Get car ready for winter now

Well-maintained vehicles deliver stronger and more efficient performance. Proper maintenance also helps avoid breakdowns and costly repairs, which can save you money. And when it comes time to replace your vehicle, a documented maintenance history will contribute to a higher resale value.

Last winter AAA’s Roadside Rescue Team came to the aid of nearly 35,000 stranded drivers. Almost 9,000 calls came from drivers with dead batteries, and more than 3,800 calls were for tire problems.

Now is the time to have your vehicle inspected to prevent breakdowns during the cold winter months that lay ahead.

How do you know when your vehicle needs routine service? With older vehicles, motorists had to study the owner’s manual or maintenance booklet and decide if they drove in “normal” or “severe” conditions. Then, they consulted a time/mileage chart that indicated when the car should be taken to the shop – and hopefully they remembered to do so. Most cars today are equipped with computerized maintenance reminder systems that remove much of the hassle from car care.

Confusion still reigns

Based on 2012 Car Care Council vehicle inspections, 77 percent of vehicles had overlooked maintenance items — the majority of which involved low or dirty engine oil. But many also had other service needs that are not routinely prompted by in-vehicle maintenance reminders, things such as low engine coolant, dirty air filters or burned-out headlamps.

Oil changes are another point of confusion. Suggested intervals for oil changes today can vary widely. AAA Tire & Auto manager Jason Brown recommends drivers take a cautious approach when it comes to scheduling oil changes. Brown said “The on board computers only monitor driving habits. They have no ability to monitor oil conditions. The oil itself is usually OK for the longer intervals, yet the oil filter can only filter so much dirt. After it becomes full of dirt it stops filtering and continues to flow the debris throughout the engine, which can result in serious damage. An oil change is the one of least expensive routine maintenance procedures you can do on your vehicle, and it has the greatest impact on the longevity of your engines life span.”

What’s right for your vehicle?

Whether you personally perform vehicle maintenance or rely on a trusted technician, the key is to follow the schedule set by the vehicle manufacturer. If your car has a reminder system, trust it to schedule your oil changes, but also be sure to review your owner’s manual or maintenance booklet to learn what other services are due at the same time.

Never ignore a maintenance reminder. Doing so will increase engine wear and potentially cause long-term damage.

It’s time to prepare your vehicle for the winter ahead

The new AAA Tire & Auto Center located at 8381 Old Troy Pike in Huber Heights offers customers a free air station so motorists can make sure their tires are properly inflated. Drivers can also get free bumper-to-bumper preventative maintenance inspections to help prepare for the upcoming winter. For more information, call (937) 281-3530.

Every month in Life, Cindy Antrican, public affairs manager for AAA Allied Group, Inc., provides traffic safety tips and information for motorists. Email: CAntrican@aaa-alliedgroup.com.

Get car ready for winter now

Renewable Energy and Soft Commodities

Lately, the commodities market has been a graveyard for investors, with prices at multiyear lows and no sign of any positive catalysts to turn things around. The global economic slowdown has affected goods such as steel, aluminum, copper and other commodities, and the lower demand from China is only serving to keep materials prices low for an extended period of time.

The 15-year commodity super cycle culminated in a burst bubble around 2008, and has experienced a trend of depressed prices and falling demand since then. With China’s market implosion, commodities took another hit as demand fell off a cliff, with the expectation being that many commodities won’t recover for years as the world adjusts to a new paradigm without heavy Chinese demand.

If we look back at the commodities cycle from 2002 to 2012, we see a high correlation between the cycle and falling demand in the Chinese markets. During that decade, China experienced high average yearly GDP growth of 10.6% and became the world’s leader of commodity imports, which helped drive up prices and boost production.

If we look at the overall performance of commodities lately by tracking the S&P GSCI Commodity Index (GTX), we see how China’s decline largely is responsible for the collapse in the commodities market.

Of course, not all commodities behave similarly. Oil, steel, copper, gold and silver generally are the representatives of all commodities; the “soft” commodities such as grain, corn, coffee and soybeans often are overlooked. China’s slowdown might have a lingering impact on hard commodities used for industrial purposes, but agriculture isn’t as highly correlated with China.

