Stagnant Lethality: Demystifying the Hidden Scourge of Legionella as a Climate Refugee TPS-0073

I think this is the hottest day of my life, certainly the hottest day of the year, and one of the hottest days since I've been out here, which is one of the hottest places that I've ever been to and I've ever lived.

So I did take photographs and video of my thermometer that showed off of the meter, approximately, what you would have to estimate is about a 125F degree midday temperature lasting for many hours.

I think I'm still alive. I'm still in the flesh. I'm still embodied. I did not succumb to heat illness, heat stroke, heat exhaustion.

Heat exhaustion is just a constant state of existence for three months, but the more acute symptoms associated with heat stroke that I'm aware of and monitoring for.

I'm in the middle of a baking desert and temperatures that are at least 125F degrees if not more and I'm figuring how to do it without A-C, without grid power without the ideal situation of having an underground bunker.

I'd be happy to bury a welded together system of 55 gallon drums with a dumpster at the bottom as long as it was structurally sound and wouldn't collapse.

I read the spec, you gotta be about 6 ft. under the surface of the Earth, if you wanna be buffered from the extreme temperatures of cool and hot, but don't quote me on that, consult your local underground shelter builder.

I've been forced and contorted into thinking about a lot of ways to to beat the heat. I really envy the elegance of all the creatures around me that ways to work with the sand and get themselves situated so that they're off the X of the killing heat of the sun.

They're designed for that. They're evolved for that. I'm not. I'm definitely handicapped, in an evolutionary sense, given my genetics, where I'm at.

So I have to seek shelter in other ways, and I have to have a little bit of a prosthesis for my sheltering and that first and foremost comes in the form of shade and a minimalistic tiny home.

I have nowhere near enough solar panel and battery power to even keep small fans going 24/7.

But I do have about enough energy to have a couple of small fans going and be charging my electronics and being able to have a digital, nomad life, and office hours of computing, and being connected and being engaged in the modern world of the Internet, with mobile and desktop during the daylight.

Anybody who's done this before would know, there's the unforgiving ratio of efficiency between how much excess energy you get in the day and the storage of batteries. You top off your batteries generally very quickly, and then you deplete them quickly.

The solar panels are very efficient at charging the batteries, but the use of those batteries, when there is no midday sun to keep them topped off, they lose the efficiency of them applying that back into appliances after the solar peak hours.

So you end up having to have a very disproportionate number of batteries or battery capacity within the bank, depending on the type of battery used, of course, to where, to some degree that can be cost prohibitive.

I'm just at a point where I'm willing to gamble with my comfort and to some degree gamble with my life in order to understand what is the minimum amount of landfill karma that I need to maintain order to survive and rewild.

Hopefully at least within the golden years before I die, I want to have spent at least a day, but hopefully more than a year where nothing I eat nothing, drink or utilize for my happy, healthy, robust existence in the wild is ever gonna go to a landfill. That for at least one day, nothing I use is ever gonna have a toxic legacy in the soil that I'm nurturing, and that's nurturing me.

I wanna get to not only zero waste, but zero pollution.

I wanna have that be the zone that I'm in for as long as possible.

So to me, the idea of taking on more panels and more batteries...I took on one more panel and one more battery this year, because the ones I have are definitely getting towards the end of their life cycle. I want to at least maintain the humble existence that I have. So I did compromise in that way, but I do not want to, even though I could afford to, get a lot more batteries.

I'm richer than I've ever been before, and I'm grateful for that. But I am not rich in the sense that I can afford to mess around financially I wanna stay free and not have to go to work.

So I'm as frugal and resourceful as I ever was as a homeless, spare changing, minor, dumpster diving and doing other things legal and illegal to survive.

Now that I have land, a micro nest egg, and have been able to spend a small amount to make the land survivable at a minimalist scale, I'm definitely not spoiled.

So whatever abundance financially that I've manifested in this life, it never spoiled me.

Maybe it got me ratcheted up to a new level of freedom, a new level of clarity, a new level of ownership of my time, where I could have more discernment and create new standards for myself on a lot of levels, but never spoiled and never taking it for granted. Always feeling protective of the little nothing that I barely have in the grand scheme of things.

I used money to buy time, and now I have more time than money for the time being.

I'm basically bedridden in temperatures of a 125F degrees, at least for majority of the day. I've mentioned this before, shout out to MIT Open Courseware and the Yale online free course catalogue.

In terms of reconciling the torture, that's psychological, mostly because the physicality of suffering, being in the shade and having budgeted enough water to douse myself if I need it, to wrap my head with moistened bandanas and spray myself with a spray bottle and put fans on me.

