Skip Navigation
Anyone else’s xcel bill double what it was a year ago?
  • Honestly, no. I’ll credit three things - first, I trained my family to have the fear of god of the high-tier TOU charges. Second, I programmed my power-hungry devices to not run during on-peak. And third, we had a pretty mild summer up until this past week or so.

    My last two excel bills have have $95 and $98 for a central air conditioned 1600 sq ft house.

    The modifications I made to get here: ~ I put ceiling fans in every room that we spend a lot of time in. Bedrooms and living room. They’re on 24/7 and the very slight breeze is really helpful in making it feel a degree or two cooler than it actually is.

    ~Whole house fan. I have mine connected to my HomeAssistant and evaluating every hour if it should run for ten minutes. I leave a secured basement window open, so it exhausts the hot attic air and sucks cooler basement air upstairs. Once the sun sets and the exterior temp is lower than my upstairs temp, it will run all night until the sun rises and the exterior temp is greater than the indoor temp.

    My A/C rarely runs more than an hour or so a day. There have been a few days where I ran it for hours to try and cool the house for guests and a few days where it was a little stuffy around 5PM while we waited for the sun to set, but it hasn’t been too bad.

  • "Why im here" rule
  • I miss the local community Reddit has/had - meaning vibrant town/city subreddits. The one for my town here on Lemmy is just one dude (@ickplant you’re doing your best) but it just doesn’t have the critical mass.

  • Colorado lawmaker wants to ban seclusion rooms in schools as Denver investigation continues
  • I agree locking kids into rooms is not a great way to handle this situation, but what other kind of tools are school admins given? As we’ve clearly seen, even students as young as middle schoolers are such trouble that they’re charged with attempted murder. So, they can’t send them to a different school, but they’re also not allowed to do anything to keep the rest of the student population safe? Got it.

  • What Are Some General "Buy It For Life" (Durable) Items You Recommend?
  • Yes! That’s it - Matfer. I think America’s Test Kitchen recommend them and I’d follow ATK off a cliff on kitchen advice. So far, the pans have been fantastic, but I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot to go wrong with a carbon steel pan.

  • Back to the land: are young farmers the new starving artists? | A growing movement of millennials are seeking out a more agrarian life, but the reality is not always as simple as they hoped
  • I think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.

    I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.

  • What Are Some General "Buy It For Life" (Durable) Items You Recommend?
  • Bonus points if you budget a little extra and make friends with a local upholster. They can work magic in turning that solid, but ugly, chair from something your grandma would have to something you might find in a design magazine.

  • What Are Some General "Buy It For Life" (Durable) Items You Recommend?
  • Carbon steel pans. You season and treat them like cast iron, but they develop a beautiful, smooth, non stick surface. I just made two over easy eggs in mine. They’re basically all I use anymore - no PFOx, no muss.

    I thought I bought two from a French company that started with an ‘M’ but I can’t figure out which brand 😂

  • Democrats worry their most loyal voters won’t turn out for Biden in 2024
  • Your dream is Harris?! Shit, no. No, no, no.

    My hope is that Biden is staying in the race until the 11th hour to be the lightening rod and the dems have someone better to step in.

    Of course, that would require some intestinal fortitude and a few brain cells and I don’t think the dem leadership has that.

  • Post launch day chat
  • Yep - I bought sync way back in the day and paid less than $5 for it. Used it for years and years across multiple devices until I switched to iOS. I got my moneys worth for sure - $20 seems like a bargain.

  • “Forever chemicals” flowing from Suncor into Sand Creek spike as Colorado weighs renewal of key water-quality permit
  • I’m certainly not immune to using petroleum products …but man, can this refinery get bent or what? They're constantly going over limits, they had the explosion last year, and the PR person won’t comment because they got hacked? What the hell kind of Mickey Mouse operation are they running over there?

    Suncor needs to go.

  • I replaced a car trip with RTD. It sucked.

    I'll start by saying - I really love(d) RTD. I rode it nearly every day for almost ten years - sometimes combined with walking, sometimes with a bike, and often combining buses and trains.

    I appreciated the convenience, how it mostly was reliable and on time, and how I could do other things while being whisked to my destination. There was a small price to pay in terms of speed (it rarely was faster than driving) and convenience (first and last mile is always a consideration) but overall, it was a good tradeoff.

    The stars lined up for me today - I needed to travel across town to I-25 and Lincoln and I had a ride there but not back. Since RTD is free at the moment, I figured I would give it a go and see how they were doing. I haven't been riding much in the last three years and almost none in the last two.

    First strike - the track work has totally fucked up the SE light rail lines and RTD is doing a poor job of communicating that to anyone who isn't totally on top of it. The train was late (~5 minutes, forgivable) but didn't go where I wanted (Peoria). I routed downtown and around to use the A-Line. That added a lot of time to my trip. And this shit is scheduled to go on through OCTOBER?!

    Credit where it's due - the trains were clean and (mostly) void of tweakers. Lots are riding with a dog, though - at least three clearly non-service animals rode with me today. Aside from one half-tweak having a very loud conversation about his dog, it was mostly what I remember from the before days - quiet people trying to go places sprinkled with a handful of raver kids headed to Global.

    **But it is SO SLOW. SO. SLOW. ** God, it is slow. The same drive would have taken me 40 minutes in the heaviest traffic imaginable. I walked in my door after an hour and 55 minutes. Almost three times longer. It's too fucking slow. And the headways are unworkable. Half an hour between trains? What? No. Even if RTD lowers the fares (yay! a good move) it desperately needs to make the system more efficient because I don't know anybody who's going to go for a commute that's three times as long, even if it's substantially cheaper.

    Thanks for coming to my Ted talk, happy Friday, y'all.

    1
    If RTD fucks up moving all the swifties, they’ll be well and fully dead to most people

    Conversely, if they can move two straight days of free fares with the biggest game in town it might be the very beginning of a redemption arc*

    *probably not, but a guy can hope

    3
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TH
    themeltingclock @lemmy.world
    Posts 2
    Comments 40