Life with a Kohler 12RES (12 KW) whole house backup generator.

1. Background
2. Decision to Buy
3. Installation
4. Review

Background

(7/9/2009) When I originally wrote this I had no idea it would become the most popular post on this blog. Please — I’d like to improve it and make it more useful. Post comments if there are areas you’d like me to add or fix.

I spent a large part of my life growing up in rural Pennsylvania. I actually split my time between suburban New Jersey where I went to school and an 80 acre farm approximately 40 miles from Scranton, PA at the northern end of the Pocono mountains. For most of the time that my family owned it, the farm had a single house originally built in the mid 1800s. It sat up a 1/2 mile long driveway off of a dead-end dirt road. The power lines ran cross country to the house, and needless to say, with few customers in this area PP&L (Pennsylvania Power & Light) wasn’t interested in responding to calls at a moment’s notice. Which meant that we spent a lot of time without electricity. And I don’t mean one hour interruptions either — I mean that the place was without electricity for a full week at least once if not two or three times a year.

When I was young, this was a workable arrangement for my family, but once I left for college (I’m an only child) and my parents started aging, they couldn’t go for days on end carrying buckets of water from a well to the toilets to flush them or devote the time to splitting, stacking, and carrying enough firewood to keep the stove burning for 7 days straight in the winter. So they eventually built a second, modern ranch-style house and had a generator installed. This setup consisted of a 7.5 KW gasoline-powered generator located on a concrete pad outside the back door and a manual transfer switch in the basement connected to a panel which ran a few lights, the water pump, the furnace, one light or outlet in each room (including one for the refrigerator in the kitchen), and an extra outlet in the living room for the TV. Since they cooked with a gas stove, they were also able to cook.

This was a dramatic improvement, but still not an optimal solution. By today’s standards it was a terribly inconvenient installation, primarily because it meant that my parents had to constantly pour gasoline into the thing to keep it running (about every 8 hours at a moderate load), even though they cooked and heated with propane and had a giant bulk tank right in the driveway. Plus, a manual transfer switch isn’t fun for young people, never mind my almost elderly parents tromping down to the basement by flashlight in order to throw this thing on and off.

So, when I bought my latest house in Massachusetts and my parents sold the farm in Pennsylvania, we used some of the proceeds to investigate a new generator.

Decision to Buy

Right about the time that I started research, whole-house generators were gaining popularity. The largest manufacturer, Generac/Guardian, started to put commercials on major TV networks showing people making margaritas with a blender during a major thunderstorm that knocks out power to their neighborhood. Sounded good to me.

I researched brands, sizes and types and learned a few things along the way. I quickly established that I was interested in a whole-house unit with an automatic transfer switch. I had no desire to tote large tanks of gasoline around and constantly fill up a small portable unit. Nor did I want to worry that my pipes were freezing while I was on vacation because even with a generator there would be no one around to plug it in and run it. So a propane fueled whole-house system was what I focused on. Here are a few things I discovered along the way:

1. The market for residential systems is dominated by Generac/Guardian and Kohler.
2. Other than the manufacturers, there is almost NO information on the web about installing or living with a residential generator.
3. There are very few installers who deal with residential generators and the special concerns that accompany a residential (as opposed to a commercial) installation. Like siting the generator so it doesn’t piss off your neighbors, and taking the aesthetics and usability of your yard into consideration.
4. Most propane/gas companies are useless when inquiring about these units, even when they sell them. Only a good propane supplier will take the time to work with you for little return. After all, if the generator is all you run with propane, you will be a very tiny customer for them.
5. Many town inspectors are utterly ignorant about these units and could be a significant impediment to the installation, unless they’re willing to learn and adapt like mine was.

If you are interested in a generator like this, unless you find one of the top installers in the country (like I believe I did), you had better prepare yourself for some serious learning. I believe that to truly do an installation yourself and get a satisfactory product, you will need to become familiar with:

1. Propane measurements and usage requirements. This includes understanding bulk propane delivery units, tank sizes, headspace, vaporization rates at various temperatures, pressures, volumes, and what BTUs represent. You’ll need to make sure that your tanks can deliver the propane required to run the generator at the lowest temperature you’d expect it to run.
2. Propane company delivery plans including renting vs. owning the bulk tanks, auto-delivery, minimum usage, etc.
3. Flammable gas piping requirements including materials required (black iron, galvanized, other), minimum distances from ignition sources, easy access for delivery, flow rates, pipe sizes, burial requirements, etc.
4. Generator siting requirements including gravel vs. poured concrete pads, minimum code required distance from openings (windows, doors), sound requirements, etc.
5. Electrical codes including load requirements for what you want to power, circuit panel capacity, wire gauges vs. distances, pass through requirements, transfer switch requirements, electric company rules, etc.

