Not really Net-Zero Energy: HOUZE Advanced Building Science Inc.

I saw this video (bottom of post) of this company that wants to build affordable "zero energy" homes (jump to 14:30). Unfortunately, their solution for "zero energy" is to run an electric generator on site using natural gas and then sell the surplus electricity back to the electric company in the hope of covering the cost of the natural gas consumed by the generator. Additionally, any waste heat created by the generated is used for domestic hot water and home heating.

The HOUZE company's website is http://thezeroenergyhome.com/ , but is it a Net-Zero energy home? The website only claims to provide a 10 year zero energy payment warranty. No claims about about having its energy usage offset by renewable energy generation. They also mention that this provides "Energy Independence", but I don't see how substituting grid electricity dependance with natural gas supply dependance can really be called independence.

To me, the usage of the phrase "zero energy", is a sneaky bit of marketing used to confuse buyers into thinking this may be the equivalent of a net-zero energy home when in fact it is not.

Some may argue that by utilizing the waste heat of the generator, the utilization of the fossil fuel energy is therefore higher. This would be true only if existing power plants didn't already supply their waste heat to other industries or try to use it to generate even more electricity through technologies like thermocells. Additionally, to achieve higher energy utilization, the waste heat generated by the home generator would need to be consumed year round, even in the summer when domestic hot water and home heating needs are probably not enough to consume the majority of the waste heat.

If that wasn't enough, states like California use natural gas as the primary fossil fuel for electrical generation. However, their energy mix also includes nuclear and a growing share of renewable sources which have a zero-carbon footprint. Generating your own electricity from NatGas to lower carbon emissions would be disastrous in those states.

http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/electricity_generation.cfm/state=CA

Whether zero energy payments for the first 10 years translates to zero energy payments in the future is a bit uncertain. This is highly dependent on where gas and electrical prices go. Higher gas prices combined with efficiency improvements at power stations and or changes in the energy mix could negate any advantage home generation from NatGas could have. Also consider the costs of maintaining a generator that has already been running continuously for 10 yrs. If a total replacement is required, that may significantly impair your ability to achieve a net zero energy payments in the future.

Korean Short Ribs (Kalbi) Recipe

This is a great dish to prepare for a pot-luck BBQ. It cooks quickly so you can serve a lot of people and everybody loves it so much, there's never any left to take back home. Getting the beef is pretty easy at Asian supermarkets where you often find them pre-cut on styrofoam trays. If you can't find an asian market, just ask your butcher to cut up some up for you. Most likely, they will understand what you mean if you tell them you want Korean short ribs.

Ingredients:
5 lbs beef short ribs, cut across the bone to 1/4" thick slices

Marinade:
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice wine (sake)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup sesame seed oil
a big squeeze of honey (roughly 3 tbsp)
a couple dashes of chili oil to taste
6 cloves of garlic, finely minced
4 bunches of green onions finely sliced
1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds


Directions:
Mix the marinade ingredients together in a large bowl. Ensure the sugar is completely dissolved.
Dip the ribs into the marinade to evenly coat and place into a 1 gallon zip lock bag. Press as much air out as possible before sealing.
Place the bag in a leak proof tray and into the fridge overnight to a day, flipping it once half way through.
To cook, grill each side at medium to high heat, about 2-4 minutes. Use a water bottle sprayer to extinguish any flareups. The goal is to get the fat to melt from the meat and let it fry itself on the grill without letting the fat cause too many flareups.

Japanese Style White Bread (Part 4)

After several iterations, I think we've settled on a recipe. This one is nice because we can do everything in the bread machine. However we have to add the more expensive vital wheat gluten to boost the gluten development.


Ingredients:

170g milk
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp vital wheat gluten (4 tsp)
271g bread flour
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp yeast
2 1/3 Tbsp butter cut into small pieces

Directions:

Add all ingredients to your bread machine bowl in the order provided. This order is important. Adding the vital wheat to the milk first maximizes the gluten development via autolyse. Try to sprinkle the sugar and salt in a ring evenly around the edgest of the mound of flour.  Before adding yeast, make a little crater in the mound of dry ingredients and add the yeast into it. Collapse the sides of the crater in to cover the yeast with flour. Then evenly distribute the butter over the top of the mound. These steps ensure we get even distribution of ingredients which leads to a nice consistent texture of the bread.

