Save Household Energy Blog

According to the article at usatoday, Ford claims that its Fusion Hybrid is the most fuel efficient midsized hybrid with MPGs of 41 MPG city and 36 MPG highway. Toyota is not taking this lightly however. Their Prius is rated at 48 MPG city and 45 MPG highway. And, both the Prius and the Fusion meet the requirements of being classified as a midsized car.

Sounds like Ford needs to do a bit of explain’in!

LED bulbs are the latest energy saving innovation in lighting. My most recently acquired LED lighting device was an LED flashlight (shown left) containing 14 mini bulbs from a Menards home store. On my birthday, Menards sent me a card with a certificate for a free LED flashlight, so I thought I would take them up on their offer. I was pleasantly surprised in that this tiny flashlight provides an incredible amount of illumination with its 14 bulbs – I almost could strap two of these to the front of my car if my headlights ever gave out! I liked this flashlight so much I bought 3 more for Christmas gifts at about $6 each. (I guess that was their plan!)

LED bulbs also make great decorative lighting, consuming far less electricity than conventional lighting. At the Energy Savings Blog, they document that LED Christmas tree lights use $0.56 in electricity compared to $6.03 in electricity with mini incandescent lights, and a whopping $25.13 for Grandma’s 4 watt old-fashioned lights! And the brilliant bright light of an LED might make it a very attractive choice for holiday lighting.

With respect to room lighting, LED’s may still be in development since they tend to emit a very intense blinding direct light. Still, they have many uses in specific lighting situations. For example, softer versions, as seen at crane.com, may work well for bedside lamps or hallway lights. Also, some of the larger LED bulbs in a frosted design, as seen at x-tremegeek.com, would work well in a floor lamp or desk lamp application. The prices can be a bit high, but often they are rated to last 10+ years.

We live in northern Wisconsin in a 40+ year old ranch home. Read here about the wood burning stove that we can now heat our home at temperatures down to zero degrees F!
The wood burning stove pictured left heats our house thanks to the new blower system and many improvements in insulation I made this fall, documented on this blog and on my site SaveHouseHoldEnergy.com. Also, you will find a host of other resources for saving money while on a budget on this site, including a page on how I cut my oil hot water bill nearly in half, along with a homemade solar shower I constructed.
The stove is in our basement on the finished side. We live in a fairly modest 1200 square foot mid-sixties era ranch home with another 600 square feet of (somewhat) finished area in the basement. Our basement was always very cold so we decided to put in a free standing wood stove. The stove worked great, but much of the heat tended to stay in the basement, too much at times.
And our upstairs was not really getting much heat. To send more heat upstairs, I put in a floor grate (pictured on left) a few years back. This helped somewhat but still did not deliver a lot of heat. The way to get more heat upstairs was to install a blower run on a thermostat. The blower was purchased at Home Depot online and is nice in that it is fairly quiet. This blower is designed to be part of a 6″ stove vent pipe. The thermostat was purchased from kkontrols.com and works incredibly well. This is the same thermostat that is used in controlling temperatures on large greenhouses I see listed in seed catalogs. This blower will turn on, and stay on, as soon as heat builds up and will turn off, and stay off, when heat levels diminish. About the hardest part of rigging this whole system up was fishing the 14-2 wire through my finished basement ceiling to connect to a power source. For safety sake, consult or hire an electrician when installing this system.

If you have windows typical of an older basement, they are the 14″ by 30″ type awning type windows that swing in to open. And these windows will generally be of poor quality and allow a lot of cold air in. The result is a cold basement that results in cold floors. A low cost solution is to add plastic. But the concrete wall will not accept the two-sided tape (I tried!). To provide a nice surface to accept the two sided tape, I measured off some 1×2 strips and screwed them together at the corners to make a square frame. I then screwed the top edge into the floor joists above and used two concrete screws, one on each side, to hold it to the wall. After drilling the holes for the concrete screws, I applied Great Stuff expanding foam under the frame to fill in any gaps and form an air-tight seal. Then I fastened in the concrete screws, allowed the foam to expand and harden, and then trimmed the excess off. Then I covered with two-side tape and clear plastic.

The result? My basement is a lot warmer!  That window was very leaky and I did not have a storm for it. Now, my interior plastic storm, sealed air tight, has stopped that cold draft completely.

