Savings from Electric Water Timer

I can now quantitatively recommend the excellently placed investment in the installation of an electric timer for your electric hot water heater.  First let's get a baseline of data to support this statement.

Below is a table of data, the same used in previous charts graphing our electric bills for the past year.  I've added a column showing the kWh (kilo-Watt-hour) utilization and a cost in pennies per each.

Statement Dt	Cost	kWh	Cost / kWh
09/20/09	116	959	0.12
10/28/09	117	968	0.12
11/20/09	127	1050	0.12
12/20/09	121	1013	0.12
01/29/10	139	1184	0.12
02/21/10	134	1155	0.12
03/25/10	117	978	0.12
04/28/20	137	1175	0.12
05/28/10	124	1033	0.12
06/21/10	131	1058	0.12
07/28/10	112	889	0.13
08/20/10	125	1010	0.12
09/23/10	108	847	0.13
10/28/10	86	655	0.13
11/20/10	85	647	0.13

As you can see, the cost per kWh has been creeping up.  Notice that this is for the past year back into 2009.  My wife found a note she'd made in 2004 when we were paying .09 per kWh.  That was way back before we used a lot of CFLs, timers, had better windows and power hungry CRTs everywhere and the average monthly bill was right around $100.


Notice the last two rows in the table above.  The October bill represents our first month of automatic switching of power.  The month preceding that we did our best to manually turn it on and off as we remembered, which was nearly every day but not as precise.  The automatic timer is set up to give us morning and evening hot water in enough abundance that we are fine with confining our showers to evening time and getting our wash done during the day.  Sometimes these switch where wash is done at night and showers in the morning.  No great discomfort is felt on our part.

So, an updated version of our chart (now rendered by Open Office on Mac OSX) looks like this.

 Now that, my friends, is quantitative evidence of a money saving trend, which justifies both the cost and effort to install as well as the mild inconvenience of scheduling your major consumption periods of hot water.  I should add, we are not without hot water during the day.  Our tank is a 75 gallon model and we often have enough hot water throughout the day for washing hands and the like.  


Updated 12/22/2010 (I finally charged my old camera phone)  Here's what the installation looks like.  The Orange wire is 12 gage 2-wire.  This is attached right next to our breaker box.

So, if you're on a budget (you are, aren't you?), go out, get a "little grey box" like device and install it or have it professionally installed.  It will be worth the cost if done right.  And do get it done right.  If you don't know how, ask a friend who does and pay them with a nice bit of food or a return favor.

Cheers!

Motivating My Kids

As a parent, getting the kids to do what they are supposed to do is the biggest challenge.  I can handle the birds and bees talks, the life and death discussions - but getting the kids to DO something they don't want to do has got to be the biggest challenge.

Tonight, I had a revelation from God and broke it down for Offspring #1.  The example at hand was cleaning the bedroom (a certified disaster area eligible for federal funds).   I taught 4 principles for tackling a seemingly insurmountable job that I thought were worth recording here for others.

Principle 1: Awareness.  You have to know what the job is, identify it's parts and take stock of what needs to be done.  Do you have the tools you'll need (baskets for misc toys, etc.)?  Never let yourself say "I can't" or "I'll try" because the first totally preempts victory and the second allows the possibility of failure.

Principle 2: Discipline. You'll need to keep reminding yourself of what the task consists of until it's done.  It's the only way you'll know when you are done and it is essential to keeping your mind focussed on the task.  If you need to make a list, do that.  If you need to break the work up into visual chunks, you can do that too.  A strategy I teach everyone here for attacking a messy room is to categorize.  Pick the biggest category of item and get all of that first.  It optimizes your time and frees your mind from the dullness of thinking about each item one at a time.

Principle 3: Motivation. Make a game out of it.  A favorite game here is "mail" where things get picked up into a bag and then "delivered" to where they need to go.  "beat the clock" and "i spy" work well too.  I also pointed out the value of tackling the low hanging fruit first (and what that meant) and how small victories encourage you to tackle larger items, so organizing your work from smallest to largest can work too.  Celebrate each small victory.

