Radiant Heat

Radiant heat (definition):  noun, heat transferred in the form of electromagnetic (infrared) radiation rather than by conduction or convection.

Last night Patricia and I attended a benefit here in Belfast in order to raise money for the Waldo County 'winter heating fund'.  In these tough economic times, some residents cannot afford to heat their homes.  Heating oil is nearly four dollars per gallon, or about 50% higher than three years ago!  Whenever we get home on a cold, winter night here in Maine, we are so thankful to be warm.  Just the thought of a cold house is very unnerving.

Home heating has been in my 'genes' for as long as I can remember.  As a young boy I would often hear my father, who owned Dirlam Heating Co., discuss heating issues with 'his men', Barrett Jones, and Baisel 'Spence' Spencer, at his shop on West 11th Avenue.  Together they installed hundreds of new heating systems in Eugene between 1948 and 1959, both commercial and residential.  Their specialty was floor 'radiant heat', which consisted of placing a 'closed loop' of 1/2 inch copper tubing on a 4 x 4 inch wire mesh on top of a bed of pea gravel, prior to pouring a concrete slab floor.  Hot water circulating through the tubing would heat the floor, which in turn would 'radiate heat' into the room.  The post-World War II housing boom was going strong in Eugene, and most of the new homes were one-story, and built on a slab floor with no basement.  This was an ideal situation for my dad when it came to selling radiant heat.  In the late 1940's these systems used oil burners as water heaters.  Dad would store ten or more new 250 gallon oil tanks in the back of the shop.  Deanna and I had more fun jumping from one tank to another, as they were all stacked on end.  Sure glad we never fell to the ground!

I was able to help the family business in the summer of 1958.  Dad taught me how the tie the copper tubing to the wire mesh by using 10 inch pieces of wire.  I would travel from job to job with Barrett and Spence in a 1953 Ford panel truck with the Dirlam Heating Co. logo painted on both sides.  At the job site I would follow behind Barrett and Spence as they rolled out the tubing, and would make a tie every four feet on a straight away, and then tie each 180 degree curve with three ties.  Once the tubing was in place, Barrett would test the closed system by using a portable air compressor.  He would stop by the next day to make sure that there was no drop in air pressure on the gauge.  This process ensured that once water was placed in the tubing, there would be no leaks!  My dad would then give the concrete guys the okay to pour the slab floor.

Barrett and Spence were always so kind to me, and would often bring along an extra bottle of Coca-Cola so that I could join them in for a 'coke break' at the job site.  This was an added bonus for me, since we kids were only allowed one bottle of 'pop' per week at home.  My cousins in Minnesota had never heard the term 'pop', and they always laughed and said it was 'soda', not 'pop'.  Coke came in a six-and-a-half ounce glass bottle that was refillable.  Barrett showed me how you could tell where the bottle originated by checking the bottom of the bottle.  We had mainly 'Eugene' bottles, but occasionally we found 'Medford', or even 'Sacramento'.  Barrett liked to tease me in a good way, so whenever we would arrive at a new job site he would proudly announce to the plumbers that I was the boss, so be careful what was you say!  Every month or so he would ask me if I had a girl friend, and I would always reply with a 'not yet'.

Each year Dad would have a booth at the Home Show at the Lane County Fair Grounds in Eugene, which would feature his latest 'radiant heat' technology.  He and my mother would paint by hand all of the signs, and the heating diagrams, for his exhibit.  Hundreds of folks would stop by over the course of the weekend to discuss heating options with him or Barrett.  Dad's biggest 'break through' came in 1953 when he invented a novel 'electric furnace' that could take the place an oil burner.  The local power company, EWEB, was offering electricity for less than one cent per kilowatt hour (about 1/2 the cost nationwide), now that hydroelectric power was readily available from several new dams in the Cascade Mountains.  This new electric furnace would heat water on demand by use of a series of heating elements inside in a manifold made with large copper pipes.  Dad always preferred Honeywell thermostats, and controls, for his radiant heating systems due to their high quality and reliability.   He even visited their headquarters in Minneapolis in the early 1950's to find out about some of their latest new products.

