How Much Air Conditioning Do You Actually Need? The Ultimate Guide to Aircon BTUs and Heat Gain in Your Home

Your body is a furnace right now.

In this moment, 30 trillion of your cells are metabolising, transforming nutrients into energy. This happens even when you sleep, and keeps us alive.

As your cells metabolise, they release heat!

more activity + bigger body = more metabolism = more heat

Fun Biology Fact But a Bit Too Much Information

This heat is an inevitable byproduct of the chemical breakdown of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), a compound that is your body’s ‘currency of energy’. It’s needed to drive your muscle contractions, move your cells, circulate blood and even get your nerve impulses going!

In the world of aircon, one of the popular ways to measure this heat is with the BTU, The British Thermal Unit.

An indoor aircon unit with 18000 BTU capacity is able to remove 18000 BTU of heat (and humidity).

How much heat needs removing from your home?

Let’s start with the internal heat sources. These typically mean energy-consuming things, like appliances, lights and people.

1: Identify the heat sources inside your home

The first major heat source in your home is you!

That’s right – when you sleep, your body emanates about 18 satays of heat energy!

And as you read this, little oranges of heat are radiating from your body. (The healthy choice)

This heat leaves your body by convection and conduction from your skin to the air, which is only possible when the air is colder than your skin. This is usually the case!

Here’s a screenshot of my skin temperature ranging between 33.4 and 33.8°C , taken with this sensor I have!

My core temp at the time was 38, which was more than my battery level!

During a heat wave when the surrounding air is hotter than your skin, the body actually gains heat from conduction and convection – here it can only cool itself down by the evaporation of sweat. Because humidity limits this evaporation, heat loss becomes super difficult! This is why hot, humid climates (like Singapore) are considered much less comfortable than hot climates which are dry. (Like UAE, or certain parts of Australia!)

Other than humans, electrical and cooking equipment are a source of heat gain too. Studies from ASHRAE have been done to determine the recommended heat gain for a variety of these!

But it’s much simpler to assume that 100% of your appliances eventually convert electricity into heat gain.

Fun Facts about Entropy – Why All Your Electricity Becomes Heat

You might think that the light energy, the sound, and the processing power that appliances produce refutes this assumption. But light bounces around your walls until its radiation is absorbed by all surfaces in a room (some escapes out the window). Sound reverberates through the air and surfaces of your house, agitating the molecules which exert friction on each other as heat! In computers, the computation performed in CPUs are simply resistance to the circuit. They perform no energy storage and do no work – simply producing heat as electricity cascades through the billions of transistors to perform instructions.

For the laptop I’m typing this post on, that means 65W!

That means my laptop is emanating about 221.8 BTU/hour, or two plain pratas of heat during the day. Yum.

What about your entire home?

Looking at EMA’s stats on Average Monthly Household Electricity Consumption, the overall average Singapore home consumes about 470kWh of electricity a month!

That comes down to a heat generation about 470000 ÷ 30 ÷ 24 = 652.7 Watts.

Which is 2227 BTU/hour!

Because the average kWh consumption of 470kWh is quite high for smaller flats, I stratified the data like this!

Almost there!

Equally important are the sources of heat outside your walls.

2: Identify the heat sources outside your home

Even a closed, empty home heats up! Before cooling you and your family, heat enters from the hot, humid outdoor air and solar radiation outside your walls.

This happens even if you had no windows!

The amount of heat is proportional to your flat’s outer surface area, which will increase depending on your floor area:

This heat travels by conduction through your window glass and the solid concrete of your walls – when one side has a higher temperature, heat will inevitably transfer to the other side!

This heat (Q) is proportional to the wall material, the surface area of the walls (A) , their wall thickness (L) and the temperature difference (T1-T2) between the inside and outside!

Heat Transfer Through a Wall — Source: Engineer’s Edge

A simple way to calculate the total heat gain through your walls and windows is to use the BCA’s Residence Envelope Transmittance Value (RETV).

Source: Code on Envelope Thermal Performance for Buildings (BCA)

(Sidenote: RETVs can be reduced with better insulation and materials! This can be a point of pride for residential buildings. To be eligible for a Green Mark Platinum, you need an RETV of 20 W/sqm or lower.)

