I recently purchased a new Carrier HVAC system and had it installed. Everything went fine. The only hitch was that I asked them to put in a 1″ filter box rather than a 4″ box. Something got screwed up and the installers came out with a 4″ filter box and said that to do a 1″ box, the install would have to be rescheduled. I did some quick math, looked up the filter prices and figured I could work with 4″ filters.

Fast forward 6 months, when I go to put in my first replacement filter. I learn that the filter box isn’t the standard size. It is labeled 16x25x4 but the actual size is 15 15/16 x 14 7/8. The standard size for a 16x25x4 filter is 15 1/2 x 24 1/2. I checked 8 different high volume filter resellers and confirmed that the most common size for a 16x25x4 filters is actually 15 1/2 x 24 1/2. I found that 90% of filters were that size. The size I have is a “Honeywell” size, and shows up less than 5% in online listings. It also costs 3x as much. Again, I don’t have a Honeywell system but a Carrier system. 

I also noticed that the original Honeywell filter doesn’t seem to fit correctly against the filter box door (see photo). The door to the filter box has a foam gasket along the sides to prevent air seeping around the filter. But the foam strips are 5 inches apart, while the Honeywell filter is only 4 3/8 wide. That means the foam doesn’t actually touch the filter along the vertical door edge. The metal of the door doesn’t touch the end of the filter so there is a gap of 1/4″ where air simply goes around the filter inside the door.

So in mid July I sent three questions to my vendor, Nugent and Sons in Sterling, VA:

• Why are we using a non-standard size filter box?
• How do I get this box to take a standard size filter?
• Why is there a gap between the original filter and the filter box door?

I was told the questions would be passed along to the ‘install team’. I sent the same questions again in late July.  With no response I called their office and was asked to resend the information.  I sent it twice (so far) in early August.

Maybe seeing this post will encourage a response?

The EU is getting closer to abandoning the twice-a-year time changes involved in Daylight Saving Time.  There is a proposal to keep the EU on DST all year round.  The legislation still has to be written and voted on, but public feedback is running over 80% in favor of scrapping time changes.  This caused the European Commission to recommend that member states abolish DST.  Hopefully the US will start down this road soon.

According to this article in Ars Technica, the European Parliament has asked the European Commission to review the costs and benefits of Daylight Saving Time. There are lots of hoops before the EU could drop DST but it is great to see this idea gaining traction.  The change was spurred by 70,000 Finnish citizens who signed a petition against DST.

But according to Newsweek, Florida wants to be on DST all year round, to help with tourism and sleepy schoolkids.

This NY Post article says that Tickets sales for the Reputation tour are “disappointing” because not one concert date has been “sold out”, and also because prices are much higher than previous tours. The NY Post has it all wrong.

Those sell-outs and lower prices have largely been an illusion. The buyers in those immediate sell-outs are often not the fans that will be sitting in the seats. Many of the initial ticket sales go to brokers for resale. Broker tickets won’t be sold to an actual attendee until later, maybe even just before the show. And, that attendee will pay a significant markup over the face value. So if you look at ticket sales from the perspective of the actual concertgoer, these shows didn’t really sell out immediately. And the prices paid to a broker are always higher than face value. Recently ticket buying bots have taken over, making it even harder for consumers to compete with brokers when it comes to buying face-value tickets.  Team Taylor Swift has found a way take out the middle man, by essentially scalping their own tickets.

So, what does that involve? Mainly charging more realistic prices up front. The main reason brokers can make money is that tickets are usually priced far below what fans are willing to pay. This is especially true when people decide to attend a concert after the concert sells out. By charging higher prices up front they reduce the profit available to the broker and therefore reduce the incentive to buy and resell tickets.

Raising the prices also slows down the ticket sales, making face value tickets available for a much longer period. When a concert doesn’t sell out, the broker’s markup is further limited. So the fact that these concerts are not selling out as quickly is by design. If the pricing is done perfectly a concert will sell the last seats right at showtime. Even if they have a few tickets left over, the fact that they are capturing a large share of the resale profit means the artist is making more money overall.  This Rolling Stone article gives a great explanation.

So, while some fans are upset and complaining about the new pricing model, they should be happy that the money is going to the artist rather than a middleman.

I have written before about the fact that Daylight Saving Time is a bad idea. But now there is a Boston Globe article that calls it “dumb, dangerous, and costly.”  It mentions that Massachusetts is studying the idea of springing ahead permanently, along with bills in the state legislatures of Texas, California and Washington.  Time to write my state legislators to get a bill going in Virginia.

Arizona and Hawaii are the only two states that currently ignore DST.  Montana just recently got a bill passed in one house of it’s state legislature, and might become the third.

