Welcome To Josh's Blog O' Thoughts: June 2008

It's been approximately 36 days since I seeded my lawn so I thought it was a good time to provide another update. Let's start right off with the pictures.

The front yard:


The back yard:


Closeup of a patch of the grass at 36 days.


As you can see, I'm doing fairly well considering the circumstances we've had as far as weather. Before seeding, I was concerned that we wouldn't get enough rain to keep the seeds viable, and with the seeded area being roughly 2 acres, I didn't have the time or resources to water it all. Turned out that we had just the opposite: too much rain! So much, in fact, that most local rivers set historic flood levels. That said, I was happy that some of my seed actually made it through all that rain. I did have most of the seed in the side yards wash away so now I'm mainly focusing on the front yard and the back yard.

These pictures were taken about 2 days after I mowed it for the first time. With my mower on it's highest setting, I knew I wouldn't be cutting most of the grass, but I wanted to cut down some of the weeds so they didn't take control of the yard. In the close up shot of the grass, you can see one of the fuller areas of the yard. You can see quite a bit of good Kentucky Bluegrass, but there is also quite a few undesirable grasses that cropped up. If anyone can identify them, leave me a comment.

In some areas of the yard I have seedlings that are quite skinny and don't seem to have grown much above 1" or so. I wonder if I didn't give them enough fertilizer to start with, or if too much fertilizer washed away in the rain.

Lately, I've been watering once daily to make sure that the grass I do have doesn't die this summer. Luckily, this summer has been very mild. We've only seen a few days that got into the upper 80's. Mostly we've been in the high 70's to low 80's.

The questions I need to get answered at this point are:

1. When should I taper off the watering?
2. Should I give it some more fertilizer now to stimulate growth and filling-in?
3. Can I over-seed some smaller areas now if I baby them with watering, etc?

I'll post back when I figure out what to do!

Are you curious about how your use of home energy is affecting the environment? Ever wonder how you stack up next to the average American household? Well, ask no more! The EPA's website has some really great tools to help you figure this all out.

Let's first start with electricity. It's something we all use every single day. Chances are that your home is using some amount of electricity every single second. Even when you have all the obvious users (light bulbs, air conditioning, computers, TVs) turned off, your house is still using electricity. Many electronics devices use a small amount of electricity to run a clock or retain settings in memory. Many things that use a transformer (that would be the big clunky box you plug into the outlet that you use for charging batteries, running speakers, etc) are constantly using electricity regardless of whether or not the device is on. That said, it's obvious that electricity is MAJOR part of our home's energy use.

Since your home is using so much electricity, wouldn't it be great to know what the source of that electricity was? Does it mostly come from dirty, coal-burning plants, cleaner, nuclear power, or maybe even a renewable source such as wind or hydroelectricity. Since electricity is distributed to users via a grid system, your electricity does not come for a single source or even a single generating company. All power sources in a region are connected to the grid and combine to provide power to all areas of that region. Luckily for us, the EPA offers a web page to determine your sources for electricity. Simply, enter your zip code, select your electric company, and you will be given a graph detailing the sources of your electricity and the emission rates generated by your mix of sources.

Here is the break down for my area:


As you can see in the graph, my region (east-central Iowa) gets roughly 75% of our electricity from coal plants, 16% from nuclear, 7% from renewable sources, and the rest from other. As you can see by comparing to the green bars, my area's use of coal is higher than the national average and we are lower than average in natural gas usage. The other source types are all pretty close. I have to say that it does disappoint me a bit to see that my region is higher than average in use of dirty coal. I was hoping for a higher than average nuclear use since there is a nuclear plant very close to my city.

Looking further down the page, you can see how your particular sources of electricity rank as far as emission rates. Compared to the national average, my area has higher emission rates. This is likely due to the higher than average coal use. Again, this is disappointing for me to see.

Now that you know the emission rates for your electrical sources, you can actually use the EPA's page to calculate your personal emissions based on your sources and your usage. Just click the My Emissions link below the sources graphs. On this page, you can either enter your usage for the last 12 months, or you can enter a monthly average. Entering the last 12 months will be more accurate if you have the data available. Since I moved into a brand new house a couple months ago, I don't have a year's worth of data to use, so I will use an average of the last few months' usage.

