See also:
- Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, Naomi Aldort

Recall that 1 gallon of gas is 36.6 KWh

And if we recall that it takes approximately 3 times more fossil fuel to deliver 1 unit of energy at your house (power plants are inefficient), then the cans actually use 11388 KWh of “primary”/”source” energy.

That’s the same as using 311.15 gallons of gas. Visual 300 gallons of a gas for a second. Yikes!!!

Might be a good idea to switch to these LED versions ($25 at home depot–1 year cost payoff) using 10.5W instead of 65W. They would gulp the energy 6 times slower! And no mercury and instant on. (Our CFL can lights take a moment to warm up…)

2 favorable reviews here:
- one
- two

See also:
- Visualize Energy

ACTON – Forty-nine students at Acton-Boxborough’s junior and senior high schools have been hospitalized in the last three years for the same ailment — stress and stress-related conditions.

Dr. John Kulig, director of adolescent medicine at New England Medical Center, said teen-agers under a great deal of stress tend to get depressed or develop headaches, chest pains and abdominal pains.

Studies indicate that 20 percent of high school seniors exhibit signs of mental illness attributable to stress. An equal number of college students show stress-related symptoms, according to Dr. Paris C. Faigel, director of health services at Brandeis University.

Author: Associated Press
Date: Nov 19, 1987
Start Page: 41
Section: METRO
Text Word Count: 345

Now what about from the house’s perspective?
Assuming a COP of maybe 2.5 on the heat pumps during this time, and assuming the weather is not too bad (we had some decent sun today — 27KWh from the PVs — and not too windy) then that’s 2.5*900W = 2250W. That’s a load of a hair dryer and a third to keep the house at 68F on a winter’s day. Glad to be using a heat pump instead. A hair dryer would get a little expensive, though probably still less than many are paying to heat their New England home.

Gotta like lots of insulation and carefully taped external sheathing.

** Note on weather: I do still have my networked “weatherdirect” thermometers tracking temps, but I haven’t set up any logging yet. I really should do that so I can do some useful graphs instead of all this hand-waving with estimates.

See also:
- Erik’s weatherdirect setup

(2) Hi Marc:
> Eric [sic], how do you have the Geyser piped – through the cold water dip tube?

hot water from the geyser circulates back to a T in the cold water supply to the marathon

colder water returning to the geyser comes from the bottom of the marathon.

This is as suggested for marathons in the geyser 6000-3.0 manual on pg 16

> And what are your solar calcs?

We upsized our PV from 200W panels to 230W (6KW->6.9) so 0.9 peak KW was a $5400 expense and gets us approximately 0.9*1200 = 1100KWh a year to use for hot water heating.

We use ~26 gallons of hot water per day according to my meter. Assuming heating from 50F to 120F that is 8.3lbs/gal * 26gal * 70F * 365days = 5.5 million BTUs/year => 1611 KWh/year. But… that is assuming straight resistance and not the HW heat pump. So… taking that into account… the geyser is “free” in the summer when the AC is on (and I’m not sure how the math works in the winter with geyser+extra basement heating… but even if it’s COP=1 we are still doing well in a annual/net sense vs the 1100KWh from the PVs.

I welcome match corrections of course!

> Do you have gallons and kWh measured into the tank, including > the resistance elements? Note that my set-up gives up the
> lower element.

We keep the resistance elements off at the breaker except when we have a predicted perfect storm of 3+ kid baths coming up.

I haven’t connected the flow meter to a hobo yet — just manually record the numbers once in a while. We have an eMonitor tracking the KWh of the geyser, but of course the basement also needs extra heat (from our mitsu air-source heat pump) in the winter because of it.

(3) RE: showerheads:
We like our Bricor B100 Max showerhead http://bricor.com/water-saving-products/showerheads/b100-max/

And I often leave the kids bath water to cool off before draining the tub.

Erik

From my comment at:

http://blog.energysmiths.com/2011/11/getting-into-hot-water-part-2/comments/page/2/#comments

And perhaps the ease of making mobile-friendly web pages and “responsive web design”, even websites which act just like a native app on the iPhones or Androids of the world — have you seen nytimes.com/chrome/ in a Chrome browser?

