I hope everyone made it through last night’s festivities unscathed. Much to my surprise, I not only stayed awake but caught a second wind at midnight and stayed up until about 1:30 or so. Rather uncharacteristically, I paced myself quite well and didn’t even feel all kinds of hung over this morning. Just tired. I thought I might stay in bed (if not actually sleep) as late as possible, but Fritzi decided that 7:00 was late enough (this despite the fact that my wife was already up and had let all the kids out already), so up I got.<\/p>\n
Speaking of my wife, she’s on-call today, so naturally she got called and is now at work trying to solve some crisis or other (basically somebody – a schmuck doctor, no doubt – decided that a patient needed to go back from whence they came, requiring that transport and who knows what else be arranged and paid for. Not exactly a simple proposition on a holiday when everything is closed). So hopefully she’ll be back before 2015 rolls around.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Fritzi snores away in his bed, content in the knowledge that I am no longer in mine. We’re sequestered away in my office, because that’s the best place to stay warm during the day after the heat gets set back down to 55°. Actually, I don’t think he really cares how cold it gets, but I do. And where I go, he goes (unless there’s a chance of food being available elsewhere, of course).<\/p>\n
Speaking of the cold weather conditions (it’s a balmy 19° right now, but we have some very cold air moving in over the next few days – from you bastids over in Minnesota, which I see is pretty much all below zero at the moment. No offense, but can’t you keep that shit to yourselves?), I decided to try the “tea light” heating system with the clay pots yesterday (it was either that, or get some work done).<\/p>\n
I have a little electric resistance heater in my office that I turn on from time to time when it gets really cold. The low setting is 1300 Watts, and I usually only need it on for a few minutes – after that, the computers keep thing warm (well, warm enough for me). But I figured, what the hell.<\/p>\n
I found a small clay pot and a bigger one to put over it. The small one had enough room to cover 3 candles, so that seemed like a good start before I invest in bigger pots (if only I was in Colorado this morning, and could invest in more pot out there). Sadly, within about a minute (or less) of covering the candles with the little pot (which did, indeed, have a hole in it), the candles went out. I really didn’t have the right configuration so, so much for that idea until I get a better setup. But, before I spent any money on it, I figured I’d do the math and see if this was actually as cost-effective a heating solution as that limey in the video<\/a> said it would be. <\/p>\n I won’t bore you with the details (I was going to, but then I read what I’d written and realized nobody wants to read that), but for the cheapest paraffin tea light candles I could find at Amazon ($8.40 for 100 weighing 1.6 pounds and using a value of 20,000 BTU\/pound of paraffin), it would cost the equivalent of 89¢ per kWh to heat with tea light candles, as opposed to about 13¢ per kWh that I pay for electricity. Not to mention that paraffin is a petroleum product and all that – though I supposed you could get beeswax or soy candles, but now you’re getting even more expensive. Even with British Guy’s way cheaper candles, it would still work out to be about 28¢ per kWh.<\/p>\n So I guess I’ll have to pass on the candle heater idea.<\/p>\n Have a good start to the New Year, and stay warm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hope everyone made it through last night’s festivities unscathed. Much to my surprise, I not only stayed awake but caught a second wind at midnight and stayed up until about 1:30 or so. Rather uncharacteristically, I paced myself quite well and didn’t even feel all kinds of hung over this morning. Just tired. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8288,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8287\/revisions\/8288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}