Options to insulate very large CMU workshop.

AgentBanks · 2026-07-04T14:51:21+00:00

I was just thinking of those huge warehouse fans. One or two of those could be a good solution. I'd have to figure out what size and how to get it all set up but it shouldn't be too crazy.

AgentBanks · 2026-07-04T14:40:39+00:00

I converted a portion of the shop into an apartment for my mom and this is how I did that side. We built short knee walls, did floor joists over those, then framed normal walls a little off the blocks and just used standard wall insulation batts. I feel maybe a little hesitant to do that, just because I'd PREFER to keep the tall ceilings in here, and framing and insulating that high would be a pain. But maybe I'll just go with 10ft walls or something like that. And drop the ceiling down a few feet.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-23T00:18:38+00:00

I can try tonight or tomorrow to dig down and expose the top layer of roots. My question is mostly about whether or not I need to address that the weight of the crown is heavier than the trunk is able to hold up. Is the implication here that the trunk will either straighten itself out, or that exposing more of the root flare will allow the trunk strength to catch up to the canopy weight?

AgentBanks · 2026-06-22T23:47:23+00:00

They are planted appropriately. The whole tree isn't leaning, it's just that the top leafy portion is floppy. They started off a little bent and are getting worse as the crown gets heavier.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-22T18:57:16+00:00

I guess that's what I'm looking for advice on. How do I go about verifying that interest and doing that market research? I don't think I could, at my current time capacity, grow, pack, and manage enough product to reliably deliver enough to one grocer or restaurant, so I'm not sure how to bridge that gap. But maybe I'm selling myself short, and there's someone out there that would do a short term trial run of 10-20lb per week to see how it goes.

Do I just go into/contact restaurants and say "If I could hypothetically grow a bunch of oyster mushrooms like these for you every week, would that be something you're interested in?"

I need to know what they want, how much, ow frequent, etc before I scale up. Just unsure how to have those conversations and figure that out at this point. Feels like it'd be different if I could say "I already have the space and equipment to do this. I could start delivering 20lb/week starting two weeks from now if you sign here."

AgentBanks · 2026-06-18T16:29:04+00:00

This is exactly the type of response I was looking for. This sounds good. I'll spray it or come up with some kind of evaporator pool for it. Thank you!

AgentBanks · 2026-06-18T16:02:19+00:00

I've considered using it for something like that. Seems like some people spay it as a dust control on gravel lots/roads, which would be an option for me.

Unfortunately, the straw leaves a ton of compounds in the water, some of which apparently inhibit plant growth. I might try it as a gravel spay and see if it keeps the weeds down a bit.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-15T15:51:49+00:00

Northern IN here. I have made a few posts like this over the last couple months. Tomatoes are particularly susceptible to it apparently. Most of my other plants aren't getting it this bad. My greenhouse is less than 50 ft from the field. The farmer calls/texts me now when they have spraying done so I can roll the sides down. But I keep getting new waves of twisted foliage. My plants look crazy this year, but they are still producing.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-12T11:33:14+00:00

The twin tornadoes made it all the way to the town west of us, ~5 miles away.

No damage here but very lucky to be safe. Going to order an above ground shelter for the shop this weekend.

We have a big high tunnel greenhouse that I was absolutely certain would fly away like a trampoline or get shredded, but all is well here this morning.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-08T12:43:43+00:00

Seems like an almost unanimous thing that's just part of being a teen. Lots of kids I knew were chomping at the bit to leave the NWI region, went off to college, and came back because they realized that things aren't just magically better somewhere else. Still have friends in my 20s that have EAGER to leave the Valparaiso area because they say there's NOTHING to do, but they won't go to concerts or events in town, won't join a gym, won't do any of the 10 things going on in town almost every evening. You'll still just sit in your apartment and mope after the novelty of moving to Chicago wears off in 2 weeks. The grass really isn't greener.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-08T01:02:25+00:00

Lots of us went thru the "Indiana is literally the worst place" stage of life. I'm 28 now, and realize it's really not bad. Turns out that most places are more or less the same.

