#6 - Half Plan

Just found a neat site. Mother Earth News published an article describing a project to cut the energy use of a household (heat, electricity, transportation) by half. They don't just talk about doing it, but they actually do it and report the results. If you like graphs and data see this link. If you want to see the top 8 projects then see this link. The bottom line seems to be that hey reduced their energy use by 63% without any lifestyle changes. Below are 8 projects, costs and payback. Wow!!

The Top Eight Projects	Initial Cost	Savings per Year	Energy Reduction per Year	CO2 Reduction per Year
Personal Computer Power Management	$20	$178	1,780 kWh	3,560 lbs
Install Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs	$50	$117	1,170 kWh	2,340 lbs
Seal and Insulate Heating Ducts	$20	$75	940 kWh	480 lbs
Reduce Infiltration Losses From House (Seal Leaks)	$50	$156	1,980 kWh	1,010 lbs
Vent Dryer to Inside During Winter	$5	$63	630 kWh	286 lbs
Insulate Windows With Bubble Wrap	$38	$75	960 kWh	490 lbs
Eliminate Phantom Electrical Loads	$70	$57	570 kWh	1,140 lbs
Use an Electric Mattress Pad	$125	$186	2,320 kWh	1,150 lbs
Totals	$378	$907	10,350 kWh	10,456 lbs

As I have found with wood pellets, insulation, CFLs and the like, there is low hanging fruit everywhere.

#5 - Dad Didn't Have All This Stuff

This is one of my favorite graphs. It shows what percentage of Americans had which appliance or convenience over time. When I saw this the first time, it brought back memories of my mother telling stories about the "good old days". My dad was born in 1910 and my mother was born in 1917. They both grew up on rural dairy farms in Vermont. The were born into a world with no electricity and I have a picture of my mom as a teenager doing her homework under an oil lamp. I used to fill my grandmothers woodbox with small sticks of wood for her kitchen stove. What is striking now is the amazing changes they saw over their lives. And yet their memories of growing up without this stuff, based on the stories I grew up hearing them tell, seemed pretty normal if not downright bucolic. I guess my take away is that we don't need all this stuff to have pretty much OK lives, and very possible better lives.

So when someone says we "need" more and more and more electricity and we will be miserable if we had to use less (or worst), I don't buy it. I gotta go turn off the radio, turn down the thermostat, brush my teeth with an electric toothbrush, set my digital alarm clock, text everybody about carpooling tomorrow, check my kids Facebook pages, get bread out of the freezer for the morning, check the digital thermometer and listen to the weather radio, and go to bed.

#4 - What Cars Really Cost to Drive

I found a website a while ago Edmunds TCO that breaks down what it costs to own a car. It uses the assumption of 15,000 miles per year and breaks it into:

- Depreciation

- Taxes & Fees

- Financing

- Fuel

- Insurance

- Maintenance

- Repairs

I wanted something other than 15K per year so I took the data from Edmunds TCO site and created a spreadsheet that allowed me to play with annual costs, and "per mile" cost to see how much it cost to drive a number of different cars per mile. Feel free to make a copy and play with it yourself.

Here are some per mile costs for a few different cars assuming 15,000 miles per year:

2006 Subaru = $0.44

2011 Prius = $0.52

2006 Tacoma = $0.56

2007 Prius = $0.34

Having just put over $2K in repairs in my old Subaru, I can believe it. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking it's "just gas money" to go to town and back.

One thing I realized is that almost every car I have owned was "put down" because of rust. I can usually get 200K+ miles on a car but the rust kills them first. So if I can somehow share a car and put a lot more miles on per year, say 50K, then I can wear it out before the rust gets me. Lets run those numbers in the spreadsheet:

2006 Subaru = $0.31

2011 Prius = $0.24

2006 Tacoma = $0.40

2007 Prius = $0.22

You can see the effects of gas mileage in the Prius.

So the only other point I want to make is that if I drive less miles per year, I still have to pay the fixed cost. So lets plug in 2000 miles per year

2006 Subaru = $01.56

2011 Prius = $3.11

2006 Tacoma = $2.05

2007 Prius = $1.52

So the next step is to get rid of the car. Rent a car. Pay your brother $1 per mile to use his car. This is where carsharing, taxis, ZipCars, etc could work.

