Get a Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor From Your Local Public Library!

April 24, 2017

...os Angeles Public Library, have Kill A Watts you can check out just like a book. I’ve got one right now and I’ve been running around the house checking out our gadgets. Some appliances, such as the refrigerator, that cycle on and off need to be left plugged into the Kill A Watt for at least a day or longer to get an accurate result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K2uBZKLOEg I found the instructions for the Kill A Watt a bit confusing. Naturally,...

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Searching for Energy Vampires

Mr. Homegrown

April 27, 2017

Water and Power

13 Comments

...d cut off the internet. This would stop the urge to compulsively check Facebook and watch YouTube cat videos. Hit the big red button and you’d have to settle down with a book. But the “internet of things” in our household (a “smart” irrigation controller and a Ring doorbell make this impracticable). The Man always finds a way to keep us connected and dependent! Our old microwave consumes the next greatest amount of power at $3.88 a year. The micro...

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Designing the World’s Most Pretentious Garden Shed

Mr. Homegrown

September 13, 2016

Design, Gardening

11 Comments

...n’t help but admire the design. For ideas I thumbed through a coffee table book of 18th century French revolutionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s oddball sketches But fabricating a waterproof sphere from used headboards and pallets is beyond my carpentry abilities. Nevertheless, I came up with a few scribbles: Thankfully, most of my thoughtstylings stay in the sketchbook like the idea of a 20-foot tall observation chair on top of the shed. Ke...

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My Facebook Problem

Mr. Homegrown

February 26, 2018

Thoughtstylings

55 Comments

...re at Root Simple, I’ve been pondering several strategies for managing Facebook. I went through Facebook’s settings and disabled everything that Facebook lets you disable. I stopped posting links to Root Simple in Facebook in the hopes of training people who want to keep up with me to go to this blog rather than look at my Facebook posts. If and when I post in Facebook I use Federico Tobon’s rule, “Post positive things. Mostly yours. Not too much....

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Chicago Kit Houses

Mr. Homegrown

August 25, 2017

Design

...kit home catalog I posted on Monday: the Chicago Wrecking Company’s 1913 A Book of Plans. They later, and wisely, changed the name of the company to Harris Brothers Homes. The catalog contains Wrightian styles like the one above. As well as the 1913 version of a tiny house. Need a barn? They’ve got you covered. Want to open a store? They’ve got a plan for that too. The catalog contains customer testimonials such as this one from an early house fli...

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