Alternative Energy

I have been researching again. Sustainability, off-grid, alternative energy, all of the things that would be necessary if something happened to society as we know it. Want to know what I have discovered? It is really expensive and none of them are good for general purposes.

If you do a web search on these things, you will find millions of pages, most of which are simply common sense things, to reduce the amount of energy you consume. You can use solar PV systems, but they are expensive, bulky, and if you live in an area that doesn't get optimum amounts of sunlight year round, not really the way to go unless you have a huge amount of battery storage and/or another source as a backup. Wind turbines can be a good solar backup, but you have to have open space, a good steady wind, and they can be noisy if they are too close to the house. Micro-hydro is another good source for solar backup. If you have a creek, stream, or spring with a high enough flow rate. Again, you have to have the right local conditions.

Then there is the whole biomass thing. Essentially, it all boils down to a wood stove of some sort. Yes, you could rig up a way to use the wood stove to boil water, to create steam, to run a turbine, that is connected to a generator, to produce a current. Is it efficient? Not really. You would have to really, really like cutting firewood, and have a large patch of woods, for this to be a viable option. But...there are things you can burn besides trees, provided your stove can handle the different types of fires and still be efficient. Corn cobs, waste paper(ie cardboard, rolled newspapers, etc) sawdust (either loose or pellets), broken shipping pallets, construction waste, basically anything that is cellulose based and will still burn. A wood stove in the home would be a great alternative to being strictly electric since you can use it to heat the home, cook on, and heat water, but this would be mainly limited to cool or cold weather seasons. But as a supplement, it is a great option.

Lets say you have 5 acres and a small (1000 sf or less) house and it is just you and your significant other. One of you works outside the home and the other stays on the property and gardens, tends the livestock, etc. For this setup, 4 to 6 solar panels with the associated battery bank, a wood stove, and maybe a small wind turbine (if you really use a lot of electricity, like for a separate chest freezer and a small ac unit) would be a good set up. The main problem would be that the equipment would run you over $10,000. Plus the batteries would have to be replaced every 5-8 years and that can get expensive in the long term.

You could go really old school and do without electric completely. Have 2 wood stoves, one inside and one outside, candles or kerosene lamps, and live without an AC unit. Here in the hot humid South, not really a viable option. It can be done but you have to have the right layout on your house or you would just be living in a oven all summer. Good airflow through out the house and a 3 sided wrap-around porch with windows (and screens) facing the prevailing winds. This is how our grandparents lived. And it worked out fine.

So, I guess the bottom line on this is really how much do you want to spend, and how many of the modern luxuries can you give up to do it. If it is a survival situation, I can personally give up a LOT of things. If it is just a sustainability issue, I am not gonna give up my a/c.

So until we have our 5 acres, or life as we know it comes to an end, I will just keep researching options. Maybe something new will be developed that will eliminate the need for multiple systems and battery banks. Maybe...maybe...maybe.

It does give me something to think about though.

July 4th, economy, save cash

Dealing with the family is always fun, and this last weekend was no exception. My mother in law is always shocked that I know how to do anything around the house, including but not limited to, canning food.

There also doesn't seem to be any understanding at all about modern economics. All she understands is that gas prices are going up. But that shouldn't stop us from making the 3 hour trip to come see her at every opportunity. After all, what is $4.00 a gallon gas when she doesn't have to buy it.

I did get to spend some time with my niece over the holiday. She finally ditched the dead beat boyfriend that she had been supporting for the last couple of years and is learning how to be a person. She thinks it is just awesome that I can sew, can, bake bread, smoke meat, make butter, and all of that other "hippy" stuff. Personally, I don't think of it as hippy, I think of it as making as much as I can so that I don't have to buy it.

I tried to pick my dad's brain about how his grandparents did all of the daily living things, and he just looked at me like I was crazy. He went on to explain that where his house is now was a pasture for a milk cow and her calf and that the house only had a fire place and a cook stove for heat. Personally, I am fine with that. I grew up with wood heat.

We talked a little while about how we are over consumers and spoiled to the niceties that aren't really necessary. Like the AC. He said that he had heard the cost of electricity was probably going to double in the next year and if that happened, he would be in serious trouble. He is already paying $300 a month for his electric bill. And on a fixed income, he will just have to live in the dark if it goes up very much. He really doesn't have a problem with opening the windows instead of running the AC, but his wife is a city girl who never had to hang out clothes or grow her own food. And she is a neat freak, so the dust from the gravel road would just drive her over the edge.

I am always looking for ways to cut our costs and live a little healthier. My husband will not let me have any chickens or other livestock while we live in town though. It kinda sucks, but I can understand his point of view. I don't really care what the neighbors think of us, but I also don't want the cops called on us because our rooster can't tell the difference between morning and midnight.

So, we will just plod along as best as we can and hope that things don't go to pot too quickly and that we have the time to get ourselves into position before the world collapses in on us.

Saving money is fun!

There are times when I wonder just exactly why people will spend so much money on things that they don't really need or even want. We will spent $20 a plate on a steak dinner when you can grill your own for less than half of that. We will spent $30,000+ on a vehicle that uses $80 worth of gas a week when you can spend $8,000 on a very good used car that gets much better gas mileage. We feel the need to have our climate controlled homes set at the perfect temperature at all times regardless of the fact that the outside air is near the same temperature. All of our appliances have to have a digital clock on them so we know how much time we don't have before the minor event in our lives.

