Daniel Flesher

I only have a couple more days to complete a few one-time challenges. I have two left. I think I'll have to drop fixing a couple bad faucets in my house. I will do one of them before winter comes, but it's at the lowest point in my house, so it's going to be a bit annoying as a lot of water might drain out. The other faucet doesn't leak, but is stuck so I never use it. 

So, to go totally overkill I decided to get my Kill-a-watt power meter out and measure the power draw of various electronics around my house. This was to complete the one-time challenge of making an energy audit in my house. I had done this several years ago to find the source of why I had gotten a $300 electricity bill when renting a 600sf apartment only to discover that a pipe leaving my electric water heater had burst. The water heater was inaccessible to me and not in my apartment, so that made a lot of sense. 

In general my electricity bill is between $80-150. This varies based on the seasons. It's been higher this summer because my central air is broken and I'm too cheap to fix it right now, so I used two window units which aren't as efficient. Note that this bill also includes the charging of my Chevy Volt, which I guessed averages maybe 9kWh per day, which is a pretty liberal estimate, but still only accounts for ~$25 of my monthly bill. (Yes, you can drive around and do all of your daily errands for a whole month for $25 in electricity instead of $75. The Volt is really that awesome.)

Some of my big energy hogs are my TV, home-theater computer, and Drobo, which I use to store all my movies and music. The Drobo is a recent addition, so I was most curious about its monthly cost to run. I have the eight bay Drobo Pro with seven two-terabyte drives and one three-terabyte drive. 

At idle (off) it draws 13W. When it is on (remotely started whenever my HTPC is powered up), it draws 156W for a very short amount of time and then settles in right around 24-26W. I'm not sure if any drives are spinning in this idle mode, I made sure to not be accessing any of the data so hopefully the drives weren't active. Finally, when watching a movie there is a steady draw of ~85W. 

I used the 85W number and calculated the monthly cost of running the Drobo for the 3-4 hours a day that it's on. Total cost? 70 cents. I can live with that. 

I'll do a bigger audit later. The obvious truth is that the insulation in my rowhouse is dead. It needs to be replaced in the front and back walls at a minimum (if there's anything there to begin with). The party walls between my neighbors are only partially insulated. Many of them are just parged over masonry with no insulation. If I could insulate the front, back and roof of my place really well I bet I could get away with not cooling or heating my place and just mooch of my neighbors. I think that sounds like a good plan. *wink*

I walk to work pretty much every day because my office is two miles from my house. Today I went into center city to drop off plans at Licenses and Inspections. I took the train and then walked all over the city to the various departments for pre-approvals. After I was done I only had 20 minutes to get back to the train, so I grabbed lunch at Reading Terminal Market and ate it outside on my way over to Jefferson Station. 

So I knocked out several ecochallenge birds with one stone today, all while I was on the clock dropping off the five projects my four-man firm did in 10 working days. #notahumblebrag. 

Last February I drove a Tesla Model S. I loved it, but they are too expensive to justify the purchase, and I didn't want to plan my infrequent trips around supercharging stations and charging at in-law's homes. 

Then in August it came time to replace our 2001 Subaru Outback with 230k miles on it. None of the cars we tested seemed right, and then I got turned onto the Chevy Volt. It has an electric drive train with a 36 mile range, enough for 98% of our daily trips, and when we need to visit family it will switch over to a hybrid mode (like a Prius) and get 37+ miles per gallon. 

We found a 2013 Volt for $15k with less than eight thousand miles on it, so we jumped on it. It's easily the best car I've ever owned. 

If you think you want the Tesla model 3, I'd strongly suggest you look into the Volt. The price is comparable, the electric range will work for the majority of most people's daily driving, oh yeah, and you can buy one today.

My family went to a nearby farm to pick apples and pumpkins. It may be a bit agro-tourist and consumerist, but I'm going to count it because I picked my own apples. 

I already have the habit of keeping lights off, but recently I've added shutting down all of my computers at night. Considering that one of them is a high performance desk top, having it off for ~16hrs a day has reduced our energy bill by a good bit.