Is Your Refrigerator Wasting Energy?

A lot of families think of the hulking metal box in the kitchen as "the Amana gallery" or a message center for Post-Its®, but in reality the refrigerator is one of your home's biggest consumers of electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy says that an average 16-cubic foot frost-free refrigerator, a medium-sized model, draws about 725 watts of electricity 24/7. That's about six times the power draw of a flat-screen TV, or seventy-two times the energy consumption of a clock radio. It should be clear that your refrigerator has the potential to be wasting energy -- a lot of energy. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce your fridge's appetite for power.

Bicycle Maintenance 201: How to Change Your Chain

Why change what seems to be a perfectly good chain?

The answer’s actually simple: chains wear out and even break. That wouldn’t be a problem except that “wearing out” means a chain gets longer. Here’s why: 

The anatomy of a chain.

When a chain's new, the spaces between the rollers exactly match the spaces on your chainwheels and cogs (what most call front and rear “gears,” respectively). As the chain wears, the pins connecting the links (hidden inside the rollers) wear down and allow the chain to get slightly longer. This, in turn, grinds away at the teeth on the cogs, which changes the length of their spaces. If you have to install a new chain because the old one broke or a link froze up, the spaces will no longer match. That makes the new chain skip on the cog, and can wear out the chain faster than it should. Worst-case scenario, you may need a new cogset, which costs about three times as much as a new chain (and requires special tools to install). You probably don’t want that.