Kevin Warnock

Takagi brand tankless water heater

On my bus conversion I plan to have two propane water heaters. These will be low flow on demand models that can heat up to 1.6 gallons per minute. That’s plenty in a vehicle where water should be carefully conserved.

There are two main styles of on demand water heaters in this low flow category.

The first style is vented to the outside via a chimney, just like most on demand and tank style gas water heaters.

The second style, so called vent free, is not vented to the outside. This means all the combustion gasses stay inside, just like when you use an unvented gas fireplace or a Mr. Heater Buddy space heater.

The vent free propane water heaters cost slightly more than conventional vented on demand water heaters. Presumably the extra expense is to pay for the safety features not found on the vented models. The ventfree water heaters have a low oxygen sensor that will shut off the gas flow if there is insufficient oxygen for proper combustion. Improper combustion can produce more deadly carbon monoxide gas, which can kill you if it builds in concentration.

I am happy to pay more for safety. I already have a carbon monoxide detector on board since I use a Mr. Heater Buddy heater while I continue the build out of the interior. That heater also has a low oxygen sensor like the unvented water heater.

About a week ago I had what I think is a bright idea:

Install both vented and unvented water heaters routinely in all buildings that offer hot water to their users.

The reason this is a good idea is that both types of water heaters transfer only a portion of the heat they produce to the water passing through them. The rest of the heat either goes up the chimney or into the room depending on if the heater is vented or vent free.

When it’s cold enough outside that heat is required indoors, then it would be wise to use the vent free on demand water heater. Part of the heat will heat the water, and all the remaining heat will be deposited into the living quarters with the same 99%+ efficiency as if the gas were burned in an vent free fireplace.

When it’s warm enough outside that air conditioning is required indoors, then it would be wise to use the vented on demand water heater. Part of the heat will heat the water, and most of the rest of the heat will be sent up the chimney and out of the air conditioned space, saving electricity that would otherwise be needed to remove the surplus heat from a vent free water heater.

This could be complicated to set up and control, but not if one does the following small amount of extra work.

Run separate hot water lines from each water heater to the fixtures. Under the counter where the faucet valves are, install a three way valve before the hot water faucet valve.

Buy two faucets, and make sure they are the kind where you drill three holes in the counter top and mount three separate parts into their respective holes. Such faucets are called widespread faucets.

You’ll want two faucets because you will need nice looking matching knobs for my system. You’ll need to modify the second hot water valve and handle so that the part that’s above the counter line is unchanged, but the part that’s below the counter line will be mated to the three way valve I specified above.

This extra knob will control which on demand water heater is used when you turn on the hot water. If you set the three way valve to position A, then the vented water heater will be used and the vent free heater will stay off. If you set the three valve to position B, then the vented water heater will stay off and the vent free heater will be used.

If you need a greater amount of hot water, you could put the three way valve in its middle position, which would cause both water heaters to be used simultaneously.

This proposed system gives built in redundancy in case one heater fails.

Such a system would work for houses and offices as well, with a big benefit for water savings. Vent free water heaters only deliver 1.6 gallons of water per minute, so this would limit how much hot water a user can waste. If users insist on mimicing the flow of a normal tank style water heater, more than one 1.6 gallon per minute vent free water heater could be installed in parallel such that they would all start when the hot water faucet is turned on. That is provided code permits this, of course.

Both styles of water heater are available in propane and natural gas versions, so what I suggest here can be applied to all manner of installations, providing of course that building codes where you are permit such a system. Here’s a natural gas traditionally vented model that at the time of this writing sells for USD $175.99.

I care about such efficiency because I am building my bus conversion to be a model of efficiency. For example, I am installing triple pane windows with steel insulated window shades, for a total of 5 unbroken surfaces separating the indoors from the outside when the shades are drawn at night. I am also installing 8 inches of foam insulation on the roof, for an R rating of almost 60. I am hoping to be able to heat and cool the interior just with solar energy. I will have the propane water heaters on board for use when it’s too cloudy to warm enough water with the rooftop solar hot water collectors I plan to build.