The only thing I'm wasting is just, I'm accelerating the rate at which my water gets depleted because I don't have a well, and I'm living off of rain water and water that I truck in once a year at this point.

So I have to think about the water storage capacity that I have.

From my very foolhardy and ignorant city slicker beginnings of not having my water game dialed in the first summer and having actually probably almost died because of it. I definitely put myself through weird, agonizing pain in different organs because of not understanding how to do certain things right.

It's a learning curve. But by now, my water supply is abundant enough to where I can be more experimental. But I gotta be careful and frugal with the water supply.

I've capped my energy supply already, but I could be very extravagant with my usage of water.

Of course, I drink enough with an electrolyte Himalayan sea salt, pinch of it per every gallon of water that I drink. That's how I've staved off hyponatremia since it almost killed me last year. Seems to be doing all right so far.

Not only do I love growing flax sprouts and seedlings and harvesting and eating the sprouted plant as it's growing, but I've been subsisting off it.

It's replaced ground sesame seeds. Now I eat ground flax seeds, and I this is not for everybody, so don't take it as a fad diet. I'll have five heaping teaspoons a day, and basically about a third of a soup bowl of fermented greens.

That's my lunch, along with with green tea two non-heaping table teaspoons of cacao.

I figure that it works out mathematically calorically because I'm not moving a lot. In the cooler months I'm able to move around a lot more and do a lot of work so I can excuse myself to eat more.

But moving less and losing my appetite in the heat, I require less calories.

It feels like torture to eat in high temperatures, even in the morning, even before the sun is up. You spend all day and all night being beaten mercilessly by the eat. Then you have a couple of hours in the early morning, right before the sun comes up to feel beaten up.

So you get beaten up for 22 hours, and then in the time that you stop being beaten up, you feel how beaten up you've been for about 2 hours, and then you start getting beaten up again.

That's the torture that I'm surviving through, and one of those things is how it affects the ability to have an appetite.

In the cool months I'm fine eating my trail mix breakfast bowl dry. Though now in the heat, in the last couple days where I said, oh no, I'm starting to get that sick feeling again that I'm losing my appetite, and that's not good.

So I'm gonna add water to it and just make it go down easier.

I eat as slow as I possibly can. They say, drink your food and eat your beverages sort of thing.

I'm in the thick of it now. It's getting real. I'm trying to do the economics of the energy and the water, and then spend the time with the course.

The physical aspect of being tortured by the heat is nowhere near as bad as the psychology of being debilitated, so that you can't really engage in any activity for that many hours, so that the time drags and you can't get in the zone, and therefore, if time's not flying because you're not in the zone, because you can't move and you can't do anything...

The online video courses are a blessing to be able to escape to intellectually. I'm able to survive psychologically also with the help of being almost punch drunk by the sun, and a little bit of my raisin wine to help me sleep and to help ease the pain and to give me something to look forward to every day, one potent glass of that raisin wine and a ratio of four to one of that glass of wine to water.

It was very timely for me to be going through those Yale courses and to say, you know, now that I'm tinkering with this extra water budget that I have and the solar energy. It is time to start actually implementing some of these novel hacks that I spoke about in recent episodes, things that are leading up to a reveal of my now, still totally primitive, but in the spirit of Macgyver, just a hack job, but a hopefully intelligent, maybe not sophisticated one.

A life hack based on some command of the science and the physics and a bit of engineering.

There was a session block within the fundamentals of physics, a Yale Open course, it's online, where I really like the professor.

He's able to take very rudimentary, intuitive concepts about our fumbling through reality with our senses, and then seamlessly explain how that all maps out onto formulas.

I do depend on some general understanding and awareness of certain principles in order for me to be able to survive right now as I'm fumbling upon a system of taking the hyper conductive, thin metal of a dog bowl, just a stainless steel mixing bowl that's the size of bigger than what we would normally have a bowl of cereal or a bowl of soup out of, but more the size of a generous dog food bowl.

It's hot obviously just in ambient air, it feels hot to the touch. Or if you put hot soup in it, you can't hold it because it will burn your hands. So conversely, the same goes for coolness through it, so it can be very cold.

Not gonna go into too much detail, because I went to it already before, but what I've arrived at now is this ability to, in the desert, in the midst of 125F plus degree temperatures.

I can generate cold water in small amounts and generate a cooling machine at a microscale with a stainless steel dog bowl.