What’s Keeping “Soft” Commodities Down

Agricultural commodities also have fallen victim to the collapse of the commodity super cycle, plagued by the fall in oil prices and less demand for goods and services. Considering that the global population is constantly growing and there’s only a limited amount of arable land available for crop production, at first glance, it might not make sense that this industry is experiencing hard times.

Unlike oil, which fluctuates both on demand and supply, it is largely supply that affects agricultural commodities. Demand for food products is relatively steady as the amount of arable land is fixed and a steadily growing global population will demand food products, regardless of economic direction.

Right now, it’s a supply glut that’s primarily keeping soft commodities weak. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report indicated higher-than-expected harvests in the corn, wheat and soybean markets, sending prices plummeting lower.

Record-high soybean and corn harvests surprised analysts and created a supply glut that likely will impact agricultural futures for the next quarter or two. The World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates Report shows a drop in production for a wide variety of soft commodities such as corn and wheat, with less use as residual use and livestock feed. A higher dollar also means these goods face stiffer competition overseas, which is hurting U.S. exports.

The lowered expectations could be a contrarian signal for investors, though. At current prices, there isn’t much more downside risk in agricultural commodities, while there’s plenty of room for upside surprises. Crops largely are dependent upon weather conditions, which easily could alter the long-term outlook, although it’s a risk that can’t be relied on as a basis for investment.

Instead, the impact of a bumper crop, a crop which yields unusually high production, has already been priced into final yields. With high expectations of further oversupply issues, any type of downward figure revision would have a positive impact on soft commodity prices.

Link to Renewables

Agricultural commodities have had a relationship with renewable-energy companies for the past decade or so. Oil has been the primary influence in regard to food costs as a critical component in farming usage such as fertilizers and transportation of crop goods.

The demand for biofuels adds another element to the cost equation as well as contributes to supply and demand expectations of corn, wheat and other soft commodities. The heavy push toward sustainability both in increasing crop yields for food and energy consumption as well as increased investment in green energy could be the key to recovery in this sector.

While oil prices are likely to remain low for the foreseeable future, the green energy sector hasn’t slowed down at all. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global investment from developed countries in green energy topped $278 billion in 2014 compared to $178 billion in 2009. The drop in oil also helped free up capital for green energy investments as well as attract a more skilled labor force to the industry. As competition increases, green energy will continue to influence overall global energy costs, helping to keep them stable and bring wholesale costs down.

The Bottom Line

Green energy might be the key to lifting prices in soft commodities. As oil becomes less influential on global energy demand and commodity values, alternative energy will take its place more and more over the coming years.

While agricultural commodities have been kept low by falling global demand and oversupply issues, a healthy green industry might be the catalyst that helps turn the commodity super cycle back around.

Image courtesy of Suat Eman at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Renewable Energy and Soft Commodities

Dyson AM11 Pure Cool multiplies its pure coolness

For years now Dyson has been the go-to company for impressively engineered (some would say over-engineered) air-moving devices. We all know of Dyson’s vacuums, Airblade hand dryers, and fans, but their fan family is more extensive than you might think. Fans became heaters and, as of September 1, they evolved into air purifiers.

The Dyson AM11 Pure Cool air purifier is a tower fan (it’s 40 inches tall and meant to be placed on the floor) with a “360° Glass” HEPA filter that’s rated to last for six months of nonstop use. Tower fans are nothing new and Dyson does extensive air filtering with its vacuum line, so an air purifier — which is little more than a filtered fan — made perfect sense. For its part, Dyson would stress that adding in a filter is not enough to make an effective product. Poor design and construction means air leaks where tiny allergens (in the 0.5 micron range) can escape making any number of today’s air filters less than fully effective.

