One of those things you really kinda need is a furnace, when you live 90 miles from the Canadian border—in either direction.
So…since we got ticked at our car insurance company and switched, we decided to switch house insurance as well…but they, unlike the guys who wouldn’t cover our kitchen floor, actually ask questions about the age of things they might have to replace, like the roof, the furnace (which can cause general mayhem) — and we got to investigating.
Our furnace is a little guy, a Bryant, which is sort of a Carrier, which is 12 years old, and 80% efficient. This means 20% of the energy goes up the chimney. So…we began thinking. We plan to stay in this house. If we live here another 10 years, the furnace will be 22 years old, and we might be a little less able to pay for a new one. So…we can get a deal: our state wants the 80%-ers out, and is legislating against them, the utility people are offering a 400.00 rebate for switching to a 95%, the feds are offering a 100.00 deduction, and it just might be a good idea to do it. The difference in fuel costs will pay for itself in about 6 years; and that means that the furnace we have is going to cost us that over the next 6 years and it will be 6 years older, as in 18 years old and maybe by then, no rebates…mmm. Let me see. My math is not as good as Bren’s, but this is starting to look as if a move now is appropriate. So we are going to get the replacement, which will also save us annually on insurance. I think we’re making a good move here. I got the technician off Angie’s list, and I approve: we asked him about the ac, and instead of going into a song-and-dance combo deal, he said, it’s working: never replace a decent ac that’s working and doing its job, because they don’t get that much better, and none of them are going to be significantly better in this particular region of the country. Furnaces are another story. I appreciate that advice.
SO—no fix on the kitchen floor this year, likely, but getting that taken care of —that’ll be good.
And y’know all those commercials about saving you 400.00 on your car insurance: proved true. As you get older, your car gets older, your driving pattern changes: all these things figure in, and it’s worth calling and getting a quote. Ours has been inching up year by year and they finally sent us the one we questioned. Funny thing.
If you get a membership offer from AARP, (American Association of Retired Persons)—my advice is, join it. In a forest of offers for insurance of every sort—if their stamp is on the product, it’s tended to be good. And an AARP card gets you deductions for hotels and motels.
Yeah, furnace replacement is a good thing! This is my second winter without a furnace, which living in Nebraska isn’t so great either. We had a water pipe break right over it and didn’t know until it was too late. The cost to replace the entire system will run about $3000. Ack. We’re looking at alternatives since we were never happy with that one anyway. Making do with space heaters right now, which have done better this year than they did last year. I’m hoping we can afford to replace stuff next year before winter strikes again. We had a relatively mild winter this year, so it wasn’t so bad.
In other news, I have released a book as my birthday present (tomorrow! Ack!) The book is Mirrors: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/292611
I actually have two more novels that just need formatting and they’ll go out, too.
And Russ bought me a new camera for my birthday! Canon Rebel 4Ti. Oh my! I am going to have so much fun. DSLR, finally. I’ve been using point-and-shoot and bridge cameras for years. Fun to have one where I can invest in lenses and get just what I want.
Sorry. I’m just bouncy here between book releases, new camera and trip to wild life refuge tomorrow!
@Zette — great news about the camera and the book releases, and happy birthday! Your photo blog is great already; looking forward to what you can do now!
Thank you! Russ just bought me a 75-300 lens to go with it. Oh my. I am just in photography heaven now!
My picture of the day blog has the first picture I took with the camera: http://zettepicaday.blogspot.com/
Great pix! Wonderful camera, great photographer!
Really lovely pictures. Beautiful sunsets and I really like the ones of your kittehs.
Yay on the book release, the fabulous camera, and the trip!
Bummer on the furnace. We had a quote at 2500 installed, not counting the rebates which will knock it down to 2.
Have you ever thought about marketing your photos to iStock? You get paid as people download them.
I’ll have to look into that one. Oddly enough, I’ve had a lot of pictures published in various magazines and books (and one used at a wild life refuge in Texas), and that was with non-DSLR cameras. I think this one is going to make a lot of difference once I get the feel for it. So many new controls! AAAIIIIEEEE!
We were told ours would be about $3000. We had just had this one put in about six years ago, and a year later the motherboard went out and cost us another $1000 to fix. And it never really heated the house as well as our old stand up heater in the dining room did, and we are seriously looking at going back to that type! At least then we had a couple rooms warm.
