New paradigm for home heating automation and control

It's something that really has to be planned for. This year, we shut off the attic, the basement and a spare bedroom. The living quarters stay warm but the unheated areas drop to around 50-60F. It makes doing the laundry or working in the workshop chilly, but it saves a lot of money only heating 1/3 of the house.

There are lots of psychological issues here, too. I've found that it's best to keep the bathroom the warmest, the bedroom the second warmest, the kitchen third and the living room fourth. That's based on the fact that even a dog doesn't like it's butt touching something cold - maybe a heated toilet seat means we could shave a few more $ off the heating bill. The bedroom can be kept pretty cold if the bed is kept warm with an electric blanket. Again, the "dog's butt" theory comes into play. No one likes to crawl into an icy bed!

There should be some pretty automatic ways of doing that, too. When the house senses you're approaching in your car it should begin the warmup. :-) While it's simple to zone resistance heating (what I'm doing now) the problem would be more complex with gas. As Mr. Burgess noted, to really warm up a place requires quite a BTU blast - one that would be unacceptable in normal use.

Amen!

-- Bobby G.

"Marc F Hult" wrote in

Tsk, tsk. Please don't be a master baiter. You know better than to swat the local curmudgeon. You're going to both have to share a new sobriquet:

"In 2002, Kentucky's coal-fired power plants emitted 87 million metric tons of CO2 (seventh overall in the United States, EIA)."

Damn. That's a lot of CO2!

What happened to the ashes?

I assume adding ways to control fly ash and other particulate matter brings that pellet fuel cost up, were an homeowner to go that route and seek to minimize pollutant outputs.

You can count on that as long as petroleum production is cartel and not market based.

HAL of 2001?

Home: "Marc, I'm afraid I can't let you back into the house."

Marc: "Why not?"

Home: "Your random activity patterns make it impossible for me to operate at peak energy efficiency. Calculations show that with you locked out, I can reach optimum efficiency levels."

-- Bobby G.

Neat. I've seen a solar shingle material that doesn't look much different from the regular variety. It's improvements like these that will propel solar in a big way.

There *IS* an energy crisis to the poor Jane and John Homeowners who are paying twice what they did last year to drive to work and twice what they did last year to heat their homes. For lots of people, that's a crisis of incredible proportions. It means giving up a lot, especially to people who live close the borderline, economically speaking.

I do agree, however, it's not like we'll have to shutter America and go dark. There is a short-term crisis as a result of Katrina that, with the help of some rabid journalists, Senators and newscasters, has been blown up to incredible proportions.

My read on the matter is that once upon a time we had the most voracious oil appetite. Now China has come into the modern world as a very big mouth to feed, oilwise.

I agree. I recently read a piece that described how much lobbying muscle the coal industry has. They aren't going to be weaned from mountain-eating very soon. It's important that people try, though. The mining companies have been forced to change at least some of their ways, even if their compliance is half-hearted, at best.

And the weak died off, just the way She intends! I've read that some scientists believe our ancestors got our big break during the iridium asteroid strike that alleged to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The skies stayed dark for a long, long time and only the carrion eaters made it through - only the small ones, at that.

One lump or two?

-- Bobby G.

That's Khrushchev-era thinking IMO.

everything, coal supplies more than 40% of the electricity.

That's Geology 101 IME.

Economics 101 in the 21st century recognizes costs of the enormous and substantially irreversible environmental consequences of the dependence on coal.

Duh. My house had gas lights powered by locally produced coal gas many years before electricity was available. And you don't even have to 'burn' coal to make its energy available for household use. Coal gas is made by distillation, not oxidation ("burning") of coal. (I spend better part of a decade working on the science of the environmental clean up of old coal-tar plants and related industry.)

Good thing not everyone is waiting passively, eh? We _will_ prevail.

Flippant, ignorant nonsense. (But what does one expect if depend on you googling up facts from msnbc? ;-)

Legislation to clarify the Clean Water Act to make the filling of stream with waste explicitly illegal (which IMO is implicit in the 1972 legislation) was introduced three years ago. This would end the ongoing legal wrangling now 'advancing' from whether the US Army Corps of Engineers actually did environmental assessments or not (Did Not; Did So! ) to whether the outrageous assertion made by the USACE in its environmental analysis that mountaintop removal doesn't have significant environmental consequences will stand.