Let’s take the maximum RETV – 25 W/sqm.

This leads us to the final table of internal and external loads!

I’m assuming that the floor area of a condo is about the same as a 4-roomer, gasp! As we all know, they’re going down in size.

The story doesnt end here!

The heat your house expends today may change over time, which would be wise to consider.

3. Changes over Time

Consider the changes to the number (and size) of people in your home over time.

If you want to minimize the number of times you upgrade/change air conditioning units, it’s a good idea to size for the future. Most air conditioning units last 15-20 years!

Within this time horizon, how will the loads in your house change? Should you size for the largest heat load in the next 20 years? Or the load your aircon serves 80-90% of the time? It might be tempting to just buy the biggest air conditioner you can, but over-sizing your unit can be tremendously wasteful depending on the part-load efficiency.

We’ll cover that… next semester!

I hope this post helped you understand what BTUs are and how the inside and outside of your house matters when you are looking for the right size of air conditioning!

Cheers.

Cool Tools Review: The Embr Wave 1, GreenTEG CORE and FOCI Wearable!

Aaaand here’s the short version!

We could end the post here, but cmon now.

So I really like strange wearables. Especially if they’re related to temperature. Or perceptions of temperature!

I want air-conditioning systems to work less for me. For this, I need to want less, which is difficult!

Tracking my data is part of a path to find the minimum conditions I need to be in comfort.

That aside, let’s get to the products!

(Fun fact: Humans have been getting cooler, one of the reasons being less chronic inflammatory conditions over the past bunch of centuries. Woohoo!)

As these products are not your usual smartphone or watch, I’ll be briefly going through their underlying technology first before going through the experience of using it. Feel free to skip those bits if you wish!

The Embr Wave

With Singapore’s intense heat and furious use of aircon, the idea of bringing cooling direct to our bodies was something worth a ($300+) try to me. Exciting new powers of personalized air-conditioning would make sweatingonthewaytowork a figment of the past. I would be so cool. Ha.

So the Wave doesn’t really do that!

How it Works:

The Wave contains a peltier plate, which becomes cool on one side and hot on the other side when you pass an electric current through it.

One side of the square goes cold, the other side gets hot.

This is called thermoelectric cooling – it’s a super-cool effect which we use for regulating the temperature of scientific devices and other tiny electronics.

To reject the heat on the other side, peltier plates are often combined with heat sinks (Metal blocks with a lot of ridged parts on them for more surface area) to dissipate this heat away. This explains the wiggly lines on the Embr Wave’s surface! The higher surface area is helpful to more efficiently dissipate heat when being used in Cooling mode.

The Experience

Does it actually cool you?

Sssssorta. It’s the kind of cooling you would expect on a hot day when you dip your hands into cold water. Or suddenly touch a cold, metal doorknob.

On heating mode, it’s like when you’re in a cold room and cup your hands around a warm mug of coffee.

This pulse of cooling or heating is applied to the underside of your wrist, which has a solid amount of bloodflow and is very thermally sensitive.

bwaaaang. (Unfortunately it doesn’t turn your skin blue, that is an edit)

The pulse of cold doesn’t remain constant – it comes in waves! According to Embr, this maximizes the feeling you get from each pulse, which I can verify. Having a constant source of cold on your skin tends to be forgotten – receiving waves makes them feel ‘new’ every time.

The Embr Wave comes with a pretty great app, which is where you can set these custom modes for yourself!

Overall, the psychological effect of cold hits slowly over time – I ‘feel’ it more keenly after an extended session with the Wave (like 30-60mins). It’s not exactly the aircon-everywhere I was hoping for, but could be valuable to someone looking for that last squeeze of comfort in a space that is always slightly too hot or cold.

Other

The design is a little blocky for laptop use, as it sticks out the bottom of your wrist! This results in occassional collisions which is not so nice. Also, the Wave 1 is charged by micro-USB (the horror!), but Embr is nice enough to include a cable in the box.

Nonetheless, Embr Labs just recently released an Embr Wave 2 in April, with a sleeker design and, according to them, stronger cooling.

The GreenTEG CORE sensor

The CORE is super cool!