This puts us in the normal Dyson-decision-making mode: we know its a good product, but at $400 (list price) it’s not just expensive, its considerably more expensive than options we know to be great and two-to-three times more expensive than good products from reliable companies. As for me, I’ve used a Homedics AF-100 air purifier for years. I’d put it in the “better than nothing” category, which is to say that it has a street price of about a fifth of the Dyson and it seems to be sufficient for my needs. All that said, air purifiers that are designed for big rooms and serious filtration can get very expensive.

At first glance, the AM11 is a Dyson “bladeless fan” with a new filter base. It looks a whole lot like the AM07 tower fan and the functionality is similar — it turns on and off, it oscillates, it runs at power levels from one through 10, and it can operate on a sleeper. The Pure Cool filter cannot be disabled or bypassed, but it can be removed and replaced. It’s fine enough that it will filter out everything from bacteria to pollen to cooking smells. The key here is not just that it’s a good filter, but also that it’s sealed properly in the housing, which means the air being pushed through the fan went through the filter, not around it through a poorly fitted panel or leaky seal.

In addition to offering Dyson-level build quality, the Pure Cool addresses another serious problem with air purifiers: they are ugly as sin. Most are beige plastic boxes that are embarrassing to have in any prominent place in your home. And hiding them away defeats the purpose of having an air purifier, because they need to be where the people are. The oscillation and power of the Dyson mean that it fits in a number of settings, and can sit in a corner and cool most areas. The fan does not tilt, but its height gives it enough vertical coverage for most situations when the fan function is as important as the air purification.

One interesting complication with the Dyson bladeless system is that much of the air that is being moved never goes through the base or, for that matter, the filter. Here is Dyson’s own explanation of the fan’s use of Bernoulli’s principle in its “air multiplication”:

So, the majority of the air being moved by any Dyson fan, including this purifier, is not going through the base, so its never purified. This makes the Pure Cool seem like a product where Dyson’s bladeless technology might not be ideal.

The Pure Cool was first released in China and Japan, and, like most air purifiers, is primarily aimed at markets where air pollution is a serious issue. This extends to the capturing of pollen, germs, and particulate, making it something with wider appeal but it’ll probably never be a big seller in the US or Europe.

Test results

One thing I’m not going to do in this review is pretend to do any scientific testing of the air purifier’s filtration. If you want more on that I’d highly recommend SweetHome’s excellent dive into the science behind air purification. That article didn’t test the Pure Cool and ended up recommending a device that cost $250 — not cheap, but a far cry from the Dyson. The only other thing I’ll note on this front is the HEPA is a DOE standard so there is quality assurance to the filters used by any company whose product uses that label. It doesn’t ensure that the fan quality will be good enough to take advantage of the filter, but at least you know you are starting from a strong foundation.

At its very essence, what does a filter do? It takes stuff out of the air and holds onto it. After 25 days of 24/7 usage on setting four (out of 10) my AM11’s filter picked up less than a tenth of a gram of particulate. I’d say that’s because I live in an immaculately clean apartment, but that’s not the case. And even if I did, the Dyson is less than 10 feet from a window, but was open for at least 5% of the testing time.

I’m not fully sure what the takeaway from this is, but we do have to remember that when it comes to airborne particulate, a gram would be a lot. So you might never see additional weight if the filter was only picking up bacteria, but between things like dust and dander, I would have expect to see some movement, especially considering that this time period used up about 14% of the filter’s life.

What I really wanted to do was to find some way to prove the Dyson was doing its job. Once again, I’d point you at the SweetHome article or this video of the AM11 clearing the smoke from 10 cigarettes out of the air:

Next was testing for noise production and air speed:

For a bit of context you can check out the results from our testing of the best desktop fans (please note, that testing was done at a different time so it’s not apples to apples data). Long story short, the Dyson Pure Cool moves a reasonable amount of air, but it’s not a very powerful fan.

As for the noise levels, I used an iPhone 6 with a noise monitor app, not any fancy test equipment. As a result, the numbers are inflated, but you can get an understanding of the trade off between moving more air and generating more sound. At its lowest three levels the Dyson is basically silent. At its loudest, the fan is more than you’d want to listen to in a typical living room but it’s not obnoxious — it’s along the lines of having a dishwasher or washing machine running nearby.

