Hawaii Travel

Archive for January, 2010

i know dan weaver said that the bigger pics are better, but i still not sure how to keep this from overlapping over there —->
wordpress dunce.
anyway. it’s BRAXTON! homey was back in town. along with a lot of you. for christamasssss. it made for some highly entertaining evenings out letmetellyou.

sure it was nice to see [...]
Go to Source

With electric cars, it seems that what you pay for is range.

And generally, range means battery size, although certainly vehicle weight and aerodynamic qualities play a role.

(Image: The THINK City car. Credit: THINK.)

Examples:

The golf-cart-looking GEM car gets about 30 miles, and costs under $8,000 in its most basic model.

Need a pickup truck? Zap has one with a 30-mile range at $15,000.

There’s the Dynasty electric vehicle, with a 30-mile range, with a basic model that sells for $14,000.

Those three are low-speed models, generally with a 25-mile-an-hour maximum. For street cars, though, the per-mile-of-range pricing isn’t a lot different.

BG Electric cars is promising a Chinese-made, 45-mile-per-hour sedan with a 60 to 120-mile range, depending on configuration, for $16,000 to $27,000. But it seems to be having difficulty bringing it to market on schedule. It was promised last year.

The THINK car, which is to be manufactured in the U.S., may be on sale late next year at $25,000 with a 100 miles range.

The Mini Cooper electric car, the Mini-E, gets about 150 miles to the battery charge, and runs in the $50,000 range.

The super-hot Tesla Roadster gets 200 miles of range out of a list price of $109,000.

It’s not a linear chart, but generally, what you pay for in an electric car is range. Based on the numbers above—and clearly they may change with time and alterations in design and capacity—you get a mile of range for somewhere between $250 and $550.

The most basic vehicles are in the lower end of that range. Hotter cars like the Mini-E and Tesla, move up the range.

With the GEM it’s $267 a mile of range.

The ZapTruck is $500 a mile.

Dynasty is $467.

BG’s promised price works out to $225 to $266.

THINK is $250 a mile.

Mini-E is $333 a mile.

And Tesla is $550 a mile.

The GM Volt, promised late this year, runs more, near $1,000 a range mile, (40-mile range at a price less than $40,000), but it’s not a pure electric car. It will have an on-board gas-powered range extender, making it more akin to a hybrid.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

Go to Source

To hand-wash dishes, or not, which is greener?

There are so many folks out there with half-baked opinions that you might never get to a supportable answer.

That said, here’s ours, which contradicts popular counter-intuitive “green” thinking: If you have a solar water heater, and you’re an efficient washer, hand-washing has dramatically fewer environmental impacts.

You can waste a lot of water before you overcome the cost of the electricity for the washer’s electric motor and the environmental cost of building and shipping that dishwashing machine.

On the other hand, if you’re paying a utility to heat your water, either alternative will be an expensive one, and the judgment comes down to how much more hot water is used in your style of hand dishwashing than the dishwasher you select.

All kinds of green gurus are arguing that running a dishwasher has less impact on the environment. Mostly, they justify this position with a deplorable bit of analysis—they consider the amount of water used, and ignore electrical costs and the inherent environmental cost of the existence of the dishwasher.

Here’s an example from a Hawai’i newspaper. The average dishwasher uses 8.7 gallons of water per load, while hand washing can use 10 to 20 gallons, depending on whether you leave the water running. Therefore the dishwasher is greener.

Here’s an About.com argument that dishwashers are greener than hand washing.

They are, of course, both wrong in almost every scenario. [They're pretty much only right if 1) you're using a very efficient dishwasher, 2) you're a very inefficient hand-washer, and 3) you're using fossil fuels to heat your water.]

The best electric dishwashers can do the job with five gallons, more or less, and the worst with 15 or so, but there’s far more to dishwashing than water.

Let’s call the detergent use even. And for the purposes of this assessment, let’s call water heating even, assuming you have a solar water heater and aren’t drawing electrical power to heat water.

In that case, figuring a 1000-watt dishwasher that runs for an hour, you’ll pay electric costs of $.30 to $.40 per load, depending on where in Hawai’i you live. And the water costs about 3 cents for 10 gallons. (The electrical cost of pumping the water out of the ground is built into this price.)

Anybody paying attention? You can use two 55-gallon drums full of water hand-washing before it costs as much as the electrical cost alone of one dishwasher load.

That calculation is child’s play. It gets trickier for those who don’t have a solar water heater, and who are paying the electric utility or the gas company to heat water. From various sources, I’ve come up with about .2 kilowatt hours to heat a gallon of water from tap cold to dishwashing hot.

