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01 October 2012

Picturequote

This is a quote from Conan O'Brien when he was on The Nerdist Podcast.
...if you have a creative mind. I've described it sometimes as a very powerful lawnmower. It can do all this great stuff but every now and then it turns around and it rolls over you and chews you up.
When I heard that I felt an odd sense of relief. During school I would get that all the time. I'd have so many ideas and be doing so much research that I'd hardly produce anything. Information can be stifling like that. If you really consider the consequences our your actions, good or bad, inaction at times seems inevitable.

This is a reused liquid CO2 storage tank. The walls are 1" thick steel (I've cut lots of them with an oxyacetylene torch), the insulation surrounding the tank is about 4" of closed cell rigid foam, and the covering is fiberglass. They're actually fairly inexpensive. My dad uses them for hot water storage for the steam systems we build. This way we can spec a much smaller boiler and let it run overnight. Also, when you heat up water it drops all its solids, so by doing the heating in a separate tank we keep our boilers cleaner. Plus these are easier to clean out. We install the pipes which becomes the closed loop for the steam. Over a week the 180 degree water may drop just a few degrees in the dead of winter.