'Round and 'round

I guess I'm just an easily excitable guy. Doesn't take much to fire my imagination and get me spinning and dreaming and bobbling ideas about in my head like a pinball in a loose machine. It keeps me entertained, but I find myself on constant watch for the specters in the shadows. Those ideas and thoughts whose basis is fundamentally flawed before the spinning even starts. Chasing these can lead to some pretty ugly stuff.

To combat this tendency I have tried to make note of this fact (over and over again) so that I might better learn to check myself before the fall. Then, perhaps, I might have a fighting chance to get a hand-up or turn away before I wind up face down in the pavement. Sometimes it works, othertimes, well... I end up spitting blood and licking broken teeth, knowing full well that it was probably my own damn fault.

To be honest, most of the time my twisted ideas never get so far, I'll toss them up long before they have a chance to fester. But every once in a while, I seem to average about one a year, an idea will come along that keeps me spinning until I have either had enough, or understand the process clearly enough to file it away into my "gee, that's a neat thingy... wonder what better use could be made of it" closet.

Which brings me to "Howstuffworks." It's not a site I visit everyday, but it's always there to shine a bit of light into the darkness of how our physical world works. If I get a wacky notion, or want to get the skinny on how something works, I'll check here first. Their authors usually present the material with a no nonsense approach that is just what I'm looking for.

Now, four paragraphs deep, we finally come to today's starting point, Refrigeration. It all started like this: The local electric company announced a rather severe rate hike in our area, and with summer coming on strong I'm thinking it's high time to get that extra insulation into the attic that I have been putting off for years. This led me to how our aging air conditioner system is overdue for a checkup, and then to how a good friend of mine recently finished building a house with a geothermal heating/cooling system built into the design from the ground up.

Basic refrigeration is interesting stuff, as I had never really understood quite what was taking place. I knew there gasses and pumps and all that, but I had never considered how the system as a whole worked. All in all, it wasn't too hard get a handle on. Then I came across the bit about the Peltier/Thomson/Seebeck effects, which are basically different spins on the same electrically charged principle that describes the heating and cooling properties induced when electricity is applied to various metals and combinations of metals. Now that's cool!

The math is way over my head, but the basic principles are simple enough. I'm still absorbing all this new information and hopefully I'll go ahead and get the insulation in the attic before trying to take out loan for a whole new heating/cooling system.