Principle 4: Endurance.  The most important thing to achieving total victory over a task is to complete it.  That last fraction will be tempting to put off until later, but do it now while you're still motivated and have momentum.  It's the hardest thing besides getting started but the biggest victory because victory over the last fraction of the job is victory over the entire job.

Brilliant Offspring #1 (we'll name this one someday) added Principle 5: Celebrate!  When you accomplish a big goal, it's time for a big celebration.  Cookies and milk, having a friend over to play, whatever is suitable to the work accomplished.

As I was typing this, my little ward came down with a crayon written version (from memory, with some adaptations) of the above in short form and asked me to type it up and print a copy.  So we did and now it's officially a tool for use in the Carter house. :-)

DIY TV Repair

I confess, that title sounds like the lead in for a comedy sketch or a photographic essay on the misapplication of duct-tape.  But, by the grace of God, it's the truth.  Our TV started flaking out last Thursday and my resourceful wife Googled the model number and problem description and was able to secure information and detailed instruction for repair.  Armed with this knowledge, I set about deconstructing our 5 year old (bought factor refurbished no less) flat panel TV.  After about 40 screws were removed and carefully grouped on the workbench by geographic origin, I was able to gingerly dislodge the circuit board for the power supply, locate the three failed capacitors (bulged out on top a slight bit rather than perfectly flat) and remove them.

The following morning, out for breakfast with Offspring #1, we picked up three new capacitors with the same mili-jule rating (1000uf) at a slightly higher voltage, 35v as opposed to the parts being replaced which were 25v.  I also needed a desoldering tool as I couldn't clear the holes on the board with my improvised bit of wire.  All told, the cost was $16.33 including tax.  I think the capacitors were only $1.87 a piece or so... expensive as capacitors go but the price to pay for one-off access (in multiples of 3).

My wife and I agreed, $16.33 is much more affordable than a new TV or a $75 minimum repair look-see.  And, to my amazement, the  whole thing works just fine... and I learned a bit about capacitors.

Fall Project Barrage

This past weekend was a good opportunity to catch up on a couple of items that I've been wanting to knock out.

Hung Out To Dry

We decided we liked the clothesline arrangement out back so the posts got set in cement Saturday.  It's getting too cold to use them now but we might chance one or two more days of use before winter really sets in.  Making inside arrangements for clothes drying without electricity has been the subject of some research and discussion.

The "Amish" make collapsible wooden drying racks that look really nice and fold away for storage.  Unfortunately, good ones start around $80 and go up from there.  Plus they take up floor space which, in our somewhat cramped family room in the basement, is at a premium.  God blessed me though with a new friend at work who shares many if not all of my values and views.  He's a remarkable individual in his own right having survived near total bodily decimation in an auto wreck 20 years ago.  On a recent visit to his place, I noticed a very sad looking "party" deck in the back yard.  I asked him if he had plans to fix it up.  "I want it gone."  A quick visual inventory told me that it was a trove of reusable materials, so I offered to help demolish it in exchange for first pick of the best parts.  He readily agreed as his wife was keen to have it gone as well.  A couple of weeks later we were having a party with the Sawsall and a nice hefty sledgehammer.  The railing was made out of 7/8 inch rigid conduit and was one of the first things I called dibs on.  And that's where this story and the need for clothes drying space inside meet.

Taking two six foot lengths of the pipe, I assembled some home-brew expanding gaskets using about $3.00 worth of hardware from Wal-mart.  Starting with a 1-1/2" x 1/8" screw I added:

1. a small lock washer 
2. a 5/8 inch washer
3. a 1" x 2" strip of felt folded thrice and wrapped around the screw
4. an additional 5/8 " washer
5. a 6" length of 350 lb. dog chain
6. one final 5/8 washer and...
7. the nut.