White brown and green chicken eggs from hens kept by Kevin Warnock

My cousin Cnynthia Christensen gave me a Marans hen when I visited her farm in Oregon when I was in Oregon for my grandmother’s 100th birthday party. That was in December 2011. I carried the hen back to San Francisco in a box in the backseat of my car. The Marans was not yet old enough to be laying eggs.

Yesterday, February 13, 2012, my Marans hen gave me a present — her first egg. I know the egg in the coop was from her because she is my only Marans, and my other hens will not lay dark brown eggs when they start laying.

Sadly, three of my original batch of chickens were eaten by raccoons that live in my neighborhood. I saved an egg from each of those hens and photographed today the egg from my Marans alongside the others.

You should be able to see easily the striking colors of these four eggs — the Marans egg is in the lower left. The green egg in the upper left is from an Ameraucana. The brown egg in the upper right is from a Brahma chicken and the white egg in the lower right is from a Houdan chicken.

The Marans egg is somewhat spotted. The Brahma chicken is a dual purpose chicken that can be for eggs or meat. I wonder if that’s why that chicken was so large, and why it’s eggs were the largest from chickens that I have ever seen.

I wonder if my Marans knew today was Valentine’s Day and she wanted to give me something special? I could have had a tasty breakfast of one fresh egg this morning.

I love my chickens.

vi.com webpage as of February 13 2012

I read with interest on Techcrunch this morning that the two character domain name vi.com was just sold for USD $325,000.

I jumped as I wondered if vi.com was the latest entrant into the online document editor business.

Vi, short for visual editor, is the default editor in the UNIX operating system.

UNIX and its descendants like Linux power much of the Internet.

Sadly, Vi the editor will not soon be visualized at vi.com.

Instead, on July 14, 2012, the pricey vi.com domain will be used by ViSalus help people visualize how they can lose weight.

So Vi is simply short for ViSalus.

According their website, the firm ‘ViSalus is the No. 1 weight loss & fitness Challenge platform in North America—rewarding those with the best 90-day transformations over $25 MILLION each year in free products, prizes, and vacations.’

In a way ViSalus is to weight loss what SaveUp is to fiscal fitness.

This story made me cry. Here’s an excerpt:

“Authorities say the Tennessee River’s current was swift when 25-year-old Christopher Heaton jumped in the water to rescue his girlfriend.

Heaton, of Jasper, Tenn., had driven to Bridgeport, Ala., to meet his girlfriend Tuesday evening. He arrived at their meeting place near a boat ramp to see her car sinking as it was swept down the river, said Jackson County Chief Deputy Rocky Harnen. Witnesses told police Heaton immediately dived into the water.

But the woman — whom police haven’t named — escaped from the car and was helped from the water by fisherman at a ramp only 20 yards away, Harnen said.”

It’s so sad that his girlfriend was alive and well just 20 yards away!

I know how powerful love can be, and I might well have jumped in the river as Heaton did had I discovered my ex-wife’s car sinking in the river. When I was married to her I was so in love with her that I believe I would have thrown my normal caution to the wind. Now that I’ve divorced her I don’t know how I would react, as she’s less important to me now. But that doesn’t mean she is unimportant to me and that I would definitely not jump in, because part of me still loves her.

Brief excerpt from paper 'Hamilton-Jacobi equation' by Robert L. Warnock

I like to think I am a smart and inventive guy.

I have two professional claims to fame:

I created the first online document assembly website (Hotpaper) and the first online office suite (gOffice).

Both of these categories of software proved to be quite popular.

In the United States, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer now dominate the online document assembly business.

In the United States, Google Docs and Zoho now dominate the online office productivity business.

I am proud that I created the first versions of these significant components to the fabric of the Internet.

