On the Home Front Archives - Page 7 of 10

DirecTV or not DirecTV (or Netflix is in the wings)

I received an email today from DirecTV listing the current pay per view offerings for this week and saw a movie that Michelle said she wanted to see. OK, OK it’s Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru”, call me a wuss but I’m gonna enjoy it too.

So I went to my Tivo to set it up to record and I noticed a new flag on the confirmation screen indicating that the PPV movie will expire at Noon tomorrow. Since I seldom watch a movie I’ve recorded in even the same month I recorded it much less the next day, I was somewhat perturbed.
So I went to the DirecTV website and looked this up and can see that my recording will probably last for a long time provided I don’t view it. Once I begin playing the movie, the clock starts ticking and I will have 24 hours within which to finish viewing.
There are plenty of movies that I will start to watch and then decide to finish days or weeks later. I don’t have an issue waiting to see the ending and I can remember the beginning well enough that I don’t lose anything across that gap.
What I have now is my satellite company (or, more probably, the content provider behind them) dictating how I will view my recording.
One of the reasons I use PPV is for exactly this freedom. Renting a movie from a Blockbusteresque source comes with the explicit contract that I need to return this item in a day or a week depending on popularity. But PPV has always been more ephemeral than that and the added flexibility (plus the lower cost and avoided trip to the store) have always been of great value to me.
Continue reading DirecTV or not DirecTV (or Netflix is in the wings)

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Testing on a Known Power Consumer

I’m quite pleased, after leaving a single 60 Watt bulb on for nearly 10 days, here are the results from my Kill A Watt EZ P4460.
They confirm that the unit appears to be functioning correctly and that my last couple of posted results are probably accurate.
I was worried that the unit was under reporting.

RESULTS

Elapsed time: 237 hrs (I left the bulb on continuously for this test)
Measured Consumption (Watts): 60 <– this is what I was a little concerned about.
Measured Consumption (Amps): .5 <– also consistent with what I would expect.
Total Consumption (kWh): 14.6
Cost –
     Actual (for duration of test): $1.55
     Daily: $0.15
     Weekly: $1.08
     Monthly: $4.65
     Annual: $56.64

This puts a concrete dollar value on “we’ll leave a light on for you”. 🙂

One 60 Watt bulb, in my neck of the woods. With power supplied by Georgia Power, just under $57 per year.

Next, I’m hooking it up to my 12 year old Whirlpool refrigerator, I am almost scared to see what I’m paying to keep that running.

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Main Computer Results

I had the computer set up and it was showing fairly steady power consumption of around 220 watts. Again a little less than I expected. Turning off my smaller monitor drops the consumption by 19 Watts (s/b 34 Watts), the larger monitor by about 26 Watts (s/b 55 Watts).

I’m going to disengage the power meter now since I want to reconfigure things a bit as I swap in my new modem/router combo from AT&T. I’m going to hook it up to some known consumer (a light bulb) to verify if the consumption readings are accurate.

Assuming accuracy, my main computer’s consumption after 273 hours (a little over 11 days) is 51 kilowatts or $5.42. The average cost is about 47 cents per day or $3.33 per week. The predicted annual cost is about $173 per year. A bit of an eye opener really. Little things have so much power to add up when paired with the inexorable march of time.

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Hair drier Results

I had intended to let the Kill A Watt have a little more time with my hair dryer but I was having such gargantuan issues with my DSL today that I decided to turn off my whole computer system (UPS, Router, Modem, the works). Since this is such a rare event and, since I wanted to measure the computer system’s consumption, I figured I might as well go ahead and attach the Kill A Watt device to the computer now.

First, after a week with the hair dryer I see that I’ve only consumed .09 kilowatt hours (or about as much power as turning on a 60 watt lightbulb and leaving it lit for 90 minutes across an elapsed time of an entire week). This was surprising given that it’s such a high energy consumer. It’s rated to consume 1600 Watts but the Kill A Watt showed only 1398 Watts being consumed. So I suppose it’s a little “greener” than I thought 🙂

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me greatly as I really don’t use the hair dryer for very long. Just enough to try to make my part somewhat stable.

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Power Consumption Checker

I picked up the Kill A Watt EZ P4460 in order to see how much energy various appliances are using in our house. This little unit is great because it doesn’t lose its settings when unplugged (or the power goes out). It will keep track of the elapsed time and give you hourly, daily, weekly and annual consumption for whatever’s plugged into it. Great for things that cycle on and off (your fridge) or are used intermittently (like the hair drier which is hooked up to it now).

