In the garden, and RAIN!!!!
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, December 25, 2025 04:27
VIEWED: 1005090
PAGE 224 of 1154
Hope you can sleep soon. I've got to sign out now. Up way too late and a lot of stuff to do tomorrow. Going to see the dentist for my cleaning.
I might turn the fan off now. It's 67 on the 2nd floor, so it's probably 62 on the first floor and I forgot how cold that starts getting. lol. Going to have to bundle up now.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Morning here and I got stuff to do today.
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Hmmmmmm....
I wonder if I can use one of my existing digital timers for the blower or not. Probably not safe. I'll have to do some research on it.
In the mean time, as nice as it is putting that on every night, I might have to only use it every 4 or so nights unless we get another grueling heat wave.
I just got my bill for the month and it's about $15 higher than it should be. Says my daily electricity costs were 41 cents more per day than last month. It'd be worth it to me to pay 50 cents a day to keep that blower on every night, but that 41 cent a day bump was spread over 33 days and I only had that thing going all night for what... 5, maybe 6 nights?
I can't think of anything else I've really done differently other than running a few house fans more than last month. It's possible that this blower costs me $2.50 to $3.00 per night to run.
Nah... that can't be possible. I know the thing is ancient, but there's no way it's drawing that much power. An average blower should only be drawing about .5kw/hr. I'm not sure what my cost per kw/hr is, but even giving an extremely conservative 14 cents per kw/hr, that would require running it 200 hours to make $14. Even if it was a monster and used a full kw per hour, that would take 100 hours to equal $14. And chances are the cost to me is more like 10 or 11 cents per kw/hr. (I'll have to check my bill).
I had to have done something different this month that I'm not thinking about.
Would love to get a timer based solution that only turned it on between the hours of 3AM and 7AM for maximum benefit.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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It didn't occur to me until now to keep a record of how many hours I had the thing running...
I'm surely going to do that any time I run it in the future.
Two things I did figure out. My power company no longer tells you how much they charge for electric and just give some bullshit statement about usage and whatever it's costing them being passed on to the consumer. Strange. They still tell you what you're paying per unit of gas though.
Doing a little math, I figured out that they charged me 12.2 cents per kw/hr (this month).
I also didn't see anything on the blower about wattage, but it says that it's 1/2 horsepower. Converting that gives me 0.37285 kw. So 1/2 horsepower/hr = 0.37285 kw/hr.
So...
The blower uses less juice than I had imagined it did, and the cost of energy is nearly 2 cents cheaper than I was accounting for.
It should only be costing me less than 5 cents per hour to run that thing. (0.454877 cents, but let's call it 5 for simplicity sake).
I went back here and saw that I put it together on the 17th. The meter reading was on the 22nd during the day (so we can't include the 5 or so hours I had it running last night). There was also a night that I didn't turn it on at all because it was cooler in my house than it was outside all night long.
That leaves 4 nights of running it.
I'm just going to guesstimate that I ran it 12 hours on average those 4 nights.
That's only $2.40 in total, or 60 cents per night.
If I ran it 12 hours per night, every night, it should only run me $18 per month.
I had to have been doing something else with my electric. I know I left a few overhead florescent lights in the garage on a few nights. (OOPS!) I've also been using some power tools here and there, but that shouldn't be much.
Yanno what? It's probably that I'm home more without working and the TV and peripherals are on more. That might have added $12 or so bucks to the bill right there.
I'd appreciate it if anybody who knows about electric and can math well can verify what I've written here. I think I'm going to keep using it this month, but I'll just do some better record keeping of how long it's on.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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"I'd appreciate it if anybody who knows about electric and can math well can verify what I've written here."
But that's like work ....
Computers and TV draw more than you might think.
I don't know much about timers, so I did some preliminary looking-up. I assume the blower you plugged in is in a 120V outlet, which is the exact same as your other outlets that you plug your lights, iron, TV, etc into. The difference is how much current - amps - they draw. And since they're all at the same 120V voltage but differ in amps, and watt = amp X volt, the various things you might put on a timer differ by wattage.
I looked up Home Depot online (they just happened to be near the top of the page) and indeed different timers are meant to work at different wattages. https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-Controls-T
imers/Plug-In/N-5yc1vZc334Z1z17md8
Being lazy I googled hp to Watts conversion https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/power/hp-to-watt.html and got 372.85 Watts equivalent to 0.5hp.
So it looks like you'd need to be sure to get a timer rated for at least roughly 375 Watts.
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Yeah. It's just using a standard outlet.
My timer says on the back:
125V ac, 60Hz, 8.3A
125V ac, 60Hz, 1000W
(8.333333 amps x 120 volts = 1000 watts)
I don't think it's as simple as that though. I've read that these motors can run steady at around 5 amps, but can take as much as 20 to get started.
There certainly is more visible electric arcing to the plug than any other appliance that I've ever plugged into a wall before.
I haven't used either of my timers for anything in years. I'd risk burning it out and giving it a shot if I wasn't afraid that it would melt down one day and burn my house down.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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I went ahead and turned it on again last night for 10 hours. 10PM to 6AM this time. Got the temp from 76 degrees down to 67 degrees.
I think for now I'll just keep using it when and if I need it and just do it all manually. It's really nice to have and way better than I used to live during the summer before I did it. At 1/2 horsepower it can't be costing me more than 5 cents per hour to run it. Those additional costs must be due to behavioral changes because of unemployment. It shouldn't even cost me $18 to run it every night in a month for 10 hours, let alone 4 nights.
Timers can get pretty pricey if you want one for heavy duty loads that don't have crappy customer ratings. Plus, none of the questions or comments seem even remotely related to my application, so I can't really be sure that I'm buying a beefy enough one for the job unless I go way overboard with it.
At that point, I'm losing most of the ROI.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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"I'd risk burning it out and giving it a shot if I wasn't afraid that it would melt down one day and burn my house down."
I can see that that could be a consideration!
You might have an 'induction motor'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_motor
Sorry to say that's WAY beyond my experience. What I can tell you is that there are two types of resistance in an electric circuit - one is what we know as resistance (things that conduct DC poorly because of the nature of the materials the electricity is going through), and the other is things that conduct somewhat poorly because of the nature of the configuration of certain elements once AC current is going through them. https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae517.cfm
An inductor motor is basically just two sets of copper coils, and, as a DC conductor, copper is a dead short. So as the motor is starting up and before all the magnetic fields get established within the motor that provide impedance (AC resistance), the motor is a (near) dead short and draws a ton of electricity. You'll probably see the house lights dim as it starts up. On the other side of operation, as you're pulling the plug, all the magnetic fields that have been established start to collapse and continue to drive current - hence the arcing at the outlet.
Anyway, supposedly you can find the motor's start-up power draw rating indirectly on the face plate. There are some numbers that allow you to calculate what that is.
I think you should ask an electrician or someone knowledgeable.
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Think we got some rain over night. Things look kinda damp out.
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