Update on the plumbing from before: The leak in the tub was transient. The tub is now totally dry, as is the basement ceiling.
We have either performed a perfect repair, or else we have redirected the leak to someplace where it’s not visible. Either way, I’m blissed out. Go us.
The story of the day involves plumbing.
Good day. Before I forget it, click here for the Jedi answer to Brokeback Mountain, courtesy of jrtom.
Woke up and went to morning Pilates workout with redmed. It was a good time, except for the “you’re hurting yourself” pain on the leg lifts. Either I was doing them wrong, or I’ve never worked that muscle / tendon in my entire life. Either way, I bailed on those exercises.
Then we came home, and I took down the holiday lights and then went in the crawl space under the bedroom to put down plastic sheeting (against moisture) and install insulation (against cold). For the insulation, I used this spray crap called Great Stuff. This crap is amazing. You put the little nozzle into a gap in your foundation / wall / whatever and fill it with foam. The foam adheres to anything (masonry, wood, metal, ceramic, flesh) and expands like crazy. It’s also this awful yellowish color.
While down there I looked around and saw that there was one corner where the cobwebs were blowing and billowing in an icy breeze. I found the source, Great Stuff’ed it, and the breeze stopped. It could be my imagination, but the bedroom floor feels warmer already to me.
Then I continued the document apocalypse. More shredding, more destroying. Stumbled onto a cache of letters from my girlfriend from High School. They passed the “do I feel even a twinge of a desire to hang on to these” test, so they lived. The corporate credit card statements from eight years ago were not so lucky. I removed another three big filing boxes from my life. Go me. Less to move, less to care if it gets ruined.
Went to a work party for redmed‘s job this evening. More rich food, too much wine, and guarded conversation. More wearing a tie. It was fun and all, but I need to either build social connections with these people outside of these formal events, or stop liking them.
Last night, went into Roslindale for sushi with friends. Sat up talking until 11, and then turned into pumpkins like the old people we are, and drove home. Thud. Asleep in moments.
This morning, measured the bedroom as well as the space between the rafters in the dark and terrifying part of the attic (17′ by 14′, 15″ spaces). Purchased 6 rolls of R-25, 15″ wide pink insulation for a total of about 198 square feet. Hauled it upstairs, and rigged up a light by which to see, and a half sheet of sub-flooring on which to sit. It’s not so bad, once you get the proper infrastructure in place.
The space is rectangular, with the roof too close to stand up. In one corner (occupying about 1/3 of the total space) is this hole. No rafters. At first it seemed to be filled with roofing trash. This is the part over our little hallway leading to the bedroom. Eventually, I realized that it was the old entryway to the house, a little roof-let over what had previously been a small back porch. I installed as much insulation as I could, prior to dealing with that.
Yes. They built the addition around the old structure, and never bothered to remove the old porch roof. I love these people.
I wound up totally destroying the roof-let with the Wonder Bar, a saw, and a fair amount of grunting and kicking. I left a bunch of the structural stuff in place in case it was somehow holding up the house or something. Then I stuffed insulation into the spaces around and between what was left. Insulation ain’t rocket science.
After that I made a large batch of applesauce. 9 pints. Preliminary reports are that it’s pretty tasty.
Meanwhile, there a study session for the OB-GYN board exam going on in my dining room. The other husbands and I during residency summarized the noises that come out of these sessions as “blah blah uterus, blah blah placenta.” That’s been triply true today. The most entertaining part was when they were reviewing genetic oddities leading to ambiguous gender. For them, it was very serious to distinguish between the various and very specific forms that this takes. To me, it started off vaguely amusing and descended to hilarious.
I’m going to go, before I reveal too much.
More tinkering with numbers.
The DOE’s energy calculator is awesome.
I’m very confused right now.
