Disposable luxury?

Our 32'' flat screen TV has gone to a better place. Or something. In any case, it isn't turning on anymore. 

We tried everything we could think of (mostly the obvious, like changing the batteries in the remote, attempting to turn it on with the button on the side, plugging it into a different outlet, but also taking it apart - being careful not to shock ourselves from the capacitor to see if anything looked obviously burned out). We thought it might have gotten hit by a power surge, but the DVD player and other devices on the same power strip work, so yeah, it just up and died.

At the time we bought it, this Sharp Aquos cost us a non-inconsequential sum. It lived in our living room for a while and then lived in the basement when we upgraded to a 46''.  D thinks it the capacitor and claims that these things are now being built so that they are cheap and "disposable."Fixing it is pretty much impossible, or at least not cost effective, especially since a new TV will only set us back $200 or so.

It pretty much sat unused in the basement because when I exercise I listen or watch through a portable device. But a few days ago I wanted to watch an old DVD and was shocked that our old faithful TV wouldn't turn on. Suddenly the realization hit that we are a one-TV household (we kinda were already, since we never actually used the TV, but it was there just in case). So the question now is - how much are we willing to pay, if anything , to have a TV in the basement that we will barely use. Of course now that it's not there, I have all kinds of reasons to want to use it, all sorts of movies that I want to watch while using the treadmill and elliptical that, while the TV was working (or while I thought it was working) I never wanted to watch.

First world problems...yeah, I know...

How Much It Costs To Heat Our Home

The Nest we got for Christmas is still useful, although it has some annoying quirks. The most prominent being that while they tout the amazing energy savings you will receive by owning one, they make it really annoying to actually get at the data. You can see how long the heat runs, for up to ten days, on the Nest, the iOS Nest app, and the nest.com website, but the data is always presented as pictures - which means there's no straightforward way to record the data yourself. Which you have to do because they only show the past ten days. The monthly email they send is similarly useless.

So what I have done since our oil tank was (finally) filled is keep a log of the Nest-reported heat usage and any notes for unusual activity for each day. Fifty-seven days later, we received 139.6 gallons of heating oil (at $4.29/gallon). Data analytics time!

First thing: get the outdoor temperature for each of those 57 days from wunderground.com. You can type in custom date ranges and get lots of information - I decide just to use the mean temperature. Which allows me to make this simple plot showing temperature and energy usage.

Date on the x-axis. Mean temperature (F) on the left y-axis and heating hours on the right y-axis.

There's clearly an inverse relationship between heating hours and mean outdoor temperature. I made a scatter plot with heating hours versus mean temperature (F) to show this relationship more clearly.

Because I took notes I know that the outlier you see at 44 degrees and 5.5 heating hours is because we turned up the thermostat to 70 when we were having some guests over. I was pleased to see that the trend between heating hours and temperature is linear - this makes it trivially easy to model energy usage related to outdoor temperature.

By model, I mean create an equation that shows the relationship between the outdoor temperature and how much heat we use. How do we make the equation? By sending the data in the plot above to the statistical software R and asking it to find the straight line (in blue) that fits the dots best. Which is: heating hours = (-0.17 * mean outdoor temperature (F)) + 10.43. This may look familiar if you remember back to your algebra lesson. This is a form of y = mx + b, the slope-intercept formula.

How is this useful? Well, if I know the temperature outside, I can predict how many heating hours the house needs. For example, on February 1st, the outdoor mean was 29 F and the equation predicts that we should use 5.5 hours of heat. We actually used 5.25 hours. 

Unfortunately, this model only holds up for our current temperature settings. We only have a few recorded days where we overrode the settings. Not enough to make a new model that incorporates new temperature settings. But with a few points, I can make an educated guess about how changing the thermostat inside changes our energy usage. We had two days where we increased the temperature  inside by 4 and 6 degrees. On those days we used 15% and 75% more heat. On the two days we decreased the temperature by 4 degrees we used 10% and 30% less heat. So, we will not save much by reducing the heat, but increasing the heat could cost us several hundred more a winter. 

