Good morning!!!!

[buckeyefarmer]

Since building my house in 1997 i have spent $76,786 on :
Electric $51,574 (529,258 KWH)
Heating Oil $13,600 (1997-2011)(don't know gallons)
Pellets $11,611 ( 45.68 tons)(includes 2 tons just bought for this winter)

My electric bill for this year so far is $3526, and 4 yrs ago it was $2623 for about same amount of usage.
I have electric dryer, electric hot water, geothermal and pellet heat, geothermal cooling, most lights now LED, and TV is almost always off.

 

[LouNY]

I haven't keep up with my totals over the years, I'm afraid it would be quite scary.
Until I put in my coal insert back around 2010 or maybe a bit earlier I went through 1300 to 1500 gallons of heating oil per year.
After that I only used about a 1000 gallons per year, along with about 3-4 ton of coal.
My electric for the last year has been around $3500.
We have the electric dryer, mini-split (2) for cooling and heating, the oil boiler runs year round for hot water. The coal provided a lot of heat over the years.
We don't watch much TV however my wife is still working from home so her dual display computer is on much of the time, and my laptop is on constantly for browsing and my cameras.

 

[WinterDeere]

...it seemed like it was race to see if I would get done before running out of Argon, but I made it with a couple hundred PSI left in the bottle.

Nice work! And I guarantee you just caused half this forum to ask themselves, "did I remember to close the bottle valve, last time I used the welder?"

 

[thclimer]

Lou,

Today I'm swapping my Massey's FEL for her front snow blower. I can now guarantee we will not get any snow for the next week, after that all bets are off. If I would not have put the blower on we would have gotten 1 foot next week!

 

[WinterDeere]

I haven't keep up with my totals over the years, I'm afraid it would be quite scary.

Ditto. I installed two wood stoves and burn 6 - 10 cords of oak and hickory per year, to get my oil usage down to 1000 gallons per year! We also run two heat pumps, and a little resistive heating, in addition to the wood stoves and oil-fired boiler. Oh, and propane to keep the garage above 53F, the temperature at which our garage refrigerators begin to malfunction, and to heat a basement rec room when in use.

The prior owner heated the whole joint on oil. When I asked him what it cost per year, he said, "I don't actually know. I own a heating oil company, so I sign the delivery slips, but I never actually looked at the total."

 

[ronjhall]

Utility bills include both electric and natural gas. Gas furnace, AC, gas water heater and dryer. Stove is electric. Water is from a well. My shop is heated with gas to 50° during cold months. House is 1,800 sq ft. Total bill for the last year was $2991. The one item using most electric is waterfall pump in garden pond.

 

[ronjhall]

The wait time for painting fresh laid asphalt must be 5 days. Camera shows crew is on site getting setup to paint strips.

 

[rswyan]

50F and "Fair" @ 11:30, calling for a high of 54F with winds out of the east @ 10 - 15 mph. Low this morning was 35.2F.

Got cages put around arbs yesterday first thing:

Was running low on rebar wire ties, so only used 1 per stake. Probably will go back and add another on each stake.

Also got the cage put around the red maple and removed the plastic trunk protector which it had outgrown.

After that I headed over by the garden and got the aluminum extension ladder hosed off.

Once that was done I started hosing buckets and flat panels (plastic, FRP) out/off. Got a lot of that done but still a few more pieces to do.

Worked on topping off posts following that, only 4 left to go on those.

Harvested the 3 small sugar pumpkins, 1 tiny Casper, and 1 more Kentucky Field pumpkin. Also another 3 Honey Baby winter squash. Think that pretty much does it for the squash and pumpkins.

Woman seems to be done cutting down the weeds in the flower bed and wanted to light off Her burn piles so we did that. Was windy so piles burned pretty well but probably not entirely gone at this point as a lot of it was pretty green.

With all the underbrush having dropped leaves noticed a couple more nice large rocks further back on the property which I'll need to harvest and add to the collection at some point:

Woman broiled some ocean perch and flounder with rice pilaf and green beans for dinner, was very good ... other than I ate too much ...

On the agenda for today:

See if I can locate my Bluetooth headphones ... I think I may have left them up in the shop.

Mow down here around the house and get the leaves blown off the lawn and/or mulched before the rain rolls in.

Gather up the stuff that got hosed off and get it put away.

Beyond that see what else I can get done before the rain rolls in. It's coming up from the south and should be here around 17:00 or so ... so a more limited window for getting outside stuff done today.

Hope everyone is having a decent Wednesday ...

 

[daugen]

Interesting thought. A bit less useful for cleaning inanimate objects, but I will run with that thought. (But not with a Q-tip in the use not talked about...) Still, kind of funny that the design change lined up with the asset sale.

All the best,

Peter

I'm sure qtips gets down to insurance...really.
regardless of everything saying never use them in your ears, pretty sure almost everyone does.
A totally disregarded safety notice and they know it, sell a zillion of them, so only rational response to lower
puncture injuries and costly claims is to soften the stick.
you can buy nice hard cotton swabs but I sure wouldn't want them near my ears.
they are more for craft use

while Ken was blowing leaves so was I, getting filthy in the process due to how dry it is.
got the gardens cleaned out and full wagon taken to the woods, then sucked up the leaves so they
wouldn't get all clogged up when the heavy rains come tonight.

cut some flowers and took them over to landlady.
use them or lose them, would get wrecked by heavy rains

pushed the little mower, pretty active morning.
this afternoon starting to put stuff back in rv for next Wednesday's trip.

 

[daugen]

Utility bills include both electric and natural gas. Gas furnace, AC, gas water heater and dryer. Stove is electric. Water is from a well. My shop is heated with gas to 50° during cold months. House is 1,800 sq ft. Total bill for the last year was $1991. The one item using most electric is waterfall pump in garden pond.

Ron, you are just going to have to tell those fish and frogs times are tough and you have to slow down the pump
to conserve electricity...... is that pump on a timer?

1000 gallons of fuel oil
too bad there isn't another equivalent biodiesel fuel for much less money

ocean perch sounds good RS.