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Category: science kits

Saturday, 24 October 2015

10:17 – We’re doing the usual Saturday stuff. As soon as I post this, I’ll start the laundry. This afternoon we’ll do more packing/cleaning in the library and my office.

This weekend, we’ll do a quick check of some of the germination test baggies. Some of the species should be well on their ways by now, but some won’t show any change yet. In particular, parsnips are notoriously slow-germinating. I won’t bother to check them until they’ve had three weeks to get started.

We’re expecting to hear about the house on Monday. The bank that holds the main mortgage on the property has already accepted our offer. The holdup is that some idiots gave the owners a second mortgage AFTER they’d declared bankruptcy in 2013 AND AFTER that bankruptcy had been cleared by the court last November. So that debt is still current and the second mortgage company has filed a lien against the property. The bank that holds the first mortgage is on the edge of foreclosing. If that happens, the second mortgage company gets nothing at all, so they should be motivated to take a small fraction of what they’re owed. We authorized our broker to offer them $5,000. Our real estate attorney is waiting to hear back from the second mortgage holders. If they refuse, the property gets foreclosed, they lose everything, and all bets are off on the sale of the house.




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Tuesday, 6 October 2015

08:19 – We got a couple dozen biology kits and science kits built yesterday, so our inventory status is back up to a reasonable level for this time of year other than for forensic science kits, which we’ll work on today and tomorrow. I also issued two orders yesterday for more open-pollinated seeds, which is the last of what we need for the first batch of two dozen heirloom seed kits. Dehydration and testing of those begins tomorrow.

I’ve been reading a scholarly tome on seed saving, and the numbers are pretty interesting. The viable shelf-life of seeds varies significantly by species, but even more important than species are the moisture level and storage temperature. Once you get the moisture level below about 15%, each additional 1% reduction in moisture typically extends shelf life by a year or two, down to the optimum at about 7% or 8% moisture. Below that, seeds tend to “harden” and have reduced germination rates because water is unable to penetrate the seed to allow germination if the seed is planted normally. But such hardened seeds can be revivified if you allow them to rehydrate over the course of several days to a couple of weeks in a high humidity atmosphere.

But storage temperature is even more important to shelf life. Taking 70 degrees Fahrenheit as a baseline, each 10F reduction in storage temperature on average doubles the viable shelf life. That means that keeping seeds in the refrigerator at 40F extends their shelf life on average by a factor of eight. Freezing them extends it even more. On the seven different species the author of the book tested, the least stable seed type retained 95% of its initial germination rate after 11 years frozen and the most stable was calculated mathematically to retain 95% of its initial germination rate for more than 300 years. That’s very good news indeed.

While we were watching TV last night, Barbara asked me if I’d thought about long-term storage of dog food. She said she understood that Colin could eat what we eat, but wanted to know if there was any way to repackage his dry food for long term storage. Unfortunately (or fortunately from Colin’s point of view), there isn’t. Dry dog food is in fact rather moist, and it contains a lot of oils and fats. We could stick it in the dehydrator to get it down to a moisture level suitable for long-term storage and then pack it in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, but Colin wouldn’t want to eat it after that treatment. Actually, the best way to store dry dog food is in its original bag, where it has a shelf life of at least a year and probably two. So, as Barbara said, if things get really bad Colin is going to end up eating what we eat. Colin isn’t even slightly unhappy about that prospect.

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Monday, 5 October 2015

08:41 – Barbara is off to the gym this morning. While she was still working at the law firm, she did the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work. This is her first full week of going during the day on Monday-Wednesday-Friday.

The wet weather is pretty much past. In the last 10 days, we’ve had about 6 inches (15 cm) of rain, which is almost two normal months’ worth. Everything is sodden, but we’ve been lucky. No damage other than limbs down, and only minor power blips. It could have been a lot worse, and in surrounding areas it has been.

We got a bunch of chemical bags and small parts bags for biology kits built yesterday. Barbara also taped up a couple of dozen shipping boxes, so today we’ll build another batch of biology kits. We’re still accumulating materials for the open-pollinated seed kits, and will begin production work on those this week and next. They won’t be ready to ship until next month, mainly because we have to do germination testing and there’s no way to speed up nature.