For someone with no background or no desire to dive into the details, this is no small feat. And the internet is full of horror stories about bad installations leading to non-working systems (see this for example).

So, I went about researching and used the dealer locators to find dealers in my area that sold both Guardian and Kohler generators. In spite of being listed on the manufacturer’s website, I really had difficulty getting people to call me back (note this was 2005 during the building boom — I bet people are more responsive now). I found a dealer local to me in Massachusetts and called them. They were responsive and knowledgeable (part of a respected large electrical contractor). They came out and did an initial home survey, took pictures and measurements, and asked a lot of good questions. Then they went away and a couple of weeks later gave me a quote for $11,000!

I had seen a company online that had a good website, but they were located almost 100 miles away in New Hampshire and I figured they would never come as far down as my area. But only because I used to live in New Hampshire and I knew where the business was I took a chance. This proved to be the single best decision of the entire process. Powers Generator Systems proved to be the kind of expert resource I needed. They were prompt, courteous, knowledgeable, flexible, professional, and … wonderful. Without question they were the single best contractor I have ever worked with. And they did the complete job for under $9000!

In consultation with Powers and with a little figuring about loads, I settled on a Kohler generator for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I felt that their transfer switches were more advanced and faster acting, and there was (an admittedly unsubstantiated) feeling that Kohler was slightly higher quality than Guardian. Thus began the installation.

Installation

The following is not intended to be a step-by-step guide to installation walking you through all the possible calculations and permutations, but rather a basic outline of the steps I took to get the job completed. In order:

1. Calculate power requirements
2. Decide on generator size
3. Calculate gas flow requirements and determine tank size
4. Determine installation location
5. Order generator and gas service and apply for permits
6. Install gas piping and gas pipe inspection
7. Generator site prep, installation, wiring, and run test
8. Final propane installation & tank fill
9. Final inspections (Fire Department & electrical)

Your actual steps may vary depending on local requirements.

Calculate Power Requirements

This is the first area where one can go astray. The main strategy a prospective generator owner needs to employ is to keep the manufacturer and dealer from over-sizing the generator you buy. Unless you have some kind of dramatic load (like central air conditioning), all the online calculators and manufacturer recommendations are designed to do two things — maximize their profit margin and limit their liability.

The method promoted by most manufacturers and installers all but guarantees an oversized installation and higher profits for both manufacturer and dealer. The typical method simply adds together the maximum capacities (amperage) of the circuits you want to power and specs a generator with enough capacity to cover them all. This maximizes profits in two ways. First, within any given manufacturer’s line of generators, different capacity generators are often built on the same basic chassis. The only substantial difference is the size of the stator winding. The incremental cost for larger stators is insignificant, yet the price difference that the manufacturer can charge is substantial. Thus, within generator families, larger generators are more profitable to sell. Second, coming to your house to conduct the power survey costs the installer money. Time spent with you is time not spent on other projects. So anything the installer can do to minimize the time spent gathering specs increases hos or her profit. So what you typically get is a cursory survey that results in a larger generator than actually needed. And, by over-specing the generator they all but guarantee that there won’t be problems later when you add appliances.

A more appropriate survey adds up the actual loads which are on the circuits that will be protected and makes a realistic estimate of how often they will truly be simultaneously run. A really good survey will use an actual power monitor (like the one I have) to actually record the draw of various appliances. As an example, I have an 1800 square foot house with an electric range, electric well pump, electric dryer, and three room air conditioners in summer. By any online calculator I need a minimum 16KW generator. Yet I have had a 12KW for years without a problem. And in fact, as an experiment, I once fired up all three air conditioners (a 15,000 BTU and two 6,000 BTU units), the clothes dryer in maximum, the oven at 350 degrees, the large stove burner on high, and then made my well pump engage by running the water. The peak draw on the meter? 10.9 KW. So instead of following the manufacturers recommendation, all I need to do is not turn on absolutely EVERYTHING in the house at once and I should be fine on my 12KW unit.

Decide on Generator Size

Kohler 12RES 12 KW Generator

I want to point our here that my original installer went with the 16KW recommendation, but it was Powers that pointed out that a 12KW would do fine. That was my first clue that they were a good company.

So I decided on a 12KW unit. If you have some additional loads, like central air or an electric water heater, then your requirements will need to account for those loads.

