Month: October 2007

Today we got the well drillers from Selkirk to drill our well. It was surprisingly exciting. We now have a well, our well is 125 feet deep and has 30 gallons per minute of flow. This is 5 times the usage required for a house, so we are in good shape. The drilling took five hours in total with the pumping tests.

I had some 3/4′ down delivered and put on the driveway, I decided to put some 4-6″ down as a base first so I scraped it off. The Cockshutt tractor did a great job.

We are still working on funding to build, our current problem is that the appraiser appraised our house as a shop rather than a house, this resulted in the value being a lot lower than the cost of building and it also means that the resale value is worth less to the bank. The result is that it was valued at less than half the cost of building, and the bank was only willing to loan us 65% of that value. Obviously this would not be enough to build with, actually not enough to get the concrete finished. One long conversation later and many phone calls, and it is being reappraised as a house, but it will be devalued due to it’s uncommon layout.

We got some 3/4″ down gravel, it’s a lot more like sand than I thought, but it was a good deal, and it’ll work good enough to keep the trucks from sinking into the driveway. It looks like I have some spreading to do, I thought the guy would have backed up further before he started dumping. I wish my tractor had a blade on it.

We bought a newer 1990 Jetta turbo diesel that’s standard, it’s really nice, but it needs a motor (it makes lots of smoke, bad smoke). I’ll fix it after we build our house.

The house is coming along, there’s nothing new to see, but the paperwork is getting done, we sent the plans for appraisal and the lot has been appraised. The cement guy has the go ahead to do the grade beam and piles, and I ordered the rafters (there’s a long lead time from when they’re ordered until there’re built. We’ll have to wait for the bank’s approval before we order anything else. Hopefully we will find out this month. If I ever build another house, I’m going to buy a bigger desk, this one has piles of paperwork everywhere, I’m always rooting through it looking for something, and always redrawing our site plan for whatever reason.

I tested out 25+ year old freezer and our 3 year old freezer for energy usage with the watt meter I bought on ebay.

The old freezer uses 2.8 Kwh per day which is $56 per year.

The new freezer uses 0.82 Kwh per day or $16.40 per year.

But that is not the whole story, the new freezer is larger. In order to compare them equally we have to calculate the size of each, to be accurate I would have to calculate the interior volume, but they are full of food so I calculated the total volume by measuring the length X width X height.

New freezer volume 20,416 square inches.

Old freezer volume 38,016 square inches.

To find out how much energy the old freezer would consume if it were the same size as the new freezer we :   20416 / 38016 X $56 = $30.07

If we take the price of the old freezer’s energy usage per year and divide by the price of the new freezer’s usage we get 1.83 or 183%

My conclusion is that the old freezer uses almost twice the amount of electricity per year but for the extra $14 per year it is not worth buying a new freezer.