Much of the country is in a heat wave. It's been in the 90s and triple digits here the last couple of days. Yesterday, Lisa turned on the central AC in anticipation of another hot one. We limit our AC use, this was the first time this year to break down and start it up. There were blackouts and reports of extreme stress on the power grid. Lots of people out there using a lot of AC energy.
Well, here's the thing. Though I didn't tell her, when she turned on the AC, she did so at the thermostat and did not include the outdoor breaker at the compressor. Without it, no AC. So, I opened the basement cold air return register and let the duct fan, activated by Lisa's thermostat action, blow. The basement, cooled by shallow passive geothermal action (in New Hampshire, the earth below 5-6 feet is at 52-53˚F all year) remains cool. The basement air, drawn into the duct system, circulated through the house and kept the place cooler throughout the day during the highest electricity demand.
By 8:00pm as the day had caught up with the basement's ability to cool the house (and Lisa was feeling it), I kicked in the real AC, dropped the house temp down 4 or 5 degrees, dropped the humidity, and we were good for the night. This morning, I switched back to just the fan (on circulation mode which doesn't run the whole time) and we are saving energy and helping out the power grid again today.
If you have central AC, give it a try. Any amount of time not running your AC compressor saves energy and money.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Keep your house small
Keep your house small. If your are in the market to buy a house, buy a small house. If you own a house, resist adding on to it.
One is no longer able to claim, as has been claimed countless times to countless young adults as they establish themselves and consider purchasing their first house, that housing prices always go up. I was told the same during the housing bubble of the late 1980s. Perhaps you could call it the housing rush of the late 1980s. I remember an open house where the house sold for well over the asking price within two hours of it being on the market. We arrived at the open house and the house was already sold. The market was crazy. We had to buy quick or get priced out of the market. We were told to buy as much house as we could because the more house you bought, the more of an investment base you had to reap the bounteous rewards of the ever rising housing market.
We ended up buying a small house. At around 1000 square feet, it served our needs. Sure, we could have used more space. But, realistically all we really needed was more storage space. There is not much of an attic, no garage, and a small compromised basement (water infiltration during the spring snow melt), but we got by. A few years later we had a son. This put more pressure on the size of our house. We were advised to add on to our house to accommodate our rising spatial needs. A number of our friends added on to their houses as their children grew. We too, felt the temptation as our son grew and our house increasingly seemed to lack some of the benefits of a larger house.
But larger houses consume more. They consume more energy and materials in the construction of the house itself or of an addition. And they consume more energy and materials year after year in heating/cooling, maintenance, and upkeep. If you are a homeowner, the house you own is your house. You are responsible for how that house functions as a part of our collective human impact on our planet.
I am happy to say that we did not add on to our house. While there were times, many times, that I felt that we should have added on in order to provide more space for our son and his friends, I now realize that it was not necessary. We all survived. Just as generations before us did, with larger average families and smaller average houses, we did fine. And now that our son is away at college and, unless he boomerangs, is no longer living with us full time, we find our home quite comfortable without having added to it.
Full disclosure: We have supplemented our storage capacity. Early on, we bought one of those small metal sheds. This gave us a place for our lawn and garden tools, snowblower and the like. The lifespan of that shed was shortened by a blizzard that collapsed the roof (which I repaired to get some more years out of it) but it served its purpose for 20 years or so. Recently, I built a small barn to replace it. This barn is large enough to not only replace the small shed but to also provide additional storage that allows for more efficient use of our basement and attic. The key thing about the barn is that it is unattached to the house, and has no provision for heat. If I had added on to the house, the temptation would have been to make the additional storage space unnecessarily heated space.
Another argument for small houses is that they require proportionally less maintenance. That means less time and money is required to maintain them. All home owners need to budget for the maintenance of their property. Whether it is a new roof, a coat of paint, adding insulation, or whatever, as the size of a house increases, so do the costs of upkeep. This brings to mind another topic that I think about and that I will pursue in a separate post.
So please, think long and hard about the size of your house when considering a purchase or adding to your existing home. Keep your house small.