Calculate Gas Flow Requirements

The first step here is to find the right gas company. In the world of residential propane, generators are an extremely low volume business and therefore not very lucrative for gas companies. In most higher-volume installations, you lease the propane tanks from the gas company and pay a monthly fee just to have them. The gas company will tell you that this is for your own protection (they will change/replace cylinders when they are old and unsafe) but this is just marketing bullshit. They do it because it’s a predictable revenue stream that more than pays the cost of the tank over it’s lifetime and so that they can recycle tanks among customers increasing their profit even more. Most residential hardly notice the rental charges on their invoices because their use of propane dwarfs the modest charge. But for a generator user who might not use more then 50 gallons in a year the cost is significant.

There are a few propane dealers around who understand this and will outright sell you the propane tanks which, although a larger upfront cost, will minimize their cost over their lifetime. Eastern Propane here in Massachusetts is just such a company, and they were the second great find during my search for help. [Disclaimer: I worked with someone for 9 years whose wife is a Customer Support manager at Eastern, so I tried them early in my search and wasn't disappointed. But I didn't research propane dealers nearly as much as I did generator installers.] After consulting with the Eastern representative, we agreed that for generator installs, owning the tanks is probably a better deal.

Now the arithmetic begins. Each manufacturer will provide a gas requirement as part of their installation instructions (203,000 BTU/hour for the 12RES). The key to this part of the installation is in working with your gas company to ensure that enough propane is delivered to your generator to let it start and run when needed. This is a more complicated task than it might initially seem, particularly if you live in a cold climate.

Propane is stored as a liquid, but it must transfer to the vapor phase in order to run the generator. The rate that this happens is directly proportional to the heat available to make it happen which is in turn a function of both temperature and surface area exposed to the heat. This means that in a cold climate, the size of your propane bottles may be more of a function of ensuring an adequate gas flow during the minimum expected temperatures than it is of how long you might want the fuel to last. A good discussion of this is at Propane 101 and is shown in the chart below which I borrowed from http://www.flameengineering.com/Propane_Info.html.

VAPORIZATION RATE – 100 lb. Propane Cylinder (Approx)

My Dual 125 Gallon Tanks

As you can see, the energy available to your generator at 0 degrees is dramatically different than at 70 degrees. My installation is done with dual 125 gallon (450 pound) tanks which can be seen at http://www.eastern.com/pdf/PropaneTankOptions_062606.pdf.

Determine Installation Location

Once you’ve figured out the tank size, the next step is location. You will need to figure out the placement of the generator at the same time so that piping can be calculated. The distance between the tanks and the generator will determine the type of piping run needed. For example, codes define a maximum length of unsecured pipe, so much of your piping will need to be attached to a structure or run underground. The availability of structure to which you can secure the pipes can be a major issue (I needed to bury mine). In addition, the propane installers will worry about specific codes governing cylinder placement including minimum distances from potential ignition sources, which can include lots of stuff you probably didn’t think of like outside lighting, Bar-B-Que grills, electrical outlets, etc. And, they’re going to want the cylinders in a location that they can reach with their delivery hoses too. After your installer explains local requirements to you, you will have narrowed down the available locations for the cylinders and generator significantly. Astute readers will also have picked up on a central paradox governing this calculation. The generator itself is an ignition source! So yes, the cylinders must be both a minimum distance from the generator to prevent ignition, and a maximum distance governed by the piping required. See, this isn’t as flexible as you thought!

While siting the cylinders, you’ll need to keep in mind some things about the generator as well. The most universal requirement is that it be close to the electric service entrance to minimize the cabling required and that it must be a minimum distance from any openings to inhabited areas (to prevent the exhaust from pumping carbon monoxide into the house if you leave a window open).

Locating the generator away from the electrical service is possible, but remember that the size (diameter) of the cable run between the generator and the transfer switch will need to be increased with distance to overcome resistive losses. So there is a practical limit based on the maximum cable size that can be run. Your installer will be dealing with large bundled cables here, not typical 14, 12, or 10 gauge copper house wire.

If you balance the propane requirements with the generator requirements, you will have few choices of where to site the units. I am lucky that my house has a detached garage connected by an open breezeway (meaning it’s not inhabited so the distance from a window in the garage doesn’t matter) and this is close to both the driveway (for propane delivery) and the electrical service. Plus it’s separated from the main house to keep the noise at a minimum.

Once these decisions are made, the propane installer will develop a piping plan which balances flow requirements with local codes governing pipe material and allowable distances. In many areas, codes can vary from town to town. For example, in Grafton, MA where I live only black iron pipe is allowed. But just one town over, black iron pipe is not allowed and copper must be used. Only a local expert can navigate this mess.