When we first moved into our new home we had trash service that involved recycling. I hated spending time trying to rinse mayo and old pasta sauce out of glass jars, because the had to be clean to be recycled. Then our trash company added new fee for recycling and I suddenly realized that recycling was optional in our area. I had also read an article in the NY Times that said recycling was waste of time and agreed. I was taking time to wash my trash and paying extra for the privilege.  So I stopped using the recycle bins.

I do care about the environment. I pay to have our old electronics recycled. I save hazardous waste for special drop-off events. But I am not alone thinking that the time and money spent on household recycling provides minimal benefit or is possibly a complete waste. If you could add the cost of the time people spend sorting and preparing their trash I think it is clearly a losing proposition.  A local government might consider this extra time free, but I value my time.

The law of supply and demand also agrees with me. If landfill space was truly running out then the cost of trash disposal would go up and it certainly hasn’t around here. If recycled raw materials were truly of value then the savings would at least cover the cost transport and process it. The fact that I have to pay extra and do extra work means that recycling raw materials is not worth the effort. This was true way back when the NY Times wrote about it, and the costs of raw materials recently fell further, putting many recycling programs in financial jeopardy.

So my wife thinks I am a heretic and my neighbors have offered to pay for my recycling service, but I am going to hold off on principle.

This article in Popular Mechanics pops myths on both sides of the argument.

We bought our house in 1999 and it uses propane for heat and cooking. The builder allowed a propane company to install an underground tank and retain ownership of the tank. Apparently this is common and requires you to purchase your propane from that supplier at whatever price they set. Even though the initial propane price seemed fair, I asked what it would take to own the tank. I was told it would cost $1100 and that I would have to maintain it myself. I decided to wait one season and see what winter prices were like.

Lucky for us, the builder made another mistake when building the house. They forgot to insulate the roof over the family room and we didn’t realize it until the following summer. So all I knew come spring was that I burned enough propane the first winter to justify buying the tank. The propane supplier wasn’t happy, but I got very little hassle other than some dire warnings of “being on my own”. I now get my propane from a dealer that will sell me an entire year’s worth of propane at the summer price, store it for me, and deliver what I need each month.

Yes, there is a risk that the tank will fail, but probably not for 30+ years. Yes, I have to ‘maintain’ it but that means replacing regulators every 15 years. I just had this done for the first time and it was less than $200. So I am confident that I have saved enough over 15 years to buy several entirely new tanks, including the cost of installation.

Recently I have noticed that the smaller dealers like my original dealer have been bought up by some really large players. Now the price difference between independent and locked-in customers seems much higher than before. So, after this past “polar vortex” winter I compared propane prices with a new neighbor. He was stunned when he saw my propane price. If he had paid for his propane at my price the difference would have paid for his propane tank in just that one winter. Within a few months he had purchased his tank.

Not everyone is so lucky. Some propane suppliers are using high pressure tactics and outright lies to prevent customers from buying back their propane tanks. They will claim that your only option is to pay all sorts of fees. Some vendors simply refuse to respond and force the customer to bring in lawyers before they agree to a sale. So I was very pleased to read a blog post by someone in a nearby town who found a way to force the issue with his supplier.

With all the TV and newspaper consumer advocates out there you would think that this issue would be discussed more often. And the folks with the most to gain, the independent propane suppliers, don’t seem eager to educate potential customers. So maybe giving this issue a bit more exposure will help.

I have always had a problem pouring rinse aid into a dishwasher. Now I am starting to think this could be by design. I mean, who benefits if I waste rinse aid? The same guys who designed the bottle and spout.

If you don’t want to overfill and waste the liquid then you have to pour slowly. This is because it is hard to see how close to full the dispenser is,until it is full. At the same time it is very hard to pour rinse aid slowly without spilling because of the tiny hole and the fact that rinse aid is watery. As soon as you tip the bottle you get a spurt out, then it has to stop to breathe in and then it spurts out, etc. This spurting makes it very hard to aim and very easy to miss the hole.

At first I thought I was just doing it wrong and maybe someone had created a video of the correct way. The first video I found was by Sears. Even the person making that video couldn’t pour the rinse aid without spilling it outside the fill cup. Then they wiped up the spill. The instructions on the bottle of every brand specifically mentions wiping up any spills. If spills are that common it seems to point to a bad design.

Of course you could pour the rinse aide into something smaller like a measuring cup, and then pour from that into the fill cup, but then you are wasting the liquid that coats the measuring cup, and you have one more thing to wash.

My approach now is to screw the cap off of the bottle and pour the rinse aid directly from the neck of the bottle. This works pretty well, except when the bottle is full. A full bottle is still a challenge because the cup is recessed into a large flat door and there is no easy way to get the neck of a tall full bottle down close to the cup. This especially true for people like me who get dishwasher rinse aid at Costco where the bottle is even taller than normal.

Now I save the last empty rinse aid bottle and I refill it part way from the new full bottle. I can tip the half full bottle almost to horizontal and get the neck down to the fill cup without spilling. Nothing is wasted and nothing extra to wash.