The final test was for power usage, which will help determine operating cost.

The power consumption of the fan is relatively modest. If you were to run the AM11 at setting level five with oscillation nonstop for a year, your electricity cost would be $13.20 (at 15 cents per kWh).

Dyson Pure Cool conclusions

The price is the major drawback of the Pure Cool, but that’s pretty obvious from the start. There are some other downsides, but they are much easier to cope with. The filter can’t be rinsed, rather it must be replaced. Replacements don’t appear to be available for sale yet, but Dyson has said to expect them to be $70. At $140 for a full year of nonstop use (there is no mention of fan speed, but I’d assume this is at 50% speed), a more typical eight-hour-a-day user will have filter cost of about $47 a year. Not cheap, but more or less in line with the competition.  Another downside is the lack of a filter bypass. If you are using the Pure Cool as a fan and you have the window open or have it placed on a porch, you might want to use it without the filter so that you can minimize debris build up and maximum filter life.

The Pure Cool AM11 is a totally sensible addition to the Dyson lineup. It combines the company’s expertise in air moving with its extensive usage of air filtration and throws everything in a fan that was basically already designed. From the standpoint of the general consumer the AM11 makes sense in that it will replace the AM07 tower fan — now for about the same money you can get a beautifully designed fan with a filter, why not do it? As for a purchase of someone with a real need for an air purifier, it’s not clear if the Dyson is a great choice. The air multiplier design inherently means that more unfiltered air is being moved than filtered air.

Dyson AM11 Pure Cool multiplies its pure coolness

Surprising study finds that solar energy can also cause climate change (a little)

In this photograph taken on August 23, 2015, a general view shows construction taking place at Roha Dyechem solar plant at Bhadla some 225 kms north of Jodhpur in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images

Large solar arrays could have some surprising side effects, according to a new study, including causing changes in the local climate.

On a global scale, these changes will be minor compared to what would happen if humans continue to burn fossil fuel for energy instead, but are still worth watching, scientists say.

Figuring out how renewable energy sources will affect their local landscapes is an increasingly relevant challenge for scientists, as more and more nations are vowing to slash their carbon outputs and switch to alternatives, such as solar and wind energy. Previous studies have shown that both solar arrays and wind farms have the potential to cause regional changes in temperature and precipitation by altering the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth or disrupting local airflow patterns.

With this in mind, Aixue Hu, a climate change research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, conducted a study, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, that attempted to predict the climatic effects of solar arrays. 

For their experiments, Hu and his colleagues assumed a low-carbon scenario, in which global greenhouse gas emissions would start to decline after the year 2020 as renewable energy sources are more widely used.

The researchers then carried out a series of simulations. The first simulation included solar panel installations across the world’s deserts — the parts of the world likely to receive the most sunlight — and throughout all the world’s urban areas.

The second simulation mimicked that scenario, but also assumed that the world would continue to consume a lot of energy through the use of air conditioning. 

The final simulation dropped the thermostat assumption and scaled back the number of solar panel arrays. This scenario is the “more realistic” of the bunch, according to Hu, and was meant to test whether a more modest solar panel installation would be able to address the global energy demand through the end of the century.

After running the simulations, the researchers found that the solar power generated in each of the experiments would be enough to satisfy global electricity demand by 2100. That was the good news. But the experiments also showed that the panels do have an impact on climate, at least regionally.

Solar panels change the way sunlight is reflected and absorbed by the Earth. Any radiation they take in is radiation that’s not being absorbed by the Earth. This leads to a cooling effect in the region surrounding the array. In fact, the first two simulations in this study, which assumed solar panel installations throughout the world’s desert and urban areas, produced a 2-degree Celsius regional cooling in the desert regions. This cooling was also associated with a 20 percent decrease in precipitation in the deserts. Other, slightly broader changes in precipitation and wind patterns occurred as a result in the regions surrounding the deserts.

