Tuesday, August 28, 2012

SD Home Hot Tub and Landscape Show

Wow... Just over a month in and I'm already having 10 day streaks without a post!  last week was a bit busy for me, things are really getting going in the lab, so I haven't had much downtime to sit and write.  Not that I have much time this morning...er afternoon.  I've got cell cultures that need to be fed, yeast that need to be re-cultured, proteins waiting to be purified and parasites itching to infect those aforementioned cell cultures.  It's a regular zoo here.

This weekend we went to the San Diego Home, Hot Tub & Landscape Show at the SD Convention Center. We had received a free admission coupon in the mail (although it turns out there was no admission fee anyways!), and figured it would be something to check out since both Mandy and I had the day off Sunday.  It was a relatively small show, occupying less than a quarter of the SD Convention Center's main hall with probably 100 vendors or so.  I think the main show is actually the San Diego Home Garden Shows that will be at the Del Mar Racegrounds on Sept 14-16 and again in the spring.  Too bad we have to pay for that one!

But the recurring themes at this weekend's show were Solar Power and Epoxy Flooring. 

It's a very tempting idea to install solar panels on our house. San Diego has sun nearly every day, we have no real shading to speak of on our roof, and panels would let us be completely energy independent since we're pretty low usage (thank you, SDenergychallenge.com for showing that).   But at a cost of at least $5-10k, I think we may be waiting a few years. The government is offering some pretty good rebates, but it's still a major commitment. Maybe in a few years when the technology improves to the point where it's easy enough to run down to  home depot, buy some panels and storage batteries and hook it up yourself for a few hundred dollars. Wouldn't that be nice?

As for the epoxy pebble flooring, all I could think was "how difficult is this going to be to clean in the long run?"  All these little nooks and crannies for things to slowly accumulate in.  Ugh.  But they did have some very nice designs and it seems a pinch to install.  But what it did remind me of was my college dream of making a coffee table with epoxy and bottle caps.  Thousands seem to have done it, but I still think it would be a ton of fun making one.  Too bad I tossed out all those bottle caps I collected over several years in college planning to make one (don't worry, I had help collecting them).

Still, there are so many possibilities with epoxy.  I started typing epoxy in to the google search bar, and one of the autofills was for "Epoxy penny floor"!  Awesome! Although THAT looks like a lot of work....and pennies.  They said it took 40,000! Better start collecting change now. =)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The penny flooring must have been painful... but the results are absolutely brilliant. I have though about epoxying bottle caps and corks to my kegerator...but have never taken it on. Talk about timing....I'm about to epoxy my basement floor, wanna send me all your pennies?


Unknown said...

So what are you putting under the epoxy? Pebbles? Or something else?

I have one of those big liter containers in my amazon cart just waiting for the inspiration of what to epoxy!

Mandy said...

Babe, you did not talk about what we did afterwards. I think walking around the marina was a lot more interesting than the home and garden convention.