Blessed by the Potato

In the name of efficiency, many places are moving towards using motion detectors to control the lights, which can be annoying when the decision circuits decide the room is empty and turn the lights off on you. On the whole I find sensor-controlled lights more of an inconvenience than a labour saver. Still, if the lights are off more that’s going to save power. Advances in lighting efficiency means it’s not quite as bad as it used to be to leave the lights on, but unless there’s a next-generation LED technology coming, turning them off when you’re not in the room is still going to be a necessity as always-on lighting just isn’t realistic.

However, motion detection isn’t free, either: the sensor uses some electricity, and of course has some capital costs. So the question is how bad do you have to be at turning off the lights for a motion-controlled light system to make sense?

Doing some brief research (I googled it), the sensor is not energetically expensive: drawing roughly half a Watt, that’s only 4 kWh/year. If the sensor is controlling four 100 W incandescents or eight 50 W halogens, that’s only ten hours of accidentally leaving the lights on, less if it’s an even larger room or hallway. Of course with lighting getting more efficient, even setting aside LEDs and using four CFLs of 13 W each, it would take 77 hours of accidental usage to break even, or about 12 minutes per day. And you have to be especially negligent to make it worthwhile to put a sensor on a circuit with only one or two bulbs.

And on the flip side, sensors can lead to more light usage if you rely on the timer to turn the lights off rather than turning them off yourself. If you leave a room long enough for the lights to turn off say 3 times per day, and each time the lights burn for 2 minutes longer than they would have if you just hit the switch on the way out, then that’s an extra 36.5 hours of light caused by the switch. More if there’s more in-and-out traffic through the area, less for more rarely visited spots.

It might be because I’ve got investments on the mind, but this sounds like it’s going to shape up to be an analysis focused on risk: if the room is a place you go to infrequently with your hands full (so less likely to turn the lights off, and more likely to have them burn for a long time if your forget), with many high-consumption lights, then the risk of having the lights burning all weekend may outweigh the drain (and capital cost) of the sensor.

There are some other benefits to motion sensor controlled lights, such as infection control. There are also drawbacks, such as the existential crisis that happens every time the sensor fails to see you: are you a ghost and just don’t realize it yet, or is the sensor on the fritz?; and DEAR GOD TURN THE LIGHTS ON ALREADY I’M JUST TRYING TO POOP AND WHY IS IT DARK?

In the end though it doesn’t look like we’re talking about large sums of money either way. 4 kWh/yr will work out to about a dollar in electricity, and the sensor-powered light switches are only a few dollars more than a regular one. For your own private dwelling it may be a toss-up, but for a lightly used commercial washroom the math may make more sense, when the lights could be left on unnecessarily for hours every day. Which is a shame, because those are the same places where the malfunctions are most annoying.

It’s been a hell of a run here at the day job with two massive projects back-to-back. I know pagecount is a very rough metric of productivity at best, but within two weeks we had a ~44-page grant and a ~40-page grant to submit, of which ~36 and ~18 pages were for me to write, and all of which were mine to edit. Some writing is more labourous than others — 36 pages of unfocused blog rambling is something I might do in my spare time over two weeks if I was in the right mood, whereas single pages of highly technical material can take days to churn out, much of which may be spent reading research materials to get and reference the data — but however you slice it that was a lot of work. And a lot of overtime to make it happen with the crunch on.

I can hear you asking “but Potato, how could you possibly work so hard and pull so many all-nighters and still be such an awesome daddy to Blueberry, while keeping up your 10-hour-per-week second job inspecting subway cars for the TTC?”*. Of course one part is that I completely neglected the blog over the last month, but that was a pretty minor contribution to the war effort. The answer is the magical combination of salty food, refined sugar, a significant calorie surplus, and caffeine. That’s pretty much the recipe for supercharging your brain to keep you going and focused for such a task, but it comes at a steep cost: between not exercising (Wayfare and Blueberry made it into the car early enough many mornings to give me a ride to the subway so I lost many of my morning walks), the stress, and the lack of sleep, I’ve put on 20 pounds in the last year, all of which came in sudden bursts during two particularly busy periods (this last month and the insanity last fall).

