creating delicious apps for a better world
Interesting articles
Here are some more interesting articles from the ~30 RSS feeds I subscribe to:
This link is a must-read for my wife, who is learning web design:
CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Tips, Demos and Best PracticesDesign:
Life:
Tech:
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Experiment Results: 30 days after shutting off the hot water heater
The experiment
After seeing our absurdly high electricity bill from June, my wife and I took some drastic action. We switched off our hot water heater to see how much money we could save.
We figured that the water heater would be the biggest energy sink since we have an ancient thirty gallon water heater with no temperature control. We have no air conditioning or heating, we just use fans. We never use the clothes dryer machine. We do have 2 computers running much of the time though - I'm mostly on my laptop, and my wife is mostly on her iMac 24".
Results Summary
We just received our electricity bill and found that it was about $40 less than the average of the previous 3 months (30% savings), but we discovered some surprising miscellaneous tidbits as well.
Here's a snippet of the bill:
*The February 2008 and March 2008 bills were a bit different because we got married, had a honeymoon, etc and were not home much. I quit my corporate grind job and started working from home in April 2008 which accounts for the extra energy use.)
Here are some simple calculations
3 month average power consumption, April-June 2008: 452 KWH
July 2008 power consumption: 314 KWH
Energy Saved: 138 KWH (30% savings)
Cost per KWH: $0.287
Money saved per month: ~$40
The scary thing is - one year ago, in July 2007, we used about 100 KWH more than we used this year, but it still cost around $3 less back then. Somehow, this is the fault of George W. Bush.
The first cold showers
The 2-3 days after turning off the circuit breaker for the water heater, the water from the hot water pipe cooled slowly. It gave us a gentle transition time into our life of cold showers.
Thank God, we live in Hawaii, where it is nice and warm all year round. I sure wouldn't recommend this for folks who live in the colder places in the winters. (I lived in the northeast US for too many years, and you'd probably get hypothermia if you took a cold shower in the winter)
On about the fourth day, all the residual heat had left the now dormant water heater. When I went into the shower, the water did not feel friendly. I still had the expectation that there would be some heat from the hot water knob, but there was none. At least not perceptibly yet...
I stood in the shower for a few minutes before actually getting wet. I touched the water but it just felt too cold. I spashed a little on my body, but it only made me feel colder. Then I realized that I actually took cold showers regularly - whenever I stepped into the ocean, or rinsed off at the beach. I could do this. The trick was to just go in and move rapidly.
I held my breath and jumped into the stream of cold shower water as if I was jumping into the ocean. It was sooooo cold!! FRAK! FRAK! FRELL!!!! (for those of you who get the Battlestar Galactica and Farscape references). I couldn't wimp out. I told my wife that we could do this - that it was not so hard to do.
At the same time as the panic, it was oddly refreshing. But then cold overwhelmed the refreshing.
I started moving and washing very rapidly. After about another 30 seconds (it's so hard to track time under those circumstances), things felt like they warmed up a bit, and I could stand there almost without panic, but still had to keep moving.
In another 30 seconds, I frantically soaped up. (I have a shaved head, so there are no worries about shampoo and stuff.) The next step was rinsing off the soap. Now here's the odd thing - while rinsing, I was actually pretty relaxed. My body had adjusted already. Veins that were normally at the surface of the skin collapsed, body parts shrank, skin got paler. The water felt relaxing and refreshing at this point. I stood in the cold shower an extra minute afterwards to enjoy it. I felt cool. Literally. That was the first of the true cold showers.
After 30 days of cold showers
I enjoy the cold showers now. They're good especially when I know I'm going to get hot later - like right before going to sleep on a hot night. I still do go frantic in the first 15 seconds of the shower, and still sometimes pause in front of the cold stream of water, but I know I'll be feeling alright, once I'm in and start moving and getting on with the business of washing.
Some things my wife and I have noticed:
- The water from the hot water knob is still warmer than the water from the cold water knob. This could be because the "hot" water sits in the water tank and has a chance to get warmed by the ambient heat, while the water from the cold water is just fresh cold pipe water from wherever that comes from.
- After one of us takes a shower, the air in the bathroom itself is quite a bit warmer than what it first started out as. Could we be generating that much body heat? (could be a way of burning off calories! I'll call it the "reverse sauna".) If we take our showers in a row, then the second person to take the shower then actually gets a warmer shower experience than the first, since the room has been heated by the first person's body heat.
- Our skin is less dry after taking a cold shower.
- Hot water feels soooooooo good now when we experience it at sink faucets of restaurant bathrooms.
- The longer one stands in the cold shower, the longer the coolness lasts after the shower. There is a minimum threshold though. If I take the shower too fast and exit before enough cooling happens, then I quickly heat up after the shower to become much hotter than before the shower.
- The shower time has decreased dramatically. I used to take 10-15 minute hot showers. Now it is a breezy 2-3 minutes, or a little bit more if I want more cooling.
- Hugging someone who has had a cold shower is refreshing for both the hugger and huggee.
Once in a while, I forget that we don't have hot water anymore.
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Some interesting articles
Some interesting articles/feeds/sites I read this morning:
Tools:
- Firebug Lite - Firebug debugger, but as a bookmarklet!
- Pencil Project (a sketching / GUI prototyping tool)
Life:
- Reclaim Your Time: 20 Great Ways to Find More Free Time | Zen Habits (I don't know where my week goes! It's Friday already!)
- Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Printable Paper Productivity Tools (Better than a PDA because you can rip it up afterwards)
- Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning? | Popular Science
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Feeding
Useful articles I found today, from about 30 RSS feeds I subscribe to:
I hate trying to support IE6, and I'm not alone. This article gives me enough support that I'm not going to support IE6 on this next web app I'm writing up. After Apple's MobileMe doesn't support IE6 right?
Ajaxian » Pondering Support of IE6Can't wait:
Really good examples:
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