I ran into an insidious run of "Bad Luck" starting in late 2009. The "bad luck" was the result of two unexpected computer crashes as my backups were slowly corrupted. I could not trust the numbers saved in my books, lost a lot of records (so slow, I didn't notice the files were being corrupted.) and I spent a good part of my waking hours for almost a year recovering my books for tax purposes.
Thank goodness I could pull this off!
In any event, last winter was tight. I needed to save money any way I could and I thought I'd share with you how I managed to save $100's of dollars (closer to $1000) in my electric bill by doing some simple things.
I had a stack of 1/2 inch aluminum faced styrofoam sitting in a shed in back. (Cheap stuff.)
I decided to insulate my windows with it to keep heat in and not lose heat through radiation through the windows. I'd judiciously take the styrofoam off of the windows on the south facing wall when the sun shined, and replaced it when the net amount of heat coming in was not enough to overcome radiant heat loss. (This was a judgement call based on the temperature I felt between the window and the styrofoam.)
I put on warm clothes to keep warm, and only turned on the heat when I felt the pipes might freeze under the house. (Which was surprisingly not that often.)
It got to an "uncomfortable 48 degrees in the house, and if I was just sitting, my body didn't generate enough heat to feel warm. (I'm an old fart.)
So, I overcame this discomfort by sitting under an infra-red heat lamp screwed into a chicken coop receptacle (you know, the kind with the porcelain bulb holder.), and sat comfortably warm while the rest of the house was cold. The furnace was rarely on, and my electric bill would hang around $58-$68 the whole winter. The year before had bills in the range of $125 - $250+/mo.
When I went to bed, I slept with a heating pad.. kept me cozy warm between the covers.
Fall and Spring are no problem, the weather is great and the house stays relatively comfortable 24/7.
This summer, it has been in the high 80's to almost 100F. (The last I looked, 98.7F today.) at 1PM which is not the hottest part of the day here. With daylight savings time, the heat on the hill I live on is highest around 3:30-4:30 PM. I have not turned on my air conditioner, yet this year.
So here I sit, it's 98.7F outside and I'm comfortably cool. How? By wetting my T-shirt and sitting in the air flow coming from a window fan in the next room. Yes, I have windows OPEN on this 98 Degree day. Why, because it helps cool the hot ceiling.
On these hot days, my T-shirt stays wet for about an hour. Then I have to go back to the kitchen sink (UGH), rinse out my T-shirt, and put it back on with a fresh supply of water. Keeps me cool and comfortable all day long doing this.
I'm my own SWAMP COOLER!!!
Two other benefits besides feeling cool is, I stay cleaner with the hourly rinse, and my T-shirt stays cleaner, longer.
I always wondered how early Americans survived the tropical heat before air conditioning (let alone electricity) existed in New Orleans. It is fascinating to ponder this while I look at the architecture of the mansions built during that era. High Ceilings, Ivy covered walls, and covered porches and windows.. Big windows to let the breeze in... a lot of ingenious schemes can be seen in the design of the buildings built then.
We all know that there are millions of people on this planet who survive intense tropical, desert, and arctic conditions without electricity. How do they do it? Some practices defy logic, like black gurkhas in the Saudi Desert. I thought black absorbed heat? Yet, these people survive.
We have a lot to learn about how we define comfort and not pay too much attention to temperature. Our bodies can adapt to almost any temperature given the right circumstances. (For instance the woman who swam from the US to Russia in arctic water. Normal people would die from hypothermia in minutes, but this lady spent months conditioning her body to withstand the frigid arctic waters. In other words, her body adapted to such an extreme temperature condition.
We can also take advantage of how our body adapts to temperature throughout the year.
(My experience is, I gain weight in the fall, and lose weight in the summer. The last few years I watched what I ate during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season to avoid the usual 10-15 pounds I gain during that time frame. Although my caloric intake was drastically reduced, I still gained 10 pounds. Was the 10 pounds just my bodies natural way of getting ready for winter? Don't know, but it sounds reasonable to me.
I wanted to share this with you because it may be useful to know if you ever run into a budget crunch.
June 30, 2012 -- I BLEW IT!!
Yesterday I turned on my air conditioner for the first time. The day before it was starting to get uncomfortable after several days of 100+ F temperatures. I read 107.8F that day and noticed that the main reason I had problems was because the overnight low temperature was not getting into the high 60's anymore. Conditions now are such that the lows are above 78F (which I feel is the cutoff point for my own healthy living.)
Yesterday, around 11AM I finally decided to change strategy when the outside shade temperature was 104F. I realized that the ceiling fan was cooling the ceiling which was getting quite warm. This cooling of the ceiling meant that the heat conducted through my ceiling was sped up. (Heat conducts faster when there is a larger temperature difference is what I was taught.) So a hotter ceiling would emit more heat into the room through infra-red radiation.)
Steven Harris (a cool guy) teaches to reduce the temperature on the roof by devising a way to keep it cooler by watering it. (Interesting to see infra-red light (electromagnetic spectrum) cause molecules to move faster = hotter; then the moving molecules cause other molecules in their surroundings to wiggle. This wiggling of the molecules cascades through the roof, only to find no more roof, so the excess energy is turned back into infra-red light.) So, light can get through solids, in a round about way.
To slow down the conduction of the heat from the hot roof to my ceiling, I decided to turn off the ceiling fan to keep the air at the ceiling hotter. My thought was hot air rises. If I did not disturb the air flow at the ceiling, the ceiling would stay hotter and there would be less heat conducted from the roof to the ceiling. (More infra-red heat radiating around the room, but the total heat coming into the house would be slower.)
The other thought I had was that the cooler air would stay towards the bottom of the room. I've seen this stratification before and it not only happens in the air, but is very evident in water. There was a definite thermocline in the swimming holes I enjoyed in the summer when I was a kid. We hear the weatherman talk about this all the time.. so it's not rocket science.
Another thought is that water vapor (related to humidity) is also lighter than air, and "humidity" stratifies also which might reduce the humidity towards the floor. (For those scientists out there, my own studies on air flows and air exchanges in the home led me to believe that air has a "yield value" that means air will not move until there is enough energy available to overcome the attractive forces between air molecules. ---- poorly said :{ )
So now my air conditioner is on and I'm slowly ramping up the temperature until I get uncomfortable. At this point, I will try to balance my comfort using my wet T-shirt/fan technique to stay cool for the day. I may decide to keep the Air conditioner set as high as I can to keep my electric bills as low as possible by balancing these two ways to stay comfortable.
THIS IS FUN! (Yup, I'm a crazy guy who thinks he knows everything but knows nothing!)