With the book pretty much done and under review at the prospective publisher(s), and my other InDesign project shelved, my side project is now to lose that weight and try to undo some of the damage. That’s a tall order: I’ve had no success at this in the past. Though I managed to make it through my PhD gaining basically no weight, I gained an amount that can only be described in fuck-ton units through my MSc and have never managed to lose any of it. I suspect it is an evil curse from all those Western blots (because if half-assed attempts at dieting and semi-serious exercise regimes didn’t get rid of it then it has to be supernatural, right?).

Anyway, let’s move on to something you might want to read about.

Over on the Reddit, a user asked me to create “the complete rent-vs-buy manifesto” to bring together the salient points when making the comparison and decision. To a large extent that would just mean putting some organization to about a half-dozen posts I’ve already written to form one larger, coherent post. It’s kind of an interesting challenge and I almost reflexively started outlining how I would approach it. However, I’m crazy enough without having a manifesto to my name, and it’s hard enough to get first time buyers to even look at their rental options with a 1000-word post — I don’t think a 5,000 word soup-to-nuts summary is really going to help.

Oh, I see the Ballparkinator fix is still on my to-do list. I’ll get to it real soon.

Have I talked about the book much yet? (Checks back, not really). So it’s done. Not like ready-to-put-on-the-bookstore-shelf done, but done enough that I have sent it (or queries) to publishers to see if they want to publish it instead of publishing it myself. With all the feedback/feature creep from the beta testers it ended up being legitimate personal finance book length — about 42,000 words or about 200 trade paperback pages, with 20 helpful figures (I consider the bunnies helpful). That’s more than triple the length of the first book, so it’s way, way beyond just “PSGtDIYI 2nd ed” and is its own book (with that how-to/implementation stuff as the core of it). I have a new title that I really like (I know a publisher may choose a new title if they take it on but I’ve gone ahead and spent a few bucks to register the associated domain).

To be realistic, the odds are that a publisher will not take it on. I’m hoping they will of course, but my plan is to be ready to launch into self-publishing as soon as the rejections come in. From what I’ve read, they typically take ~6 months to make a decision so I’ve got a few months yet. Still, I’m moving in the background to continue to tighten up the editing, get the formatting ready for the different form factors, and I’ve retained an artist to help me with a new cover design. I’ll definitely go with a hardcopy version this time around.

What I’m struggling with now is whether I should continue to keep things pretty hush-hush or start getting the word out. I don’t want to publicly say what the snazzy new title is yet because that could still yet change (especially if a publisher has a better idea), but I also don’t want to leave it until a day before release. I want to start sending out advanced reading copies, but don’t want to step on the publisher’s expert toes on marketing if I do end up getting a publisher — after all, that’s the primary reason for getting one.

The broad sketch of my plan is basically to wait another month or so before I start doing any of this stuff, and then to start with ARCs for bloggers. I don’t know whether the 6-ish-month clock for hearing back from publishers starts when I sent the first query, or only after the full manuscript arrived. I should hear back by December, so if I don’t hear back by then I’d like to launch the self-published version in time for xmas shopping, new year’s resolutions, and RRSP season. I know some works started as self-published items and transitioned to traditional presses, but aside from those exceptions I don’t really know if initiating a self-publishing push will scuttle a potential publishing deal if I had just waited an extra few months. Though I’m afraid to push too hard too soon on self-publishing, I also don’t want to wait forever (and miss a big part of the yearly cycle) to give extra time to a process that has a ~90% rejection rate.

Anyway, lack of sleep, dilemmas, too much stress weight, manifestos, and soon I’m going to have to start “sunsetting” Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing.

* – or alternatively: “what’s with all the whining? 83 hours/week should be your starting point for the work week. That leaves you with 85 hours of non-work every week: put in 18 to watch Blueberry, 1.5 to get groceries, 3 to wash the dishes and clean up, 2 for meals you’re not eating at your desk or during Blueberry time, 2.5 for personal hygiene, and you’ve still got 8.3 hours per day left to do whatever the hell you want. Don’t whine about a lack of sleep just because you chose to spend some of that time with your wife, checking your email, watching TV, telling people on the internet how wrong they are, or massacring video game orcs to de-stress instead.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve put up a weekly round-up post. It made sense to stop the practice: when I barely post once a week to begin with, all that would be left is round-up posts. For those visiting for the first time because of the inclusion in this week’s Carnival of Wealth, welcome! I wrote a welcome post not so long ago that still applies if you need to get oriented here.