So I was walking to the mall in the BLAZING hot sun one day (normal in Singapore these days, the weather’s been nuts!) and wondered the following:

Would I sweat sooner if I walked slowly in this blazing heat, thereby spending a longer time under the skin-melting gaze of Sauron, on my way to get some KFC?

Or would I sweat sooner if I ran to my dearsweet KFC, thereby spending a shorter duration under the sun, but spending more metabolic energy to do so?

I needed some way to track my core temperature and skin temperature in real time, and graph this against my activity level. It would not be feasible to walk with a thermometer in my mouth. I didn’t have a thermometer pill.

Before investing the remainder of my life into starting a company to research and make such a method + app to track data of such method in realtime, luckily I found out about the GreenTEG CORE!

So you strap this little thing onto your chest, and it senses your skin temperature and their proprietary heat flux sensor to back-calculate your body’s core temperature to a ±0.26°C accuracy. Then it streams this real-time to an APP, which you can LOOK AT in REAL TIME. It was exactly what I wanted!

The little clips fasten it to your chest strap!

How it Works

GreenTEG uses a combination of skin temperature, heartbeat and their own research-based algorithms to generate a core temperature that hasgiven super close results to pill thermometers. The CORE is enabled with two algorithms – one incorporating heartrate (Sports Activity Algorithm) and one without (Everyday Living Algorithm). As changes in core temperature do not immediately reach the skin, the Sports Activity Algorithm takes in heartbeat data to come up with a more accurate and immediate figure for core temperature, needed by athletes who require immediate feedback for their sport!

So I got the heartrate sensor too!

I line em up like this. My girlfriend calls it my bra. That’s the FOCI on the right!

For those who find this uncomfortable, the CORE comes with one-day-use adhesive pads too!

As the CORE is relatively simple in function (clip+strap), it’s really all about the app!

While the CORE app doesn’t allow a direct CSV download (yet?) unless you pay a fee for a Research Mode or a Garmin device, you’ll be able to track and set alerts when your core temperature goes off the charts. Here’s me at high activity:

And another steep ramp-up:

And here’s the effect of a sudden heartrate drop:

As you can see, the body takes a while to return back to the normal core temperature of about 37°C!

While I love the functionality and will be saving the detailed analysis for another post, I do wish I could see both graphs on the same creen to observe the timings! Another gripe would be that the app sometimes resets the tracking when the bluetooth connection is lost, but GreenTEG continues to push over-the-air updates to improve this over time (this is why you get the app-enabled tech)

The FOCI Wearable

It’s a little clippy thing that goes on your waist, pushed against your diaphragm to track your breathing patterns! The FOCI was a strange little find on kickstarter, when I was looking for something nondescript to track my breathing patterns over the course of a day!

How does it work?

The FOCI tracks tiny breathing movements and translates this into a predicted cognitive state with the ‘neuro-respiratory patterns’ identified by their AI model. These states are broken down into Focused, Calm, Stressed, Fatigued, Distracted and Flow.

If you click them, it displays the duration

The FOCI is 10g, super lightweight and easy to clip on without noticing, and easily hideable. However, as it can’t get a clear signal while you move around, the only accurate readings come from when you are seated.

While my personal use with the FOCI has been quite brief, so far I’ve found that it quite accurately tracks whether I am in focus or not! While the little bubble moves with your breath, making it fun to look at and track your breathing state, I’ve also found that the best way to maintain focus is to not look at it while you’re tracking yourself.

Overall, while I am interested to see where TinyLogics takes the app and device (graph my breathing please!)

That’s all for the Embr Wave, the CORE and the FOCI! You can comment or subscribe if you like this, or let me know if you’d like to know more about these cool tools!

I’ll do another big review when I gather more interesting tech! (Reon Pocket, I’m looking at you.)

Cheers.

The Big List of DBS Rewards Points – How Much Are DBS Points Worth? (June 2021)

I chose my credit card for the miles.

(Note: this post is not sponsored, chill please!)

DBS Bank Cards - Credit Cards, Debit Cards and More! | DBS Singapore — Photo Credits: DBS

Naturally, I never bothered to check how many points I have.

Have you?

Just like Grab, DBS has a huge list of rewards which make it hard for me to say what the best bang for my buck is. Check out this old interface!

What I want to know is the highest dollars I can redeem per point.

Or, the lowest number of points needed to redeem $1.