Japanese Style White Bread (Take 3)

In my earlier posts I've been trying to make Japanese sandwich bread (aka Shokupan), namely trying to imitate one sold at Anderson bakery. This time I think I'm getting pretty close to what I want. Last time the texture wasn't quite right. It needed a bit more chew or tenacity when being pulled apart. This told me that I needed a bit more gluten development. I could achieve this in different ways: autolyse and/or adding higher protein flour (like Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat and Gluten Flour -- 22 oz). For this trial, I'm going to adapt a recipe from my bread machine for making "Milk Bread". The combination of milk and butter should soften the texture of the bread without causing it to lose its chewyness. I also decided to do only autolyse, since its expensive and doing an autolyse is essentially free. We also need to contend with how to incorporate the butter. Traditionally you don't add fat in the autolyse because that reduces gluten development. On the other hand, I tried added butter on top of the autolysed dough, hoping the machine would mix it in evenly. Unfortunately, that didn't work so well (I found small streaks of glossy dough in the bread). So this time I folded in small chunks of butter into the dough with about 4 folds. That seemed to work well without seriously affecting gluten development.

Autolyse:
271g bread flour
3/4 tsp yeast
170g milk


Mix the flour and yeast first in a large mixing bowl. Then add the milk and mix until it comes together in a shaggy mess.

Fold in butter:
 2 1/3 Tbsp butter

Cut up the butter into little cubes, I think I cut my cube of butter into 16 little cubes, but you could get by with less I guess. Just sprinkle a quarter of the cubes on top of the dough. Fold the dough over like a book and repeat until all the butter is gone. Don't try to work the dough at this point. We're just getting the butter chunks evenly distributed without mashing them into the dough.

Add the dough rest of the ingredients to the machine:

1 Tbsp bread flour
2 1/2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt

Add the dough to the bread machine dough. Sprinkle the remaining ingredients on top in the order provided. This additional flour will act as a buffer between the dough and the sugar/salt. Sugar and salt are very hydro-philic (water loving) so they will draw moisture out of the dough which will in turn dissolve the sugar and salt and get reabsorbed by the dough interfering with the autolyse.

Wait and start the machine:

Our machine automatically initiates a "rest" phase which we can count towards our autolyse period. Depending on your machine's rest period, you'll want to delay when you start the machine so that you get at least 30 minutes of autolyse. If your machine has a delay start timer, then you can use that.


Results/Conclusion:

This bread turned out pretty well. My wife thinks its good enough for her, but I want to see if I can eek out a little more chew. The version pictured below had one egg and more yeast so it rose all the way to the top of the machine. The egg gave a crunchier crust which I don't like for sandwich bread.

Japanese Style White Bread (Take 2)

In my last attempt my bread didn't really rise, which I think is a result of my use of really old yeast in a jar. My wife mentioned that the Anderson bread had a stronger "bread" flavor. This to me, means that I need to use a preferment like a poolish or a biga to really add that yeasty flavor to the dough.

Poolish:
100g bread flour 100ml lukewarm water  1/2 tsp yeast	Mix ingredients together in a small bowl. Cover with plastic. Let sit overnight at room temperature.
Water-Roux Paste:
20g bread flour 100ml water	Mix flour and water in a small saucepan. Cook over low to medium heat, stirring continuously until it reaches 65ºC. It should have thickened to a paste at this stage, that is when you stir you can see the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat, place a cling wrap over the paste and leave until lukewarm, or room temperature, before using. (Alternatively if you don’t have a thermometer, cook as before until it just starts to thicken, then continue to cook for about 1 more minute before removing from heat.) This water roux can be kept in an airtight container after cooling in the refrigerator for 1 day if not used immediately. However DO NOT USE if it turns grey in colour, that means it has gone bad.
For the Bread Dough:
50ml lukewarm water 30g butter, cubed Poolish Water-Roux Paste 250g bread flour 30g sugar 1 tsp salt 2 tsp instant dry yeast	Add all the ingredients to your bread machine in the order provided. As always, its best to make a little crater in the mound of flour and drop your yeast in there. Then set your machine to the white bread setting and start it.