In 1948, my dad sold his '36 Ford Coupe in which he first traveled to Oregon, and purchased a used 1939 Chrysler Imperial 8 cylinder sedan.  This beautiful maroon car, like some autos in this era, came with no cabin heater.  Many years later my father would tell me that he was able to fabricate a floor radiant heating system that circulated hot water from the engine in order to overcome this deficiency.  I've never heard of anyone else modifying their car in this way!

Dad pioneered another interesting development during his 'radiant heat days' with his friend Bill Eaton, who was a manager at EWEB.  Namely, the use of off-peak electricity to heat a slab floor.  In order to demonstrate the feasibility, the electric furnace at our house, which of course had floor radiant heat, only operated between 10 pm at night until 6 am the following morning.  The warm slab floor would then continue to radiate heat during the day.  The experiment worked, and the house stayed comfortable all day long!  Dad was curious if the earth below the slab remained at a relatively constant temperature, so he drilled a 1/4 inch diameter hole through the slab floor in our family room to a depth of about 10 inches.  He then placed a thermocouple in the hole, and attached it to a big Leeds and Northrup chart recorder, about twice the size of a computer printer, so that he could measure the temperature below the slab throughout a 24 hour period.  Since off-peak electricity can be sold at a lower price than electricity during peak demand, this allowed some folks to save money on their heating bill.  However, this was perhaps not the best way to go for people that enjoy sleeping in a cool room at night!

Eventually copper tubing became very expensive, and floor radiant heat was rarely called for by architects and builders in the Eugene area.  Electric baseboard heaters became a much cheaper option, so Dirlam Heating had to make the transition to yet another new technology.  However, my father always felt that nothing compared to the comfort of floor radiant heat.  The invention of cross-linked polyethylene tubing, commonly called PEX, ushered in a dramatic revival of radiant heat in the U.S. and Europe, in recent years.  I'm sure that this 'comeback' would have made Dad very happy.  He was always hopeful that wind and solar energy would become the method of choice for heating both homes and commercial buildings.  Perhaps this dream will come true too.










      

No Man is an Island, but Eugene is a City in Oregon

On my 40th birthday I received a Peanuts birthday card from a close friend that knew I was born in Eugene, Oregon.  The front of the card read 'No Man is and Island', and the inside 'but Eugene is a City in Oregon!'  This card was special to me, and I kept it posted in my office at Pfizer for many years.  Why?  I think it brought back memories from my youth in Eugene, and I was proud that Charles Schulz made reference to my town in a clever way.

Eugene was named after Eugene Skinner who was resident 'number one' when he built a cabin in 1846 at base of a small butte called Yapo-ah by the Calapooya tribe.  By the time I was hiking up to the remains of his cabin in the early 1950s, the butte had been conveniently renamed Skinner's Butte.  As I grew older, I realized that many Indian names were changed by the 'White Man'.  Too bad, the Indian names always had such a nice sound to them, and they named them first!  The view from on top of Skinner's Butte was really fantastic.  Below I could see the Willamette Valley (pronounced 'will-lam-ette, dammit'); it was surrounded by tall mountains to the east, west, and south.  The Willamette River was at the base of the butte, and it flowed north up the valley to Portland over 100 miles.  I guess you could say that Skinner had an 'eye for a view'!

My father, Charles, first traveled to Oregon from his home in Redwood Falls, Minnesota in November, 1936 in his new Ford Coupe. He and his brother Aubrey visited their Uncle John Durlam in Lebanon, which is 50 miles north of Eugene.  Uncle John, and one of his brothers who lived in Iowa, changed their name from 'Dirlam' to 'Durlam' when they both got jobs with the U.S. Post Office.  They felt that they should have a phonetic spelling of their surname now that they were government workers!  My grandfather, Philip, kept the original spelling from his father William who came from the village of Dirlammen in Hessen, Germany.  I visited Dirlammen in 1992, and it was quite a thrill to meet a farmer with whom I shared the same last name, perhaps he was a distant relative.

