Ear Worm and Other Matters

One of our local-ish fm radio stations, WSRS 96.1 (Worcester), switches exclusively to Christmas music sometime in November. I only ran across it on Sunday while searching for a radio station to listen to in the car. If you like to listen to Christmas music early in the season, they are your one stop shop. There is a live stream via internet, too. Their selection is pretty decent and sometimes amusing. I’ve now developed quite an ear worm for You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. It has a catchy tune and the lyrics crack me up.

You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.
You really are a heel.
You’re as cuddly as a cactus,
You’re as charming as an eel.
Mr. Grinch.

You’re a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.

You’re a monster, Mr. Grinch.
Your heart’s an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You’ve got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Grinch.

I wouldn’t touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.

Etc.

Yeah, I know it’s not very Christmasy, but still. It turns up on the playlist a couple of times a day. But, if you’re more into Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song, they play that, too. I’m enjoying the early holiday tunes this year.

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Later on today I’ll get around to posting Week 25 of the 90 Percent Project. I’ll probably also post Week 26 sometime on Thursday. That one is going to be horrible, but fair is fair. It will be the following week that’ll be interesting.

As I suspected (knew), having the laptop has really trimmed my electricity use. Yesterday I registered a whopping 1 kWh for the day. Today’s reading said 2kWh. I think I’m probably averaging 1.5 kWh per day currently. If the weather ever turns cold enough to freeze water out on the deck, I’ll be able to stick a few containers of solid ice in the little fridge and that will effectively cut back the work it has to do, which will drop my electricity use back a little bit, too. Why not take advantage of Mother Nature’s free gifts, eh? I have done that a couple of times in the last two weeks and it does make a noticeable difference in the daily electricity draw. Anyone with a larger fridge could easily freeze a couple of gallon milk containers and stick them in the fridge to gain some benefit. I also use a couple of those thin plastic Ziploc containers with the blue lids, in the sandwich size, too. They’re small and easy to fit in tighter spaces.

So, you might wonder, how much of a life does one live on 1 or 1.5 kWh per day? I don’t think anyone looking in for a day would think I was skimping on creature comforts very much.

My morning starts out with a trip to the coffee pot. While that’s brewing (220 watts total), I go down and turn up the hot water heater, feed Abbie and the birds. Once the coffee is finished, I turn off the coffee maker, pour myself a cup and pour the rest into a tall thermos bottle. It’ll stay steaming hot well into evening...if the coffee lasts that long.

Breakfast usually involves either a bowl or oatmeal or cheese grits cooked in the microwave. While I’m slurping either one of those down, I fire up the computer, tune into some streaming music, and look at what’s happened in the world since last night. Having the laptop reduces my electricity draw by 2.5x over the desktop computer. In other words, instead of sucking up 157 watts per hour, I’m only drawing 65 watts (and possibly slightly less as I’ve turned the screen’s back lighting down to about 50%).

And then a shower. When I’m finished in the bathroom, I go down and turn the hot water heater back to the vacation setting.

The rest of the day isn’t very exciting, really. Sometimes I run a few errands. Otherwise, I’m tappity-tapping on the keyboard. I turn a couple of lights on around 4:30 when it starts to get dark here. The bulbs are 9 and 14 watt CFL bulbs, which gives me an equivalent of 100 watts of incandescent light. Dinner is either cooked in the microwave, on the wood stove (if it’s burning) or on the kitchen stove. Sometimes a combination of all three. If the stove is burning, I’ll also have a pot of water simmering on standby for doing the dishes later. And while I’m doing dishes, I’ll heat another pot of water on the wood stove for a small handwash, if needed. If the stove isn’t burning (like yesterday and today, so far), I will boil a kettle of water with my electric kettle (about 100 watts for 4 minutes) for the dishes.

During the evening, I’ll sit by a lamp with a 23 watt CFL bulb (100 watt incandescent equivalence) and either read, stitch, or web surf. About three evenings a week, I’ll put a Netflix DVD into the DVD player. That draws 12 watts an hour and the little LCD television only draws 27 watts (turning the screen’s back lighting down just a tiny bit cut the electricity draw from 57 watts to 27.)

And that’s pretty much it. Nothing extravagant, but not all that constrained, either. Just about everything that requires electricity in this house is plugged into a power strip. When I’m finished using something, I switch the power strip off so that there are no phantom loads.

This, of course, would be a normal day. Days like last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were quite abnormal. I used 19kWh, 15kWh, and 7kWh respectively. That was post-flood and involved the use of the dryer, spin cycle on the washing machine to wring excess water out of the pile of laundry that had been sitting in front of the washing machine when the flood happened, the dehumidifier, and several fans running at top speed. I finally turned the dehumidifier off on Saturday morning and the fans off on Sunday morning. Thank goodness. They were driving me crazy.