Saving money around the house

be careful with those little eco cfl bulbs o rwhatever

not everyone knows they contain mercury and you have to dispose of them properly and take extra caution when they break.

 

yes this is true. so if you have little children you might need to know a local poisen control hotline

 

well if you need outdoor lighting. malibu lighting is what i recomend. its all chinese crap these days but its all that me and my dad use. pretty good stuff.

 

My wife already knows that... lol Our 3yr old ate some kind of dye from a slide/microscope kit someone got our 7yr old. Needless to say poison control had no idea what to do, and told her to call back if she found out anything so they would know.

Thanks! I'll look them up. I have enough cheap chinese crap working for me that I don't usually spend money on "better" ones.

 

Best way to save money....quit smoking the good weed. You can get weed that's almost as good for 50% of the price.

 

cool. yeah my dad used to work indirectly with lowes. he would get
ALOT of free crap from vendors. so what we didnt keep or give away we put up.

 

And 50% of that weed is cow manure. You deserve negative rep for that comment. I'm all out for now and will give you some when my battery recharges. You are going to totally piss off Rick too.

 

My answer to the rising heating costs a couple years ago was to put in a wood burning insert into my fireplace in my living room. Now Nov-Apr we burn wood (which is free for me at my dad's with some effort cutting and splitting) and use the furnace only when we're out of town or on those really cold nights (-0 to -20 here) to warm the house up in the morning. And the thermostat stays at 60 at night and 66 during the day, again with the burner in the living room where we spend most of the time its 75 + in there. Added insulation to the ceiling in the living room to keep more heat in. Plastic all the windows, check the calk, stripping etc in the fall.

With natural gas and heating oil costs up 40%+ over last year nows the time to do it guys... Pm me with questions.

 

LOL, some dickweed actually left me neg rep for this post. Of course the dickweed didn't leave his username.

 

We have a pellet stove that we started using more last winter by buying 1 ton at a time. Still spent $240/month plus oil every couple of months so I'm not sure we saved any money. I have a wood stove I bought from a friend for $50, but I wanted to use that to heat the barn for winter oil changes and such! Now I'm wondering if it's worth figuring out how to install it in the house. Like if I'd need a new chimney, or if i could tie it into the one for the furnace and put it in the basement. That would dry the basement out, but I don't know if it would heat the rest of the house enough (like a russian stove). I almost think I'd have to make air ducts since we use hot water baseboard heat and not air.

And if I put the stove in the house, there's the question of how to heat the barn? I bought a propane heater last winter, but I'll be avoiding that now I think.

 

Don't be smoking dickweed man, that's bad for your health. Stick with the 50% of mean green smoke.

 

yeah those pellet stoves can be a wash, I go for the good ol' wood myself. Plus if you don't have access to wood, just put an add in craigslist to cut trees or branches down for free if you get the wood. That will get you almost an unlimited amount of wood. Just be safe around power lines, houses, fences etc...one bad tree fall and you'll be spending more than you save plus you get the work out to boot.

Putting some better insullation around the Base board of you house can be a BIG saver if you need it. I checked mine when I first bought the house and there was none so I put foamed the cracks where I could and put 2 sheets of foam - 4 inches total in there and it made the basement and floors warmer last winter.

 

yeah cutting wood is getting to almost be forgotten. people dont really do it any more. however, there is a good feeling you get when you chop your own wood to heat your house.

 

Well it heats the house just fine, and I can go buy $50 worth of pellets that will last 10 days. If I run out of oil I have to wait a couple days (or 3-4 if it happens friday night), and pay at least $400 for the minimum delivery. So it's cheaper for me to keep the pellet stove heating most of the house, and easier on the wallet if we run out of fuel. Not to mention I know how long a bag lasts. I have no idea how long the furnace can run from each mark on the tank gauge.

The other thing is we have 100yr old windows in the house and replaced 8 of them (4 per living room, 2 living rooms). So I'm hoping that'll reduce my oil consumption as well. Our pellet stove is also in the back of the house so if we could move it closer to our living spaces we could probably run it on low instead of high all the time.

I'm actually chopping and splitting a tree we took down last month. What a pain in the ass by yourself! I'm storing the wood for whenever I get around to installing a wood stove we practically stole from a friend for $50 (he just wanted it GONE! lol). Would be nice to use it in the house, but installing a chimney for it would be a big, expensive, pain I think. Would rather use it in my barn with a simple stove pipe through the roof so I don't freeze while working out there.

 

again craigslist can be your friend...just put a WTB chimney piping...Stainless is the way to go, but if your out of town and don't have the strict building codes you can run one out the basement window and up the side and bammm..on those cold night it pays for itself really fast. Fleet Farm or an internet search will bring up lots of cheap alternatives.

 

Can it run horizontal? I'd have to send it out the side and up like you said as I have a two story house and thought about putting it in the basement. Unless I can tap into the existing chimney that the furnace vents through. Not sure if I'd have to do any work to that. Well, other than repairing the bricks on the roof that are coming apart.

 

Hey PT, you must consider moving to Sri Lanka or the Maldives where you'll never have to heat your house. You constantly worry about heating cost's.

Talking of chimney's, have you tried to reclaim some of the heat from it? If you can enclose the outer tube (for fireplaces) and encase it with aluminum fins (similar to a car's rad) and add a fan to the enclosure or behind the fins and you'd be reclaiming some of the hear you would otherwise be wasting.

I have a commercial hot water boiler (30 years old) that has a water loop (similar to a rad) installed right where the chimney connects to the boiler with a recirc pump. The water reclaims the heat loss and this water is used for heating. Current codes does not allow this set up for some unknown reason but I think its an awesome idea. If you have intentions of making this a $50 mod, remember to double or even triple your chimney size to compensate for the restriction caused by the rad, failing which toxic fumes will enter your house if the boiler/furnace is located inside the house. If you are serious, we'll chat about power venting later.

 

yeah, well, when fuel oil rose past $4/gallon and it takes over $1,000 to fill the tank things need to change.

I had thought about a similar reclaiming system on the exhaust vent for the pellet stove, but couldn't figure out a way to do it in my head. Thought about wrapping some flexible copper pipe around the outside, but then there's the plumbing, pump, and how do I exchange the heat? So I never got far with that.

I know they have heat exchangers with fans for 8 and 10 inch stove pipes for wood stoves, but nothing for pellet stoves that I've seen.

 

Whats the difference. A stove is a stove. Wait a minute, If I remember right, pellets have a smaller (6") chimney. The problem is for residential, all these adaptations can become an eye sore but commercially, no body cares. You should try to reclaim heat form your boiler. If you are interested, I can send you some photographs of a rad inserted into the chimney and the associated plumbing and recirc pump etc.

 

Yeah, it's a 4" or 6" double walled horizontal pipe. My boiler has a flex pipe (kinda like a heavy-duty dryer hookup) to the brick chimney so not sure on the heat exchanger. Not to mention, I can touch the furnace vent whereas the stove vent is very hot to the touch and I'm guessing it could heat water to 120-140F easily (especially when the thermal shut off for the exhaust blower is set at 120, and 30 minutes after it drops to 120 the fans shut off).

Pictures would be cool. Give me an idea to try maybe.