To make things easier, I have a short 3 prong extension cord attached to it so I can keep the meter in an easy to view spot while it’s in use so I can remember that it is there and check it periodically.

Georgia power is reasonably expensive, about 10.6 cents/kilowatt hour according to my bill, and I only expect it to get more expensive in the future. However, our energy bills seem to be reasonably modest, averaging about $115 per
month throughout the year so it’s not like this is a huge bite in our
wallet. But, even though almost all of our lighting is now compact fluorescent, I am sure there are areas where improvement can be had. I’d prefer not to waste energy if I can help it.

So, over the next few months I will be attaching the unit to whatever strikes my fancy and will let it sit for a few days to try to gauge consumption and cost.

To test it, I initially hooked it up to our CF tri-light lamp that Michelle uses most mornings and can see that consumes negligible power. I believe it was going to be 5 cents a year to operate (she only ever uses the lowest power setting anyway – about 13 watts).

I am anxious to see how our nearly 12 year-old fridge rates. Then on to the computers…

Honeywell HZ519 Baseboard Heater Noise Issue / Rotary Heater Rotating Lifetime

About 4 years ago, shortly after the Georgia Public Service Commission completely abdicated their responsibilities and threw Georgia consumers to the Natural Gas provider “wolves”, I invested in a bunch of electric heaters to use as part of a “zoned” scheme to keep my house comfortable (heat only the bedroom area in the evening and morning, heat only the TV room when we were watching TV, etc.).

One of those heaters was the Honeywell HZ519 Baseboard Heater which has served us very well until this past year.

It still heats the area well and its thermostat works fine, but it’s taking to making REALLY odd noises as it heats up and cools down.

I swear it’s like listening to outtakes from Star Wars’ SPFX folks when they were testing audio sounds for the epic series.

I’m just curious if anybody else has encountered this. I’ve picked up the unit, shook it to see if anything is loose, checked to see if there was dust in it (used a compressed air can to blow out the vents) and can find nothing unusual save for the bizarre noises.

As an aside, the average life for Rotary heaters’ rotary apparatus, under regular (daily in the winter) use, seems to be just over two years. This as evidenced by my two Honeywell rotary heaters and my Holmes Twin Ceramic rotary heater. The heating elements continue to work just fine but those rotary components are certainly not meant to last a lifetime.

Renovations – a couple of months later

Now that we’ve had a few months to live with and consider some of our renovation choices I just wanted to share some of my thoughts.

One big change that I would make is to NOT go with fitting the standalone bathtub into an alcove. Even though they offer the bead kit that will prevent water from seeping through and damaging the wall, and even though Tommy made sure that there was going to be a great seal with caulking, etc. to back that up, the fact is that the bathtub itself lacks a sufficient slope for the water to cascade down the wall and flow into the tub. Instead it tends to accumulate around the base of the wall.

After each shower we make sure to quickly wipe up the excess water to prevent mould from forming from this accumulation.

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Our toilets are GREAT, they have overcome our bungalow’s naturally sluggish sewer drainage and all perform consistently and well. However, Michelle didn’t favor the flush handles and so we installed some that protruded from the tank by a good inch or so over the original ones. This means that the toilet seat lid rests against the handle. The flush is VERY vigorous and can be felt through the handle when they are depressed. What this means is that the handles are wearing through the toilet seat lids.

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It’s gotten bad enough that, if we’re not careful, the handle can actually be held down by the friction of the toilet seat and allow the water to flow slightly after the flush. This is remedied by pulling the seat forward when flushing but these handles will need to be replaced.In designing the bed end tables, I specified that the cupbard doors open “traditionally” with the hinge on the side and the handle in the middle. I was thinking of “normal” use such as accessing the cupbard when standing in front of it. This, of course, makes it awkward to open if you’re in bed which is when you want the most convenience. So I’d have these cupbards open the other way. I may be able to swap the doors from the right and left end tables… hmmm.

I had elected to have only the heating lamp and not the fan on a timer in our master bathroom. I’ve never had a fan timer before in there and I was simply used to it. But, given the risk of mould from the water accumulation above I’d now like to put in a timer for the fan so I can have it run for an extra hour after we’re done in there, but not for the whole day. Since the fan is on a half-size switch, I need to think about a way to do it, but nothing obvious comes to mind.