My daily useage supply containers of stored water are like hot bath water in terms of how hot they are just sitting in the shade in glass jugs.

But I can turn that hot water into cold water that makes the metal lower the submerged portion of that bowl at least as cold as a refrigerator.

I would say it feels ice cold, but I but to be safe, I'll say, if you were to touch the wall within a refrigerator, or maybe even maybe even touch the upper wall under the freezer, that's about how cold the base metal of that bowl feels where the water is in contact with it.

Then it gets absurdly warm as you go up to the top of it, away from the water.

The final element to that system that I arrived at before today, was basically a computer fan, the kind that you would use to cool the power supply area of a PC tower. So not the smaller computer fan that goes in the CPU, these are about 5".

I place one in the dog bowl and within about 30 minutes the cooling effect happens.

That system was three elements, stainless steel dog bowl, partial fill of water, low voltage DC computer fan on top of it.

With that, I've been able to have the best medical and physical relationship with the heat so far on this third year, because I had not developed that the first year, I didn't have enough water to spoil myself with dunking bandanas in water, not just saving that water for drinking and for irrigation of the plants that I had. So the first year was the worst.

The second summer was far better because I built out more water storage, and I was able to at least routinely moisten myself on my skin with a spray bottle, and by dunking my linens in basically hot water.

So it didn't feel cool at all, but it was doing evaporative cooling. It did have an effect, so it kept me alive. But this year, I don't feel like I'm in blasting AC, but I am thrilled.

I am benefiting from the fact that I am now generating cool water and cold temperatures at a micro scale that I can psychologically lean on and medically lean on.

Every time I dunk those linens for that head wrap, it's cold and it feels cold to the touch, and it's cold on my head.

The real proof in the pudding by just monitoring how much less sweat output I have to produce.

The fact that I can be sitting in a 125F degree temperature and not be perspiring profusely the way I have been in the previous years shows me that these effects are real, and they're starting to work, and it's becoming a factor that I need to really understand more and really try to scale and optimize.

So in that thermodynamics course today, there was plenty within it that I'm gonna have to continue to listen to again and again and watch again and again in order to really understand it fully.

But a lot of the principles were making sense, understanding the nuanced differences between radiation, convection and conduction, and really knowing the physics of what exactly it is I'm doing.

Because right now, more than anything else, my survival and my sanity and my ability to function and be productive, it's all a factor of these Macgyver kind of physics. I didn't come from that background in terms of understanding it.

I'm reverse engineering it and hacking it as I go along.

The threshold that got crossed today, because I'm kind of recaping a bit, was the threshold of adding a layer that I intended to add, which is the layer of misting and creating an ambient mist in order to do a few things to augment the effect of just having that sort of stationary cool water in the base of that bowl that I could dip fabric into and wrap it around myself.

The next level of experimentation, but also adding risk that I'm gonna talk about, which is gonna be the main sort of title and subject is getting into the realm of how to discover what the minimum energy and water usage amounts are gonna be in order to create survivability and some amount of comfort by applying the far more, luxurious standards of just taking a backyard, summer barbecue party, hang out...

Deck chair, chill zone, misting system, that I've enjoyed immensely when I had access to it before.

But that requires, obviously unlimited grid water.

The unit itself, it's really cheap. I did get one though I've decided to use it only if I needed to cool guests. I'm just trying to be frugal. I'm trying not to burn my financial nest egg, and I'm willing to burn my skin and burn my soul and be scorched by the sun in the process to some degree.

If I die protecting my nest egg, then at least I will die with a nest egg and I'm okay with that at this point. I'd rather that than go back to work, get 15 million COVID infections and then be dependent on the system and dependent on others to live a miserable life. That's what keeps me persevering in my experiment of survival, and what gives me nightmares.

I'm not throwing shade on anybody, I'm not saying I know better.

It would be ironic if I died of a Valley Fever or Legionella pneumonia, legionnaires disease, which I'm gonna get to in a minute...that in order to avoid the respiratory fate of corona virus, I were to face a fate of legionnaires disease or Valley Fever.

But to be honest, the quality of life and the immersion in nature, like I said before, I'd rather rather get eaten by a bear than get hit by a bus.

To me, dying in the wild is best. Dying in the wild of legionnaires is gonna feel better than dying of a corona virus that I never would have encountered unless I personally walked into a bat cave, or had hubristic scientists or military bio warfare warlords collude to unleash it on humanity.

Medical disclaimer, this is not a primer on legionella bacteria or legionnaires disease. This is something to only peak your interest if you were curious, if you've maybe heard about it, I'm going to introduce it and demystify it a little bit.

Obviously, using the play on words of demystification, because the aerosolization, ie, misting of water that contains the legionella bacteria, of which there are many strains, and some of them are more or less deadly in terms of causing a form of pneumonia.

This is gonna be an intro because where I've arrived at in my survival, cooling, minimalist hacking technology, is that I've crossed that boundary now that I have that cool water supply. As of today, I added a new element, which is that I've suspended a coffee can, probably a gallon, one of those larger coffee cans.

I had used it in the nursery before, and so I adapted it for this purpose.

It kind of looks like this very solar punk kind of IV the way that you see those IVs that people in the hospital have to push around. ut instead of a plastic sack of sailing or whatever solution they're keeping you topped up with, it's a coffee can with a silicon sealed spigot. I drilled a hole to attach it through the bottom.

Then running out to a hose clamp that's clamping a half inch silicone tubing length that then terminates in a brass garden nozzle, the kind that you don't squeeze, like a gun trigger but you you rotate and it opens by, twisting it.

That is the water reservoir IV that I have to top off that dog bowl with the fan.

It does attract bees in the in the morning, that I have to wave away after putting on goggles, but when it gets too hot later around mid day, they disappear.

But in the mornings, they're all over me. At one time, I was ganged up on by four of them. They've had me running for it and doing all kinds of funky dances and kung fu maneuvers.

Everything shiny and reflecting water attracts them it seems. I've created a nice system for them to get into an area where the pond is so that they can get in and out of it. I've seen them use it. It's a little tunneling system I created for them. It allows them in and nothing else bigger.

They've used it, but they still wanna dance with me.

But so far, I've been successful and no harm has come to me or them, but I gotta worry about anywhere there's any water standing, they're gonna sense it, and they're gonna go for it.

I've been able to get away with having this coffee can reservoir suspended. They've gotten near it but it's been seldom enough to where I don't have to monitor it constantly so that's good.

So the next phase is wanting to approximate the effect of that misting system, but doing it at a scale that doesn't just burn through all my water. I gotta remain under budget with my water supply.

I have got to push myself under every circumstance to minimize the use of water for any purpose. Even though I have more than I've had over the last couple of years, the conditions are such it that needs to last longer.

I can't just tap out and call time out and go get some more water the way that I did in the previous years. So I have more, but it's also more precious. And my use of it has to be more intelligent, so it kind of counter balances in a way.

I would rather use the supply very minimalistically and figure out what the minimum survival, sanity and discomfort level is...

If I end up at the end of this period of time that I have allotted before I go and resupply with the water, if I end up with a ridiculous amount, where I say, I could use a lot more well, then next year I'll use a lot more.

But this year I don't wanna take a chance to where I fall short.

I have to economize the water useage and the cooling effects I want to sustain. So I have to find the minimalist dynamic between these forces of convection that are happening sort of magically in this dance between the density and the capacity of water molecules in the air in fluid form, these different, interplays and edges of the physics of interaction between dry desert heat, air and water, etc.

In terms of the approximate water distribution ratio in the summer, I drink one third, I apply one third to keep myself cool and clean, and I irrigate crops with one third.

So within that budget, if I could just make this small computer fan extend that field of cooling just a little bit more on a couple of different dimensions, it would be great to have more cooling than just the damp bandana.

That's what happened today. I was basically able to huddle up and hunch over this little bowl with a little bit of water and a computer fan in it, because the little area of coolness and that gradient of coolness that's being generated by that magical effect of the physics of some gradient of conduction, convection, etc. Today I was able to extend it more than yesterday, the big difference was that I did two things. I allowed the water level to come up so that it was just barely touching the bottom of that fan, plenty safe and away from where the electrical wires are going into the top of the fan, or the back, I should say, the back of the fan versus the front of the fan.

So I felt comfortable knowing its low voltage DC and I've got circuit breakers.

The frame of that fan is basically maybe an inch and a half, if only a few millimeters come in contact with the water in that dog bowl, then it's creating a mist.

It's creating a mist around the dog bowl that is able to hit me with micro droplets that are basically creating the effect of sweat without costing me the loss of electrolytes and drinking water.

I'm basically being externally sweated upon by this partially submerged computer fan in this bowl of water that's now cold water.

The fact that it's starting off at a lower temperature then hitting me, and then evaporating against the hot air around me, it's actually, moving the needle towards comfort and past bare minimum survival.

So hunched around that bowl, getting that mist from that computer fan, just barely digging into the water level.

Now, here is where the real mechanical intelligence comes in.

What makes it a sustainable, self contained system that is set and forget at this point, is that that IV water supply, even though it's only whatever that coffee can holds, I've got that nozzle suspended over the top of the fan so that it drips barely almost closed all the way tight.

But it drips a drop, maybe every second or two.

I've got to a point where it's at that equilibrium, where that drip is coming down, a the drip hits the fan on its way down and adds to the velocity and the range of that misting effect.

Just one drop on a computer fan from above, obviously away from the wires and the motor, but right square on the fan, and it can blast without making a huge mess, and it's gonna dry almost instantly off of most of the surfaces it hits, but it will remain long enough to have an evaporative effect when it's on my skin.

But a drop comes down, whatever doesn't get mistified by hitting that fan just drops down into the water in the bowl and maintains that water level so that the water level is always continually being kicked up by the fan.

Otherwise, I would just have to keep manually pouring water in.

If my life depended on it, my sanity depended on it, I would do that, I have been doing that. I've been adding to it a few times a day, but there's a difference between maintaining an exact level and just keeping it from drying out completely. That's a big difference from keeping it perfectly topped off at all times.

So adjusting that drip from that little IV system, now the main risk is legionella. There's a risk of becoming a legionella bacteria farmer, as so many unwitting, stagnant artificial water systems that we've built do by default.

To give a little presentation on this menace that is legionnaires disease. It's one of the enemies of survival, until we get to a point in a permaculture design, where we've got everything flowing cyclically and very naturally.

At that point, there's little if any need for the prosthesis of water tanks and irrigation. The goal, ultimately, for some of us extremists in permaculture is for there to be nothing toxic, nothing that ends up in a wasteland, nothing machine made, nothing really fabricated, nothing that you couldn't fashion with your bare hands, ultimately.

That's the end point that we wanna go back to that our ancestors lived in, that was nontoxic, non carcinogenic, healthy, aesthetically pleasing, etc.

For most people doing permaculture, we're on a continuum. Some of us really relish the vision of that state. Some of us are just like, hey, we're trying to survive. We use PVC or use tarps, we use whatever it takes that's plastic in order to just survive.

I'm kind of in that situation too. There is an idealism about everything being non toxin and all natural, but it's also about acknowledging the modern state that we're in and just using what's available, so for a lot of us, that is using the crutch and the prosthesis of plastics.

If we can use some of these toxic plastic and other mechanically derived materials as temporary scaffolding to build the ecological system that's will make all that material obsolete, then that's the best possible use of it anyway. So that's my philosophy at this point.

But in the meantime, legionnaires disease and the growth of legionella in stagnant water that's not sufficiently hot or cold..

There are a lot of places where the bacteria can be hiding in civilization, within our many uses of water that are not always highly pressurized, constantly circulating, disinfected, cold or hot...There are many environments conducive to the growth of that bacteria.

While it's generally not as pathogenic if the water that is living in is not disturbed and aerosolized, what makes it pathogenic, generally speaking, is when it is aerosolized in the form of being sprayed, in the form being disturbed, the finer the droplets, the more dispersed that spray is.

So cooling towers, fountains, faucets, shower heads, any kind of misting system.

I have to be concerned because I am living in a situation where all of my water is stagnant, the disinfectant effects have over time worn off.

So what is my legionella mitigation strategy after creating the perfect conditions for it to kill me?

I've been using gravity based water filtration systems. I've adapted in a certain way, using the five gallon bucket as the reservoir, if you will.

Whereas in the past, I've used the official stainless steel reservoir, but there's a budgetary life hack to just get the filters themselves a 5 gallon bucket, again me using the plastic prosthesis for financial reasons but that has protected me thus far as the first line of defense to take water stored in 55 gallon drums and other tankage and whatnot. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gallons that I've amassed to give me a year supply of cooling, cleaning, hydrating, irrigation.

That filtration systems creates that first line of defense against whatever potential legionella could be growing in the tanks.

I'm pretty impressed with how little visible biofilm I'm seeing in my bulk water supplies. But I'm not gonna drink straight out of that without filtering it for a number of reasons.

So the first phase is filtering, then that goes into glass jugs that are in direct sunlight. I've never had a turned stomach, let alone nausea, vomiting or diarrhea or anything that I would consider a biological contaminant of my water filtration.

To this day, the worst thing I've experienced is filtering out a little bit of green algae and spitting out a little bit of sand grit once in a while. This is your three of doing that.

