We were just about to toss out some old goggles that were in the closet and, on a lark, decided to check their UV protection. Mine were maybe 10+ year old Oakleys (haven’t used in many years) and Darlene’s were her old Smith’s that she had been using up until last month. Both are fitted with orange “high contrast” lenses.
Well, both appear to be failing to provide UV protection now. Not good!
Sunglasses and ski goggles can lose their UV protection over time. So… double-check your old sunglasses and goggles for UV protection!
I tested with a UV flashlight (“black light”) I picked up recently off Amazon when I decided I didn’t want to trust the unknown Chinese manufacturer (“Oho”) of some new camera goggles I bought. As it turns out, those new goggles and my old Liquid Image camera goggles I’ve been using for many years pass the UV flashlight test fine. (As do my and Darlene’s sunglasses.)
You can do a quick and dirty test just using a $20 bill and one of these inexpensive UV flashlights. You can also get a more professional test (with an actual UV blocking measurement) from your local optician.
Here’s a bad result on left (strip is fluorescing due to UV light getting through lens), good result on right – both are orange tint lenses and many years old:
Record loads of snowfall (and occasional bouts of rain) mean lots of snow and ice on the Tahoe house – enough to build up ice dams all the way around the house and to eventually find water streaming down the walls in the dining room.
It looks like the problem spot is where one of the dormers meets the roof. Melting snow collects above the ice dam below the dormers, getting under the shingles until it gets high enough to stream down where the dormer wall joins the roof. There is some heat tape installed under these dormers to create drainage through the ice dams but it’s not installed quite correctly and I had mistakenly understood that it’s not necessary to run it at night when the temperatures get down to the teens outside. Apparently there’s enough heat getting through the roof to melt the snow even when it’s that cold outside. So I ended up with water streaming down the inside walls (past electrical outlets, to boot):
Not good. I’ve got a crew coming from Mills Roofing later this week to remove the snow and ice buildup. There will be more snow and then more melt and more ice dams though. The heat tape that is there now is only on a portion of the rear of the house and it wasn’t installed properly. It doesn’t hang over the edge of the eaves as it should (to let the water drain off the roof) and a good 8-10 feet of it is wasted strung up on the wall coming from the junction box. I was able to rearrange some of it but the roof here is too steep for me to deal with most of it.
I’ve been in contact with Brian from Summit Ice Melt Systems and will be looking into potentially installing their product to prevent these ice dams from forming at all. However, that still leaves the issue of all this melt water collecting and refreezing on the deck below – and potentially leading to further water intrusion into the house:
There’s also still the outstanding damage to the roof from prior seasons. There are several sections of shingles missing from the roof but I wasn’t able to find anyone that wasn’t already booked up to repair the damage over this past year. I did eventually sign up with Jeff’s Roofing Truckee but he also wasn’t able to get to it before the first snows arrived. He did manage to locate a supply of the Tamko shingles in South Lake Tahoe though. Hopefully, he’ll get to my roof later this year once the snow and cold weather is gone:
Got in a few more games this month, including a long gaming night with Roland, Clay, Dan and Darlene that began with Fury of Dracula and continued with everyone’s first time play of Terra Mystica. Got to try Inis with four players at the local gaming meetup in Scotts Valley. Darlene and I played many rounds of the new push-your-luck style game of potion brewing in The Quacks of Quedlinburg. We also had our first encounter with the “boss minion” in the gorgeous co-op Mechs vs. Minions and, lastly, we were utterly clobbered and my character driven insane in our first two player campaign attempt of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. So much for “standard difficulty” with even the starter campaign “Night of the Zealot” – we’ll be trying again though, with both the lights and the difficulty turned down!
Six intrepid gamers (Mark, Stefan, Darlene, Charles, Roland and myself) gathered on a Saturday. We pushed our luck seeking the most treasure in the mines of Diamant, struggled to cross the finish line first in Flamme Rouge, tried to make off with the most loot in Clank! In! Space!, worked to build the strongest foothold at the fringe of the galaxy in Empires of the Void II, screwed each other over with the storms of Category 5, and made and broke mad alliances to establish the most colonies in Cosmic Encounter. Oh, and there was a bit of dice-throwing for good measure.
Darlene and I also joined the local Scotts Valley gaming group a couple of times this month. Early in January we had our first time run through the lovely fourth edition version of Fury of Dracula. As Dracula, I was eventually tracked down and defeated but surely only because of the fact that I/we misinterpreted a few important rules. Wait until next time… mwahahahahaha!
In late January, we got together again and, as Long John Silver, I tried to keep my treasure hidden from four scheming pirates (Darlene included) in the new Treasure Island. We also got in a game of Sushi Go Party before breaking off into two groups. Darlene tried out Whistle Stop, while I had another go at evading the vampire hunters in Fury of Dracula. Unfortunately, we ran out of time.
