spinph com app ST. ALBANS CITY — As each morning reminds us: It’s cold outside. Every winter, our planet tilts its northern half away from the sun, shortening the days and lowering the temperatures, yet everybody needs a place to stay warm. This year more than most, the follow-up question has become: “At what price?” As the debate around energy use continues, Vermont and its residents face the age-old challenge of finding the best way to heat their homes at the cheapest cost. From heat pumps to wood stoves, there are more options available than ever, but the conversation has also gotten more complicated, especially as the state wrestles with its own age-old problem — keeping taxes low. To get a comprehensive solution to your heating needs, the Messenger recommends talking to a professional heating specialist. But in the meantime, here’s our next best effort to explain what Vermonters need to know as they deal with another cold winter and rising heating costs. Layers, movement and energy In Vermont, most of the state’s underlying social issues are related to housing in some way, and heat joined the list this summer, thanks in part, to the Clean Heat Standard. But then, Vermont has always been cold. So what changed his past year? Like everything else since the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest conversation around indoor heating has been spurred by rising costs, changing demographics and a lackluster housing stock. Admittedly, explaining all that isn’t going to help anyone actually keep their homes warm. Instead, this past week, I sat down with Dwight Decoster, who thinks a lot about how to keep a place toasty. He’s the head of the Champlain Valley Weatherization program, a Colchester-based nonprofit where he and his team upgrade 240 homes per year as part of a state-funded program. To meet with Decoster, a homeowner can apply to the program through the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, where applicants are weighed and ranked according to need. There’s a point system, but if you fit the state’s criteria, Decoster’s crew could show up to take a look over your property and start identifying the best ways to bring it up to 21st century heating standards. Through the program, a client can get their homes weatherized for free. “It’s one of the best kept secrets in Vermont ,” he said. To get started with a new client, Decoster said it requires two visits by energy experts to lay out what they do with each house, because it takes so much time to help people wrap their heads around the concept of what they want to do. Decoster said he tends to start his conversations about heat by relating it to how people get ready to go outside in the winter. To weatherize your home — like to weatherize yourself — you start with putting on your hat. Since heat rises, Decoster and his team look into the roof and the attic to make sure everything is nice and tight. Then, they focus on the foundation to keep your footers dry, followed by the final check — the exterior walls. To keep the warm air in and your house zipped up, they usually add a few layers — usually including some sprayed cellulose insulation — and then you essentially have a house buttoned up for the winter. The weatherized results should better encapsulate the thermal energy that’s generated in a house. Every home has some sort of heat-generating device, but Decoster said a house that leaks hot air is essentially throwing away the energy costs needed to generate it. “The (investment) payback on air sealing is like seven years,” he said. “The average payback on insulation is 10 to 12 years. So you see how obviously, customers want to get their biggest bang for their buck. But air sealing and insulation need to go together.” Decoster and his crew often start with a blower to kick-off each weatherization project. The machine forces air into a house, and a thermal imaging device can identify the various sources heat may be leaking from. Decoster compared the process to trying to stop up the light that can be seen outlining a closed door. If a door’s gap isn't tight enough, that’s plenty of space for it to shine through. Heat functions in the same way, as thermal energy moves toward a colder low pressure space. Usually, weatherization involves adding more insulation, but Decoster said doing so is kind of moot until those holes can be tightened up. Along those same lines, any homeowner can make necessary adjustments today to help prevent heat from escaping, he said. Check to make sure there is a weather strip on your door. For a quick test, Decoster said shut your front door, turn out the lights inside, turn on the porch lights and check for any silhouetting. Lock your windows at night. Even with double locking windows, the extra pressure against the frame creates a better air seal. Look on the outside of the house, by taking a walk around it. Check for any faults in air paths that could lead in and out, like range hoods or bathroom fans. Insulate your attic hatch. Decoster said he spent an hour adding a weather strip to the attic when he first moved into his house, and it can completely change the airflow throughout a structure. If you’re a little more DIY, Decoster said spraying insulation can be done by a relatively handy person. He recommends cellulose over fiberglass insulation, as it's cheaper and much greener from an environmental perspective. History and energy use Ask energy expert Jim Stiles about the most efficient heating solution he can think of, and he heads underground. “The one that has really captured my attention for many decades now is the groundsource heat pumps, or sort of, twist on that, a thermal energy network,” he said. Stiles is the chair of the City of St. Albans Climate & Energy Advisory Committee. The group’s focus has been on fixing up city property to find cost efficiencies, but he can imagine a much bigger