I replaced mine summer of 2011. Went for the $2200, IIRC, 80% unit. For one, there was no good way to run the condensation drain piping.
And if (when) the price of fuel goes up you save even more.
I replaced my furnace a few years ago and the savings was quickly obvious. Also the new one took up less room in the cellar!
Re insurance: AAA membership can also get a deduction on some plans.
If you are a US veteran (or if one parent was), you can join USAA. Sterling reputation, many services, and the insurance prices are amazingly low.
I’ve never been happy with our homeowner’s insurance and have been after husband to check into other companies — which we have. Saving a boat load on the vehicles and some on the house. Now you have me wondering about AARP. Oh well maybe next year, lol. But we did find out the house was hugely over insured and the charges on the cars and bike was over the top. I think we’re saving something like $600 on the vehicles and around $300 on the house.
Zette, the Duraflame and Eden Pure room heaters are very good alternatives, although I like the Duraflame better. We got them to off-set our horrendous propane bills which is so much worse then electric for us.
You want to read the house insurance carefully. Ours rebuilt our house, and gave us half as much on contents as house. Unfortunately, the value of the contents was about three times the value of the house!
Yeah, contents replacement is equal to house replacements. We will have a rider on the jewelry. But actually that would cover furniture, clothing, kitchen and garage and extensive library. Nothing would cover the bulk of the art which was done by my mom. You can only get art appraised if it already has a price established and she never sold anything. Will, however take video of everything (long overdue), especially books, art and improvements we’ve done. And have discovered that the Amazon cloud will give us Kindle folks 5gig for photos. So, will scan oodles of pictures with my wand scanner and have yet another redundancy backup.
We have 2 pretty-useless fireplaces, one upstairs, one downstairs directly under it. The top one has a 5″x5″ cleanout for ash (ha! I laugh) and is plumbed for gas; the downstairs one is plumbed for gas only. They want 300 plus dollars to make these work, and who knows whether the top one would even draw—has a very cranky flue pull; and we’re allergic to wood smoke, anyway. SO…….we got a nice little electric fireplace insert that mimics burning wood. It could have crackles if we wanted to pay for it, but circular sound tracks drive me bats, so that’s out; besides, when we’re using it we’re trying to watch telly and don’t need the sound. It does have a modest little heater, just enough to take off the chill. So we are very fond of it. Jane has this neat little fire-dragon made of braided copper cable, which is a permanent inhabitant of our fireplace. So this is our auxiliary heat. Won’t help us in a power-out, but we have two cats for that. We brought in some smooth river stone (5″ size) to floor the hearth around it, so it, with its firescreen, looks pretty darned good…with no ash cleaning.
Back in the days when I had my Persian kitties, a silver Persian female chased a swallow that emerged from the fireplace, chased it through the ash, and around the living room, the kitchen, the hall, the dining area…I finally got a sheet and cornered the bird, which I released unharmed, and kitteh? She was quite grey, very dusty, and quite miffed I’d ruined her game. The distribution of ash? Pretty thorough!
It still surprises me the savings in replacing old electrics. We replaced the hot water tank three years ago and started seeing the difference immediately. We also replaced most of our light bulbs with energy efficient bulbs. I have them in the sun room, daylight corrected….. 1500 watts for the cost of 350. We have found other small things too that keeps our winter costs down. This is an electric house as I have to have heavy duty wiring for my kilns, but we heat with wood, which we take off our land, keeping the cost down is a game for us.
Car insurance was a lot which I switched when our local company sold to a large group which could not be bothered to return my calls on a Friday afternoon (Oh, we left early and our answering system isn’t hooked up correctly!) I ended up going with another company and am paying a third of what I was.
The moral is, listen to CJ and do your homework; it will pay off in the end. 😉
Oh, and is everyone aware that Posterous is going away? It’s easy to gets your photos, but it should be done post-haste!
@Zette…..Congratulations on publishing the book and the new camera. You’ve been doing a great job with what you’ve been using!
If you need a good ‘resizes to fit the web’ photo site, try Photobucket.
