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MrYenko posted:I’d pay an extra $50 a month for FIOS. Even at the new, mystery rate you’re still paying less than I do for Comcast’s lovely cable internet service.
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Jun 25, 2018 14:34
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Moving in to our new house next month. 1Gbit up/down for ~ 45 USD / mo. We could also go broadband, which is 35 / mo for 25 mbit up/down. Wasn't even a contest.
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Jun 25, 2018 16:49
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Motronic posted:
This is making me chuckle pretty hard. On mine they "back billed" me for a change they notified me about in my "paper" bill - which they discontinued without a $2 paper bill fee. Digging through the PDF's I found their notification - of a different amount. Unwound it all, and now I'm back to getting my old rate with free paper bills.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:00
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I actually just ditched Fios for Comcast. Was not happy at all with the quality/price I was getting compared to Comcast. Lost 45mbps of upstream but I'm okay with that. Also nice to have a STB interface that was designed this century.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:10
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Struensee posted:Moving in to our new house next month. 1Gbit up/down for ~ 45 USD / mo. We could also go broadband, which is 35 / mo for 25 mbit up/down. Wasn't even a contest. For $175 a month. With a bandwidth cap. Of 500 GB/mo. 
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Jun 25, 2018 17:22
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So you could theoretically hit the bandwidth cap in a bit over an hour. Nice.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:28
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australians still pay metered service, lol but yeah other than them, America is ridiculous compared to the rest of the modern world in what we pay for high speed internet. It's basically ubiquitous and low-cost in most of western europe.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:29
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So you could theoretically hit the bandwidth cap in a bit over an hour. Nice. Gigabit (Gb) does not equal a gigabyte (GB). It's a sneaky term that companies use because they know most consumers don't know the difference! 1 Gb is equal to 125 megabytes (MB)
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Jun 25, 2018 17:30
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Leperflesh posted:Gigabit (Gb) does not equal a gigabyte (GB). It's a sneaky term that companies use because they know most consumers don't know the difference! Yes, I know. 500 GB cap is 4000GBit, which is a bit over 3600, which is the number of seconds in an hour.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:33
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The Dave posted:I actually just ditched Fios for Comcast. Was not happy at all with the quality/price I was getting compared to Comcast. Lost 45mbps of upstream but I'm okay with that. Also nice to have a STB interface that was designed this century. TiVo + Cablecard here. I haven't used a cable company provided STB in over a decade.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So you could theoretically hit the bandwidth cap in a bit over an hour. Nice.
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Jun 25, 2018 17:38
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yes, I know. 500 GB cap is 4000GBit
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Jun 25, 2018 19:34
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Speed is measured in bits per second, files are measured in bits or bytes or what not. So you could still download 1500 gigabytes of data, at 1 gigabit per second speeds, in ~3 hours 35 minutes ( http://www.download-time.com/ )
sadus fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 20:01
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I dunno it seems personally reasonable to me that I could use my entire month's worth of internet in less time than it takes to watch Apocalypse Now. #America
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Jun 25, 2018 20:21
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We can't have people actually be using the internet and getting  now can we?We have no bandwidth cap with CenturyLink DSL here, do they have caps for their gigabit stuff? We only get 7 mbit down / 1 mbit up at the very end of a copper line. Good enough for Skype but not Slack or Zoom but I still manage to work from home OK somehow. The day the new low latency satellite internet is available will be amazing. I once complained in vain to the FCC about CenturyLink people literally laughing at me when I asked when they were going to install fiber up here in the mountains. The CenturyLink lawyer who had to reply noted I was a "heavy downloader" - yeah, how is that even possible with such slow speeds. Oh well, its good enough for streaming Plex @ 720p, and even a 4k HDR movie only takes like 24-48 hours to download. Worth it to have bears and elk for neighbors
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Jun 25, 2018 21:10
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H110Hawk posted:This is making me chuckle pretty hard. On mine they "back billed" me for a change they notified me about in my "paper" bill - which they discontinued without a $2 paper bill fee. Digging through the PDF's I found their notification - of a different amount. Unwound it all, and now I'm back to getting my old rate with free paper bills. .....and it was a discount that I negotiated the last time this happened that fell off of my bill. I let them pitch me on pricing and I just got gig-e service "we call it the gig" (thanks' Verizon drone) for $99/mo - I had 75/75 before. So we both kinda won.