Apply for Permits

Once you, your generator installer, and your propane installer have all agreed on the locations for things, it’s time to place the order and pull the permits. A good installation contractor will do this for you, but it’s always a good idea to double-check and ask to see the paperwork.

Piping Install

The next step was the installation of the piping. The gas installer should have specified all the pipe sizes to be used and you will likely need a licensed plumber to do this install, or else the inspector won’t pass it. Don’t get me started on this gross restriction of freedom and total scam by states bowing to the plumbing and union lobby. But anyway, the gas company may have a certified pipe fitter on staff who will do the job without sodomizing you and shaking you down for all your money like a union plumber. In my case, the run between the tanks needed to be buried, so the gas company gave me the dimensions for the tank placement and the generator company gave me the dimensions for the generator placement and I connected the points and dug a trench between them. The trench needed to be 40 inches deep with 6 inches of sand in the bottom. When complete, I notified the gas company and they sent the fitter to install the risers and the run between them. When done, the fitter capped both ends and pressurized the pipe with compressed air. Then he notified the town who sent the plumbing inspector to sign off on the install. As long as the line held pressure everything would be good.

Once the inspector signed off, I was free to fill in the trench (another 6 inches of sand on top and then the dirt). Then I notified the generator company that the rough piping was complete.

Generator Prep & Wiring

This was the easiest part for me because Powers generator handled everything so professionally for me. On the day of the scheduled install, two guys showed up on a truck with the generator. A few minutes later an electrician from Powers also arrived. I had discussed the install location with the original Powers rep, but the location wasn’t optimal and I was sure that the information about the work hadn’t reached the team.

Essentially, my installation was done on the left side of my garage. The wiring penetrates the garage, goes up and across the door header, and then down and out the other wall. From there it needed to go under some wooden steps and underground, and finally through the wall and into the basement near the main service. I was certain that no one had told this poor crew that the were going to need to remove wooden steps and trench across my breezeway plus penetrate three walls. When I met them in the driveway and explained it to them, all they said was, “Yup. OK.” And that was it. Unbelievable.

While the guys outside began leveling the pad area and dumping the gravel they brought for a base, the electrician headed for the basement. I live in a house built in 1978 that originally had electric heat. So it always had 200 amp service. But when the electric heat was removed by the previous owners, no one really cleaned up the wiring, so the 220 circuit breakers are still in the box and the old wires are hanging all around. To further complicate things, another previous owner has installed a sub-panel to power a basement workshop they had set up. This didn’t even phase the electrician who went right to work preparing for the transfer switch and the rest of the install.

Transfer Switch & Panels

At this point, I just let them work, occasionally reminding them to help themselves to the refrigerator with soda and water that was in teh basement. Several hours later I heard the generator fire up (they were testing it with a portable propane tank). I went outside and was stunned at the complete job they did. The wores were run perfectly, the trench had been dug and conduit installed, everything had been sealed, caulked, and glued, and the steps had been replaced like nothing had happened. I went to the basement where a brand new transfer switch was mounted and where the circuit panel was neater because the electrician had not only done the installation, but consolidated important circuits and fixed a couple of unbonded neutrals and a missing ground! They even swept the sawdust off the floor, some of which I had left there. I was utterly stunned, never having had such a professional experience.

After a few minute rundown of how things worked and how they set it up, they left me the paperwork and it was complete.

My Generator (forgive the mess)

Final Propane Hookup

After the install was done I contacted the gas company one final time. In a few days a truck arrived with the two 125 gallon tanks and the concrete pads they would sit on. The driver muscled them into place and let me know that the final connection would be done in a few days after the scheduled fill-up. A couple of more days passed until I returned home from work to find that the tanks were suddenly full. The day after that I returned home to find that the piping was finally all connected. Success!

I simply had to try because I didn’t believe that it would actually work. So I went to the basement and pressed the button as the instructions said and the generator fired in less than 10 seconds and ran great. And it hasn’t missed a beat yet in three years!

Final Inspections

This last part was the easiest, though somewhat nerve racking. I let the town know that everything was complete and they told me that the inspector would arrive in a couple of days. True to his word he arrived as scheduled and admitted he had never seen a generator like this before. His number one concern was that there was a transfer switch to keep the generator from back-feeding the grid. He asked me about this while he was staring right at the transfer switch. Rather than be a royal pain though, he looked at the the documents that came with the transfer switch and was satisfied that it was good enough. He left without really looking at anything else. Sometime in the next few days, the final required town inspection by the fire department happened and they left a nice letter to be displayed in the window nearest the generator.

