EnviroLimbo

Refuge

2010-10-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

For a while, I was blogging at daysunmeasurable. But I've been driven from that space, so have returned over here! Which I should have been keeping up the whole time anyway!

'K so.

1. In our quest to go ever lighter on the Earth, we've moved to a new house. We have 2.2 acres, a house, a barn, an arena, two boarders, 10 chickens, 4 horses, 2 dogs, and the best neighbors on the planet.

2. This year, even though we didn't get a garden in, our friends and neighbors were sufficiently generous that we find, in our glass recycle bin, olive oil, vinegar, gin and whiskey bottles, and that's all.

3. We will not starve this year, since we have put in a winter's supply of food, and plan to start a garden this fall, to fill in as spring comes, with the first of new greens.

4. We are still assembling our 'baseline'. Water is way, way up. And, since this house has never been made efficient, so are all the fossil fuels. But we hope to make dent shortly. The square footage is actually less than the old house, but we have our horses here, but they are no longer at the place with the enormous tractors... So, over the next few months, I'll see if I can make sense of all this.

Meantime, today, we bottled two batches of wine, started a new one, and a batch of beer. We also canned the sauerkraut, which turned out to John's liking, whic means it's good... For sauerkraut! And we canned 4 pints of dill pickles, making use of the last of the cucumbers from the CSA. That's just an ordinary day, here at Bellwether Farm!

Spring on the Homestead

2009-08-11T14:32:00.001-07:00

I never posted this magical photo. But before it disappears off of my phone, I want other people to see it.

This is what June looks like at our house.

We just watered it for the first time yesterday. In AUGUST.

Solar Oven

2009-08-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

Ok. This was just for fun, but what a blast it is!

I got up in the morning and thought, 'I want to make a solar oven today.' So I wandered around the house, found a couple of boxes, some packing peanuts, some aluminum foil. A more extensive search turned up the Elmer's glue.

Two hours later, I had an oven built.

An hour after that, I had cookies. Cooked by the sun.

I felt so ridiculously empowered that I posted to Facebook. And made the teachers in my energy class make 'em too. And my honors students are going to do it. So are my environmental physics students. Apparently, you can do this even with just a pizza box, although mine's a little more complicated than that. Get thee to the basement, and find thyself some boxes, o readers of my blog!

Applesauce!

2009-08-11T14:20:00.000-07:00

We missed most of our big apple tree, out of simple ignorance about when the apples are ready! ; ) But an afternoon of picking and 2 hours of processing yielded 18 pints of applesauce. Which we thought would be plenty, given that we almost never eat applesauce. But it's SO GOOD. We are going through it like nobody's business. Good thing we have two more trees of apples coming on!

This reminds me of a conversation we were having with J's dad the other day, when we were wondering why we don't know these things about apple trees, etc., that are coming to seem really, pretty important to us. And he said, rightly, 'It's because we didn't teach it to you.' Shortly after that, I came across a quote from Nora Ephron: 'What my mother taught me about cooking was that if you work hard and make money, you can make other people do it for you.'

So much knowledge, just evaporated in one generation. Oops.

A garden update

2009-08-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

We did not plant enough rattlesnake beans. I'm beginning to think there's no such thing as enough rattlesnake beans. We ate them ALL in the pod, and there were none left to dry and shell! We'll plant again for fall production, and see if we do better!

Tomatoes and zucchini are finally coming on, and my lemon tree is looking like it might turn one of 'em yellow soon!

More than 200 lbs of produce so far, and we haven't even gotten to real tomato time, zucchini time, or grape time yet!

One apple tree is done. Two more to go.

Corn was late going in---hopefully not TOO late. And the winter squash is starting to take over the yard.

Potatoes are bearing. The fingerlings are amazing. Creamy and sweet. We are waiting anxiously for the Yukon golds.

IMHO, we pretty much didn't plant enough of anything. ; ) I have fresh-veggie greed. I just can't get enough of 'em.

A new kind of home brew

2009-08-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

We bottled our first wine two nights ago. We made it from a kit---a cabernet/merlot blend. We got 28.5 bottles for our trouble, and drank the half bottle with dinner (homemade chinese food, with homegrown veggies!). It was quite drinkable, if a little 'raw' still. It has a grape juice tang to it still that will probably go away as it ages in the bottles. It took surprisingly little time, and was disappointingly easy. We pretty much just opened packets and stirred them together, waited a few days, stirred in more packets, waited a little longer, and bottled it up. Easy-peasy. It will be 'ready' in early November. Just in time to test it out before T-day.

This is the cheapest (not poisonously bad!) wine we've ever had. The kit was about $40, and we invested in a corker/capper at about $50. We already had all the other stuff from brewing beer. So that's... er... my poor sabbatical head... about $3/bottle.

We've inquired about the next step in wine-making, having moved from beer kits to malt kits to all-grain. Our guru tells us that the next step is to start with your own grapes. J asked if we could use concord grapes, and the guru tells us that those make the classic Italian table wine. We have a bumper crop of those on the way! I guess we need more bottles to re-use...

How is this 'enviro'? Well, mostly we save on the shipping water all over the place. Instead of shipping 28 bottles and their contents from wherever to here, and then throwing the empties away, the company shipped us about 40 pounds of grape juice. We re-used a lot of bottles (thanks A&K!), and so on. Of course, growing our own will be an even bigger enviro-benefit. We're on it!

Considering dinner...

2009-07-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight, for dinner, we had:

Appetizer: our first sliced tomatoes, still warm from the sun, with salt and pepper

First course: Corn-on-the-cob from the CSA, boiled, with butter and salt.

Second course: a stir-fry, made from our own zucchini, squash from CSA, scallions from CSA, and these absolutely, positively amazing beans from our garden (var: rattlesnake), which can be eaten as nice, fat green beans, or dried like pinto beans. We ate them in a chinese-style stir-fry, which was overpoweringly delicious. Seriously. It was so delicious that we started spooning our sauce over the corn and J was mad that we didn't have any rice to go with it. (I have a thing about 'too many starches'!) But there were leftovers, so we can make rice tomorrow. ; )

Dessert: I had homemade chocolate-chip cookies made last week. J ate those 'Grandma's' brand of choc. chip cookies. I don't know how he stands 'em.

It's so satisfying to walk out the door and pick the food that will be dinner. What a loss that most people don't know what this feels like. It feels like 'diversifying your portfolio' or 'insuring against a loss' or 'I love it when a plan comes together' or, more simply, it feels like magic. Because when you carefully tuck the little seeds in under their soil blankets, you just have to believe that sooner or later, they are going to feed you. And then they do. And I think, 'Wow. What have I done to deserve this?'

Home again.

2009-07-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

We've had family in town for almost a month---first my mom and her partner for 8 days, then a few days later, my 17-year-old sister arrived for a two week stay. It turns out...

we're weird. ; )

From the food we eat to how warm we let the house get in the afternoon, to the chickens and the garden, we are just slightly off-center.

And so our house has not felt like our own. We lived altered lives during the month---roasting a chicken, having bacon, being 'off the farm' most of the day, driving all over Utah, missing visits to ponies.

Guests take up room in your space and in your head, no matter how much you love them. And when they go, there is a feeling of ease, with a heavy, contented sigh, as you do the last of the laundry, munch up the last of the cereal you never buy, and shut the door of the guest room. And go back to the garden to see what's new.

Been a long time...

2009-07-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

but lots has been going on.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll try to catch up. I'm back from Socorro anyway, and can tell you that seeing actual stores again was like being a little kid in Disneyland. If I never step inside another WalMart, that'll be ok.

But the garden is in, and that's keeping us busy.

10 pounds of cherries off the tree yielded two quarts of dried cherries for oatmeal and granola.

We have four pints of pickles and two pints of cherry jam already in the cellar as well.

40 pounds of seed potatoes, asparagus, a dozen tomato plants. Ack!

And the front garden attracting attention from everywhere.

Lots to catch up on! I'd better get on it!

The electric bill...

2008-11-10T15:07:00.000-08:00

This is funny.

Socorro Electric Co-op sent me a bill for two weeks of electricity usage (I guess so I'll be on the 'right' schedule). How much did I use? 0 kWh. (Which probably really means < 1.) So I got billed $2.94, which is the minimum bill. Presumably, this covers postage, envelopes, etc.

Looks like my impact from having a whole other house is going to be s-m-l, small.

Also, I got the water bill for the same two week period. I used 2 units. But they don't tell me what the units are. I'll have to call. I'm guessing it's probably hundreds of gallons... it's certainly not 2. or 20. Hopefully not 2,000!

In other news, I have acquired algae eaters for my fish tank. Man! They are fun! Little zoomers is what they are. I'm gradually building a self-sustaining eco-system in there. I can't believe I never did this little science experiment before!

And, the herbs are going gang-busters. I've discovered that lemon rice is a fine flavor substitute for actual lemon in lots of different applications. My new favorite is to drop it in with the rice when it's almost done cooking. Mmmmm... And it's traveled only about 8 feet! Unlike the lemons, that come from thousands of miles away.

I wonder if I can grow a lemon tree indoors here...

Obamanos!

2008-11-05T14:34:00.001-08:00

Hooray!!!!

'nuff said.

Two news stories...

