The Thermostat, man in the loop system

Easiest way to save energy, and by extension money is to adjust the thermostat. This saves in heat costs during the winter months and cooling costs in the summer. Most importantly this method requires zero initial investment, and tracking the subsequent savings is incredibly simple, assuming you can use excel or a spreadsheet program. I'll cover a simple analysis method in a subsequent post, and put the base excel sheet I use for tracking my usage, and improvement projects up here for anyone to use. But here I wanted to talk about the thermostat controls.

Most thermostats used in houses today have programming options, various cycles, remote sense options(beneficial) and even Internet/smart home ready. Personally I dislike most of the features, because it removes the person from the loop, normally a good thing, but not for energy savings and optimization. Now a more advanced user will get a lot out of the remote sense and Internet/smart home systems, but a novice will run into more problems than it is truly worth due to the higher costs of secondary sensors, systems and programming. I'm even anti-programming because again it removes the person from the energy loop, and thus mitigates a critical feedback loop.

Why is that feedback loop important? Because it forces you to make a conscious decision every day to adjust the temperature as you see fit. This puts energy usage on your mind, do you really need to keep your house at 65 during the day so you can wear jeans indoors while the temperature outside is over 90? Is it really that hard to wear socks in the winter? Or even use blankets, yes if you are a millionaire(or billionaire) it doesn't but for the average homeowner these little decisions will pay dividends by reducing your costs. By putting the thermostat control into your mind, you are paying attention to what you are doing, taking responsibility in what happens, and not just having a system take care of it for you, which is more important than just about anything when it comes to putting your own house on an energy program/budget.

more to come, most importantly how to do a quick analysis in a few days....

Decided a relaunch was in order

Previously I worked modeling energy usage at Industrial Facilities, think refineries, mines and chemical plants, so initially launched as a way to communicate a better way to do this and extrapolate those methods down to the homeowner...but well...

It sucked
Honestly.
Most of the concepts are too esoteric to make any sense in a blog format, and really aren't applicable...so time to start over.

This past semester I sat down and actually tried to audit my own house and found most of the crap online was useless. LED lightbulbs make no sense(do you really want to own your house for 15-20 years before payback), $150 automatic register adjusters don't add up economically unless you control them from a central point and can have dynamic feedback to the central Heater or AC. So I'm going to relaunch as a way to go about fixing your house smartly.

I support this, and you should to

Asteroid Mining, that is. Theoretically Planetary Resources Inc will be announced on Tuesday. From Gizmodo it appears that an impressive group of entrepreneurs and business professionals have formed a company with the goal of mining asteroids. This is a tremendous adventure, previously one only held in the realm of government b/c of the sheer scope of resources and skills needed to pull it off, but because we now spend more money on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in the USA than NASA(or any other engineering endeavors) it's up to industry. But that's a different rant.

So why do I support this? Here's why, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about it

Bingham-Cooper Mine

• Many minerals, such as gold, tungsten, platinum, palladium came to earth from asteroids
• Asteroids contain many minerals and elements that are scarce, or hard to get to on earth.
• Instead of strip mining an entire mountain, creating pits in the earth, as shown to the right, we can use an entire asteroid.
• Technology will need to advance in many realms in order to harvest an asteroid. Everything from power generation, rocket travel, vacuum machinery will need to take enormous strides
• Energy, specifically high power density technologies will advance, generating higher power density devices that will have wide ranging benefits on earth. It isn't practical to use gasoline as your fuel source with a launch cost of ~$3,000-$6,000/lb
• Reduced pollution from the energy intensive methods of mining and resource recovery on earth. Rare Earths aren't rare by definition, just making their recovery economical is. Both the cost of recovery per pound and energy usage per pound is very high making them both incredibly useful, and incredibly bad for the environment. 

I can go on for hours, but this is a brilliant idea, and a much better use of money than Apples decision to pay back its investors with a stock buyback and dividend. Also since it is not government run, there will be efficiencies gained due to lowered overhead and the ability to hire the best and brightest at market rates, which the Government cannot do b/c Congress gets in the way. Go Planetary Resources...