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water through wood
Tuesday, September 11 2007
The southwest and southeast pillars of the solar deck sit directly on the deck of the roof above the laboratory. This deck, like nearly all roof decks on the house, tilts at a steep 45o angle. For whatever reason the southwest pillar has given me chronic problems with leaking. I've squirted plenty of black goop into any possible gaps and have also added a square of aluminum flashing. All the overt leaking has stopped, but during a persistent drenching rain today (the first in weeks) I noticed that the heavy oak pillar in the laboratory had developed mysterious dark spots and stripes along its length. Oddly, none of these stripes actually reached up to the ceiling and none of them were wet to the touch. But they looked exactly like damp wood. When I tested these dark places with a multimeter I could get measureable flows of electricity through them, with resistances of 50-100 megaohms across a distance of a quarter inch. Meanwhile non-dark parts of the wood acted like perfect insulators. I looked online to see if anyone was providing tables to convert electrical resistance to water saturation, and though I saw many two-probe moisture meters that do exactly that, their secret was somehow being kept off the internet.
The amount of moisture I was detecting must have been incredibly small; if I dabbed a drop of saliva on that same wood I could measure a resistance of 1-2 megaohms across a quarter inch, indicating the presence of fifty times more water.
Could this darkness in the pillar really be warter coming from the roof, carried down tiny tubules at its center, only to burble weakly to the surface randomly along its length? Or might it just be condensation on a humid day? In any case, as soon as it dries out, I'll be injecting creosote goop into all the gaps in the solar deck's southwest pillar just on the chance that what I'm seeing is water that has found its way into those cracks.
I had a housecall today on Yerry Hill Road near Woodstock with a mission to simply install a DSL package that had been delivered by Verizon. The client was a woman living alone with a friendly dark brown Pit Bull/Sharpie. She also had one of those old-school black rotary telephones from the 1940s, one without any phono jacks or plugs into which a standard DSL filter might be installed. So I cut the plug-cord of DSL filter about halfway down, stripped the ends of the cable that remained, and spliced it to the line. I then plugged the decapitated plug into the female end of the filter and stripped the lines of its stub of cable so as to provide wires to run to the screw terminals of the phone itself. I don't know what Verizon would have done in this situation, but this improvisation worked perfectly, and I was even able to stuff the DSL filter into the surplus bulk of the phone itself. (One of the great things about old equipment is that they have room for expansion - this rule applies to the engine compartments of 1940s-era cars as well.)
My thoughts regarding 9/11 six years out: it's so 2003! Seriously, I can't believe I'm the only one sick of 9/11. As a historical lesson, its only value is in showing Americans that they are bunch of pussies willing to give up their freedom and democracy the moment someone shouts "Boo!"
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