Hybrid Hot Water

Our water heater came with our house when we moved in 14 years ago, and kept chugging along, sucking up electricity and turning it into, more or less, enough water for 3-4 consecutive showers (the last one was always a little iffy). We never drained or serviced it, though we did wrap it in a coat of insulation way back in 2012. That was pretty much all the attention it ever got. In 2015, we confirmed through a smart meter that it really was sucking up a ton of our electricity bill.

The energy guide sticker made it seem comparable--even "better" than other hot water heaters. But considering this was early 00s technology at the latest, it really didn't compare to what was available now.

We wanted to get something more efficient. And more important, to me, we wanted to do it on our terms and our timeline, rather than panic-buying something when the water heater inevitably decided to give up the ghost one day (probably in the middle of winter, too).

D did a lot of research and decided we should splurge on a hybrid hot water heater. This went against the opinion of the experienced HVAC guy who installed it, who insisted we were wasting our money. A hybrid system can heat the water 2 different ways. It has an old-fashioned immersion heater, just like our old hot water heater (albeit far more efficient 20 years later). These heat up water relatively fast and are a tried and true, decades' old type of technology. 

The hybrid part comes from the fact that it also heats the water with a heat pump. Now I didn't really know what a heat pump did, though D has bemoaned the fact for years that we don't have one along with our AC (combo units weren't really when we replaced ours in 2015), since they create heat so much more efficiently than standard heaters. The whole story is here (specific to water heaters, though the principle works the same for heating). Here is the key:

Heat pump water heaters use electricity to move heat from one place to another instead of generating heat directly. Therefore, they can be two to three times more energy efficient than conventional electric resistance water heaters. To move the heat, heat pumps work like a refrigerator in reverse.

They require that the room they be installed in stay above 40 degrees (there needs to be some heat in the air to pull from), with a lot of air (they don't work well in closets). Our basement satisfied both those requirements. Because they pull end up pulling moisture out of the air along with the heat, they also tend to dehumidify a room. Considering we run our basement dehumidifier constantly, that seemed like an amazing twofer.

What makes our water heater "hybrid" is that it can do both. Since heat pumps can take a while to heat the water, we didn't want to commit to having a very slow system with four people who all take showers within about an hour of each other. The heater lets us pick how we want to heat our water:

Efficiency means "only use the heat pump" and we're trying that out to see if we can manage with just the most efficient system. So far, so good, at least in the warm summer months (more heat to pull out of the air, cooler showers, etc). The electric setting would turn our unit into a standard water heater. And hybrid, of course, lets the heater pull from both heat sources as necessary.

We also got a bigger tank. The new heat pump is 67 gallons, while the old one was 55. This gives us more ready-to-go hot water. We discovered that once the water reaches the right temperature, it can hold that temperature for a while. We know that because the heat pump is quite loud, blowing a fan sort of like an AC unit. So we can hear when it's running, at least from in the basement. When it got installed, it ran for about three hours nonstop and then didn't start running again late in the evening after two showers.

This new AO Smith is taller but it's actually quite sleek and nice looking. Because of the way it pulls heat in and dehumidifies, it has to drain. Our HVAC plumber installed this rather hilarious/awful piping out the bottom, to the wall under the utility sink, and into the drain. We wanted to drain it there since our rightmost utility sink has a crack in it.

But the pipe was so awful that we decided to risk it, assuming that the amount of water generated by the heat pump won't be enough to be a problem for the sink. Now the pipe doesn't stick out awkwardly into my laundry area.

Here's the whole scene, after some decluttering yesterday as we moved around some shelving and purged some unnecessary junk (hampers we never used, the drying rack to our older dryer).

The system was expensive (our HVAC guy certainly thought it was pointlessly expensive) but there are state and federal rebates for upgrading to this kind of water heater, and we're seeing about 5kWh used each day, which equals about $1. Not a ton, of course, but it adds up (and probably will add up to more in the winter when we use more hot water). More importantly, we (hopefully) have a water heater that will last us another decade or more without concern.

Bye, old faithful!

Old water heater loaded in a truck to be removed.

 

Lawn and Murder Bees

Last summer, we (well, mostly I), continued to tend our vegetable garden. After protecting the garden with chickenwire and closing it off like Fort Knox to keep the rabbits out after they decimated my snap peas in 2021, we did manage to keep out most of the yard herbivores and harvest some things. Here, for example, is one of our tomato harvests. (I have many more harvest pictures from 2022 but this post isn't really about that, so imagine radishes and cucumbers too.)