2008-10-15T07:59:00.001-07:00

this morning. One so upsetting I could barely leave the house. I nearly stayed curled up on the sofa all day. But the second got me off the sofa and out the door.

1) this year's red list is out.
32% of amphibians threatened or extinct.
Between 21 and 36% of mammals threatened with extinction.
38% of the world's species, overall, are threatened with extinction. That's
more than one out of every three species.
Welcome to the second largest mass extinction in the history of the planet, so
far. Just so you know, the trend is negative. It's going to get worse.

2) Google's Clean Energy 2030 proposal. Google has spent the last dozen years or so gathering up the smartest problem-solvers on the planet, and putting them all in the same place. Go, google, go.

I've done my part three of Google's five Clean Energy targets.

"We can achieve these results in 2030 by:

Deploying aggressive end-use electrical energy efficiency measures to reduce demand 33%.

Baseline EIA demand is projected to increase 25% by 2030. In addition, the increase in plug-in vehicles (see below) increases electricity demand another 8%. Thus, our efficiency reductions keep demand flat at the 2008 level."

We've reduced electricity demand at our house by 66%!

"Replacing all coal and oil electricity generation, and about half of that from natural gas, with renewable electricity:

380 gigawatts (GW) wind: 300 GW onshore + 80 GW offshore
250 GW solar: 170 GW photovoltaic (PV) + 80 GW concentrating solar power (CSP)
80 GW geothermal: 15 GW conventional + 65 GW enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)"

Through Rocky Mountain Power's Blue Skies Initiative, we get ALL of our electricity (and some of our neighbors' too) from wind power. Yes, we pay a premium. Ok.

"Increasing plug-in vehicles (hybrids & pure electrics) to 90% of new car sales in 2030, reaching 42% of the total US fleet that year"

Oops, no, not this one. Plug-in conversion not available for our year Prius. But if it WAS available, we'd do it. Someone convert the 2001 model, please!

"Increasing new conventional vehicle fuel efficiency from 31 to 45 mpg in 2030"

We get 48.6 mpg on average in our 2001 Prius. See preceding bullet point.

"Accelerating the turnover of the vehicle fleet from 19 to 13 years (resulting in 25 million new vehicle sales per year in 2030, a 31% increase over the baseline)"

If someone would sell me an electric car for less than $25K, I would buy it.

I'm ready for 2030. I did my part, twice over! I'm 66% more efficient! Now build me a plug-in for my Prius, or an electric car. I'll buy it tomorrow. I promise! Let's 'git 'er done', as they say around here. Time's a wastin'.

La cucaracha...

2008-10-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

So yesterday, I made a huge pot of spaghetti, so I can have lots of leftovers this week. It's not that I'm saving time, but I'm trying to starve out the cockroaches, and making one big meal all at once (and then packaging it tightly and storing it in the refrigerator), means that I can use fewer pans, etc. during the busy part of the week. This means I'm less likely to leave any drips or crumbs for the nasty little pests.

I've seen five of them now. Three in the bathtub, one in the drain of the kitchen sink, and one on the bathroom floor. I seem to have inherited a thriving colony of all the various breeds from the prior tenant. Sigh. It's not that I'm not a generally clean person in the kitchen, it's just that I hate having to do the dishes IMMEDIATELY, EVERY TIME. It's tedious to not be able to leave your afternoon tea mug in the sink until dinnertime. It's also tedious to have to think so hard about how you store all your food. Roaches love paper and cardboard and glue---hence, I'm working to eliminate those from cabinets. What a pain, since lots of dry goods come packaged in boxes. And, of course, it's tedious to have to dry everything right away, including the dishes, the sink, the bathtub, the bathroom sink. Roaches need to get water every single day, so one of the best ways to get rid of them is to remove all possible water sources.

I'm hoping that when it gets cold, the roaches will decide to move into the neighbors' houses, which will almost certainly be much warmer than mine. (This is hope in the true sense of the word---I don't think this is really going to happen),

The next step is moving to active measures (like boric acid, aka Borax, or the combination of baking soda and powdered sugar that blows them up when they eat it---fun!). If they are coming in through the drains, I can keep them out mechanically, with plugs. But if they are coming in through the walls or floors (more likely, frankly), then I will have to step things up.

I had a lizard in the living room. But that didn't bother me. I tried to catch him to look at him more closely, but he ran out the door before I could get 'im.

A flock of quail live in the field next door, and I've seen two roadrunners! I also saw an enormous (maybe 4 feet long) green snake in the middle of the road. It was very dead. There's some crazy bird that makes the most astonishing noises just after the sun goes down, but I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know what it is!

Car-Free Challenge: Socorro

2008-10-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

Week 1:

Most work days are easy. I can walk to work from home. If people are going out to lunch (a common thing around here!), they are usually carpooling anyway, so I just jump in with one of the others. Since I'm only here visiting, they are very kind about me not 'taking my turn' with the driving.

I DID have to get furniture this week, but I went to Aaron's furniture rental, rather than buying some, and they delivered it to me!

Weekends are a little more challenging, because there are so many errands to run! Saturday morning, I rode my bike to take myself out to breakfast at the local coffee shop, then hit the farmer's market. I filled my bike bag with produce and local honey, and found a gift for Trisha, who's caring for Trinket back home. I biked back home to drop all that off, and then loaded up my backpack with dirty laundry, and walked to the laundromat. Did my laundry, walked back home. By then, the wind had picked up, it was spitting rain, and there were tornado warnings around the state. So I used my 'new' couch for the rest of the day, reading and listening to music!

Sunday morning, I rode my bike down to the Obama headquarters, to sign up as a volunteer. Then I headed over to the locally owned market to pick up lightbulbs, a new kitchen sponge, etc. Back home to drop all that off. Out on the bike again to the bike shop to pick up a pump (I forgot to bring one), and a bigger bike bag. ; ) By then, I had changed my mind about dinner, so I stopped at the Smith's (chain grocery) to pick up a couple of rolls to go with my spaghetti. I was back at the house by 2 pm, which was plenty of time to use the couch some more!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle...

2008-10-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful book by Barbara Kingsolver. She's a lovely writer, with a turn of phrase that often surprises the tears lurking in the corners of your eyes. But in this book, she's done an amazing job of bringing everything that's wrong in our food supply down to earth and close to home.

Lots to think about in there.

Away in New Mexico... a top-ten list.

2008-10-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

For the next six months, until the end of March, I'm on leave in Socorro, NM. This means that John (poor guy!) is holding down the fort at home, and I'm living in a very small A-frame house. Our numbers will suffer, no doubt, as we inhabit two different homes for the interim.

But, while I'm here, I'll continue to blog about what I'm doing right here, in this spot, to try to reduce my carbon footprint. Here's my top ten list, as of today.

1) I don't have a car. At all. Socorro is all of five miles in diameter, and most people here are horrified. I suspect they are trying to figure out how I'm going to keep from going stir crazy! But there's work, a library, a small University, a movie theater, about 20 restaurants, a grocery store and a laundromat, all within a 1-mile radius. We'll see how it goes! Maybe they are right. But maybe they aren't!

2) I have rented furniture for my stay. This will go back to the rental place, and move on to someone else after I've used it. While I did not consider things like the source of the wood in the furniture, etc., when I rented it, I did rent from a reputable company, that builds long-lasting furniture. Given that the options are severely limited by my car-free status, this is a pretty good solution!

3) I am continuing my mostly-meatless lifestyle, except for breakfast burritos from the burrito lady (more about her in a moment), and occasionally on Thursday lunch. This is the CASA lunch day, when the whole group goes somewhere for lunch. If there is a meatless option, I will most likely order it. However, I will not ask the group to bend to my will on this. Wherever everyone wants to go is great. Hopefully, over the course of the 6 months, we will visit every hole-in-the-wall Mexican place in town! I DO want to cover the full range of excitement in local Mexican flavors, so will be open to all kinds of things I would not ordinarily make at home.

4) One of the big reasons that I'm concerned about the environment is that I'm concerned about social justice. It's unfair that the poor should have to bear so much of the burden of the lifestyle of the rich. This is shockingly apparent in New Mexico, where the dividing line between rich and poor is not so much a line as a canyon. A grand canyon. So I feel there's a balancing act between reducing carbon footprint, and participating in the life of the town.

Let me give an example. Here at the AOC, there's a woman who comes every morning at 8 am to sell handmade burritos. Most of these burritos contain identifiable meat. All, probably, contain lard, at least in the tortillas. Most of the ingredients are not organic. But most of the ingredients are local. The labor is local. The money I exchange for these burritos stays in the local economy, and helps this enterprising woman feed her children, care for her parents, and gain independence. Am I simply finding justification for what I want to do anyway (eat luscious burritos)? Or is there really a balance to be struck here? I don't think I'm rationalizing. I don't think...

5) Socorro has a farmer's market twice a week (Tuesday at 5 pm and Saturday at 8 am). I plan to go tomorrow, and report on what I find!

6) I have no television or internet service at the house, although I can load tv shows and audiobooks from iTunes onto my laptop and iPhone at work or at the library. I'll be interested to see the bill when it comes! The radio keeps me company, although KUER is a WAY better public radio station than KUNM and I miss it.