We replaced our furnace last winter. Well, we didn’t really have a choice about it; the old one up and quit. I don’t know how Zette, also in a cold climate, manages without a furnace; we have an Eden Pure heater and borrowed two more and got by, but it wasn’t what you’d call comfortable! But we shopped around and we, too, got discounts and rebates which made the process much more pleasant, and the savings on our power bill, even though they raised the rates this year, is very satisfying. So on the whole, it was really a good thing when the old furnace gave up! Now I’m looking at our stove and fridge, which were here when we moved in many years ago. They still work, but the fridge is making very odd noises!
Last winter was brutal, to be honest. I spent most of it in several layers of clothing and with blankets around me. This year wasn’t nearly as bad and with Russ here I had an escape to warmer places.
Congrats on the furnace. When I had to replace my AC/Heater several years ago, I lucked into an energy saving model. Well worth it.
AARP was a help for my grandmother, meds and doctor visits. If the eligibility on that is 55, well… 55 is getting closer and closer!
@ Zette — Yes, look into iStock, GettyImages, and Corbis. I don’t take photos often enough to have done this, but it’s a good idea. Designers use each of those a lot, and any bit of income is a good thing. Zette, please remind folks when you have the next one or two books out.
My own budget will be “way iffy” (technical term there) for a long while. — But Protector is already pre-ordered, and I’m expecting to get books from Closed Circle when they’re ready.
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I have been getting up to speed with font design. It’s not super fast, it’s feast or famine, but my first rough estimate of how quickly I can get one font out, or a family of four faces, or more, was more encouraging than I was expecting. Once I’ve completed my first face, and then first family, I’ll have some better idea of the time involved and how I can gain income from it. (I’m expecting to sell through MyFonts.com.) The process is somewhat like writing novels: A long time of designing and tweaking each glyph in a face, each face in a family; and then getting them published. Sale to a foundry gets a lump or two payment(s), then residuals from sales thereafter. Though I was surprised at MyFonts.com’s model. As a small indie startup font designer, this may be the best route for me. It gets better marketing than I could do myself, and it means I’m not tied to a single big-name foundry. It is not, however, a way to become instantly rich, just like with writing or graphic arts. Heh. Everything I’m trained and educated and talented for is nice desk work, but it’s all liberal arts. Not the way to get rich, I will still be worrying over budget, but my income will at least be improving some, and this, among other things, is something that makes me happy, something I like and think I have some talent at, so it’s a step in the right direction. … Just not something that will happen with a wave of the magic wand. It will be a while before I get my first fonts out there. I can see that getting a display face out more often, while working on larger font-families is the smarter way towards income and variety, not to get bored either. More as it develops. This is the first really encouraging personal and professional news I’ve had in quite a while, to offset recent bad news. (I will be moving out of my home into an apartment some time this year, as soon as I can. Not good news, but maybe this is also a step in the right direction.) So… well, nothing’s perfect, but ultimately, I think I’m headed the right way again, finally, at long last. Sure hope so.
AARP eligibility is 50 and over.
http://www.aarp.org
Thanks. Oh dear…I’m even closer to AARP eligibility than I’d thought. (I’m 47.) This is both good for budget and insurance, and a bit, well, it shouldn’t be vaguely distressing/insulting, and yet….
Hah, my parents had no problem with the “senior discount” and eligibility. I understand my grandmother was…miffed. LOL. (Probably not seriously, but still. One can sympathize. One still (mostly) feels (and perhaps acts) like a teenager…an old soul teenager, but even so.) Aha, finally found my way out of that parenthesis! 😀
At 59 I vacillate. I am miffed to think I’m “old”, but I really like to take advantage of the discounts!