Another reason I have been tracking our heat usage with the oil deliveries is to see how much fuel we use to heat the house, per hour. We got 139.6 gallons and ran the heat for a total of 216.5 hours. That works out to about 1 gallon heating the house for 1.5 hours. At $4.29/gallon that's a about $2.86 for an hour of heating. At our current temperature settings, that means that we will be spending about $1000 a year on heat.

According to this, it takes about seven gallons of oil to create one mmbtu of energy. At current oil prices, that means it takes over $28 to make one mmbtu. Natural gas costs only about $4 for an mmbtu. Which is a whopping price difference. $1000 of oil-powered heat might could be replaced with only about $200 of natural gas. The problem is the cost of conversion - since we have water-filled radiator heat, a new boiler, installed, would cost around $10,000. Which means that it would take over ten years to make the money back, at our current energy usage! Still, if we increase our indoor temperature to the US average of just over 70 F, then our payback timeframe would get closer to five years. Also, we could have a gas cooking range! This spring/summer we plan on getting some quotes on what the conversion would actually cost.

Spring has sprung?

So, literally, this happened overnight:

No buds yesterday, pretty pink flowers today. Do you know what that means?

Yard work.

Is it sad that lovely blooms evoke only pain and dread for me?

And despite all the work we paid to have done, it looks like we have a lot to do. The squirrels dug up holes all around our yard and garden. None of the new grass has grown - and in fact the lawn is looking very sparse and muddy, and some stray spurge is taking over the garden where the phlox should be growing. I'm thinking that besides clearing out the overgrown areas in the back of the house, the professional gardening and lawn work wasn't worth it. We'll see over the coming months. But in the meantime, our work is only just beginning...

sigh...

Bacon-flavored fire-starters

We use our fireplace a few times a year. It's always a little bit of pain to start the fire - lots of paper is needed. I've been saving the lint from the dryer for about a year, but it isn't that useful in starting the fire. It doesn't burn - it just smolders. I did a little reading and it seems that candle wax is needed. We don't have many spare candles - but we often have extra bacon grease! With an egg carton and some stash yarn, I had everything to make fire starters.

First, lint is stuffed tightly into an egg carton

Then a slice is cut off

Then cut further into individual cubes

Bacon grease is heated up to make it nice and liquidy

J provides some stash (extra) yarn

I pour the grease into the right-most lint-blob...

....then soak the rest and wound them up with the yarn

So, lint + egg carton + yarn + bacon grease = fire starters. Since I don't want to keep bacon grease at room temperature I stuck the starters in a plastic bag and stored them in the freezer. Even a few months later they work great, burning for over ten minutes.

Little details

We've made a few small home decor purchases recently that I wanted to share.

While our $2 plastic Ikea knobs were cute...

...these glass ones in shades of blue really class up our dresser. The online store sells some really lovely knobs and door pulls.

 We replaced a boring clock on our bookshelf with...what else? A book clock! Isn't it neat?

We're still on the fence about our last acquisition. After we had seating shortages during a Super Bowl party, we decided to buy some extras, so we bought this pouf from CB2 (pouf seems like a really politically incorrect term, but that really does seem to be what these are called).

It's a little bigger than we expected so it won't slide under the sofa or coffee table. It's also a lot firmer than we thought it would be, so it doesn't seem like it would be very comfortable to sit on, which, of course, is what we bought it for. Might be time to make our own with some poly-fil or bean-bag filler, but honestly I'd much rather be lazy and buy something. There are some lovely Turkish and Moroccan styles available, but they are all pretty expensive and don't look any more comfortable. Etsy sells covers, so that might be something. Any suggestions from you? It's been a while since we got any comments.

Walking on (thin) ice

Despite all our efforts to make our home more energy efficient and better heated, our work is never done. I guess that's just a fact of life for any home over fifty years old. During a cold snap a few weeks ago, we noticed that the floor in our office was quite chilly, even though the crawl space below it was now insulated and the heat in the room actually works.

On closer inspection, D saw that there was actually a small gap below the baseboards, allowing cold air to blow between the office and the crawl space. I protested that the crawl space ceiling (i.e. the office floor) had been thoroughly insulated so the space should not matter, but D pointed out that insulated still did not necessarily imply that it could sustain a comfortable room temperature. The crawl space is, after all, more a part of the outside than the inside.

