a black bear, rummaging through the 55-gallon drum that was provided at the site as a trash can. I just said “Hi, Bear” in a loud, deep voice, and it took off running. Of course, I had a heavy-caliber pistol in my hand at the time.



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Monday, 20 June 2016

10:15 – Barbara is off to the gym and running errands. This afternoon and the rest of this week we’ll be filling and labeling bottles and making up science kit subassemblies.

One of the problematic chemicals has always been starch indicator, which is a suspension of “soluble” starch in water. We use a 10% m/v solution of thymol in IPA as a preservative. That generally works pretty well, but we sometimes get mold or fungal growth in some of the bottles. We just threw out a bunch of them the other day that had assumed a dark brownish gray cast. They’d still serve their intended purpose, detecting very small amounts of iodine, but their ugliness offended me. So yesterday we tried something different. I made up a small batch of the starch indicator, enough to fill 60 bottles. After they were filled and capped, we put them in a pot of boiling water and let them boil for ten minutes or so. That’s enough to kill any microorganisms present, although not spores.

The bottles are polyethylene, which softens but does not melt at the temperature of boiling water. I was a bit concerned that boiling would deform the bottles severely, so we ran a test recently with just one bottle in a pan of boiling water. It swelled a bit, but did not melt or deform.

Killing spores would require heating the bottles to 121C (250F) in a pressure cooker or autoclave. Unfortunately, it would also melt the bottles. So if just boiling them doesn’t keep them from growing mold/fungus, we’ll have to use a 19th century technology which is still occasionally used today for special purposes. It’s called Tyndallization, and was widely used for preserving food before pressure cookers became widely available.

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