Posted by K Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:18:00 GMT
Treehugginess aside, I want central air. I have been living in the land of the uniseason, between 50 and 70 most of the year, and I get wilty and pathetic and whiny when the temperature goes above 75 or 80 degrees. Welcome to DC, wimp. Get ready for some suck.
Read more...Posted by Matthew Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:27:00 GMT
Last night I watched an alarming program on global warming. I was already freaked about our potential gas bill after peeking at our neighbor’s bill in January. Having an old house is great but not if you’re paying to heat the outdoors. Our place didn’t have insulation but that’s been rectified. We still have a bunch of windows to replace once we get in there.
At any rate, electricity is another concern since I’ll be working at home all of the time and thus be home consuming electricity all of the time. The green electricity offerings in the area are encouraging
Pepco Energy Services offers 100% green electricity at $0.1147 /kWh for 12 months. Washington Gas offers a $0.1225 /kWh rate. Compare that with the $0.1143 /kWh that I pay to PG&E for baseline usage. This year and last we used over 400 kwh of power for 3/10-4/10. We went over the baseline usage and paid a more painful rate for a small portion of power. Seems like green electricity is competitive and there isn’t really a reason not to do it.
Read more...Posted by Matthew Fri, 28 Apr 2006 07:17:00 GMT
I’ve started to look into fixing all of the modern appliances that regularly drive me bat shit.
First, connectivity to the Internet. I need to compare the evil Comcast with services from RCN (http://www.rcn.com/). At first glance RCN’s 20Mbps download with 2Mbps upload for $90/month seems like the fastest speed I can obtain for a reasonable rate. My employer pays for $50/month so it is not as outlandish as it might look at first glance. T1 service is around $300/month which is still out of reach for a single home (but several homes . . .hmm). Sadly, I couldn’t find a provider that offered it in 20011.
RCN offers phone services as well but it is not clear from their site if the service is over VoIP. The second things on the list to fix is removing all dependency on the PSTN.
Unfortunately, I think it may have already been wired into the house. The only equipment requiring a TDM line is the ancient Tivo that I hope to replace anyway and a possible security system already installed in the house (likely to be non-functional). Turns out ADT is on top of it and offers a cell based service. Interesting. Wires come into the basement and everything becomes wireless.
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