I am in Arizona, and it’s gorgeous and about 70 degrees F. I can’t post any readers’ cats today, as they’re in a folder in my office, but let this video of Boo, an extremely inventive orange tabby, be this week’s substitute.
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Curiously enough, I, too, am in Arizona…where it’s about 93 degrees F, on its way to 97, and a high of 102 tomorrow and 104 on Sunday.
At least the new insulation, double-pane windows, and the rest are doing their bit…inside it’s still only 79, and the A/C has been on all of about 15 minutes this year, late yesterday afternoon.
b&
Just wait until July…
I’m actually somewhat looking forward to July — or, more importantly, August when the temperatures stay above 110 but the humidity starts to ratchet up as well.
Note, that’s not “looking forward to” in the sense of “eagerly anticipating,” but rather, “looking forward to” in the sense of, “Now that I’ve got all this extra insulation and an overabundance of free energy from the solar panels on my roof, will I even experience any discomfort inside?”
If today is any indication, the A/C won’t turn itself on at night even in July and August, and that’ll be huge. It probably won’t come on more than a handful of times during the day, too, which would be awesome.
Meanwhile, the solar panels will be powering half the rest of the block as everybody else’s A/C is running 24/7….
b&
What do you mean, “free energy”? You’re using up the sun. Stop it!
Actually, I think that’s rather impressive. I had fogotten that this would be your first summer with everything in place. Just don’t go outside.
It’s not the Sun I’m using up, it’s all the zero-point energy! But don’t tell anybody else that….
The A/C did go on for about ten minutes not long after I posted that last note, but it’s been silent since then. And it’s up to 95 outside…I am so loving the new insulation!
b&
What kind of insulation did you use? L
I had a local HVAC contractor (Mason Mechanical, who also did some duct work and sealing) blow in “stuff.” It’s whatever that recycled / shredded fire-treated fluffy “stuff” is that comes in compressed blocks and gets churned up in a big hopper before being blown through a really long and thick blowing-not-sucking vacuum hose.
Before, there was hardly any insulation left up in the attic, what with it being the original from the Carter administration. Now, it’s generously up to whatever the modern standard is for new construction (R31, I think?) It’s literally a world of difference.
The A/C just came on as I started typing this, for about the fourth time today. The high today was over 95. I expect the A/C to turn itself off after just a few minutes like it did the other few times today, and I don’t expect it to come on again until tomorrow afternoon.
I’ve got the thermostat set to 80, but it feels much more comfortable than it did last summer even when I experimented with setting it down to the 76 range…mainly because there’s no giant radiant heater over my head anymore.
Hmmm…another thought: I’ve also now got solar panels shading the south half of my roof, and much of the energy they do absorb is getting turned into electricity and fed into the grid to run the neighbor’s air conditioners rather than radiated into the attic as heat. That probably has something to do with it, as well.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. The A/C just turned itself off, just as I’m about to hit, “Post Comment.” b&
Oh sure you’re happy but what about the rest of us that depend on conditioned air coming out of the the Arizona desert?
No worries! I may not be pumping nearly so much of that superheated conditioned air into my surroundings, but I am pumping a number of times more electrons into the grid than I’m using — so you can use some of those electrons to condition your own air!
b&
I’m sure you are just making a joke, but for any who might not have all their physics to hand:
An air conditioner is a heat pump. It moves heat from the inside of the house to the outside. As long as the temperature difference is constant, the heat leaking in must equal the heat being pumped out.
Since the heat pump is nowhere near 100% efficient, it consumes significant energy which is added to the environment outside the house.
b&’s neighbours are tending to increase the local temperature to his (slight) detriment, especially with their inefficient insulation.
It is maybe too late to ask, but I’d certainly like to know details of the solar PV system (all the costs before and after tax credits, etc.).
Tim, see my reply elsewhere to Tardis_blue. The contractor I went with — and I have nothing but the most awesome things to say about them — is American Solar, a local company that’s done more installs in Maricopa County than pretty much all the other companies, big and small, local and national, combined.
