Electric water heater timer

hwillm1977

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xpc said:
The American average is 800Kwh a month so either your numbers are off or you are burning some serious electricity, how much is your bill? I was in the navy and never took a shower like that though we have heard of them. Also 12kw of baseboard would barely heat a 800 sq. ft. house even if well insulated.
The house is approx. 900 sq. feet, there's one baseboard in each room and two in the largest room (11x15, the kitchen)... they really don't even come close to keeping us warm, but they were supposed to be just back-up for when the stove goes out or we aren't home for a few days. I have no problem with the house being 60 degrees though, I just put a sweater on :)
 

xpc

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FarmerChick is on the right track, what the heck are you running to eat that much electricity? though running the baseboards 24/7 would actually cost $900 a month
 

hwillm1977

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FarmerChick said:
With the woodstove you went down only by 1000 kwh per month in cold times. WHAT is the rest of that electric use? I mean do you run something big that is not a normal household load? Just wondering cause it seems high to me?
It's still the baseboards... because the stove is in the kitchen and the layout of the house is such that some rooms don't get any heat from the stove, so most of them still come on...

We had an energy assesment done and they tell you how big the drafts in your house are... for example, my parents mini-home came back as having a hole the size of a basketball in the wall... our house is so drafty it's the equivalent of taking one living room wall off :)

This summer the project will be replacing all windows, doors, and insulating the remaining walls and the attic... if we can come up with the money
 

FarmerChick

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WOW that is interesting cause I was going to suggest an audit..LOL

Your draft and loss is equivalent to ONE WALL gone from your home----in that cold BC weather?

Sure I can understand that now.



Yes you must do what is necessary to insulate that home.

Boy there is nothing in this life that ever seems cheap and easy to handle is there? LOL


Let me also say---- a few small stragetically placed fans will shoot warm air from the woodstove into the other rooms. I understand when the room setup is not convenient to the heat getting thru the whole house......but a few inexpensive fans could direct heat for you.

You don't "buy wood" do you???
 

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hwillm1977 said:
FarmerChick said:
With the woodstove you went down only by 1000 kwh per month in cold times. WHAT is the rest of that electric use? I mean do you run something big that is not a normal household load? Just wondering cause it seems high to me?
It's still the baseboards... because the stove is in the kitchen and the layout of the house is such that some rooms don't get any heat from the stove, so most of them still come on...

We had an energy assesment done and they tell you how big the drafts in your house are... for example, my parents mini-home came back as having a hole the size of a basketball in the wall... our house is so drafty it's the equivalent of taking one living room wall off :)

This summer the project will be replacing all windows, doors, and insulating the remaining walls and the attic... if we can come up with the money
Or you could just camp out in the kitchen in the winter. :/
 

hwillm1977

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yep... it's hard... keeping up with the power bills costs so much that it's hard to have money left over for supplies to fix the house... and so goes the vicious cycle.

we really were completely unprepared for the move to this house, but are slowly turning it into a better place... just a lot slower than we had planned on. This is our third winter here, and I thought the house would be completely finished by now... it's not even close :) We have window fans (two fans side by side that usually slip into a window in the summer) in the tops of the doors to the rooms for moving the hot air around on the bottom floor...

We have been buying wood, it's takes about 3 cord/winter... but we own enough land that we have been cutting trees and will have dried wood for next winter so that will help a lot next year too.
 

FarmerChick

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yes that is key to you to get free wood
glad to hear that is happening

alot of free wood angles here on SS

call your local state park etc. they offer for a small fee (in the US) to take wood from the park



Have you researched ways to get that free wood? Belive me, if you have to pay for wood on top of that electric, I know you are having it rough..LOL

yea you can't win in life---you just try as hard as you can to stay against the flow of tide coming against ya.


How did you get that home?
 

hwillm1977

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FarmerChick said:
How did you get that home?
We had a trailer that was paid off, but it was in the middle of a city, in a trailer park with a 6 foot yard... and because of student loans I can't get a mortgage, so we started driving around the country every weekend looking for fixer-upper houses we could either buy cash or the owners were willing to rent to own... our budget was about $25K if they would rent to own because we didn't want to pay for a house for any longer than 3-4 years.

It took us a few years, but we finally found a place, sold the trailer bought this place and are fixing it up. We are renting to own the remainder (the house was $20,000, we only had 10...) but it will be paid off by the end of this year. We bought the house as-is, with one acre of land in the yard, and 5 acres in the middle of nowhere which is where our wood is coming from.

A wood permit here is $20/cord (our yard actually backs on crown land, so we do pull deadwood out of there too)
 

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hwillm1977 said:
yep... it's hard... keeping up with the power bills costs so much that it's hard to have money left over for supplies to fix the house... and so goes the vicious cycle.

we really were completely unprepared for the move to this house, but are slowly turning it into a better place... just a lot slower than we had planned on. This is our third winter here, and I thought the house would be completely finished by now... it's not even close :) We have window fans (two fans side by side that usually slip into a window in the summer) in the tops of the doors to the rooms for moving the hot air around on the bottom floor...

We have been buying wood, it's takes about 3 cord/winter... but we own enough land that we have been cutting trees and will have dried wood for next winter so that will help a lot next year too.
3 cord is way too little of an amount for where your are and for the condition the house you describe, my guess would be in the 7 cord range. My winters are 3 months at worst and typically 4C day and -8C night with a completely remodeled house of new windows and insulation from top to bottom and can burn 3 cords. Your wood should be at least 2 years dried or it may not heat well. My wood stove easily heats 3 bedrooms to 16C and the living room and kitchen to 22C, I use one ceiling fan and nothing else. Something isn't burning right.

When I first bought this place it was worst than winter camping and I'm from Wisconsin, I would wake to hoar frost on all furniture. I bought two $10 rolls of R13 insulation and permanently sealed the windows until March, I hung blankets in all the doors of the living room to seal in the heat and lived on my couch - I would leave the water drip and flush the toilet on a whim (it froze once, don't ask). Tell me more about your house and where the heat is going, I was an HVAC contractor and may be able to help you on what to do next.
 

hwillm1977

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xpc said:
Tell me more about your house and where the heat is going, I was an HVAC contractor and may be able to help you on what to do next.
It was built in 1883, all original windows and door (we replaced one door with an energy star steel door)... about 900 square feet... originally it was built as a rooming house for sawmill workers in the area. Its a story and a half, with an annex off one side for the kitchen. There is no foundation under the kitchen, and it is sinking so will be torn off and rebuilt after weatherproofing the main house. The woodstove is in the far end of the kitchen, so that room would be around 40C degrees when the rest of the house is comfortable... even with the wood burning most of the baseboards stay on a lot of the time.

The space underneath the main house is a crawl space (half is barely deep enough to get under the house, half has been dug out and holds potato bins, our well pump, and lots of mud). The stone foundation has holes large enough to stick your arm through.

There was blown in insulation in the walls, but that has settled so the bottom 2 feet of each wall is insulated and nothing else is. There is blown in insulation in the attics, but it is less than 6 inches thick and really not adequate.

frontagain.jpg


front1.jpg


This is where our water heater is, although that stove has been replaced with an airtight heating stove:
kitchenstove.jpg
 

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