In urban areas, the effects were a little different. In the first simulation, the model predicted a very small amount of cooling, with temperature falling approximately 0.26 degrees Celsius. In the second simulation, the one in which global thermostat regulation is significantly increased, the large amount of power consumed actually produced an urban heat island effect, in which human energy use releases heat into the environment and causes the regional temperature to warm up. In this scenario, the warming from the heat island effect essentially compensated for the cooling caused by the solar panels.

When considered on a global scale, these effects become much smaller. In the first simulation, the average change in global temperature is an average decline of about 0.34 degrees Celsius, relative to the temperature that would be expected under the same low-carbon climate scenario with no solar parks. In the second simulation, where the heat island effect is taken into account, there would be an average increase in global temperature of about 0.09 degrees Celsius. 

However, the authors acknowledge that it’s unrealistic to assume such widespread solar panel installations in the future. So they looked to the third simulation for a more realistic view of what’s to come.

In the third simulation, which included fewer solar panel arrays, the climate effects are scaled down accordingly. The average global cooling observed in this simulation is only a decline of about 0.04 degree Celsius. 

The study shows that, while large solar arrays can cause some significant regional changes in climate, “globally it will not affect the global climate much,” said Hu. “This is a big contrast with the fossil fuels.” According to most climate projections, human-caused global warming — the result of releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — could lead to anywhere from 1 to nearly 3 degrees of global temperature increases under even moderate climate scenarios.

That said, the study does also provide some insight into how the local solar panel-induced climate effects might be minimized. The results suggested that local climate effects were smaller in urban areas than in the more remote desert areas and can be mitigated by the urban heat island effect. So while it’s tempting to place large solar arrays in desert areas, where they’re most likely to receive the greatest amount of interrupted sunlight, the authors note that “a more distributed solar panel installation could reduce the impact of the solar panels on regional and global climate.”

And being aware of the way certain regions could be affected by large solar deployments, could help policymakers make decisions about how to distribute panels in these places and how to prepare for the local changes that could occur as a result, Hu said.  

So future research may also examine how the distribution of solar arrays could be changed in order to maximize their positive effects on land use and minimize their negative ones.

In the meantime, this study reinforces the idea that a transition to renewable energy is imperative to protecting Earth’s climate future. While the transition won’t be without its own effects, the authors note that the alternative — a world in which fossil fuel burning is allowed to continue unabated — would be far worse.

Surprising study finds that solar energy can also cause climate change (a little)

3 HUGE Boxes of NEW Purolator Auto Air Filters

I have 3 Huge Boxes of Purolator Automobile Air Filters

These filters vary in size and will fit SO many different cars, trucks, vans and SUVs

