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| Daytime temperatures for November 21, 2015 |
Forsyth MO – Unlike some folks who
look at cold waves with some trepidation, I was actually looking forward to
the first cold wave of the season with eagerness. And, not
because I have a thing for cold arctic air, I don't. Rather, I
wanted to discover what the impact would be on my new condo I had
recently moved into would be. It is a one bedroom, small affair that
sported large sliding glass doors overlooking Lake Taneycomo from a
third story level. My balcony where the glass doors were situated
faced west and so would bear the brunt of gusty and very cold air
that slammed into my southwestern Missouri adobe on the evening of
November 21, 2015!
As you can see by the temperature
graph, the weather event was fairly gradual during the day and then
began to get colder after nightfall when the winds changed from the
southwest to the northeast, gusting to 15 mph and more! I had
retreated to my bedroom with a small Lasko space heater that was
attached to a remote thermostat set for 74ºF (the built in space heater stat isn't very accurate).
The furnace in the rest of the condo was turned down to 63ºF (a Nest controller)
as I retired to the smaller space to watch TV and to browse the
Internet. My bedroom was a space of about 13' x 12' x 8' high or a
volume of about 1248 cubic feet. I figured, therefore, that a single
small space heater would be sufficient to keep me warm.
As the day progressed, I noted that I
was using power at about the rate of a kilowatt hour per hour. That
trended out to 24 kWh's which would have been a good thing. And, in
fact, the next morning my total use for the 24 hour period was only
27.1 kWh's! Not too shabby. However, that wasn't the end of it...
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| November 22 morning |
The next morning, I arose at about 7AM
and wandered out into the general living area of the condo. I noticed
that the furnace was running and yet it still felt rather cold. A
quick investigation turned up the reason why. Air, very cold air was
infiltrating the base of both sliding glass doors! My infrared
Kintrex temperature device indicated that the temperature at the
base of the doors read near the freezing point! That was not a good
thing. A quick check of my TED Energy Detective confirmed my fears. I
had already used 12.47 kWh's since midnight! A rate that would jump my
electrical use to over 42 kWh's, and in a very short order! I needed to do
something and do it fast!
The solution, (the only one I had at that point),
was to stuff towels along the base of the doors. Amazingly that
change the spot recorded temperatures from the low thirties to a much more
sane 54ºF! A figure I
felt I could live with until I figure out a better alternative. [More on that later in the season]
All in all, this cold wave that came and went in the course of about thirty hours was a good test bed for me to get some idea of how well I would fair over the coming winter. I don't know about others, but if I can keep my electrical bills as low as possible, I'm a happy camper!
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