[BabyPeanut]

Drive three miles round trip to the box store in compact car to buy an EnergyStar appliance. Good or bad?

I did that today.

[WisJim]

Three miles: you could have walked or biked

Compact car: you could have walked or biked, but better than a gas hog

Box store: Bad, bad; support the local small business instead. The big box store won't provide the service in the future that the locally owned store will

Energy Star appliance: Did you really need it, or just want it?

[NeoPeasant]

Did you go just for the appliance or was it one item among many in a shopping trip that couldn't be put off any longer?

[aahala]

A three mile trip in a compact car is not likely to consume more than
the equivalent of 10K of electricity and just about any upgrade in the
efficiency of an appliance can save that in a few months.

So I think BabyPeanut deserves an energy savings ribbon. I don't have
such an icon in front of me, so make do with a wink.

[BabyPeanut]

Three miles: you could have walked or biked

Buy me a bike! Make sure it can haul a small EnergyStar appliance!

[BabyPeanut]

Did you go just for the appliance or was it one item among many in a shopping trip that couldn't be put off any longer?

The appliance could not wait. I did buy a second impulse item when I was there. Both were made in China.

[BabyPeanut]

A three mile trip in a compact car is not likely to consume more than
the equivalent of 10K of electricity and just about any upgrade in the
efficiency of an appliance can save that in a few months.

So I think BabyPeanut deserves an energy savings ribbon. I don't have
such an icon in front of me, so make do with a wink.

Details:

It was a Home Depot and a LG (Life's Good!) de-humidifier to deal with the water that the incompentent bumble boob of plumber caused to get in the walls and disolve a bit of the latex foam insulation from the walls.

I set the dehumidifier to 70% (the wettest setting) and low fan (the least energy but the most time.) The house is sealed except for the vent in the upstairs bathroom that some Sears idiot put in on an angled ceiling long before I bought the house. There's a trapdoor in the ceiling fan that shuts when the fan is off. The angle causes the door to always be open. #uckers. I can cram wadded up plastic bags in it but I'm seriously trying to dry out the walls at the moment. Plus the new dehumidier was exhuding some funny "new appliance" smell that seems to have passed.

[strider3700]

how many watts/hour for the dehumidifier at those settings? How much was the one it replaced?

Since it sounds like you didn't replace an existing one but needed this one It's all bad due to an original construction issue (something let moisture into the walls and now you need to expend energy to correct it)

Now if you don't get the moisture out you'll get mold and need to replace/repair the walls expending lots more energy(go ahead ask how I know)

So beat the contractor for wasting energy but you probably can keep the ribbon for saving energy by fixing something rather then throwing it away.

[BabyPeanut]

how many watts/hour for the dehumidifier at those settings? How much was the one it replaced?

Never had one before.

The important thing to remember is the house is valued at more money than anything I will ever have. Naturally I'm going to use electricity to protect my investment. If its all so simple, cut-n-dry and easy where's your beautiful brick-n-block 1946 split-foyer bungalo house with the raised ceiling over the masonary fireplace on a terraced hill on a parkway overlooking a creek?

I did end up running and running the dehumidifier today but it's got so much water to catch up on now that the bonehead plumbing mistakes are a thing of the past. The only good news is that I held off on all interior plaster/drywall/painting so I didn't have good work destroyed by total dork plumbers. Oh and it was under warrentee so they didn't charge me to fix their errors.

Still my average monthly electric bill this year is only about $56 dollars despite yet another price hike in July of this year.

[BabyPeanut]

The dehumidifier has a timer with three modes:
* no timer
* on two hours then off two
* on four hours then off four.

so it's 50% power mode.

[evilmonkeyspanker]

Is it bad, that I am building my new computer with a 500 watt power supply?

[BabyPeanut]

Is it bad, that I am building my new computer with a 500 watt power supply?

Buy a kill-a-watt meter and plug your computer into that and then you will know how much power it draws. I'll bet you $500 and a foot massage that it's not using 500 watts unless you have a very old computer with a huge rack of disk drives (RAID-5?)

Actually, I have a huge old DEC Alphaserver 1000A with a built-in storageworks disk drive rack somebody gave me for free. I stopped using it. Now to get rid of it. There are boxes and bags of crap I'm getting rid of in the "staging area" now waiting for Wednesday when they will be moved into the garbage area outdoors so it's just a matter of time. I got rid of the Sun3/60 to a enthusiatic young person and the DEC Vaxstation to a geek. I still have the free SPARCstation-4. Anybody want an old clunker un*x workstation?

[Googolplex]

Is it bad, that I am building my new computer with a 500 watt power supply?

Not necessarily. If its an up to date gaming machine it could very easily use the whole 500 watts at peak load considering todays power guzzuling processors and, especially lately, video cards. And it will be at peak load pretty much the whole time during those long hours blasting your way through Half Life 2 or whatever you may play.

If its not a monster gaming machine though, or a monster server with lots of disks or some such, then yeah, 500 watts is probably way overboard.

[0mar]

Most computers consume about 250 W including the monitor. Leaving everything on your computer for ~4 hours costs 7-11 cents depending on where you live in America.