An update on the Geo-thermal...

If you live anywhere near the North east, you've experienced some of this extreme weather we've had lately. We have been in the negatives at least at night for the last week, at least. We were lucky to get above 20 today. Of course we aren't even the worst. Mark was in the Quad cities and it was in the -20's and the windchill in the -40's. That's COLD!! Well we of course had our geo-thermal running and thought I would give you all an update on how it worked....

We live in a very old house. We've been doing alot of work to it, since we bought it. New roof, siding, insulation, windows. We even had new duct work put it, since there wasn't any in the 2nd floor before. That said, it's still an old house and still has alot of leaky places. All along the foundation, along the floor you can feel the cold air. We have some floor boards missing that leak air. It's far better than it was. That said our gas furnace has a hard time keeping up when it gets below 0 degrees outside. Well the geo-thermal had a hard time under 10 degrees. Not because it froze or anything, but just because the house leaked so much it just dropped the temp to fast. You see the geo-thermal is more of a constant heat. It runs more often and takes longer to bring up a temp. The gas furnace you turn it on and it blast hot air and warms it up faster. That is why you have to have a back-up source of heat. Most units have an electric backup. It kicks on when the temp drops to fast and warms it up. The Geo takes over and keeps it there. Well we have a new gas furnace, we had to put one in when we moved here, so we opted to use that instead. All it means is, when it drops below 10 outside esp if the windchill is lower, we have to turn the gas on and the geo off to warm the house up. I mean it was dropping 5 degrees in an hour when it was REALLY cold out. So we did have to use some gas, but all in all, we're still happy with it. It saved us a bundle already. We only had to run it for probably 1 day total since we put it in. Mostly at night. A gas furnace would've been running constant with these temps.

So our next big project??? Well figure out how to fix the foundation so it doesn't leak so bad. Maybe we can put a basement in?? Who know at this point. We're still considering our options.

Stay warm!!!!

Rice soup...

is NOT good. Yup I tried it and it just was NOT a good thing. I had some chicken and rice that I had made, used homemade broth and everything. Well the leftovers I thought might make go farther if I made into soup. So I added more broth some vegi's and water, and well it didn't get any farther than the trash. It just was not good. Unlike barley rice get's blander as it cooks. The broth was fine, but the rice was just to blah. I cooked it in lots of flavor and it was great as a casserole type dish. Soo it went into the trash and we had PB & J instead. The kids all tried it, but it just wasn't good. SO I advise don't try this at home LOL. Maybe if there was less rice and potatoes maybe??? but just rice, don't waste your time or food.

TTFN