Let’s get to it!

Naturally, the best points/dollar were from the exclusives category – naturally DBS would incentivise you to purchase one of their cards!

These aside, I’m glad to say that the KrisFlyer Miles were one of the better items at 53 points to redeem a dollar! Justifies the whole card.

Also kudos to these three sites I used as a reference to evaluate the Qantas, Krisflyer and Asia Miles.

On average, the it takes 60 points to redeem a dollar. This means each DBS point is worth about 1.6 cents.

Which means my 25891 points are worth $431.52.

I guess it’s time to use em!

I hope you found this helpful. Let me know in the comments if you want to see more posts like this.

Cheers.

The Heart of Air-Con: The Artist’s Guide to Water-cooled Chiller Plants in Singapore

For the engineers and techs in the energy & sustainability sector, I am here for you.

This is your bread and butter!

And I hope to draw it for you with uncommon beauty.

What is a Chiller Plant?

So.. air conditioning takes up about 50% of energy consumption in our commercial buildings.

The cold is costly!

The energy which powers Air Conditioning simply moves machines that throw human heat outside of a building.

This sounds simple, but actually involves a long chain of machines, passing the heat to each other.

This magical process works mainly because of one principle:

Hot things transfer heat to cold things.

In a building, this happens a few times:

Your muscles and organs (37°C) heat your skin (36°C) in your body.
Your skin (36°C) heats the supply air (18°C) from your air-conditioning, making return air (28°C).
The return air (28°C) heats a chilled water supply (7°C) in the aircon unit to a chilled water return (12°C) .
The chilled water (12°C) heats a very cold refrigerant (5°C) in the chiller’s evaporator, to 6°C.
The refrigerant is compressed (6°C -> 50°C) into a high pressure vapor in the chiller’s compressor.
The hot refrigerant (50°C) heats condenser water (30°C) in the chiller’s condenser to 35°C.
The condenser water (35°C) heats the ambient air (29°C) in the cooling tower…
… which is where all our heat goes! The ambient. The sky. The outside.

Is this bad for the environment?

Technically, without air conditioning, we would walk around heating the air anyway.

What these machines do is essentially increasing the gradient between hot and cold.

That’s no problem, right?

The thing is, not all machines are efficient – they produce their own heat while working.

And the energy they consume from power plants.. requires more heat to generate too! Ideally, 100% of the electricity we supply to machines is converted into the useful work we use the machines for. However, some of this heat is inevitably converted to heat and sound produced by friction between mechanical parts and electrical resistance.

The more machinery we run to operate an air-conditioning system, the more heat is generated in the world. Sounds kinda funny, but we don’t really feel the effects of this when we’re chilling indoors!

On to the machines themselves!

1. The Air Cycle (Air Handling Units)

Humans do stuff. Their muscles and organs get warm, and this heat is transferred to their skin, which is transferred to the air around their skin.
This hot membrane of air transfers heat all over the air! Hotter air particles have more kinetic energy, and jiggle faster than their cold neighbouring particles. These hotter particles rise above their inactive neighbours who remain relatively still (AKA Meritocracy). At the ceiling of a room, a fan sucks in these hotties, blowing them past a very cold chilled water coil inside an Air Handling Unit (AHU). This coil’s water is at about 7°C. That’s cold!
The hot jiggly particles collide against this coil, losing their jiggliness to the coil surface. The cold water inside the coil takes gets heated from 7°C to 12°C. Meanwhile, the air is cooled from ~28°C to about 18°C. The resulting average room temperature is somewhere around 24°C, which is the temperature your thermostat tries to maintain.
The cycle repeats. Cold air hits human, human heats air, hot air heats water, hot air becomes cold. Ugga bugga.

2. The Water Loop

Chilled water just took some heat, and needs to drop it quickly. It flows through the Chilled Water Return pipes to the chiller plant, where it will be cooled back to 7°C again, by the chiller.
Chillers have a simple function – Make chilled water cold again.

They do this by passing the 12°C water through super-cold refrigerant fluid, which is about 5°C in the evaporator.
After the 12°C water transfers its heat to the refrigerant, it leaves the chiller at 7°C, on its merry way back to the AHUs.

