Good help is hard to find

I ran a handyman type business part time for 35 years until health problems caused me to quit. I put an ad in the paper for just one week and was as busy until the day I closed it out. It surprised me that I would be so busy but in retrospect I now know why.

My customers would pass my name around to their friends and family because I treated then like I wanted to be treated. Apparently this concept has gone the way of black and white television and rotary dial telephones. I have now reached the age where I am the one that needs some help.

I sided my house several years ago but a wind storm caused one piece to come loose. I called several people and the first person that showed up nailed it back up with the nail heads showing, but the next windstorm we had the nails pulled thru the siding, leaving holes. So he went on the “S” list and tried again.

One man showed up in the back seat of a car driven by a relative. He looked over the job and asked if I had a ladder to get up there. What? You don’t have a ladder? He then said would have to go on the internet to see how to do the repairs I needed. Another entry to “the list”. Finally I had a man from Lancaster do the job and he did it the right way. It hasn’t blown off since.

One day, the automatic garage door opener stopped working. Investigation revealed that the underground wiring I had installed over thirty years ago had shorted out. Because I had a concrete patio installed right over the in ground conduit, I decided to call an electrical contractor to install a new underground feed. They dug up my yard, burrowed under the sidewalk and put the new wiring into the back of my garage instead of the side where I had originally installed it.

Shortly after that, after it had snowed, my wife came into the house and asked if there should be sparking where the old wiring entered the garage wall. I looked out the window and saw that the siding was melted and had black marks on it. I quickly ran to the basement and shut off the circuit breaker before my garage and two inside vehicles burned up. If it wasn’t for the fact that there was snow piled up against the wall, I probably would have lost the building and my cars.

Seeing as they were a licensed electrical contractor, I never inspected the job they had done. I figured they would do it right and to code. Wrong! My investigation of this problem revealed the old wiring had never been disconnected and they didn’t install the National Electrical Code required disconnect. So I called them and read them the riot act including quoting the specific code they violated when they wired my garage.

I told them they had two choices. The first one was fixing the problems including replacing the burned and melted siding or I would report them. They were out the next day to repair the wiring.

I needed my gutters cleaned. I called several people that were recommended on Facebook but only one showed up. I would have called them Curley, Larry and Moe but I think Moe was still in prison. They did do what I asked. They cleaned the gutters but left the downspouts as plugged tight as a duck’s arse. I didn’t find this out until the next time it rained and they all overflowed. My list is getting longer.

I wanted my exterior doors replaced. They had been here since 1919 and they wouldn’t close in the summer and leaked so bad in the winter that the breeze would blow out a candle. One person showed up, a large company that advertises on the television. They gave me a price but because my doors were oversize doors, they would only install a standard door leaving a 4” gap at the top for me to deal with. I am running out of paper. Finally I found a person to do what I wanted. Replace 2 doors, two storm doors and all for the low, low price of $6000.

I wanted a digital thermostat installed in my master bedroom suite. So again I went to Facebook for suggestions. A man contacted me and we agreed he would come over the next day. When he arrived, he had our new thermostat and his tools in a plastic “Tee shirt” bag.

I left the room and sat in the living room when I heard a zap, saw sparks and all the lights went out in the bedroom. So I got up to see if he was laying on the floor. Four and a half hours later, after several zaps, damns and f bombs and after he reinstalled the old thermostat that was not working now, I told him to go home. He took some of the pieces with him and left a pile of spare parts. My list gets even longer.

It was cold that night and it’s going to be a cold for a few more nights. We still have no heat.

Bear Ridge Solar

Cypress Creek Renewables is proposing to construct a project called “Bear Ridge Solar” to install solar panels in Cambria and Pendleton. I have no problem with people using their property for legal reasons.

Solar energy gives us clean power from the sun and it’s use is growing in both the United States and globally. The cost to put in solar energy has decreased by over 70 percent since 2010. In the past decade, solar power has had an average annual growth rate of over 60 percent. Many businesses and households that switch to solar energy save money.

While without a doubt solar energy might be a very important solution for a lot of the world’s energy problems, it’s not a cure all without problems. Studies have shown that solar energy has a significant environmental disadvantage.

The effect that solar farms may possibly have on plants and animals be capable of sending ripples through the entire ecosystem. The environment could become less livable for plants and wildlife that thrive in local conditions.

Utility size solar panels can take up a lot of space. I understand the Bear Ridge Solar project will take up 900 acres and I think it might result in environmental degradation. Solar farms could also obstruct local vegetation growth. Think about all those farms that let their land go fallow so the naturally occurring plant life can be harvested for hay.

However, a deeper perception of the environmental effect of solar installation could educate farmers on microclimate changes and how they could make better use of the land under panels. Farmers may need to think about selecting crops that can survive in the lower ground temperatures and shade created by the solar panels.

Solar farms that blanket a large volume of land are apt to impact the local fauna and flora, particularly birds. The loss of habit for birds include nesting sites, nest building materials, food sources like bugs and places to hide due to habitat loss. Solar panels aren’t able to share the land they occupy for other uses like wind energy does.

Solar panels for domestic use usually don’t require very much land. In fact many of these installations are on roof tops and don’t use any land whatsoever. However, at the industrial level, the large amount of space required for the installation of panels needed to produce energy is a challenge.

Also, a great many people feel that utility scale solar panels will create a visual disruption for the local communities. I believe the song goes “Oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain” not “the glint of solar panels.”

However, it is not just plant them and hook them up. There are emissions associated with different stages of the solar cell lifecycle. It is very important to know the solar panel production process. It begins with the mining and subsequent processing of the raw materials. Quartz, copper, silver and aluminum ores are mined from the earth utilizing trucks, tools and heavy equipment. These ores are then transported by trucks or rail to processing facilities.