First off, I submitted my last post on the cone of probability to the Carnival of Wealth, Dollars to Dollars Edition over at Control Your Cash. A quick note of correction: I have links to the past ~3 years of archived posts in the sidebar, but the WordPress archives actually go back about 9 years — I just truncated the sidebar because it was ridiculously long (and also anything before that point is really just whining about grad school and World of Warcraft and not really worth going back to).

Michael James is writing a book about retirement. Well, he hasn’t said he is in so many words, but he has been knocking out post after post examining how to safely turn an investment portfolio into spending money: Two posts on the 4% rule-of-thumb, and adjusting it for fees. A retirement income strategy of holding a certain portion in fixed income/cash and investing the rest, with follow-ups on this cushioned strategy. Revisiting that strategy he works out some example cases with a smoothing filter on adjusting spending to market returns, and some historical perspective. Finally, some thoughts on treating your whole portfolio like a RRIF.

Sandi gets a post up at Spring just in time for inclusion, talking about budgeting as the most important aspect of personal finance (even though it sucks).

I don’t read many parenting blogs, but recently came across Illustrated with Crappy Pictures and she’s hilarious. If you have to start somewhere in the archives, you might as well with this post: “Parties without cookies are not really parties at all. They are just groups of people feeling disappointed.”

Active investing:
Note that even though I did win the Financial Uproar Misfit Bloggers stock picking competition this year, and did actually invest in each of my picks, my actual returns were not nearly as good as what you see in the contest. Partly because, you know, the fact that I own more than 4 stocks. I should also note that I came in last place for 2012, such is the nature of these contests. Anyway, my rate of return (IRR) for 2013 was bang on 20.0%, which is a fair bit below my passive benchmark return of 23.9% (though in an absolute sense it was a fantastic year). I invested heavily in Dundee International, which has slid through the year, and sold too early on many winners (with at least two going on to roughly double after I sold them). There are loads more mistakes to point out, including checking out mentally through the fall when I was busy as balls. With that under-performance and no strong investing ideas in hand, this year’s savings will be going into the passive portfolio.

Power outage:
When last I posted, the outage was into its sixth day for us. We ended up being without power for seven days, only to come back to find that despite all our precautions one of the pipes burst. That led to another few days of couch-surfing as our water stayed off and the kitchen was torn apart to fix it. It was actually a bit of a miracle the landlord was able to fix it that fast — much more difficult and we would have had to wait for an outside plumber to do the job. However, we were left with a bit of a mess to clean up (the first mess from when we evacuated in the cold and dark, leaving behind dirty dishes and what-not, then cleaning out the fridge and freezer, then a pile of drywall dust and insulation everywhere). Then, just after we moved back in, we had another 2.5-hour outage. As soon as the lights started to flicker I realized I have some mild form of power outage PTSD now. It was so much colder that night than the ~0°C night when the power first went out: the house cooled as much in those 2 hours as it did in the first 12 of the original blackout (when we were starting to talk about evacuating). Thankfully this time it was both short and we had some communication from Toronto Hydro on what to expect. At least the house is clean now. I’m not sure the fridge and freezer have ever been this clean.

Busy:
I came into my 2-week winter “vacation” with a massive to-do list, to catch up on all the stuff I had been pushing aside while I was so busy in the fall and also to start some new projects (like to finally sit down and start crystallizing the 2nd edition of my book, and to help set up all the computers my family got for xmess). Well, I lost two full days to driving alone with the ice storm and power outage, to escape (in poor conditions) to my dad’s at first, then shuttling back and forth from Wayfare’s parents’ place to check on the house and run the portable heaters in a vain attempt to prevent the pipes from freezing. And I could forget about being productive while staying over at someone else’s place. Then we had to clean up the mess caused by the prolonged power outage. So I don’t have any new posts finished for you, no progress on cleaning out the junk in the house (just cleaning of the junk), and I haven’t even looked at a request to write a book chapter, let alone thought about the material itself. I am not remotely caught up on sleep, either.

Though speaking of sleep, after spending a few days couch-surfing through this disaster, I have come to appreciate the couch for its sleeping art. As a side sleeper, couches are not so bad, though tossing and turning often means completely flipping my setup around to keep my back to the back of the couch. But I like having that warm, soft vertical surface against my back. I think someone should invent a bed with side uprights like a couch has, but with a decent amount of flat space for sleeping and no bloodly couch cushion voids. Uprights on either side, that would be awesome.

