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.

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.

Here you can see:

how it nicely flattened the temp curve by closing the registers when temperature reached setpoint.

Time to finish the rest of the house.

Stay tuned.

Nothing else for now, my brain is washed out…

a) internet stores with no retail location, with what looked like decent selection and good prices
b) eBay
c) internet stores that belong to big, well known retail companies using internet in addition to their regular operations.

Prices for this particular piece were growing in order presented above. I was a little bit surprised by the difference in prices between stores from a) and eBay. Just a little bit, because I learned over the years that eBay is no longer the cheapest source of goods and if you look deeper, you’ll probably find thing you want cheaper. What intrigued me was the difference. You rarely can find a place 25% cheaper than eBay (we are speaking about new stuff worth a little bit more than $10).

Anyway, I’ll decided to give them a try. I picked one, soniccameras.com made and order and waited. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

Thank you for your order. Your order number is: 30206

This email is to confirm receipt of your online order with us.
For your security, please call us at 1-888-450-4111, Option 1
to provide a verbal confirmation so that we can ship out your
order. If you have already called and confirmed your order,
you may disregard this request.

Thanks again for shopping with us.

When I called nice guy told me that they are very sorry but the item is back ordered, I’m 94th in the line and expected wait is around 6 weeks and if I want to wait. Sure I didn’t.

So I canceled the order and went looking for another one. I found one suggested by several price comparing sites, prestigecamera.com. This time I looked not only for price (which was about 10% more than the first one) but also for clear indication that item is in stock. This one clearly said so. So I placed an order. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

We thank you for choosing Prestige Camera as your choice
for all your photographic equipment.

In order to further verify your order #53555510, we will
need to speak with you on the phone. Please call our
processing department at 1-800-xxx-xxxx extension
Extension xxx so we may verify and process your order.

I called them and this time story was a little bit different. Again nice man said that the item I ordered is for Japanese market and it won’t work in USA. They have another similar item though designed for US market for the price x. That really pissed me off. Not only there was no info on their site about this, no (as he claimed) pop-up allowing me to choose which option I’d like, The price he offered was equal to MSRP and way above everything else I saw on the Internet. I canceled the order, again.

So I went with eBay, placed an order, payed with PayPal and within 12h received USPS tracking number showing me that the item shipped.

Bottom line: It took less than 3 days to completely ruining opinion I had about internet stores without retail outlet and all price comparing sites. Looks like they are abused to get traffic to scam stores trying to either rip you off on price, or hold your money for unknown number of weeks with vague promise of delivery.

Next time I’ll think twice before I place an order on thing I need pretty quickly.

20 washing modes (e.g. mini 30, hand washing, baby, mix 40, wool, cotton).

Since when do we wash children in washing machines?

Click on the image to see full version.