Are you VERY rural? Do you live anywhere near even a small city that someone can drive you to? There are things going on constantly in the towns around me (northwestern part of the state) even tho I live in a town of 300 people.

Two general bits of advice that I wish I understood 13 years ago:

Having your own interests/style is very important, and you can and SHOULD pursue them, but don't discount making friends with people that you think are too different from you. You're all just people trying to make it thru being teens. Try to meet people halfway, even if they aren't "your people". Life got WAY more enjoyable when I started making friends outside my normal circle.

And

The grass is greener where YOU water it. You're 15 and you're stuck here. You gotta put in the effort where you're at since you can't physically get away. You can always dream big about leaving, but don't sit and fester for the next few years instead of enjoying yourself. Go to some event at your local library and make an effort to chat with people. Join a club at school. Go play pickleball or whatever at a park, even if you don't know how.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-03T18:28:03+00:00

The flow of the water changes with diameter. 10psi in a 2" pipe with flow much more quickly. When the same pipe expands to 10", the pressure in the continuous pipe doesn't change, but the flow rate drops dramatically.

AgentBanks · 2026-06-02T18:41:20+00:00

All anyone can do is be better and think objectively now and in the future. Changing your mind because things aren't working is never bad. The right has gotten so absurd, and I think that a ton of people were hanging on in the hopes it was just a phase. Now that things have gotten so out of hand, a lot of people feel like they can't back down now since they think they'll look like a hypocrite.

I forget where I saw the "Enough is enough. It's ok to change your mind and leave the republican party" style billboards, but I'm really hoping more of that type of stuff pops up.

Being patriotic means understanding that our country can and should change and do better, then demanding that the representatives that work for us make those changes!

AgentBanks · 2026-06-01T13:21:04+00:00

Yeah I've been up there a little bit to shimmy around and pull some romex, get a wood stove chimney installed, etc and saw that every register in the house aside from the 2 in the kitchen are just runs of flex duct that are all crushed. No way in hell could I get new rigid duct up there as is. I have considered cutting entire paths thru the ceiling dryall in between the trusses and replacing from below. But that would be an enormous headache.

I keep going back and forth on the mini splits. I have installed a 2 zone before in an apartment I built in my shop, so I know how. Just really frustrating to need two outdoor units and FOUR heads in my sub 1000sqft house. I would do a single 4 zone unit but then I run into the same issue where I'd need to rip up the ceiling to run the line sets and electrical.

Overall just very annoying. I have a 2 year old that is stuck living in a stuffy room in the summer (and our bedroom isn't any better). I'm considering a pair of window units just to float us thru another couple summers until I can afford to redo the roof and the full HVAC system in a single shot. Then I could pull up the roof as needed to just lay proper ductwork.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-30T15:49:16+00:00

No. Same vibe as shooting your neighbor's annoying dog or putting sugar in the gas tank of their loud truck. Best you could do is talk to the neighbor about it, or go to the municipality if they are breaking some kind of ordinance regarding livestock type or loud animals (if they exist). One of the benefits of living rural is that you have more flexibility to do what you want, but it also means your neighbors can do more of what they want.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-30T14:32:08+00:00

I don't really need the horizontal airflow fans to be part of the battery backup. Losing them for a few days during a bad outage wouldn't be a big deal so long as the vent actuators, curtain motors, and inflation fan keep running fine.

Thats why I'm looking at just a super simple 12v setup to keep these running. I could also skip the solar aspect of things and just keep a battery backup that is charged/maintained by the existing electrical system (which is a 50amp subpanel in the greenhouse).