This assembly was placed inside the end of the pipe and then the nut was tightened, compressing the felt between the two inner washers.  I kept tightening till the gasket made a very snug fit inside the pipe.  Repeating this at the opposite end, I hung the chains from the bottom of the floor joists by screwing 1/2" wood screws through the other end of the chain.  Et viola, semi-instant clothes hanging space.  Using plastic hangers and clothes-pins where needed, we have enough hanging space to dry a load of laundry up out of the way.


Electric Crusade

Last month I posted our results for our electric bill attained by turning off the water heater except when needed.  We managed to narrow it down to about 3 hours a night.  To our great joy, our electric bill for last month was only $87 for roughly 600 kw hrs.  This is half the electricity we would use keeping it on all the time.  That pretty much sold us that it would be worth the hassle for me to wire up the 40 Amp 220 V Timer.   I sent a call out to our neighborhood network seeking just 5 ft. of 10-2 660v wire.  Fortunately, the engineer down the street was installing an electric space heater in his garage last weekend and after getting it run, he had 5 1/2 ft. left over.  God is good!  He was happy to let me have it (and knows I'm happy to share whatever excess I find myself in possession of that fits his future needs as well) and inside an hour I had the switch wired in.

I started by cutting the mains and then cutting the line coming out of the main panel leaving enough to bend it into a new junction box and splice the new wire in.  I used heavy gauge wiring nuts to connect the new splice to the old wire.  10 gauge wire is stiff stuff, so it was easy to use needle nose pliers to bend the leads into alignment like small pipes to make twisting the wiring nuts on easy.  The timer simply mounted to the same board the main panel and new junction box are fastened too.  After carefully studying the wiring diagram, I cut the spliced in line and threaded it through the knock-outs on the timer box  and made the connections.   This particular timer is electro-mechanical and so "setting" the timer involves screwing the properly colored cut-in and cut-out tabs onto the timer wheel.  We set the timer to run the water heater from 6:30 to 9:30 and after a day of use it seems to be sufficient for our 78 gallon tank which has a 4 inch foam jacket.   The other nice feature is that it has a manual cutoff/on switch which itself is actuated with the timer, so you can turn it off early if you like or on early if you like.

I'll report back in the future to let you know if our savings hold out.  One future bit of data crunching to do yet is to compare the dollar figures from last months chart with the actual price per kwh we were paying.  That, I expect, will show that while we've been cutting our use, the cost has been rising with the down economy (for various reasons - lack of wholesale buyers to offset our facilities costs for one) and while we're making good progress against our cost here, it could be a lot lower with the cuts and improvements we've made.

Hogan Hero

The last bit of fun this weekend was building the shell of a Navajo Hogan, sans dug out, out of cedar rails for the kids and their friends to play in.  It was an immediate hit and was occupied for the remainder of the day till sunset.  I got the idea from D.C. Beard's Shelters, Shacks, And Shanties.  It's a great resource for educating your own woodland critters on the finer points of wilderness survival.    A real hogan is sometimes big enough for a man to stand in and is usually dug into the earth or overlaid with sod or dirt.  Ours is just a free standing arrangement of cedar rails for demonstration and play purposes.  Having had a lot of fun building it though, I think we might build a real one (including digging the pit to set it over) out near our campsite sometime next year.  Maybe.  I suppose the last thing they need is a place to get into trouble hidden away from the watchful eye of mom and dad.

Power Savings Adding Up

For a month now we've been shutting off the Electric Water Heater during the day and turning it on a couple of hours before showers and laundry and shutting it off after.  Sometimes we'll turn it on before going to bed and then off in the morning or get up a bit early to turn it on and have showers an hour or so later.  This has had a measurable impact on our energy use and I think at this point it merits setting up the 40 Amp 220 V timer to control the on/off times for us.   I purchased the switch a long while back and never set it up since I wasn't sure it would have an impact.  It appears that it will.  Take a look at the graph below.