The air filters are new in box and have the model number on them

Selling the 3 boxes for $60 TOTAL or $20 each Large Box

These boxes are packed full with filters

561….708…2 six six 0

3 HUGE Boxes of NEW Purolator Auto Air Filters

Parade features wind turbine blade

Chris Oaks spoke with Jereme Kent, general manager of One Energy.
Q: You stole the show at the Halloween parade by driving a huge flatbed truck, with one of the blades from the wind turbine project under construction on the north side of the city, through downtown. What are the specs on that thing?
A: Each blade weighs about 17,000 pounds and is 140 feet long. When completed, each of the turbines will have more swept area than a football field.
But it’s hard to imagine that kind of scale until you see one up close, which is why we wanted to put it in the parade, to give people the chance to see one up close. We lifted it onto the truck with a 12,000-pound forklift and a large excavator, actually two rigs on both ends.
Q: This project for Whirlpool and Ball Corp. is easily the largest in Hancock County, and one of the largest in Ohio, correct?
A: Outside of Paulding and Van Wert, I believe it’s the biggest in Ohio, consisting of five turbines. Two for Whirlpool and three for Ball.
And it’s really starting to take shape with the cranes going up. Components will start being set in place over the next couple of weeks and all of them will be up and online by the end of the year.
Q: My understanding is that these turbines will be capable of producing around 20 percent of the electricity needed to power each plant. Is that typical of a commercial wind turbine project?
A: Well, nothing about this project is typical. But to put it simply, the amount of power we can generate is largely determined by the amount of land we have to work with.
In this case, this was the largest reasonable output that we could do given the footprint of the area we had to work with, and it was enough to make the project a worthwhile investment for both companies.
Q: In the case of this particular project, you purchased the land the turbines will sit on, and you have plans for further development?
A: That’s right. Given all the factors that were taken into consideration, the best option was to purchase the land in order to have full control of the layout, where the turbines and necessary buildings would be, to control setbacks and so on.
That also gives us the opportunity to do fun things like opening the land up to create parks and picnic areas that would be accessible during the right times of year. And that idea of opening the area to the public is something that’s not been done in any other project anywhere in the country that I’m aware of. I believe it would be a first.
Q: There are those who are still not convinced of the long-term, wide-ranging viability of these alternative energy systems. What is it that convinces you that others just aren’t seeing?
A: I think the biggest problem is that our industry has done a poor job of communicating its benefits and its opportunities. It’s true that, by its very nature, wind is a hit-and-miss type of energy production. You have windy days and you have calm days, so any given site on any given day may seem somewhat inconsistent in its ability to generate clean power.
But, over the broad scale, in terms of a larger region such as the entire Midwest, or over a long span of time, the generation becomes much more stable. But, the biggest challenge to incorporating all forms of next-generation power remains the electric grid system.
In some areas, there’s still equipment from the 1930s that is being used to move power from generation points to the consumer and it’s like trying to plug a modern computer into an old knob-and-tube wiring system. It’s just not something the grid was ever designed to handle.
And so that becomes the most significant limitation to wider deployment of these technologies. But it’s something that will gradually be updated as the technology advances even further.
“Good Mornings!” with Chris Oaks airs from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. weekdays on WFIN, 1330 kHz. He can be reached by email at chrisoaks@wfin.com, or at 419-422-4545.

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Parade features wind turbine blade

Treasury alludes to tax avoidance cases as reasoning behind community energy relief cuts

By Liam Stoker

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30 October 2015, 12:15 Updated: 30 October 2015, 12:25

The Treasury has suggested that cases of individuals or companies using community energy schemes as vehicles for tax avoidance has triggered this week’s decision to cut relief mechanisms.

On Monday amendments were placed into the new Finance Bill between its second and third reading, making community energy projects exempt from receiving EIS, SEIS and SITR tax relief as of 30 November.

The cuts were resoundingly criticised by the industry, which labelled them “extremely damaging”, however financial secretary to the Treasury David Gauke indicated that apparent “misuse” of the scheme was the motive behind the decision.

And in a statement issued to Solar Power Portal, a Treasury spokesman said that the government had become aware of “significantly increased interest” in the use of participating in community energy schemes for “low-risk tax planning purposes”.

HMT said that preventing such abuse was the reasoning behind the changes, which were made in order to “ensure they remain effective at delivering investment to high-risk businesses that need funding to develop and grow, while protecting taxpayers from potential abuse”.

“The government is committed to supporting the investment and innovation needed to achieve a cost-effective transition to a low-carbon economy, but we also want to do this in a way that is fair and provides value for money to hardworking taxpayers,” the spokesman added.

The Treasury has yet to reply to more specific questions on the matter, including whether or not the department had conducted any internal impact assessment prior to making the decision.

The stance is unlikely to appease community energy campaigners who rely almost solely on share issues to investors in order to raise the required funds. With just a month until eligibility for tax relief is removed projects that have failed to raise sufficient funds face an uncertain future. Mongoose Energy managing director Jan-Willem Bode told SPP earlier this week that as much as half of his company’s pipeline faced uncertainty as a direct result of this law change.

Meanwhile Edinburgh Community Solar Co-op has urged new investors to sign up prior to the closure of tax relief, stating that “time is certainly off the essence”.

Depending on an individual investor’s circumstances the Edinburgh scheme proposes returns of between five and seven per cent, however these will fall given cuts to the tax relief measures and the programme is some distance off its target, so far raising just £124,000 of its £1.4 million aim.

Treasury alludes to tax avoidance cases as reasoning behind community energy relief cuts