mission of helping establish an underground thermal network for the city. The idea is far from being a reality any time soon, but the concept behind the technology is to create a system of underground pipes that holds thermal energy — via warm water or coolant — that each building attached to the system could easily share. It’s kind of like huddling for warmth, but on a streetwide level and if huddling was more of a shared utility. “It’s ideal in terms of where you most hope to be,” Stiles said. “For the people and places where it makes good engineering sense, it has other advantages because of the reduced demand for electricity.” While such a system could be beneficial for Vermont, Stiles recognizes the steep ask required for such a system. The infrastructure would include installing underground pipes — likely taking a few million in grant funding — and there’s no previous success to point to in Vermont to show the proof of concept. In the grand scheme, however, the concept does solve the basic problem for Vermonters, Stiles said. There’s a natural lack of heat in Vermont’s northern climate, and a row of weatherized homes connected to a thermal network would be able to capture a lot of the heat that currently goes to waste in many of Vermont’s neighborhoods. The cost to do it, however, is just too much in the current economic climate, especially as oil companies tend to sink millions into securing their holds on energy markets, Stiles noted. “It’s there, but it’s value engineering,” Decoster said. “A lot of these really energy efficient builders, they'll give you a package. ‘This is the most energy efficient I can build. And we back off from there.’” But then again, that’s how most efficiency upgrade discussions tend to head. In the long run, energy efficiency saves money, but the upfront costs are usually too expensive until there are more adopters. Decoster gave his own example. He knows people in the climate field who can construct houses that heat and cool themselves, adapt to the weather, have zero emissions and can generate their own electricity. Getting to green is possible. But making that technology affordable, that’s another question. “In Vermont, you’d be talking the top tenth of 1% that can afford that technology, the average Vermonter, no way,” Decoster said. “In my house, I have a wife who’s really good who knows when to put the shades up when she wants them. She knows how the air flows in her house.” As for the debate around the Clean Heat Standard, those rhetorical guidelines around the latest climate tech have hyper-focused on air source heat pumps. Underground systems, as considered by Stiles, also use heat pumps, but the difference primarily lies in the source of the heat itself. Air from Vermont’s cold winters — compared to the earth a few hundred feet down — tends to be much colder, making it a worse heat source for a heat pump. Using them as the only source of heat was generally frowned upon by those interviewed for this piece, due to their inefficiencies related to Vermont’s climate. The Vermont Public Utility Commission, however, is still hacking out new rules to try to encourage the use of heat pumps, although the final details could end up being much different. With that said, everyone interviewed for this piece encouraged the use of heat pumps as a secondary source, as they still deliver heating efficiencies. This past May, Americans for Prosperity — a conservative think tank — even ended up sending out a five-part mailer campaign to stir up a political defense against the Clean Heat Standard, as it tied into complaints around affordability. The policy’s effectiveness was also under contention. As proposed, the Clean Heat Standard’s stated goal was to essentially lower the overall amount of energy used by Vermont by giving fuel providers and distributors the additional task of helping Vermonters with the transition to cleaner alternatives. In theory, the effort would have shielded Vermont residents from the ebbs and flows of gas prices, which are affected by much bigger players in the world — both private and public — than the State of Vermont. Instead, the effort is currently leaning toward a much simpler solution set of some sort of fee system to collect incentive dollars to help pay for heat pump house conversions, although the exact rules — as well as the policy’s effectiveness — are still in contention. They are due in January. Getting a heat pump Most people have seen a heat pump without recognizing it. Like electrical panels, air conditioners and cell towers, the devices are literally designed to be as inconspicuous as possible. Vermont, as a state, is one of the earliest adopters of the device, installing 63,000 of the units last year. “It’s kind of like a small filing cabinet tipped on its side horizontally, connected to a refrigerant line,” he said. Some sit outside a home like an air conditioner. Some are fitted inside a house’s already-installed heating system, with mini-splits functioning as space heaters. The really fancy ones take advantage of underground thermal systems, as Stiles preferred. VGS technicians install a ductless mini-split heatpump at a residential dwelling. To create heat, they essentially function like reverse air conditioners, pulling heat from one source to shoot hot air into an enclosed space, or to warm up liquid when attached to a water heater. Installing them, however, can be tricky. Tim Perrin, VGS’s director of energy management and services, explained some of the considerations with me this past week over Zoom. Many households can benefit from a heat pump, Perrin said, but so much depends on the set-up of each house and its existing heating source. In Vermont, for example, roughly 6 in 10 households rely on gas-powered furnaces attached to a central air system. In such cases, Perrin said even an air source heat pump could help carve out