Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Linguini with Clam Sauce

As most of you know, I lead a fairly reclusive lifestyle. Yes, by central Connecticut’s standard of shopping malls and condos, we rustic upstate Yankees live in the boonies among the trees. Of course, someone from Washington state would laugh at what we call the woods. On the other hand, a New York City native living only 100 miles away would think he was on a wilderness trek when visiting our part of Connecticut. It’s all relative. While I live in a wooded area, about the only thing around here that’s really rustic are the trees. Our house is a hexagonal California redwood contemporary that exemplifies the personal style and expression of a mad scientist with carpentry tools. Think of a wooden octopus and you have a reasonably accurate description of the ground plan. It would look out of place next to a traditional New England saltbox or Cape Cod, but, isolation has its advantages (very few neighbors). And, to me it’s always been the official Circuit Cellar.

Being an engineer whose expertise is embedded process control has left its mark. Our home contains about as much copper as wood. There are wires everywhere. The security system connects to the home control system; the driveway sensors talk to the video and security system; the video and entertainment electronics talk to the home control and lighting system, and so on. Everything was mostly direct-wired, so the result is one gigantic wiring maze.

In all the time I’ve lived there, I’ve installed computerized controls on everything except the heating and air-conditioning systems. It’s not that I can’t instrument them, but rather that I’ve had little success proving enough tangible benefit to justify complicating an otherwise uncomplicated environmental system.

We just built a large kitchen addition, and I thought I would try it once again. As the contractor was constructing the kitchen, I added what seemed like another mile of copper for temperature sensors, heat and vent controls, and a shade canopy extension. In combination with sensors detecting outside temperature and humidity, I presumed I could calculate heating and cooling ramps and anticipate demand more efficiently. Then, I could tie it all into the home control system and let it control everything.

When the crew finished, I was ready to begin doing my thing. Typically, that means blowing holes in the walls for the control devices, kludging control schemes for equipment that wasn’t originally intended to be computerized, and stringing yet more wires. Ten years ago this would have been a no-brainer. I would have jumped right in and then written articles about the electronic transformation. Today, I’m a little more practical about such adventurous ideas. This time, I decided to make linguini with clam sauce (it’s a kitchen after all) and think about it for a while. In fact, I decided to cook for a couple of months.

It was déjà vu all over again. I could rip apart the whole place and call it “computerized,” but in this particular Connecticut location, I doubt that I’d see a significant advantage over traditional controls. The benefit provided by trees that give shade, extending the shade canopy, and opening a few windows seemed to be adequate for all but extreme weather. The real extremes I hadn’t encountered before, however, were the ones the kitchen created.

Kitchen vent hoods have reached new levels of performance. While they certainly exhaust smoke and smells efficiently, it’s what they don’t tell you in the kitchen store that you have to be careful about. When my 1300-CFM blower winds up, if it hasn’t sucked everything including the furnace out the vent, somewhere between the first and second flips of the steak au poivre, it’s dropped that cozy kitchen about 30° in the middle of January. Of course, the opposite can be true in the summer. Turning on a six-burner Viking stove is about the same as firing up a medium-sized furnace in the middle of your kitchen. Ultimately, the environmental control solution isn’t a duel between Linux and Windows CE. The solution is straightforward: Add about 60¢ of baseboard heating and a 2-ton air conditioner.

The primary lesson I learned during the couple of months of gathering data was basically that I like to eat too much. Being able to claim that it’s all computerized won’t make it a better place to cook and entertain. As for the environment, it seems that the extremes are the dominate issue, and centralized environmental control wouldn’t add any advantage over the distributed individual heating and cooling controls standard with conventional installations. Every time I’ve tried to justify it, I’ve come away with the same answer: In this tech-crazy world it’s hard to admit it, but, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: October-2002