If you read my article about Different Types of Heat Loss, you will learn that you can lose a lot of heat through convective heat losses. Convective heat losses occur when air movement transports heat out through window and door cracks.

Window plastic is a very inexpensive way to convert a drafty old window into a window that performs as well as a top-of-the-line energy miser. Another way to deal with these convective heat losses is to weather strip around doors. The weather stripping costs very little, but can make a big difference.

To read more in detail about how I weather stripped around doors, added plastic around a window, and added more attic insulation to reduce my heat costs, go to Four Easy Home Insulation Tips

Recently, I just completed a project where I can potentially cut my hot water heater bill in half!  As a side note, my oil fired hot water bill was over a hundred dollars a month when oil prices were over $4 a gallon, so I have a lot to save. What I did was:

• Turned down my heat settings
• Had maintenance performed on the heater
• Used an insulating blanket
• Installed a temper tank – this allows the incoming water to warm up to something on the order of 70 deg F rather than 40 deg F. I also utilized waste heat from my hot water heater exhaust with a hot air blower system hooked up to a thermostat.

Go to Save Hot Water Heater Costs for more details on what I did. Watch the video below!

Used the solar shower today as the kids were monopolizing the shower. It was in the high 50’s today and when I took a shower at 4PM it was about 52 degrees. But it was sunny. The water was luke-warm – not too cold but not too warm. It was OK. But this shower had to warm up from some pretty cold temps – it was down in the high 20’s last night!

I have one more improvement that I thought of to try: I am going to put foil face sheathing over the pink dense insulating foam so that the sunlight will reflect down. I believe that with this improvement, my shower could be usable until early November, when things freeze up solid around here. Will do this improvement as soon as possible and post again.

For next summer, I am thinking of making this shower look a bit nicer with a wood slat face and some glass panels made of glass from the pile of old windows I have.  It really is nice to have this extra shower – and it saves a little on our hot water bill as well.

In order to extend the number of days in the year for which my homemade solar shower can be used, I added some insulation to allow the water to heat up on even 50 degree or cooler sunny days.

The insulation consists of the following:

• Two inch dense foam along the back side of the heating chamber so heat will not be drawn away by the metal building. In the photo above, this is the pink foam at the back under the plastic.
• An extra sheet of clear plastic spaced approximately 2" above the bottom sheet. If you notice in the photo, 2×2 wood spacers have been added. This 2" air space will provide insulation on the top and sides.

In addition, I doubled up the black plastic bag so the inside bag would be shielded from the sun. In my first attempt, the top of the black bag became extremely brittle after several months. The bottom of the bag I used in my first attempt was not compromised however.  With this setup, I anticipate that I can get a full year of use before the bags need to be replaced.

I look forward to giving this new shower a try on a cold day! Today, it was raining, so I don’t think the water will be too warm. The 100 yard commute will certainly prove to be refreshing if the outside temps are under 50 degrees. So far, the coldest temperature I have used this shower was about 49 degrees – but in that case the daytime highs were in the low 70’s.  With this new setup, I anticipate that the shower will be usable on far colder, but sunny, days.

I will post again after trying this out on a cold fall day.

Something seems to have attacked my solar shower? Squirrel perhaps, or maybe a bird? I noticed water dripping from the frame and upon closer inspection, the top clear plastic was ripped in two, and the black bag was ripped up at the top! Some squirrel decided to have a drink of lukewarm plastic flavored water? Or maybe a bird?

At any rate, the black plastic bag is in need of replacement anyway. It is very brittle from the sun beating on it and tears apart almost like paper. The 55 gallon trash bag has been in place for a little over two months now. I will replace with two bags rather than one so perhaps the inner one will last a bit longer, provided there are no attacks. With this replacement, I will also add some insulation to help this shower function even in colder weather.  I will place 2" foam along the back and an additional clear plastic cover. Hopefully, the water will heat up even in temps below 60, provided it is sunny. I will post again when this is completed.

The reason I was able to build my solar shower for under $25 is that I used a lot of recycled materials from around the house. I used old boards that I salvaged off an old deck that needed replacing, boards from previous projects, a discarded handle from a trouble light for a towel rack. I even used part of an old tackle box as a plastic soap and shampoo rack. Watch the video below to see all the places where I used recycled materials.