some efficiencies, as the heat pump can do much of the heavy lifting to bring a home up to higher temperature before it becomes a better trade-off to switch to a primary fuel source and warm a space up the rest of the way. Usually, the time to switch between two heating sources is when the temperature measures between 40 and 50 degrees. The extra device also gives property owners some options, Perrin said. They can switch to whatever heating option works best at each temperature, and if there’s a major upswing in fuel prices, households can more easily adapt. But that doesn’t mean that heat pumps can be programmed and forgotten. There is something of a learning curve to running the devices, Perrin said. Unlike a central heating system, where you can set a temperature and wait for the furnace to kick in, heat pumps can be a little more finicky. They require annual cleaning, and heat exchange is often localized — depending on the design, of course. Relatedly, solutions often require some customization to fit each space. Like Decoster, Perrin also stressed the importance of weatherization attached to all these conversations. Heating a space is a combination of both generation and retention, and there’s not much point in addressing one without tackling the other. In older houses, for example, past construction techniques often created houses that were a little more loose and actually encouraged air flow, Stiles said, which robbed the house of its heat. Instead, people hunkered down in limited parts of the house, dressed with the expectation of the cold. “They dressed very warm and lived very cold in the winter,” Stiles explained. These days, we’ve made some progress. During a custom-fit, Perrin said a heat pump expert will examine the space to double check for weatherization issues, as well as, begin the conversation around potential conversion. “This is where understanding the heating needs of a home might be effective to find that technical balance point,” Perrin said. “At some point, the outside air temperature is just able to heat the home and it starts to be necessary to have some sort of supplemental heating source to support the home on really cool days.”Here's how Ireland's political parties have said they'd spend the Apple Tax billions

Ireland's 22 help Nicholls State take down New Orleans 73-70Cancer – (21st June to 22nd July) Daily Horoscope Prediction says, Stay healthy and happy today Do not compromise on love today and ensure you keep your partner happy. The professional life will also be successful. Health and wealth are positive today. Do not let egos hamper the romance. Have a great in terms of work today. You are also prosperous but saving money should be the priority. No major medical issues will also trouble you. Cancer Love Horoscope Today You will make the day special in terms of love. Spend more time with your partner and engage in activities that you both love. Love the person unconditionally and you’ll see the difference in life. Marriage is also on the cards. Plan a weekend filled with adventure. Single natives will come across someone special while traveling, in a classroom, official function, or at a party. Propose today to get a positive response. Married male natives should avoid office romance that may hurt their family life. Cancer Career Horoscope Today Be professional in at office and take up new tasks that will keep you busy. Lawyers, academicians, engineers, managers, accountants, and bankers will have a productive day. Government employees can expect a change in destination. Some team leaders will have problems in tackling politics within the team. However, ensure it does not impact the total output. You can expect a change in role while government employees can have a location change. Entrepreneurs will be happy to take the trade to new locations. Cancer Money Horoscope Today No major monetary issue will cause chaos in life. However, it is wise to be careful about investments. Do not invest a major amount in the stock market. You may pick the first part of the day to clear all pending dues. Continue shopping for electronic items and gold. You will require money for hospital expenditures. Businessmen will see funds through promoters and traders will have good returns. Cancer Health Horoscope Today No major health issues will be there. However, some females will have issues related to skin and teeth today. Seniors should be careful while using the staircase. Do not miss the medication and also be careful while driving. Pregnant females should be careful while traveling or boarding a bus. Minor natives may suffer from bruises while playing but they will not be serious. Cancer Sign Attributes Strength: Intuitive, Practical, Kind, Energetic, Artsy, Dedicated, Benevolent, Caring Weakness: Insatiable, Possessive, Prudish Symbol: Crab Element: Water Body Part: Stomach & Breast Sign Ruler: Moon Lucky Day: Monday Lucky Color: White Lucky Number: 2 Lucky Stone: Pearl Cancer Sign Compatibility Chart Natural affinity: Taurus, Virgo, Scorpio, Pisces Good compatibility: Cancer, Capricorn Fair compatibility: Gemini, Leo, Sagittarius, Aquarius Less compatibility: Aries, Libra By: Dr. J. N. Pandey Vedic Astrology & Vastu Expert Website: www.astrologerjnpandey.com E-mail: djnpandey@gmail.com Phone: 91-9811107060 (WhatsApp Only)

Published 5:58 pm Sunday, November 24, 2024 By Data Skrive The Monday college basketball slate includes eight games featuring a ranked team in play. Among those contests is the Duke Blue Devils squaring off against the Kansas State Wildcats. Watch women’s college basketball, other live sports and more on Fubo. What is Fubo? Fubo is a streaming service that gives you access to your favorite live sports and shows on demand. Use our link to sign up for a free trial. Catch tons of live women’s college basketball , plus original programming, with ESPN+ or the Disney Bundle.

