I’ve done it before, and we are doing it again. Our dining table is in poor condition, so we sanded the top off and we are going to restain it. You can see the white marks from plates and pots that were too hot, and even some sharpie marker marks from the kids. We sanded it and started to stain it. I put it on a bit too thick so we might sand that a bit before coating it with a water based sealer.
It’s been a month since I hooked up the power meter to the hot water heater, so now it’s time for an update. We used 564 KwH, at 9.4c/KwH we used $60 during the last 31 days heating water.
Came home to a new snow fort in the backyard and had hotdogs for dinner. It has everything you could want including a open concept fridge and cupholders for hot chocolate. There was a blowing snow advisory going when we had our campfire and you couldn’t tell.
I have been trying to break down our electrical use to see how much power things in our house use.
I have a small watt meter for things that plug into the wall but our larger loads and things that run on 230 volts I didn’t have a good way to measure until now.
I recently bought an inductive wattmeter that keeps track of the power that is used.
It needs to be wired in parallel with the load to know the voltage applied but the current is measured inductively.
I plan to measure the stove, dryer, furnace, garage heater, and water pump in the future but for now I am checking the hot water heater.
It’s currently hooked up and clocking, one of our kids took a shower that turned into a bath followed by a shower last night. I would think that would be expensive but as it turned out it was 0.95KwH or about 10 cents. I checked it’s accuracy with my fluke meter for both current and voltage and they are within 1%. I’m going to let it run for a few weeks and see how expensive a water heater is to operate. I will post the results.
Below is a picture of the meter on the water heater.
I was driving last week and saw a few houses that had lots of snow. You would almost think they were abandoned but there are fresh tracks in the driveway, someone just left to go to work.
the people who live next door got it just as bad. Further down the highway there was a barn with a caved in roof due to snow.
We have been making a skating rink for the kids for a few years now. It started a few years ago two tarps in size then four. Last year I upgraded the hose from the regular garden hose fed from 1/2” pipe to a 1.25” pipe that comes right off the well tee.
We can now flood a massive amount of area in one tenth the amount of time. Below are pictures from the third day of making the rink, it’s now an inch thick flooded directly on top of the grass and is skateable. It still needs one more thin flood to make it smoother, but it’s looking good.