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Jun 25, 2018 22:05
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sadus posted:We can't have people actually be using the internet and getting
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Jun 26, 2018 06:22
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Any oddball suggestions why our power usage is so high? Our power usage for April and May (combined) was 3852 kWh which is crazy high for 2 people. I think I've checked all the normal stuff. We have no AC, all of our appliances are new efficient energy star stuff, I replaced the hot water heater with a hybrid one, our power meter is digital and I've verified the numbers, and we are a detached home so it seems unlikely anyone else's usage is being accidentally combined with ours. The hot water heater says 200 kWh for the 2 months. Unfortunately the Nest doesn't keep data that old but I can't remember much heater usage (definitely none in May). Our furnace is very old but we're going to replace it before winter. The digital meter that irregularly updates makes it difficult to do the suggestion I see online to turn on rooms individually and track usage at the meter. Any ideas? I'm replacing all the light bulbs with LED but I can't imagine that is going to make a dramatic difference. Typically we just have a couple computers on and maybe a TV. I have one of those plug in meters otw which I'll move around the house trying to find anything using more than it should. The power company would just say the old owners had high usage too. Our usage patterns should be about the same as in our old rental which had old everything and yet our usage here is over 4 times higher. FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 02:40
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FuzzySlippers posted:Any oddball suggestions why our power usage is so high? Our power usage for April and May (combined) was 3852 kWh which is crazy high for 2 people. I think I've checked all the normal stuff. Resistive heating? If so that's a culprit. Take a picture of your breaker panel so we can see the circuit sizing. Put your hand on the breakers, any of them hot? Your electric meter likely has a "current load" output. Read the manual on it. Turn off your furnace, take a reading, turn it on, same thing.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:03
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H110Hawk posted:Resistive heating? If so that's a culprit. You mean electric heating? Yeah it is all electric.  None of them were hot. The heater makes a racket when it comes on but you think it is pulling power even when it isn't properly on? I turned off the breaker on the furnace as well as the breakers in the box marked furnace. Weird thing: it is still making a buzzing noise even though in theory it is completely without power. I'll keep an eye on usage with it. My electric meter is locked up. I couldn't find any info online about being able to fiddle with it and it has a big plastic bubble with a weird key thing. It just cycles between a bunch of 8s and a current total reading. I recorded the reading 3 hours ago and it has gone up 7 kWh since then. In that time I've had actively running 1 computer, 2 monitors, 2 fans, no lights, and the oven on for a few minutes. Along with all the idle stuff (fridge, routers, etc). That seems way higher than it should be so I think I have something unexpected sucking power. FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 04:40
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FuzzySlippers posted:You mean electric heating? Yeah it is all electric. Did your old place use natural gas for the dryer and water heater before? Those can eat up a ton of juice if you're running them off the grid.
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Jun 27, 2018 07:43
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FuzzySlippers posted:You mean electric heating? Yeah it is all electric. Don't fiddle with the meter. It should be scrolling through readouts though. I bet one is instant draw. If you are going through 2kwh an hour with no draw (no one used hot water, etc) then you may have a problem. Your furnace is two parts: the forced air unit (blower fan) and the heating element. I don't know how that is normally breakered - one double or a double+single. Your panel shows a ton of 220v appliances, if you were used to combustion for heating (water, clothes, oven, air) then this is going to be a shock. Start doing process of elimination, an hour after the last electric heating was used take a reading, set a 1hr timer, then read it again. Try it with cooking dinner, or taking your morning showers, etc.
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Jun 27, 2018 14:20
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Is it possible someone's stealing power from you? You could simply try flipping your master breaker off (or flipping each individual breaker off) for an hour and checking your meter. It shouldn't be possible to draw any power during that time; if it's still ticking up then you can rule out anything on any circuit you control, and something fucky is going on.
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Jun 27, 2018 15:51
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FuzzySlippers, in case you get frustrated, here's a soothing song for you to listen to while you try and find out where the excess power draw is coming from: https://youtu.be/kPqqkf53-Hw
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Jun 27, 2018 16:08
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FuzzySlippers posted:Any oddball suggestions why our power usage is so high? Our power usage for April and May (combined) was 3852 kWh which is crazy high for 2 people. I think I've checked all the normal stuff. That is crazy high... My high monthly usage is around 800 kWh a month, sometimes 300kWh depending, and AEP says that comparable homes are about that. 2 kWh an hour seems really high... If you have the patience, flip off all your circuits and watch the meter for awhile as you flip them on one by one to see which one is consuming the most, and try to isolate which circuit is acting up. Do you have prior months of electric usage to compare against? Did it start happening all of a sudden? AEP shows historical usage for the last year on their website.
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Jun 27, 2018 16:40
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What are you all doing with your extra room? Home theater? Rec room? Dressing room? Gym? Library?
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Jun 27, 2018 19:10
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potatoducks posted:What are you all doing with your extra room? Home theater? Rec room? Dressing room? Gym? Library? Currently 2 guest bedrooms, an in-home gym and a combination office / PC gaming / VR space.
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Jun 27, 2018 20:01
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My windows are old-school ones with metal frames, which get hot when they are in direct sunlight. This probably puts additional strain on the AC and costs me a lot of money. Who do I talk to for replacing them with modern ones? What should I be looking for? I’ve been reading about low-e windows but I don’t want overkill in terms of cost.
