American's energy gluttony extends to homes
 

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Nice post.

I do have A/C, but we try to limit its use. It can frequently go above 100 degrees with 100% humidity in my area during the summer. At night if it's windy and in the 'winter' the A/C is never on. We're also cooling a smaller house. It's around 1500 square feet. My Dad and I are looking into the possibility of setting up some sort of geothermal system to cool the house, but we're not sure how deep we'll have to go to get to that cooler water.

And you can't hardly get away from it either. My house is in a moderately priced planned neighborhood, no house smaller than 1700 sq ft of heated space, all houses have cathedral ceilings, all houses built with the bare minimum of insulation, all appliances the cheapest available, ect. The rooms looked nice, but now that I've lived in it a couple of years I've found that about 300 sq ft of room is wasted. The kids rooms are too small, the living room and master too big. Then there's the whole "second story" that is completely wasted. The AC has a hard time cooling the house, the heater has a very hard time heating the house, the TV has to blare in order to be heard, they even painted the house in a brownish beige that looked really nice but really just means you have to have twice as much lighting on. Oh, and due to neighborhood Nazi rules, no solar panels, ect allowed. They even started giving me grief about by exterior TV antenna, installed before the HOA was actually formed, until I asked them to send me a nice, typewritten letter that I could forward to the FCC when I handed them a copy of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that specifically banned any entity, public or private, from banning a TV antenna, along with a few case studies that showed that the FCC almost always backed the homeowner so long as the antenna is installed per their regs, and usually fined the HOA 10 times whatever the HOA fined the homeowner, AND reversed the HOA-imposed fines, if the HOA harassed the homeowner over the antenna :thumbup: .

I am SOOO looking forward to selling the place in 2 years when both my kids move out, and using the money to build a small, highly efficient house. Even going to try and swing a metal roof with those new solar panels that were designed to fit in the valleys of the metal roof as a complimentary system. Combine that with a rainwater collection system (liked what I saw on a different post here) and I can have a hard working roof on the house! I'm also really hoping that LED lighting is far enough along to run the house on all LEDs at conception. If I can work it right, I might wind up with a house that costs 50 bucks a month and operates like one that costs 1000 a month to run. :D

I hate HOA Nazis. That is why I want to live out in the woods somewhere away from those idiots and the bleak wasteland of suburbia.

Yup, most HOAs have asinine rules about things like solar and water collection. Our next home will not be in a community with such rules in place.

Something I think all cities should be attempting to impose on new single family dwellings is proper solar orientation. All of these houses built on streets running north/south are often built with the worst orientation for efficient heating and cooling. Every window on my home faces either east or west, which means we get maximum solar heating in the summer, and virtually none in the winter. I'd make some joke about the rocket scientist who thought this one up, but I was stupid enough to buy it!

That would mean having a north/south road every, say, 10 houses, with east/west roads every 2 houses. It would also mean some new housing designs to have houses that look good on both sides of the road when all the north facing houses have no windows and the south facing houses are all windows. Definitely need required minimum overhangs, my POS only has 1ft overhangs. I only bought the place because we were at month 6 into the search, living in too small a house, and we were tired of looking. Houses in my area were either new, or really laid out badly. Man I can't wait to begin building my own place! The only bad thing about it, I'm really not looking forward to the kids moving out even though it'll mean far more money available for me and far less hassle.

<GASP!> Houses that don't all look the same??!? ;)

The sad thing is that few developers really seem interested in working with such an intelligent concept. So even if municipalities madated street orientations favorable to solar design, you'd still see houses with all of the big windows on the north side and virtually none on the south - if not just as many on the east and west.

It's a long road to home energy self sufficiency and that road is E-W in my case, meaning my full dormer cape style has a perfect, second floor peak to first floor gutter, due south facing roof, pitched at about 45 degrees inclination, but the owner has no capital available this year (again).
Only the fridge and oven lamps are incandescent.
My work shed is solar powered, barely, but I can work into the dark of the evenings, listening to the radio or watching the tv, running small power tools and such, at least two nights a week.
The frog pond has piping and valving in the dam to accommodate future pico-hydroelectric (maybe nano-hydro is more like it). A pelton wheel driving an auto alternator would be a fine assist to the shed's solar.


OMG! I just dug out the electric bills and noticed that in 2005-6 we averaged 517 kWh per month. In the past 12 months that has risen to 540 kWh per month!
We have met the enemy and he is us!
Wake-up time! Get out the ammeter and find those watts!

i just turned my a/c from 80 to 83

how much more electricity do lcd tvs use? either way my electric bill still hasnt gone over $35 and i dont plan on letting it go over $40 in the next few months either.

All TVs start sucking significant wattage as size is increased, but in order of worst to best, I believe it goes CRT, Plasma, LCD.