Results
This recipe makes a bit too much for my Zojirushi BB-HAC10 Home Bakery 1-Pound-Loaf Programmable Mini Breadmaker. It almost overflowed the machine during the rise cycle so I ended dumping it into 2 loaf pans and baking them for 30min at 350F.

What about the bread?
Well, I could smell a bit of alcohol which might mean that I used too much yeast. It had larger bubbles and was more translucent than the Anderson bread. I also feel like the texture wasn't as springy as the Anderson version, tending to break instead of tearing apart. I think I'll try a different approach next time.

Backing up my HostGator Account using Rsync

Once you exceed  a certain amount of disk space usage on Hostgator they will stop backing up your website. So if you want to ensure that a failure on their end doesn't cause your site to go down permanently, you'll want to start backing it up somewhere else.

For me, I don't want to spend any more money on a hosted backup solution, so I guess I'll be making a backup on my local machine.

 


Install cygwin

When selecting packages, search for "ssh".
Under the "Net" package select the openssh and libssh packages (you don't need any "sources" and "development" packages)

Then do another search for "rsync", and make sure its selected.

Then click through the installation steps to install Cygwin with those packages.


Setup SSH on HostGator
If you have a shared account (i.e. cheapest plan) then SSH access will be disabled by default. You'll have to open a support case with them in cPanel. I recommend using the Live Chat Support system to get the fastest turn around time.

Setting up passwordless SSH
After support enables SSH for you'll want to be able to login without having to type in a password.
First fire up your cygwin terminal and enter the following command:

ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 1024

Keep pressing enter to get through all the prompts (you don't want to add a passphrase). This will create your keys in your <cygwin>/home/<username>/.ssh directory. The program will tell you which file is your private "identification" key and which is your public key. Remember where these are.

Next we need add our public key to your account on HostGator.

Again from your cygwin terminal run:

ssh -p 2222 <username>@<hostname>

You will be prompted to login. Login and you will now be inside your HostGator account.
Then cd to .ssh/ directory.
Here you will want to add your public key that you generated earlier. To do that first open your public key file in a text editor and copy the entire line (Ctrl+C). Make sure you get the entire line, it may look like multiple lines if you have wordwrap turned on.
Next run these commands in the cygwin terminal:

chmod +w authorized_keys2
vi authorized_keys2

This opens the file for writing, and then starts the vi text editor.
Next, press 'i' which sets the vi editor into "insert" mode.
Use the arrow keys and the "End" button to get to the end of the last line. Press enter to create a new line at the very end of the file.
With the text cursor on the empty last line. right-click with your mouse to paste the public key information into the file.
Then press 'Esc', ':' , 'w', 'q', 'Enter'  (ignore the ' and , ). This undoes the "insert" mode, then switches to command mode (':'), where 'w' tells it to write the file and 'q' tells vi to quit.

Now we want to test our passwordless ssh so enter:

exit

And this should disconnect you from the HostGator.
Next run:

ssh -p 2222 <username>@<hostname>

and this time, it shouldn't prompt you for a password. If that's the case, enter

exit

again to disconnect. Otherwise, you'll have to go back over your steps to figure out what went wrong.

Testing Rsync
Now, I'd recommend you start rsync on a small test directory just to make sure all the settings are right. I used the "tmp" dir on HostGator in my example, but you can use whatever you like as long as its not important. You also need a folder on your local machine to serve as the backup location.

Again from your cygwin terminal, run:

rsync -avz --rsh='ssh -p2222' <username>@<hostname>:/home/<username>/tmp /cygdrive/c/<backup dir>

This runs rsync through an ssh tunnel on port 2222. The /home/<username>/tmp is the directory on HostGator you want to backup. The /cygdrive/c/ is cygwin's way of saying "C:\".
Once this finishes, look in your backup directory to see if you're satisfied with the results. If you are, you can change the directories to match what you really want to backup.

Automating Rsync
Since we're on windows, we can use the Task Scheduler to run rsync.
Define a new task with the following settings:

Executable: <cygwin>\bin\bash.exe
Arguments: -l -c "rsync -avz --rsh='ssh -p2222' <username>@<hostname>:/home/<username>/tmp /cygdrive/c/<backup dir> > /cygdrive/c/<log directory>/rsync.log 2>&1"

Set the schedule to whatever backup schedule you want. You'll want to make sure that you select the option that prevents the job from starting if the previous job is still running. The <log directory>/rsync.log file will contain the log of the process so you can always come back to view it if there are problems.