All of this requires fossil fuels or electricity. Quartz for instance undergoes processing with hazardous chemicals in high-temperature furnaces to produce electronic grade silicon. Creating solar photovoltaic panels is a very water intensive process. Even though the solar cells themselves don’t use water to generate electricity, the manufacturing process requires a quite a bit of water.

Off-grid Photo Voltaic systems frequently have throwaway batteries that can store energy when the sun shines so people can use it at night. These batteries will damage the environment if they aren’t disposed of properly because they might leak toxins such as lead and sulfuric acid.

Furthermore, quite a few solar cells contain small quantities of the toxic metal cadmium. The batteries that are required to store the electricity generated by photo cells can contain a myriad of other dangerous substances like heavy metals and other dangerous substances. If the manufacturers don’t strictly adhere to the laws and regulations regarding these chemicals, they can create significant health risks, especially to the workers.

As solar technology improves, manufacturers may be able to move away from these potentially dangerous substances, but for now, they mar the otherwise impressive ecological benefits solar power offers.

Solar energy has some other problems. First, no matter how clear the skies, a solar panel won’t produce electricity at night, so a solar energy system needs to have some method of storing energy. And if there is bad weather for an extended time, a solar energy system will provide little output, which means you need to have backup energy generation alternatives available.

Moreover, when solar panels aren’t disposed of as they should be, these chemicals can be an environmental threat. Often, panels end up in e-waste dumps in developing countries such as India, China and Ghana where these toxic chemicals might create devastating health effects for residents of nearby communities. Solar panels are said to create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants do and we all know how nuclear power works out. Just think about Chernobyl or The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Sure Solar may be the way to go but I think we need to find this out from someone that ISN’T going to benefit from this.

Norb is a freelance journalist from Lockport.

Cats are said to have nine lives. I wonder how many I have.

black cat on planters pot — Photo by Katarzyna Modrzejewska on Pexels.com

The first time I can remember that I came close to death was when I was a delivery driver for a fried chicken takeout and delivery place on Main Street in the 60’s, I had popped in to a Carols, a fast food, hamburger joint across the street for a bite to eat. As I was leaving the parking lot, I was making a left hand turn out of the driveway. Some kind person, in the outside lane, stopped to let me pass thru the traffic. I drove thru the gap and was broadsided on the driver’s side, totaling the car.

Speaking of car accidents, there have been a couple of other times I have totaled cars. The next time I was driving south on Niagara Falls Boulevard. I was in the inside lane when a car going the other way crossed the double yellow line and hit me. My car was crumpled on the driver’s side from the front bumper to the back. The windshield and the windows on the left hand side of the car were shattered. My car was pushed into a gas station and came to a stop a few feet from the gas pumps where the attendant was pumping gas. His jaw hit the ground.

One other time I was going to a repair shop due to a gas line leak in my car. I was going down a hill when suddenly, the brake lines blew. I thought this was the way I was going to die but I managed to swing onto a side street to avoid smashing into the guard rail at the bottom. I jumped the curb and crashed into a tree instead. When the car stopped, I was under the dashboard on the passenger side with only a cut on my nose.

Twice, while I was in the service, I think we came close to losing our ship. The first time we got lost at night in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. All of our navigation and radios had suddenly gone out. We didn’t regain them back until the morning and no one ever found out what had happened. Another time, in the North Atlantic, we ended up putting a gash in our hull during a storm at night. The water was gushing in. We plugged it up as well as we could. Every portable pump we had on board was pressed into service putting the ocean back outside where it belonged.

I had a brush with death when I first met Lady Electricity. We had a lamp that needed to have the socket replaced. I laid out my tools and sat on my couch to do this relatively simple project. I had disassembled the light and went to disconnect the wires. Hello! How was I to know you should unplug the light before touching the wires?

Electricity and I have gone around a few more times in my life. I was working at a vinegar plant when I was told to put a few new circuits in the lab because some new equipment was overloading the breakers. “Easy Peasy Piece of Pie,” or so I thought. There was a conduit with wiring running to the lab so all I had to do was pull a few new wires through it. There was plenty of room.

I would be able to separate the conduit at the joints and push the wires I needed into it. I was doing this when I got the shock of my life. All I could do was hang on because all my muscles had tightened up. When the 30 Amp breaker tripped, it dropped me in a pile. I must have blacked out because the next thing I can remember is seeing spinning lights. Eventually as I came to, I thought that I couldn’t be dead because I was hearing sounds from the plant.

But this wasn’t the last time electricity tried to get me. I was working at U. S. Sugar and was trying to rewire a panel. My meter was broken so I borrowed a buddy’s. Call it inexperience with this type of meter but I thought everything was off. I went to hook up some wires when the 440V picked me up and threw me across the room. I spent three weeks in the hospital with 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree burns.

Are we counting? This is eight times I cheated death. I cheated death three more times by beating cancer. My first dance with this dreaded disease was ten years ago. After my surgery, the surgeon said if I had waited two to four weeks longer, he wouldn’t have been able to save me. The cancer metastasized two more times. I was told the last time it was stage four. Neither my oncologist nor I expected me to survive the last time.

I have also had pulmonary embolisms twice. The last time the doctor stated that it was the worst case he had ever seen in a living person. That the only time he had seen embolisms this bad was at an autopsy.

I think that death now looks at his to do list and if he sees my name, he crosses it off because he is tired of dealing with me.

Tagged with: Death, Cats, Cancer, Electricity, Bermuda Triangle, Niagara Falls,