I don’t think there is anything I could have done about this, but the thermo-balanced faucet does come at a water-throughput price. It’s not nearly so bad as those severly “lo-flo” fixtures but I can see that it does limit the water somewhat. I don’t have a problem conserving water (you can just look at my water bill to see that) but my morning shower isn’t a place that I wish to scrimp. I temporarily replaced the new showerhead with the one that used to be there and I could tell that there was some restriction imposed by the new head itself. This was resolved by a quick trip out to the garage and drilling out the restriction. But there is still a limitation imposed by the faucet itself that I’m willing to accept for the great temperature control features that it offers.

Aside from those trifles (the bathtub being the one that I would most caution folks about) we’re still extremely pleased with the work and the results. It wasn’t cheap, but you need to invest your time and/or your money to get what you want in life. Lacking the great amount of time it would take (and some of the requisite skills) the money trade-off was well worth it to us.

De-cluttering our home and our lives

Garage Sale We’ve been a bit busy for the past little while. In the post renovation euphoria, we realized that we really like the quasi-minimalism that we had in our newly re-invented rooms. We can find what we’re looking for and we like the feeling of lightness that comes from just knowing that there is not a mountain of *stuff* either behind the closet doors or filling up the drawers in the desk/cabinet/you name it.

Add to that Mich has been watching various home improvement shows and eventually zoomed in on “Clean Sweep” and has even ventured so far as to buy the “Clean Sweep” book (It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff) and started taking it’s philosophies to heart.

So we’ve been working our way through the house re-evaluating EVERYTHING. We’ve been discarding old papers that at one time we thought were so important – who really cares about those pay stubs from 15 years ago? And re-evaluated our “time capsules”, which are boxes of items that we didn’t want to get rid of for one reason or another and thought that they’d be interesting to us many years in the future. We went down from 4 time capsule boxes to 1. It *was* a little interesting going through some of the items we thought were so precious 15 or 20 years ago, but it was much more cathartic evaluating them and either selling, giving away or discarding them.

On the whole, digital pictures and smaller mementos to trigger memories of good times past are sufficient for our purposes.

Our neighborhood has a couple of garage sales a year – where the homeowners association does some advertisement and folks know to come through ’cause there will be a lot of sales concentrated in the area. So we participated in the one that was held last week and divested ourselves of a BUNCH of stuff and cleared a modest profit as well 🙂

Combining this de-cluttering with the philosophies embodied in our focus on “Getting Things Done“, we’re finding ourselves much clearer in our expectations for our free time and our lives and goals in general.

We picked up DVD storage pages, the kind that fit into a 3-ring binder, and we’ll be collapsing our DVD collection down from a couple of shelf-fulls to a handy binder size. This AFTER culling the collection for the garage sale.

Today we’ll finish assembling the shelves we picked up yesterday and complete organizing the back room we’ve designated as our “storage room”. We have no basement and there are some things that you simply do not want to store in a shed or the garage (Christmas items, party supplies) and so we’ve designated a room in the house that will host such items. But only after a THOROUGH vetting – do we really want/need to keep these things?

It takes a LOT of energy and effort to work through this kind of project, the renovation was a good shaking-up / taking off point for us. Hopefully the momentum from this effort can roll through the rest of our life as the satisfaction of finding what you need when you need it as well as being pleased with how your place looks is almost beyond description.

Renovation Final Accounting

OK, all the bills are in and I finally have a picture of the total, final cost of our renovations. You can jump to the end if you want to see the gory details right away…

Recall that we did the following:

Moved the water heater from the laundry room to it’s originally plumbed location in the middle of the house and updated it to a tankless Rinnai heater:

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Updated the master bath from

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And changed the master bedroom window from

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to (and painted the room and trim)

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and added end tables

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Updated the guest bathroom (sorry, no good before pix 🙁 )

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Updated the Laundry room to get rid of the partial wall hiding the water heater and replaced the floor, repainted the wall and added wider shelves:

I can’t BELIEVE I don’t have a decent before shot, here’s an in-progress picture to try to give an idea of how it looked before:

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and after

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Plus:

– New dresser for the master bedroom

– Can lights in the great room

– Accent lights in great room (on dimmer)

– Can lights in the kitchen + re-zoned the lights so that 3 areas of kitchen are controlled separately.

– Lighting fixture in the dining area (on dimmer)

– Added a fan with a timer where there was none in the 1/2 bath

– Routed all exhaust fans out through the roof (rather than into the attic as the existing ones had been set up)

– Sealed the accent tiles on our patio which were crumbling due to moisture / freezing. Tommy found a great sealer for this. We’d already tried to seal this ourselves with one recommended by the stone folks.