I can tell you on dishwashers: Bosch is the way to go, costs a bit more but the quality of the clean is lightyears better than GE. Fridges—I think we’ve got a Frigidaire, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best. It’s adequate. I’d love to have a side-by-side freezer, but we have a little kitchen. OTOH, if you want a nice little free-standing freezer, the Haier (Costco or Walmart) is excellent. It’s a droplid sort with a drawer, and holds a lot of food. We had it in the basement (used in the apartments) and Jane just horsed the thing upstairs to the pantry, where to my amazement, it fits. It’s going to make buying in bulk much, much nicer. As is, we’d buy in bulk, then eat the same thing for days, because space is limited. The range? Jenn-air is the one I’d have except for, a) they’re a bear to keep clean and b) runaway fires can be a bit scary and c) they’re crazy spendy. I’ve got a nice little GE range that heats nicely and has a decent oven that has no bad spots. This range is perfectly good enough. If I want fire, I can go to the back yard and heat real coals. Microwave? Panasonic. The Sensor Reheat is the most wonderful invention: it detects steam. YOu can put in a dish of frozen veggies, and just with no other fuss push one button—sensor reheat. No weighing, no problem. It starts heating and when it detects steam, it runs a simple calculation on the length of time it took to get it to steam, adds a fraction for good measure, then dings an “I’ve finished.” You never get cold or halfcooked veggies. I love that feature!
I rent, so I have no say in anything. Fridge is harvest gold, and so is the electric stove, so you know how old they are. I was given an Amana Radar Range microwave, which pretty much fits into the theme — the microwave I was using before that was too small to put a dinner plate into. I have gas heat and electric AC. Two things that have really saved me money — One was when the heat/AC thermostat went out, I talked the landlord into replacing it with a programmable one for both AC and heat. Second thing was those fluorescent screw in light bulbs. I have them in every socket in the house. Those two measures alone dropped my electricity bill by about $15 to $20 a month, and dropped my gas bill by a good $8-a month. I have gas heat and water heater, and electric AC, and it’s kind of a trade off, in winter, my electric bills are lower but my gas bills are higher. In the summer, in the TX panhandle, where it can get hotter than a $2 pistol firing uphill, my gas bill is next to nothing, but my electricity bill is higher than giraffe’s ears. One thing, once I switch to AC, I don’t run the clothes dryer unless I absolutely have to, and then I try to run it late at night. I wash everything in cold water except me and the dishes. It’s ridiculous to heat the house up with the clothes dryer and have to run the AC to cool it back down again. But then, I’m lucky that I have a very nice clothes line — welded metal pipes in two “T’s” set in concrete that hold five clothes lines. Another thing for those in a more southerly clime, you’d be amazed at how much heat an incandescent light bulb puts out. Part of my electricity savings from going to the fluorescent light bulbs was the reduction in heat from having lights on, and not having to run my AC quite so much. Also, in the summer, I restrict my oven use to late at night, and I just got an electric kettle, which is the main thing I use my electric stove top for — heating water for tea.
I know that clothesline!
And I hear you about Texas heat. One that helps: Penney’s sells oldfashioned blackout curtains, sort of rubberized fabric, white, with a magnetic strip closing. We wanted them for light control: our previous telly was hard to see with the curtains open. But you just hang these on the hook behind the curtains, and they turned out to be real good at insulating the big windows against either cold or heat. You really feel the difference if those are open on a cold winter night; and also when the summer sun comes beating in.
Similar situation, here in the mountains of Central Arizona. Our heat pump runs on piped propane from the town, so heater is propane driven as is the water heater, but the AC is electric. We really hate the propane company. We’ll pay more in the depth of winter [wich rarely gets below the mid 20s at night] to heat the house than we will to cool it in the height of summer when it gets over 100. We do have a wood fireplace, but that’s for the really cold snowy days [5000 foot elevation] and my sinuses have a real limited amount I can tolerate the smoke residue.
But the programmable thermostat has made a dfference and so have the Eden Pure we use in the front of the house and the Duraflame we have in the bedroom. I do, however agree with Zette — it helps, but one still gets on the sweats and fleece. But I don’t mind paying a bit more on the electric in the winter just to avoid the ridiculous propane bills [which have topped $350 a month for a 1700 sq ft house]. The living room/kitchen area are at the south end of the house, so the blinds are open during winter days [unless it’s cloudy or snowy] which helps heat up the main living areas. Last year we did take out these horrid flourscent lights in the kitchen, put in two skylights and a nice track light. We don’t use that light often, but I plan to replace the little Halogen 50 watt lights (!) with LEDs. The skylights have UV protection and don’t seem to heat up the house, but the amount of light thhey let in is amazing — living room and kitchen are an open area. It was funny, for months we would reach to turn off the lights whenever we left the room! So we use the CFC lights we have in everything too.
In summer, it’s the George Foreman grill and the electric pressure cooker. The oven is off-limits. although I’ll use the stove of course.
