Have you ever just walked around your house and wondered how everything went wrong? Try it. It looks pretty normal doesn’t it? It’s warm inside and cold outside. There doesn’t seem to be a problem here. Why am I doing this again?
Well, let’s take a walk around my house right now and see what we find. It’s currently 18 degrees outside and 68 degrees inside. The garage is about 36 degrees. In the garage is the hot water heater, in which is 50 gallons of 120-degree water. The pellet stove in the front room is making that area a toasty 74 and spreading warmth throughout the house. The houseplants are keeping the humidity steady around 40% and you can smell all that wonderful plant oxygen floating around. There is nothing unusual in the living room or the office. But, the kitchen is where it gets crazy.
The kitchen is 68. But in the kitchen is this small space that I am cooling to 40 degrees while I am heating the space around it to 68. Then there is an even smaller space that I am cooling to 25 degrees. So, it’s 18 outside and I heat the air to 68 and then cool it again to 40 and then cool it yet again to 25. What?
But the garage is already 36 degrees. I don’t heat it and I don’t cool it. It’s just 36 degrees and it’s free! If I want it a little cooler I open the garage door for a while and if I want it a little warmer I let the sun shine on it for a while. This sounds like a perfect place. But the only thing I use it for is the car. Somehow along the way I’ve been convinced that using the free 36 degree air is a bad thing and that the only good 40 degree air is what I’ve heated and then cooled again.
If the refrigerator doesn’t prove I’m a nut case, then the freezer surely will. It’s 18 degrees outside and I warm the house to 68 and then cool the freezer to 25. That’s 7 degrees warmer than it is outside! Would it really be so terrible to have that stuff frozen to 18 degrees instead of 25? Well, at least all is not lost. At least the heat that I remove from the refrigerator and freezer are put back in the house by the most inefficient electric motor ever created, the compressor.
It’s not like the electric dryer in the laundry room. That is one crazy place if you think about it. I put the clothes in the washer, they get clean (by some magic) and then I put them in the dryer. The dryer heats them to about 125 degrees and blows the effluent air outside! Wait, outside? That’s right, never to be seen again and totally wasted. I can see the steam rising out the back window and I just shake my head. Where have I gone wrong? This must be an electric company plot of some kind.
© J T Weaver, 02/18/2013
J T Weaver 
Ever watch the show “Shark Tank”? One of the shows included someone who invented a pedestal for a dryer that filtered the used warm air and directed it into the house instead of outside. As I recall, he did not get an investor, but his local hardware store was selling them. Another insanity of our culture is going to great lengths to grow grass in our yards and then cutting it.
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You know, I actually had one of those when we lived in New England 25 years ago. It put heat and moisture back into the house in the wintertime, worked great. But filtering the lint was kind of a problem. Thanks for reading, glad you liked it.
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