Map of recent visitors to Betty's

[Angela M...]

I had one of those little air filters but the filters were costly and then hard to find after a few years. After buying the house the furnace had an Electronic Air cleaner on it that worked pretty good with permanent washable filters. Last year I rented a new furnace/ A/C unit and humidifier with a UV light air purifier also. The air filter on that is 5 inches thick and replaced by the heating company every four to six months. The first few years in the house we had two small window air conditioners to help with the heat and humidity and then I bought a central A/C unit from where I worked (built it myself on the line after work) so I knew it was a quality unit and then installed it with some help. After 36 years it was failing and the R22 freon it was charged with was now illegal to use and hard to find anyway.

[Betty]

They still make r22 until 2020. Production has been cut back though, & reclaimed r22 is almost expensive as virgin r22. The "drop in" replacements for r22, like r422, r410, & r38 (mo99) aren't quite as "drop in" as advertised. The oil won't circulate properly in them so you have to change out the oil to something more compatible called ester POE oil I believe, or you'll grind up your compressors. Those replacements also eat away worn gaskets, seals, & valves, so you have to replace all of them before using the new gases. You will also lose about 8-15% efficiency with the replacement gasses.

Watch where you get reclaimed r22. Some of it is old & contaminated with acidic old oil, particles, & other hydrocarbons if it wasn't cleaned up properly. Some had even "topped off" low freon with propane! Propane works good as a substitute, but I wouldn't want it circulating around in the hot parts of an AC unit, or leaking near those hot parts, sparking relays, & switches.

Many of those brand new Chinese window AC units still use R22, but they'll never admit it.

Modern units are a lot more efficient than a 36 year old one though. 30-40 years ago a simple 10,000 BTU window unit would draw around 1,5000-1,800 watts. A modern $89, 10,000 BTU unit only draws 350-600 watts after it's been on a few minutes, & warmed up. But their compressors no longer come with a 3-5 year warranty.

Beware that UV air purifier units are ozone (O3) generators, just like coronal discharge purifiers. But the UV ones usually generate less ozone. Ozone (O3) is very bad for your lungs, pets, & plastic or rubber objects in your home - - including your modern TV screens. It is very corrosive, which is how it kills germs & odors. Also you should not run them in high humidity. Using them in combination with a humidifier or on a humid day stops the ozone & purifying process. With humidity, it generates dangerous nitrous oxide & other bad gases instead. They should be used in a dry environment, to clean the air in a room, while no people or pets are in the room.

As far as replacement filters, look to see what you got around the house or in the hardware store to make your own filters cheaper. They have "cut your own" filters in stores cheap. Much pool filter & large pro fish tank filter material will do the same job filtering air, but can be washed in soap or bleach, then rinsed, & re-used.

[Angela M...]

Yes r22 is available and used in the U.S. but illegal in Canada for a few years now, so we sold all our supply to our parent company in Phillie. They would use it in the repair shops and their small manufacturing plant. We had large tanks of it outside our factory and deliveries were always at night because it took some time off load and interrupted our charging stations. We had just taken delivery when the government inspector showed up and told us we had a week to arrange for it to be taken out of our tanks. We also had many smaller tanks around the factory in repair stations of reclaimed r22 that we loaded on our finished product trucks to go to the U.S. I managed to save a small tank to refill my A/C unit after I fixed a leak in the system. 

[Angela M...]

Thanks for the info on my UV unit, I did not know any of that. I must check with the heating company that installed it and it is mounted in the plenum above the on board humidifier. It mainly runs in the heating season as I had turned it off for awhile recently before getting a replacement lamp. it has been in a couple of years now and I did not see any adverse effects on the TV's or rubber items in my workshop. Wow, that is where my rubber and latex pants are stored in a container under the workbench.

[Betty]

I used to use a UV filter that emitted low but "safe" levels of ozone. With COPD, & knowing the dangers, I used it in an unoccupied back room I use for storage. When I moved to a smaller place, there was no room for my stuff. So I use the bedroom to store my stuff, & live in the rest of the place "studio apartment" style.

It's sealed up most of the time, because I only go back there to get something or pack something away. So the air gets a musty smell, & stale, even with the window cracked open. Maybe it's from the old carpeting in there, or all the stuff stored in there.

So about once a week or so, when I'm not in there, I'd run the UV filter for a few hours or the day, while the room was unoccupied. It worked. It made the room smell fresh again for a week or so. My sissy clothes, & my less used clothes are stored back there.

After close to 2 years of using it about once a week or 2 back there, I noticed almost all the elastic bands on underwear, & sweatpants stored back there lost their elasticity. The elasticity of the arm openings of my puffed sleeve dresses was shot too. Rubber bands in a drawer back there would break when stretched. Some plastic bags in there were becoming stiff or brittle. Radios stored back there got static in the volume controls. All ozone damaged.