Just about the only thing which will stay apps are video games since linking is not (or at least, less) important in a game since games are usually self-contained universes. And even there I might be a little wrong.

– 1.1 no decent input. Note taking apps like Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker HD will work on this but can’t beat a keyboard and mouse. I think Bill Gates was right about that.

– 1.2 too big too carry around and not that great for watching movies in lap (laptop way more comfortable)

– 1.3 not that great for gaming since no controller! multiple kids I’ve spoken to have fully admitted this is a problem. In their words… “the games on the iPod Touch are not “rageable” — meaning I think that you can’t really get very worked up about them one way or the other because well… they are not very good. At least in a Mario Brothers sort of way. Angry Birds ok. Puzzles ok. But to really get into a game, i think one needs a controller or a keyboard and mouse. touching alone is not right. Not the right feel.

– 1.4 while it might be acceptable to pull out an iPhone and glance at it while with friends somewhere, the size of the tablets will mean that this will probably never feel quite as acceptable.
Maybe I am wrong. ala a shifting baseline of culturally acceptable things…

2. ultrapads like the MacBook Air and other windows based SSD laptops will become more popular (many of the advantages of a tablet with fewer downsides)

3. And smaller 7″ tablets will get higher-res more readable screens and

4. also android will be market leader vs ipad so all the apps that are “iPad only” right now will get fewer and fewer. Yes, I know some will remain like BBEdit, etc. But most will be available on both.

5. small phone-sized smart devices will continue to be very important. The size is right. Not too big so it fits in a pocket VERY easily. Even a little bigger than an iPhone is too big.

6. those ultrapad computers will get:

– 6.1 touch screens (there are tablet computers I’ve seen from dell and lenovo)

– 6.2 computers will also get better about having different “views” I will call them for a lack of a better word. You might have an “office” view, a “media center” view. And an “app” view.
In other words, I want to keep all the power of the platform and input devices, but I want to customize things at the “OS” level more. I shouldn’t have to install “Easy Peasy” to get a simplified laptop. It should just be another “view”. I think Microsoft and Apple know this. MacOS will probably merge (at least design wise) with iOS. I have read that it is happening already with Lion with the default behavior of the mouse in some apps. Scrolling vs Swiping…

When I want to use a computer to read a newspaper or watch youtube, it doesn’t mean it has to look like a normal newspaper website. For instance, the NY Times Chrome App is great. http://nytimes.com/chrome/

7. Meanwhile, it would be nice if we didn’t have to thow out so many electronic gadgets to “evolve”. Got that “Palm V” still? That “iPod Classic”? That’s another advantage to good-ole computers. I can have a quite old piece of Windows- or Mac-based computer hardware running pretty much brand new software. Sweet.

8. A lot more people should be telecommuting given the technology we have!

We shall see… we shall see… Wake me up in 20 years!

Learning what a tablet might be useful for. Entertainment mostly at the moment for most people it seems. Web-browsing. This might be proven naive soon enough. Even most of the flash-based games the kiddo likes on the netbook won’t work here since they require a mouse and arrow keys. Flash itself works fine in android… but these games were designed for different input and will need retooling.

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. … That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That’s what a computer is to me: The computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact. And that is: everything around that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” (at 3:30 in the PBS program)

See also:

- In the PBS program aired 11/3/2011 (Steve Jobs: One Last Thing), David Sheff states that Jobs described a book-sized device just like the iPad 30 years ago (at around 24 minutes into the 55min program) “…he really envisioned the iPad almost 30 years ago”

- Steve Jobs predicts the Future in 1990

“Many banks and insurance companies in the U.S. are organized as “mutual companies.” A mutual company is one that is owned — and sometimes governed — by its members instead of being owned by public or private shareholders”

“After more than a century of quietly collecting deposits and making loans without the bother of shareholders clamoring for dividends and higher profits, the two savings institutions separately announced plans last month to convert from mutual, or depositor-owned, organizations to shareholder ownership.”

There are a few mutual savings banks in our area in Massachusetts… but as the quote above explains, it seems like the main problem with choosing this over a credit union is that it might go public sooner than later. EXAMPLES

See also:
Mutual savings bank – wikipedia
Credit unions in the United States – wikipedia