While my contributions to the Internet may not have the sex appeal of the social network Facebook or the political influence of the micro-blogging website Twitter, my contributions do allow people to get real work done online.

Getting work done is important to the advancement of humanity. Friending and Tweeting also help advance humanity, but the importance of writing and communicating well with the help of productivity software and document assembly software should not be discounted. How long could you go without Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel or their new online competitors? Probably not long if you are a white collar worker.

I bought a nice house in San Francisco with the spoils of my inventions, and I believe I lead a comfortable and richly satisfying life.

I am shockingly happy. I am surprisingly happy for Google, Zoho, LegalZoom and RocketLawyer — despite their making more money from my innovations than I did.

However, I am not smart like my father Robert Warnock.

Yesterday I learned that my father’s paper Hamilton-Jacobi Equation is included on the peer-reviewed ScholarPedia website.

ScholarPedia is a WikiPedia like website for scientific papers.

Creating an online office suite like I did is a piece of cake compared to what my father works on. Many smart 20 year olds today could build the software I was first to build. But I don’t think any 20 year old could write the papers my father writes, no matter how hard they tried.

Don’t think I am putting myself down by this post.

I am simply showing you how outstandingly bright my father is. My mother is also outstandingly bright, and I’m certain I got my smarts from them.

I regard myself as quite smart.

I continue to invent things on a weekly basis. My mind is frequently dreaming up improvements to many everyday problems. I will never have the time to implement even a small portion of all the crazy ideas I come up with. The best I can hope for is to write a minority of them down and publish them to this blog, where hopefully others will find and then implement them.

I am devoting considerable energy to developing ideas to improve the efficiency of living, including heating, cooling, food production and water usage. Look for many more thoughts from me on these subjects over the coming years. My hope is that my ideas in these areas will have a profound influence on the state of the human condition by the end of my life.

As a side note, I am impressed that Scholarpedia uses Web Fonts to display math equations. That means you can copy and paste the mathematical equations in articles published on Scholarpedia. You generally can’t do this on WikiPedia, where equations are entered as LaTeX source code but then converted to image files for display.

I found the following video on Digg. This is a ‘sponsored ad’ meaning Acura paid to place this ad on Digg. Normally I would never clutter up my blog with a paid ad, but this one is funny and meaningful to me. This video shows Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld vying to be first in line to purchase the new Acura NSX.

When the Acura NSX came out I wanted one. I was sad when I discovered I am too tall to fit inside one. I tried to find a shop that would modify the seats to lower them, but no shop would touch the project, citing worry I would sue them after a crash if the modified seats came loose. I was prepared to buy a new NSX, and the dealer would not help me find a way to make the purchase work for me. I never even test drove the car because I had to bend my head over at an angle just to even sit in it.

I don’t know why Acura couldn’t have provided more head room. I fit with room to spare in the much smaller Lotus Elise.

Perhaps the new NSX will have more headroom than the earlier models. However, I don’t particularly care for the pictures I’ve seen of the new NSX. I much prefer the Lotus Evora or the Ferarri 458 Spider.

I’m not in the market for a new car anyway, as I just got a really nice silver BMW 528i with a 5-speed stick shift transmission. I have wanted a stick shift 5 series for years. They are rare compared to automatics. My BMW has the best feeling stick shift I have ever driven, even better than in the Lotus Elise and the Mini Cooper S, which both have outstanding stick shifts.

BMW 5-Series E39 sedan similar to the one I just bought. Photo from Wikipedia.org.

My new BMW is not brand new. I don’t buy new cars and I never plan to buy a new car, as they represent a poor financial transaction to me. But my new to me car is so shiny and lovely that my neighbors asked me if it was an actual new car! To top things off, my new BMW has fold down rear seats with a pass through area for skis. Now I can bring back 12 foot lengths of steel and aluminum from Bayshore Metals without having to cut them in half with a hacksaw in their parking lot.