One is no longer able to claim, as has been claimed countless times to countless young adults as they establish themselves and consider purchasing their first house, that housing prices always go up. I was told the same during the housing bubble of the late 1980s. Perhaps you could call it the housing rush of the late 1980s. I remember an open house where the house sold for well over the asking price within two hours of it being on the market. We arrived at the open house and the house was already sold. The market was crazy. We had to buy quick or get priced out of the market. We were told to buy as much house as we could because the more house you bought, the more of an investment base you had to reap the bounteous rewards of the ever rising housing market.
We ended up buying a small house. At around 1000 square feet, it served our needs. Sure, we could have used more space. But, realistically all we really needed was more storage space. There is not much of an attic, no garage, and a small compromised basement (water infiltration during the spring snow melt), but we got by. A few years later we had a son. This put more pressure on the size of our house. We were advised to add on to our house to accommodate our rising spatial needs. A number of our friends added on to their houses as their children grew. We too, felt the temptation as our son grew and our house increasingly seemed to lack some of the benefits of a larger house.
But larger houses consume more. They consume more energy and materials in the construction of the house itself or of an addition. And they consume more energy and materials year after year in heating/cooling, maintenance, and upkeep. If you are a homeowner, the house you own is your house. You are responsible for how that house functions as a part of our collective human impact on our planet.
I am happy to say that we did not add on to our house. While there were times, many times, that I felt that we should have added on in order to provide more space for our son and his friends, I now realize that it was not necessary. We all survived. Just as generations before us did, with larger average families and smaller average houses, we did fine. And now that our son is away at college and, unless he boomerangs, is no longer living with us full time, we find our home quite comfortable without having added to it.
Full disclosure: We have supplemented our storage capacity. Early on, we bought one of those small metal sheds. This gave us a place for our lawn and garden tools, snowblower and the like. The lifespan of that shed was shortened by a blizzard that collapsed the roof (which I repaired to get some more years out of it) but it served its purpose for 20 years or so. Recently, I built a small barn to replace it. This barn is large enough to not only replace the small shed but to also provide additional storage that allows for more efficient use of our basement and attic. The key thing about the barn is that it is unattached to the house, and has no provision for heat. If I had added on to the house, the temptation would have been to make the additional storage space unnecessarily heated space.
Another argument for small houses is that they require proportionally less maintenance. That means less time and money is required to maintain them. All home owners need to budget for the maintenance of their property. Whether it is a new roof, a coat of paint, adding insulation, or whatever, as the size of a house increases, so do the costs of upkeep. This brings to mind another topic that I think about and that I will pursue in a separate post.
So please, think long and hard about the size of your house when considering a purchase or adding to your existing home. Keep your house small.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Chris Hayes responds to my point regarding people's unrealistic expectations
I shot off a quick email to an NHPR call in show with guest
Chris Hayes. I didn't get to it until late but it made it as the last
item discussed. I especially liked how Chris said that David Brooks had
just written a NYTimes article on the same subject the same day.
Scroll to around 93% if you want to just hear his response to my email:
http://cpa.ds.npr.org/nhpr/audio/2012/06/061212_090636.mp3
Scroll to around 93% if you want to just hear his response to my email:
http://cpa.ds.npr.org/nhpr/audio/2012/06/061212_090636.mp3
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Scott Walker's win analyzed
The conventional wisdom has it that the win by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the recall election was a referendum on support of unions, public unions in particular. This is based on the radical restrictions imposed early in his tenure and the drama that ensued with public demonstrations, and the efforts of democrats to prevent the governor and state Republicans from eviscerating union bargaining rights.
I respectfully disagree. I thought during the demonstrations that the public unions got the message all wrong. They defended union bargaining rights. That makes some sense. But what they didn't do is to make any effort to focus the message on anything but bargaining rights and themselves.
The entire working class would love to have the benefits that the public workers enjoy. Most do not. And that is the problem. And that is the missing message.
