Plastic up the Windows

Winter is coming and your heat is going out the windows.  Every single home leaks heat out the windows and that is a fact of physics.  Cold migrates to heat and heat migrates to cold.  Even if you have top of the line insulated windows your home is still going to leak heat through every single window.  Why does this happen? Windows are an open box for heat to escape.  No installation of an energy saving window matters because the air space around the window is wide open.  But you can somewhat stop the relationship of heat going out and cold coming in and save you heating dollars.

Plastic and windows are good friends when it comes to winter heating bills.  Every home improvement store sells the plastic window insulation kits.  I happen to be a huge fan of putting plastic up over the windows. 

We have an apartment with floor to ceiling windows in the front.  There has always been a cold breeze that came through the windows even though they are tightly sealed windows for the most part.  You might ask yourself why you should put plastic up on your windows.  This is why.  Heat migrates to cold because that is science and physics.  Cold migrates to heat and this causes a reaction in the battle between hot and cold.  Cold usually wins and your heat goes out the window.  For the sake of a few dollars and a few hours of work you can save large amounts of money and enjoy your indoor heat more.

By simply putting up a plastic sheet over your windows you throw up an insulator to the heat in your home and the cold outside.  The two sides of hot and cold will still fight but there is a mediator that cancels all of their arguments for entry or exit out.  The air trapped behind the plastic warms all day long and that alone keeps your heated space from attracting to the cold windows long into the night. 

Do yourself a favor and try putting up some plastic on a few rooms that you know are cold even with the heat blasting.  Install the plastic outside of the frame of the indoor windows and woodwork.  It makes a huge difference.  An ounce of prevention for so little cost saves tons of money on your winter heating bill.

Stay warm my friends.

Papamoka

Solar Air Heater

UPDATE 11/24/12
Check the video and pictures out HERE

I’m a solar heater junkie. My prototype looks like crap but the science and data makes it a winner when it comes to solar heating. You can find lots of videos on the subject on You Tube regarding soda can solar heaters and such and I have to give the inventors of that theory on gaining free heat from the sun credit for a great idea. I don’t go to meetings for my solar heater addiction but I love the idea of free heat from the sun. My addiction is making the theory better and more accessible to the masses. Thus, I have been working on a box geared more towards the elderly and people on fixed incomes that can move a heating unit from one window in the morning to the next in the afternoon depending on where the sun is coming into their home. Having a fixed unit that just faces south has never been something I have ever been fond of. Permanent installation either. Why not move the unit as the sun moves if you are at home anyway? Why not have a system built into the solar heater that stores the heat longer when cloud cover comes in? Why not build a box that can not only be placed in a window but just moved to a sunny spot of sun that is already coming into your home? Place it by a slider door, on a living room coffee table, wherever the sun is shining into the house. If it is getting full sun then our heater will give free heat! Free Solar powered heat for you home that will supplement your existing heating system.

As Emeril says, can we kick it up a notch? My box is a simple two foot by two foot wooden box with a bunch of systems inside that retain heat and amplify heat when the sun is partly clouded. Testing on my unit and tweeking of the unit have been going on for weeks and it still is in the testing phases but I think it is a marketable solar heater design. I’m trying to keep the cost to consumers below $400 retail but the parts needed to make it totally renewable energy are high with metal pricing fluctuating daily.

Testing today in the early hours between nine AM and eleven AM facing the morning sun (East) resulted in significant results that I am very pleased with. High atmospheric clouds came and went and the unit worked like I thought it would. The backup systems of the solar heater with no moving parts or outside source of energy other than the sun to retain heat cycled in and out was amazing. Results below are after the unit was heated just by the sun for twenty minutes with high atmospheric clouds intermittently.