I commented to Barbara last night that I was surprised by how many readers were pre-ordering these kits, which are basically the proverbial pig in the poke. She said she wasn’t surprised at all, because we’ve spent the last five years shipping science kits that demonstrate that our company provides value for money. Interestingly, although the seed kits won’t be ready until next month, we’ve almost sold out the first batch. I’d planned to keep two seed kits aside for our own use, but I decided that since the next (larger) batch will be ready in December or early January, one will suffice for now. That means we have two-count-’em-two kits remaining available for readers who want to order them, first-come-first-served. If any of you regular readers/commenters want to order one or both of these remaining kits, you can do so for $100 per kit if you place your order in the next few days. To do so, go to paypal.com, choose the option to send money, and transfer $100 for each kit you want to orders (at) thehomescientist (dot) com. Make sure to include your mailing address, either street address or PO box. Your telephone number would also be helpful, just in case we need to call you for some reason.

10:19 – We’re now officially out of the first batch of seed kits. I decided to keep the offer in effect for now, so if you want a kit or kits for $100, please go ahead and order. The only thing is that your order will no longer go out with the first batch next month. Instead, it won’t ship until December or early January.

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Friday, 2 October 2015

08:28 – Barbara is settling in well to working for ourselves rather than for a paycheck. One of the things she was looking forward to was being able to go to the gym during the day instead of after work. She had been going after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which made for late dinners and short evenings those days. Yesterday, she went to the gym during the day. She’ll probably start going three times a week instead of twice.

I’ve started preliminary work on a new line of science kits that we’ll introduce in 2016. The working title for the line is Science Basics, and the kits will be designed to sell for $99 each. They’re intended for students who will not go on to major in science in college, and will provide reasonable rigor and scope for a standard one-year laboratory course in biology, chemistry, or forensic science. I’m not too concerned about cannibalizing sales of our more expensive full kits. It’s a different market, and homeschoolers who are on a tight budget, which is to say many of them, should welcome these inexpensive kits. I’ll also design them to minimize the use of any really hazardous chemicals. They’ll also be micro-chemistry based to minimize clean-up and disposal issues.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered some gun accessories from Midway USA, including a magazine loader for AR-15 mags, a tactical sling for the Ruger AR-556, four more 30-round Magpul AR-15 magazines, and two Tapco 30-round magazines for the Ruger Mini-14. That takes us to eight total mags each for the AR-556 and Mini-14, which should be sufficient. We’re in decent shape right now on .223/5.56mm ammunition, but once we get relocated I want us both to shoot familiarization on both of those rifles. Rather than shoot up the good stuff, I think I’ll order a few test 20-round boxes of the cheap TulAmmo stuff from cheaperthandirt.com. If it functions reliably in both rifles, I’ll go ahead and order another case or two. The stuff is steel-case and so not reloadable, but at around $0.22/round the price is hard to beat, assuming it works reliably.
  • I continued research into the Sparta, NC area as a possible relocation destination. I was pleased to find the Alleghany County Rifle Association has a range outside Sparta. If we end up buying a house in the Sparta area, one of the first things I’ll do is join that club. There’s also a good gym for Barbara. There isn’t much shopping, but that’s okay. We can make the half hour trip to the Walmart Supercenter in Galax or West Jefferson whenever we need to, and we’ll be coming down to Winston-Salem for a Costco run every month or two. And there’s always walmart.com and amazon.com.
  • I managed to get in a few hours’ work on the prepping book. As of now, I intend to devote at least two full days a week to working on it until it’s complete.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Thursday, 1 October 2015

09:01 – Yesterday was Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of today, she’s working for our own company. Now that she has control of her own time, she’s heading over to the gym this morning. This afternoon she’ll be doing science kit stuff, starting with filling a bunch of chemical bottles.

I called Amazon yesterday about the problems I was having with my Fire HD7. They’re sending out a replacement, which should arrive tomorrow, along with a return label for the old one.

Science kit sales are down. Not a single order so far this month.

I started work yesterday on the heirloom seed vault we’ll offer in the book. So far, we have maybe 2/3 of the final lineup, including high-nutrition and/or flavorful vegetables like beans, beets, carrots, corn, onions, peas, sweet pepper, tomatoes, and turnips. For herbs, we have basil, oregano, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. We’ll be adding several herbs, including perhaps stevia (a no-calorie sweetener, although it’s hard to grow outside the far south), St. John’s wort (a natural anti-depressant), tobacco, and so on. We’ll also be adding peanuts and sunflowers as sources of oil, and perhaps poppy.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Obtaining suitable seeds is the least of it. We need to dry the seeds to 7% to 8% moisture before packaging them, and I need to write detailed instructions for planting, harvesting, preserving, and seed-saving.

