Almost Winter

Even though we've had highs in the sixties for about the past week, it is pretty much the end of fall. Our monthly gas bill reminded us of this– a bit over $100 even though it's been "relatively" warm. I think because of the relative warmth we haven't been using the wood stove as much as we should, and haven't been setting the thermostat as low as we should.
At any rate, today I made a trip to the store and picked up a couple of things. First, the same Frost King indoor window-plasticing kits we got last year, along with the same crappy caulk rope that's too small to use easily. These items made a big difference last year. Then, a programmable thermostat to replace our old mechanical mercury one.
The new thermostat is a Honeywell, like the old one, but unlike it is 5-1-1 programmable, which means you can have different programs for weekdays, saturdays and sundays. For starters I've got it set to turn the setpoint down to 55 when we sleep and 50 when we're away during the day. Last year during the cold times of winter we had the old thermostat set to about 55 all the time, and heated up with the wood stove. With this newfangled thing we should be able to use even less gas, but have the luxury of waking up to a relatively warm house (currently set to a balmy 67 for the morning!). The programming is pretty easy, and I imagine we'll be tweaking times and temps once we get used to how it works. It cost us 80 bucks; most likely it'll pay for itself this year. For folks using gas heat only, it's expected to pay for itself in as little as a couple of months during the winter around here.
We did have our furnace inspected for the first time since we bought the place. Had a pretty good contractor come in and check/clean the various parts, while explaining to me what he was doing. Turned down the gas pressure a little, it was set somewhat high. Other than that, the basic synopsis was that it looks very good, but we should be aware that it's at about the end of its expected life, since it was installed in 1988.
We almost managed to schedule a chimney sweep to clean and inspect the chimney our wood stove is using, but haven't actually managed to do so yet. I did clean out the blower on the stove, which was operating at about 50% due to two years of lint, dust, and cat hair collecting in the squirrel cage blowers. We've been very happy with the stove recently, probably due to this and our dry wood.

Also in the "almost winter" category, we finally got the third cord of wood stacked out back on Friday, and S. did some lawn cleanup while I was finishing the tail end of that. We do have some carrots out in our garden which we should probably dig up during this warm spell.