Testing results for 4/30/2011 Between 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM CST

Average ambient air temperature: 65.83 F
Average Air Exhaust Heat after reaching 110F Temperature: 125.99 F
Average Heat Retention System Temperature after Reaching 100 F: 113.6F
Average Heat Gain After reaching 110F ambient air temperature: 60.18F
Maximum heat gain from ambient air to heat exhaust: 70.2F

What does this mean to you? The average temperature of the heated air coming out once the unit is heated is 125.99 degrees F based on today's testing results and that is free heat from a two foot by two foot box that can be moved from room to room. Give the unit one half hour to heat up in full sun and it is pumping out the heat for free.

What I find very interesting is the cycles of the air to heat retention systems cycling plus and minus of one another in opposite directions. One goes up and the other goes down in temperature. New science results with the data for me to experiment with. I’m having a blast with it. The applications beyond just heating air are enormous! Pick a topic that relates to providing heat to a home and it works in a simple little box.

Check back soon to see when we are actually selling my toy. Free heat is good. Email us if you would like more information. Papamoka (at) hotmail (dot)(com).

Legal disclaimer: This unit will not heat your entire home but it is a kick ass supplement to whatever heating system you have when the sun is hitting the unit directly.

Papamoka

You Don’t Know What Cold Is

I’ve always considered myself a hearty New Englander. Poor weather conditions come with the turf of living in the Northeast of America. On the bright side, if you wait a minute the weather will change. All but one of my six brothers and sisters immigrated to Florida for the warmth and yes they do call when blizzards hit and brag about being out on the patio.

We had a small snow storm the other night and I was boxing up the fluffy white stuff into very compact snow balls to ship to my hateful siblings so they can enjoy our pain and suffering. I cleverly installed a launching device to throw whatever is left of my snowball in the box by the time it hits West Palm Beach right in their smug face when they open the care package.

Then I came across this on Yahoo from the AP on what the folks in central Alaska are putting up with. 60 below ZERO! No wonder there is less than a million folks living up there! The rest of them froze to death! God bless them for their stamina for not packing up the truck and moving to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, or even Florida where the temperatures are always moderately warm in comparison. So now I don’t feel so bad when it is 22 degrees out and the heating system kicks in. At sixty below zero I would be busting up the kitchen table and cooking it for heat in the friging oven. Basting it with lighter fluid from the charcoal grill every twenty minutes. Check out what Yahoo News has to say…

By STEVE QUINN, Associated Press Writer Steve Quinn – Thu Jan 8, 5:59 am ET

National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Brown said high pressure over much of central Alaska has been keeping other weather patterns from moving through. New conditions get pushed north or south while the affected area faces daily extremes.

"When it first started almost two weeks ago, it wasn't anything abnormal," Brown said.

"About once or twice every year, we get a good cold snap. But, in this case, you can call this an extreme event. This is rare. It doesn't happen every year."

Temperatures sit well below zero in the state's various regions, often without a wisp of wind pushing down the mercury further.

Johnson lives in Stevens Village, where residents have endured close to two weeks of temperatures pushing 60 below zero. - Yahoo News/AP

I don’t know about you but I get the chills just reading 60 below zero? How the hell do you insulate a home against that kind of extreme cold? The walls of the house would need to be eight feet thick and filled with the stuff to keep the cold out. How many heating systems do you need to keep up with keeping the house at a comfortable temperature? God bless the hearty folks of Alaska, I will stop bitching about the cold in New England. I'll be tossing an extra comforter on the bed just thinking about this story.

Papamoka

Plastic Up the Windows, Winter is Here

One of the biggest scams with replacement windows is the installation. You can buy a window that is supposed to save you half of your home heating and cooling costs but if they are installed half assed you get nothing. When the guys making $10 or $12 an hour to install the windows just install a window then they just install a window. Much of the savings is lost when the installers do not insulate or caulk around the outside of the jams around the new window and you might as well still have that old window in its place. All that technology in a top of the line new replacement window you just paid top dollar for is lost because a twenty cent piece of fiberglass insulation was not stuffed in the gaps of the frame by a guy or gal making $10 or $12 dollars an hour. The sales pitch was great, the end result sucks.

