Sabtu, 07 Juni 2014

Is it safe to turn a gas oven on and leave the door open for heat?

Q. My landlord wont turn the heat on in my basement floor apartment. (he has control and he has to pay utilities) but its so cold. So Ive been leaveing my stove open and its actually been helping with the heat I just wanna make sure i wont explode


Answer
Likely not. But you know there ARE laws about minimum temperature allowed. I can give them to you if you live in Ontario, or help you find them if you let me know your state/prov (send me a msg) That being said, we left our stove on alot for the same reason, though it was electric. There should be nothing wrong as the gas burns off, not fills your house... BUT
Don't leave it on all the time. I think you'd be safer to do most of your cooking in the oven and leave the door open when it cools down. Don't have it on with the door open. But if you cook something, by all means leave it open and let the house warm up. Even turn it on for a few minutes throughout the day.. but don't leave it on the whole day to heat the house.
Short periods of time should be no problem.. though you may want to get a carbon monoxide detector, and of course turn it off and open the door if you smell any gas!

Consider a space heater, though it has to be turned off when your not home.. Even candles throw alot of heat.. a couple tealights are enough to keep my room warm... If the temperature is below you're city's minimum, you can charge those things to your landlord!

(I don't know why everyone thinks it's so bad... It's not like car gas.. It's natural gas! It's very clean, and it would only be toxic if it weren't burned off... eurg, some people around here!)

What do you do to save money?




circa 1980


I'm inspired to ask this from an episode of Oprah today. Supposedly one lady saved $200/month on her electric bill, simply by unplugging EVERYTHING not in use!
What are some things you do? At home? Grocery shopping? Saving on gas...etc?



Answer
I use a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure how much each electricity plugged-in device in my home uses. This meter measures watts of power used at a given moment, as well as kilowatt hours used over time. I found out that my coffee maker uses 2 watts constantly just because it's plugged in, my cable modem and router each use 15 watts constantly, my printer another 40 watts, and so on. All told I think I found around 300 watts worth of electricity that was being burned 24x7, which over the course of a month, assuming you're paying $0.10 per kilowatt hour (which was my rate at the time), adds up to $21.60 per month. I switched a plug-in carbon monoxide detector to a battery-powered one; lowered the brightness on a clock radio to its minimum setting; unplugged the DVD player and television, and only plug them in when in use (which in our house is only about twice a week for a couple of hours); and put the computer equipment on a second power bar, so I can have just the desktop computer on (one power bar), or just the router, modem, and printer on (other power bar) to access from my laptop, or both.

I also measured fridge and freezer power consumption with the Kill A Watt meter and then measured the temperature inside the fridge and freezer to make sure they weren't too cold. Turns out my kids had accidentally turned the fridge freezer setting down to about -20F, way too cold! So I adjusted that as well.

All told we were able to lower our electricity consumption by perhaps 4 kilowatt hours a day, to an extremely low 8-9 kwh, which is about a quarter to a fifth of what the average family uses in my area (province of Ontario Canada). We never paid anywhere near $200 a month for electricity, so we couldn't possibly save that much, but I would guess that someone paying over $200 in electricity could probably save three quarters of it by understanding where their energy is being used and by saving as much as possible.

I've tried to share some of my insights about saving energy with a little website I've developed, links to relevant articles provided below. Also a link to a site covering the kill-a-watt meter. Hope you find them useful.




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