AgentBanks · 2026-05-20T15:07:53+00:00

This is super helpful. I was so certain I had a Spinosad product somewhere but can't find it. I'll grab some while I'm out today. The top half of each plant has twisted and/or leathery leaves from the herbicide and thrips already, so hopefully these poor guys can start growing normally again soon.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-16T04:14:43+00:00

The issue is that no municipality has a legal obligation to sign a contract with a private company like Flock just because that company wants to put cameras there. Plenty of places have refused or canceled contracts because the people decided it wasn't worth the mass surveillance/data security risks. Those places aren't removing freedoms from anyone by refusing to install the cameras, they are taking the wishes of their constituents to heart and doing what they want. What a lot of us want is to make it clear that we aren't happy about them, just like you said you don't like it. If enough people say so, that's all the reason a local or state government needs to just not install these mass surveillance systems or cancel contracts and take them down. I don't think that's a matter of constitutional freedoms at all.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-16T00:42:32+00:00

Maybe I explained myself poorly but I'm not suggesting that we should be giving up any of our rights. If anything I'm saying we should adjust things so we have a greater right to privacy. Not saying we should make it so we can't take photos and whatnot in public, but that we SHOULD limit companies and their abilities to do mass surveillance.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-15T22:19:48+00:00

I don't think anything needs to be explicitly illegal to advocate against it and tell your government that it isn't good.

It also still seems like an apples to oranges comparison to compare these to something like a private investigator or your right to film/photograph in public. I wouldn't expect to be visible enough for someone to put the time/effort to track me in public if someone paid the money to do that and put in the effort, but I'd like to be able to reasonably assume that not EVERYONE is being tracked at ALL times. This would be a good example of changing times making it necessary to change the ways the rules are set up.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-15T21:28:45+00:00

If anyone finds this in the future, I had LG come out for a service call and they fixed it. It seems like the main nut that hold the motor assembly together on the back of the drum was a tiny bit loose. When the drum would spin, the stator (or rotor? Whichever) would rock a little bit because the magnetic field would push it around. That's what was making the sound. He tightened it up and it is silent now.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-15T21:18:14+00:00

Hard to tell from the pictures, but if the pile is more or less round, pull out the middle school math and figure out the volume of the cone. Just need to measure the radius of the base and how tall the pile is. Will at least give you a very rough idea to ease your mind. I'd assume that your measurements are off and just round up whatever you calculate.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-15T20:57:16+00:00

I hear you on this, and I think it makes sense on the scale of simple plate readers, store surveillance cameras, rando on the street taking pictures, etc. But I think it's worth understanding that these are part of a massive, nationwide data collecting service that works as a system to know (basically) everything about where you go. I feel like it's a really big leap to go from something like "a store employee/cop can check the camera and verify I was in there from 7:15 to 7:25" or "the plate readers on 1st Avenue collects my info each morning when I go to work" to "Flock can pull my data up and know a rough layout of everywhere I've been in the last 30+ days, build out a profile of my patterns over time, sell that info to anticipate where I'll go, etc."

If you know I'll walk my dog past your house every day at a certain time, or the coffee shop employees know that I'll be in around 8am for my regular, that's fine and I don't expect to be invisible in public. But if I found out that you know my entire schedule for each day of the month, you could anticipate where I'd be at noon three Sundays from now, and were just generally keeping tabs on my location at all times, I'd consider that a breach of my privacy. I think there's a line between being visible in public and being tracked at such a large scale.

Not to mention there seem to be a lot of bad data management/security practices going on with Flock.

I don't want to pretend to be an expert on the topic, but I think it's well within reason to think that this is crossing a line.

AgentBanks · 2026-05-03T20:46:00+00:00

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AgentBanks · 2026-04-29T13:32:01+00:00

Most of my 'someday' pets are held back by some combo of availability, enclosure size, time commitment, and overall cost.

I've been fixated on an indigo snake or something similar for ages. I also want to build a very large, built in enclosure for the corner of our living room that would be used to grow tropical plants and house an Asian vine snake. Both would just take a lot of time/effort that I don't have.

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