The Heat Is On
So far this year I have written about 325 blog stories. I used to write more than one per day (especially on weekends) but I have mostly stopped that practice because I don’t want to wear myself out. Obviously, writing is not physically demanding, but there really is only so much in the tank to say and I neither want to churn out really shitty prose nor overdo it to the point of making myself less eager to write. Of those stories, I figure I wrote 20% of them (65 or so) from the desk in my hot tub. That’s right, I often write from my corner perch in the hot tub, using a desk I have fashioned from black heavy-gauge plastic I bought on the internet, specifically for that purpose. I cut the plastic (which was being sold as a commercial display stand) to fit snugly over the spa coping and it became my spa desk. I am not one of those 104 degree hot tub people, which is good since you aren’t supposed to stay in that type of hot water for more than ten to fifteen minutes. Instead, I keep the spa at more or less body temperature and rarely higher than 100 degrees. That gives me the ability to stay in the spa pretty much as long as I want and write my stories. I don’t know if I think better or write better from my spa desk, but I do like my hot tub and am a frequent user whether I am planing to write or not. If someone asked me what I liked most about retirement and being out here in California, I would probably include my hot tub in the top five things.
All year, as I have sorted out the workings of this new home, I focused my attention on the electricity use of the house. The solar, the Tesla batteries, getting the Nest thermostats working properly so that the air conditioning in the three zones of the house went on and off as they were supposed to and both kept us cool and financially solvent. It took some learning and doing to get it all right, but I now know that there will be no billing surprises at the beginning of the month since I can track gross usage, solar generation, battery usage and net usage. In fact, I would suggest that I am so comfortable with it all that I only rarely check the Tesla app to see how I’m doing. The amount of money at risk is now so small that it seems wasteful to focus too much time on it. The propane system of the house has been another matter altogether. The decision to go solar with the electricity was prompted by several monthly bills approaching one thousand dollars. But in the first ten months of this year, my propane deliveries have totaled more than $5,000, which makes me think that propane is my new utility mission. Granted that is only up 50% from 2019, which, given the paucity of visits to the house then makes that understandable. The users of propane in the house are far fewer than the users of electricity, the principal ones being the stove, oven, dryer, hot water heaters, furnaces and the hot tub heater. I am led to believe that the hot tub is the biggest offender, but I cannot quantify that yet. I suspect everything else combined adds up to about what the spa heater uses.
When I started the year, I was, for some reason, most inclined to go into the hot tub in the morning. That was nice for a while, but when the heat of summer rolled in, I found that a 90 degree hot tub was a nice cooling experience in the sunshine of the afternoon. I went so far as to buy a cantilevered umbrella (which I have recently installed on a newly built stand on the southwest corner of the spa). The good news for propane purposes was that the spa was more or less heated to 90 degrees by the sun and very little heating was required during the summer for afternoon bathing. But it took me some time to adjust the operating schedule of the spa so I was heating the hot tub every morning for two hours whether I was using it or not. I sort of knew that was not energy efficient, but the granular costs never seem so bad until they have accumulated over the course of a month and a tankful of propane. I’ve now decided that the regular daily heating schedule should be late afternoon since it is most efficient and I am finding its a nice way to end the day. Guests also are generally more inclined to use the spa on an afternoon or evening schedule.
Recently, I had the experience of running dry on propane. I’m supposed to have a regular and automatic refill that is supposed to avoid that, but this being a new year of full-time residency, the propane service’s algorithm (that’s fancier than the simple estimate they probably used) didn’t work and we ran out. No hot water was the giveaway. AmeriGas came first thing in the morning and filled the tank, but apparently once there is air in the lines, a service call is needed to get pilot lights going for some of the appliances (others do this automatically). We got everything going within 12 hours and all was well. It did give rise for me to ask what I could do to keep better track of my propane levels and usage. It seems there is an AmeriGas program to install “telemetry” on all tanks like mine, but this is a process and I could not discern where I stood in the long line of people wanting the functionality, which supposedly includes an iPhone app. I thought maybe my little run-in on empty experience might allow me to jump the queue, but no luck so far.
And then, a few days ago my spa heater stopped working. Or, to be more accurate, I couldn’t get it to heat up higher than 70 degrees, which is functionally like the heater not working. I left messages for several days with my spa service guy, who has taken care of the spa for the nine years I have owned the house and installed the spa. When he finally got back to me, he said the old heater was just “worn out”. That begged many questions about why he couldn’t anticipate this issue rather than have it just fail, but texting on service issues is far less helpful to the client than it is to the service person. When I Googled spa heaters, they tell me their useful life is 7-10 years, so my nine year-old failed system seemed about right. I then asked about a combined propane and solar heating system (my neighbor Winston has such a system, which I think he jury-rigged himself). Again, I’m not sure why I have to make these suggestions instead of a top-notch spa service person knowing exactly what I should consider, but I do. My guy not only liked my idea, but once he learned from my text that I have solar and Tesla batteries, he suggested a hybrid system that operates on a dual basis with a propane 110,000 btu heater and a 110,000 btu electric heat pump that can operate separately or together or automatically optimizing based on criteria I can supposedly set. You know that I am going to have to get smarter about the speed versus cost of propane and heat pump, factoring in the $2.64/gallon propane cost and the virtually free solar kilowatts I am generating.
So now, in addition to the structural engineering and carpentry work I need to engage in on the deck, the low-voltage landscape lighting work involving multiple transformers and such, the stone and metal sculpture work of my bison project, the heat is now on to get the heat back on. Ah, the pleasures of retirement and home ownership. Not enough to push me towards one-stop assisted living, but enough to make me understand why others opt in.