We've established a good downward trend but this isn't all just flipping a breaker with some regularity.  Let's review some of the changes that we've made in the last two years to help us get there.

• Replaced our Old Windows
• Added a Wood Stove as secondary heat, became mostly our primary heat source.
• Replaced all lights with CFLs.
• Added motion switches in a couple of strategic areas.
• Stopped using the Clothes-dryer so much when we installed an outdoor clothesline.
• Not mentioned in a blog but - got rid of energy hungry computer and CRT monitor and replaced with a used Mac-Mini and flat panel monitor
• Added a wind break / privacy fence on the windy side of the house

I'm not going to go into the dollars and cents here because it will make me cry, but we stretched ourselves financially to the limit to accomplish these things.  Some were for the future knock-on savings.  Some were for the improved energy independence and some were just things we wanted to do anyway.  All in all, it has all been a value add on our home.  Realizing savings from these things will likely take a few years and may not happen at all with the rising and variable cost of electricity, but we'll pray and see.

South Side Courtyard

I've been emboldened lately in my carpentry efforts.  After building the clothesline and enjoying the work that went into it as well as the sense of accomplishment, I decided it was high time to do something about the. disused side, the ugly side, of our house.  It's the south side, sadly, that is so unloved here.  Just the utility meters,  a pile of tires, and our AC compressor.  Not much to look at and as a mater of fact, a pretty useless space except for traversing from front yard to back.  Weeds had overgrown and the grade didn't slop away from the house nicely, so the time for action had arrived.

I had my local help (aspiring Dr. / Lawyer 15 yr old from down the road) de-weed and grade the area with a pick and rake.  Then I called in the utilities to mark where the under ground gas, electric and phone were located.  I was on my own figuring out where our well line ran but had a pretty good bearing on that.  Once the area was marked, I started measuring out the area I wanted the fence and flagged the holes.  I didn't use any fancy trig to get it square, just kept checking my measurements and moving stakes till things were true.

Off to Lowes for 13 pressure treated 4" x 4" x 8' posts which went 18" into the hard clay.  This was actually fun for me as using an old clamshell post hole digger really gives you a good upper-body workout.  One night I was so eager to get out and dig I skipped dinner and got to learn all about the need for carbs!  I had started smelling ammonia and kept looking around for the cat peeing on the house, a post, my leg... something.  Lo and behold - the stench was coming right off my chest.  Turns out that when you don't have carbs, your body breaks amino acids for energy and produces an excess of nitrogen in the process.  This bonds with CO2 and if you can't (or aren't) peeing it out fast enough, you sweat pure ammonia.  Wow.  Blew my mind and cleared my nose.

Once the holes were dug and I was happy with their placement, I ordered fence panels and concrete which came two days later on pallets (reusable!) by truck.  It only took one night to mix cement and set the posts.  A trick I learned while doing it was not to set the posts all in a row, one by one, but to set the corners first,  then tie a string or rope between them along one side as a guide for the other posts.  This helped me find that one hole was too far to one side so I was able to widen it before setting the post there and the lines are very straight now with the panels on.

It took me about three nights to put up the fence panels (two in the wind!) with screws, including cutting them to size.  They were 6' x 8' and I really wanted my posts 6' apart for wind resistance, so close to two feet came off each segment which left me with 11 nice narrow segments of fence for other future projects.  I found triple corrosion resistant screws at the local hardware store and the coating really made the screws go in like butter with my electric drill.

Tonight I built the small gate that will go at the front to permit the utility meter readers access to the area.  That came together nicely and prompted me to impromptu an infomercial for "invisible gate".  We make it! Where is it? We don't know! It's invisible gate!!  One large gate at the back will allow garden tractor and cart to be parked there as needed and allow larger items to move in and out, like perhaps a picnic table.

