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Laundry time! (image source: sxc.hu)

Not too long ago, I saw a television commercial that touted the energy (and, hence, money) saving abilities of some-brand-or-another’s high efficiency washers and dryers. I wondered… Could dropping upwards of a grand and a half on high-efficiency washers and dryers really save enough coin to make up for the cost?

I toyed with the idea of calculating the cost of running a load through our good ‘ol Kenmore washer and dryer, but never really ran with the idea until this week, when my shiny new Kill-a-Watt energy meter arrived. With Kelly at work for the day, I shut off the furnace, emptied my bladder and set up my newly-unboxed gizmo to measure how much electricity the washer was pulling out of the wall. I figured I’d run a worst-case test – a bleach load, warm wash, with towels, and a double rinse. The results?

• Electricity – Washer: 0.32KWh ($0.018)
• Electricity – Dryer: 0.49KWh ($0.056)
• Gas – Total: About 0.3ccf, or 0.30555 Therms ($0.30)
• Water – Total: 60.3 gallons ($0.15)
• Detergent – 3.2 ounces ($0.32)
• Bleach – 4.2 ounces ($0.115)
• 1 Dryer Sheet ($0.05)

The grand total? 73.94¢. Worst case. A smaller load, with colored clothes (hence no bleach), and no towels? I’m guessing less.

So even if that magical high-efficiency washer and dryer could clean our clothes with no energy or water at all, it would still take almost 1,900 loads of laundry to pay for them. If we assume that they cut our usage in half (still, a pretty tall order) then doing about 4 loads of laundry a week (which we do), it would still take over 18 years for them to pay for themselves.

Those old ceramic-white Kenmores are looking better and better…

Just testing…

As of about 90 seconds ago, Wordpress.org and Automattic have announced their official Wordpress app for Android!! Yay!!!

Check it out over at http://android.wordpress.org/ … and watch here for more info soon.

If you want a cookies that makes you want to close your eyes, chew slowly and say “mmmmmmmmmm” for a really long time, go to Levain Bakery in Manhattan, and order one of their Chocolate Chip Walnut cookies. Unless you’re this [very disturbing] guy, one will be enough.

If you don’t happen to live in New York City, or would perhaps like to make such a cookie at home, then take a gander at My Brother’s Interpretation of these taste-bud-gasmic cookies. And do rate it highly, won’t you?

And, if reading his instructions and making them for yourself just isn’t enough, you can watch him prepare them – in 3 different shirts – over at Veoh.

Image source: pinchmysalt.com

Since right around this past Christmas, I’ve been on a complete bread tangent. It probably started with my annual attempt to produce a memory-invoking stollen bread, which was repeated twice over this year so that we could share the results with as many friends and family as possible… But not long after Christmas day came and went, I found myself visiting local bookstores, looking for a copy of Peter Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Since buying the book, I’ve tried recipes for classic, pre-fermented Italian bread, and a delicious potato-rosemary bread that filled our house with the smells of roasting rosemary and garlic as it baked. But neither was really all that blogworthy, mostly because they just weren’t as photogenic as the breads in Reinhardt’s stellar book… Until now.

My Pane Siciliano started on Friday afternoon, when I prepared a pate fermentee pre-fement, and quietly stashed it in the refrigerator to work its enzymatic magic. On Sunday, I prepared, kneaded and shaped the dough, then slid the pale little S’s into the refrigerator for an overnight proofing. By this morning, they’d grown pretty dramatically, and were ready for the oven after a half-hour to perk up at room temperature. In they went, along with a few spritzes of water for a steam treatment, and about 18 minutes later they emerged, ready for their close-up…

Pane Siciliano

Pane Siciliano

I know I’m just one guy, in the next state over, but I’d like to say thanks. Thanks to Scott Brown, and thanks to his supporters in Massachusetts. As a conservative living in New York, I’m pretty much guaranteed that my values have a pretty slim chance of being represented at the federal level – and it’s reassuring to see that someone has stood up and pledged to bring integrity back to a Senate where that value is sorely lacking.