I think it would be epitomy of geekdom to bring a watt meter along while shopping for one. (And probably what I'll do.)

good cus i am thinking about buying a 40in lcd tv

40 inch is good, but a 52 inch wouldn't burn that much more juice. This will be one area where I spend some cash, is on a decent TV. Everything else will be as efficient as possible, but I want a good TV for watching movies on. Just waiting for the Sharp 52 incher I want to go below 1000 bucks.

realistically that will probably happen in 9-10 months.

i was looking to get a 32in tv for 1g in january, but i held out and procrastinated on doing solid research. now i can get a 40in tv of much higher quality for 1g... its ridiculous how much prices have been dropping recently.

Energy consumption of TVs:
https://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-3.html
https://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0616/p13s02-stct.html

I'm trying to conserve electricity even more now. I bought a clothesline and dried a load outside yesterday. Conditions were great for it and I think it was just as fast if not faster than my electric dryer :thumbup: . I would like to do at least one load a week outside (we do 2-3 loads a week). Just gotta keep the japanese beetles off things.

Nice find Jim.

From the CSM: "One 50-inch plasma high-definition TV (HDTV) was estimated to use 679 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. A 32-inch liquid-crystal display with HDTV capability was pegged at 387 kWh per year. By contrast, an older analog 34-inch TV was estimated to use just 209 kWh per year, NRDC tests found."

Looks like I got the part about CRTs totally wrong! The Cnet review is very enlightening however. Obviously there are huge dispartities in how much a TV uses while on and off. Seems to me that a person would be well advised to bring a watt meter along while shopping.

Last week our clothes washer died. It was an old Maytag that we were not really happy with how well it had worked anyway. So its a good reason to ditch it. After a bit of research I went and bought a Fisher & Paykel model that should use less than half the electricity, about half the water, and spin drys at 1000rpm for darn near dry clothes before using the dryer to finish drying and get rid of the wrinkles.
So far we really like it and it washes way better than what we had. I really like the fact that you can re-program the wash cycles a good bit to work the way YOU want it to, and even save your settings. It definitely is taking much less time in the dryer as well so were saving there too.
Its a funny sounding machine, first time it did the 1000rpm spin I though the mother ship had landed in the utility room! :D Its not loud, we just had the door open on the utility room.

That's a front loader too isn't it?

It irks me that most of the emphasis on the energy efficient washers centers around them being front loading when the reality is that spin speed is probably the most important factor to saving energy. Sure, a front loader may save several gallons of hot water, but my dryer running for 20-30 minutes vs. 40-60 would certainly save allot more.

I've read nothing but good stuff about the F&P stuff FWIW.

The front loader is more efficient at what it does, using less energy and water, and a closeline can reduce drying energy costs significantly.

Its a Top loader.

Oops, that's actually what I meant to say. :P

Awhile back, we were looking at the F&P vs. the Kenmore Oasis top loaders. Ultimately we decided that on a cost basis, it would take a minimum of 5 years for a new washer to payback the added cost - particularly since our current top-loader still works just fine and we line dry half of the time anyway.

that may be true about crt,s but think about this: they heat up like a mofo and can turn a cool room hot in a few hours. good in the winter, but bad in the summer. not to mention big, heavy, and isnt the best picture quality.

I used to live in a suburban-rural area of SE PA. There we used many lights in each room, washed dishes in the dish washer, and dried the majority of the clothing in the drier. Right now I live in Colombia...what a difference in how power is used here.

The majority of houses here have many windows, and very few lights. To make the light of the few light bulbs in the houses here (the ones I've been in are comparable to middle and upper class homes in the US) project farther, they use mostly the florescent screw in bulbs, along with no covers on them.

Even the school I will be working at has very few lights (one of the nicest school in the country), and utilizes natural light for almost every room.

Here people use clothing lines to dry all of their clothing, and dish washers are pretty much unheard of.

The small amount of energy used here must be so different from the average middle class home in the US.

One might simply chalk this up to people in Colombia not having the same things as people in the US, but actually, this is not the case. You can buy electric washing machines for dishes, driers, and elaborate and inefficient hanging lights, but very few people here do. They seem to be born with the idea that they shouldn't use so much electricity in their homes.

Not entirely relevant to this thread, but I thought it is interesting when I thought about applying America's power obsession to this Latin American country.

"One might simply chalk this up to people in Colombia not having the same things as people in the US, but actually, this is not the case. You can buy electric washing machines for dishes, driers, and elaborate and inefficient hanging lights, but very few people here do. They seem to be born with the idea that they shouldn't use so much electricity in their homes."

Whoa! Will we ever change in the United States? I doubt it!
Most people in the U.S. don't care, and I really doubt they will ever. :(

well i think alot of our fancy lighting and lighting uses is moe of a "im better than you" type of thing. it goes along with the old saying: keeping up with the jones. so whoever uses the most lights in the artsy fartsy way "wins" and makes them feel better than the people around them. lol we haev those twisty bulbs in every possible light socket we have. its REALLY nice not havign to replace my ceiling fans lightbulb every 2 months cuz the vibration would blow the bulb... i havent changed it in over 2 years!