In re: furnaces I can recommend York. 95.5% efficiency, the flue gas is so cool that they used PVC for the stack, right out of the unit enclosure. Made quite a difference in the cold times! We chose to replace our AC unit at the same time, because it was undersized for the house (and under-rated for the summers here in Boise as well!). Total cost for our installation was $3500.
An underpowered AC is a power hog and works too often, but ours seems to work ok, so we’re leaving that. We’re getting the 95% efficiency furnace, and we think we’re going to like that. One thing we hadn’t expected about the large basement on this house: it moderates both heat and cold: stays close to the same temperature year round. So it’s not bad working down there, but it doesn’t require heating or cooling on its own. I so love having a basement! I wanted one in Oklahoma—but since they built Oklahoma City atop an ‘underground river,’ they’re chancy. You can end up with an indoor swimming pool, reliant on a pump to keep dry!
I live in a basement apartment, and spring is that awkward time of year. The ground surrounding the uninsulated foundation is still frozen, while the air surrounding the uninsulated first floor is warming quickly. The thermostat is in a first floor room, so the furnace doesn’t come on as often as when the outside air was well below freezing. Now I wear a sweater nearly all the time, whereas in the depths of winter I was toastly warm. Sigh.
Of course this basement is only half buried, not much below the frost line, so I still need an air conditioner when it starts hitting 85F outside, as I start to wilt above 77F.
My wilt-temperature is 73. We stay from 65 to 67 during the winter, and transition to about 72 during summer. I’m not a flower that tolerates heat, alas. I find Spokane summers still too warm, and of course in August we hit 100 for a few days—not, thank goodness, the long, 10 to 20 day stretches of 100 degree weather we got in OKC.
We even had a spit of snow yesterday, for about 10 minutes. Then it rained. The temperatures are going to rise, now, and it’s getting time to deal with the pond pump.
You would not make it in my house. In summer, the thermostat is set at 80, otherwise my electric bill is heart-stopping and checking account gutting. Living alone helps too. I get no complaints about my running around in a tee shirt and skivvies. (In winter it is set at 65, which is what layered clothing, shawls and lap robes are for.)
You wouldn’t be happy with the temperature range in TUL these last couple of years. It’s been more like 20-30 days over 100, dip down below for a day or 2, and then back up.
TUL, for those non-Oklahomans among us, is 90 miles NE of OKC and we’re supposed to be a little cooler.
I wouldn’t expect it would have much different weather from OKC, myself. (As a California native, I find green in summer to be strange. And also forests on relatively flat land – aren’t they supposed to be on the sides of mountains?)
P J Evans, TUL is hilly, OKC quite a bit flatter.
We are sufficiently warm usually that all we might need is a blanket late at night (please don’t throw things at me! :D) Our house doesn’t have any type of heating. We retrofitted our house for window a/c units; a large 220V 18000BTU one in the main living area, and 2 smaller ones in the bedroom and computer room. It might — barely! — make sense to have put in central air, but the house is small, we have ceiling fans all over, and we would have had to run ductwork. I honestly don’t need much a/c, and have been known to happily work in temperatures that would wilt anyone but a Tuareg.
It’s so strange, but probably a good thing! that humans are so varied in what they like. I run about in just a sweatshirt in the 40’s, find the mid-50’s a quandry as to whether to wear a teeshirt with a light jacket, or just what. By the time the weather hits the 80’s I’m flagging, and the fact I endured (and worked in) 100 plus weather…it’s just like walking into a wall.
On another topic: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578340752088305668.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
might have some ideas about marketing ebooks.
It’s a crazy market that’s more willing to pay for short stories than for novels, even at the same price. Of course, they may not be the people that buy regular books. One wonders if the endangered species might not eventually be paperbacks, as the least permanent sort of copy, and fairly expensive relative to what they used to be. Back when, a 60,000 to 80,000 word paperbound was 35 cents, and now the same, at 120,000 words is, what, pushing 9.00? That’s quite a price increase. Hardbounds were once about 10.00-12.00. So they’ve doubled in price, but paperbounds have really jumped up there.
Basically the gentleman has done two things: dipped into the disaster market, which also touches sf dystopian, and started in the short-fic market.