From the Mind of Trevor Stone

My funemployment priority last fall was getting a heat pump installed before the end of the year so I could take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act's tax credits, before Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill increased taxes on energy saving systems. As a perennial procrastinator I managed to get everything in under the wire, wrapping up a week before Christmas and just a few working days before the end of the tax year. Despite IRS deadlines being the spark to get my butt into gear, by far the largest savings came from Xcel Energy's incentive programs. I saved $2,000 on my taxes on the heat pump and $1,000 for improving insulation, but Xcel gave a $6500 rebate on the heat pump, a $3000 rebate on insulation, and a check for $2500 because I did three efficiency projects in a year. So if you're considering energy efficiency upgrades to your house, don't let the death of tax benefits dissuade you: you might still be able to get it installed at a significant discount.

For anyone interested in a home energy project, step one is to get a home energy audit. Xcel offers these at reduced cost: I paid a little over $100 for an expert to spend a couple hours at my house identifying thermal leakage, checking furnace combustion, measuring air-changes-per-hour (which is the main way your house looses heat), and he probably installed at least $100 worth of free LED lightbulbs. This audit also unlocks the Xcel rebate program. It was scheduled about a month ahead of time last year, so get on it early. While you're waiting for that to happen, talk to a free advisor at Go Electric Colorado who can talk in depth about home electrification and efficiency options, navigating rebate programs, and providing a neutral assessment of project bids. One important thing I learned from the energy audit was that Xcel will only give a heat pump rebate if the insulation project happened first; otherwise they assume the heat pump system was oversized. It's also crucial to use companies on Xcel's approved vendors list; otherwise you won't get a rebate. I went with Independent Power for the heat pump project; they were great to work with, and had a lot of experience in the HVAC space. I also had a good experience with Elephant Energy and would definitely recommend them; the main reason I didn't choose them was crew availability before the end-of-year tax deadline. Bestway Insulation had the lowest of three bids, but also did the most thorough job on the free estimate visit, and were able to schedule on short notice. "This is an Eloy job," the estimator said as he squeezed himself out of my crawlspace. "We've got a guy who's really short and skinny. He says 'I was born to either be a jockey or work in crawl spaces and attics.'"

I was looking forward to comparing this winter's energy bills with last year's to get a sense of return on investment. Unfortunately, Colorado kinda forgot to have a winter this year. On the Front Range we basically got one snow storm per month from December through March, and much of the rest of the time was often T-shirt weather, with late March spending a week in the high 70s and low 80s. So aside from a week of Stock Show Weather, the new heat pump hasn't had a whole lot of work to do.

Comparing the unseasonably warm months of November-ish to January-ish, our natural gas usage was cut by a factor of about 10 (just hot water and cooking now), while electricity use doubled (the heat pump was working hard during the single-digits cold snap). The unseasonably warm February-ish increased electricity use by 50 to 60% over November-ish, and gas usage remained decimated. The November-ish bill was about $150 for electrical and $130 for gas. January-ish was about $310 for electrical and $25 for gas; February-ish was about $220 for electrical, $30 for gas. Taxes and other adjustments are included; $7 and $11 are fixed costs for just having service. Febraury's weather was more similar to November's, so this suggests our overall energy bill is similar after the change, given fixed per-unit utility prices.

This is a bit surprising, since with a conversion rate of roughly 29 kilowatt-hours per therm, our total consumption of units of energy dropped by more than half. Electricity is currently billed higher than an equivalent kWh of gas, and a kilowatt-hour of gas burned at a power plant delivers less than one kWh to your meter, of course. This does highlight that the time horizon for a payoff for energy efficiency projects is long-term; before the project I'd estimated perhaps $30 per winter month in savings, which will take more than a decade to overcome the price differential of maintaining the gas furnace status quo. This is one reason energy efficiency tax credits and rebates are important: it's a significant up-front capital cost borne by the consumer with a slow pay-out and the public receives some of the benefits through reduced energy demand. However, market forces may act in my favor: I expect natural gas prices to increase significantly over time (with a lot of short-term spikes too), while deployment of renewables—which have nearly zero operating cost. If Xcel's gas rates rise faster than their electrical rates, I'll break even on the project sooner. (There is, however, a Jevons paradox risk that expanded cheap clean energy will induce demand for electricity, keeping prices high. This is one reason I support carbon pricing in addition to renewable buildout and transmission expansion.)

There are some non-financial benefits of this project, too. I wanted to get a heat pump in part because my house didn't have air-conditioning. Our cooling tools are a swamp cooler and an attic fan, which has been pleasant on warm days but it has trouble keeping up in the heat of summer. A heat pump provides both heating and cooling through the same mechanism, just running in reverse. Insulating the attic and crawl space has also been a big win: when days are sunny to warm up the house (thanks, sun porch!) and nighttime temperatures are in the 40s the heating system often doesn't seem to come on at all, with the house cooling down to the thermostat's room temperature by the time the sun comes up. This was particularly useful handy when Xcel cut power for 20 hours on the final day of the heat pump install; the thermostat around 70 when I went to bed and had only dropped to about 65 the next morning. The air-sealed crawl space also means the bathroom tile floor isn't so chilly on bare feet headed to the toilet in the morning.

