I’m continuing to make the house a little bit more energy efficient, bit by bit. This weekend’s project was to replace the 8 60 watt incandescent bulbs in two of the ceiling fans with the compact flourescent bulbs. The problem was that both of them had dimmer switches on the light circuits and compact flourescents don’t play well with dimmers. So I picked up a couple regular switches and replaced the dimmers. In the process of swapping them out I found something that kind of bothers me. The house wiring is 12ga. copper but the wires connecting that to the dimmers is 16ga. aluminum. Needless to say they’re gone and won’t be coming back. The new bulbs are in place and the energy consumption of those two lighting fixtures is now about 25% of what it was. That’s nice since both of them are on quite a bit in the evenings.
Author Archives: Pat
Blue Ocean
Today is The Feast of the Annunciation. It’s the one day during the Great Lent when fish is permitted, so it’s been kind of a tradition that we go out for sushi. Alex suggested a new restaurant, Blue Ocean, on the corner of SH 121 and MacArthur in Lewisville. I’ve got to say that the food was excellent and the service was impeccable. This is definitely a restaurant you’ll want to check out if you’re in the area.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
I finally got around to watching the second installment in this series tonight. It was good eye candy, lots of blood and gore, things getting blown up, and they brought those damned dogs back! It’s worth the price of a rental.
Texas City Refinery Explosion
I just got an e-mail from a friend in Galveston about the BP Amoco plant in Texas City that just exploded. He’s OK, they’re all in shelters now. The news reports haven’t said what kind of chemicals were involved, but if it’s a gasoline refinery I’ll bet that gas prices here in DFW will jump by tomorrow morning.
The Last of the Winch Stuff
I sold my old tires today and used some of the money to pick up the last of the winch equipment. Eric over at 4 Wheel Parts helped me out and saved me a bunch of money. I’ve now got a couple shackles, a snatch block, a tree strap, and a bag for all of it. After that I rerouted and wrapped up the power cables to keep them a little safer.
Abandoning A Piercing
I finally bit the bullet and took out the curved barbell in my navel. It’s been red and nasty since I got it, about 11 months ago, and just hasn’t healed. Reece over at Love-N-Hate Studio in Lewisville helped me out because the balls on the barbell just wouldn’t turn. According to him the jewelry was of poor quality metal, which is probably why it was having such a hard time healing. So now I’m just trying to heal it up. I don’t think I’m going to do another one, but it’s nice to know that it wasn’t really me not taking good care of it.
Robots
Ufie Movie Night’s screening was Robots. Very cute. The writing, in places, wasn’t the best, but the animation was great and there were plenty of funny scenes. Definitely a movie you should see, if nothing else just for the trailer for Ice Age 2. That was histerical!
Winch Installation
Today’s big project was to get the winch installed. It went pretty smoothly except that I didn’t think to mount the roller fairlead on the winch plate before installing the winch. This meant that I basically had to take the whole thing off and start over. But it’s on and is functioning. Now I’ve just got to get back out to Gilmer to give it a field trial!
Here’s some pictures of the installation. Note the Gilmer Mud ™, it gets everywhere!
The Joys of Saving Energy
So I decided to replace my old dial/mercury switch thermostat with one of the programmable ones. It’s a really good thing to do because then you can set it to a more energy efficient temperature when you’re not home. Sounds pretty simple, right?
The first model I tried, a Home Depot store brand, wouldn’t work with my system. See the heating and air conditioning in this house is zoned. Zoned is good. Zoned means you can heat or cool different parts of the house independantly of each other.
In my case zoned is bad. The second floor is wired in as the second zone which means that there’s no fan control and only a very basic on/off mechanism. Unlike the downstairs which has much more control.
After taking the first one back I went over to Lowes and found one that should work. I got it all hooked up and nothing happened. Just like the first one. But this time I went downstairs and tried to turn the fan on. Nothing. Up in the attic I found that a fuse had blown due to me monkeying around without turning the electricity off. I replaced the fuse and tried again. Everything works! So now the upstairs is on a timer as well. Just in time for the Texas summers. Hopefully the electric bill will be lower.
Sledge Hammer
Dear Lord they’ve released it on DVD.
I can’t wait to get my copy.