The varieties included will be suitable to grow in temperate climates, including all of the continental US. Hawaii and particularly Alaska have issues all their own, but most or all of the varieties should do acceptably well in those two states as well. We’re also focusing on reliable varieties with reasonable disease resistance, which is to say ones that are easier for inexperienced gardeners to succeed with. The quantities included–at least 100 seeds of each variety, and often several thousand–are intended to be sufficient for a family of four to six people, with allowances made for newbie mistakes, crop failures, reduced germination rates after long storage, and so on.

One of the annoying things about a lot of similar products is that the packaging could almost intentionally be designed to encourage people to put them on the shelf and forget about them rather than actually plant some of the seeds to check viability. You open a #10 can and find a bunch of paper envelopes inside. There goes your seal.

We’ll use a foil-laminate Mylar bag as an outer container, which can be resealed with a hot clothes iron. We’ll use various sizes of plastic vials, tubes, and bottles to contain the individual seeds. We’ll encourage people to open the bag when they receive it and plant at least a few of each type of seed so that they can get some experience growing them. The package can then be resealed with a clothes iron and stuck in the freezer, where it’ll remain useful for many years to come. This is what we ourselves will be depending on if we’re reduced to growing our own food, so you can be sure we’ll be making this kit as reliable a source of food as we possibly can.

Our target price for this kit is $150, shipping included, although it may end up higher than that. We intend to begin shipping the first batch of these kits next month. If any of you regular readers/commenters want to order one or more of these kits, you can do so for $100 per kit if you place your order in the next few days. To do so, go to paypal.com, choose the option to send money, and transfer $100 for each kit you want to orders (at) thehomescientist (dot) com. Make sure to include your mailing address, either street address or PO box.

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Wednesday, 30 September 2015

08:04 – Today is Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of tomorrow, she’s working for our own company.

Instead of rooting my Fire HD7 and installing Android, I decided to contact Amazon about a warranty replacement. Even after wiping it to defaults and using nothing but the standard configuration to check web pages and email, it locks up several times an evening to the point where it requires a hard reboot. The usual symptom is that the screen either goes completely black or the left 2/3 remains lit up although unresponsive and the right 1/3 is black. I’ve had it for only five months, so it should still be under warranty. I’ll contact Amazon today.

Science kit sales are fine. For 8/15, we did only 74% the revenue of 8/14, but for 9/15 we’ve done 153% the revenue of 9/14. Total revenue for 8+9/15 is at 99.8% of total revenue for 8+9/14. One more order today would take us over 100%.

We are getting low stock on biology and forensic kits, so I’ll spend some time today making up chemical solutions and filling bottles.

Email from Jen. She and her husband decided to order that Renogy 400W solar starter kit, a decent inverter, and some heavy cabling for a battery bank. They picked up several golf cart batteries locally. They’re going to charge up the battery bank with an AC charger, connect the inverter, and then run a known load to see what kind of life they get from a full charge. They’ll then connect up the four 100W panels and see what kind of charging performance they get from them. After that, they’ll stick the fully charged batteries on the shelf in the garage and store the panels and associated gear in a Faraday cage they’ll build from copper screening.

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Sunday, 20 September 2015

09:41 – The rate of kit orders is starting to slow, as expected in late September. The last half of September and all of October is generally pretty slow, with orders starting to pick up again in mid-November and running high through about the end of January. Then things slow down again until they start picking up in June and July.

Barbara is doing her regular house cleaning, bill paying, and so on this morning. This afternoon we’ll build some more biology kits and do other science kit stuff.

Barbara’s last day at work is a week from Wednesday. She plans to take a vacation day Friday, so she has only seven work days left. She wants to jump right into working her new job, so she starts full time for our company on Thursday, October 1. She’ll have things much better organized in no time, allowing me to focus on growing the business.

We’re getting to the autumn “in-between” part of the year, when to maintain an even temperature we’d need to run the air conditioning and the heating in the same day. In hot months, we usually keep the thermostat set at 75F (24C), and in cold months at 68F (20C). That means Barbara is always too warm during cooling season, and I’m always too cold during heating season. So she wears shorts and short/no-sleeve shirts during cooling season, and I wear flannel shirts during heating season. It works out fine most of the time, but during in-between times, both of us can be both too warm and too cold all in the same day.

And then there’s humidity. A few minutes ago, I had Barbara turn down the thermostat, even though it was only 72F in here. The problem is, the relative humidity was at 64%, so even I was warm. We turned it down to 70F to at least let the AC run for a while and remove some of the humidity.

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Saturday, 19 September 2015

09:39 – We’re both working on science kits today. First up is to build more chemistry kits. Our limiting item on those is the regulated chemical bags, so we’ll be able to build only 13. Still, that’s 13 that we don’t have now, and we’re down to only two in stock.