And it was all finally over!

Summary

I’d say this whole process took about 10 days of research, a week of calling companies and scheduling visits, and then about 4 weeks of work from the start of the installation to the end. It required a lot of coordination and quite a bit of research and learning.

Review

We’ve had the generator installed for 3 years and it’s performed flawlessly. The first year was remarkably free of power failures, but by last winter the generator really paid for itself. In December we had an ice storm in Massachusetts, and while we were less affected in my town than in some areas, we were without power for 14 hours. I work in Boston and though I didn’t travel that day, while my neighbors were hunkering down figuring out how to keep the pipes from freezing, I was able to keep working online like nothing was wrong.

Through several short duration outages, the generator starts in seconds and keeps the appliances running with no issues. I would do it all over again in a moment.

Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search – NYTimes.com

Applause for the Supreme Court today on this rare, nearly unanimous decision (8–1) saying that a strip search of a 13 year-old girl for allegedly having a prescription ibuprofen pill was a violation of her constitutional rights and the school district, but not the individual administrators, could be held liable for damages.

There are several issues at play here which captured my attention, not the least of which was the hope for a clear reminder that schools and their administrators are an agent of the state (government) and therefore should be subject to the same constitutional restrictions we place on other state agents including the police. It’s high time that many school administrators were reminded that their primary job is to provide an education and not enforce policies that are outrageously more restrictive than generally accepted in the rest of society. I mean seriously, how long do you think the public would stand for the police conducting strip searches of everyone they stopped on simply a hunch that they might be concealing a single pill of a prescription drug?

I do think that the individual administrators should be held liable for their actions though. The court ruled 8 to 2 that the individuals should be shielded while performing their official duties, but I agree completely with justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who wrote in her dissent, “Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity.”

One thing that I don’t understand is the lack of utter outrage at this. Open any newspaper in the US and you will read a story nearly every week about someone being sentenced to prison for 10 to 20 years for possession of child pornography. And if the paper allows comments on the story you are certain to read people calling for life imprisonment, torture, or even the death penalty. All for someone convicted of possessing images of abuse, not necessarily an abuser themselves. But here we have a case of someone clearly sexually abusing a young girl, and not a mention has been made of it. I truly believe in a uniform standard — if someone can spend 10 years in prison and be required to be registered as a sex offender for looking at a picture of a naked 13 year-old, then I truly believe a more severe punishment is due to the principal and assistant principal in this case because they clearly sexually abused this girl.

But at least we have some progress here and a clear warning to school administrators with a dictator complex. It is NOT acceptable to enforce bullshit zero tolerance policies by any and all means. Hopefully this is just the start of courts reigning in some of these out of control policies.

It’s been more than a month since I bought my e-reader and I’m still very happy with the purchase. I’ve already finished three books on it and I have to say that the combination of Sony and Calibre is difficult to beat. Rather than write yet another review which covers the same ground as all the others out there, I thought I’d specifically address the areas that are most often cited as weaknesses on the Sony, particularly when compared to the Kindle.

The Screen

There is no question that the Sony screen has more glare than the Kindle. The touchscreen layer definitely reduces the sharpness and creates an extra layer for reflections to show. But I haven’t found this really any more or less annoying than any of my other mobile devices, including the smooth-screened Dell laptop I’m using to write this. In fact, the size of the PRS-700 means that there is almost always an angle at which you can tilt it to make the glare move to a different part of the screen. After using the PRS-700 while commuting by train and while waiting in a few lines, the glare isn’t a problem, whether I’m in bright sun sitting in the window seat of a train or reading at night in bed with the built-in light. I will admit that I am lucky that I have good eyesight, so the reduced sharpness also doesn’t bother me — your mileage may vary in this regard. Judging by the reactions of the friends and colleagues I’ve shown this to, the sharpness may be an issue more than the glare. Bottom line: The screen is acceptable to me and not a reason to forgo this device. To borrow from the Mythbusters, this is plausible, depending on your eyesight.