When my husband was concerned about getting laid off in January, we went thru everything in the house looking for ways to save money. My daughter only have 1 more year of high school before she goes off to college and we didn't want to have to move her away for her senior year. We looked at every expense we have, from house payments and utilities to where we spend our money.

It became a game with me to see where I can save money in the house.

We have a clothesline so we do not have to run the clothes dryer so much. That does a couple of things. 1) you are not using the electricity to run the dryer, and 2)you are not heating up the house with the dryer and making the AC have to work harder to cool off the house. Granted there are some things I still use the dryer for, like towels. They just get too stiff out on the line. But I can dry them on the line, then run them for about 15 minutes in the dryer with a damp hand towel to soften them up. Much better than the hour-hour and a half it takes to actually dry them completely in the dryer.

We have also been changing out lightbulbs to CFLs as they burn out. I think we have gotten about 90% of them changed now. Another thing is to turn off the lights is you don't need them. Every morning I go thru the house and turn off all of the lights except the lamp that I use behind the couch. Even though the lights all have CFLs in them, I have enough sun light coming thru the windows during the day to see. I don't need any extra lights.

I don't use the furnace or the AC unless the weather outside is extreme. We have had the windows open for about 2 months now here in Arkansas and it has been just fine. The pollen had us all sneezing for a couple of weeks but the worst of that is past now. We have been having 70+ degree days and low 60s at night so it has been just great. A couple of ceiling fans and open windows on opposite sides of the house keeps a very nice airflow going. I will probably be running the air this summer because it just gets so stinking hot here, but I will have it set on 78 or so.

On the grocery side of things, I have just been getting creative.

$2 a day for the kids to eat school lunches every day was just too much, so they have been taking their lunch every day since January. Lunch meat is expensive so I have been making ham out of pork loin, salami ( see previous posting on the how) and roast beef out of , duh, a beef roast for their sandwiches. Every now and then, they will get a PB & J just to change things up. I have been buying big bags of chips from the Dollar Store and putting it in baggies for them. I can get about 6 lunches out of a $1 bag of chips for them. I will make a pan of brownies and individually wrap them in plastic wrap then freeze them. That way I can take them out one at a time for lunch or snacks. A reused plastic bottle will hold juice or water or tea, add a piece of fruit and they are good to go.

I also looked at the grocery items that we used the most. Liquid coffee creamer was way up toward the top of the list. My husband and I would go thru about 2 quarts a week. And at $3.00 a bottle, that was just too much. So I did a web search and found that it is very quick and easy to make at home. Healthier too since I can actually pronounce all of the ingredients. Powdered milk, brown sugar, and either vanilla or cocoa powder.Wow! What a difference it makes. And I already had all of that stuff in the kitchen anyway.

I have already starting canning food for the summer. Strawberries are coming in season here so I have been making jam. Yesterday, I went to the local National Chain grocery store to get marked down produce. I got 22 ears of corn for $3.75 and 4 bags of apples for half price. 3 cantaloupes for $.99 each and 6 lemons for 89 cents. I also got 4 heads of lettuce for 59 cents each. Your local grocery store can tell you when their produce trucks run. You can usually get a really good deal on the produce they mark down or pull to rotate stock. Buy in bulk and can or freeze it. You can eat healthier for a lot less.

It is really fun to find creative ways to save money. Just go thru your house and look at the way you live. Are there options to the way you do things? Living well on less money is not really that hard. It just takes a little effort to find the right way for you.

Clotheslines are awesome!

I have found that I get a lot of satisfaction from saving money. It is almost a game I play with myself. Is it cheaper to buy a certain item online or to buy it local? Can I make it cheaper than I can buy it? Do I really need 244 rolls of toilet paper just to save 3 cents a roll?

There are a lot of things to buy out there. The newest gadgets to make our lives easier, the shiniest cell phone that will do everything but cook dinner, Eco-friendly...well, just about everything. But do we really need all that stuff?

For me and mine, we are just thinking differently about things like spending money. Granted, we still have bills to pay and sudden expenses, like the school trip to Dallas and Boy Scout camp. But for normal everyday spending, we find other (less expensive) ways to get by.

The clothesline is my favorite. Wow! I was shocked really at just how much you can save with 2 poles and some string. August 2007, I started hanging out my clothes because the dryer was on the fritz. I could not wash clothes fast enough to keep the line full. They dried too fast. When I got the electric bill, I was amazed. We cut 25% off of our bill. The AC didn't have to work as hard and we weren't using the energy from the dryer. I hung out clothes all winter. Granted, it took a lot longer for them to dry when it is cold and when it was below freezing, I had to use the dryer. But here in Arkansas, we only had about 20 days that actually stayed below freezing all winter so it wasn't that bad. We averaged about 25% below last year's usage all winter.

Now for the really cool part. My bill for March/April was half--Yes I said HALF--of what it was last year. Needless to say, I will continue to use the clothesline to dry my clothes.

I will continue to find ways to cut back on our bills. My thinking on this is to think about how things were done 50-75 years ago. Clotheslines are just the beginning. This will be fun!