A lot of people bought into the mantra of “hope” and “change” about a year ago. Now, “hope” is taking on a new connotation – people who love America and are proud to call this exceptional nation home are hoping that November 2010 will pull us out of the political tailspin we’re in. And the election of Scott Brown to a US Senate seat from one of the country’s bastions of progressivism is a big dose of hope, indeed.

One of the less-publicised but more-interesting product announcements to come out of this year’s CES conference is the Airnergy Wi-Fi energy harvester, brought to us by (surprisingly) the folks at RCA. Priced at $40 and planned for sale this summer, the little gizmo supposedly plucks wi-fi radio signals out of the air, then uses the energy to charge an internal battery which can then charge your mobile phone / MP3 player / etc.

Image source: ohgizmo.com

While the gadget enthusiast in me wants to say “sign me up!” the electrical engineer in me says, “hold the phone…”

In the US, the maximum legal power transmitted from most wi-fi devices is 0.1 Watts. If you plug that into this RF power calculator and assume a distance of 5 meters with no line-losses and 3dB of gain in each antenna, the maximum harvestable power at the Airnergy will be about 0.00000157 Watts. This is plenty of energy to sling bytes of data through the air, but even if the charging circuit were (quite impossibly) 100% efficient, this input power is an order of magnitude less than even the self-discharge rate of most Lithium Ion batteries.

Even though RCA of-late seems to be more interested in selling their branding to marginal, no-name OEMs, the appearance of their logo on this gizmo is just about the only thing that gives me any hope that it might not be smoke and mirrors. The physics doesn’t add up, but who knows – 15 years ago, most folks probably wouldn’t have believed that 0.1 Watts at 2.4GHz was enough power to carry data at 100MB/s – yet you can happily do so at your local coffee shop. From your cell phone. Along with a half-dozen others.

Visually-deemphasized, marginally-interesting note: This is DaveRea.com’s 500th post! As if you cared! Woohoo!

As I recall, it was the early ’90s, I was somewhere between age 10 and the threshold of teen-aged, and was developing an appreciation for the value of loose change. Loose change could buy you baseball cards or candy at the corner store. Loose change could be hooked to batteries with alligator clips in glasses of salt water (wait…don’t all tween males at some point attempt to electrodeposit copper onto paperclips?!). Loose change could be used to test out the snack vending machine you just built out of Construx. Most importantly, loose change could be found between couch cushions, wedged into car seats, rolled beneath appliances and dropped under beds.

And so, on the occasion that my Mom ducked outside to work in her gardens or complete some manner of seemingly-boring, adult, home-ownerly task, if the thought occurred to me, I’d roam around the house collecting change. My brother’s room wasn’t very productive – he had just finished potty-training, after all – and our guest bedroom was occupied far too rarely to be much of a coin-magnet. The couch and easy-chair in our family room were convenient targets, but once in a while, when everyplace else left me empty-handed, I’d head for my parents’ room. It wasn’t off-limits or anything; heck, the door stood open unless they got tired of finding cat hair on their bedspread. And, on occasion, I’d find a coin or two hiding behind the ruffles of their bedskirt, or under the recliner in the corner, or peeking out from the gap between the carpet and the bottom drawers of each dresser.

On these occasions, and indeed any occasion that I had to visit my parents’ bedroom, I noticed that they each had a small wooden box on their dressers. The boxes weren’t the same shape, nor were they the same size, or correlated in any way other than that both parents had one. I noticed the boxes during my covert change-collecting missions. I noticed the boxes when I’d sit with my Dad, listening to TalkNet on his clock radio while he flipped through Corvette magazines. I noticed the boxes when, as a refugee of malfunctioning plumbing, I had to use the master bathroom in the mornings before school for a month or so. And I noticed the boxes when I’d sit with my Mom, talking little but experiencing much, during her final battle with breast cancer in 1998.

Every time I noticed the boxes, I came to the same conclusion: They must be for storing Very Important Things.

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