Time for some props. We brought out some Great Stuff Gaps & Cracks. It expands once it's in place to help fill, well, gaps and cracks.

Applying it was pretty easy (says the person who watched and photographed without actually participating):

You can see in these two pictures exactly how it looked as we were applying it. D deposited the strip of foam across the whole line were the floor meets the wall across the two walls with baseboard heat, which also happen to be the two exterior walls of the room. The hardest part of the project was moving the furniture out of the way.

(Also scary to see all the dust that had gathered behind said furniture...Makes me wonder what is lurking behind the piano in the living room, the one giant piece of furniture we own that is not on high enough legs for us to see underneath.)

I can't tell yet if we're seeing any real improvement. The temperature outside this winter has swung between frigid and spring-like, so we haven't had enough cold days in a row to judge the floor temperature (with a very unscientific walking around bare-foot test). But in any case this small fix won't hurt.

A Hairy Situation

I have long hair. It likes to escape down the drain when I shower and the new drain cover didn't do a very good job of stopping it. So every few weeks D has to do a minor unclog. He's become quite the plumber and insists that he doesn't mind. And it only takes him a few minutes.

Recently, however, we had a clogged drain that resisted all of our "quick" attempts at unclogging (mostly all related to the miraculous Zip-It). When that didn't work, D pulled off all of the drain hardware and used an actual plumbers' snake to try to fix the problem. Still no luck. Our temporary solution was to switch to using the other shower and wait until we had more time to deal with it (we avoid chemical drain cleaners because of the fumes and our fear that they will eat through our very old pipes).

That worked pretty well until I decided to fill up the sink in the bathroom to do some hand wash laundry and then let it drain all at once. It would seem that the sink and tub were connected enough that letting a sink full of water go down the drain sent a back-up of sludge into the tub. Oops!

Fast forward past the part where we scrambled for towels and did quick damage control on most of the gunk.

Because D had removed the drain, the pipe wasn't fully connected to the tub and the water back-up allowed water to drain past the pipe and into the walls. Fortunately we have an access panel in our bedroom to get to the leak. It very nearly filled up the little plastic container we managed to shove in to catch the leak (most of the leak - some got onto the wood, so we kept the panel open for quite a while with a box fan circulating the air).

Waiting until we had more time to deal with the clog stopped being an option. We were dealing with the clog "now" (which, of course, wasn't a very good time, but isn't that always the case?).

Step one was to use plumbers' putty to reseal the area around the pipe and to reinstall the hardware, to prevent any potential back-ups from going into the walls again. Next, since obviously the clog seemed to be affecting the sink area as well as the tub, D turned to the sink for his next attempt to snake out the clog.

Back when we had a major clog in our basement utility sink, D bought a 25-foot plumbers' snake. It has certainly paid for itself (all $20 or something) in saved plumber costs and this time was no exception. D was able to snake almost the entire 25 feet from this spot and managed to pull out a wad of hair (I'll spare you the pictures of that one). He wasn't able to access it from the tub area but evidently this angle did the trick.

D has been saying for a year that he doesn't mind doing a little unclogging every few weeks, but I never liked that solution (and even included it on our honey-do list this past September). This time I convinced him that the old drain hardware wasn't working. For every few minor unclogs, there could be a major one as well. So we explored Home Depot and eventually came on the simplest solution:

We didn't go through the whole ordeal of putting in a stopper mechanism up at the overflow vent, but we were able to install the new grate without a screw by just enlarging the center hole and popping it on the existing bolt. So that makes it easy to pop off and replace with the original stopper (currently sitting on the little ledge in the upper left of the picture). And now most of my hair doesn't go down the drain and is easy to wipe away. Hopefully we can avoid such a dramatic clog for a while now.

Storage Saga

Like most people, our tool collection has grown slowly from humble beginnings. A screwdriver and hammer cadged from a parent. A 99 cent adjustable wrench from Walmart. A hand-me-down plastic toolbox. Before we moved into our house our tools largely fit into that toolbox. After a few years in our home our tools collection had expanded well beyond a single toolbox. 

For Christmas, our second gift was a full-height, two part Craftsman tool chest.