7) I bought some potted herbs to grow in the window. But then I also bought some fish for company. Their little tank filter runs 24/7. These two things probably more or less cancel each other out... But I'll look for more things to grow over the next few weeks.

8) I have not turned on the air conditioner (swamp cooler, actually) since I got here, even though a couple of days have been quite warm in the house. But it's New Mexico. As soon as the sun goes behind the mountain, the temperature drops 20 degrees, and I open the doors and windows and all the air swaps out of the tiny house in about ten minutes. Judicious use of blinds helps out a lot. I'm not sure I can take any credit for not using the swamp cooler. But the people in the other three A-frames are using theirs, so maybe I can.

9) Water. Oy. This is a place where water really, really matters. So I have set up a minimal water use dishwashing plan, dropped my showers to one every three days (we'll see how that goes---it's dry, but maybe not that dry!), and started measuring out the water BEFORE I boil it for tea. (I'm not sure why I don't always do that, come to think of it!) But there will be more to be done, I'm sure. I kind of felt bad about the fish, but they will use the same water for a long time! The nice thing is I'm paying my own utilities, so I can keep track.

10) I plan to leave the house better than I found it. That won't be hard, even if I only wash the floor. ; ) But there are lots of obvious, cheap, easy fixes that will go a long way to weather-proofing the house. A little caulk here, a little spray insulation there, and the next tenant will be more comfortable, and spend fewer emissions, without even having to think about it.

There will be more, I'm sure.

The potatoes are in!

2008-09-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

But first... we got another of those incredibly huge onions from the CSA today! John doesn't like them because they have more hair than he does! (HE said it, not me!)

So, the potatoes.

The potato harvest is in at Cochran's Produce. I picked up our 50# bag of red potatoes today, for $16. We did this for the first time last year. I know, I know. This sounds totally crazy. But we actually ate 'em all. We stuck them in the root cellar under the front porch, and every week we'd pull a few out, and make oven-roasted fries, or use them in soup or stew. These potatoes make, hands down, the BEST oven-roasted fries. We ate most of them that way! But you can get potatoes at the store, any time, right? So it seems kind of crazy to buy them in 50# sacks. So let me try to explain why I'm so happy about them.

a) the entire bag only cost $16. That's $0.32/pound. This is probably not the absolute cheapest that you can find potatoes, but it's a pretty good price for really good potatoes.

b) they come from Grace, ID, which is 139 miles from here, according to MapQuest. We are buying local, and in season, and supporting a small farm just up the road from here. We buy the red potatoes, so we are, in a small way, casting a vote for farmers to grow more than russets.

c) when we get snowed in, we just don't worry about it. Anyone (especially us, apparently!) can live on potatoes for several days, no matter how long it takes to shovel out the driveway, where the plow plowed us in!

d) there's something really fun about buying 50# of potatoes. It's like saying, 'Yep. I'm planning ahead.', and 'I'm going to be here long enough that I won't be swearing about having to move these potatoes.' Heck, I like just carrying them to the car, and having all these men wondering why I don't need any help.

e) there's also something really fun about looking at John, and saying, 'If you run downstairs and grab some potatoes, we can have fries for a snack.' Or, alternatively, having him look at me and say the same thing.

f) come springtime, there will be a couple of them left. The eyes will have started to sprout, and we'll cut them up, and go plant them in the garden. Later in the year, we'll dig up the tiny baby potatoes and roast them with garlic and onion and herbs, all out of the garden. And that will be dinner, because it will be so fresh, so sweet, so flavorful, so packed with pure goodness that it makes your toes curl.

g) finally, I guess it just makes me feel really, really competent. I have now lived long enough that I can buy a 50# bag of potatoes, and know what I'm going to do with it. I know about how long it will last, and how to keep them from sprouting, and how to ensure that they don't just rot in the basement. And that helps me with my version of the nerves that everyone is suffering from just at the moment. The economy might go to hell, but I'm going to have enough potatoes for the winter. And that's not nothing. That's something.

Isn't that funny? That a bag of potatoes can mean so much on so many levels?

But I have to say that the temptation to buy ten pounds of local peaches, grown not more than 10 miles from here, was almost more than I could bear. Next year. Next year, I'll try my hand at homemade peach preserves, to go in the homemade yogurt, alongside the toast made from home-baked bread, and spread with homemade jam from homegrown grapes, and maybe even a home-laid egg from our home-raised chickens.

Do I really HAVE to go to Socorro and live in a studio apartment for six months? I'm homesick already, and I haven't even left yet.

There are not enough tears to fix this.

2008-09-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Amazon.

I wanted to go there before it was gone. I wanted to stand in the lungs of the planet, and in the most biodiverse place on the planet. (The Amazon produces 20% of the world's oxygen. That's why they call it the 'lungs of the earth'.) When I got there, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I was already too late. Peru is working really hard to preserve the Amazon, but it is far from pristine.

In the news today, the BBC reports that the Amazon is disappearing faster than last year. After three years of decreasing deforestation, at least 750 square kilometers* were lost last month. The is more than three times as fast as last year (last year 2.7% of Brazil's portion of the rain forest was lost). 20% of the rainforest is already gone.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, so what? Can't we just plant it back again? I mean it's the RAINFOREST, right? It will grow back! But look at this picture:

The wealth of the rainforest is the trees, not the land. The land is poor. Hardly any organic material. Mostly clay. Mostly, it washes away. In this second picture, you can SEE the erosion happening. Where the leaves have fallen onto the red clay soil, it is protected from washing away in the eternal rain. But in between the leaves, the soil is washing down to the river. It doesn't belong there, and creates problems far out to sea. Look at this picture, from satellite images via googlemaps:

View Larger Map

See that yellow? All that yellow, at the mouth of the Amazon? That's the soil that supports the trees that support the oxygen level of the atmosphere that supports you. It's un-recoverable on human time scales. It has now been washed out to sea.

Why is this happening? It's thought that it's because food prices are rising. And the rising demand for cheap soy and beef is convincing farmers and ranchers to raze trees.

So, I wondered. Soy and beef for whom? For Brazilians? Or for me? Naturally, I dread hearing that it's because of me.

So I looked up Brazilian exports. Brazil is the world's leading exporter of sugar, coffee, beef and orange juice. Soybeans are the fastest-growing export, and mostly go to China. The top ten countries buying exports from Brazil?

US: 18.9%
Argentina: 8.4%
China: 5.7%
Netherlands: 4.5%
Germany: 4.2%
Mexico: 3.5%
Chile: 3.1%
Japan: 3.0%
Italy: 2.7%
Russia: 2.5%

Are you eating Amazon rain forest beef? You can't know until tomorrow. WHAT? you say? Well, Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) has not yet been implemented, even though it was approved by Congress in 2002. Due to food industry lobbying, implementation has been delayed. It is finally supposed to go into effect tomorrow. (Literally---September 30th, 2008!) Meat sold in supermarkets WILL be labeled, but not meat in butcher shops. That's usually ok, since you can ask the butcher at Snider's where the beef came from, and there's some reason to think that this person knows what they are talking about and will tell the truth.

COOL labeling is not required in restaurants. Snopes tells me that McDonald's and Burger King use beef imported from Australia and New Zealand, but not South America. (I remember a big flak about this when I was in high school. I seem to remember that at that time, these companies were importing beef raised on rain forest land. This practice seems to have stopped. Hooray for the big flak! Kind of. I still can't get over the fact that meat comes all the way from N.Z. to make a Big Mac, of all things.)

So I am of two minds about that. The beef is probably not coming here. While this is a rare occasion of us not being responsible for messing something up completely (hooray!), at the same time, if we are not responsible, we can't fix it (boo!).

Average residential usage?!

2008-09-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

(first posted Friday, September 26, 2008)

So I ran across this little tidbit on the Energy Information Administration website, which posts official energy statistics from the U. S. Government:

Average Residential Monthly Use 920 kwh (kilowatthour)
Average Residential Monthly Bill $95.66

Dude! 920 KWh per month on AVERAGE?! That’s 11,040 kwh/year! We sit at 1670 kwh/year, down by nearly a factor of 7! And we even live in a place that gets hot in the summer! (But we can do better. I bet we can get down to 1100 kwh/year, 1/10 the average. I’m making that my goal!)

We have TV. We still have central air. We still have lights, and laptops, and cell phones, and electric guitars, and a Wii. We have a nice big refrigerator, and an electric clothes dryer and an electric range and a coffee maker. I don’t think we’re deprived. What are all these people DOING with all that electricity?

Imagine. A world in which everyone used 1/10 the electricity they do now. Wow. That’s the same as imagining a world in which we generate electricity without a) coal (49% of electricity generation), b) nuclear (19.4%), c) oil (1.6%), and d) natural gas (20%). We could get by on Hydro (7%), and Other (3.1%). Even if we only cut down to 1/7, we’d just need to add back a little bit of natural gas (say about 1/4 of what we use now), while we ramped up ‘Other’ to double the current ‘Other’ generation.

All of the sudden, this seems like a totally reasonable goal. I would dearly love to eat fish again without thinking of methylmercury. Anybody else out there feel the same way? Anybody else willing to cut down to 1100 kwh/month? You’ll save money... I promise!

All they’d have to do is live like we do at nerd central. Hmmm... that might be too much to ask.