Taking my last three utility bills, my average usage is about 1500kWh per month (the lowest being 859kWh). The EPA page says that the default for residential usage is about 900kWh per month, so it looks like I'm higher than average. However, my numbers are skewed by not having enough data and having a VERY cold Winter and Spring. I also have to remember that due having a ground source heat pump (geothermal heating/cooling), our house is ALL electric. We have no gas service so any emissions related to electricity will be all our home uses. Additionally, a geothermal system will gain some efficiency over time, so the fact that it was a brand new system during one of the harshest winters our area has had. At any rate, 1500kWh per month is about the best number I have to use right now.

After plugging in your usage number(s), hit the submit button to see your personal emission rate:


You can see that my electricity usage generates about 35,591 pounds of CO2 (carbon dioxide) per year. So now you have the amount of carbon dioxide (and to a lesser extent nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide), but what does it all mean?

We can use a third EPA web page to calculate carbon dioxide equivalencies to see how our emissions compare to other things. At the top of this page, Option 1 allows you can enter your electricity usage for the year in kWh, but doing so will use the national average electricity source mix for your emissions. Since we already calculated our source mix and our personal emissions, we can go to Option 2 and put in our actual carbon emissions from the previous page (make sure you change the unit to POUNDS not TONS!). You don't need to enter the nitrogen oxide or sulfur dioxide in the converter because are no fields for them in the conversion calculator (nitrous oxide is NOT the same as nitrogen oxide). After clicking the Calculate Equivalencies button, you will see how your emissions relate to other things.

Here's my full list of equivalencies:


It shows that my emissions come to a total of 16.1 metric tons. My electricity emissions are equivalent to the electricity-related emissions of 2.1 average homes. The means that either my electricity is dirtier than average (which it is due the coal) and/or I use more electricity than average (which I did). However, if we compare TOTAL energy usage of a home (electricity, gas, oil), I am equivalent to only 1.4 average homes. This number is lower because electricity-related emissions are my only emissions whereas the average home will also have emissions from natural gas/heating oil. That makes me feel a little better. The part that really disturbs me, is that it would take 414 tree seedlings grown for 10 years, or 3.7 acres of pine forest to offset the amount of carbon that my home is generating.

To get your total carbon output, also run the conversion for your therms of natural gas usage (if applicable), and gallons of gasoline usage using Option 1 at the top of the form. Get the total Carbon Dioxide of each of those and add them to your electric total to know your total emissions for a year. My 400 gallons of gas per year (approximately) adds an additional 3.5 metric tons of carbon, so my total carbon emissions are 19.6 metric tons for a year.

This is very interesting information. Hopefully, as I get more accurate usage information, my emissions will go down. We've already taken many steps to be energy efficient while building our home. Efficient windows and doors, thick insulation, Energy Star appliances, CFL bulbs, geothermal heating and cooling, etc. I plan to check on this again after I have more data and will post updated numbers.

If you can't reduce your usage, you also can buy carbon offsets which help energy companies get more renewable energy into the grid. Or you can do some offsetting yourself by planting trees and other plants. I currently have about 8.5 acres of grasses and about 0.5 acres of trees. If anyone can find a website that will tell me how much carbon grasses will absorb, that'd be great!

Anyone else willing to post their numbers? Leave a comment! Let's see who has the lowest carbon emissions!

Last November, I wrote a post stating my opinion that crude oil prices are in a price bubble that would eventually pop similar to the tech stocks in the early 2000's and the housing market in 2007. To me, it just seems to make sense. The VERY rapid increases in oil prices that we have seen in the past year alone can not be simply related to supply and demand fundamentals. The increases have just been too huge.

Today, Yahoo! Finance has a video interview with David Herro who was named one of the "World's Greatest Investors" in 2007. In the interview, he reaffirms my position that oil, as well as other energy commodities, WILL see a price bubble burst. After that, he expects oil to retreat to the $60-80 per barrel range. Those numbers are still much higher than they were a few years ago, but that has been SOME increase in demand since then, primarily in developing countries.