– Repainted the chimney and flashing

– Touched up paint around garage door

– Cut and installed mirror in gym, removed high wall-mounted 28 inch console TV from gym

– Created support for gym window-mounted air conditioner and cleaned, re-aligned windows

– Swapped out all switches and outlets in hallway and master bedroom for “Decor” style versions

– Replaced most hinges in house with brushed nickel ones. Painted some that we could get away with.

– Installed those cool magnetic door stops

– Pressure washed the exterior of the house

– Lots of little fixes as they found things that needed fixing

– Relocated outlet, phone and satellite coax outlet in TV room into closet so we could start new project of updating that room

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Note that most lighting in our house, that is NOT on dimmers, is compact flourescent. I’m just waiting for dimmable CFs to replace those remaining ones but there are plenty of times you want a low light (late night, early morning) for ambiance.

The final cost?

We had estimated, with generous buffers, that this was going to cost us about $36,000.

The total actual cost was…. drumroll … $58,700. This is very close to the 50% MORE that you are warned that such projects are going to cost than you estimate so we were not overly surprised. Having folks in the house who have the skills to effect relatively major changes in short order is very tempting and we did succumb to the temptation on several occasions where we realized that we would REALLY not be happy if we didn’t pursue a particular trail. i.e. we originally did not plan to do ANYTHING with the laundry room. But once the reality of the void of the hot water tank presented itself we realized that it would make no sense to leave that room looking so shabby. Similarly, decisions were made throughout the project – adding a fan to the 1/2 bath, having custom end tables made, etc. that we did not plan for originally but made a LOT of sense while we were in the midst of things.

If you want to see where the money went, here’s an overall accounting in PDF format.

Ask us if we would do this again if we knew what we know now and I’d say “Definitely Yes”. Everybody we worked with was great. Tommy and Larry are two highly skilled, competent and reliable masters of their respective crafts. They had many practical suggestions when we were venturing into new territory (for us).

Most of the other folks we worked with were brought in on Tommy’s recommendation and we were comfortable with everybody we worked with being both in our house and working with our wiring /plumbing / cabinetry.

Tommy and Larry’s contact information is here.

The electrical work was done by Wayne of Precision Electric Co. (770-207-1444)

And the plumbing work was done by Northlake Plumbing Service, Inc (770-921-2046) these folks we had the least contact with as I needed to be out of the house on business but what I did see I was comfortable with.

Minor changes to the Gym and Mich’s Office

We’re walking through the rest of our house and clearing a way a bunch of the clutter that we’ve accumulated over the years.

I really can’t believe that I don’t have any decent “before” pictures. You always *know* you have some so don’t bother taking any and then realize later that you really didn’t have anything suitable.

So here is the “After” layout of the Gym. We removed the 28″ console TV we had mounted on the wall near the ceiling as well as the nearby wall-mounted stereo/VCR (that dates it nicely) rack. We also had the old mirror from the guest bathroom cut and mounted on the wall, pulled in one of our now-obsolete bedroom bureaus and rearranged everything.

We were wanting to replace the flooring with something more gym-like, but the prices proved prohibitively high. It was going to take about $3,600 to have such installed. I looked around and really wanted to have some 3/8″ “Triump Sports Flooring” from Johnsonite installed. It seems ideal for this application. Maybe next project…

So instead we elected to have our carpets cleaned and just make use of the mats that I already owned to provide proper exercise surfaces and to prevent the sweat from saturating the carpet. Probably the next big project we undertake will be to replace the remaining carpeting in the house with wood and/or tile flooring. Ah to have infinite resource (read “money”)…
Here is the view as you come in through the door off of the hallway

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The TV used to be mounted about where you see the white disk of the clock on the wall.

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Panning over you can see the exercycle and treadmill. I’m much happier with the treadmill oriented this way. It’s much safer in case of a slip or fall.

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Here you can see the air conditioner, which Tommy and Larry supported for us so that there would be less strain on the window frame. It’s also MUCH better insulated now than it used to be.

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Here you see the bureau with the stereo now mounted on it. You can also see Mich’s office in the back there.

Finally a back view where you can see the doorway to the hall and the mirror from the guest bathroom.

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Mich’s office hasn’t changed a great deal, but the desk is now oriented differently (no longer in front of the window), and she’s pulled in the bookcase that used to be located in the bedroom.

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I can’t get her to part with her drafting/art table yet so I’m hoping she’ll start actually using it for it’s intended purpose rather than just for storage. We’ll have to see..

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We’re overall very happy with the house and are working to make it all more conducive to how we like to live. Less clutter and more focused rooms.