Dale Stephens's Blog (5)

Ok, I have had a couple programmable thermostats in the past... But, once again about 11 months ago I was doing my weekly (sometimes daily) stroll through the neighborhood 'big-box' home improvement store and back in the back past the garden section there is this little…

Background

Ok, back in November 2012 I stumbled into my local 'big-box' home improvement store with an extra $1,000 USD to burn and without any research or pre-planning I purchased 35 LED bulbs to replace my incandescent and CFL bulbs. I was way tired of continually replacing a couple CFLs time and time again and the 25,000-50,000 hours of lifetime sparked my interest and put a $1K hole in my wallet. At a burn time average of 3-hours per day that is 22-45 years of…

Background:

In 2012 we decided it was time to replace our 27-year old contractor grade double paned aluminum widows. Some of the seals had failed. Some of the window were leaking (water).

We planned to replace 19 windows initially and ended up replacing 21 in total. 11 of which were single-hung 3-0x6-0 that we replaced with double hung windows. Three had arched eye-brows and had to remain single-hung.

From my online research I was…

Background

In November 2012 I started replacing all CFL and Incandescent lighting in the home with new LED bulbs. At our local 'big box' home improvement store I purchased several (35) LED bulbs and began making the switch to LEDs. Over the past several years most of our incandescent lights had been replaced with CFLs. I was not happy with the performance of the CFLs both in terms of light quality and life of the bulb. It seems like every other month I was…

During the past 12 months (2011/2012) we have completed several energy efficiency and other projects in our home in Plano, Texas.

Background:

Brick Veneer, slab on grade home built in 1985.

Living           1938 sq. ft.

Under Roof   2560 sq. ft.

Home faces Southeast. All rooms have ceilings above 8' with ceiling treatments (vaulted, boxed, splayed,). Home built with 24 contractor-grade windows mostly 3-0x6-0. Home…