A 20-gallon hand-wash then costs 6 cents for the water and $1.20 for electricity to heat it, for $1.26. An efficient 10-gallon hand-wash costs $.63. For the dishwasher, the total costs depends in part on how much of the heated water comes via the household water heater and how much from the washer. Let’s say $.30 to $.40 for electricity plus a $.32 hot water bill (5 gallons plus the water cost)–about the same as an efficient hand-wash, and less than an inefficient hand-wash.

But the upshot is that if you use a lot of hot water, and you’re using electricity to heat it, it’s going to be a costly venture either way. If you’re an inefficient hand washer and you’re paying the utility to heat your water, the dishwasher might indeed make more sense. (If you use more efficient fuel-based water heating like gas or heat pumps, the calculation shifts back toward hand-washing.)

But if you’re using the sun to heat your water, you can be awfully inefficient as a dishwasher before you overcome the significant cost of running the machine.

I like this note from Dave Brook, energy extension agent at the Oregon State University: “Studies showing an advantage to one method usually assume less-efficient practices for the other—such as leaving rinse water flowing continuously when washing by hand. Because there’s no clear advantage of one method over the other, the main benefit of automatic dishwashers is convenience, not energy savings. Many people find dishwashers are a great place to store dirty dishes out of sight before washing them.”

As a University of Bonn study says, “while on the water there is a clear advantage of using a dishwasher, on energy in real life the situation is more complex as distribution and generation losses have to be taken into account as well.”

But once again, all those assessments assume you’re paying to heat the water. If you’re not, the choice is abundantly clear: wash ‘em by hand and your environmental impact is minimal.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Go to Source

One of the key recommendations for runners has always been, “Wear good shoes.”

New research is now suggesting that may be bad advice.

Not that you should wear bad shoes, but rather, perhaps, that you should wear no shoes at all. Of course, that’s problematic for a number of reasons, even in fair Hawai’i.

Scientists comparing running in shoes and running barefoot have found that while shoes protect the feet in some ways, standard running shoe designs also dramatically change stresses on the joints of the lower body.

The press release is here. and the actual report is here.

The findings suggest that standard running shoes, with raised heels to reduce impact on landing and wide heels to prevent pronation, create significant changes in torque on the ankles, knees and hips.

The study was published in the PM&R: The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation under the title, “The Effect of Running Shoes on Lower Extremity Joint Torques.” Authors are D. Casey Kerrigan, MD, Jason R. Franz, MS, Geoffrey S. Keenan, MD, Jay Dicharry, MPT, Ugo Della Croce, PhD, and Robert P. Wilder, MD. (PM&R: The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation, Volume 1, Issue 12 (December 2009), published by Elsevier. )

The researchers ran subjects on a treadmill, with standard running shoes, and without. Subjects were 68 individuals who ran regularly at least 15 miles a week, about half of whom were men and half women.

Their findings indicated that the running shoes transferred significant amounts of rotational force on the leg joints above the foot, when compared to barefoot running.

One message from this work might be to run barefoot. But broken glass, nails, sharp rocks and the rest of the debris along roadside running routes could make that a hazardous adventure.

The authors suggest the work could inform the design of future running shoes, to reduce the joint torque issues: “It is unknown to what extent actual joint contact forces could be affected by compliance that a shoe might provide, a potentially valuable design characteristic that may offset the observed increases in joint torques.”

I confess that I was a longtime barefooter. Old-timers in Hawai’i and particularly on Kauai may remember the “barefoot reporter.” I started wearing running shoes when I started running marathons and later triathlons, primarily for protection from roadside debris. The running days are long over, due largely to foot, ankle and knee issues. And now, I wonder, “Was it the shoes?”

I hesitate to take that concern too far. We were designed to walk and run generally on forgiving natural surfaces, while much running today is on solid concrete and asphalt. You can feel the difference.

The authors of the shoe/foot suggest manufacturers consider changes in popular shoe design.

“The development of new footwear designs that encourage or mimic the natural compliance that normal foot function provides while minimizing knee and hip joint torques is warranted. Reducing joint torques with footwear completely to that of barefoot running, while providing meaningful footwear functions, especially compliance, should be the goal of new footwear designs.”

Does that mean new running shoes will look like the interesting, strange Vibram Five-Fingers?
Probably not, but it might be a step in the right direction. Here’s one take on them.

On the other hand, don’t give up on your natural feet. Here’s the website for the sport/lifestyle of “barefooting.” It includes a number of reviews of shoes that provide protection from the road/path surface, without the “control.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

Go to Source