Notes from the Underground

It's been quiet on the blog but only because we've been so busy doing stuff that I haven't had time to write. Recently we were inspired to totally revamp the basement. I'm not even sure why, after all this time, we decided to make it pretty. Maybe because the rest of the house was done? It wasn't like we had a lot of free time to work with (in fact, with the holidays and a few other unexpected problems - more on those later - we had absolutely NO free time). But the house was becoming cluttered and we were convinced that cleaning up and adding more storage to the basement was a solution.

The first step was to pain the wall over the fireplace as an accent wall, to cover the dry wall patch from our chimney repair. Since we don't have the original white  - which was painted by the previous owners - we decided not to even bother trying to match the other walls, and to go with something completely different.

After debating from every color of the rainbow (the furniture is so boring that nothing was off the table), we decided to stick to something we already owned and used Mythical from the accent wall in our guest bedroom. But first, time to clean and prime (actually, first step was clear out all the junk at least enough to get to the wall and lay down a drop cloth). I didn't bother to photograph the cleaning process, but we turned to our trusty non-TSP cleaner to scrub everything down.

Well apparently we weren't going to use this primer - the can had rusted and left bits of rust in the paint. That one is now sitting outside with the cap off drying, so that we can throw it out.

Fortunately we had an even better choice - a tinted gray primer. Because the walls were already white and in good shape, we didn't bother to cut in and edge the wall with primer.

But we certainly did with the paint. And there were sooooo many edges. That, as usual, was my job. The fireplace was a particularly "fun" challenge.

I mostly freehanded the edge but I did tape off both corners with the other wall. Partly because we didn't have the white for touch-ups and partly because such a straight edge was quick to tape - quicker in fact than doing a freehand edge.

After a few hours of edging, D came in and spent 5 minutes rolling all the rest - so much more dramatic with so much less time. Sigh...

The good news was that this really only required one coat plus some quick touch-ups. The light isn't great in there, so maybe the paint job is really horrible. But it's definitely good enough in dim lighting.

We've made tons more progress then this, so stay tuned for our next post!

Bright Shiny Data

Well hello. What's that shiny thing on our bookshelf? It looks like a digital picture frame but it is so much more.

Our utility company offered us a slot in their pilot program to track the way we use energy. It's sort of a Nielsen rating of electricity usage. Plus it gives us immediate feedback and awareness to let us determine ways to be more energy efficient. Plus it is, in fact, a digital picture frame. And what new parents don't love to have an unending slideshow of cute baby pictures?

But actually, we're really loving this energy tracking. After a quick h]set up link to our smart meter, this thing was ready to go and providing us with updated energy usage every 3-5 seconds. We'd already been receiving monthly breakdowns of energy use for the last few months. We knew that we seemed to use most of our energy in the late evening after the baby was sleeping, but we never really knew why.

Here's an hourly breakdown for a day when one of us got home at about 1pm. You can see that our energy level went up at that time, with a spike at 4pm. Lights, heat, hot water, and the dishwasher were to blame.

But this is the real story of why our energy usage tends to go up at about 9pm. See if you can guess. Here's a pretty typical power usage snapshot, taken this afternoon - the little blips are heat and hot water usage, i.e. showers, dishes, etc. But that sustained blip at 9pm?

Here's our energy snapshot again, this time photographed at about 9:30 at night. Our energy use for this minute skyrocketed. What are we doing?

Laundry. And lots of it. Not quite every night, but close. Turns out that our dryer is by far the least efficient thing we have running in our house, per minute of run time (since we use the hot water heater more often, that one might actually cost more in the long run). Baby goes to bed, and we start laundry. And sometimes, it's a load that uses hot water! A double whammy. At least now we know why our electricity bill has gone up this year.

The immediate feedback is fun. Last night, we tried plugging and unplugging our Christmas lights to see what effect they had. We have a Kill-a-Watt monitor to check power usage of an individual device, but this gives a more complete picture. Of course, the digital frame itself is using energy, but only about $5 a year or less. Well worth the price! I can't wait to compare with summer when the AC is running full-blast!