A Dispute!

2008-09-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

My friend Julianne taught me this great saying: ‘We could continue to argue without ANY data, or we could get some, and talk about it more later.’ What a great way to keep discussions from becoming arguments.

So, in my last post, I claimed that the winter peak in energy usage is due primarily to the clothes dryer. John thinks it’s due to the television. We tend to watch more television in winter than summer because, well, it’s dark outside! (Still, it’s only something like 6 hours/week.) We didn’t actually have an argument about this, because that’s just not the way we interact, but we did talk about it.

We could do it the computational physicist way. We could go around and find how much energy is used by the TV, and the DVD player, and the dryer, and make a model of usage, including all kinds of estimates. This would probably be fun. It would be a good excuse to get one of those Kill-A-Watt devices...

Or, we could do it the observational astronomer way. I will be gone this winter, so the dryer should get used approximately half as much, since there will be approximately half as many pounds of dirty clothes. (Note that this is probably not precisely true, since some things, like sheets get used by both of us. Also the minimum number of loads is usually two---whites and colors.) But the TV, etc. will get used the same amount, since it doesn’t care how many people watch it. So. In May of next year, we can plot up the 2007-2008 numbers next to the 2008-2009 numbers, and see who’s right.

If neither of these is conclusive, we could do it the experimental physicist way, and put cumulative power meters on every appliance, and actually measure it for a year. But we’ll try the other two options first. Why? Because they are easier! And if they are conclusive, there’s no point in going into this kind of detail.

Aren’t you glad you don’t live here? This is nerd central.

Updated Electricity Plot

2008-09-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

So, here’s an updated plot of our electricity usage since Sept, 2002. You can see that we’ve been working hard!

But here’s the interesting thing. That last dot is 2008, the first year that we had central air all summer. We still dropped in electricity usage, but not as quickly. So, in the second derivative, it’s flattening out.

Here’s another view, which helps explain what’s going on. I’m plotting average KWh/day for each month of the year. The blue bars are the six year average, and the red bars are this year. You can easily see that while July and August of this year are substantially above the prior average, and September of 2007 is a little bit above the average, the other months are down. In some cases, way down.

The winter peak is interesting. That’s the electric clothes dryer.

But check out May. It’s the lowest usage month, and so in a sense gives our baseline usage, for critical things like the refrigerator and lights.

In May, we averaged about 4 KWh/day. That’s a rate of 0.17 KW, or 170 Watts. That means we’d have to generate at a rate of around 950 Watts to power our house entirely by solar panels in May. That means I’d need, say, five 200-Watt panels. According to my online research, that would come to less than $5000 for the panels. A little further looking around reveals a cost of about $8633 for a complete grid-tied 1050 Watt system (approx 5.9 KWh/day, or 176 KWh/month). That’s totally affordable, especially with rebates and tax breaks, which can sum to several thousand dollars.

Now, that’s for our best month. And I’ll need to look up all the tax breaks and rebates. And, we need another year or two of pushing the numbers down, to see how low we can go. But our baseline usage is now within shooting range of an affordable solar system! I’m really proud of that.

The future’s so bright...

2008-09-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

I gotta wear shades. Oh, that was a good song. Ok. Not really. But it was a really fun song.

Long ago, we put an exterior, roll-down shade on the big front window. That’s it, in the picture above. So this summer, we installed one on each of the other two enormous plate-glass windows. These close-up pictures make them look really obvious, but when you are farther away, or when they are rolled up, you barely notice them.

Do they work? Yup. It was about 85d degrees out today, with bright sunshine, and the house only got up to 73, even though I made no effort to run around and close windows to keep the heat out, like I usually do when I know it’s going to be warm. I just had the shades down.

How much did they cost? Well, the cost of procrastination is really, really high. The first one cost us a little over $1000, about three years ago. These two, which are smaller, cost over $3000. D’oh. But in the end, it’s going to save us money, both on our electric bills, and on the grid-tied solar system we are eventually going to install.

Why does it matter? In my next post, I’ll include the latest graphs of electricity usage. While installing the central air conditioning ran up the electricity usage in the summer, our annual usage is still down from last year. But the summer usage of the air conditioning definitely stands out. These shades should help keep that usage at a minimum, even on the hottest days.

New raised beds!

2008-09-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

Last year, when we took down the old fence, which was really, really old, and probably made of wood from the orchard that used to be here, we burned most of it in the fireplace. But some of it we repurposed into raised beds, as seen above. We filled them with compost and turned over sod, mulched ‘em, and left them for more than a year. Then, this year, we planted them with tomatoes and potatoes, and cucumber and squash and pumpkins and so on. That worked out so well that this fall, John has decided to try the square-foot gardening thing that we hear so much about! So he put in the three beds you see in the picture below. We’ve since planted them with some root crops, just to see what happens. They have sprouted, but we don’t think they will actually mature before winter sets in. It doesn’t matter really. It’s an experiment. It’s hardly ‘waste’ to put a couple of seeds in the ground!

Other things you can see in the photos: At the back of the right-hand photo, you can see a little roofed patio, that actually has a fireplace in it, which is totally sweet. The riot of foliage at the front of that is a grape vine that I wrote about in a previous post. At the back of the beds are two gray trash cans (one tipped over on it’s side). This is our active compost system. There’s a bat box on the utility pole, which has not attracted any bats, unfortunately. We think maybe there are too many other great places to live. And finally, an old satellite dish mount sticks up to the right of the utility pole. I have designs on that as a mount for a solar oven, if’n I ever get around to it. It’s already set up on an equatorial mount, and so it would be trivial to put a little tracking motor on to track the Sun.

We’ve tried lots of different path-making materials, and you can see one of them in the top picture---pea gravel. The jury is still out on whether we like it more, less, or the same as other options.

New fences, and a new pump ‘house’

2008-09-24T15:30:00.001-07:00

One of the things we’ve been meaning to do since we moved in is fully fence the back yard. Above, you see a picture of the piece of fence we designed and built to go at the north end of the house. I built the fence, and John built the gate. After last year, I was tired of plain old vertical fence slats. This is much more interesting, don’t you think?

So we built another one at the south side, between the house and the cottage, as shown below. Our back yard is now fully fenced, which means sometimes we can let the chickens out, and when Tycho comes to visit, we can just open the back door and let him out!

So that left me with a lot of scraps, so I built a little cover for the pump that runs the secondary water for the irrigation system, which is gradually coming back on-line. I’m not happy with my current solution for the ridge line, so I stopped in the middle, before I got too far along. I’ll keep looking during my travels to Lowe’s, etc., until I find something I like.

Why all this activity? Well, we’ve finally gotten all the basic, hidden things, like insulation, electrical panels, a new furnace, etc. out of the way. So now we get to do fun things, like plant trees, build fences, and, in my next post... build new raised beds!

If you know what you are looking for, you can see the three new trees in the ‘field’ behind the pump house. Currently, we are reading a book titled ‘Small Scale Grain Raising’. Next year, that ‘field’ might be planted in wheat!

Preserving the harvest: sage and rosemary

2008-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

I just love living in Utah.

Herbs practically dry themselves here. Sage grows like a weed, which is ok, because I really love it, especially in browned butter sauce over gnocchi or other pasta, or sizzled in olive oil with chickpeas and shells, or...

Anyway. the easiest thing I’ve found to do with large-ish herbs around here is to take a needle and thread, and cut a bunch of branches of whatever you’ve got---sage or rosemary, say. Thread the needle through the stem of the herb, and hang them up out of the sun, but somewhere that air can circulate around. The back of our kitchen works fine. They’ll just dry, with no further attention from you. (Note: this would almost certainly NOT have worked in Seattle!) Usually, I just pull off the bottom as I need herbs for cooking, but sometimes I go to the trouble to pull the dried leaves off and pack them in a bottle or jar.

I love to give the ropes of fresh herbs as gifts, although I’m not sure people like to receive them. Lots of people don’t really cook from scratch, and don’t know what to do with a rope of fresh sage...

Preserving the harvest: zucchini

2008-09-24T15:29:00.000-07:00

Who knew?

Zucchini chips are awesome!

Here’s what I did:

Sliced them thin. I used the cheese slicer, which was probably a little too thin. I’ll leave them thicker next time I make them.

Lay them out on racks. Next time, I’ll probably spray the racks with olive oil, and may use screens instead, to keep them from falling through between the slats.

Put them in the sun, a dehydrator, solar dryer, or in the oven. I have a ‘dry’ setting on my oven that really speeds things up. It turns on the convection fan, and lets you use really low temperatures. So I set the temp at 150, and left them alone for a couple of hours. They shrank up to practically nothing, but the flavor was so amazingly concentrated that I’ve been nibbling on them for days!

Next time, in addition to the above changes, I’ll also try salting some. That can’t be bad. Seriously. These are good snack food!

Preserving the harvest: cucumbers

2008-09-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

See those five jars in front? Yup, dill pickles.

This is so ridiculously easy, I can’t even believe it. I got the recipe on-line:

4 lbs cucumbers
3 cups white vinegar
3 cups water
1/3 cup pickling salt

for each pint jar:
2 T dill seed
3 peppercorns
1 or 2 dried cayenne peppers (optional)

Wash, cut cucumbers.
Combine vinegar, water, salt. Heat to the boiling point.
Pack cukes into hot, clean jars.
Add spices.
Seal, process 10 minutes.
Makes 6-8 pints.