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State, national officials remember Jimmy CarterWASHINGTON, Dec 30 — Jimmy Carter, the 100-year-old former US president and Nobel peace laureate who rose from humble beginnings in rural Georgia to lead the nation from 1977 to 1981, has died, his nonprofit foundation said yesterday. Carter had been in hospice care since mid-February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia — the same small town where he was born and once ran a peanut farm before becoming governor of the Peach State and running for the White House. Carter died “peacefully” at his home in Plains, “surrounded by his family,” the Carter Center said in a statement. “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights and unselfish love,” Chip Carter, the former president’s son, said in the statement. Carter was the oldest living ex-US leader and the nation’s longest-lived president — an outcome that seemed unlikely back in 2015 when the Southern Democrat revealed he had brain cancer. But the US Navy veteran and fervent Christian repeatedly defied the odds to enjoy a long and fruitful post-presidency, after four years in the Oval Office often seen as disappointing. During his single term, Carter placed a commitment on human rights and social justice, enjoying a strong first two years that included brokering a peace deal between Israel and Egypt dubbed the Camp David Accords. But his administration hit numerous snags — the most serious being the taking of US hostages in Iran and the disastrous failed attempt to rescue the 52 captive Americans in 1980. He also came in for criticism for his handling of an oil crisis. In November of that year, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan clobbered Carter at the polls, relegating the Democrat to just one term. Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, swept into office on a wave of staunch conservatism. Active post-presidency As the years passed, a more nuanced image of Carter emerged — one that took into account his significant post-presidential activities and reassessed his achievements. He founded the Carter Center in 1982 to pursue his vision of world diplomacy, and he was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts to promote social and economic justice. He observed numerous elections around the world and emerged as a prominent international mediator, tackling global problems from North Korea to Bosnia. Carter, known for his toothy smile, said basic Christian tenets such as justice and love served as the bedrock of his presidency. He taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist, his church in Plains, well into his 90s. In recent years, he had received various hospital treatments, including when he revealed in August 2015 that he had brain cancer and was undergoing radiation. ‘ Leader, statesman and humanitarian ’ Tributes poured in from White House leaders past, present and incoming. Bill Clinton said Carter “worked tirelessly for a better, fairer world,” while Donald Trump said Americans owed the Democrat “a debt of gratitude.” George W. Bush said Carter’s legacy would “inspire Americans for generations,” while Barack Obama said the former leader “taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service.” “America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian,” current President Joe Biden and his wife Jill said in a statement. “For anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith, and humility.” In April 2021, the Bidens met with the Carters at their home in Plains. The White House later released a photo showing the couples smiling together, although only Rosalynn was seen by the press outside, bidding the Bidens farewell while using a walker. Rosalynn, Carter’s wife of 77 years, died on November 19, 2023 at age 96. The former president, who looked frail, poignantly appeared at her memorial service in a wheelchair, with a blanket on his lap bearing their likenesses. Carter is survived by the couple’s four children, three sons and a daughter. — AFP

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