Hawaii house retrofit with paper shades

After a year living on the  Kohala coast on the Big Island of Hawaii, we are really enjoying the dry wind and clear, blue skies.   Living in the Kohala desert climate has been a very different experience than our previous years in rainy Hilo and humid Kona.  The summer sun can be ferocious in Kohala and our living room can become a solar oven from sunlight streaming through the windows during the day.  

In the book, “Your Ideal Hawaii Home: How to avoid disaster when buying or building in Hawaii”,  we mention that Hawaii style houses with long eaves that protect from the sun are the most desirable places to live.  Ironically, the place we currently live has three sets of windows on one wall of the living room that extend up two stories high.  During three months of the year, the sun is perfectly located to shine directly through the wall of windows and like a magnifying glass the contents and people in the room below are cooked.  The eaves along the top of the building are about 2 feet too short to protect the windows from the sun.    Though the lower windows have coverings, the upper windows are only tinted.  Even with the tinting treatment, we have gotten sunburned sitting on the couch.  

Our retrofit solution is to cover the upper windows and block the sunlight.  The big challenge is that the windows are 20’ high  which is too high to access with most ladders.   Our first attempt was to push cardboard into the upper window crevice with a pole, but air currents pushed the cardboard out of place no matter how we tried to secure them and they came crashing down on us at random times.  Installing any heavy window covering at that height is dangerous to anyone sitting below.

We recently found an inexpensive solution to the problem by installing temporary paper shades. We hired a local handyman to bring his extra long ladder and install them for us.  The light-weight shades  stick to the top of the window.  Since they are light, air currents only cause them flutter. They look great, far better than cardboard, and the temperature in the living room during the day has gone down by several degrees.

These paper shades are  popular in Hawaii and sold at many hardware stores.  Although, the hardware stores we checked, were sold out of the large sizes we needed, so we bought our White paper Redi-Shade through Amazon.  

Battery technology for Hawaii

Our unexpected night visitor, a rat that ate through our bedroom screen door,  led us to look for a better rat trap.  Our search resulted in a high-tech, battery-powered Rat Trap that zaps rodents rather than crushing them.  The device works because of a new type of lithium battery that reviewers are saying kills tons of rats in their barns and farms before needing to be replaced.  

The latest technology of disposable AA Lithium Batteries last 9 times longer than previous versions. These batteries no longer contain cadmium so they are also less toxic than the first generation of lithium batteries. We are excited about this new technology because we think it could make Hawaii energy independent.

Why?

Hawaii’s perpetual sunshine is great for getting electricity from solar panels, but the problem is how to store all the electricity produced during daylight for use after the sun goes down.  When we had a solar panel in Hilo, the sunlight filled the battery before lunch.  The rest of the day was wasted electricity production.  

If rechargeable car batteries could store 10 times more electricity than they do now, it would solve the problem.  Electric cars batteries would provide weeks of driving instead of hours and big energy users like data storage farms, bakeries, and other manufacturing could become viable in Hawaii with large amounts of electricity stored from low cost solar power.   A power company in Oregon is testing a giant new type of lithium battery to help stabilize their local power grid.

When these new types of  batteries become more widely available, Hawaii residents will be able to generate more low cost solar power and the island’s money spent on imported oil could instead be used to improve the land and everyone’s quality of life.

Living Wheat Free in Hawaii

Bread is expensive in Hawaii and often hard to find fresh, so it was easy to note that my gout attacks occurred after eating a lot of bread.  When researching the relationship between wheat and gout in November 2012, we could find no evidence that wheat caused gout, but we decided to try a wheat free diet anyway.  Though many people report immediate weight loss on a wheat free diet, we both put on 10 lbs.  The wonderful upside has been no gout attacks and the swelling and inflammation I usually have in my feet is gone. The spaces between my toes, where I usually get gout, is now much smaller as are the joints in my fingers.

The problem with modern wheat is thought to be the gliadin protein which acts as an opiate; it misdirects the immune system, increases appetite, and causes emotional highs and lows from surges in insulin production.   

Though gluten intolerance is often seen as a  digestive problem, eating wheat can also cause joint inflammation, skin problems, and respiratory distress without a person having digestive symptoms.  Dr. Kenneth Fine, a researcher at Entero Lab, uses stool samples, rather than blood tests, to detect antibodies in the digestive tract from a reaction to gliadin.  His research has found that 35% of Americans cannot tolerate wheat and more than 80% have genes types that are more likely to have problems with wheat.

Instead of wheat pasta, we now eat brown rice pasta.  We also replaced wheat tortillas, bread, and pancakes with our own dough consisting of rice flour and ground flax.  Ground flax makes dough easier to roll out, so we don’t have to use additives like guar gum or xantham gum. We use almond flour and coconut flour to make cookies and pie crusts.  (We use maple syrup and fruit as sweeteners.)  We also add green pea and buckwheat (which is not wheat in spite of its name) flours, which are actually fruits, in our tortilla and pancake dough. 

The wheat-free diet is challenging as one must totally avoid wheat because the immune response to the gliadin protein can last up to 6 months each time wheat is consumed.  It took us about 6 months for our bread craving to stop and we are just starting to feel that a wheat-free diet is worth all the trouble.  We have found wheat in all sorts of products, even some yogurts and cheeses.  We cut back on our almond flour and nut consumption to get back down to the weight we were before we started the no-wheat diet.  

From a gout perspective, getting rid of wheat has been wonderful.  For the first time since I can remember, my feet and toes are not swollen.  Our skin has changed remarkably; it looks younger and tauter.  Our hair looks glossier, but that may be just from eating so much flax.   Experiences of other 50-something guys is that it takes 4 years to get the ultimate benefit of a flat stomach.  Though our bellies have shrunk, we still have 10 more pounds to lose to gain the full benefit of being wheat-free.