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Jun 27, 2018 20:17
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Thanks for the suggestions! Our old place had gas central heater but everything else was electric (and also super old). At the new house our dryer and water heater are brand new and the most efficient electric I could find. Since we know the water heater's usage I know it isn't making a great impact. The internet suggests gas vs electric stove shouldn't be a huge difference. Our historical usage is for our old place (though the dude on the phone did say old owners had high usage). We knew the electric heater was going to be a big difference which is why we didn't freak over the early bills while we were still heating but these crazy bills with no/little central heat usage has set off alarms. Our central heater had 2 breakers on the heater and 2 set of double breakers on the electric panel. Those have all been off. Our meter doesn't seem to show current usage because it only cycles between 3 values: 00000s, current total usage, and '9'. If that 9 is current load it doesn't vary much which would be a bad sign. I'll try shutting everything off for a time later today. I've been recording current total reading for the past day: 6/26 5pm: 8831 8:15pm 8838 10:15 8842 -- shut off furnace 11:58 8844 6/27 12:36am 8846 1:41pm 8864 This is imprecise since it rounds to the kWh. Looking at it I think the furnace despite being 'off' was drawing power. My quick imprecise math suggests we were using 0.0349 kWh a minute despite the fact that for most of the 5-10pm period no lights were on, my wife was out of the house, and so only power was used in my study. The Nest thermostat claims the heater did nothing (no fan, no heat). From 10pm to 1pm the next day we used 0.024 kWh a minute and for a big chunk of that all lights were running, we cooked dinner, did 2 loads of laundry, dishwasher ran, and my wife was home in the living room with TV + ps4 on. I'll do more testing with this. We were already planning on replacing the heater before the winter (probably with a heat pump since we live in Seattle) but I guess we can leave the breaker off till then. FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 22:15
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enraged_camel posted:My windows are old-school ones with metal frames, which get hot when they are in direct sunlight. This probably puts additional strain on the AC and costs me a lot of money. We were saving up to replace our 90-year-old windows when one of them exploded itself all over the dining room, and we happened to catch a sale, so we bought two new ones for the dining room and two for the back of the house where the winter winds hit the hardest and the afternoon sun pours in in the summer, all of them with low-e. It does help keep the heat down (if you leave them closed, of course), but I'll say this: it darkened the rooms more than I thought it would. Kind of like being in an aquarium. The light is greener, too. These are vinyl replacement windows, so possibly it would be different if you spent more, I don't know, but I'm quite satisfied with the quality otherwise, so I think it's a low-e thing. We are theoretically going to do the rest yet this year, and I think we'll get plain glass for those. We're in northern Michigan, though, so solar heating is rarely much of a problem. If hot sun is a problem where you are, then you might prefer it. I am glad we sprang for double-hung and tip-in cleaning, though. And the joy of being able to open windows any time of the year is hard to explain to anyone who's never had windows with separate storms.
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Jun 28, 2018 01:27
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enraged_camel posted:My windows are old-school ones with metal frames, which get hot when they are in direct sunlight. This probably puts additional strain on the AC and costs me a lot of money. New windows with double panes and low-e coatings will likely not transmit as much sound or heat into your house, this is true. If you want new windows that's a good reason to replace them. Just know going in that window replacement can get very expensive very quickly. You probably won't save as much money as you spend on the replacements (unless all of your windows can easily be replaced with in-stock sizes at your local Lowe's). It's for sure a quality-of-life upgrade, though, and I probably paid more for my house because it already had modern windows when most in the area do not.
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Jun 28, 2018 05:16
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Re: windows: I'm in the process of trying to find new windows for our house. House is over a hundred years old, with half original windows and half vinyl replacements. Some of the original windows are in bad shape and need repair or replacement. Many of the vinyl replacement windows are ugly and incongruous and need to be replaced because they are super ugly and I hate them. The rest of the vinyl windows are just incongruous and eventually need to be replaced. I don't necessarily hate them but they don't work with the house. Most outfits I found either only do vinyl or if they do wood, the wood windows they carry look like rear end. The antique window restoration placed I found had gone out of business. Then I finally found a place that does historical replica windows in wood and everything in their portfolio looks amazing. And expensive. I hope they respond soon. Another thing I've learned is that there are also levels of vinyl window quality. Our house has a high quality custom-made vinyl replacement window in the dining room. It's gigantic and has an arched top. Both the inspector and window guy we had over mentioned that a previous owner definitely paid a lot for it. It's fine for the time being (still eventually want a nicer wood one in its place - though if I wasn't such a giant sperg about having historically/aesthetically appropriate windows, I'd leave it). There are also some vinyl windows in the house that are complete garbage - ugly and poorly fitted side slider windows that buck up in their frames if you push too hard/from the wrong angle, and the excessive ruts and grooves and whatnot inherent in their design are great at collecting detritus while being difficult to clean. I think going to showrooms for stuff like windows would be totally worthwhile - so you can look at and operate the windows on display.
