Hot and Cold

When winter starts to roll around and we start to prepare for various Winter Festivals, the people of New England start to moan and groan about the potential for a bitterly cold winter.  It's one of those unifying things that we go through every year that provides us an opportunity to show up to work in snowpants and work boots a half hour late, then we compare stories about how long it took us to shovel the sidewalks and driveways.  Then the people with snow-blowers and plows smirk about how effortlessly their snow pile has been growing.

One of the winter-onset aches is the cost of home heating oil (we heat with natural gas!) or how many cords of wood a wood stove can go through in a winter.  We chat about thermostat settings and tolerance for bundling up inside as compared to setting it at 70 and just forgetting it year-round.  We talk of winterizing our windows/doors/basements.  We talk about how little sunlight we get in the wintertime (dusky around 4?!  What!?).  Most of the time, it's not that we don't like the winter, but that People like to complain.

There is a comparable discussion that happens at the onset of the two or three hottest weeks of the summer. At that point, it's a rush to the basement or home stores for window air conditioning units to help take the edge off the summer heat.  In my geeky mix my enthusiasm for thrift, record keeping, and seasonal analysis, I have generated the figure below:  The Seasonal Variations in Gas & Electric Utilities for our Half-Duplex.  (1100 square feet, two story with basement.)

Three Years of Utilities for the Jacksons, normalized to cost per day.

In interpreting the above plot, there are a few things to note:

Sep-09 Given an ancient freezer from a friend moving across the country. It added about 50 cents per day to the electric cost average. Old compressors in fridges and freezers are notoriously inefficient, so if you have appliances made before 2000, you should consider replacing them.

Mar-10 Had baby. We abandoned our previous trend of having the house chill down to 60 while we slept and began using an electric heater to warm just the sleeping spaces. We also had various houseguests after Blake was born, and used more electricity.

Jul-10 For the opposite reasons as March, we wanted to cool down the house for the nursing mother and baby, so we ran the air conditioner quite a bit more than our previous summers. Well, we air condition for the hottest month anyway.

Spring-11 Well, throughout this spring, Jen learned how to quilt. She had quilted before, but during this spring she REALLY took on the hobby. She found it therapeutic, relaxing, and fulfilling, and allocated a budget of time and funds to this awesome skill. With quilting comes IRONING, which is a 1100 Watt heater that gets alot of use when quilting.

Jul-11 Sold the old freezer, and bought a smaller, more efficient chest freezer. Regained the much of the 50 cent per day advantage.

Jan-11 Looking at the RED line for natural gas useage, keep in mind that we had killer snowstorms: 1/12/11: 15inches, 1/21/11: 7inches, 1/26/11: 10inches , 2/1/11:10inches. It was unrelenting, so our gas heating spiked that year a bit higher than normal. To back that up, I'm including the average daily temperature from the gas company bills from those heating months. It's clear that the 2010-2011 winter was consistently colder than our disappointingly warm winter last year. We only had like 4 inches of snow for the whole winter last year. It seems like last year's moaning and groaning was largely for naught.

2009-2010	Avg Tmp	2010-2011	Avg Tmp	2011-2012	Avg Tmp
Nov	51	Nov	49	Nov	49
Dec	38	Dec	34	Dec	45
Jan	30	Jan	29	Jan	34
Feb	32	Feb	29	Feb	38
Mar	44	Mar	38	Mar	46
Apr	53	Apr	45	Apr	52

So there you have it.  Any other observations you care to make on the above data?  Comments welcome.