" The problem with Usenet is that so many with nothing to say feel the necessity to say it. ... "

Ya got that right ;-)

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Yup ;-) My experience with old brick and stone homes is that the insulation retrofitting is the most time consuming if done thoroughly (Remove inside mouldings, attach stud wall to brick, insulate, wire, sheetrock, restore moulding with extensions). It's also where the biggest environmental payback is.

But there's also lot's to be done with HVAC system through HA The fact that electricity is now cost-competetive for heating in many more locations and circumstances opens up more good possibilities. For example, heat strips and associated wiring are easier and less expensive to add than hot water. So why retrofit with hydronic when electrical underfloor is cheaper and easier to install and less expensive to operate?

... Marc MArc_F_Hult

Right. With buildings with large thermal mass (=large heat capacity) such as stone or brick or concrete slab, the problem is severe. This is also an issue with hydronic, underfloor heating. One solution that has been implemented commercially is to include outside temperature in the thermostat's decision algorithm. Another step forward made possible by custom HA software with internet access is to use a forecasted temperature. This is part of what I alluded to earlier.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Intersecting (to me;-) fine point: My calculations were based on the sum of the parts of the utility's (Cinergy/Duke) part of the bill, but I forgot about the taxes added on top of that. Wunder where they go ;-)

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

There isn't much ash compared to coal. We also used coals from almond shells in a copper brassier that was put under a round table with a wool blanket on top. Four or five people could sit around the table at once keeping their feet (if nothing else ;-) toasty warm. Very traditional. Very efficient. Very social. All gone .. :-( No X-10 involved :-)

Last year I toured the plant of a major manufacturer of wallboard ("sheetrock") located near my house on the Ohio river. The supply of synthetic gypsum for the wallboard is provided entirely by sludge from sulfur-dioxide scrubbers on the very same coal-fired power plants, also on the Ohio river, that provide the electricity to my house. This is about

2,000,000,000 pounds per year of waste that doesn't need to go to landfills, but, rather, can become a physical part of my next energy-saving re-insulation project ;-)

I just built and installed a 1.5 x 3-foot aluminum and glass enclosure for the solar cells that have been sitting in my 'junk box' for ~15 years. The intent is to develop an entirely self-sufficient, low-power HA system starting with environmental monitoring.

So HAL might run for a long time unless some black substance were to fall over the earth blotting out the solar radiation to the solar cells (and thus HAL's power supply). FWIW, this is a scenario (Black Gook Covers Earth) that I was asked to evaluate, chalk in hand, during my PhD candidacy oral exam 40 years ago ;-) The premise in turn was probably stimulated by the interesting nonsense in the 1950's book by Velikovsky _Worlds_In_Collision.

Lottsa ideas that seem new aren't ...

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

and lottsa typos made when I go too fast ;-) Make that "30 years ago".

(How time flies when you're having fun !) ... Marc

Marc_F_Hult

"Marc F Hult" wrote in

That was when Generalísimo Francisco Franco wasn't "still dead" as SNL was so fond of saying.

The problem is that kind of recovery effort is almost never worthwhile on a small scale. Single homes burning coal pellets or something similar will put out a lot more particulate, in aggregate, than a larger plant putting out an equivalent amount of total power. But making homes that are not single heating fuel dependent is probably going to be a thriving industry for a little while, at least.

That's an interesting place to start. I've deployed a number of wireless thermometers in various parts of the house to study the temperature patterns but I want to switch to something far more automatic. What will you be using to monitor temperatures throughout the house? Any thoughts to measure air flow or infiltration?

That books makes intelligent design seem highly credible!

I saw an SD card that can fold itself into a USB plug today. That's new, at least!

Have you gotten your MUX on line yet?

-- Bobby G.

I was at a conference not too long ago where one of the speakers presented the idea that we'd run out of petrolium supply before its environmental impact forced us to stop using it, but the environmental impact of coal burning would force us to stop using it long before the supply runs low.

It was, at least, interesting to consider.