I was watering in the morning and looked up under the eve and could see that dust was caked in the soffit vent above me so I blasted it with water and the dirt just poured down.  If you don’t know what a soffit vent is you may have another type of ventilation technique for your attic. It gets hot in Texas and I would have cooked eggs on the sidewalk but I already had breakfast.  I changed the filter a few weeks ago and had the air ducts professionally cleaned a couple of years ago and made this discovery that everyone in the A/C business knows but maybe not everyone else thinks about, which is why I am writing this blurb today about cleaning your soffit vents. After searching to spell it correctly the world uses soffit and soffet but soffit is how dictionary .com spells it so that’s good enough for me.

When I was finishing I could see the screen again that keeps the bugs out and as clogged as the soffit vent was certainly no air was moving either.  Big problem! I quickly went around the entire house and all but one was pretty dirty.   I had turbine fans put in several years ago and noticed they did not turn as fast as they used to.  After cleaning out the vents those turbines are noticeably faster again.  So, if you are like me and never cleaned the attic vents it will pay to check yours so the air can move freely in the attic. There are many types of vents.  It was over 100 today and without air moving I can only guess how hot it could get in the attic and what that is doing to my electric bill.  What ever type of attic vents you have, if they are clogged will not do much good to move air as needed and we all know the result.  Yes, it’s another project to be done around the house but this one is fast, cheap and easy to do.

Ok, so we picked up the Consumer Reports magazine at the grocery store with the lead cover being the 2009 New Car Preview – Best & Worst cars in fuel economy.  At first glance it looked like a lot of current useful information.
As we reviewed the information looking for the holy grail of gas mileage and creature comfort a few things  stood out.  The biggest thing we took away is that in spite of the hunger for better fuel economy is it business as usual with the auto makers?  It is a given that a work truck is going to get poor gas mileage but it appears  the manufacturers are pumping out business as usual.  The line up of cars mostly in the 18-22 mpg range seems to be about standard.   If this is improvement then we must get the news out that people need solutions.  While in the same grocery store another patron was clearly discussing that she was getting food and had no gas to go anywhere else.
We would recommend you save your gas before driving out to buy the magazine.  It is chocked full of the usual consumer reports style of comparisons but when you look closely there is a big gaping hole in the quality of the report. We noticed the test vehicles were not necessarily new models but the casual look at the summary scores of what’s better is misleading.  We say this because for example the Mazda3 test vehicle was a 2004 iSedan.  The narrative talks about getting 30mpg but to be fair to us as consumers we would simply not accept car data 5 years old.  That is not relevant.  We could go on and on with other examples of aged models included in the magazine.  We were surprised to see however that the Hummer H3 and the Toyota Tundra reliability expectation ratings were low.
The articles did provide data of great interest and value that shows how components vehicles performed over time by including a year by year summary.  This is handy if you want a used car because you can get a quick view of performance for other owners which could help you avoid or at least know you need to look for certain classes of problems before making your used car purchase.  This is a reason to buy the magazine, getting pertinent information about 2009 vehicles will have to wait.  We look forward to the usual quality and apples to apples comparison.  Comparing and scoring cars from 2004 to 2008 and calling it 2009 car preview data simply misses the mark. The edition we discussed here shows to display until November 10, 2008.  Many magazines stopped putting the publishing month in order to get more mileage out of each magazine.