Icewind's Ramblings

This past weekend while temperatures in Anchorage plunged to minus digits as a solid few days of extremely cold air settled in over the state there were those who braved the extremes for a worthy good time. I say ‘worthy’ because it was an annual fund raiser for the Alaska Special Olympics organization and a good time because you must be nuts to jump into a hole cut into the ice of a frozen lake at minus 11 degrees. But that is what over eight hundred jumpers did last Saturday morning while several hundred onlookers and well wishers cheered those who took the “plunge”.   There were over 4,000 pledges made for this fantastic event. Notice the “steam” coming off the participants after getting out of the water heading to the warming tents. The event was another great success . . . raising over $ 275,000.00 for the organization to help train our special Olympic athletes and other programs offered throughout the year. Congratulations Jim Balamaci, for all you do directing this...

Systems Performance Analyses of Alaska Wind-Diesel Projects; Selawik, Alaska (Fact Sheet) Last week I flew to the village of Selawik , Alaska an Inupiat Eskimo community just above the Arctic Circle .  The group I traveled with was made up of mechanical engineers, AutoCAD draftsman, construction, and Indian Health Services.  Our mission was to do an emergency evaluation of the existing water treatment plant and come up with a design and construction plan to renovate the plant as quickly as possible.  The 35% design drawings completed by another firm were almost useless as when we arrived on site we discovered much of the information in the “As-Built” drawings was wrong.  Equipment was located in the wrong place and the measurements for things were so out of whack that the easiest way for us to proceed was to make a new drawing to work from and design the new system. We gathered in the Anchorage airport just after 4 am to begin our journey first on an Alaska Ai...

Before I start tonight’s post I wanted to add another perspective from events of today. I awoke this morning to another day well below zero and was notified that the downstairs bathroom was only giving us hot water; no cold water was coming out of the shower. This led me to think that there was a frozen pipe and also that one of the pipes was touching one of the hydronic heating pipes. This in turn was making the ‘cold’ water pipe seem to be giving hot water. The cold pipe was robbing the heat from the hot pipe that goes to our baseboard heaters. I knew this was going to be a long day having to repair a busted pipe when I returned home and not something I could deal with right then at six am so my mindset was not negative but also not the start of a ‘happy day’. The day progressed and I received a call around three in the afternoon that the pipe had thawed and was now leaking water out of the ceiling in the mud room leading from the garage into the stairway into the ...