It took me about an hour. I didn’t have any dried cayenne peppers, so I included one hot red pepper fresh from the garden. And I didn’t have quite enough dill seed to go around (this took a whole tin from the grocery store). And I dropped one of the jars pulling it out of the water bath. It didn’t break, but the lid came off, and there was dill vinegar everywhere. So that was kind of a pain. But in the end, I had five jars of totally delicious pickles. I will probably make more, if we have more cucumbers.

Preserving the harvest: grapes

2008-09-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

See all those luscious grapes? That’s a fraction of the grape harvest here. We have three grapevines on the property, two of which we are trying to retrain onto a new arbor. But the third yielded the above grapes, and plenty more. They have seeds, so don’t make good raisins (at least I don’t think they do, but I just had an idea... I’ll try it, and let you know if it works!). But what you CAN do is make jam! So I did.

First, I used my fingers to get the skins off. I put all of that in a pan with about a cup of water, and boiled for five minutes. That made it possible to pass them through the food mill to get the seeds out. Then I ran the skins through the blender, and added them to the pulp, along with a packet of pectin, and boiled the tar out of ‘em. I packed it into eight jars, and processed in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Ta-da! Enough grape jam to last the year, for sure. Total time: about 2 hours.

Daryl is laying!

2008-09-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

We have three laying hens, acquired in May. Two of them are ‘silver-laced Wyandottes’, and we don’t know what the third one is. She’s all black. We used to call them ‘the black one’, ‘the stupid one’, and ‘the other one’. But then my mom found names that stuck: Larry, Daryl and Daryl. (From the Bob Newhart show, for all you young’uns that don’t get the reference. “Howdy. I’m Larry, and this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl.”) There they are at right. Larry is the black one, who’s looking at you, as if she’s saying ‘Are you lookin’ at me?!’. Daryl and Daryl are the Wyandottes, and look almost identical.

Anyway. One of the Daryls is now laying. The eggs are small still. We are getting one every other day or so for the last week. I expect that soon the other Daryl will catch up, and then the black one (Larry) will come along a little later. Larry was definitely younger than Daryl and Daryl.

What fun! I keep running back to the coop a dozen times a day to see if we have any new eggs! They don’t mind, because I usually bring a little cracked corn scratch or a grasshopper when I check on them.

Speaking of the coop, here’s a picture of it. I built it inside the foundation of an old shed. The white part is the ‘chicken tractor’, that we they lived in all summer. We can, in principle, move around on the grass. I built that last spring. But it’s very heavy, and we’ll probably make something different for next year, and this one will stay where it is, and function as the actual coop, weather-tight with nesting boxes. The top lifts up, so that you can reach in and grab the eggs without ever having to get your feet dirty!

The big structure to the right is the run. The two things are attached via a very simple hole in the fencing! The girls have free rein in there, and we put in all kinds of things for them to peck at and turn into compost. Mostly we add cut weeds and straw, but also kitchen scraps (our mostly meatless diet means most scraps can go right in---they love the cucumber ends, and ends of greens!), and sometimes grasshoppers and other bugs. They are working all of that into compost faster than you’d ever think possible, and are enriching it at the same time. There is absolutely zero odor. But with 3 chickens in 120 square feet, you wouldn’t expect any.

I will probably add a shade-tarp roof before winter comes. The roof slope is about 45 degrees, so we shouldn’t have much trouble with snow collecting on it!

We are so enamored of the ‘ladies’ that we keep putting in new things to see if they will ‘play’ with them. So you can see we slid some boards across so they could play ‘Queen of the roost’, and they do, knocking each other off, and jumping from roost to roost. We also gave them an old wooden ladder, that they have learned to climb on. The latest addition is a wooden feeder, with a cover. They love to jump up there when they hear us coming, and squawk at us for goodies.

Note also the cedar fence in the background. That’s new since last year. Gradually the old homestead is being made new again!

Conference update

2008-09-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

So, remember, two posts ago, when I mentioned that I was forcing my eco-freak on the hapless conference goers? Well, everyone had a terrific time!

When they first heard they were taking the bus from the hotel, pretty much all of them had a look on their faces. You know the one, the ‘Ohboy, what have I gotten myself into?’ look. The one that says, ‘I wonder if I can get out of this.

But then they got on our beautiful buses. And they were impressed. And then I took them to Salt Lake on the Front Runner, and they were amazed. And all of them said in their evaluations that it was a good idea to do public transit, and several of them said they wished they had something half as good!

All were happy with their WSU water bottles, and the delivered water. I got to send a whole lot of bottled water and soda back to catering.

One problem was that catering did not pick up their china and silverware right away. The Friday delivery was still sitting there on TUESDAY of the following week. Ew. But that would have happened anyway, with the bowls and serving utensils, so I don’t count it as a mark against ‘green’, but rather a mark against catering...

As for the event on Antelope Island, in the end, most everyone was too tired to go! I had to go, because I was the speaker, but only one other person wanted to come with me, so I cancelled the bus, and took my Prius.

End result: Success! Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves, and while initial reactions were a little mixed, after a day or two, everyone was pretty excited about the experiment. The public transit in particular saved big money, and made everyone jealous of my town. Way to go, UTA!

Enormous Onion french onion soup...

2008-09-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

Ok. I have to get this down, because I just invented it today. Pretty much the best soup ever. Deep, rich, like restaurant soup but less salty, and completely meatless. What’s the trick? Homebrewed beer, and Miso.

We had an ENORMOUS onion delivered from our CSA, and I was inspired. So here’s what I did:

1 enormous onion (about 5 cups of chopped onion, no joke!)
2 T olive oil
1 T butter
4 cloves garlic, pressed
6-8 cups vegetable broth (see below!!)
1 T soy sauce
1 t sugar
day old crusty bread
mozzarella cheese

Put 2 T olive oil and 1 T butter in a large saucepan over med heat.
Chopped the onion and threw it in there. I let it sweat for about 15 minutes.
Added 4 cloves of garlic, pressed.
Cooked for another 4 minutes or so, until it started to smell yummy and garlicky.
Covered, and reduced heat to low, and simmered for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, I made pretty much the best vegetable broth ever.

1 onion, chopped
3 carrots, peeled and sliced thin
1 celery heart, including leaves, chopped
2 large cremini mushrooms, diced fine
3 garlic cloves, pressed
1 bottle homemade stout,
8 cups of water,
2 bay leaves,
2 t dried thyme,
shake of red pepper flakes,
salt and pepper,
1 T olive oil
1 T red Miso

Saute onion in olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add carrots, celery, mushrooms, bay leaves, thyme, red pepper flakes. Saute until they start to color and produce ‘fond’ on the bottom of the pot.

Deglaze the pan with the entire bottle of beer. Simmer until nearly all the fluid is gone. Add the water, stir. Add the miso, stir. Season to taste. Let simmer a few minutes so the flavors can blend.
_________________________

Add the broth to the onions. I did this by setting a sieve over the pan, and slowly pouring the broth through. Only a couple of carrots ‘escaped’. I fished ‘em out with a spoon.

It was a little flat, so I added 1 T soy sauce, and 1 t sugar to brighten up the flavors.

Add some day-old french bread slices, some thinly sliced mozzarella cheese, and broil, if you have the patience, or just eat the gooey goodness without browning the cheese.

There you have it. One of my favorite foods of all time. Authentic richness and flavor, no beef required.

Greening the Conference...

2008-08-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

So, here’s the thing. We planned a conference for 30 people, but put it at a bad time of year, right before school starts. So we won’t do that again. Still, we have about 10 people coming, to find out from us how to do production for a small planetarium. While they are here, I feel sort of responsible for their footprint, since I am making lots of their decisions for them. So, I’m trying to be a little thoughtful and creative where I can. Here are some examples...

1) Our water in our building is terrible. Seriously. It’s often brown, usually smells funny, and some people say it makes them sick. For those of us that ‘live’ there, there are two options, and we use them both: we have a filter connected in the faculty office hallway; and over in the planetarium, we have bottled water delivered in those big, blue, 5-gallon, reusable kegs. So here comes the conference, and catering services wants to sell me water for my guests. In little tiny bottles. Like several of them per day, per person. In my head, I look from the conference person (who’s actually on the phone!), to the water dispenser (which is actually in a whole other building), and I think, I have a better idea. So I called the Public Relations people, and they donated the re-usable plastic water bottles that are branded with the University name! Ok, so there is still the pthalate and bpa worry, but at least it’s only one bottle per person for the whole week, instead of several per day! A huge improvement, footprint-wise. Why don’t I just have them use the filter? It’s slow and expensive, compared to the water cooler. Also, we are behind on our water usage from the summer slowdown, and have several of the jugs just sitting there, waiting to be used!

2) Interestingly, catering services offers china and silver instead of paper and plastic, if you ask. This was even at no extra cost. So we will be minimizing trash at snacks and lunch!