The fact was, however, I didn't really enjoy gardening (at least not after it got about 75 and the mosquitos came out) and the kids did not want to help and, well, it was much easier just to buy those veggies from the store. Things had become a little wild by the end of the summer as I went out less and less to avoid being assaulted by biting insects:

So last fall, we made the rewarding decision to give up on veggie gardening and turn it back into yard:

This summer, it was a lovely patch of grass (and not even the weed-filled grass of the rest of the yard, yet). Though we tried to level it as best we could, it is still a little mounded, but hopefully as the tilled ground compacts, it will mostly be level with the rest of the yard. And really it probably is only noticeable to us.

All was well. We spent our limited gardening time in our flower beds along the front of the house and the back fence line, slowly trying to build out our pollinator-friendly spaces.

Until...the yellow jackets came...D noticed some activity in the lawn while watering the back garden a few weeks ago. He had mildly angered...some buzzing things...and went over to investigate. About 10 feet away from the activity, he got  a stinger to the neck and turned tail and headed indoors. After asking some neighbors and doing some research, he learned that they were most definitely not ground bees, which are solitary (and usually stingless, which these assuredly were not), but likely a yellow jacket nest. Yellow jackets are aggressive and really not something you want to mess with. And while they can excavate their own hole, they will often find space where the ground is looser or even dug out by something like a groundhog. Like the soft earth of our former veggie garden! UGH.

They had moved in right at the edge of that new patch of grass. Here are a few pictures of their nest location, from a safe distance away (including inside through a screened window--I was taking no chances):

The holes can be incredibly small and they can possibly have multiple entrances, but the primary suggestions for how to eradicate them included pesticides and suffocation. D figured out that they were dormant/sleeping at night and that it was possible to attempt to cover up the hole until pest professionals could come and take care of it. He covered up the (main? only?) entrance with a bucket and a brick. Here is a zoomed in video, taken from afar, of the angry yellow jackets the next morning:

That was a lot of NOPE right there. A couple of weeks after D made the painful discovery, professional help arrived. Wearing a bee-keeper hat and thick clothes, he widened the hole that served as the entrance put chemicals in.

He warned us to be on the lookout for holes created by other animals that can serve as a starting point for yellow jackets, and to fill them in and stomp on them. Two days later, we've seen no activity from that nest, thank goodness. 

Edited, one hour after originally posting, to add:

We found another. Fuuuuuuuuddddggggge. Since it's in the median, we're checking to see if it's our municipality's problem or ours. (Further edited to add - the town will take care of it, yay!)

One-Year Storm-i-versary

Last year, a big storm blew through that took our power out for over 24 hours. Funny enough, at the time, I waited to write a post about it because of a lingering issue post-storm that, it turns out, is still lingering. A year is long enough--let's get on with the post!

Having the electricity go out is not, in itself, much of an update. We've been pretty lucky due to the fact that our electrical circuit leads into the commercial part of town, so the few times we lose power, it usually comes back fast and is not worthy of a post. This time, however, we lost it for a while and we were READY! A few months before, we had purchased an electric vehicle (EV), as you may remember from this post about installing the EV charging station. At the time, D--in what turned out to be amazing foresight--also bought an adapter to allow our car to utilize its bidirectional charging capabilities. Meaning that power can also flow FROM the car to other things at 120V. This, it turned out, was fabulous timing.

A few hours into our black-out, we started to worry about how long our fridge would keep our food cold. Four hours, it turns out. A freezer will keep food safe for 24 to 48 hours, but a fridge (even without opening it and having it be pretty full) won't last long. That was, obviously, not great. But bring power in from the vehicle parked in the driveway and we were in the clear. The hardest part was pulling the fridge/freezer out from the wall. After that, we sent the charging cable from the driveway through the garage into the sunroom and then into the kitchen. 

Using a power strip, we also powered a small lamp and could charge our laptops and phones. It really felt like magic.

After charging up the fridge/freezer overnight and with no end to the blackout predicted, D rerouted the cables to go out the dining room window and drop down to the basement and through the door to give our basement chest freezer a burst of energy too. 

