Tonight the salters came out and I felt the all wheel drive kick in on my Subaru while heading to the Minooka Dog Park. Earlier Kanook and I were at Brookfield's Mitchell Park where the northwestern sky turned dark grey and soon a blizzard of snow pellets lashed down at us. People that I met muttered something about global warming.

Back home, there are still some leaves hanging on to the branches of my maple tree. Saturday I hauled a few trash cans of chopped leaves to the dump where I was chastised for not putting them against the wall. Sorry, I'm not a mind reader and all the leaves in the pile seemed like they would welcome some more.

I still have some leaves to contend with. I can probably mulch them with the lawn mower, but as I'm on vacation this week, I spent much of the afternoon looking for clear plastic bags and a mechanical partner to hold the bag open. Two hardware stores, a Home Depot and a Walmart later, none had anything that I wanted. There are plenty of large paper bags but sitting by the curb for the few weeks until pick-up will likely have them fall apart and looking worse than the neighbors who have raked leaves by the road thinking that they will still be picked up.

Driving around town I see a lot of leaves piled by the curb and often flowing into the street. Perhaps some are still scheduled to be picked up, but I know my ward is finished so that makes me wonder whats going to happen to all these leaves waiting for the pick-up that will not come. It seems to me that our communication of the pick-up schedule could have been better conveyed. Or perhaps some people just have not made the effort to search out the information. What I am pretty sure of is that come the first snowfall big enough to bring the plows out, an ugly, leafy mess will be overturned spoiling the small comfort of clean white snow.

Perhaps all of this can be corrected next fall. May I suggest that we take a step back to the colonial days and get the word out by via a Town Crier. Let the Aldermen wear a three cornered hat while walking the streets shouting out the ordinance and rules of leaf handling. Maybe they can include where to buy bags and holders too.

The signs of fall approaching have come. The lush green leaves have begun to show their age, green lawns have gone dormant and some cooler evenings have arrived. Make no mistake, some warm and humid weather is yet to come and there are some of us that will have air conditioner breakdowns and have to decide on buying a new air conditioner.

There have been big changes in air conditioning and huge changes yet to come. The recent federally mandate increase in air conditioning efficiency made air conditioners more expensive, but was largely invisible to the public. The next big change is coming in about one year and it is huge.

Air conditioners run on Freonâ, or so many people think. Details and facts about it are boring but lets call it refrigerant for this blog. Refrigerant comes in many types and what type is used depends on if we are cooling the air in your home, in your car, in your refrigerator or in a food store freezing things or cooling beer or making ice cubes. There is no one size fits all purposes type of “Freon”.

About ten years ago, in preparation for next year, a new refrigerant that is ozone friendly was introduced. It replaced the old favorite R22, and is called R410A. Some call it Puronâ. Call it anything you like but chemically it is R410A and air conditioners that use it are offered by all popular makers of furnaces and air conditioners.

What does this boring information mean to you? At the end of next year, air conditioners that use the old favorite refrigerant, R22, can no longer be made. R22 is also mandated to be produced less and less. This means that R22 to recharge your air conditioner will become more and more expensive! Supply and demand.

So we have a choice when we need to buy a new air conditioner now. Will it use the soon to be obsolete R22 or the refrigerant of the future, R410A? It’s like buying a car or truck and deciding if it runs on gasoline or diesel.

I work in the wholesale distribution end of heating and air conditioning. We sell several different brands of furnaces and air conditioners in many states so have a good idea of what’s going on out there. Some dealers are selling their customers only R410A air conditioners. Some still sell R22. Often this is because the price of the equipment is still a little less than R410A and because they are not comfortable with the new R410A.

So my first point is if you are going to buy a new air conditioner for your house, buy one that uses R410A. The only reason that I could see to buy R22 equipment is if you are selling your house soon or short-term cost is more important than long-term expense. But wait. There is more!

A recent blog encouraged new building codes to prepare for the increased use of electricity to heat our homes and fuel our future electric cars at home. When you buy a new air conditioner, you can go a step further into the future and buy a hybrid air conditioner that can also heat your home. This is called a heat pump.

Heat pumps have been around for many years but the notion that they are for warmer southern states have held back the popularity of them here, until recently. I won’t bore you with the technical stuff that excites guys like me. The facts are that heat pumps are air conditioners that don’t only work a few weeks in the summer but also work year around heating your house too!

Heat pumps can heat your house at times for less than the most efficient natural gas furnace. The savings can be greater if you heat with oil or propane. True, it won’t keep the house warm by itself at colder temperatures, typically below 30 to 40 degrees, but an often-overlooked fact makes them attractive even in places like Alaska. 

In our area, if you count the number of heating hours spent above the 30 to 40 degree range, you will find that it is around one half of our heating season! That means your furnace would run around half of what it otherwise would.

True, heat pumps don’t create heat for free, but the trend is for fossil fuels to increase in price greater than that for electricity. An air conditioner that you buy now will be there on average for fifteen or twenty years. So think about fuel cost trends and a heat pump installed now makes good sense.

How much will a heat pump save you? Many dealers don’t like to sell them because many customers want a figure written down on this. Energy prices are very dynamic and there is no crystal ball to assure what your savings will be. However, experts agree that buying a heat pump now is a forward-looking choice.

Whatever you decide, make sure it uses R410A instead of R22 refrigerant!

 T. Boone Pickens has been spending his own money on TV commercials inviting people to visit his website and read his energy proposal for America. The man makes good sense and I signed up for his email updates.

