Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer - my everyday fights with reality

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music by U2 - Beautiful Day from U218 Singles

If somebody asked me a year ago what do I think about riding bike in the snow I’d say you have to be stupid to do so. Today… I did it myself and boy did I have a fun!

Bike handled surprisingly nice. Probably in greatest part because I have nice Panaracer Rampage tires. The only tricky part is when you try to turn and there is a patch of ice below the snow. Oh and rolling resistance is like you were driving on loose sand.

Can’t wait to get some more.

Here’s what I saw today when I went out to check the weather:

For those of you imperial challenged:

And of course zero clouds and clear sky. Time to look for some additional blankets…

One of the nicest features of our new HVAC zone system is module called balanced controller. Basically it’s an algorithm calculating heat demand in every zone and opening and closing registers accordingly.

Here you can see that one of the zones (middle one) was fully open while remaining two were just barely moved, Then when this zone was satisfied in it’s heat demand it was closed and the first one was fully open to direct all hot heat into this zone to shorten furnace running time to the minimum.

I don’t have any statistic data to prove my theory yet but it seems to me that such behavior shortens greatly overall running time and simply saves us money.

Looking at the graph (and trying to keep my fingers from freezing):

I noticed interesting thing - the temperatures in my office tend to go down a bit every day (look at those last four green peaks). Keep in mind that my thermostat is set to the same temperature as it was before, yet those temps really go down. Looking for explanation I tried to remember what changes in weather did we observed during those last 4 days. Did it become colder outside? Not really. Maybe hotter? Naa… Rained? Snowed? Was it windy? And then it strike me - we got more and more sun each day. So apparently upper level of our house acts as greenhouse absorbing energy from sun. And because the thermostat is in fact mounted there, lover level rooms, not exposed to radiation heat became colder and colder.

One additional reason why giving those rooms more decision power as when to turn the furnace on is not that bad idea.