Our entire national system of retirement and pensions, inclusive of all levels of retirement security from corporate pensions to Social Security and is a system of those who have a lot to those that have very little. With the economy as sluggish as it is, voters who have little to no retirement savings look to the public unions and their pensions and benefits, compare it to their own situation and wonder why it is that they should support public employees relatively cushy benefits and retirement with their tax dollars while they struggle and have no such security.
If unions argued that their benefits and pensions are something that they and everyone else should have access to, and that they would be working to develop a universal plan that would ensure the middle class had an equal chance at these benefits, they would have garnered more support. But to merely say that they should have these benefits and the tax payers should foot the bill does not provide and argument that a struggling middle class voter is likely to rally behind.
So it was touted to be about bargaining rights and that was fine with Republicans because they are against unions and their bargaining rights. But if the unions thought that they could couch their arguments to the Democrats and more importantly the Independents in terms of bargaining rights and ignore the union's benefits that non-public workers do not have, they were wrong.
I respectfully disagree. I thought during the demonstrations that the public unions got the message all wrong. They defended union bargaining rights. That makes some sense. But what they didn't do is to make any effort to focus the message on anything but bargaining rights and themselves.
The entire working class would love to have the benefits that the public workers enjoy. Most do not. And that is the problem. And that is the missing message.
Our entire national system of retirement and pensions, inclusive of all levels of retirement security from corporate pensions to Social Security and is a system of those who have a lot to those that have very little. With the economy as sluggish as it is, voters who have little to no retirement savings look to the public unions and their pensions and benefits, compare it to their own situation and wonder why it is that they should support public employees relatively cushy benefits and retirement with their tax dollars while they struggle and have no such security.
If unions argued that their benefits and pensions are something that they and everyone else should have access to, and that they would be working to develop a universal plan that would ensure the middle class had an equal chance at these benefits, they would have garnered more support. But to merely say that they should have these benefits and the tax payers should foot the bill does not provide and argument that a struggling middle class voter is likely to rally behind.
So it was touted to be about bargaining rights and that was fine with Republicans because they are against unions and their bargaining rights. But if the unions thought that they could couch their arguments to the Democrats and more importantly the Independents in terms of bargaining rights and ignore the union's benefits that non-public workers do not have, they were wrong.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Update on first blog entry
Going back to my first blog entry, where I wrote of the new phenomena of our sump pump running in the fall for the first time and not running during the spring snow melt for the first time, I have an update.
After the exceptionally dry winter and early spring, we have had quite a bit of rain lately. And, you guessed it, our sump pump has been running for the last few days. Again, this is a first.
So, the "global weirding" of the weather as an indicator of climate change continues.
After the exceptionally dry winter and early spring, we have had quite a bit of rain lately. And, you guessed it, our sump pump has been running for the last few days. Again, this is a first.
So, the "global weirding" of the weather as an indicator of climate change continues.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Reboot the economy with a plan that looks forward to a time when things will be much different.
Well,the big news is that the stock market is way down again. Surprise surprise.
At this point, I would like to revisit my thoughts on an economy based on growth.
Much of the blame for the recent drop in the market seems to be focused on the poor jobs reports and the continued difficulties in the Euro Zone. While that is probably a righteous analysis, the blame for the economy being in the state it is needs to be spread more widely and analyzed in more depth.
People's confidence in the financial system and the economy has always been seen as an indicator of the direction of the economy. Confident consumers equals consuming consumers. Increased consumption equals a growing economy.
Well, the finance elite would have you believe that this bad news in the jobs report is the most important factor in the wavering confidence of the average consumer. The more they tell you that, the more likely it is that you will believe them. Somehow, they are hoping that the recent story about a JP Morgan Chase fiasco, which had them losing 2-3 billion dollars or more on the same type of complex derivatives that sent us into the morass we have been in since 2008, is seen as having nothing to do with it. Hmm. The lack of humility of Wall Street's major players, and their effects on the economy in the past and the potential effects that they may have on the economy in the future are much more troubling to me.
So we need consumption to get the economy growing faster in order to create more jobs. People increase consumption when they feel that they have disposable income and are confident that it will stay that way. Instabilities in the financial markets decrease confidence in the future. This decreases consumption and the economy slows, decreasing disposable income, decreasing consumption... Is it unreasonable to consider excessive consumption an unstable base on which to perch our economy?