3. The Refrigerant Loop

Air passed heat to water. Water passed heat to refrigerant. Refrigerants are fluids with ideal properties for containing and releasing energy rapidly, but I’ll be skipping those details for now (low boiling temperature! Rapid phase-change material!),but in summary is a fluid that can be very cold at room temperature. This enables it to be the ‘colder thing’ which the already-very-cold 12°C water can give its heat to.
Once the refrigerant takes this heat, it is compressed into a hot, high-pressure vapor, which enables it to now be the ‘hot thing’ to transfer heat to another water loop, the condensor water loop.

The whole operation of a chiller looks like this:

Which I hope makes sense of this!

4. The Condenser Water Loop – Throwing it all out

In the chiller’s condenser, hot refrigerant now passes its heat to water (Yes, a separate circuit). This water goes to a cooling tower, those huge grilled-boxes you see on top of many buildings in Singapore.

cooling tower vs. chiller – cooling towers on roof — Source: waterchillers.com

Cooling towers do exactly what you do to cool soup – blow air over it. The hot water is trickled down the serrated walls of metal, and air is sucked through these walls by a huge fan in the centre of the box’s ceiling.
The water that collects at the bottom is at about outdoor temperature, where it is pumped back to the chiller to be heated again.

This stage is called Heat Rejection, the final stage of any air conditioning cycle. It is where the heat of hundreds of warm humans is amalgamated and tossed back out into the air, where it is more easily forgotten.

Is this all necessary?

We’ve all suffered the heat here – air-con definitely makes it feel better. While I don’t have air-conditioning at home, I seem to survive quite well with fans. Even a cool breeze outdoors on a sunny day makes me feel comfortable enough to forget the humidity.

I’m not so sure what the best way is – what do you think?

The Big List of GrabPoints 2 – How Much Are Grab Rewards Worth? (Updated June 2021)

Got too many Grabrewards points?

Aiyo.

If you’ve been buying grabdeliveries during the COVID-19 Heightened Alert, or work somewhere really far from home, it might be worth checking the rewards in your Grab account!

It’s a real pain to decide what to use them on, though. Way too many options to scroll through on a phone.

I don’t want to view them on a small rectange!

Like any Singaporean, I’m looking for the best bang for my buck.

And like any engineer, I made a big excel sheet for it.

But of course.

The list is huge! Some interesting facts:

The largest categories were Shopping (63 items), Food & Beverage (31 items) and Services (21 items).
The average points/$ was 355.6 points per $. In other words, every 10,000 points would be worth about $28.
The most worthwhile item (ignoring lucky draws and free lounge passes) were the 70% off Spa Rael reward for 5000 points.

Check out the tables below for the top 5 Rewards for each category. I sorted them by Points per SGD – the fewer points/SGD needed, the more value you can squeeze out of your Grabrewards points!

Kudos to this post from milelion! I used his 1.8c/mile to evaluate the KrisFlyer miles.

I hope you found this helpful.

You can download the sheet here!

HIFAS_Grab-Points-5-Jun-2021 Download

Cheers.

The Einstein Pigeon is Coming

I saw some roadkill today!

Aw.

Most pigeons I know would dart from oncoming traffic – why did this poor thing stay put?

It’s fascinating – we cull blur-eyed pigeons from the street every day, leaving the most neuronally dense pigeons in prosperis.

But beyond surviving traffic, pigeons don’t suffer much more selective pressure. Maybe the occassional battle to win some family’s bakchormee scraps , but there’s plenty of that to go around.

They’re smart enough to avoid the dangerous humans at lunch, at least.

They’re peacefully silent.

They’re not scary like rodents and roaches.

So they survive!

In a low pressure with enough resources to go around, so do we!

But would you want to be a pigeon?

Further Reads:

Are Cities Making Animals Smarter? – The Atlantic

Rats May Be Genetically Adapted to New York Living | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

How to See the Future: All about Asset classes and the economic cycle!

Where do you park your money? Do you shift your investments during booms, recessions and slowdowns?

If you just own cash (and your CPF), that’s alright. Savings accounts may grow slowly, but they’re one of the safest investments to keep your earnings safe from market fluctuations.

However, inflation risks the erosion of your savings over time, if it grows faster than the interest rate of your bank account.

Whether you only keep savings or already deep-dive into risky stonks, you’re already making a decision about the best place to park your money!