3) Originally, I had planned to just have everyone get to campus from the hotel however they chose. But then I realized that that would be a huge pain. I’d have to worry about parking passes, and all these people would be going the same way at the same time but not sharing, and there’s all this construction on campus... Anyway, I decided to rent a University shuttle bus to take people back and forth to the hotel. But then only 10 people signed up, and here I was paying many, many hundreds of dollars for a shuttle bus and driver. So, given my car-free challenge experience, I thought, ‘I have a better idea’. So I went off to the Smith’s, and got everyone bus tokens and maps for the 603. It picks them up a block from the hotel, and drops them off right outside the door of our building. This little brainstorm saved me nearly $700. I don’t know what’s going to happen when the charge shows up on my University credit card, but I’ll think about that tomorrow...

4) We had also planned to use a different shuttle bus to get everyone down to the Clark Planetarium one evening, to see a show, and then get dinner in SLC. AHA! Front Runner to the rescue! By the time I send these people home, they are going to be so jealous of our public transportation, they’re going to want to move here!

5) The only event that we couldn’t get to by public transportation is a star party on Antelope Island. I’m the speaker, as if there wasn’t enough going on, and I thought it would be fun for everyone to go. But no buses go out there, and even if they did, it would be at the wrong time. So I rented a mini-bus from motor pool, to drive them all out there and back. My driving of the mini-bus should be an exciting addition to the already over-loaded schedule! Maybe it will rain... just kidding... sort of... ; ) At least we will all be together in the ‘ultimate’ carpool, instead of heading out in 12 separate cars!

So I’m working on it. Maybe the next big thing is the virtual conference, but somehow, I don’t think so. We are social animals, and chatting by computer is just not the same.

Zoom, zoom, zoom...

2008-08-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

I am SUCH A HUGE FAN of not having any idea what I’m doing. ‘What, what, what!?’, you say. Here’s the thing: when you start doing something new, you start out being totally lame, and then you gain proficiency, and then you look back and all you can say is ‘Bwah-hah-hah! Look what I can do! I LEARNED something!’ And that pretty much totally rocks.

We have a new land-speed record.

We went the usual route to the barn today. From the moment we turned onto 24th, every time I looked at my speedometer, it was over 20 mph!

It took us 35 minutes to get out there. That’s means we were averaging ~17 mph, even with all the stop signs on Tyler.

Dude, I’m a monster.

John and I had a discussion about it, and he figures we go faster when I’m in the lead because I’m always way up in my highest gears. He likes to keep a faster cadence, and tends to stay in his lower gears so he can pedal faster. I have a horse rider’s leg muscles (sometimes it’s a matter of life and death to STAY ON THE HORSE). So I’m all about slow-twitch, high power, slow cadence pedaling, and spend most of my time at the top of my gears.

What that tells me is that if I follow him a couple more times, and stay in my lower gears and keep pedaling, instead of just powering for a minute and then coasting most of the time, I’ll learn to pedal faster. And then I’ll be pedaling fast AND having high power, and I’ll practically get to the barn before I leave the house.

Whatever Happened to the Car-Free Challenge?

2008-08-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

S went off on Science Safari with a bunch of K-12 teachers, exploring the science of Utah, from particle physics to microbiology to astronomy. That was a week of riding around in a bus, with a less-than-stellar bus driver. That’s enough to make anyone start to hope that the combustion engine is on it’s way out! ; )

During that week, J stuck to the car-free challenge, riding his bike everywhere he went, stopping off at the grocery store, and so on. So far so good.

Then Trinket got sick. Again. This happens every August. Arg. She stopped eating and drinking. So we needed to get out there and check on her two or three times per day. But the car is still in the shop! Out comes old red, the 1989 F250 pickup truck that we keep around to haul the horse trailer. It typically sees about 2000 miles per year. This week, it went about 1/10 of that, all at once. Plus, J needed to go to a conference in Cedar City, so he rented a car from motor pool to get down there.

So we didn’t do so well for a week or so...

But then! Yesterday, we went down to C and N’s house for dinner. They live about 8.24 miles from us, according to Mapquest. The 640 bus goes right past their house, but the last bus coming back is at 7:15 on Saturday. That makes for a short, un-fun evening!

So instead, we rode bikes down to the train station, took Front Runner to get across the appalling mess of I-15/Riverdale Road/Hill Air Force Base. (We have yet to find anything remotely like a good way to get through there on a bicycle.) We got off the train at the Roy station, and rode bikes the remaining 4 miles to C&N’s house. All told, that’s about 7 miles on the bikes and 8 miles on the train. It took about 1:15 minutes to get there. Ironically, we average about 12-15 mph on the bikes on that type of terrain, and so could have gotten there in under an hour if there was a good way to go...

We left their house at 8:30, so that we could catch the train that would hook us up with the 603 bus coming back up the hill. We are still nervous about riding up the big hills in the dark... also, had too much wine to feel like riding bikes up the 36th street hill at 10 at night!

The 603 bus, it turns out, change its route at night (at least it does at the moment, apparently because of construction). So we wound up getting out at the Smith’s, and coming home across campus---can’t you just see the headline now? “Two University Professors get Bicycle DUI’s on Campus” We laughed all the way across campus as we wove our way through construction zones, deadfall from Friday’s windstorm, and the random insertion of stairs into walkways.

Did it take longer? Yes. Definitely. A lot longer than driving. But did we enjoy ourselves more? Yes, we did. And no ill-effects from our wine-drinking and pasta-eating this morning, since it took us an hour and 45 minutes to get home, and an hour of that was riding bikes. Nothing like exercise to help you metabolize butter, alcohol and carbohydrates!

Oh, and I have to say that there’s nothing like riding your bikes across a college campus at 10:30 at night to set your mind right and make you feel like you are 22 and invincible!

Today, bikes to the barn (Trinket is doing better---she is on some ulcer medications that seem to be helping). Hooray! And the car is still in the shop! If we didn’t know better, we’d think it was sulking... ; )

The Car-Free Challenge: Saturday

2008-08-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

Yep, bikes to barn, rode the pony, biked back downtown, took the 603. The first bus that came was already loaded with bikes, so we had to wait half an hour. So we got lunch, and then put our bikes on the next bus. On the way up the hill, there was someone waiting at a bus stop with their bike, but no room to put it on the bus... we felt kind of bad, but what can you do?! They are going to need to engineer a way to put more bikes on each bus, I think!

We went back downtown on the 603 to see the new Mummy movie, and took the 603 back again. We had to wait about 20 minutes on the way back, but it was a good opportunity to people-watch!

Then, we were too tired to cook (riding bikes and ponies when it’s 95+ degrees out makes you really tired!). So we got delivery pizza from the Runner.

I’ve started investigating options for Socorro. I think it’s pretty much a bike-able town. At least, I know people who’ve used a bike for the main form of transport down there...

The Car-Free Challenge: Friday

2008-08-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

Well, we might not be going to Idaho to visit friends, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nice time right here on a stay-cation!

This morning, we are going to walk with Cassie along the trails over to the Kaffe Mercantile. It’s a nice little coffee shop that has organic coffee and chocolates, along with actual made-in-store scones and other dainties. Mmmmm, yummy.

Otherwise, who knows what we’ll get up to?!

We also need to go pick up our bikes from the bike shop!

Later...

Did the following car-free errands today:
Went out to breakfast at the Kaffe Mercantile this morning, then...
took the bus and
Stopped by the library
Picked up bikes at Bingham’s, where the ‘Bingham’s guys’ nicely tuned them for us
Rode those bikes to the grocery store (the Smith’s on 12th)
Took a new (to us---the 625) bus back to our favorite end-of-the-street bus-stop!

John tells me he’ll call the dealership about the car on Monday.

The Car-Free Challenge: Thursday

2008-07-31T15:11:00.000-07:00

Right. So sometimes, you make a plan, and it just doesn’t go that way.

John and I were running around last night, trying to get ready to go to Idaho, and knowing we’d spend most of the evening having dinner with friends. We went out to start the car (remember how we thought the battery was dead?).

We hooked up the jumper cables.

Nothing.

We re-read the instructions, and tried again.

Nothing.

We looked at the instructions a third time, and tried a third time.

Something is seriously wrong with our car (maybe it’s sulking!)

If I were superstitious, I’d say this was because I said, just the other day, that our car was really reliable! ; )

Anyway. Now we are on car-free challenge for real. So we took the bus to the Petco for dog food, and to the mall for new sneakers. A.J. drove past as we were waiting for the bus, and we must have looked like we needed a ride, because he stopped and picked us up! See that? We have such nice friends!

Tomorrow, the car gets to get towed out of the garage and down to the dealership, and we’ll find out what’s wrong with it... hopefully, it’s a simple fix!

The Car-Free Challenge: Wednesday

2008-07-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

So, today we had to move the horse trailer. Really. We did! Honest! The barn where we keep the horses has finished the new trailer parking area, and we needed to move the trailer from the temporary parking area to the new parking area. We were the last trailer in the old area, and the owner of the barn was asking us to move it.

So we took the truck out to the barn, and moved the trailer. We also had lessons, and then dropped the bikes off at the bike shop to get their annual tuning done. Then we met a visiting former student for lunch, and then headed home.

We took the 603 bus back downtown in the evening to meet the same former student (and family) for dinner at Shin Sei (best sushi in town!). We took the 603 home again.