The LCD TV in there got faint dark patches on the screen when turned on, especially near edges of the screen. The low level of ozone, over time ate away the seal around the LCD panel, so that the panel layers were separating, deforming, & corroding.

The bad effects of high levels of ozone may not take too long to notice, but low levels from those "safe" filters can take a long time or years for the bad effects to be noticed. But the damage done to your stuff, equipment, clothing, & lungs it causes will be permanent.

It took almost 2 years for the damage it did back there to be noticeable.

[Betty]

Map of visitors to Betty's since May 2016.

You can see a similar map by scrolling down to the bottom of most of our pages, if you aren't using ad & script blocking. Many of our features will not work or work properly if don't set those tools to make an exception for Betty's.

But the dots are too big so cluttered & lacking fine detail. In this map the dots are tiny so show a better view of the cluttered areas. The light circled dots are people who were currently here during the screenshot about 10 minutes ago.

[Betty]

We've had 389,601 hits to Betty's in the past 30 days. Our busiest day in August was 17,062 hits on Sat. Aug. 6th. Our quietest day was last Tue. with 10,134 hits. We've had 3,132,218 hits to Betty's in 2016 so far. At this rate, we won't break our 2016 record, as the busiest year ever at Betty's with over 5 million hits. More likely it will be one of our typical busy years though, at around 4.5 million hits for the year. Our busiest month for 2016 was in April at 444,577 hits for the month. Our quietest month for 2016 was July at 345,588 hits for the month. For 22 years, July is almost always our quietest month as most of our visitors spend more time outdoors, traveling, & on vacation.

We are currently carrying over 30,000 pictures, & hundreds of stories at Betty's served directly from our servers. That doesn't include thousands more cool pix at our PSK/UncleGadget site.

These huge numbers of traffic, enormous content, security, & privacy that we provide cannot be carried on a small or cheap server. During peak times, & busy days, it would even be difficult or impossible to handle it all on a single large, expensive dedicated server.

So please don't forget to donate to keep all that content flowing, & continue to serve it to everybody who wants it. As we're getting more traffic than ever before, it has become an expensive project to keep running continuously, reliably, 24/7.

Below, is some of our current stats in graph form, like recent visitor browsers & OS's used during the past 30 minutes. I'm still surprised on how many users are still using that nasty-ass Windows 10. Don't you people ever read the news, or do you  just listen to the ads & reviews sponsored by their advertisers?

I have to admit though, if I was getting free computers, software, gadgets, or making $200-$1500 a month in ad revenue from my sponsors & advertising while reviewing stuff, it would be very tempting to write a good review about their product, or at least avoid saying too much bad about it.

I see Pale Moon & Firefox are still getting used here more than the average public. I guess we have more users concerned about their privacy than your average fool on the internet. They are much more private & secure than any other browser. And no matter what you set your privacy settings in Google Chrome, it's still not very private.

Of course, if you're using Windows 10, you're throwing all that privacy out the window anyway. Any no, contrary to popular reviews from Windows fan boys, or those who have corporate sponsors, you cannot shut W10 spying off. You can change some setting to make it look like you shut it off, but it's still always on. Plus, no matter what your settings are, MS will reset your W10 settings to their liking with the next update.

I still see a slow rise of Linux users, as W10, & MS telemetry/spying, & jerking around their customers, slowly is making people move to something else. Let's not forget, that Android, Chrome books, & Kindle devices are also Linux. Some people are just not tech savvy to move to a traditional Linux, or not want to bother with the fuss of it. So are transitioning to Linux powered easy, cheaper android devices instead.

I have not seen any increase in apple product usage during this recent Windows/MS year-long scandal though. I'm sorry apple fans, but even if someone could afford an apple product, many still consider them way overpriced for what they're getting. I was shocked the first time I had an apple laptop in for repairs, it was a 2005 ibook. It was all technology from around 1998 & 1999 inside, & also put together rather poorly.

And for long time apple users, now they're stuck in a rut. After years of doing things apple's way, they find it almost impossible to change to anything else because they've grown too used to it. It's not better, you've just grown too comfortable with it, so anything else seems wrong. It's like if you only drove the same car for 20 years, you almost have to learn to drive again when you get a new one.

It's ironic though, because those who have grown too used to apple stuff, would find it easier to switch to some versions of Linux because many are quite similar. Linux is a friendlier interface built on Unix. Apple is a friendly interface built on Unix.

Unfortunately the ones that would consider switching to a different OS are windows users who recently have been getting forced to switch to W10, or discovered they're getting MS spyware sneaking into their older windows OS's.

[Betty]

Map of visitors during the past 30 minutes.

[Betty]

Map of visitors during the past 30 minutes, browsers they used, & the OS they used.

[Betty]

Map of visitors to Betty's during the past half hour.

Pretty busy for the morning. It's the pre-dawn hours in my town, & still dark as night. But already there's a lot of people visiting Betty's from my time zone.