The heat pump is also a lot quieter than the gas furnace was. A heat pump can run at slow speed to pull latent heat inside from the outdoor air, then blow that air into the house to keep it a consistent temperature. A gas furnace must periodically start a fire, then blow a bunch of air that's significantly hotter than room temperature around before dousing the fire and waiting for the house to cool below the thermostat setting. The furnace cycles and air movement was pretty noisy, with an air return vent in our living room. Getting warm air meant it was harder to hear the radio, or we'd turn up the TV. Now I often don't notice the heat is on unless I step over a vent. I do sometimes miss the very-hot air rising from the floor, though. When you come in from a cold and wet snow adventure it's nice to be able to temporarily turn the thermostat up one or two degrees and then stand over a vent to quickly warm up. When I was a young kid, my mom would turn on the furnace when I got out of the bath and have me lie next to the bathroom floor vent with a towel over me while she narrated my adventure as a cloud rising over the Pacific and blowing east, dropping rain on the mountains. I also used to wake up in the morning and lie next to the long register in the living room and marvel that I could hear my parents through the duct work in their bedroom downstairs. The efficient "maintenance warm air" from the heat pump doesn't give quite the rosy feeling. Fortunately when the sun's out I can use our sun porch when I want to emulate a heat-seeking feline.

March through June in Colorado have been a lot wetter than the norm over the last three decades. The last time I remember this much rain (excluding the 2013 freak flooding event) was 1990, which I remember as the year of rained out Little League games.

July seems to have dried out a bit, but it's still been an unusually water-themed month for me.

On July 4th we watched the Boulder fireworks show… and an impressive night-time thunderstorm to the south from the 4th-story café balcony at my office.

On July 5th I was at home getting ready to gather letters to Congress before the Dead and Company show. With about 30 minutes of prep left to do I noticed there was a funny sound coming from our utility closet. Upon investigation I discovered that the hot water heater had sprung a leak about a foot from the top and was spraying water on the wall behind it. I turned off the inflow to the tank and called around to find a plumber who could show up on the Friday of a 4-day weekend. When we bought the house we knew the tank was old enough to need replacing, but we hadn't gotten around to it because we wanted to investigate tankless water heater options. I learned from the plumbing and heating guy that a tankless system would require boosting the gas capacity in the pipes that go all the way across the house, plus new venting.
This resulted in around a $8,000 estimate for a tankless heater compared to $2,000 for a tank heater. Doing some gas expenditure estimates, it didn't seem likely that $8k over 20 years would come out ahead of $2k every 10 years. This is a bummer, since water heater tanks are a pretty inefficient use of greenhouse gas-producing fuel. Fortunately it was pretty clear that the leak hadn't been going on for too long, so we actually managed to dodge a big mess of having 40 gallons of water bust through a rusted bottom.

With the water heater problem staunched for the moment, I headed to the Dead show about an hour before showtime; leaving the letter collecting for the next day. It had been a super-hot day and the sky seemed pretty clear, so I opted to leave my light jacket in my bike bags. Since I got to Folsom Field close to show time I decided not to jockey for a front-row seat and instead figured I'd have plenty of room to dance if I picked a seat in the second level, facing the still-hot sun. Some clouds moved in and there was some foreboding clouds to the west, but it looked to me like they were going to head north of the stadium. A light rain started a minute or two before the band took the stage and opened with "Not Fade Away." The rain picked up a little bit and I was still feeling warm and dry, though started to question my "don't bring the jacket" decision. The band played "Cold Rain and Snow" and the rain picked up a bit, but the now-rapid cloud motion still looked like it might miss us. Wishful thinking.

As "Cold Wind and Snow" ended, Bob Weir announced "We've got a little weather situation, so we're gonna take five." The PA system announced that everyone should head to one of the designated shelter areas… and the sky opened up with big rain drops, turning to hail. I was stuck in a crowd of people trying to stream through one of the tunnel "gates" from the seating area to the outside of the stadium, but the people in the front of this liquid tube of humanity decided to stop once they got inside the tunnel. Getting out of this crowd wasn't feasible, it was probably 10 people thick in an 8-person aisle width, so the wave slowly pushed from the back and we inched forward while getting pelted with pea-sized hail. Eventually the message reached the folks inside the short tunnel that they were blocking egress and the middle cleared out enough that the crowd pushing from behind could slip out. My felt Uncle Sam hat had somehow kept my head fairly dry, and I was still warm, so I calmly walked across streaming puddles to the Balch Fieldhouse, which was now a hot and humid huddle of Deadheads. Everyone was pretty chill, though, and folks made orderly use of the bathrooms and bought pricey food from vendor stalls.