If you’d like to know even more, please feel free to ask specifics. On-list is fine by me if Jerry doesn’t object, or you can email me at ben@trumpetpower.com.
Cheers,
b&
89 degrees in Tucson this is the view from my daughters office at U of A http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/
The ice is supposed to break on the Santa Cruz tomorrow. We’re getting a new swamp cooler next week, and I can’t wait for that fan-driven breeze wafting the fragrance of newly-drenched aspen pads through the house!
74 and raining with hail in Houston.
Kink knows the Sproinnnnnnnggggggggg trick, too!
If it’s only 70, you must be in… Flagstaff? I’m a Prescott resident, and it’s already warmer than that there.
Actually, I think he’s to the North of Flag, looking at an oversized irrigation ditch or something like that.
b&
Ha! I was just commenting to a friend how Merlyn begins my day at around 4:30 by pushing items off my nightstand, one by one. I wish he’d let me sleep another 45 minutes or so.
We’ve had kittehs for nearly 15 years now, and I don’t think I’ve needed to set an alarm clock in well over a decade. Cats love a routine.
I had a cat that would do the same with objects on my dresser. I had to be careful what I put there.
I had once said that my pets would not control when I got up. That lasted for many years, but eventually they wore me down.
I found if I got up to feed them, I could go back to sleep…
They had you well trained…
Meowa culpa…
+1
My car Max wakes me early by leaping up and flipping the handle on the bedroom door; which, if the door is closed, opens it and lets him into the bedroom, where he begins chewing audibly on the bed cover.
First rule of cat ownership: NEVER feed them when you first get up. Don’t even do it once. You never want them to associate getting you out of bed with food.
I’ve trained my cat to associate being fed with coming in from her short little morning ramble. It means it is very easy to get her to come in: most of the time, all I have to do is open the door and call.
You don’t use DropBox to share files between devices?
I’m in Sedona untill Sunday what a great place,everyone should visit one time. Better than the Grand Canyon in my opinion
Dude, I’ll totally buy beer at one of Flagstaff’s premier breweries if you’ve got some time tonight.
How the bloody hell did this devolve into a discussion of temperature when there was a wonderful cat sproinging a doorstop? I blame Ben Goren. . . .
Well, it was either that or tell all y’all about how my cat alarm clock isn’t a sproinging doorstop but a loud purr transmitted through his cheekbones to mine, and I figured I’d spare all y’all the jealousy….
b&
I didn’t want to talk about the way my cats ask to come in and go out in the early morning.
Claws; meet wood. Say goodbye, wood. Two cats times a minimum of one in and one out each…
A: @Ben Goren–I don’t understand; you paid for enough solar cells to put more electricity into the grid than you take out? Or did the city pay? If you did, that’s mighty generous of you!
B: I had a cat that used to sproing the doorstop. It lasted a few days, and I took the doorstop off. Then he would just sit outside the door and meow loudly and piteously all night long. Sooo…we just ended up leaving the door open so he had free access to the bedroom. He was a great cat; a major pain in the butt, but great, nonetheless. We just lost him last fall, and this brought back nice memories. =)
When I was working with the contractor to size the system, I knew I wanted something bigger than the bare minimum to offset my annual bills. Panels degrade with time; a few decades from now, they’ll only produce about 80% of what they do today, so I wanted to cover that loss due to age. More significantly, I have plans for eventually getting some sort of an electric vehicle.
Before this past summer when I had everything done, I was using about 10 MWh per year. A 6 KW photovoltaic array will produce just about exactly that much when placed at the orientation, latitude, etc., etc., etc., that my rooftop offers.
6 KW of panels worked out to be an odd number that used up most but not all of the space on the roof, so I rounded up the number of panels to a 6.24 KW array.