Lots more gaming over December, including many more flaming balls of lava with Fireball Island and the Curse of Vul-Kar. With the local Scotts Valley gaming group, we finally got to grow some trees with a full four players in the gorgeous Photosynthesis and we successfully terraformed Mars again in, of course, Terraforming Mars. With Clay, Kevin, Rachel and Dan, we had a battle of alliances in the classic Cosmic Encounter; Troy joined me and Darlene for New Years Eve and a couple plays of Clank! In! Spaaaaace!, a lot of pushing our luck too far with Diamant, as well as a relaxing run of Tokaido. Darlene got me a copy of Alchemists for Christmas which she quickly became so obsessed with that we found ourselves playing multiple games until the early morning hours. That and she’s also hooked now on deck building games like Clank! and Dominion. We also enjoyed some more dice puzzle solving in Sagrada, building out our fiefdoms in Bunny Kingdom and uncovering lost Mayan ruins in Tikal.
Unfortunately, I only sometimes remember to snag some pictures while we’re engrossed in the games:
Lots of fun first plays of games this month both at home and meeting up several times with the local gaming group at the Scotts Valley library. Alchemists has you experimenting on yourself and your students to figure out the ingredients for magic potions and then publish for fame and fortune, Decrypto pits two teams of codebreakers against each other, Inis has several Celtic clans competing to elect a king across all the land, in Mechs vs. Minions you must continually program your mechwarriors to beat back the onslaught of minions and accomplish the co-op mission but lastly, via Kickstarter…
Speaking of Mechs vs. Minions, check out the absolutely incredible components that come with this campaign-style co-op game:
We also got in some great repeat games of Great Western Trail (drive cattle to market), Whitehall (track down and catch Jack the Ripper), Flamme Rouge (bike racing), Bärenpark (design an animal/bear park), Azul (lay pattern-matching tiles), Sagrada (pattern matching with dice), and Arboretum (build out paths of different tree species).
Lots of wildfires in California lately and over 100 in the Santa Cruz area this year so they’ve closed many of the county parks to try to reduce the risk. This one a couple of weeks ago (the Rincon fire) was quite visible from my place but happily they were able to get it under control in a couple of days:
After seeing someone test the air filtration of Tesla’s Model X and its “biodefense mode” against the heavy smoke we’re getting from our wildfires this month, I decided to pick up an inexpensive air quality sensor to test my home’s air as well as my Model 3’s more mundane filtration system. (The Model 3 doesn’t have the Model X’s fancy “biodefense mode” or huge HEPA filters.)
With the PM2.5 sensor reading 150 μg/m3 (unhealthy) in the San Jose area (due to smoke from the Camp Fire that burned through Paradise, CA), I found that the Tesla Model 3’s air filter would bring things down to the 20’s in the cabin in just a few minutes when recycle air was turned on. Later, I stopped and made a video to record it falling from 135 to 5 μg/m3 in less than 10 minutes. It climbed back up to the 80’s pretty quickly though when I turned off recycle air and let it bring in fresh air:
This video was even picked up by Teslarati (“Model 3 protects owner…“) and re-tweeted by Elon.
Hi, Elon! But they didn’t pick up on my follow-up test to compare the Tesla to a Toyota:
Comparison with Toyota RAV4 EV
I decided to repeat the test with my 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV. This time the starting air quality wasn’t nearly as bad as my initial test but both the Tesla and the Toyota were able to filter the cabin down to a reading of zero from a start of 50 μg/m3 with recycle air turned on. At full fan speed, the RAV4 took about 10 minutes and the Model 3 was able to do it in about 3-4 minutes.
With recycle air turned off (fresh air intake on), the PM2.5 reading in both cars climbed up again. The Tesla was able to hold it around the low to mid 30’s but the RAV4 went up to essentially the outside reading of 50 μg/m3 again. So the Model 3’s system does work better.
One other thing of note is that the RAV4 ended up with a much higher concentration of TVOC (total volatile organic compounds), even though the vehicle is five years old. Presumably this is off-gassing of some of the materials in the cabin.Oh, and I forgot to turn off A/C in the RAV4 for the test – hence the temperature drop.
Here’s more detail in screenshots – RAV4 start and finish with recycle on:
Model 3 start and finish with recycle on:
On a subsequent four-hour drive to Tahoe in the Model 3, I encountered much worse air along the way (San Jose, Central Valley, Sacramento, etc). I’d guess the PM2.5 count was easily at least 150 μg/m3 and probably much higher in places, but I avoided opening the windows to test it. I kept the air on recycle and saw that the particle count held down around 20 but sometimes climb to the 30’s. Not bad, given how bad it was outside.
If you’re interested in buying a Tesla, using someone’s referral link will give you a discount (the amount varies over the years) and grants redeemable credits to the person who referred you. Here’s my Tesla referral link.