So, car-free readers... does it count? Or do we re-start the clock?

The Car-Free Challenge: Tuesday

2008-07-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Car-Free Challenge, day 10... more time at the barn.

I rode my bike to the barn again, no sweat. I even got brave, and rode down Harrison (a pretty busy thoroughfare). We’ve been afraid to do this! I thought I’d drop West across Harrison, and take Monroe north to 24th, but I misjudged my street, and came out at the wrong light. If I’d gone straight across, I would have wound up in the mess of streets and hills behind the Carriage dry cleaners. So I made a right instead, and went straight up Harrison to 24th. No sweat at 8:30 or so in the morning.

Rode my pony.

Headed back via bike to downtown, and caught the 603 up the hill. I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned, but our bikes need to be tuned, and my lowest gears are unreliable. At least, that’s the excuse I’m using! ; )

But seriously. 15 miles is nothing to sneeze at, and it’s getting easier and easier. While I’m not sure I’d want to do it after work, first thing in the morning, it’s actually a really nice way to start the day!

BTW, looking at that picture, I suddenly notice that my horse’s head is REALLY BIG compared to mine. I never noticed it before...

The Car-Free Challenge: Monday

2008-07-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Today, John and his whole research team were in the car, most of the day. BUT. It wasn’t our car---it was a University vehicle. AND, their high-altitude balloon launch had been planned for almost a year. AND, they all car-pooled together over the mountains. AND, all his team was going anyway. Is this cheating on the car-free challenge? I don’t know... sticklers would say ‘yes’, and we should probably consider our Car-Free Challenge officially over.

But I didn’t get in the car today. So I am still car-free after nine days! I walked to work, as usual, and walked home for lunch, and walked back to work again in the afternoon, and walked home and took Cassie (bark!) for a walk on the trails. I pondered ordering delivery food, since John was out with the ballooning crew until very late, and truly, we are getting a little low on basic staples around here, since it’s the end of our ‘food week’---Winder Dairy and the CSA box come tomorrow. But then I just made rice and had a salad instead. And some of the awesome dark chocolate we brought back from Peru for dessert! Mmmmmm.... Better than the Chinese delivery place!

Tomorrow morning, we have barn, but I’m planning to bike out there. Actually, I think we have to, since we can’t seem to find our jumper cables and so the car is still not running (remember that we left the door ajar last week, and didn’t discover it until Thursday). On Wednesday morning, we both have lessons. Our friend Angie is coming in to town, and we will meet her for lunch downtown on Wed after lessons, so that’s all bike-able, although the timing is going to be tight.

But then Thursday, we for sure have to get back in the car. We have had plans for months to go up to Sandpoint, Idaho and meet up with C&T---they have a new kid we haven’t even seen yet! I think it’s going to be weird to get in the car. Then, next week, we have the big road trip seminar for local school teachers. That’s going to be even weirder!

The Car-Free Challenge: Sunday

2008-07-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Our walk home at 10 pm last night was particularly nice. The sun had just set, and we had a nice late evening walk, getting home just as the last light faded from the sky. We don’t spend enough time outside at night...

This morning, we were out the door at 8:10 am to ride the bikes to the barn. John led, and was tuckered, so we definitely ‘took our time’. It’s shocking to think that ‘taking our time’ on the bikes means traveling at 17 miles an hour, but that’s the way it is! I’m barely pedaling on the flat at that speed... crazy.

We rode horses, bragged about our car-free challenge, brought some pony laundry home, and caught the 603 bus to get back up the hill. It was a moment of perfect timing. As we were coming across the 24th Street bridge, we saw the 603 pull into the transfer station. So we hustled along to 25th and Washington, which is the next stop. We had to wait about 5 minutes, which was really just enough time to organize ourselves to get on the bus!

We were home at 11:30.

Ok. So let me make a big deal about this, if you please. When we DRIVE to the barn, which is about 9.5 miles, we leave the house at 8 am, and arrive back a little after 11. We have worked it into our world view that a barn trip takes about 3 hours.

Riding our bikes for most of the way, it took us 3 hours and 20 minutes. Dude. We totally rock.

The Car-Free Challenge: Saturday

2008-07-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

Saturday is the day of the Farmer’s Market downtown, which at this time, still has very few farmers! Spring was late this year, and so the produce is late, and it’s a good thing we can ship it all in from California, or we’d starve to death.

But seriously. We took the bus to the Farmer’s Market, then walked down to the transit station to pick up the BIG bus map, so we can continue our challenge into next week and the future. We walked back to the Farmer’s Market, picked up a few things, got an iced coffee and a crepe, sat on the lawn for a while, and then decided to go to the grocery store. This occasioned some nervousness on John’s part, because he didn’t want to pick up a huge amount of stuff at the store. But that’s ok, because we didn’t need a huge amount of stuff!

Back on the 603 bus, past our usual stop, on to the Smith’s. We bought everything we need, and a few things we don’t, and only spent $64, about half the usual amount. I think this is partly because we didn’t buy a LOT of things we didn’t need, for fear we couldn’t carry them! (We cheat, admittedly, because we have a delivery dairy, as well as a CSA membership, so don’t go thinking this is our total grocery bill, or that we were trying to get milk home this way!)

We came out of the store, and while we were trying to figure out which stop to stand at, the North-bound bus went by (the Smith’s is near the end of the line, so you can get on South-bound if you want, and it won’t take much longer than crossing the extremely busy street and heading back North-bound). It would be about 1/2 an hour before the next bus, so we decided to walk. Turned out the bank was open, so we stopped and deposited our economic stimulus check (whoopee!), and then cut across campus. We were home in less than 1/2 an hour, including the time to stop and deposit the check. All the food was fine, and so were we, in spite of the 100-degree heat today.

I will say that I think I need new sneakers. Mine were worn out at the beginning of the week, and I’ve put some miles on ‘em since then. Do they make sneakers that are meant to actually be used to actually go places? I’ll have to shop around! On Monday. At the mall. Which I can get to by taking a bus that goes RIGHT PAST MY HOUSE! (Have I mentioned that I feel like an idiot for not doing this years ago?)

We spent some time this afternoon talking about what it would be like to get rid of the car all together. We ran some numbers, and figure we could save about $5000/year. What would we do with an ‘extra’ $5000/year, tax-free? Huh. That’s like getting a $7,500/year pay raise. We’ll try being car-free a little while longer, and see how we do. If we can do it for six months, then that will get us into the winter months, and we’ll know that we can do it all the time.

Tonight, we have a dinner date with the Johnstons, to exchange trip souvenirs. We’ll walk over there on the trail, cutting across Mount Ogden Park, and walking on surface streets for probably less than half a mile. In the past, we’ve tended to walk to their house about half the time. It’s a nice walk, and since our dog likes to play with their dog, we usually take Cassie with us. It’s nice to be able to take her for a long-ish walk through the woods on the way over there...

Have I mentioned that Ogden is a really great place to live?

The Car-Free Challenge: Friday

2008-07-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

So, when we started this on Sunday, we thought, ‘Oh good, because on Friday, we won’t have to go anywhere! That will help us get through the week.’ But then Friday rolled around, and we were having so much fun with our challenge that we decided to hop on the bus downtown and grab dinner and see a movie. We chose to see ‘Dark Knight’, which is, like, THREE HOURS long. Oy. That put a little crimp in our style because the latest show we could go to was the 5:30. Otherwise, the buses would have stopped running by the time we got out.

But it was ok, because we are hungry all the time now! So we ate at Subway (me with the ultimate veggie sandwich), and then headed off to the movie.

Notice that I don’t even mention the bus ride? That’s because it was so flippin’ easy to walk down the street, grab the bus, and head downtown. Seriously.

But because we hadn’t carefully checked the time, we were back at the bus stop to go home about half an hour before we needed to be. By the time the bus came, we had completely debriefed about the movie, figured out all the inconsistencies (never go to the movies with a physicist unless you LIKE this kind of analysis!), and gotten a little tired of standing there! Had we checked the time, however, we might have gone down the street to get a beer before taking the bus home, and that would have been really great... next time...

But really, here’s the thing. It was not a hardship to wait for the bus. We just conversed, enjoyed the cool(er) night air, and people-watched. Apparently, it’s now way cool for guys to put their shirt on only halfway---with one arm out of the sleeve... weird. Waiting for the bus was just... down time. Which we don’t get enough of, anyway. So maybe during the school year, this will seem like a pain? Or when the weather is bad? Dunno. Some people HAVE to take the bus everywhere. They seem to get by all right.

It’s kind of embarrassing, really. I mean, here we’ve been complaining this whole time about the noisy buses that go RIGHT BY OUR HOUSE. Dratted buses. Making so much noise. And it turns out that this is something to treasure, not complain about! Imagine. Somebody driving past your house every day, like 50 times a day, just waiting for you to notice that they can take you where you need to go. Ugh. I feel like an idiot. This is not a challenge. This is a reality check.

The Car-Free Challenge: Thursday

2008-07-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

This was Pioneer Day, a uniquely Utah holiday. The whole place pretty much closes down, including banks and the post office, so there can be parades and picnics and rodeos to celebrate the arrival of the Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley.

To gentiles working on our car-free challenge, this means that buses are on Sunday service. Fortunately, we are not actually expected to be anywhere at any particular time, so it all works out!

