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Total Electric

A little experiment begins.

Julian S. Taylor
6 min readNov 7, 2023
© 2023, Julian S. Taylor

When my spouse and I moved into our home in Rochester, New York, we had a lot of adjusting to do. Unlike Colorado, inspecting the home prior to purchase was nearly impossible so we had to buy this pig in its obscuring poke. The plumbing leaked, the walls were spotted with unpainted plaster patch, the walls of the upstairs shower were cracked and failing, the downstairs bathroom was contrary to code and had to be decommissioned, and the house was infested with black centipedes and spiders.

The basement bore a dank, brown, slightly excremental smell that could not be expunged and mold was blackening every corner. As we worked to refurbish the entirely redeemable upstairs, the basement remained a problem. A thorough cleaning of the basement as well as installation of flooring, better lighting and an innovative ceiling, improved the visual aesthetics but the smell remained. My office and library still bore the olfactory stamp of a dilapidated boxing gym.

As with our home in Colorado, we renewed our project to eliminate natural gas from the home entirely. We researched alternatives and finally designed our plan. We would replace the gas water heater and air conditioning with heat pump alternatives. We would replace the gas clothes dryer with an electric dryer and the home would become the total electric dream home we had been…

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Julian S. Taylor
Julian S. Taylor

Written by Julian S. Taylor

Software engineer & author. Former Senior Staff Engineer w/ Sun Microsystems. Latest book: Famine in the Bullpen. See & hear at https://sockwood.com

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