The fence will also get a coat of colored stain to match the house and protect the wood.  5 Gallons will hopefully do it but I might have to go back for more.  Corner boards will go up and get the same color as the corners of our house to tie it all together.  Not sure how I'll work the tops though as I chose stockade tops for the fence (like slightly rounded pickets) and my posts are square and a tad above the fence tops.  I'll have to think on that for a while.

So far, project costs:

Yep.  A fair sight more expensive than I thought I was getting myself in for at the outset.  But, to date, no regrets.  The courtyard already feels like an extension of our home and despite still being rough, it feels like a nice place to be outside with some privacy when you want it.  And, as it is near our bedroom, I have noticed it already cuts down on the wind noise around the corner of our house at night, which is an added and unexpected benefit. Once it's painted and the interior space less rugged, I'll try to get some pictures on here.  Ever since switch to a camera-less phone for work, I've been less the shutter-bug.

So - some lessons learned, some good hard and enjoyable work, some nice craftsmanship going into the finished product... I'd say I'm well pleased with this project despite the cost of all new materials.

Solar Power: Clothes Dryer

It seemed like our electric bill was high or getting higher.  At one point it felt like it was climbing 9% per month.  In actuality, it fluctuates wildly month to month, shown below.  The last figure is an out-lier as we were gone for 8 days during that period and the hot water heater, dryer and washing appliances were all off duty during that time.  Just that 8 days saved us 14.5%! 

Household Electric Bill -  9/09 - 7/10

The chart is baselined at $100 to provide more drama, which really needs no help.  While we've started a modest downward trend, it's still up where I would consider it too expensive.  So three weeks ago, having identified what I perceive as the main energy hog in our house, I put together a new solar powered clothes dryer.  In other words, up went a 4 strand clothes line.

I was proud that it only cost me about $36 in new hardware.  I had scavenged some pressure treated 1" x 3" x 44" boards from the Lowes dumpster locally - free for the asking.  Also left over from the garden fence project were two 8' x 4" x 4" pt posts.  Using my miter saw, I made 45° gussets for a cross member from the 1 x 3's and assembled what basically looked like telephone poles with for wires running between two of them. Screws were left over from the play ground kit and scavenged from our old shutters.

The poles went two feet into the clay and the cross members were an inch from the top, leaving room to glue on some old copper / tin post caps.  Max height of line is then 5'-11" so my wife has no trouble reaching.  The poles are 40 ft apart.  I bought 200 ft of steel core green plastic line which has stretched with use.  Fortunately, I anchored it to the hooks on either end with cable thimbles and u-bolts so it is adjustable for tensioning.  I could probably come up with a more convenient tensioner mechanism given some more time... something that doesn't require getting out the socket wrench.

Per usual, till we're satisfied with placement and utility, the post holes are just backfilled with crushed limestone and capped with packed clay.  If we like what we have, I'll cement them next year.  It took about three evenings to put it all together; one night spent shopping for hooks, u-bolts and cable, one night cutting the gussets and one night assembling and installing.  Probably 3 or 4 hours all together in effort.  I installed the whole thing in an area that gets full sun for about 85-90% of the day during summer and should get 100% daily sunlight other times of the year.

I am very much looking forward to what our electric bill is like next month.  I am anticipating a good percentage drop, perhaps 30%.  We'll see.  Also consuming a lot of load here is our Electric hot water heater, two freezers, a refrigerator, a dehumidifier which runs in 4 hour intervals, the clothes washing machine and the dish washing machine.  Lights are almost all now CFL except for the basement which has dimmers so those are incandescent but I took half the lights out of the recessed cans down there.  My desk lamp is a 40 watt... I can't have a cold blue glow of a CFL at my nice warm writing desk... just too incongruitous.

I'm looking closely at other solar powered items, like the food dehydrator I mentioned last month.  A Solar water heater is very appealing to me as it would be something within my mechanical means.  Stay tuned.