#3 - Converting from Oil to Wood Pellets

When I bought my house 25 years ago, I burned cord wood off my property and backed it up with fuel oil. The house came with a scary combo wood/oil furnace (Deathinator 500) which I never tried to burn wood in. I had a crappy wood stove which was nice in that it lit the room through the cracks, but the air control was designed by someone who clearly failed mechanical design and heat transfer. The house bounced between 95 and 55. I live on top of a mountain on a road fit at that time mostly for goats and Mongolian pack horses. After hauling gravel the first year, I got 4X4 cars up the hill. and who would have thought the oil guy refused to come up after October and before April (mud season). No guts no glory. So the 275 gallon tank in the basement was it. One year I ran out and got a 55 gallon drum full in the back of my trusty plow truck (lovingly named Fe2O3).

When the kids came we ditched the wood stove and put a 1000 gal tank in and bought the first tankful for (this will age me) $0.69 per gallon. So good bye wood, and hello imported Arab oil. the American dream. So each year I used 800 gallons worth (can you say leaky house, but what the heck, $0.69 per gallon?

So as oil went up and my cute little kids turned into militant tree huggers, we used less and less oil until I had to start peeling the dog dish off the my dogs tongue each morning. We got down to about 500 gallons a year but the price shot up to $3.00 a gallon. So it was time for change.

Four things happened. My kids started leaving the nest, and had no problems sleeping in the cold (eat your hearts out parents) when they came home. I installed a new oil furnace that was way more efficient than the DeathStar. We installed a pellet stove (Harmon XXV, awesome stove). And this year, I had the main part of the house sealed and insulated. As a result, I am on track to heat my house with something less than 3 tons of pellets. The oil furnace was on 1 day while I was gone after Christmas (thermostat = 50F) and once last fall for 15 minutes to make sure it still worked.

So I am going from $1500 per year to about $600 per year, and I don't have to chip ice out of the shower head each morning.

Fuel oil right now is $3.78 and if I had not changed anything I would still be burning 800 gallons, or $3K per year instead of $600 per year. That's a lot of wool socks.

So thanks to our incentive program at AER (where I work) for help with the pellet stove and insulation. Now I gotta work on my electric hot water heater..

#2 - Jelly Beans

After that cerebral intro I am launching right into the heady topic of Jelly Beans. Actually, I owe a co-worker some research. I torture her with oddball curiosities ( who wrote the song containing the lyrics "my python boots are too tight") and she chases them down and then tortures me with something (like how do they make the flavors in jelly beans) and so here I am chasing that one down.

So each day in the afternoon I walk up to the front office and snag 4 jelly beans at 4 calories each. They are Jelly Bellys I think which are small. So thanks to Google I learned all about first jelly beans, and then flavors.

Jely Beans:

I found a video which explains how they are made. First heat sugar to 170C, add glucose, starch, color and flavor stuff (natural I am sure) and mix it all in a big boiler. Starch is used as a mold to dribble hot sugar into (brushed off later and reused) and then cooled. They sort the klinkers out, too big and too small with screen belts and then dry them for a while. Then they go in a big dome pot thing which they add sugar to and rotate the pot so the jelly beans roll over each other and get rounder. Food coloring is added to more sugar and put in the drum and then more sugar, then syrup (more sugar), then a little wax to make them shiny. Then off to the packaging machine, into the truck and off to your local store. Here is a great link explaining more.

Flavor science:

This is fascinating. A place called Mother Murphy's Labs scored the job of making all the weird flavors for the Harry Potter inspired jelly beans with flavors like dirt, sardines and boogers. I can imagine them pounding the air in excitement when they got the "baby diaper" flavor project. They also get normal jobs like donuts, mocha, vanilla and the like.

So I wonder what kind of research was involved in developing the "baby diaper" flavored jelly bean?

#1 - A Place to Write

I created this new blog, because I needed a place to record stuff (get it out of my brain). The more I get down out here, the more neurons available for new stuff. It always amazes me that this couple pounds of noggin can store all those movies, faces, music, and old girlfriends perfumes, recall them at will (most of the time) and still have room to cram more in.

I guess as I get older, I am getting more curious about ideas. There are some amazing people out there with ideas and explanations of how everything around us works. Someone introduced me to ted.com where interesting people are invited to give the 20 minute speech of their life. I would recommend you check it out.

For years I have followed the writing of David Brooks who is a columnist / political pundit (slightly right wing) for the New York Times. A couple of years back he got off on a neurology jag, trying to explain in his own mind, why politicians who are gifted people people, could go on and make really bad decisions. He started passing on, through his column and subsequent blog, what he found and I kind of followed along.

Humans are fascinatingly complex, as is the world, and he sort of discovered this.

So this is my little journal to jot stuff down. My disclaimer is that I am an engineer not a writer of any kind, so be kind. I think I the name Graham R. Spelling fits about right ...