Tethering / Downloading Books

Much has been made of the Kindle’s wireless ability and the Sony’s lack of wireless. I haven’t found it a real problem not to have an immediate wireless connection to download a book. Wireless access to the Amazon store is certainly an interesting feature, and it may be the wave of the future, but I think it’s a “nice-to-have” feature more than a “must-have.” I mean, really, who needs to buy another book RIGHT NOW while in some odd location? In this world of constant connections (I’m writing this on a train via a Verizon mobile broadband connection) who doesn’t have a moment to sit, plug in, and organize your books. And another thing, the wireless connection on the Kindle is certainly good at getting books and things onto the device, but how do you manage them once they’re there? Or is the Kindle designed to be some kind of electronic bookshelf where the hot novel of the moment is read and then left to sit and rot for the next 20 years? I get that the books will be available on Amazon for future download so backing-up isn’t critical, and you can always delete right from the device, but I’m not buying it — I think I would want to easily move my e-books around and back them up on my own. The Calibre software makes this really easy, but more importantly, it does so much more including scraping news feeds that I can’t imagine I’d even want to use a Kindle without it, so I’d be tethering it anyway. Bottom line: Wireless is nice but not really that useful a feature. In homage to the Mythbusters, I call bullshit on this one … lack of wireless is not a reason to forgo the Sony.

Content

Much is made of Amazon’s expansive library of e-books compared to Sony’s and the other electronic booksellers on the web (ebooks.com, etc.). But I don’t see it. Any popular, recent book seems to be available to the Sony, and I haven’t run into anything that I really can’t find yet. And more importantly, since the Sony can digest more formats than the Kindle, I’ve been able to throw a lot of non-book PDFs and other formats at it with no problem. This includes the news feeds that Calibre gathers for me as well as PDF versions of user manuals and journal articles. And, if you’ve looked at Amazon’s magazine and newspaper selections lately, even though they’re improving, the selection is certainly limited and the editions seem to be expensive. Calibre can grab better content directly from the publisher and cut out the middle-man. I like that. Bottom line: Sony’s easy support for more formats means it wins hands-down over the Kindle.

Battery

This is an area that I didn’t see in many other reviews and it should be. Because if the PRS-700 has a major weakness, I think that it’s the battery. Compared to what my Kindle-owning friends tell me the Sony battery is pathetic. A friend tells me that reading a couple of hours a day, they recharge their Kindle every few weeks. With that usage, I’d be surprised if the Sony made it a full week. And worse than that, most of my normal USB chargers don’t push enough current to actually recharge it. I’ve plugged it into an old BlackBerry 8100 charger I had and a portable travel USB charger and neither will top off the battery. Ditto for the small portable AA powerpack that I carry to keep my phone going. So in this case the Sony is a big loser — you need to tether it to charge it or cough up $19.99 for the wall wart (the Buy.com price) or figure out what the current draw is and find some other charger with enough power to charge it.

Final Verdict

I haven’t regretted purchasing the Sony PRS-700. I’ll admit that the battery thing is a bit annoying, but it’s manageable. If you’re like me and carry a laptop almost everywhere, there is really no need to worry about the Kindle’s wireless connectivity being an advantage, or about not being able to charge the battery. And the screen has acceptable sharpness and the glare isn’t an issue.

Given the chance I’d still buy the PRS-700.

The New York Times published an article on 6/11/09 that once again named poultry as the largest source of food poisoning in the US. Also listed as causes of illness: vegetables. In fact, the article had this to say:

Researchers counted leafy vegetables, fungi, root vegetables, sprouts and vegetables from vines or stalks as separate categories. Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, noted that if all of the produce categories were combined, outbreaks associated with vegetables would have far exceeded those in poultry.

Of all the food categories mentioned in the article, one was absent: hamburger. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned.

So, as I said in my original hamburger post, most people won’t get sick from a rare burger.

[Update: additional speedtest reslts, 7/1/2009]

Riding the Information Super Highway from Worcester to Boston

Back in 2008, the MBTA announced that it would be installing Wi-Fi connectivity on the Commuter Rail lines, starting with a pilot on the Worcester-Framingham line that I ride. Awesome — I just started commuting in September of 2008 and the pilot was already in place; full deployment to the rest of the line was scheduled to begin January 2009 and be complete by summer. Visions of a productive commute danced in my head.

Now for the reality. I’ve been riding the Worcester-Framingham line faithfully for 9 months now. Nearly from end to end. I have tried to work online in the morning and in the evening, and even at odd times during the day when I had off-peak commutes. And I can only reach one conclusion…

The W-Fi service sucks. Totally. Worse than the Compuserve dial-up access I had over a Hayes 1200 baud modem in my old Apple II in 1984.

For proof I offer the speed test I conducted today on my way home (performed between Back Bay station and West Natick):

6/19/09 Speed Test

0.12 Mb/sec (120 Kb/sec)?! That’s barely 2x 56K dial-up. And a latency of 206 ms means they must have carrier pigeons they release to make the connection.