Amazon’s customer service is pretty amazing. I had Barbara filling chemical bottles yesterday, and one of the ones she filled was with a chemical I’d ordered from Amazon. I got two one-pound containers from them, which were marked as containing 454 grams each. The first one I picked up felt light, so I tared a balance and emptied the contents of the container into a large weigh boat. Sure enough, there was only 427 grams in that container. The second contained only 423 grams, so there was a total of 850 grams in the two containers, rather than the 908 grams I’d paid for.

The stuff cost about $31/pound, so I went to Amazon.com to post feedback to the seller. I’d ordered two items on that order, one of which was from a third-party seller and the problem one from Amazon.com. The only feedback option was for the item from the third-party seller, so I backed up and started looking for another option to let Amazon know that the products were light. The only option that made any sense was the one for return/refund, so I clicked on that. The item from the third-party seller was grayed out and marked non-returnable, so I clicked the radio button next to the product that Amazon had sold to me. I then had to choose whether both of the containers were a problem or just one, so I marked the option for both. On the next page, the only option was to request a refund, so I clicked on that, expecting to be able to enter a requested refund amount. I’d intended to ask for $5 or so, but it informed me that the product was not returnable and that Amazon had issued a refund in full for $62. I was flabbergasted, as was Barbara when I told her.

She said that wasn’t fair to Amazon and that I should contact them immediately to tell them what had happened. So I went back on their site and clicked on the “call me” button. Literally half a second later, my phone rang and I was speaking with a customer service representative. I told him what had happened and that I was expecting a refund for maybe $5, but certainly not $62. He thanked me for calling, and said that in that situation most of their customers would have just kept the money and not bothered to call them. I told him that that struck me as being just as dishonest as someone who was given too much change by a cashier and didn’t tell her. It comes out of her pocket, after all, just as this was coming out of Amazon’s pocket. But the support rep told me that it would actually be more trouble than it was worth to partially reverse the instant refund they’d issued to my credit card, and said just to keep the extra money.

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Friday, 18 September 2015

09:49 – Barbara is taking a vacation day today and heading out to run errands. We’ll spend the weekend doing science kit stuff. We’re low stock on just about everything.

Speaking of low stock, apparently there’s some kind of significance about this month for many Mormons. Some book or other written by a Mormon woman but not endorsed by the LDS Church is predicting a catastrophe this month, and I’m sure the severe flooding in Utah is reinforcing those fears. The result is that long-term food storage vendors are seeing a gigantic flood of orders. Augason, Thrive, and others are unable to keep products in stock, both on-line and in stores. Even Walmart.com is back-ordered on many of their shelf-stable food items because of the panic buying.

We’ve been covered up working on science kit stuff, but I did manage to get a few items that might be useful in the future. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I read Lights Out by David Crawford, which is a different kind of PA novel. It focuses on a typical exurban neighborhood dealing with the effects of a continent-wide long-term power outage. The protagonist isn’t Rambo, which is a refreshing change. It’s a decent book, not great but a lot better than most of its genre. And it does give one something to think about.
  • I started design on a new kit. This one isn’t a science kit per se. It’s an heirloom seed kit, and I’ll sell it on-line via the prepping book. I’m not happy with any of the current heirloom seed kits out there, many of which appear to have an almost random selection of seeds, chosen without consideration for factors like reliability, ease of growing, nutritional value, climate adaptability, suitability for both northern and southern latitude day lengths, and so on.

The other problem with these seed kits is that they simply don’t include enough seeds. Ideally, of course, every prepper would already be keeping a garden, but the reality is that many preppers store heirloom seeds “just in case”. One kit I looked at included only one ounce (28.4 g) of bean seeds, which is 70 or so seeds. Yeah, under ideal conditions and assuming everything goes perfectly, those 70 bean seeds could produce a lot of beans. But what if conditions aren’t ideal or things don’t go perfectly? What if they’ve been in storage for so long that the germination rate is only 40%? What if animals or insects wipe out most of your crop? That’s why my kit will include 300 g of bean seeds, or roughly 750 seeds.

Then there’s the choice of plants. Nearly all of the seed kits include lettuce. Lettuce! It takes up precious space, requires a lot of work, and provides almost no nutrition. What’s the point to trying to grow it at all? Conversely, very few of the kits include turnip seeds. Turnips produce a massive amount of food and have high nutritional value. Anyone considering planting lettuce would do well to plant turnips instead. Or beets.

All of the kits include onions, which is fine. Onions are important for flavoring bulk staples. The problem is, many of the kits include long-day onion seeds. Long-day onions are fine if your latitude is about 45 degrees or higher. But at lower latitudes, the days never get long enough for those onions to flourish.