I also added a solar hot water heater with a pair of panels. Antifreeze circulates in a closed loop between the panels and the tank, where hot antifreeze-filled coils replaces the lower electric element in an otherwise-typical electric water heater. Those two panels provide the heating equivalent of what about 3 KW of PV panels would provide, and my back-of-the-math calculations suggested that they’d save me about as much energy as I’d use in an electric vehicle. Most of my surplus electricity comes from the addition of those panels.
…but not all. Before doing any of this, the home had almost no attic insulation left (from the original lot blown in when it was built in the Carter administration), and it still had the original single-pane aluminum windows. Between the insulation, windows, A/C duct work and sealing, a solar-powered attic vent fan, Solatube light tubes, white paint on the roof, and some other odds and ends, I’ve dramatically cut back the energy I’m using to cool and / or heat the house. I hardly ran the heater at all this winter, and it’s only been since yesterday when the outside temperatures flirted with 100 that the A/C has come on. It’s much more comfortable, too, even with the thermostat set at the same or even a higher temperature.
So, all in all, I’m generally feeding back into the grid each day at least a few times as much as I take from it, sometimes much more. There were a handful of dark and stormy days during the winter when I used the heater and / or did laundry or the like that I used more than I generated, but only a very few.
The way the utility’s billing works, I get a kWh-for-kWh credit for all that I generate. If I generate 35 kWh during the day, use 5 kWh during the day and another 2 kWh overnight, the next day I start with a 28 kWh surplus. That surplus carries over day to day and month to month, until the end of the April billing cycle…where, if you still have a surplus, they cut you a check…but only at the (roughly) $0.02 / kWh that’s the Palo Verde Nuclear off-peak wholesale rate. It’s a joke, really, but I’m okay with that…for now.
And, you know what? I’m just tickled pink. It’s an amazing luxury to know that I’ll never again have an electric bill, even if I did something silly like run the A/C with the windows open in the middle of summer.
It’s also an amazing financial investment — far and away the best I could possibly make with the capital I put into it.
I’d have to dig out the paperwork, and it’s all a bit complicated what with the tax credits and the rebates the utility pays directly to the contractor and the like…but, if I remember right, my total out-of-pocket costs were just north of $10,000, and I should have saved that much in electric bills by about seven years from now. If you remember the Rule of 70, that means it’s a 10% rate of return. And remember that I could have gotten away with a system much smaller for a lot less money that still would have paid itself off in about seven years; this oversized system will let me drive an electric car (that I don’t yet own) for free.
That means that it’s not just an investment that pays a great rate of return, but it’s an investment that’s proof against inflation. And not just any type of inflation, but energy inflation, and even transportation energy inflation, which is really poised to skyrocket, what with all the talk of needing to tap into tar sands and all.
Sorry, Jerry…I know this has even less to do with cat sproinging than ambient Arizona temperatures…but Tardis did ask….
Cheers,
b&
My cat could get in and out at will, and his getting up procedure to make sure I got up to make breakfast involved:
1. warm up feet by lying on human
2. when feet are warm bounce experimentally on chest
3. pat human’s face until eyes open
4. final resort: get onto bedside table and start knocking contents to floor: books, whoops, coffee mug, oops
All this at 5am, I might add.
You forgot “Meow” loudly in human’s ear, but you’re spot on otherwise…
You guys are a bunch of weenies. My cats never wake me up. They wake up when I get up.
I just get up at 3:00 am. L
My cat starts snapping the rubber door seal at 6 AM to get in for breakfast. He grabs hold of it and pulls it back like a rubber band and SNAP (repeated hundreds of times if necessary). He eventually tears it up and I have to replace it. Annoying little bugger.
When we got our first cat, who stayed in at night, I told my wife not to put things on the bed headboard. She ignored me. The cat would first climb up on her and do a “step dance”, that kneading thing with her paws. If that didn’t work, a heavy object would soon be pushed off onto her head. Objects on the headboard are now only placed there if they can be secured.
My cat used to knead my head and groom my hair, accompanied by the loudest purr ever heard from a 6lb cat. Of course she only wanted me to get up so she could steal my spot on the pillow. Man I miss her.