after work yesterday I didn't do the right thing. I feel asleep for about 30 min on the couch and woke up too late to drive to the afternoon meeting. So we started cleaning, I scoured one side of the kitchen and we ran into town to buy a new part for the dishwasher. It didn't work...surprise surprise. We put in this new expensive faucet, that was given to us, which don't get me wrong, we are very greatful, it is awsome, but you can't use a portable dishwasher with it. So the solution....we hook it up to the bathroom sink. Okay, so it's kooky, but hey it is working! This winter as we do every winter we will seal the back door up and keep the dishwasher back there. I'm going to be caulking all the window seals and trying to learn how to using my sewing machine. I've gotten quite a few of my 45 to do list things done, I still have quite a few, but I will work on them. Duck had to go back to school to see about getting into a lab tonight. This has been a touch semester, I thought it was going to be better, but it infact has been so much worse. I'm going to go get some soup started so that I can can it tomorrow after service. I'm also going to make some potatoe soup and take some to Sister Mil.
We used our broken new chainsaw that isn't broken, the owner just never put chain oil in it apparently. It works so good, I'm SOOOOOO happy. We cut up so much wood so far we have about 2 ricks, I figure we will go through a rick every week or every week and a half. Using that info, I think that we should have about 20-25 ricks of wood ready for this winter. We will also cut extra to sell next year. This should help supliment any income that we don't have. I bet we have another 4 or 5 ricks here to cut, and another 3-5 down the street to pick up. This is going to be a wonderful start! This means that we will only have to cut about 10 ricks which is about 4 or 5 trips to our friends. Then it will be back out early spring.
I'm also really starting to work on plans for my garden next year. I found out that the cups from work that have the dome lid will make perfect for incubators, I will start bringing them home when I use one. I felt terrible, I told B to call me if she needed me and never heard the phone ring, I feel like jerk. I'm so sorry, I feel bad, it has been rough all week, and I was hoping to make it easier for her and I failed her.
Today we hooked up a solar panel, it will be interesting, it should really starting helping our battery back up really well, and hopefully we can run the tv and dvd player off of it 3 or 4 days week, if not more. This will help us reduce the amount of power we use, which would be cool, we are really trying to get our electricity bill down below 100 a month. In fact I'm looking at how to tips on how to reduce the energy you use and I ran across this tip, which doesn't make sense...
Consider setting your water heater temperature at 120 degrees. Take short showers instead of baths. You can use 15 to 25 gallons of hot water for a bath. Showers use 3 to 5 gallons per minute.
Using the median of this theory, lets say the shower uses 4 gallons of water a minute...how long does it take for you to take a shower? Now, I know that most would consider me a freak, but I can literally take a shower from water on to water off in about 3 minutes if I hurry, longer if I'm taking my time and the kids aren't beating the door down. Now, I know for fact that my shower head only uses 2.5 gallons since we have a special one that is energy efficient. Okay..but back to the point, if I took a 3 minute shower at 4 gallons, that would be 12 gallons, good job, but let's face the fact, most people take at least a 5 minute shower if not 10. So at 5 minutes you will be using 20 gallons of water, at 10 you will be using 40. WOW, that's a lot more than 15-25, even if they only used 3 gallons, that's 30 gallons of water. Okay, enough with this pshychotic rant.
We are going to be setting up a new water system in the basement for the gray water system. Thanks to the rain barrels that we found for 5 dollars each, we will need to go get a few more before winter hits, I want two for rain, Duck wants one in the garage, one for the gray water system, one for Sister H and one for Sister W. This will be interesting, this winter we will put a water system in for the dogs that will hopefully allow them to have fresh nonfrozen drinking water. We'll see how this works out. In the mean time while building all the solar heaters, we need one for Sister M and 4 for us including the one for the dogs. At night we will just use the heavy drapes that I make., this way we can use the light during the day to light the house for free and let the natural solar heat in.
We also need to start the insulating project in the basement, never enough hours in the day or days in the week. We need to block off he crawl space after we insulate the floors above the crawl space, this will hopefully keep the bathroom, hallway and laundry room floors warmer. Since we don't heat those areas because the crawl space will be blocked off and it seems to waste more heat then receive we think it will help to wrap the heat pips and insulate not only the floor but to seal it off with insulation board. We are also going to put up plastic over the escape in the basement and plastic the window down there. I'm going to go ahead and plastic the boys bedroom windows upstairs and hang the new curtains and then hallway. I also want to make a door draft buster thingy, I need to find patter on them. I did find a pattern on sungglies or how every you spell it, I'm going to try to make one for each of us, and we are going to look into buying sleeping bags for our beds during the really warm night since we kick the heat down at night real low.
Duke energy which is where I also rec'd the info above on the water says:
Lower your thermostat temperature to the lowest temperature that is comfortable to your family. You may save as much as 3 percent on your energy bill for each degree you lower your thermostat. Reduce your thermostat setting at night and/or when you are away. A 10-degree setback for eight hours each day could save up to 9 percent.
We cut our from 70 to 64 at night, and to 54, which is the lowest setting it will allow us to use. Now, I'm sure your thinking that's cruel to make the kids sleep in a really cold house, keep in mind that we have a child save heater in their bedroom, have the upstairs rooms blocked off so the heaters will only heat the upstairs to 70 at night, we also make the boys wear warm pjs and give them twice as many blankets as we use and in most cases wake up in the middle of the night with all of us in the same bed.
Okay, I'm going to go for now, I feel like I'm rambling and I'm really really really tired.
Toodles....
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