Once you save the task, you can manually run it in the task scheduler. I would go ahead and do that now and examine the log file to see if everything's okay.

Optionally, add the --delete flag
 Now that everything's working automatically you may want to add the --delete flag to the rsync command to delete files in your backup, that were deleted from the website. This ensures that the contents remain in sync after you delete something from HostGator.

Update - Changing Host Key

Once in a while HostGator may update the hardware your site is on, and that may cause a change in the IP address assigned to your domain. This causes the ssh calls through cygwin from your local machine to fail. You will get a:

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!

message in your rsync logs when this happens. The easy fix for this is to simply delete lines from your /home/.ssh/known_hosts file corresponding to the old IP address/hostname. Then from the cygwin terminal, do a:

ssh -p2222 <username>@<hostname>

and login to your account manually. This will repopulate the known_hosts file with a new key.

Japanese Style White Bread

After seeing how much my wife was spending on  "premium white" bread from Anderson Bakery ($7/loaf), I decided it was time to start making it at home. After all, my wife was the one who insisted we get a bread machine years ago because we were spending so much at the bakery.  As I predicted, after a couple of tries, she eventually found it too much work and never quite made the same type of bread she was used to, never using the machine again. I figured, that I had to put our bread machine investment to work and come up with an easy "premium white" recipe that we can make in the machine.

Here is a recipe I found
https://cornercafe.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/japanese-style-white-bread-loaf/

The secret here is the water-roux paste which supposedly gelatinizes the starch in the flour allowing more liquid to be absorbed into the bread.

This is my adaptation for use in a bread machine. The first step is creating the roux paste since you'll want that to cool down while prepping the other ingredients.

Water-Roux Paste:
20g bread flour 100ml water	Mix flour and water in a small saucepan. Cook over low to medium heat, stirring continuously until it reaches 65ºC. It should have thickened to a paste at this stage, that is when you stir you can see the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat, place a cling wrap over the paste and leave until lukewarm, or room temperature, before using. (Alternatively if you don’t have a thermometer, cook as before until it just starts to thicken, then continue to cook for about 1 more minute before removing from heat.) This water roux can be kept in an airtight container after cooling in the refrigerator for 1 day if not used immediately. However DO NOT USE if it turns grey in colour, that means it has gone bad.
For the Bread Dough:
150ml lukewarm water 30g butter, cubed Water-Roux Paste (see above) 1 Tbsp milk powder 350g bread flour 30g sugar 5g (1 tsp) salt 7g (2.5 tsp) instant dry yeast	Add all the ingredients to your bread machine in the order provided. As always, its best to make a little crater in the mound of flour and drop your yeast in there. Then set your machine to the white bread setting and start it.

Results?
I have to say that my 1+ yr old yeast isn't good anymore, so the first loaf turned out pretty dense. I'll have to try this again with some fresh yeast.

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Funny Stuff My Daughter Said

Premise: My daughter had been routinely complaining about a tummy ache after dinner.

Daughter: I ate too much so I have a tummy-egg!
Father: Did you say "tummy-EGG"?
Daughter: Yeah, you see my tummy is sticking out like an egg!
Father: When your tummy hurts its called a "tummy-ACHE" not a "tummy-EGG".
Daughter: Oooooh....


Premise: We're eating at a japanese ramen shop and I'm taking moyashi [bean sprouts] out of my bowl and putting them into my wife's bowl which my daughter is also eating from.

Daughter: Don't give me any more moyashi. I want to be skinny!
Father: Well, technically eating more moyashi will help you to become skinnier.
Daughter: Then, daddy shouldn't YOU be eating more moyashi!
Father:.... errrr, good point.

Using Agile Programming to raise your kids

As a software developer by trade, I'm exposed to lots of strategies for making teams and development more productive. However I never thought that those ideas would be applicable to home life until I saw this video on TED.


After showing my wife this, we started creating a simple checklist for our daughter and so far its been good. If this lasts, we'll try adopting even more of the ideas. You can buy this guy's book below: