Jumpilomdm, GE isn't and won't be the answer to today's widespread residential kitchen mid-range appliance problems, unless they are hungry to capture the wide open market spot with RELIABLE, no plastic/wire components, reasonably affordable, great customer service and repair, and elimination of "no returns" market. Apparently, that is too complicated for many manufacturers in the mid-range market. IF GE were smart, given their new (partially public) R&D/investment money, maybe they would consider payback for shoddy past underperformance by great customer service. It starts at the top with management, and if the top takes the GE name with top salary and bonuses typical to such, it won't happen. I am not holding my breath either. I was responding to xedos' point that once the big appliance companies know they are top dog mid range market (starts with a W, ends with a P), consumers might be better served by companies trying to stage a comeback, which describes GE after many soured on it's overseas outsourcing & poor customer service and poor refrigerator QA. For your viewing pleasure, here is the new, big, electronic board heavy GE FD refrigerator, available April 2013. Regrettably for GE, I won't be the one of it's first consumer testers, especially with GE's "no returns" policy. Here is a link that might be useful: Link:

For those who can't open it, here is the text portion: Color Their World Tim and Elaine Ryan in their foyer. By CELIA BARBOUR Published: November 18, 2007 APATHY comes in many forms. But to Elaine Ryan, it comes in just one color beige though it may use dangerously seductive aliases: vanilla, mocha, crème caramel. To her, these shades represent nothing short of a renunciation of the inalienable right to happiness in home décor. Ms. Ryan likes to cook, and food influences her choice of paint colors. So theres papaya in the foyer, and celery in master bedroom. The Ryans bought the house as it was being built, and Ms. Ryan added her own details. "People deny to themselves that they need color," said Ms. Ryan, an interior designer and author, most recently, of "Color Your Life: How to Design Your Home With Colors From Your Heart" (St. Martins Griffin, 2007). "Color is vital to our spirit. It isnt just that color is nice. Our spirits soar when we walk into a room that has color." Her fervor is evident the moment you turn into the driveway of the house in Woodbury, Conn., just west of Waterbury, where she lives with her husband, Tim, a retired estate planner and a committed environmental advocate. Their two-year-old colonial is yellow pure, intense and bright as lemon peel. Anyone left indifferent by the houses exterior will surely be knocked flat by the foyer. This room is entirely papaya, the ceiling as well as the walls, offset by bright white trim. The Ryans she is 63, he 70 moved to Connecticut from Arizona two years ago, essentially retiring in reverse, from south to north. "We had a very rich life in Arizona," said Ms. Ryan, who grew up in Brooklyn. "We had wonderful, wonderful clients. We were well known in the community. But whenever fall came and ballet season opened, or another show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I was longing to see ... "Let me put it this way: I lived in Arizona, but my heart was in New York." Mr. Ryan, meanwhile, had started to "burn out," as he put it, on estate planning and spent the 15 years before their move studying Arizona ecosystems and leading hikes for the Sierra Club he guided 72 groups through the Grand Canyon. The environmental movement "dragged me in," he said. "I didnt plan to get so involved, but I did, and really enjoyed it." Nonetheless, Mr. Ryan had no objections to the relocation. The son of a Navy admiral, he had grown up moving from place to place. "Tim is the kind of person whos really very happy wherever he is," Ms. Ryan said. "As long as he has his chair and good light, hes comfortable." Indeed, so easygoing was Mr. Ryan about the whole process that he didnt even come to see the house unfinished when his wife made an offer before they bought it. "I said to Tim, What if you dont like the house?" Ms. Ryan recalled. "He said, If you like it, Ill like it." Admittedly, there are some aspects of the house that Ms. Ryan finds frustrating. For starters, it is 1,700 square feet smaller than their Arizona house. But she doesnt look back: "What can I say? I love this house more and more." Even the fact that the house was unfinished was a plus; it allowed her to reconfigure parts of the interior to suit her needs, adding a screened porch in back, for example, and a walk-in china closet. "Im an interior designer, but I do a lot of architecture," Ms. Ryan said. The rooms are filled with a remarkable assortment of antiques and decorative objects, displayed in combinations that attest to Ms. Ryans self-confidence as a designer. In her dining room, for example, a bowl of Mexican folk-art papier-mâché bread and fruit coexists with an 18th-century English sideboard and a 17th-century chest. "Clients always ask, Will it go?" Ms. Ryan said. "Everything that is of good quality will go together, just like good people go together." Further illustrations of this philosophy turn up through every doorway. In the sitting room, for example, an Italian gilt mirror hangs above a wall-mounted flat-screen television. "The Samsung is good, and the mirror is good, so they go together," Ms. Ryan said. In the kitchen, she points out a Baccarat chandelier suspended above her "little, teensy" butcher-block island. "Good, and good," she said with a laugh. Her design talents arent the only thing she displays in the kitchen. Ms. Ryan also has the reputation of being a very good cook. "Some people eat to live," she said. "I cook to live. Or live to cook. Cooking makes me feel whole and in harmony." Not surprisingly, her next book will be about color and food. Food certainly influences her choice of paint colors. In addition to the papaya in the foyer, theres celery in master bedroom and cantaloupe in the sitting room. "The reason I love cantaloupe the color is because I love cantaloupe the fruit," Ms. Ryan said. To Ms. Ryan, a strong paint color would never limit other design choices. "All colors are neutral to each other," she said. "Anything beautiful against beige is also beautiful against cantaloupe." But she realizes that most people are less bold in choosing and mixing colors. Her current book attempts to help them break through this resistance by offering psychological guidance along with practical decorating tips. "It speaks to the reader about the link between their interior self and interior design of their homes," Ms. Ryan said. Numerous workbook pages are filled with questions like "Can you remember the colors you loved as a child?" to help readers uncover the colors that will resonate for them. For readers who are reluctant to embark on what could be a life-altering quest, the books final pages are a set of 64 tear-out "color bars" that will do the thinking for them. The system is simple all the even-numbered colors go together and all the odd-numbered colors go together. Ms. Ryan swears its foolproof. "This is truth," she said. "There are 1,000 tones of every color. How can I be positively sure that this green will go with this blue?" The answers, which Ms. Ryan discovered through eight years of trial and error, are depicted on the color bars. She was never tempted to turn to optical science to back up her instincts. "No, no!" she said, clutching her forehead. "I did it all with this head."

The bark of several species of willow does contain a chemical that acts a bit like asprin. Ref: WebMD Willow bark is the bark from several varieties of the willow tree, including white willow or European willow, black willow or pussy willow, crack willow, purple willow, and others. The bark is used to make medicine. Willow bark acts a lot like aspirin, so it is used for pain, including headache, muscle pain, menstrual cramps, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), osteoarthritis, gout, and a disease of the spine called ankylosing spondylitis. Willow bark’s pain relieving potential has been recognized throughout history. Willow bark was commonly used during the time of Hippocrates, when people were advised to chew on the bark to relieve pain and fever. Willow bark is also used for fever, the common cold, flu, and weight loss. Salicin, the active ingredient in willow bark, seems to have contributed to the death of the composer, Ludwig von Beethoven. Apparently, Beethoven ingested large amounts of salicin before he died. His autopsy report is the first recorded case of a particular type of kidney damage that can be caused by salicin. How does it work?Willow bark contains a chemical called salicin that is similar to aspirin.

@fsq4cw - how about a ballpark price just for the air-to-water heat pump? Just out of my own curiosity. Note that due to @mtvhike having a fairly large solar array and the specifics of his tariff scheme, I'm not sure that any significant capital cost to reduce his electricity usage will pay off well. This shows one of the oddities about specifics of solar tariffs. As I understand the way it works is this: his base tariff for electricity is 9.5 cents/kwh. Any solar he generates offsets the electricity he consumes (calculated annually?). BUT: any solar generated in excess of consumption is only paid at the wholesale rate, which is dramatically lower than the retail rate (call it 1 cent / kwh). Right now - without full year data - he expects to consume somewhat more than his panels generate. The upshot is that his savings from reduced consumption are limited (You could analyse this differently but I find it easier to just take what he already has as the base case, I think the conclusions are the same). Let's say, for example, he consumes 4,000 kwh annually more than he generates, for a bit less than $400 (netted out annually). If he saves more energy than that, every 'extra' kwh saved only gets him 1c / kwh. At least unless or until he adds some significant extra load, like buying an EV or putting an aluminium smelter in his garage or something. So: I'd say it makes sense to consider a minisplit primarily for the air conditioning comfort and if it also offsets some of his straight resistance heating, great, there's some modest savings there (within a 'limit' of however much his consumption currently exceeds his solar generation). Spending much additional for the 1c/kwh savings just won't make much sense financially. This is pretty simplistic as right now he has historical data for consumption and the solar array is relatively new so annual generation only estimated, and of course from year to year both may vary. And at any rate, a good argument to not rush into anything with high upfront expenses or to prioritise other projects for the time being.