BrianW

3.5 here in Branford right on the shoreline. Quite the surge in temps earlier...

Getting smoked here as the last band moves through.

What a band just south of here on the sound...

Temperature just jumped 7 degrees from 22 to 29. Still moderate snow here.

Radar looks terrible. The heavy stuff seems to be south? Is it going to fill in?

95 is a mess already.

Its crazy down here along the CT shoreline. Most trees are budding and stuff is sprouting all over. I saw a bunch of dandelions today. Neighbor's were mowing their lawns on Sunday. My herb garden on my deck came back to life.

I just noticed the Vermont resorts are advertising like crazy on billboards along 95 in CT. I am pretty sure I drove by one that literally just said "We have snow in VT". Talking to people here many have the mindset that if there is now snow here there is none up there.

Just got a snow squall warning on my phone for Fairfield County Connecticut. Driving right into it on 95.

My maple trees have green buds on them and stuff is popping up in my flower beds down here on the CT coast..

Down here on the CT shoreline my maple trees are budding and I got stuff sprouting in my flowerbeds...

Some interesting info on how their forecasts and data compares to the NWS.

Looks like IBM bought weather underground? The new ap is way better than the old version. The new temp map with the color is really cool.

How old is the house? Sounds like you have a well insulated newer house to have that fuel consumption. My sister is building a brand new house in Boston. The house is crazy insulated and airtight. The heating and cooling loss numbers were insane. Its going to cost practically nothing to heat and cool when I looked over the plans. Might have been much older mini splits. The stuff coming out in the last year or two are probably twice as efficient. The technology is rapidly advancing and getting more efficientl. I ran some numbers for Taunton MA. It looks like you have municipal power and pay significantly less than the rest of MA so your savings are pretty massive. At Taunton MA electric rates of .14 a kwh and the mass.gov posted average propane price of 2.92, here is what a million btus of heat would cost you. Heat pump- $9.33 Propane- $35.52 For others in MA here are the state wide average prices taken from the mass.gov website for comparision. Heat pump at .22kwh. $14.67 Heating oil $27.45 Propane- $35.52 Natural gas- $26.83 Natural gas is not cheap as cheap as it once was in New England and prices have doubled since the beginning of the year. There is not enough pipeline supply and a huge demand from gas power plants that prices have been high.

Maine is aggressively deploying heat pumps and has incentives for them. Here is an interesting article on it. Didn't realize they had soo many installed. I also attached a performance graph of how newer units can achieve some impressive cold weather performance. My unit can put out its full rated heat all the way to almost -20 before capacity drops. Maine is the most heating-oil-dependent state in the country. More than 60 percent of the state’s 550,000 households rely on heating oil as their primary energy source for heat. But because a little more than half of the electricity generated in Maine already comes from zero-carbon hydropower and wind power — and legislation signed yesterday sets a 100 percent renewable electricity target for 2050 — a rapid shift to electric heat could deliver significant emissions reductions. It should also save households and businesses money. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.greentechmedia.com/amp/article/maine-wants-to-install-100000-heat-pumps-by-2025

An Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) will typically produce around 4kW thermal energy for every 1kW of electrical energy consumed, giving an effective “efficiency” of 400%. It is thermodynamically impossible to have an efficiency of more than 100%, as this implies that more energy is being produced than is being put in. For this reason the performance is expressed as a Coefficient of Performance (COP) rather than an efficiency. The above example would be expressed as having a COP of 4. The reason that it appears that more energy is being produced than is consumed, is because the only “valuable” energy input is electricity used to drive the compressor and circulating pumps. The remainder of the energy simply transferred from a heat source that would otherwise not be used (such as the ambient air, ground or a river) so is not considered as an energy input.

How is that 380% efficiency measured? Google coefficient of performance. Here is a real fuel cost comparison calculator I use. I I inputed some real New England numbers so its pretty accurate.

Lost power for most of the night. Ground is so saturated here trees were coming down like crazy last night from the winds. 5.21 inches in the last 7 days!

2.36 here. Heavy basement flooding here. Pond across the street overflowed.

How often did you water it? New grass needs an insane amount of water for the roots to establish and grow deep. Looks like most of the dead section is on higher ground and the soil is probably bone dry.

There was an aerial plane survey done after the 38 hurricane. Pages 12-14 have some of the RI coastline. That area got hit hard. http://cslib.cdmhost.com/digital/collection/p4005coll10/search/searchterm/Aerial survey!index sheet!1938/field/title!title!title/mode/exact!none!exact/conn/and!and!and/order/title/ad/asc

Some potential tonight for a possible viewing.

There is no stopping it from what I have read. Billions of native ash will be wiped out. Only hope is to create new ash strains resistant to eab and introduce those into the wild. I believe they did something similar with elm trees where they created a Dutch elm disease resistant tree.

Is Emerald Ash Borer up there yet? I would start treating it if you intend to keep it. I have been keeping mine alive by soil drench with insecticide. Cost like 5 bucks to treat it yourself with the same stuff the pros use thats available online. The ash are pretty close to wiped out here in CT. Here was an ash stand I drove by today. There are whole tracts all over the state that look like this. It looks terrible.