One item I'm really fascinated with is some information regarding cars being fueled by natural gas. This is nothing new. Over twenty years ago we had a Ford van converted to run on propane. The gas station was by State Fair Park in West Allis and the oil in the engine never seemed to get dirty. Run out of gas before getting to a propane station? We carried a regular propane barbecue grill tank of gas that could be connected and get the truck another 30 miles or so. Even that wasn't really new technology. My uncle had a farm tractor, a Minneapolis Moline, that ran on propane.

On Boone's website is a link to natural gas fueling stations.  Those prices you see are called Gas Gallon Equivalent which means "CHEAP" as compared to gasoline. The Journal recently had an article on compressed natural gas and it was pointed out that there are home fuel pumps available to hook up to your gas meter. It takes a long time to refuel, but imagine never visiting a gas station again. Notice that a CNG station is here in town at the WE Energies site on West Avenue. The bad news is limited hours, probably due to their trucks being about the only ones using it, but I'm sure longer hours would happen if the public begins using it.

So while natural gas can be used to fuel our cars and trucks, what will the additional demand for it do to the price of it? Will it drive up the cost of heating our homes? There is still the so called "Carbon Footprint" that is left behind by burning natural gas, if you buy into that idea. I still believe that the solution to energy needs will be how we create electricity and the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine.

In the past I've criticized new construction as putting a load on our dwindling water resource. This, even though the business that I'm in is dependent on new construction. Briefly, I don't believe that long time residents of the city or county should be put in the same boat of inconvenience to accommodate development and expansion. Those dwindling the resource should be the ones to carry the load. Water wise, this would be prohibiting watering lawns, gardens and washing cars in new developments except with water gathered from cisterns or other non-aqufier sources. On site water recycling of gray water should be included with conservation efforts.

Preparation for the diminished used of petroleum should be implemented in the the building code too.  Electricity is the energy of the future. We will power anything with a petroleum engine with it and we will heat our homes with it. As an expert in the heating and cooling business, I can see gas furnaces going the way of oil furnaces in the next twenty years. Honda has shown a natural gas powered fuel cell generator to recharge electric cars and provide power for the home's electric furnace and heat pump/air conditioner. For those of you with hot water heat, there have been electric powered boilers so don't feel left out.

GM will be introducing the electric car, the Volt, which will run entirely on electricity, recharge at home if desired, but have gasoline back-up so you don't get stranded. In my needs, the electricity range is adequate for most all of my driving around. So the Volt can replace one of my cars and the other can be the guzzler used to pull the boat and so forth.

The building code should anticipate the plumbing changes and increased electrical service needs of the near future and require that it be install NOW in new construction and remodeling of existing homes and buildings. 

"We have met the enemy and he is us" Pogo, Earth Day 1970

OK class, take your Sunday newspaper and turn to page 12A and read the headline; "Judge rules against oil drilling in Michigan forest". Let me start by pointing out that Congress, our body of lawmakers, presently has a national approval rating of 9%. This is one reason why. People are sick and tired and getting poorer partly due to federal judges legislating from the bench. Congress seems to not be interested in doing anything about that. 

We hear the word pristine used often as a reason why we can't drill here or there. Yet I've gone geocaching in seemingly pristine places only to find out that they were restored landfill sites. The things out of place were the occasional pipe sticking out of the ground for water testing. The Discover Channel recently did a special on earth without humans. If we were to vanish from the planet, our roads and buildings would crumble as nature grew in the cracks and crevices. Pollution would be cleaned up by micro-organisms.

Use your best whiny nasal voice here; "Well the big oil companies aren't drilling where they already have leases". Could it be because it isn't cost effective to go after it there, yet? In my travels, I've seen small oil rigs inactive one year and a year or two later they are pumping up and down. Cost effectiveness is why.

We need to get the whole mess going so that we can satisfy our present need for oil while at the same time work toward eliminating our need for it. Congress's approval rating will never get higher than 9% until they begin getting things orchestrated and stop worrying about re-election funding for their cushy jobs. Slapping down judges that are creating roadblocks to this progress would be a good step!

Snapshots are usually thought of as still pictures. A capture of a brief moment in time. Sometimes they can fail to tell the whole story and lead one to incorrect conclusions.  Like taking words out of their context. Politicians love to do that to each other. Sometimes opinions and even conclusions are based on snapshots of information. Wise people are flexible enough to change their opinions and conclusions when presented with the whole video rather than the snapshot or the whole text rather than the snippet. Even wiser people don't come to conclusions without seeing the whole story.

I shudder when world leaders (G8) decide to put economic stress on their countries, such as carbon dioxide emissions, based on a snapshot of the history of the world. I don't think that even a crazy Iranian leader would deny that there was an ice age.  Evidence of warm weather plants have been found at the north pole regions, so it is logical that there have been times of unusual warmth. Global Warming, in other words.  Man was not there to cause it. While the snapshot shows it appears to follow man's industrialization, the video shows otherwise.

The planets Mars and Jupiter have been detected as warming up slightly. Jokes have been made about that but doesn't that mean that some serious evidence to the pop culture beliefs about global warming are being dismissed? Could it be that the sun might be to blame here?

I'm a ham radio operator. We are very familiar with how the sun affects radio signals and every eleven years the sun has a cycle that hugely affects radio.  What other cycles might the sun have that we don't understand or are aware of that could be responsible for climate changes?

Now I hear that clean air may be partly responsible for global warming! Makes sense. What happens to the temperature when a cloud goes overhead on a sunny day? Is man a factor in the particulates clouding the air or might it be volcanoes spewing ash at irregular times?

So long as political science and theories make extreme conclusions based on snapshots, real progress will falter.  We need to see the whole video.