A very cold 24 hr period in December!

Dec 18-19: Down here in southwest Missouri, an arctic incursion really smacked it to us with an average temperature of about 16 degrees! The translated into 61 kWh's of electricity I had to use to keep my modest adobe warm!  In the chart above, you can visualize just how far from the 'norm' that temperature reading was!

The first arctic outbreak of December 2016!

Forsyth Mo. - All over the news, recently, was a forecast of arctic air that was scheduled to slam into the Taney County Missouri on or about December 7. The forecast sounded serious as the weather service was calling for some morning temps in the lower teens! This from the National Weather Service;

'Overall, it looks like winter will make its first real appearance to the Ozarks over the next week to 10 days.'

My thinking at hearing that news was how I would face the challenge of keeping most of that cold air at bay. I was living in a condo located on at the end of a building on the top floor of a four floor structure, and so my unit would be exposed to the elements from a number of sides. Sure, my building was well insulated, but still there were areas of concern...

For instance, there were two sliding glass doors that lead out to my balcony. They were built in 1991 and were showing their age, as air leakage was a problem. That area was located in the living room, and so I decided to set the furnace on a low setting (60ºF) and then retreat to my bedroom office during the worst of the weather. That location offered a much smaller volume that I hoped to heat adequately with a small space heater. The lone window, in that room, was also treated with a collection of cardboard boxes that would supply some dead air space along with R-values of about 3. That should help a lot, I figured. At least that was the plan....

Last January, when it got cold, in a similar fashion, I used about 45-55 kilowatt hours of electricity to maintain my unit at a livable level. Back then, I have daytime temps in the low 30's while overnight temps got down into the teens! And, as a senior living on a fixed income, I really needed to try and keep those electric bills under some kind of control!

I hope to update this post, beginning December 7 when the weather turns colder.Be sure to visit my weather site at www.taneyservices.com for more real time weather data!

Well it is summer and it's hot!

So what better time for my AC unit to quit on me! Mid July is likely not the best time to be having problems, and after a visit from John's Heating and Air Conditioning Service, I got the news that my 20 year old system was 'on its last legs'! I was also informed that it would be a 'few weeks' before they could get me a new unit installed due to the time of year. Swell. John Lane, President of the company, was nice enough to come out on a Saturday and I got a picture of him standing by his van, but managed to erase it by accident. My bad. At any rate, John seemed very knowledgeable and promised to get me a quote via email. I hope to do a followup post when they get the new unit installed.

While I was waiting for that to take place, I decided to purchase a portable AC unit just to have as a backup and and wanted to evaluate it performance envelope. The unit I ordered was a Honeywell MN10CESWW 10,000 BTU Portable Air Conditioner with Remote Control. I was told by Greg that it should be able to do a good job of cooling my bedroom area, a place I could retreat to in case the main AC failed. I'll do a critique on this unit when it arrives in a few days.

It's winter energy crunch time! A page out of my diary.

For me, the period between late January and mid February, is crunch time! That is the portion of every winter when, if you are going to get killed with heating costs, really low temperatures can do a number on most everyone down here in SW Missouri. Hopefully, that will not be the case this month of February!

Update: Just as soon as I posted this, I knew it would be bad luck. The National Weather Service which was forecasting a Feb 10th warm up have revised that to a trend to colder weather!

January 2016 arctic front to be a test!

The National Weather Service is forecasting the 'coldest air' of the 2015-16 winter season to begin sometime around the January 9th weekend. To that end, I plan to publish a weather event log concerning what steps I took to save energy use, the data I accumulated and a summery of everything that happened over the estimated three day span. Stay tuned for the start of the dialog beginning on January the 9th!

Leaky sliding glass door experiment!

Note that the average temperature was 31.2 degrees!

In a never ending effort to save a watt here and there, inevitably I run into situations involving winter weather and how to get through them in a warm fashion. Warm, that is, as in not breaking the bank!

Since I'd recently moved to a single bedroom condo and had shed myself of a much larger stick built home, I was hoping the move would also translate into some energy savings. although, I'll admit that the presence of two large sliding glass doors gave me some pause. I knew from experience that the large expanse of glass could translate into huge amounts of heat loss. Not only because of the glass, but also because the seals around them are notoriously leaky, a fact that was born out when I checked them in the fall. I could actually feel air flowing in around the base of each!

As fall moved into winter, I elected to try and seal the base of one of the two doors with good old duck tape. Surprisingly, that worked to some extent! I also purchased a 3M film package large enough to cover one of the doors, figuring that if it worked, I could then go forth and cover the other door. But, before doing that, I wanted to establish a baseline of sorts to see just how large the thermal gradient was between the windows and the rest of the living area they were located in.

I placed two temperature sensors by the base of each door and then situated another towards the back of the living room. All three were wireless and so I was able to monitor the readings from a warmer location. For this test, the furnace was set down to 61F on a night where the high and the low was about 32 degrees.

The results of this impromptu experiment, are shown in the graphic at the start of this post. As I expected, the two glass door areas were definite heat sinks coming in at a steady 50 degrees when the outdoor temps were just at the freezing mark. Interestingly, however, the loss oh heat from the total area was very slow and as a result my furnace never kicked on during the test period. As a result, I was able to survive the night in some comfort (aka my bedroom with a space heater) for just 30 kWh's of power used.  

A great cooking combination!

Every once in a while, even a slow person like myself stumbles on something that works a lot better than what was working for them before!

Since I began using a Duxtop induction stove top along with a Calphalon 10” stainless steel frying pan and Le Creuset two quart round Dutch oven, I've been a happy camper! Between these three kitchen items, I've been able to make most of my meals without having to resort to using the stove top at all!

I got hooked on the induction cooking concept when I learned that not only was the temperature control very precise, it was also extremely efficient power wise. How efficient? Well the previous month I used only 5.0 kWh or about sixty one cents worth of power to make almost all my meals. Between the Duxtop and the microwave, which used about 5.5 kWh's, my total for cooking for the month came to just $1.26!

That was last month and I had not answered my need to cook 'oven type stuff', deferring instead to visit fast food emporiums. So, this month, I added another great watt killer device known as a Breville convection oven to round out my occasional need for baked, roasted or seared food. As of December the 8^th, and after baking numerous chickens, baked potatoes and cookies, I've used a mere 3.27 kWh's or about forty cents! If I were to trend these three appliances out; my total electric cost, for a whole month, would come to 23.6 kWh's! That's a minuscule $2.89 for the entire month and we're talking three course meals, each and every day!!