We rent, the house has all new double glass windows, I feel bad for the original owner of the house who probably paid a fortune for the full replacement of all the windows in a three family house. They got screwed! Every winter we have to throw plastic window wrapping over the inside of the windows to not only cover the windows but the trim around them inside the house. I fear the house is going to lift off at any moment because the sails of the plastic are always full in our double pain windows. How do you fly a three decker house? Is there even a flight school for this? Maybe the people that sell the plastic window insulation kits should cover this topic in the installation directions?

Anywho, the plastic is going up in this house and if you want to save some heating dollars then you need to throw some plastic up on your windows too. It isn’t hard to do. Every home improvement store carries the kits this time of year for all sized windows. We covered our three bay bedroom windows with a large oversized window kit. The temperature in the room rose by ten degrees or more with just the existing heating system.

It’s simple, it is inexpensive, and it saves you big bucks on your heating bill. You put the supplied double sided tape around the window trim on the wall, you pull the protecting layer off the double sided tape starting with the top edge and half way down on each side of the window, start at the top of the window with the plastic and fit it to the surrounding wall and frame of the window. Remove the rest of the protective barrier on tape as you snuggly fit it to the window. Press and seal the plastic and you did it! Done! Now all you have to do is wait for the energy savings in your home heating bill.

Frost King has a great product and I’m sure that your local home repair store has other great products that would achieve the same goal. Saving you money on your heating bill this winter is easy if you put the plastic up on the windows.

Papamoka

This isn’t your Father’s Wood Stove

Picture courtesy of Whitfield

There is no better feeling in the world on a cold fall or winter night than having a fire going in the house. With the warmth of the flames also comes a sense of well being and a calming effect to the children in your family. Not to mention the romantic side of it with sitting with the one you love and just snuggling up together in a total sense of contentment with your life. With your home warm and toasty you find relaxation comes just that much easier to your spirit.

All the worries and cares fade away as the heat from the fire lets your body unwind from whatever hectic schedule your lives have. If you have one of the old fashioned fireplaces it’s nice to look at but most of the heat from the wood is going right back up the chimney. Then again, one of the old cast iron wood stoves that you might have may be reminiscent of the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn days but the house smells of smoke no matter how well ventilated the stove is. If you own your own home and love the idea of having a warm fire to take the chill out of the house, then a wood pellet stove is something you should consider.

Wood pellet stoves are nothing like the old wood stove your father had. There is no lugging of cords of wood and waking up in the middle of the night when the temperature dips way below freezing to feed the fire. Wood pellet stoves run for hours without any other feeding of fuel other than tossing a forty pound bag in the hopper and it tends the fire for the night. You do not have to build an ugly cinder block chimney to vent the smoke and gasses from the fire because they can vent directly out through the wall of your home. Granted you have to follow your local fire code on the venting but in most cases you can vent it right out the wall.

Once upon a time we owned one and I loved it, the wife loved it and so did the kids. Nights like this where the temperature dropped down and the house had that uncanny pecking at your neck nip to it were soon warded away with the pinging sound of wood pellets dropping down into the basket that warmed the entire house.

Word to the wise before investing in a wood pellet stove for your home, make sure wood pellets are readily available from at the least three sources. In the past heating seasons many locations were not able to keep up with demand but still sold the stoves which I thought was hypocritical. I’m talking about Home Depot and Lowes whom both had truck loads of wood pellets on consignment or pre ordered. I tracked down a local farm supply store that had wood pellets listed under horse bedding? I do love my Google Search engine!

Wood pellet stoves are a renewable energy resource and in that sense I back them one hundred percent. When I first had my wood pellet stove the cost to heat my home in New England was less than half as much cheaper. That may not be the case anymore so you should research the cost of pellets for five or six tons per heating season versus your current heating source. I used five or six tons of pellets to heat an 1800 square foot home because my family and I enjoyed the fire going in the living room in late September all the way into April. Your use may differ.

Papamoka

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