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Jun 28, 2018 05:38
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enraged_camel posted:My windows are old-school ones with metal frames, which get hot when they are in direct sunlight. This probably puts additional strain on the AC and costs me a lot of money. While I too am ever cautious of big box store home services, my interior designer recommended Home Depot when I decided to add hurricane impact windows to the ever-growing list of poo poo I'm doing to this moneypit. I went to a showroom and found a lot of stuff that I really, really liked, and an installer that I REALLY liked, but his quote was triple the next-highest.  I don't have a LOT of windows, but the price with Home Depot was a touch below any other quote I got, the windows are a house brand, but engineered and manufactured by PGT, and they gave me two years interest-free financing which sealed the deal for me. Going forward from that has been a pleasure, the installer came by for the pre-installation dimension-verification visit, and seemed extremely professional and knowledgeable. Install is on August 1 and 2, so I'll have an update then. I'm getting every opening done except the front door. (Which I'll be doing separately at some point.)
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Jun 28, 2018 14:20
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I had to stop at freight harbor to pick up a hi lift jack in order to pull up 10 shrubs. Man that place has a lot of tools home depot has but at half price. Definitely gotta check there before buying anything at home depot. I can get a die grinder, air hammer, and orbital sander for my 30 gallon air compressor for the price of one air tool at home depot.
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Jun 28, 2018 14:40
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Yes, it just won’t last long. It’s great for a tool you have one specific job for and may not need again for awhile.
The Dave fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 14:44
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Sepist posted:I had to stop at freight harbor to pick up a hi lift jack in order to pull up 10 shrubs. Man that place has a lot of tools home depot has but at half price. Definitely gotta check there before buying anything at home depot. I can get a die grinder, air hammer, and orbital sander for my 30 gallon air compressor for the price of one air tool at home depot. There’s a reason for that, FYI.
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Jun 28, 2018 14:55
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If I want to replace a non-standard outer door (it’s mobile home sized per previous owners) and it needs a new door and frame, is this more of a contractor thing to price out or a DIY thing? I assume we will need a permit since it’s a big thing.
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Jun 28, 2018 15:00
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Higgy posted:There’s a reason for that, FYI. That's fair. Besides my HVLP gun I dont use my other air tools that much so i can deal with them breaking after the 5th use if that 5th use is 2 years from now
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Jun 28, 2018 15:20
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Sepist posted:I had to stop at freight harbor to pick up a hi lift jack in order to pull up 10 shrubs. Man that place has a lot of tools home depot has but at half price. Definitely gotta check there before buying anything at home depot. I can get a die grinder, air hammer, and orbital sander for my 30 gallon air compressor for the price of one air tool at home depot. HF also just has a wider selection of tools altogether. I don't really care for buying tools at HD honestly. Except their 300 ish piece Husky mechanics tool set in the blow molded is just great, I love that thing. Much more convenient than my better quality sockets, because it's all right there in one spot and I give no fucks if I lose or break one. Protip - skip the air tools and buy into an 18v li-ion tool family, Milwaukee or Makita. Every bit as powerful if not more so, and a million times more portable and eat to use, with a wider variety of tools. Every diy oriented homeowner should own a starter set to build from.
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Jun 28, 2018 15:26
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We live in an area of few contractors and many diy-ers. We were at the local Do-It store, or whatever they're called, for something else, when I happened to see a little house built with a bunch of different windows in the middle of the store, and one of them looked just like the windows we already had -- plain glass below, vertically divided panes above. We talked to a salesperson about it, and I said we they were probably too expensive to do the whole house, as they were wood-framed. She said they had vinyl just like it, and we were off. I didn't think we could match the upper lights, but she said she could do anything, and went into the computer and moved it from three panes to four. She also hooked us up with a retired guy who seriously undercharges for labor, and he came out and measured for us so we got the right size. We bought two 32x54, Jeld-wen vinyl double-hung, Energy Saver Plus Low-E 366 clear argon, full screens, for 530.92 ; and two more of the same but 28x58, for 511.02. They were on sale for 20% off if you bought more than $500 worth, so I think that total is before the discount, or we would only have bought two. After all the random other stuff, labor came to $444.00. I can't remember exactly, but I think there was about a three-week wait for them. There are definitely better windows out there, but I'm perfectly satisfied with these for our Frankenhouse. They're a little stiff to open and close, but getting better over time, and I can wash them from indoors, which is good because 95% of them are seven or eight feet off the ground. I can absolutely see that if you have an old Victorian, you're going to want to do the best possible windows, but these were far cheaper than I thought they would be, and they echo the old windows very well.
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Jun 28, 2018 17:43
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