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Adventures in Home Electricity

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Yesterday, Tara and I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years (since we bought the house)… replace the old “round” electrical receptacles with newer “rectangular” ones. All and all, it was easy work, but somewhat stressful as we only had about an hour to do them all before the sun went down and made that part of the house too dark to work. In that time, we did about 15 receptacles, and 5 switches. 2 of those switches being 3-ways. And that’s where the fun began.

So, I removed the old 3-way switches, and made mental note of which wires went where. But, upon putting the new ones on, I couldn’t get them to work right. One of them would work correctly only if the other way turned on. If the other one was turned off, the first switch wouldn’t work at all. Now, this could have been an early sign that the first switch was bad (as it did stop working at all later that night), but at the time, I really couldn’t figure it out.

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My energy use

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Because this is an ongoing “post” that I will be re-visiting from time to time, I’m going to make a page that will be visible on the top navigation that will serve as a space for this “meta-topic”.

The main goal of this is to hopefully provide an overview of how from the time I really became aware of my energy use (with regards to electricity, gasoline, natural gas, etc), I have been trying to lower that total usage anytime I see easily trim-able amounts.

Now, please, don’t misunderstand. I am NOT saying I’m going to lower my footprint to zero (at least, not anytime soon), and I’m not saying I’m going to give up comforts for the sake of energy use. What I am saying is that with very little extra work, the average person could probably cut a non-trivial amount of energy use from their day to day life, and afterword be no less comfortable in their home (in some cases, more comfortable). What this does take is some time, and in many cases, money. But, in my mind, this money isn’t wasted. It will pay for itself in comforts, or just in long term savings.

The page will be up and running in the next few weeks. At this point, consider what you have around your home that could be replaced/upgrade that would save your money throughout the year, and would have little to no negative impact on your comfort.

ARG, Thinkgeek!!!

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UPDATE: A wonderful rep. with Thinkgeek refunded all the expired points!!! While this means I’m 75 short of the 2,500 needed for the Buckyballs, it more than satisfies my complaint. Thank you Thinkgeek! I’ll still be a loyal customer. =)

Original Post: After a coworker brought in some Buckyballs to work yesterday, I finally decided they were pretty fun. So, I’ve been looking around town for them. No love, at all. But, I knew I had some geek points with Thinkgeek, so I figured I could get them that way. So, I go and check my geekpoint balance, and low and behold, it’s 0! What the hell? So I look at the history, and see they’ve started (at some point) expiring points if you don’t buy anything from them in 13 months (it was 13 months since my last order in April… I last checked my balance in March I think). So, I went from 2,500 to 0 in 2 months.

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