We were lucky that we got out of last storm season relatively unscathed but the heavy winds (or perhaps a flying branch) did manage to knock down one of our three chimney caps. We had them installed after a run-in with a raccoon more than 10 years ago, to make sure that no one else could decide to move in. The one that came down was the one mismatched one of the set of three, and we are pretty sure that it's the one that leads to the furnace, based on our drawings and understanding from that time period (I always swear I'm my own best reader!).

You can see from this picture (as storm clouds continued to roll through) that it's the back-most cap):

The problem is that our chimney sweep, who came to clean our chimneys last fall, said he couldn't get up there to replace it. He did say it was a good-quality cap and suggested it would be possible to paint it (presumably with something heat proof?) rather than replace it with a darker color to match.

All the chimney people look at our slate roof as a huge liability that they simply do not want to deal with and risk breaking. It doesn't help that the cherry tree in front of our house, exactly where they would want to put the ladder, has grown as well. Two companies later, we still haven't found anyone who wants to replace the chimney cap. We're not trying particularly hard, but any time we see someone working around town, we get them to come by and give a quote (a quote that remains: "no thanks, we can't do that job"). So here we are, approximately one year later with no resolution. Fortunately no critters have tried to move in yet.

On milkweed, trees, and grass

Now we head over to the very back corner of our yard, for a look at the last several years of work we've put in back there. It is a shaded and overgrown mess, full of invasive species and poison ivy, so it's not one where we really enjoy working. And it's not visible to anyone but us, so the need to keep it up to avoid embarrassing ourselves is also not a compelling motivation. But still, we're making progress bit by bit.

Step one, back in 2021, was to to sever and remove as much of the wisteria and ivy choking the trees that we could. Wisteria seems impossible to fully eradicate (at least without herbicides), so it keeps on growing up out of the ground. But at least now, it no longer strangles the trees. Removing it required cutting it from its roots and then pulling it off the tree, creating long fibrous vines that were strong enough to swing from!

After learning that this honeysuckle (exact name escapes me) was actually invasive, we pulled that out too. D had wanted to for some time, but I enjoyed the smell. Still, once we learned that it wasn't particularly beneficial to local pollinators, I was glad to be rid of it. 

With the honeysuckle "tree" gone and more weeding on the ground, we ended up with a lot of space to work with. And since the line where the lawn stopped and the "garden" (I use the word very loosely) began always felt like it was right where I needed to stand to push the kids on the swings, we regained some lawn by pushing the railway tie dividers back about 2 feet.

We spread some compost and grass seed and did pretty good with adding more space, as you'll see in the pictures that follow where you can't even really tell there used to be a different border:

So here we are, with a nice cleared place that was much narrower (meaning, we felt, greater likelihood of success for us keeping it looking nice):

When the crew was out doing the patio and the corner not-quite-a-rain garden, we had them put in a birch tree on this side as well:

Well, spoiler alert--it died pretty spectacularly. We tried to complain and have it replaced but never got any satisfaction from the landscaper. We were pretty bummed and also wondered if maybe the spot was bad, though it is usually damp and shady and seemed perfect for a river birch. Then, to jump forward to just last week while we were doing other work in this garden bed, we found this underground, where the birch had been:

This large metal basket, filled with rocks and the tinest bit of soil, was obviously not removed from under the tree when the birch was planned! Of course it died--there was nowhere for its roots to go! They must have been trapped in this small space until they just gave up. SIGH. Ok. Well we just lit that money on fire.

Fortunately, the rest of the back garden bed is doing much better. We planted a slew of different kinds of milkweed: butterfly weed, common milkweed, and swamp milkweed, all native pollinators that monarchs supposedly love (I say supposedly because while they joined us two years ago in our front garden bed, no monarch caterpillars have made a home of this back area. I wonder if it has something to do with the slightly-more-than-dappled shade in this back bed (milkweed prefers sun, but they're surviving admirably back here). Here are some of the milkweed when we planted it in fall of 2021, with the newest arrivals from the nursery circled in red:

And here it is as of last week:

The orange butterfly weed has already flowered but the pink swamp milkweeds are starting to put out buds too. You can see from this angle that we still have a lot of ground we'd like to cover:

Here's what the pink milkweeds will look like, as captured last year:

Also in this back garden bed are a few trees, because I can't help myself. Close to the shed, we planted a sycamore, one of my favorite kinds of trees. We planted in 2021 and here's how tall it was last summer:

From this angle, see it all the way over there on the right?