Four deep drawers in the bottom half and five skinnier drawers and a top hatch in the upper half. The bottom drawer is large enough to hold our power drills and bits.

We layered drawer liners everywhere to try and keep the tools in place and protect the metal drawers. 

Now, nearly all of the hand tools are in one place! There's even a system. Each drawer has some kind of theme or themes (cutting, pliers, power tools, wrenches). We still need to add labels so we know what the drawer is holding before we open them!

The only major category that hasn't been carefully arranged is the most difficult of all: the thousands of random bolts, nuts, nails,  and screws currently strewn across several plastic bins......

Cheap and Easy

We got scared last Friday when we learned our oil tank was broken. We could have needed a new tank or new pipes (and new brick, mortar and cement). Instead, we needed a new mushroom cap. Of course, that $5-$10 part costs significantly more when professionals get involved. But still, it could have been a lot worse.

It seemed that the reason our pipe wasn't whistling was because it had gotten full of gunk. The mesh filter had been pushed down a little ways into the pipe and clogged with debris and dead bugs. Take off the old cap, put on a new one, and we were good to go. See the pretty new top? Shiny!

 We were very relieved to come home the next day to a full tank of oil. All fixed!

Very Belated Holiday Wishes

This holiday season has been a rather hectic one for various personal reasons and we had so many home-related updates to share that I never quite got around to putting up a holiday post. I had nearly no time to reflect on the year and our goals for the next one.

I realized this weekend as I took down the Christmas decorations that I hadn't even bothered to photograph them first. We didn't put up a tree this year because I just couldn't face the task of moving all the furniture around and getting glitter everywhere. And since putting up the tree is supposed to be fun - if it wasn't going to be, then it wasn't worth doing (I know I sound like a bit of a Scrooge). But we still decorated the house with lots of ribbon, candles, and greenery. Here's one of the few pictures to come out of the season - our candy cane and ornament centerpiece.

As an aside, let me highlight the cool work that went into the glittery pedestal on the right. Mom had a few old brass candlesticks destined for the donation bin. She had read an article about how to spruce them up and we gave it a try on this one - a few hits with a spray primer and then a few with Krylon Glitter Blast in Silver Flash made it a festive piece indeed.

Still, I'm a purist and had a moment of sadness for the loss of the pretty brass color. She gave us a few extra sets to paint various glittery and festive colors, but I lost my nerve and they are still sitting in my drawer in their tarnished brassy glory.

To keep with the Bah-humbug holiday theme we took the easy way out and found that Amazon had an instant video of a crackling fire. But of course it was only a joke - on Christmas day D still built us a beautiful fire in the fireplace and, according to my own tradition, roasted marshmallows.

May your year be a happy one full of fun home projects and no unexpected, expensive repairs!

If it's not one thing, it's another

Well, we fixed the heat and got a shiny new thermostat. We thought we were done. But the house had other plans. It seems our oil tank is on the fritz...

Last month when we got our regular oil delivery, we noticed they only filled about 5 gallons - much less than we needed. When we called, the heating company did not know what the problem was and assured us that they would fill it to the top next time. We thought maybe the truck was out of fuel or something.

Fast forward to last Friday. We had another scheduled delivery and this time, D happened to be home. The delivery guy rang the doorbell and said that we had a problem.

First, a review of how oil fill-ups work (I didn't know any of this until this weekend) - the giant fuel hose hooks into the black pipe and dispenses oil. The other pipe to the right lets out air from the tank as it's filling with fuel. It should whistle. When it stops whistling, there is no more air in tank and that means it is full. So this time around (and, presumably, the last time as well), when the delivery guy started filling up the fuel, there was silence. No whistle. That should mean that the tank is full, which it clearly isn't after two months of use.

This can mean a couple of things - the easiest and cheapest problem would be that the whistle is just broken. The hardest is that there is something wrong with the tank. Somewhere in the middle is the possibility that there is something wrong with the pipe connecting the two.

The pipe leaves the tank and immediately becomes embedded in concrete...ugh...

So this could mean busting up part of the wall in the basement, depending on what the repair folks can figure out about the problem. It will certainly mean getting into the crawl space to look around. Right now we are on about a quarter tank of fuel so the situation is not yet dire. They first said they would come on the 14th but we asked them to please squeeze us in sooner and they are coming on Tuesday. Hopefully whatever the problem is, they can fix it quickly.

