Bathroom pendant lights: 90W--> 10W but offset start times

When a light burns out, that's a good time to see what's in there and see if there's a better option. In the upstairs bathroom, there's a wall fixture that already has a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and two pendants - each with a 45-watt candelabra base incandescent light bulbs.

One of the 45-watt bulbs burned out, so I went to Front Range Lighting to see if the had a CFL that would fit. For $6 each, they gave me two 5-watt swirly CFLs that are small enough to fit in the pendants. There are slightly higher wattage candelabra base lights that put out more light but they are too big to hide in the pendants.

After the first 30 seconds or so, the lighting looks great. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep them in there though because when you walk in, one of the new pendant CFLs goes one, then about 3 seconds later the other new CFL goes on. Why is that...they're both brand new!

After the first 30 seconds it feels great in there and the vanity lighting dropped from a total of 90 watts down to 10 watts.

Failure to communicate

Even though I've set the thermostat at 70F night and day for a couple weeks, I just can't get the lower level warm (without running electric space heaters.) My friend and mentor, Doug Swart, at Fort Collins Utilities asked me...so how cold is the crawl space. Pretty darn! I said. But knew that answer was lacking a bit of rigor.

This morning at 8:30 am, I ran around the house and noted the temperatures throughout.
25F outside
36F in garage
40F in crawl space
52F lower level floor temp
63F lower level air temp
68F upper level bedroom over garage
70F upper level at the tstat

HPwES First Look at Results

Mark Shadowen of Comfort by Design came by today to deliver the results of the diagnostics tests they did on January 9th. Lots of good information. I still have to scan it, and digest it, but here are a few nuggets:

Duct leakage:
- Total system airflow (based on fan curve and measured static pressure of .85"water column) is 1,050 cfm
- Supply airflow 675 cfm (36% leakage)
- Return airflow 672 cfm (35% leakage)
Infiltration: 0.52 air changes per hour (fairly tight)

Heating system:
- load 31 kBtuh
- furnace size 110kBtuh input, derated by 12% for altitude and 79% effic =>76 kBtuh output
- oversized by 250% (2.5 times)

Cooling system:
- load 1.8 tons
- AC size 2.5 tons
- oversized by 139%