Almost none of the seed kits I looked at include even a basic selection of herbs, which are essential if you’re trying to cook appetizing meals from bulk staples. An herb garden doesn’t require much space, and I consider it mandatory to have the seeds necessary to keep a reasonably comprehensive herb garden, so those will be included in our kit. Another essential that these kits all leave out is tobacco seeds. Tobacco can be grown successfully up to about 55 degrees latitude if one has the proper seeds, and tobacco is an extremely desirable crop, if only for trade.

The other thing that worries me about many of these kits is how the seeds were processed and stored. Doing it right involves a lot of work, and my guess is that very few of these companies have bothered to do that work. If the seeds are dried properly (to ~7% or 8% moisture content but not much lower, which would “harden” the seeds and reduce germination rates) and frozen, they should remain viable for a long time. That’s how the international seed banks do it, and that’s why their vaults are located in arctic climes. I also noticed that most of these seed kits advertise that they’re packed with an oxygen absorber, which tells me that these companies don’t know what they’re doing. Using an oxygen absorber buys you nothing and may actually shorten the shelf life of the seeds.

I’ve done some germination testing of the Lima bean and carrot seeds that we include in biology kits. After five years stored just in PE bottles with no special dehydration or other treatment, I got germination rates of 50% to 60% (versus 85% to 90%+ on fresh seed). Germination rates of seeds also depend heavily on species, but I feel comfortable saying the seed kits we produce will yield reasonable germination rates after at least three to five years stored at room temperature and considerably longer if kept frozen. If nothing else, we can include a lot of seeds for species that tend to lose viability quickly over time. It doesn’t matter if the germination rate is only 10% if you have ten times as many seeds as you intend to plant.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Wednesday, 16 September 2015

08:56 – This is the time of year when I’m interrupt-driven. Someone orders a full forensic science kit, FK01A+B+C, and I’m down to just one of the FK01C kits in stock. Better build more. I could go a week or a month before I get another FK01C order, but someone could order ten of them tomorrow. My inventory records show I have enough of the components in stock to build 18 more, so I head downstairs to build those 18. It turns out I have 18 of everything I need except Modified Griess Reagent Part A, of which I actually have only 4. No idea where the other 14 went. So I make up a liter of Modified Griess Reagent Part A, which is enough to fill 33 bottles. Fill those, print out 33 labels, and label the bottles. Back to the assembly table, where I make up and bag the 18 FK01C kits. And now I’m down to zero stock on everything I need to build more FK01C kits than the 18 I now have on hand. On to the next thing we’re short on.

Until a week or so ago, I thought we were in decent shape on the CK01B chemistry kits. Those normally sell in pretty small numbers. The larger and more expensive CK01A chemistry kits usually outsell the CK01B kits by about 10 to 1. But we’ve had a flood of orders for CK01B kits, including three this morning. So I guess I’d better put together another dozen or two CK01B chemical bags. Oh, wait. I just found a bin full of those downstairs. Turns out I built those bags Monday and had completely forgotten doing so. It’s no wonder that my inventory gets completely screwed up this time of year. When I’m building batches of 30 of one type, it’s easy to keep the inventory updated. When I’m interrupt-driven, stuff falls through the cracks and comes back to bite me later.

10:53 – Sometimes, for whatever reason, one leaves oneself unprepared for something that’s important, in which case one just does the best one can and hopes for the best.

By this time, we’d hoped to be at least preparing to move up to the mountains, but it hasn’t worked out that way. With colder weather on the horizon, I’m concerned about heat. If we have a power failure, we can heat the house with our natural gas logs and our natural gas water heater will continue to work. Natural gas is the least likely utility to fail, so I’m not overly concerned, but it’s still at the back of my mind.

If the natural gas did fail for some reason, we could use the wood-burning fireplace downstairs. The problem with that is we have very little firewood. If we were up in the mountains, I’d have ordered a couple or three cords delivered, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to do that while we’re still in Winston-Salem.

Our next fallback is the catalytic propane heater, which is safe to run indoors and will suffice to keep one room at a livable temperature. Counting the 20-pound propane cannisters, we have enough propane to keep that heater running for a couple weeks. Barbara is taking a vacation day tomorrow to run errands, and one of her stops is to fill a new 20-pound propane cannister we bought at Costco. If we did suffer a natural gas outage, the first thing we’d do once it became obvious that the problem was severe is drive over to the Walgreen’s a mile or so from here and load up on Blue Rhino propane cannisters while there were still some to be had.

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