But did you choose the best parking lot?

These parking spaces for your money are known as Asset Classes, and there are about 7 of them:

Cash (Savings accounts, hard cash)
Stocks / Equities / Shares (Includes ETFs and Index funds)
Commodities (Gold, Crude oil, Wheat, Live Cattle)
Real Estate (REITs, property, dat HDB)
Fixed Income (Bonds, Fixed Deposits, CPF)
Cryptocurrencies (Not a stock hor! Crypto is poorly correlated to other asset classes, and given the diverse sub-categories within crypto, I think it’s fair to give them a class of their own.)
Investing in yourself (kidding) (not really) (do it)

People shift their dough between asset classes all the time.

In economic recessions, safe slowmoving assets like cash and fixed deposits make more sense. In optimistic booms, you would wish that your money was in stonky stocks for higher growth.

Recognising where we are in the economic cycle can help you predict the future.

Put less magically, you’ll be able to recognise the best times to shift your money from one family of assets to another.

Like a farmer waiting for ripe spring soils before planting, it helps to know the seasons!

The economic cycle has four stages: Expansion, Slowdown, Recession, Recovery.

Many things affect this cycle! Consumer optimism, changing interest rates and government policies influence how much money people are willing to fling out there, and how much they want to keep in their pockets.

Here is how most investors rotate assets in each part of the cycle:

Recovery -> Expansion

Right after a recession, optimism starts to rise and interest rates are decreasing. people are willing to borrow and invest. Industries like tourism, retail, automobiles and technology start to accumulate demand. ETFs are a very popular way to take advantage of the higher return rate of equities while spreading your risk exposure in these high times. When it becomes clear that governments will raise their interest rates, this is the best time to sell bonds and increase exposure to inflation-sensitive commodities and real estate.

Expansion -> Slowdown

While business continues to do well, fears of a pending crash and all-time-high interest rates (aka governments trying to encourage less spending and inflation) often result in a sector rotation within stocks to safer, blue-chip dividend growth stocks (think Pepsico, 3M, P&G). As the expansion slows, it’s a good time to collect your earnings from past optimism and growth by selling higher-risk stocks, equities and shares at their all-time-highs and accumulating cash and fixed deposits before the next recession.

It’s hard to predict when the economy is in a slowdown or still in expansion. In times of doubt and uncertainty, Gold is a popular hedge which may still be volatile but never go to zero.

Slowdown -> Recession

If you’ve allocated your assets well, this is you in a recession!

When the market crashes, business optimism takes a hit and investment sell-offs trigger massive drops across the economy.

Schoolkids remain blur, generally insulated, and quite happy.

In a recession, pretty much all asset classes decline. Whatever the cause, crashes are often sudden! Here, the art of moneyparking becomes more about losing less than seeking growth. Once it’s clear that an economy is in decline, goverments reduce interest rates to ease the drop, making bonds and fixed assets more attractive investments to buy.

Recession -> Recovery

At the very bottom of the recession, it is a great time to buy resilient stocks which you think will last through the recession and return again (just like SG Airlines in the heart of COVID last year…) As the mothers say, “This one is by the government … won’t fail.”

Well, your mileage may vary. Source: Google

This is the part of the market where you “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” (quote by Britney Spears)

Sentiment around the very bottom of a recession is awful – people are pessimistic, companies are doing very badly, and it can often slip one’s mind to tackle the market with an aggressive, optimistic portfolio. But that is the best time. Stocks perform best over the long term, and depending on your risk tolerance and needs, having some cash around to invest more during recessions can help you emerge with a better outcome.

Using the Economic Cycle for decisions

Knowing how money flows cyclically can help you in other choices too!

For example, if you were deciding whether to buy or rent a home, and wanted to know if real estate would be a better investment than having spare cash for stocks from renting your house, you might want to look at how the real estate market has historically reacted around big crunches like COVID!

In fact if you took the remaining, er, $2000-3000 of cash you had and grew it at a faster rate than the property market, you might end up with more value than if you bought a property!

With new eyes, you see your cash and property as two different types of investments, subject to the economic cycle in different ways.

I hope this helps you see the variety of assets out there, and how they respond to the market!