During my father's visit to Lebanon, he went down to Eugene in search of a job.  He had graduated from Dunwoody Institute (now Dunwoody College of Technology) in Minneapolis, and was eager to move to Oregon if he could find a suitable job.  Times were tough after the Great Depression, and fortunately he was able to do so when he was hired by Hope Refrigeration and Electric in Eugene.  Little over a year later in January, 1938, he married his fiancée Lois, who was also from his hometown.  My oldest sister, Deanna, was born in Eugene in 1940, and I came along in 1943.   My youngest sister, Terri, was born in 1949, and my brother Ron in 1953.  I was named John after my father's Uncle John, and given the middle name Philip from my grandfather.  Of course we kept the original spelling of our surname!

Eugene, with a population of 50,000, was a center for the timber industry in Oregon, and as a young boy I became aware of the many sawmills and plywood factories on the outskirts of town.  The rusty, steel 'teepee sawdust burners', which were 50 feet high, could be seen belching smoke from a great distance.  Logging trucks carrying gigantic Douglas fir logs, sometimes up to 5 feet in diameter, were a common sight whenever we traveled east toward the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, or west into the Coast Range on our way to the Oregon Beach.  We later learned that the largest logs came from 'virgin' or 'old growth' forests, and these trees were over 150 years old, and in the case of some cedar groves 500 to 1000 years old!  We would see large tracts of land 'mowed down' along the highways when we would take car trips into the mountains, and it would always make me feel sad to see tree stumps and dirt instead of a beautiful forest.

Weyerhaeuser Timber Company would invite our grade school class to see their mill in nearby Springfield, and their folks would tell us that their company had a program to reforest the logged areas with Douglas Fir seedlings in order to protect the future of their industry.  We were told that within 60 to 70 years there would be a mature stand of trees, ready for another round of logging.  Somehow this timeline didn't compute when you're only 10 years old!  The mill sounds were ear-piercing inside the factory, and the smell of 'rotten eggs' from the paper pulp process was really bad.  I didn't understand how the mill workers could smell this odor all day long and still do their jobs.  As we took the long bus ride back to school, I was quite certain I did not want to work at Weyerhaeuser when I grew up.  Fortunately we were given souvenir wooden patches that were football shaped, but flat, that were used to patch the knots that had to be cut out of the thin veneer before they were stacked and glued to make 4 x 8 foot plywood sheets.  These little 'wooden boats' about 4 inches long made the trip to the mill worthwhile!

Farms and orchards were numerous in the Willamette Valley.  The fertile soil and mild weather were very conducive to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, as well as grain crops.  Each fall my folks would buy bags of filberts (i.e., hazelnuts) and English walnuts, still in the shell, at local orchards.  Deanna and I learned how to crack nuts without smashing them or our fingers, so that mom could freeze the nuts for use throughout the year.  We always had our own family garden, so we had plenty of berries and vegetables in the summer.  Mom would routinely get out her Mason jars and can any extra produce.

However, living in Eugene did have a downside in the winter.  It would often rain or drizzle, and dense fog would hang in the valley.  Folks would often joke how they hadn't seen the sun for days on end.  We later learned that SAD was more prevalent in our climate, and light therapy was a useful treatment. Perhaps my biggest disappointment as a child 'weather wise' was that we rarely had snow.  Thank goodness my folks would occasionally take a drive up the McKenzie Highway to the 'snow line' so that we could play in the snow for an hour or two!  Only in January, 1969, when I was a graduate student in sunny Los Angeles, did 'The Big Snow' dump over three feet of the white stuff on Eugene.  The attached photo taken by Sam Blackwell at Lane Community College gives you an idea of how much snow fell.  My brother Ron, who was 15 at the time, proudly sent me a photo showing him standing in snow up to his waist.  And to think that Eugene did not have a single snow plow in their Department of Public Works!

Now and then as a boy, I would hear the famous quote by Horace Greeley, 'go west, young man, go west'.  I would immediately think of my father, and how he had done exactly that at a very young age.  I believe that my folks really felt that they had found the 'Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey'.  I too was very grateful that fate would lead them to such a wonderful place as Eugene.  Again, 'no man is an island, but Eugene is a city in Oregon'.