If I'm putting it in this IV system, where it sits in a can and then feeds a silicon tube, that's opening it up to ambient biology.

I don't really know how much I would expect ambient legionella bacteria to just populate in this kind of desert environment, but I'm not taking any chances.

So what I discovered today, which I will comfort myself with psychologically, at least, is understanding that, okay, so you had water that maybe may or may not have had all kinds of legionella bacteria in it, and you filtered it properly and exposed it to UV sunlight, so basically you reset the clock.

You just reset the potential growth clock back to zero.

Now every second that water isn't filtered right before use, immediately before use, you have to assume the clock starts ticking again.

My studies have given me a couple of different metrics, one of them has said obviously depending on temperature depending on the ph of the water depending on the nutrients available in the water a number of factors are gonna contribute to how fast or slow and how potentially inevitable a legionella population is gonna grow.

The problem of the artificial stagnant systems that we create, that are isolated from the cycles of nature that would mitigate this, the ecologies, water flow patterns and the competitive ecologies with the natural ecosystems that would mitigate any one pathogen from having an outsized risk or competitive advantage...we've abstracted our water from ecology.

We create the conditions for it imbalance to flourish.

I'm in a state where I'm in trying to transition towards recreating the balance that will make it less of a threat to me, but paradoxically, breaking free from the water grid in the city and trying to rewild I'm basically gambling in this interim phase where I'm putting myself at the highest possible risk of legionella exposure.

It's worth noting that it generally affects people who are elderly, immuno compromised, or just not developed in their immune system.

For people who are considered generally healthy, it's considered generally not the most lethal threat if it gets you sick at all. But I gotta think that I may not be the only one ever to be here and I wanna learn this stuff and be mindful of it. Also, my health may not always last forever.

So what I'm confident in now is that once my filtered water is exposed again, the clock is ticking...there's a variance in the rate of growth, given the factors I mentioned before, assuming that for the sake of just best practices, you imagine that to be on the safe side, better safe than sorry, that it has everything it needs and the perfect conditions to grow as fast as it possibly can.

If you design backwards from that, if I don't minimize it, but I maximize it in my threat model I'm going to over-compensate in a good way to protect myself.

If I can do that again without using chemical disinfectants, then great.

So the spectrum that I read from a few sources was anywhere from 24 hours for a problematic population level to grow, to 48 hours, and even up to a couple of weeks. Obviously that would be where all that nuance comes in of all those factors, the interplay of those factors.

For me to sleep at night, I'm gonna say, okay, I do add soap to the water a small amount of what I consider very natural, biodegradable, a one hundred percent plant based soap product, it's very small and diluted amounts, but it's enough for there to be a bit of some suds in that water once it gets down in that bowl. Certainly when the fan starts moving around in it. It's not an absurd amount, but it's there.

The only way I can have a moist cloth wrapping my head, literally 24/7, is that it has to be cycled through with soapy water. The soap has to be added to the solution once a day, basically.

Where I'm at now, I add that water, I add that soapy solution in the morning to the coffee can of water, and then I top it off, use it to keep that bowl of water filled now up to the level of the fan, so that I always have cold water to dunk my my headdress in which, depending on the temperature, dries out faster, or slower.

So a number of times, between a half a dozen to a dozen times a day, approximately, I will dunk it and ring it out and put it back on.

Now I have this ambient mist, and if I had any concern whatsoever that I was taking unproperly filtered or filtered yet left out too long after filtering water in that system to become problematic with Legionella, the last thing I wanna be doing is is hunching over that fan, aerosolizing the water, wondering if I'm basically inhaling and basically huffing in for hours at a time, this legionella laden water, because what it does in the pneumonia, it takes hold and grows and multiplies deep within the lungs.

I don't wanna just push the limits of my immune system, because my immune system is definitely degraded just by being in these extreme conditions.

So if I can trust and hope and pray that what I'm doing now, what I've done so far, has been survivable against the threat of legionnaires disease so far, adding this level of mist, if that's gonna be my lifestyle for the next couple of months that I'm gonna enjoy, I wanna do it with peace of mind.

It can take a number of days, if not over a week, for symptoms to manifest. So if I'm not hacking and coughing and wheezing and suffering from legionnaires disease, from taking this leap of faith right now, or in the next couple of weeks, I'm gonna be very, very thankful that these metrics and these physics and this Macgyver thing actually worked out.

Because it'll be the lowest amount of energy possible to achieve the desired effect, the lowest amount of water usage and wasteage possible with the essential fact of mitigating the lethality of legionella that grows in stagnant water.