After more than an hour we were back outside and the band took the stage again. They picked up in the middle of "Cold Rain and Snow" which I thought was a brilliant touch. After a few songs, Bobby announced that due to the rain delay they weren't going to take a traditional intermission. Since the early-to-mid '70s, Grateful Dead shows have had a loose first-set/second-set formula. The first set typically has shorter, lyrical songs while the second set typically features a couple long jams, plus the drums and space interlude. Without an intermission (or with a 2-song first set, if you'd like), there wasn't a clear boundary and "first set" songs started sounding more like "second set" material, with three straight amazing jams from "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo," "Cassidy," and "Deal" which I don't usually think of jam songs, and they flowed beautifully into "Box of Rain" (always a big crowd favorite, it got a big cheer from the damp auditorium), with a nice China-Rider, followed an epic Terrapin Station into Drums/Space into "Casey Jones" into "The Other One" into "Morning Dew." While my Dead-related concert attendance list is fairly short, I don't think I've been at a better show.

On Saturday the 6th I dragged myself slowly through the morning. I got involved in a very detail-oriented and not-at-all crucial prep task for my letters-to-congress project. By the time that was done and I'd gotten the rest of my act together it was getting close to 4pm and I was feeling low energy. But I'd been planning to do this for so long that I shouldered my backpack and headed up to campus… where I sat at a picnic table for five or ten minutes and sighed as I realized I really didn't have it in me to start meaningful conversations with strangers for two hours. So I biked back home, tossed my backpack on the couch, made a slight costume change, and headed back to The Hill for a pre-concert burrito. As I came up from the Broadway underpass I saw something ticket-shaped face down on the concrete. I figured it was someone's receipt or a ticket for the previous night's show, but upon picking it up I discovered it was a ticket to tonight's show. I looked around and didn't see anyone nearby, so it hadn't been just dropped. So cool—free show as a reward for respecting my personal energy limit. (Given the ridiculously high service charges for concerts at Folsom Field I didn't feel too bad about not paying.) Before hitting up Illegal Pete's I noticed Albums on the Hill, another old haunt, and managed to find 10 decent used CDs which apparently now just costs $35 bucks. Music prices have gone in two different directions in the last decade :-/

I brought my jacket to the Saturday show, but it was bone dry. I loved several selections, including an opening Scarlet/Fire, a couple beautiful slow and sweet songs, closing the second set with "Not Fade Away" (making it a two-day-long NFA sandwich :-) and a gorgeous "Ripple" to start the encore. It didn't quite have the same magic as the prior show, where we'd all unspeakingly bonded over the warm rain and hail. I ran into a coworker in the parking lot while I was on a tie dye hunt, though, and had a great post-show decompression.

Stay tuned for the next phase of adventures in a wet July, featuring more water heater problems, lawn problems, and a thunderous massage.

Yesterday's forecast was for "rain in the metro area, snow in the mountains." But in the clouds and all-day downpour it wasn't clear how disturbingly accurate that was.

This morning I began my commute by heading west from suburbia. The arched backs of the foothills were white, dotted by evergreen trees drying off from a shower. The front-most hills were merely sprinkled with powdered sugar, a green sweet loaf waiting for a hiker's dessert. The aptly named Red Rocks Amphitheater spread its auburn wavelength proudly, reminding passersby that soon the benches would replace the sky's deposit of snow with rock fans raising their arms and cries in a heavenly direction.

Heading north, I saw that Green Mountain had been rechristened White Mountain, a smooth blob of shortening atop seasonally lush green fields, the snow stopping approximately as the slope leveled. The drive up C-470 was not unlike a summer trip up Trail Ridge, but instead of passing the enchanting timber line I instead crossed an eerie snow line -- for a hundred yards the right side of the highway kissed the gossamer snow sheet.

The mountains stretched north from Golden, a white wall delineating the watered daily world from the snow-covered land of adventure. But Golden's guard to the east, South Table Mountain, sat resplendent in its green dress, not a speck of dandruff to be seen.

Some say that on Samhain the veil between the worlds is thinnest, that we may catch a glimpse to the other side. Yet this morning, early Beltane season, I have passed through the very edge of winter as I passed from one point of spring to another. Perhaps masculine and feminine are not blue and pink but white and green.

My morning commute reaches its apex at the offramp from C-470 to I-70. This is the last mountain slope on EB I-70 until Appalachia and there's a stretch of several miles which affords a clear view of the Denver metropolitan area. Often as I head for my office I am saddened to see the infamous Brown Cloud covering about one degree of arc along the eastern horizon and wishing I could practically take the bus and reduce that cloud.

Today, I saw no brown cloud. As usual, the Jefferson County skies were crystal clear, but the fluffy white clouds were 30 degrees below their usual position. I could see through a gray fog mingling among Denver's downtown skyscrapers. Along the Platte valley and covering Adams county sat a cotton comforter not quite as thick as a water tower. A few cumulus formations rose up, a knee pushing up the blankets as Aurora and Commerce City slept through their alarm.

5 to 50 in 24 hours. Colorado's a meteorologic sports car.