There is much more to uncover, like the different types of crypto, how to tell which part of the cycle we’re in, and more! For another time 🙂

You can let me know your feedback in the comments, I’d love to hear suggestions to make these posts more useful.

Happy planning, cheers.

The Ultimate Singapore Chocolate Chip Cookie Comparison 2

The list is up to 10 cookies! Shoutout to theplayfulpeach for suggesting I expand part 1. Before I describe the results, let’s dive right into the stats at a glance:

Cheapest Individual Chocolate Chip Cookie: Subway (again!)

Note: I excluded the bulk pricing (e.g. 3 cookies for $3.50 = $1.17 per subway cookie) for neatness this time, but also because the bulk pricing doesn’t change the winners in all my categories here. Nonetheless, I’ll share em at the end of this post for ya ref.

Cheapest Chocolate Chip Cookie by mass per dollar: Marks & Spencer!

Biggest Chocolate Chip Cookie by Volume: 12 Cupcakes again!

Heaviest Chocolate Chip Cookie: 12 Cupcakes (maintaining da spot!)

Densest Chocolate Chip Cookie: Jewel (beating Ben’s, now in 2nd place)

What about taste?

With taste being so subjective, I’ve left it out of this comparison – cold data only for the fairest stats. Still, if I had to lend my opinion, I’d break down taste into density and flavour.

If you love cold, dense, chewy cookies like me, I’d recommend the Starbucks cookie and the Jewel cookie – they’re tied for a pretty great bite density.

For flavour, I hate to say it, but Famous Amos takes the cake for my fave amongst the lot. They’re pretty pricey, and chewy cookies are not their main product, but there is surely some mastery in the ingredients they’ve put in that dough. It’s worth mentioning that Folks & Stories’ brown butter and PPP Coffee’s Marou chocolate chips make for interesting flavours too, if you’re looking for something a little different than the average cookie.

While we’re on subjective thingies, I will say that PPP Coffee had some very chio browning on their cookie. Paired with the large size and unique flavour, this is probably the one you’d wanna get a date or something (I swear I am not sponsored). Check this chioness out:

Hope you found this useful! Lemme know if you think there’s:

Anything I can add to this (obsession)
Anything I coulda done better
Anything I missed out!

You can lemme know in the comments, I’d love the feedback.

Cheers.

How Much Floor Area Do You Need?

We all face Choice Overload. In Singapore, house options have thousands of sizes and styles and prices – which one do you choose?

On top of the ~80,000 houses available, 1600+ renovators are available. There are hundreds of millions of possibilities.

How to decide sial.

I find it helpful to list your minimum requirements. Specifically, the things you need a house for.

If I lived alone, my house would be for:

Reading/Drawing/Tablework
Exercise
Cooking/Baking
Sleeping

For this bare-bones existence, I’d need a…

Desk+Chair
Empty space
Oven
Fridge
Bed
Wardrobe
Washroom

And that would look like:

This box is about 12 square meters, or 130 square feet.

So now that I know I need 12sqm, browsing property sites is a little less scary. Looking at typical HDB sizes, even the humblest of flats is enough:

1 Room / Studio: 36 sqm / 388sqft
2 Room HDB: 45sqm / 484sqft
3 Room HDB: 65sqm / 700sqft
4 Room HDB: 95sqm / 1023sqft
5 Room HDB: 115sqm / 1238sqft

What about couples? The budget life is hardly glamorous, but nonetheless the mental exercise of defining your minimum requirements (perhaps with a woke spouse) makes navigating the ocean of buy/rent options a little easier.

Budgetbox v2 is about 16 square meters, or 177 square feet. Amazingly, a 1-room HDB is still larger.

Knowing the minimum size for a liveable room gives us mental building blocks to imagine greater needs – how much space do you need if you wanted:

A child’s bedroom? (e.g. 16sqm + 12sqm = 24sqm) (< 1room HDB)
A livingroom? (e.g. 16sqm + 8sqm = 24sqm) (< 1room HDB)
Housing 3 children? (e.g. 16sqm + 12sqm + 12sqm + 12sqm = 52sqm) (≈ 2-3 room HDB)
etc.

Adding the building blocks is a simple guideline. However, with multiple people, amenities like kitchens, desks and washrooms can be shared for further economy.