So even though we are currently paying around $140 for a barrel of oil, and around $4 for a gallon of gas, we can expect better prices to follow.

Well I thought I'd post with my latest update from approximately day 28. First the pics:

The front yard:


The back yard:


A patch that's growing well:


It may look fairly patchy, and that's because it is! But all things considered, I think it's doing pretty well. The biggest issue has been the rain. Our area here in east-central Iowa has seen record amounts of torrential rains this spring. Some storms were dropping 4-7 inches of rain in a weekend. It has hardly let up. The result has been record setting floods in virtually all towns near rivers. So considering all the rain we've gotten, I suppose I should consider myself luck to have this amount of growth.

The front and the back are OK, although patchy. This is probably because the seed washed and gathered in places. The front does have a little rut down the middle of it. The back hill which can be seen in earlier posts is also doing relatively well although patchy like the front and back. The side yards, however, were mostly a wash. They will have to be redone completely this fall.

The other day, I threw down what remaining seed I had in the front and the back to hopefully fill in the patchiness. I figured the worst that could happen is that it didn't take, and that was the guaranteed result if I let it sit in my garage. I also had about 3/4 bag of starter fertilizer with slow-release nitrogen left and I spread in the front and back to hopefully give the grass and extra "boost". I had noticed that some of the sprouts seemed a little stunted so maybe this will help.

At this point, I'm out of supplies and time so I pretty much just need to let it go and see what I can get out of it this summer. Luckily, it appears that it might be a good summer for weather. It's DEFINITELY been wet, and mostly cool. The highs next week will only be in the 70's when they would normally be in the 80's.

I will post back with more updates as they come up.

I found it interesting today that Yahoo! had two articles posted with seemingly conflicting advice.

The first article was posted in their Yahoo! Green site which is focused primarily on the environment and energy efficiency. The article was entitled Rethinking the cost of hybrid cars and was focused on showing how the added up-front expense of purchasing a hybrid vehicle can pay for itself when compared with the cost of a similar, non-hybrid vehicle. The second article, posted on Yahoo! Finance was titled When Buying a Gas Guzzler Makes Sense and focused on convincing people that a gas-guzzling SUV could be the right choice for them.

Just by looking at titles of these articles one would assume that they would be giving advice in opposite directions. But while the one does point the user toward a hybrid, the most fuel efficient car available, and the other points the user toward a big SUV, the least fuel efficient vehicle available, there is a common link between the two articles. The link being that they are both trying to save the reader money, and that your particular driving scenario dictates which purchasing decision will be cheaper overall. The basis of this decision is that hybrid cars will get MUCH better gas mileage than an SUV, but are likely to be more expensive, especially now that SUV prices are plummeting in response to high gas prices.

So which is cheaper in the long run? To simplify it, you can base it simply on initial cost and gas cost over the time you own the vehicle, and ignore additional factors such as government rebates for efficient cars, differing insurance premiums, interest rates, registration fees, etc. If you do this, it mostly boils down to one thing: mileage. How much do you plan to drive? If you drive relatively few miles, or only plan to keep the car for a short amount of time, it will be hard for you to recoup the additional cost of the higher-priced hybrid vehicle. With SUV's hitting record lows, a low-MPG SUV may actually be a better bargain if you drive relatively few miles.

Once you start to take into account other long-range factors like insurance premiums, interest rates on the loan, and registration fees (to name a few), the hybrid becomes even more enticing. Plus, there's the added benefit of knowing that you are helping do the environment good, and helping reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

My personal financial philosophy is that recurring costs are bad. If I can spend a little more up front to reduce recurring costs, it's usually worth it. Knowing this (and my predisposition to save the Earth), I would tend toward the hybrid vehicle if I was in the market for a new car. However, I don't expect that I'll ever purchase a new car, so hopefully hybrids will soon be prevalent in the used car market. When that happens, I'll be switching over.