What’s wrong with it? Well…

• Only 2 coaches (max) per train have signal. And the “signs” (stickers) are already falling off so it’s anyone’s guess whether or not a given coach has Wi-Fi.
• Even if you win the coach lottery, it seems like the antennas are mounted in terrible locations. So regardless of where I sit I am only able to capture a signal one or two commutes per week.
• What bandwidth there is is shared among all users in range so it’s often horribly oversubscribed.
• The signal drops completely at least twice per ride.

As always, your mileage may vary. Others have reported different results (on different lines), though none seem to be anything to get excited about. See The Silver Onion blog, and the At First Light blog for examples.

What’s a commuter to do? Well I purchased a Verizon Wireless broadband plan today and I’ll be testing the USB modem on Monday. Hopefully that will let me actually get online and get something done. More to come.

Update 6/24/2009

In fairness to the MBTA I decided to test the connection when I had a chance to test a late night train (the 10:20 PM Worcester local) that was barely full. That speed test yielded the following (between Back Bay & Yawkey):

Woo hoo! An entire 1.75x faster than 56K dial-up. When no one is using it. Any system where the upload speed is 2X the download speed has something wrong. Good luck. I’ll stick with Verizon.

Update

To show that I’m not intentionally trying to bias the results, I am including a couple of tests I ran on a morning train when I actually had a full wi-fi signal on the train. These were run on the morning of 7/1/09, somewhere between Westborough and Framingham:

7/1/09 Morning Test

As you can see, they’re slightly better, but nothing to write home about. To add some perspective to this, with a Verizon mobile broadband USB stick, I routinely get speeds of .61 to .72 Mbps, or three times faster. And with much less latency it just feels much better.

7/1/09 2nd Test

Two quick notes about useful stuff I’ve found this week.

1. Lorem Ipsum text in Word
2. Running programs as another user in Vista

First, I needed a placeholder in a document and I usually use Lorem Ipsum text (see http://www.lipsum.com/ for an explanation and a text generator). I had forgotten, but thanks to Google and the authors at How-to Geek remembered, that Word 2007 has a built in Lorem Ipsum generator. It is simply inserted like an Excel function with the syntax: =lorem([paragraphs],[sentences]). Note that both parameters are optional so a simple =lorem() gives you 3 paragraphs of 2 sentences each. Sweet

The second issue was that I was running as one user on my laptop and I needed to run a program as another user. In XP and prior, this was simple — there is a “run as” command in the context (right-click) menu for any program icon. But that was removed in Vista (probably too convenient). A quick search reminded me of the ‘runas’ shell command which you can run from the command line. That worked for me in this instance. But I wanted something more convenient. My searches turned up this article on Groovypost which explains one way to get your content menu command back. Double sweet.

Just thought you should know.

Even though I’ve worked around the corner for about 9 months now, I finally made it to the Uptown Cafe (120 Cambridge St.) for a quick lunch. I’ve walked by about a hundred times and I really didn’t know what to expect other than knowing it was small and usually crowded for lunch. So here’s a brief review.

Location: Couldn’t be easier — if you’re walking that is. Right on Cambridge Street, an easy walk from the Statehouse, Gov’t Center, City Hall, and MGH.

Map

Quick Impression:

Service:
Menu:
Cleanliness:
Quality:
Value:
Overall:

Menu: I’d call it Italian comfort food. The Uptown isn’t trying to be a North End cafe. It’s serving meatball sandwiches, veal parmigiana, and spaghetti & meatballs.

Atmosphere: The place is the size of my closet. There are about 6 small tables, a counter, and that’s it. The Uptown does a tremendous take-out business, but you will see all kinds of people sitting at the tables from time to time. At lunch the place is a machine, pumping orders out the door at an impressive pace. These people bust their ass to make sure you get your order quickly and correctly. For a local lunch place, I value that very much and I totally admire anyone willing to work their asses off to make service run this quick. They get major points for this.

Food: I ordered a Steak Bellino (steak, peppers, & onions) for my first try. The steak was unremarkable; kind of bland in fact with no real seasoning. The peppers & onions were what you’d expect, not greasy with good flavor. But the real treat was the roll. As I had read on a couple other reviews, the Uptown apparently bakes their own bread and it shows. It is so uncommon to get a real flavorful roll with a delicate but crispy crust and a soft interior with a little chew. The roll alone will bring me back again.