There's not much for scale, but I'd guess it was maybe about 5 to 6 feet. Fast forward to this year and you can see it's already taller than the shed!

It's quite close to an oak tree, but we had a few arborists suggest that oak tree isn't going to last much longer, so I don't think they will have to compete for long:

We also planted a pair of "stellar" pink dogwoods for some understory color, at the same time as the sycamore:

Sadly, in keeping with our recent 50/50 odds, one of the trees is doing just fine (the one on the left) and the other kicked the bucket. Oh well. I failed to get a picture of it in flower. The best picture I have is one I took to document what kind of tree it was once I realized the band was too tight and had to come off:

More plans for this section include adding more milkweed into the cleared area, possibly planting borage seeds among the milkweed for more ground cover, and keeping the area as clear as we can from weeds and wisteria. We have separate plans for the small section of our garden further to the left (looking at the garden/away from the house), but that's a post for another time.

Where to begin again...

Posts have been few and far between due to other priorities (knitting, anyone?), life events, and well, because we've been too busy doing things in our home to record them. But we have some big things on the horizon so I might as well catch up with the smaller things over the next few months and try to build some momentum so...hi. We're back.

It's growing season, so as any regular reader will know, it's time for a lawn and garden catch-up. But let's talk about some of the hardware on the way to the outside first. Last fall, we updated some fixtures that put the finishing touches on our siding refresh from spring. Our outdoor lights in the front seemed like they were probably from a discount value pack several decades ago. It was definitely time to swap them out for some curb appeal. The post itself also needed some refresh--it was showing signs of rusting at the top and bottom. I've spray painted it one already, probably almost 10 years ago now (but somehow I couldn't find a post for it when I looked), so that held up pretty well:

After a quick sand-down to remove some of the rust and a wipe with a damp clothed, I went to work applying a few thin coats:

More dramatically, D tackled the electrical work, replacing the topper with one made of clear glass and an Edison bulb (the kind with the exposed filament, a style we've turned to multiple times before, and which you will see again in a future post). This is actually the second post topper, as we originally bought one that was much too high and out of proportion with the rest of the lamp post.

Of course the rest had to be replaced to match! The lamp right next to the door came next:

As always, a mass of old, deteriorating wires greeted us. Nothing too surprising though, so we just proceeded with the new fixture.

Tah-dah! But wait, there's more!

We forgot to get a "before" picture for the light over the garage, but it was similar to the other two, with the plastic shade and black construction. The wires were less deteriorated than next to the front door, but just barely.

Now we have three lovely, matching exterior lights (though the lack of a more sealed-off receptacle does mean things get a little dusty inside).

Coincidentally with all that, our front door hardware abruptly failed one day, almost locking us out. It wasn't the Schlage auto-lock that died (which you might expect, given that it has a battery and small computer) but the mechanism in the doorknob itself that pulls back the latch bolt. It failed pretty spectacularly--D had to uninstall it immediately just so we could get in and out, so it became important that we replace it immediately (the dead bolt still worked independently, fortunately).

Once we went looking, we wondered why we hadn't replaced it sooner. All our front door hardware is brushed nickel, including the storm door handle and our smart lock, and yet we had inherited this oil-rubbed bronze pull (oddly paired with a nickel doorknob on the inside). Why had we kept it so long? I guess it simply wasn't something we had thought of. But the new fixture (on the right) is so much prettier.

Even better, we replaced the slippery inside knob with a lever. This works better for so many reasons! Easier for Grandma (arthritis), me (hand lotion and mittens/gloves), and the kids (tiny hands). Yet another thing we never really considered replacing and yet made a big difference. 

It took one extra try to get right--we were so un-used to levers that we selected the wrong one at first, and had to reinstall the second one that came in the box when we realized which way the lever is supposed to swoop:

And because this is the house of a knitter, it seemed like a good time to upgrade our door wreath too (partly because the UV effects on the old one made all the plastic so brittle it left piles on our floor every time we opened the door):

The lights and handle weren't cheap, but they weren't expensive either. One of those things that can make a big impact in tiny details that seem so obvious afterwards.

Next time, stay tuned for a big yard update as I try to get back in the swing of things.