You can add literal blocks to get a picture of the minimum floor space needed:

Kids room < Couples’ room size, of course.

Your mileage may vary – you might need a balcony, or decide you don’t need a big livingroom, or want some separate dining areas etc as a minimum. Nonetheless, here’s a summary of the experiments above for reference:

I personally would like some spoils in the house like a balcony, a garden, a rooftop view etc. But if I can’t find these spoils, at least I know what my minimum requirements are, and whether they’re met. I hope this experiment brings some comfort to your decisions too.

I’d love to hear your feedback! Do you think I:

Missed any points out?
Should do a clear explanation on any bits?
Could go deeper in certain areas?

You can let me know your feedback in the comments, I’d love to hear suggestions to make these mental tools more useful.

Happy house hunting, cheers.

The Ultimate Singapore Chocolate Chip Cookie Comparison Table

I love chewy cookies.

I thought it would help to do a cookie comparison to find the best chocolate chip cookie for your buck. Sparked by a friend who sent me cookies from someplace new (Iamnotsponsoredhor), I bought some of my usual chocolate chip cookies to make a big cookie comparison. Here’s the list of chocolate chip cookie contenders:

Subwayyyyy
Starbucks
12 Cupcakes
Ben’s Cookies
Folks and Stories

Let’s start with their Dimensions.

12 Cupcakes has the biggest chocolate chip cookie of the lot, with Folks & Stories has the teeniest at 7.6cm (about the length of a namecard)! However, this wouldn’t be complete without thickness:

As suspected, Folks & Stories makes up for its smaller diameter by having the thickest chocolate chip cookie of the lot!

Note: Given their list of unconventional cookie flavours, Folks & Stories doesn’t seem to have a “Chocolate Chip Cookie” per se. I picked their Milk & Dark Chocolate cookie (which they name “N°1 SALT OF THE EARTH”) for this comparison.

Weight_{(Actually Mass)}

Subwayyyyy – 46g
Starbucks – 101g
12 Cupcakes – 116g
Ben’s Cookies – 76g
Folks and Stories – 53g

As expected, the Subway cookies are lightest of the lot, but it’s more than justified by their price!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Comparison Table

I compiled the stats in this table to find the densest cookie of them all and the worthiest cookie of them all.

Cheapest Individual Chocolate Chip Cookie: Subway (for both bulk and non-bulk pricing!)

Cheapest Chocolate Chip Cookie by mass per dollar: 12 Cupcakes (also for all pricing!)

Biggest Chocolate Chip Cookie by Volume: 12 Cupcakes

Heaviest Chocolate Chip Cookie: 12 Cupcakes

Densest Chocolate Chip Cookie: Ben’s Cookies

I was surprised to find that 12 Cupcakes had the cheapest chocolate chip cookies per gram, even though I consider them on the pricey side. I would say that if you don’t need so much bulk in one cookie, and just enjoy cookies, I’d get the three cookies from Subway for $3.50 and munch away (tip: they’re cheaper in universities at student price!)

Why Chocolate Chip Cookies?

There are so many flavours out there, but I feel that the classic chocolate chip cookie is the best representation of cookie dough and toppings coming together without distracting each other too much. For instance, double-chocolate cookies are more like a judgement of chocolate than anything else, and peanut butter cookies are overwhelmed by the pure taste of peanut butter. Chocolate chip cookies have little bursts of chocolate, but just enough that the dough itself can shine. I love em.

What about taste?

I wanted to use objective data for this cookie comparison! Everyone has their own preference for what the best part of a cookie’s taste is. For me, I’m particularly a fan of dense bites and complex flavours. I gotta say, the Starbucks chocolate chip cookie has my favourite bite density of them all, while I would pick the Folks & Stories chocolate chip cookie for flavour – I think it’s the browned butter that gives it an edge!

Homemade?

Of course the cheapest way of getting your chocolate chip cookie fix, if you weigh out all the ingredients and prices and divide them out per cookie, is baking yourself a batch at home. I’m a big fan of this article by J. Kenji López-Alt, where he breaks down all the effects of each ingredient on the outcome of a great chocolate chip cookie. I think I’ll share my recipe in another post.

Hope you found this useful! Comment to suggest any other comparisons you’d like to see!