Bottom Line: Since this was my first trip, I don’t feel comfortable giving a full recommendation, but I will say this: go for the roll! I know I will certainly be going back when I need a dose of comfort food.

I’ll add some more after my next meal.

Found this while searching the web the other day. As I stated in my hamburger post, I think that most published recommendations related to food safety are overly conservative. An article I found in the NY Times from back in 1997 had this to say:

“The health advice that is offered by the Federal Government is the one-size-fits-all variety. But when it comes to their own lives, many of the same public health officials who warn about the dire consequences of eating foods like hollandaise or pink hamburgers say one thing for official consumption and do another in private.”

Also,

“But except for chickens, a recent test of 70 food samples by The New York Times suggests that very little food is contaminated.”

And finally,

“Of eight experts interviewed, five admitted that they do not follow Federal food safety guidelines to the letter. But officially they take a narrower view, because few Americans are as well informed as they are about the risks. The officials maintain that they carefully weigh the choices when they engage in what one called ‘slightly risky behavior.’ Still, not all of them would speak to this point on the record.”

And remember, this article was written in 1997, when contamination was worse than it is now. I’m not sure I can say much more …

As I wrote in my rare hamburger post, I think that people’s fear of getting sick from undercooked ground beef is overblown. The other day I was in the supermarket and I saw something that got me almost as worked up as the message board post. Standing in the chicken section, a woman was about to pick up a whole bird, totally wrapped in plastic. Then she paused, walked past me, around the corner to the vegetable section, and came back with a plastic vegetable bag. She turned it inside out, pulled it over her hand, and only then did she pick up the chicken wrapping the already plastic wrapped bird in another layer of plastic.

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s not toxic waste! It’s a chicken. I’m not saying that you should lick it, but what kind of mind-bending brainwashing does it take to make someone so utterly terrified of their food that they treat it like it’s a biohazard. Actually, probably more carefully than a biohazard because I’m betting she doesn’t glove up or wrap her hand in plastic when she wipes her ass.

I was stunned. Appalled. Dumbfounded.

So I decided to do a little research into the actual chances of contracting salmonella from a typical supermarket chicken. I’m betting that they’re higher than getting sick from a rare hamburger, but certainly not deserving of this kind of treatment.

So here it goes …. how safe is our chicken?

Turns out, it’s probably not very safe at all. Probably the main test of consumer chicken has been done by Consumer Reports magazine, which found in 2007 that 87% of supermarket chickens were contaminated with either campylobacter or salmonella or both.¹ While disturbing, the presence of some amount of bacteria doesn’t necessarily translate directly to sickness potential. In order to cause illness, there must be a certain concentration of bacteria and you must consume a minimum number before illness is guaranteed. In susceptible individuals that seems to be at least 400 to 500 bacteria² but more in most people. In fact, the amount of contamination required to cause noticeable illness varies widely depending on the organism (eg. campylobacter or salmonella), the age of the individual, any underlying medical conditions, and even what they eat along with the contaminated food.³

Unlike my hamburger conclusions then, it’s hard to say how safe things are. We know that chickens are likely contaminated. And we know that some varying amount of that contamination could make you sick. But unlike hamburgers, I don’t hear anyone asking for or advocating serving rare chicken. So until I dig up a little more information, my guess is that there won’t be enough bacteria on the outside of a wrapped chicken to make you sick, but if the person doing the picking had issues then maybe the caution is justified in her case.

But you certainly won’t see me double bagging my poultry any time soon.

² Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook, US FDA Center for Food Safet & Applied Nutrition, http://www.foodsafety.gov/~mow/chap4.html. Retrieved 6/2/2009

³ http://www.mass.gov/Eeohhs2/docs/dph/environmental/foodsafety/ref_manual/chap_3.pdf

This evening I was walking from my office near Government Center in Boston to South Station and it happened to me again. In the span of just over a mile of walking from Tremont Street down Summer Street I was acosted by no less than 6 people soliciting for charities in their little vests. 4 looking for handout for “Children International” and 2 from Greenpeace. This is on top of the 2 additional Greenpeaceniks who tried to seperate me from my money at lunchtime in front of the Whole Foods plaza on Cambridge Street.

At some point enough is enough. By the time I told the 4^th person that I didn’t have time, I was actually starting to hate children. After the assault by Amnesty International the other day I actually started to hate freedom of speech and wished for a little political persecution! (I suddenly started craving Chinese food …)

Clearly these tactics are effective or all the groups wouldn’t use them. But I have to say, the blueshirted Children International people are absolutely the worst. They seem to have a pair every other block.

Enough is enough I say! Leave me alone …