Reducing future expenses by dematerializing media

[seanm123]

Re: Reducing future expenses by dematerializing media

An expat friend of mine living in Hong Kong catches all of his US Television programs via a Sling-box. Other than torrents it is the only way he can watch his College Football games and other programming his family desires. It biggest drawback is it will transmit to only one logged in account at a time, but Sling-box will completely takeover a cable box or satellite TV receiver. A good friend in the USA is hosting the Sling-box and the additional Satellite TV receiver DVR needed along with FIOS bandwidth for optimum upload performance since HD signals require 1.5 Mbps or higher so the screen does not freeze too much. One thing to keep in mind if you are attempting this setup is that many cable providers have monthly caps on upload bandwidth. A three-hour baseball game in HD quality could be about 2 gigabytes of data using the Sling Box so make sure your ISP has a large cap or no cap on bandwidth upload/download.

[mooncliff]

Re: Reducing future expenses by dematerializing media

But your air conditioner has me stumped. I'd love to get your kind of savings but don't think it's possible here. Outside temps get up to 115-118 F in the summer, and are still over 100 late at night. It seems your system handles each room individually, turning off when there's no movement. If that happens here, within minutes the room heats up so much that an air conditioner will struggle for hours to cool it off again. Without A/C, indoor temps quickly rise to 108 degrees (I know this from when my A/C died a few summers ago). I don't want my house getting that hot when I'm out; it's bad for my pets, food, the refrigerator, etc...

My summer electric bill is over $200/month :-(

Weil, I guess if you were in Japan, your electric bill would be about triple that since we are paying around 30 cents a kWh.
The air con can turn itself off if I am not here, but I just leave it on set to 70 degrees and I have a small fan blowing the cool air down the hall to the front part of the apartment, so all 600 square feet is air conditioned constantly for a couple of months, using about 3 kwh per day, or about a dollar a day. That is to reduce the temperature from 90F outside to 70 F inside and to remove gallons of water every day.
Have you tried putting on a cool roof? I did that to my house in Hawaii, and we no longer need air conditioning even though we live on the hot desert leeward coast of Oahu. All I needed to do was prevent the heat from getting into the house in the first place. I also painted the house with a heat reflecting paint, but the roof solved 90% of the problem.
Hawaiian Sunguard is what I put on the roof.
http://www.leakmaster.com/coolroofstore.html
We would have had to reroof because the roof was 30 years old and degrading, and instead of a new roof for 25,000, the elastomeric roof was $12,000. When I first did that, everyone of course thought it was strange, but now half the roofs have it, and they say, yes, everyone knows...
Can you plant trees on the east and west sides of the house? Or put shade cloth outside? That makes a huge difference. My mom cut down the trees because she didnt want to rake up the leaves... and then complained about how hot it is... sigh...
If you live in a desert area, can you use a swamp cooler?
Also Aluminet is fantastic, very light, and lasts a long time... I have a shadehouse covered in it for 10 years, and the plants grow double the size because they dont get burned from the sun.
http://www.shadeclothstore.com/depts...hadecloth.html
It is amazingly light... 300 square feet only weighs a few pounds.

[shiny!]

Re: Reducing future expenses by dematerializing media

Four or five years ago my husband painted the house exterior and roof with this Hy-Tech insulating paint additive. He added it to the paint and elastomeric coating for the roof. We noticed a 15% reduction in our summer electricity usage. Not certain how much of the improvement came from the insulating ceramic spheres, or because the house is now white instead of tan. When the house was tan it was scalding hot to the touch in the afternoon. After painting it white and with the insulating additive, the walls in full afternoon sun are barely lukewarm.

I also planted a grapevine on the west end of the house to shade it in the afternoon.

It's too hot and humid here for swamp coolers. People who say, "Well, at least it's a dry heat" have never been to the Phoenix area during the summer monsoon season. On hot days the A/C runs almost full time to keep the house at 78.

Agree with you on the shadecloth. I don't have aluminet, but do have 70% green shadecloth for the garden and the carport. It makes a BIG difference.

This is about the best I can do. A 1985 manufactured home is never going to have as much insulation as a modern stick built home. At some point you reach diminishing returns, putting more money in the house than the energy savings will pay back.