While we were getting our heating pipes fixed, the repairman tried to sell us on the joys of gas. Our neighborhood already has it, so we would just need to connect to the pipe in the street. Still, it wouldn't be cheap, or easy. And while it would mean some added benefits like being able to buy a gas stove, I'm still not sure it is worth it.

At least for now, we are stuck with having to fix the tank, since any switch to gas would take a lot longer than we have fuel - I assume it's usually something to do once the heat is off for the year.

In related news, our Nest has now learned how incredibly slowly our house heats up. We usually drop the temperature during the day while we are gone, and have it set to be back up to a more comfortable temperature when we come home. When I got home a few hours early last week, I learned that bumping it up just 1 degree takes the house 45 minutes! Yikes!

Nesting our Home

How do you know when you're a grown-up? When instead of in addition to little-kid toys like video games, you get big-kid toys for the home. This year for Christmas, both of our sets of parents gave us awesome home-improvement gifts. The first was a Nest. (Stay tuned for the next one until our next update.)

The Nest is the hot new learning thermostat, designed by Tony Fadell - designer of the original iPod. Why is this thermostat $250? Well, one it looks cool with it's sleek steel ring and elegant design.

Two, it has a sensor to detect whether anyone is home - so it knows when to turn down the thermostat. Three, it connects to the internet allowing you to change settings through either a web interface or through an iPhone app. Four, other stuff.

Still, is it worth it? For people who never touch their thermostat, this device will probably save you a lot of money. Since we actually have programmed our original thermostat, the Nest makes less sense. Still, after a few days of ownership, I really like it.

The install is both easy and painful. Easy because it is super easy to hook up.

They even give you a screwdriver. Which seems totally unnecessary. Who does not have a screwdriver?

Why did I say it was easy and painful? Well it's painful because the Nest smaller than most of the old thermostats, so you will likely have to deal with some ugly wall. In our case we also have an additional problem: the hole drilled out for the wires is off-center from our planked wall.

So my brother drilled a new hole and threaded the wires into the new hole with a coat hanger.

The new hole.

What we should have done next is filled in the old hole, primed the wall, and repainted it. But 1. we were a bit pressed for time and 2. we do not have the original paint. So we took the easy way out and used the vanity plate.

The wires were super easy to install. You just shove them into little holes on the gray tabs - no screws needed. The Nest itself just snaps onto the front. The first thing it did, after powering up, was update itself. The Nest people apparently are continually adding features to the Nest. Which is awesome. After the update completed the fun begins!

First you connect it to your WiFi network (not required, but it makes the Nest a lot more useful). Now the Brave New Home is part of the Internet of Things! Next you tell it what kind of heat (or A/C) system you have installed (in our case, we have oil-powered radiator heat), then you can fill out a schedule, then some other bits like what the minimum or maximum temperature should be.

The scheduling is far easier than a traditional thermostat because you can use the web interface or mobile app to fill out the week.

For now I've re-created our old schedule - turn on the heat when we wake up, very low for the day, on again when we get home, and cooler for the night. What is awesome is that we can change the thermostat anywhere we have an internet connection. So if we are going out to dinner on Friday night, our iPhone can be used to tell the house not to follow the schedule.

What is nice is that the Nest is smart about heating (and cooling). It learns how long it takes to heat and cool the house so that it can reach the temperature by the specified time. Which is great, because with the old thermostat I had to fudge, by telling it to turn on the heat (or A/C) early.

Another great feature of the Nest is the motion sensor. When it doesn't see anyone walk by the thermostat for a while, it will stop running the heat or A/C. This is not too useful for use during the week because we leave and return on a regular schedule, but this will be useful on the weekends.

Because I love data, I like that the Nest records how long the heater or A/C runs and scores how energy-efficient you are with a leaf. So far, we are doing well.

Unfortunately they do not seem to make the data available in a text format, so I cannot play with the data myself. There's supposed to be a monthly email. Maybe that will have what I want?

So what is worst part about the Nest? I like it so much I am very tempted to get a second one to control our A/C!