Deck the Halls

We decided to go ahead and put the small artificial tree up this year even though we'll be going to NC for Christmas. Not all of the lights from last year were working so I went ahead and got some of the new LED ones. They look pretty good and they're super efficient.

Another year, when we're actually home for Christmas, we'd like to go out in the forest and cut our own tree. You can buy a permit for only 5$ to go and pick out a tree from one of the national forests.

Heat Pump

Our new heat pump is installed where the old hot tub was. Now Sami can have as much heating and air conditioning as he likes.

[Sami writes something about the heat pump here.]

The results are in...

...and the winner is Sara's desktop PC! Sara's (AMD-based) PC consumes 147 watts (10-day average); almost three times more than our fridge. At our current 9c/kWh that's about $115 per year.

Next I'll test my own PC... scary...

See a watt, Kill A Watt

I never should've watched that movie... One of the scariest movies I've seen - it ranks right up there between "The Birds" and "Hannibal". I'm talking about the Inconvenient Truth, and it freaked me out. So, with the new house, we've been planning all sorts of energy saving renovations (new windows, heat pump for heating/cooling, insulation). We even had our Energy Trust of Oregon Energy Review. The guy told me that getting new windows would be idiotic, but our wall insulation sucks, and the electric furnace needs to be dumped (oops, I mean "recycled"). Also, water heater temperature should be turned down, incandescent lights should be replaced with compact fluorescent lights etc.

As part of our energy saving mania, I got a new toy, Kill A Watt. It's nothing else but a power meter you plug in series with your whichever electrical gadgets, and it tells you how much power they consume. Tons of fun. One surprising discovery: our coffee maker burns about 900W when it's brewing! I guess it makes sense; I just never thought about it. Gotta have my coffee fix, though - do I have to start going to Starbucks now?

The energy review guy also said that, in regular houses, there are three items that consume most of the energy: heating/cooling, water heating, and the fridge. So, Kill A Watt had some work to do: I had it plugged in with the fridge for almost a week, to figure out how much that #3 energy hog is actually hogging. The result: 57.4W (6-day average)...?! A single incandescent bulb, left on somewhere in the storage shed would burn more than that!

I'm pretty sure our computers have claimed the bronze metal in this race... or have they? Does our house fall into the "regular" category at all? More data is needed... so, Sara's computer is now plugged in with the Kill A Watt. We'll see how it goes.