Comments WaterConsNYC has made

My ever-growing crush on Umbra has only been increased by the best description of a a septic system ever, including the evocative "greasy residues providing an icing atop it all."  As usual, the analysis is spot-on although in places with sewers the issue is little bit more complicated.  I work for a major eastern US city that sits at the mouth of a river and has two baseball teams.  Disposals were largely illegal there for years due to concerns about the sludge blocking sewers and increased Biological Oxygen Demand resulting in increased nitrogen inputs to receiving waters.  The sanitation folks, OTOH, were concerned about mandates to implement high-rise urban composting and their perception of the joy that would bring to our local arthropod and rodent residents. For them, disposals meant sending food waste to wastewater treatment plants where the sludge would end up as compost, fulfilling the original recycling mandate without bugs and rats.  Since even with a 25% reduction in water use since 1990 our wastewater is still relatively dilute, the BOD issue was argued to be secondary.  Our studies showed that while medium-scale use of disposals would not have significant wastewater impacts, greater implementation levels would result in unacceptable nitrogen inputs.  In any case, in dense cities with sewers the issue has another dimension or two.

A Few More Notes on Setback

Pangolin, your point is well taken but the temperatures at which mold production condensation will occur are usually 50 F/10C or lower.
Myrtoashe, I've seen the same kind of data but in the US and Canada where we almost always have central heating elderly folks with circulation problems and who sense "cold" more than folks without such problems are not likely to set their temperatures back so far. It does raise a point of whether housing regulations in northern cities that may allow landlords to set overnight temperatures back to 55F/12C are going too far. New York apartment buildings, usually with steam heating systems, are notoriously overheated.
Swolpow and Jwebb, the issue has been around for 30 years. Oak Ridge's Energy Analysis unit did major studies in the 1980's and ACEEE and ASHRAE have published a lot of technical papers on night setback.  There's lots of data and i provided a link to one of the more recent, heavily instrumented studies performed by the Canadian housing folks, who generally do very good work.  The more that temperature is setback, the greater the savings but in reality unless you're in a very cold climate or have insufficient thermal integrity, most homes will not get down to 50F/10C.  So you may set the temperature at 50F/10C but your saving won't be any different than setting it at 55F if the temperature never goes below that.  Further, temperatures of 50F or below are probably lower than most people will find comfortable.   If it's taking you several hours (as opposed to two) to bring your home back up to 68F/20C then you have significant thermal envelope problems.
Yes, heat pumps behave differently but only a tiny fraction of North Americans have heat pumps and most of them are in the southern portion of the US.  Air-source heat pumps are for homes with moderate heating loads since they turn into electric resistance heaters under 35F/2C.
Personally, I strongly recommend a programmable thermostat set for your general lifestyle and not to manually set and reset the thermostat. There are two reasons for this: 1) you have to get up at 4 am to reset the thermostat at the coldest point of the night, which is even worse than my cat getting me up at that hour to feed her, and 2) if I set back a thermostat while I go out for only an hour or two there's a good chance I'll forget to reset it when I return.  On Umbra on turning down the heat posted 12 months ago 21 Responses

Temperature Setback

First, setting back the temperature if you go out for an hour or so will provide some savings but the best way to do this is to get a seven-day programmable thermostat and program it with the general rhythm of your life.
The bottom line to your confusion is that the amount of fuel required to bring the temperature back to 70 degrees after spending the night at 66 degrees is far less than the amount of fuel needed to keep it constantly at 70 degrees full time.  As the temperature goes down the rate of heat loss decreases significantly and since the house stores quite a bit of heat, bringing the temperature back up in the morning requires less energy.  It may seem counter intuitive but there are millions of homes saving fuel in this way that provide it works.
Now, there can be a partial penalty in that if the heating water temperature is set at 200 degrees at all times, then even though the thermostat is set at 66 degrees the boiler will start up for a few minutes every hour to heat up the boiler and boiler water.  But the mass of the boiler and it water is a whole lot less than the house.  But that's why its best to have a control that has the heating system operate at lower water temperatures most of the heating season. For more www.energystar.gov On Umbra on turning down the heat posted 12 months ago 21 Responses

Fans v AC

Thanks for providing a perfect answer.

As for the person with dogs, you may not like this answer but they might be happiest with a little kiddie pool that they can plop in.On Umbra on fans versus AC posted 1 year, 4 months ago 19 Responses