Past Writing:
My book has now made it to #12 in the Business & Finance, Personal Finance, Investing category on Kobo. Note that this says more about how few books on investing people buy than it does about my success. Indeed, all of my earnings from Kobo are still theoretical as I have yet to hit the sales threshold needed to actually get a payment from them. Also, I got a call from the GBGHF top dog on New Year’s day to thank me for the brochures I put together for them: in less than a year, they are over three-quarters of the way to their three-year fundraising goal. They’re finding that having a (high quality) physical brochure is really helping them when they meet with donors, especially when they carry them around for those serendipitous meetings. It’s also helped with their other efforts: having the staff profiled in those brochures opened the door to prominently featuring staff in their other ads and communiques

Blueberry:
Blueberry was bad at dinner tonight, putting her grubby hands into her hair. And not just like “huh, my head’s itchy” brushing her hair, but after touching her head and getting told not to by Wayfare, she stared us down and planted both her hands on the top of her head with an evil grin plastered on her face. Then after we cleaned her up, I sat in the chair in the living room and stared at her in what I considered to be a stern and parental manner. She mugged and smiled and tried to get on my good side/make me break character. I held my disapproving ground. Then she spontaneously ran full-bore at me, crashing into my chest in a massive attack hug.

The hug game was born. A few more minutes of running, giggling, and hugging and all was forgiven (you try suppressing a grin against that onslaught of cute). This is the best thing that has ever happened in the history of everything.

It has been a crazy few weeks around here, largely because of some large projects at work with nearly overlapping deadlines. I’ve had to put in a massive amount of overtime to keep everything on track. It started back in mid-September with an all-nighter for one project that had a deadline of midnight on Sunday, and I didn’t get the final material to edit and compile until Saturday afternoon. We pulled it together and sent it off just after 6, “six hours ahead of schedule” one guy quipped on the conference call. No, I muttered, our schedule was not to go right up to midnight on a Sunday, the schedule was to finish on Friday and kick it for the weekend. Anyway, I can tell I’m getting old because it’s becoming hard to recover from those all-nighters. And with the next four projects in the pipeline that followed right on the heels of that one, it’s been almost two months of feeling drained and on the edge — I’m just now getting into recovery mode. Things were busiest the last few weeks (as you could probably tell when the blog went dark), with a few hundred-hour weeks in there (technically the worst one was only 88 hours of work, but add in meal times at work and commuting time, and I was on my feet not relaxing for a craptonne of time), followed by a conference.

Like many employers these days, mine is looking to control staffing costs by not paying out overtime; instead we get time-in-lieu (i.e., if I work an extra day on a project, I get to take a day off at some quieter time in the year). It’s an understandable compromise, acknowledging that 88-hour work weeks are not normal while trying to stick to a budget. But for employees this is a tough system, especially if a quiet period to burn banked time never really comes (due to the nature of the work or chronic under-staffing). Moreover, working overtime has costs, particularly as a new parent. You may be eating out more in your rush, have more parking costs as you skip transit or walking to get a few precious minutes back, and of course daycare and babysitting. Then there’s the toll on personal health from the stress of a major project and burning the midnight oil.

Getting time off is a good way to catch up on the family time you missed out on (indeed, I just spent the day playing with Blueberry). But it doesn’t make up for the monetary costs of working more. A good balance would be to pay out some overtime (e.g., if someone hits time and a half territory, pay out the half), though there’s nothing I can do about that for my current position.

Without changing the policies of a large bureaucracy, one way to put back the hole in the budget that crazy hours (and pizzas) burned is to use the time off to do freelance work¹. In my case, I’ve had a few ideas on that front, and one possible project on the back burner — and now have enough lieu time to pursue some of them. I doubt I can ever find a time quiet enough to take it all in one chunk (scheduling my normal vacation is hard enough), so it’ll likely be burned off as a day or so per week (at this point I won’t have to work another Monday from now through June). Most likely I’m going to start working on the 2nd edition of my book, and maybe look at a dead tree edition. Fortunately, Wayfare’s work is fairly flexible, so if I can take more time off to watch Blueberry, she can work more to repair the hole in the family budget.

If freelance isn’t an option for you, then time-in-lieu may be a chance to save money around the house, for instance by making more things from scratch. Failing that, you can take a day to just relax, and let the expenses sort themselves out in the budget somehow.

1: Which leads me to: hey, I’ve got time banked. Who has a project for me?