Week 2: Feelin like Victor in Chapter 7, Volume 3

When I get home each night, I walk, exhausted, to my bedroom. Remember, it's in a shed behind my house.

So, I'm out here, outside, its cold, and I'm like "Wow,,,.,.its is really cold...! Can't wait to be inside a nice, toasty room!"

One fun thing I like to do (and if you start cutting your heat use you can do this, too) is to PRETEND that I am WARM. Ahahahah good times.

To be completely honest, though, I've noticed I have been sleeping better. Either that or my body is going into some state of hibernation in an effort to stay warm. Some of my friends have expressed worry about my health, which is doing fine. Here's what I wear to bed each night:

- leggings
- thicc wool socks
- sweatpants (yes, over the leggings)
- shirt (T-shirt, long sleeve, whatever)
- sweatshirt (shoutout to Summit merch)
- a goshdarned Norwegian 100% wool (or something, I can tell it definitely came from an animal with minimal processing) sweater

Then I just put on my hood (its weird but keeps my head warm), and pull up three blankets and a comforter, and BOOM. Snug as a bug in a rug :)

So anyway, I've been coping.

I have been questioning my choices (!!) recently, I really want to stop doing this. What keeps me going? The knowledge that I am changing the world!

Aren't I?

Let's fact check. My room is about 25 sq/ft. I don't know why I need to know that but I do. The model of my heater is a "CADET COM-PAK LARGE ROOM ELECTRIC WALL HEATER WITH THERMOSTAT" (kept it in caps, hope you feel threatened ❤). The Cadet Heat website has a few details on the specs of this particular model (which btw not even sure this is the right one).

This heater is very durable; I don't have to replace it often (hopefully never), which means less waste. Just take a look at this comment from a consumer who DEFINITELY was pleased with this product:

According to their website, the model that looks most like the one I have uses 3,000 kW/h (because our house is on a 208-volt circuit). I used to use the heater all day, which means I was using 72,000 kW every 24 hours. That translates to 2,232,000 kW in a month...ugh what?

Using this handy EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator I found out that me blasting the heater for 24 hours used the same amount of energy it would take an average passenger car to drive 131,332 miles. Apparently, I also used the energy equivalent of that produced by 6,029 gallons of gas, 58,625 pounds of coal, or 8 homes' electricity for a year.

Either I'm a horribly flawed person, or something went terribly, terribly wrong with my calculations...

On another note, how much money am I wasting?? My poor parents must have heart attacks when they see our electricity bill. In my first post, I said that I was costing them $5.02 every 24 hours on a 1,500 Watt heater, according to this table:

Now, according to Cadet Heating, the heater I have is a 3,000 Watt heater. To find the cost of that I would double $5.02: $10.04 every 24 hours!

About the same amount it would cost to buy 2 Starbucks drinks a day. 

If everyone in the world did this, that would be $10.04 * 7,670,802,832 (according to World-o-Meters) = 7.70148604 x 10 (that's right, scientific notation, britches!)

Using the EPA calculator again, I get these equivalencies: 

- 62,708,718,121 pounds of coal burned

- 6,449,394,437 gallons of gas consumed

- 1,485,403,717 tree seedlings grown for 10 years

Anyway, like I said, I'm not completely sure this is the same heater I have in my room. I only chose it because they look very similar. Also, these numbers seem really big. If you see some mistake in my math, please let me know. Thank you.

Another limitation to this post is that my estimation of the world's use of heaters was based on the assumption that everyone uses the same heater as me, AND that they use it as much as me. Obviously, both of these are gross generalizations.