1 kwh = 3412BTU
1 gallon of heating oil is 139,000BTU
Yearly kwh consumption: 1.291e3 * 3.412e3 = 4.4e6
Yearly fuel consumption: 1.162e3 * 1.38000e5 = 1.6e8
This isn’t all that surprising, since we use the oil to both heat the house and to heat our water. All the electric has to do is run the computers and the lights. Plus, there’s some inefficiency in the conversion of fuel oil to heat, otherwise known as “what’s hurtling out the chimney.” I’m willing to believe that keeping the house warm and the shower piping hot is two orders of magnitude more energy than keeping the lights on.
But, if I wanted to buy the same amount of BTUs from the electric company, it would cost a lot more.
1.6e8 BTU / 3.4e3 = 4.7e4
4.7e4 * $1.2e-1 (cost per kwh) = $5.6e3
So, assuming that all the inefficiencies are identical on my end, it would cost me around $5600 to get as many BTUs from electricity as I currently get for $1800 from fuel oil. Of couse, there’s tons of other stuff, like the fact that an electric heater would be more efficient (rather than running hot water around my basement in pipes, I could produce the heat exactly where I need it).
Put that in your electric car and smoke it.
I do love math.
I’m tinkering with data, now that I’ve got a full year of usage information on my house.
* We burned 1162.3 gallons of heating oil last year ($1825)
* We burned 1291.06 kwh of electricity last year. ($1291)
* We used 5,100 gallons cubic feet of water last year. ($199)
I also noticed that last year, fuel oil cost $1.40 per gallon. This year we locked in at $2.50 per gallon, and it’s already retailing at $2.62…so that may have been a good idea. Yes, this is the reason for the insulating frenzy.
There seem to be a lot of pages with totally unsupported claims of “average” residential use. Anyone know a really good resource for specific, regional averages? I found This site, which is pretty awesome. It’s a government sponsored calculator that lets you plug and chug potential savings from various modifications to your house. It’s adjusted for zip code and everything.
I found a water use page claiming that the average american uses about 60 gallons of water per day. Our usage appears to be 5100 * 7.4(gal/cf) / 360 days * 2 people = 52 gallons per day. Once you factor in the fact that we both travel a lot, I suspect that it all averages out.
I’ve got a kill-a-watt on the way, primarily to measure power consumption of the machines I’m benchmarking at work, but I also plan to find out how much energy my appliances are burning.
Edit: I just confirmed that my company’s computers burn more power in a year than my entire house.
Went a halloween party last night with redmed, capital_l, and capital_l. Pictures are here. Fun was had by all. It’s nice to finally be developing a social circle around these parts. We’re right now missing the demolition derby, but that’s okay with me. I can’t find any mention of the schoolbus demo, so we may have missed that too. Oh well.
For about a year now, I’ve been wondering why my basement is warm, instead of being cold like most basements. I’ve previously attributed it to the fact that the furnace sucks, and throws heat like a mo-fo. Today I added a little bit of detail to that observation. My house is heated by a nightmare tangle of copper pipes that carry hot water from the furnace through various radiators in the rooms. Along the way to the rooms that they’re supposed to head, these pipes are exposed in the basement. We picked up about $50 worth of pipe insulation at the Home Despot today, and I think that we might be just a teensy bit more efficient in heating the house now. Since putting in the attic insulation we’ve already noticed that the house tends to stay warmer. Plus, when I stick my head up in the attic, I now notice that it’s cooler than the mail level. Hopefully, the combined effect of failing to heat the attic plus the new hotness of failing to heat the basement will offset the recent heinous increases in the price of heating oil.
I tossed a bunch of grass seed on the lawn this afternoon. A flock of dark eyed juncos is currently eating it. They’re cute little grey birds with white bellies, so it’s okay.
Here’s the wikiquote entry for JWZ. My favorite for the day: ‘Browser compatibility problems are nature’s way of saying “stop trying to be so fuckin’ clever”.’
Okay, back to benchmarking.
Skill I never really wanted anyway, number 345: Re-hanging a dishwasher door.
Turns out that dishwasher doors have these crazy hinges on them that sometimes pop out. After staring at them for long enough, I figured out how to pop them back in. Having figured it out, it was a simple matter of brute force to do the deed. fdmts 1, dishwasher 0.
Oh, brute force. Is there any task to which you’re not well suited?