I believe we need to analyze our economy based on comparing the present situation in all of its complexity to what we can try to predict about the future economy when important changes will have taken place in the makeup of humanity.
There will be a time when the human population level is effectively stable if not shrinking. The undeniable fact that our planet is limited in size frames the positivity with which I tell you this. When it will occur depends on the rate at which we approach that limitation, and the extent to which we are able to adapt and provide for the growing populace.
Some, myself included, believe that we are either approaching or have already exceeded the acceptable carrying capacity of our planet. We have huge problems created by the huge growth in human population. Our resource depletion and the costs and effects of obtaining them, using them, and disposing of the waste is putting a huge strain on many aspects of the ecosystem.
Putting these realities in the context of the economy over time, should steer our thoughts on how to deal with the economic planning and regulation. The future will be one of population stability. We need to phase our economy over time to accommodate that future. The sooner we can do that the better, but it can only happen smoothly if the changes are well thought and enacted in a timely and predictable manner. One must always keep in mind that change typically happens slowly and the immensity of the changes we need to our systems requires an understanding of that need and a commencement of action as soon as possible.
The paradigm of growth as the ideal model for the global economy must be replaced, in a controlled manner over time, with one where the goals are decreasing the amplitude of the bubble/recession cycle and increasing economic stability at very low growth rates.
At this point, I would like to revisit my thoughts on an economy based on growth.
Much of the blame for the recent drop in the market seems to be focused on the poor jobs reports and the continued difficulties in the Euro Zone. While that is probably a righteous analysis, the blame for the economy being in the state it is needs to be spread more widely and analyzed in more depth.
People's confidence in the financial system and the economy has always been seen as an indicator of the direction of the economy. Confident consumers equals consuming consumers. Increased consumption equals a growing economy.
Well, the finance elite would have you believe that this bad news in the jobs report is the most important factor in the wavering confidence of the average consumer. The more they tell you that, the more likely it is that you will believe them. Somehow, they are hoping that the recent story about a JP Morgan Chase fiasco, which had them losing 2-3 billion dollars or more on the same type of complex derivatives that sent us into the morass we have been in since 2008, is seen as having nothing to do with it. Hmm. The lack of humility of Wall Street's major players, and their effects on the economy in the past and the potential effects that they may have on the economy in the future are much more troubling to me.
So we need consumption to get the economy growing faster in order to create more jobs. People increase consumption when they feel that they have disposable income and are confident that it will stay that way. Instabilities in the financial markets decrease confidence in the future. This decreases consumption and the economy slows, decreasing disposable income, decreasing consumption... Is it unreasonable to consider excessive consumption an unstable base on which to perch our economy?
I believe we need to analyze our economy based on comparing the present situation in all of its complexity to what we can try to predict about the future economy when important changes will have taken place in the makeup of humanity.
There will be a time when the human population level is effectively stable if not shrinking. The undeniable fact that our planet is limited in size frames the positivity with which I tell you this. When it will occur depends on the rate at which we approach that limitation, and the extent to which we are able to adapt and provide for the growing populace.
Some, myself included, believe that we are either approaching or have already exceeded the acceptable carrying capacity of our planet. We have huge problems created by the huge growth in human population. Our resource depletion and the costs and effects of obtaining them, using them, and disposing of the waste is putting a huge strain on many aspects of the ecosystem.
Putting these realities in the context of the economy over time, should steer our thoughts on how to deal with the economic planning and regulation. The future will be one of population stability. We need to phase our economy over time to accommodate that future. The sooner we can do that the better, but it can only happen smoothly if the changes are well thought and enacted in a timely and predictable manner. One must always keep in mind that change typically happens slowly and the immensity of the changes we need to our systems requires an understanding of that need and a commencement of action as soon as possible.
The paradigm of growth as the ideal model for the global economy must be replaced, in a controlled manner over time, with one where the goals are decreasing the amplitude of the bubble/recession cycle and increasing economic stability at very low growth rates.
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