We left at 8 am, to ride bikes out to the barn, which turns out to be just under 10 miles. No problemo. It took us half an hour to get there, which is about 5 minutes longer than it takes to drive, on average. Because it’s a holiday, there was very little traffic. A couple of scooters went by, and we wondered out loud if we’d been transported to a third-world country, where cars are much less common! We did the pony thing, and then headed back towards town at around 11 am. We were back downtown by 11:20, and watched the 603 bus go by, a little behind schedule, and on a detour. This was ok, because the bike racks were all full anyway, and we wanted some tacos!

So we wandered over to the town center, skipped past the sheriff’s posse BBQ, and went up to the taco carts. We ate five tacos between us, and then headed back to the transit station. We waited a little bit for the bus---maybe 15 minutes or so. When it showed up, there were two bikes on it already---uh-oh. One person got off with his bike, and the bus driver hopped off the bus and said to us, ‘I’ve got room for one.’ The guy who got off said ‘I think the other guy is getting his bike off at Washington and 25th (this is about 4 blocks away). So John decided to bike over there, and put his bike on when the other bike got off.

I got on the bus, and talked to the guy who had his bike on the front. We switched places on the rack, so his was in front, since he was getting off first. He was pretty mad at the bus driver for not ‘letting’ John on with his bike. But we hadn’t asked, so there you have it. The bus driver came back, and away we went. We dropped off the other rider at Washington, and picked John up, so everything worked out. John is now almost as happy as I am about the 603 bus, and not having to ride up the hill when it’s nearly 100 degrees outside.

We have heard that UTA has a policy that if the bike racks are full, and there’s room on the bus, you can actually bring your bike on the bus. (A quick search of the website neither confirms nor denies this information.) If it’s true, then John, technically, could have gotten on the bus. But it was a holiday, and not a big deal to ride over to the next stop, so we don’t really care. We’ll have to try to find out the actual policy, for future reference.

All in all, a successful car-free day. We are starting to feel competent at getting around without a car! Time to go back and re-read this book: ‘How to Live Well Without Owning a Car’ by Chris Balish. Car free all the time? hmmm... something to think about. Especially since we accidentally didn’t shut the back door of the Prius all the way on Sunday, and today find that the battery is dead. Drat.

In related news, today is a yellow air day (too much car exhaust at ground level combined with high temperatures makes ground-level ozone. This is bad for you), AND a yellow power-forward day (the grid is showing signs of stress from all the air conditioning). Yikes. It’s a little surprising, because it’s the Friday after a holiday, and lots of people have taken the day off... traffic was light this morning, NPR tells me.

The Car-Free Challenge: Wednesday

2008-07-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Success!!!

It was a pretty sleepless night, actually. I had dreams that I was falling off my bike into traffic, and between that and the thunderstorm rolling by, I had to tell myself in the middle of the night that I would just drive to the barn in order to calm my nerves. But then I got up, and the sun was shining and the streets were dry, and I decided, ‘What the heck!’ I took a deep breath, got my stuff together, and headed out the door.

I caught the 603 at 7:27 am, figured out how to put my bike on the rack (where it says ‘Pull the Handle’, it really means ‘Lift the Handle’---it has to go up, not down.) I got my ‘you’ve stored your bike on our bus’ pass, and away we went. 17 minutes later, I got off of the bus at the Transfer station, and I’m pretty sure I forgot to put the rack up. But the bus driver didn’t say anything, so maybe I didn’t.

At 8, the 604 pulled up to the station. I successfully loaded my bike, got on the bus, had a conversation with the driver about the exact stop for me to get off, and settled in. At 8:07, we left the station, and 15 minutes later, I was on the other side of the treacherous bridge over the tracks, and hopped off. I definitely forgot to put the rack up, and the driver had to remind me. Dratted novice bus-bikers!

I took a minute to get myself organized, and then walked my bike across the street, hopped on, and pedaled to the barn. 3.5 miles later, I was there. That nice flat section just flew by. Every time I looked at my speedometer, it was over 20 mph, so I was zooming. It took about an hour all together, house to barn.

I was in plenty of time for my lesson, so I drank some water, and took my time getting changed. Then I had my lesson (Trinket was a star!!!!! We have stretchy trot!!!! On demand!!!! But that’s a whole OTHER blog.), held horses for the farrier for a couple of hours, helped out with turnout, and shot the breeze with the barn staff a little bit.

At 1:27, I texted John that I was getting ready to go. I probably wandered around for at least five more minutes, just getting helmet and gloves on, putting phone away, generally making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything... I hopped on the bike, and had an uneventful trip back to where I left the bus that morning. I just missed the 604---I mean JUST---it pulled out as I was arriving, so I decided to just keep going and pedal back to the transit station. This was about three more miles, but the bus either had to make lots more stops, or traveled a longer route---I actually beat it back to the station. I got to the station, and hung around for about 5 minutes before I realized that John would probably want to know I’d gotten there, so at 2:06, I texted him. This is of no interest, except that I traveled 6.5 miles in about half an hour, including stopping at three traffic lights and a railroad crossing, and having to slow down for a trailer that didn’t see me. So that’s a pretty good clip, I think.

The 603 was running 15 minutes late, so I didn’t get on it until about 2:10. By 2:30, I was home! I definitely remembered to put the rack up this time! Again, the trip took about an hour, including the delay for the 603. I think if we timed it right, we could get home in 45 minutes. (Barring any bus delays.) This is about twice what it takes to drive the distance.

Biking OUT is not a problem. We typically do that in the morning, when it’s still cool, and it’s all downhill. It’s coming up the last hill to the house in the middle of the day that sucks. Give us a couple of weeks, and it will probably be trivial, but it’s nice to know that the bus option is there to help us get home. It means we’ll ride our ponies harder---no doubt they’ll be happy about that!

So here’s what I learned. The bus doesn’t go everywhere. But if you think hard about it, you can probably find away to hook a bus and bike trip together. It will take longer to get where you are going, probably, but between being able to do other things on the bus, and not needing to go to the gym, it’s not a bad solution. IF you can be flexible about when you leave, and it’s ok if you are 15 minutes late sometimes. That’s a huge ‘if’, especially for people who need to take the bus, because they probably don’t work for the most flexible and understanding bosses on the planet.

I also learned that we need more food. LOTS more food. I gobbled two huge veggie tacos as soon as I walked in the door. That was two hours ago, and I’m STARVING. ; ) I need a snack. Eventually, this will level out, but I’m definitely burning more calories. I’m not craving meat, which is an interesting change from previous years, when my body was used to meat protein, and didn’t know how to cope without it. But I sure am hungry!

The Car-Free Challenge: Tuesday

2008-07-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

So today was the first big challenge day. Fortunately, it is summertime, and our schedules are really flexible. Unfortunately, it’s summertime, and it’s really hot. Probably not the smartest thing we ever did... riding 26 miles round trip... first day out... in the summer sun... D’oh.

So we head out to the barn, leaving the house at 8 am. On paper, it looked like a good idea to drop down to the Ogden river trail, (a dedicated bike lane) and then head out to the barn on 24th street. Turns out that adds several miles to the trip! We wanted to do this to avoid a bridge that is pretty intimidating. Driving, it’s 8 miles to the barn. Biking this route? 13. D’oh. It took, like, an HOUR.

So, by the time we get there, we’re pretty pooped already, and I figure that if I ride my horse as well, I’ll never make it home! So we play with Kody and Trinket in the arena for a while, and then head back out. This time, we decide to skip the river trail, and head straight back over that intimidating bridge. While stopping at a traffic light, I overbalance to the left, get my foot stuck in my toe clip, and take a low-velocity tumble. But I jump right back up, hop on my bike, and make the light. I’m nearly a mile down the road before I notice that my handlebars are all messed up, and the gear shifters are no longer where they used to be!

We stop off at Bingham’s (pretty much the greatest bike shop ever...like anyone could ever know that, Napoleon), to get lunch, and to buy racks and sacks for our bikes, so that we can carry stuff. They help us with the install, since I’m so short the rack didn’t fit quite right---there wasn’t enough room between the brakes and the attachment point. Over lunch, I begin to wonder if ‘mostly meatless’ and ‘mostly carless’ go together... hmmmm... And away we go!

Coming back the rest of the way was relatively uneventful, except for the jerks who thought we were taking too long to cross Monroe, and yelled at us. Well, whatever. They would have felt pretty crappy if we’d rushed into it and got hit by a car...

But I had to walk my bike up the last bit of the hill. I was just pooped out. John’s a good guy, and walked his bike too. We got home around 1 pm.

But this afternoon, we had to go get the CSA box. What to do, what to do? Too tired to take the bikes, and who wants to ride a bike down Harrison anyway? I’ve seen people get in trouble on the part by the behavioral center (there is no shoulder, and a fair hill there makes for slow cyclists, and impatient drivers). So, we checked with UTA. A bus goes almost exactly where we want to go! So we made a date to take the 4:26 bus from down the street, and go get the CSA box. This is great! We empty out the box into our backpacks (SWEET! we don’t have to remember to bring the empty box back!), pick up a few extra local produce goodies at Cochran’s (they promise fresh, local corn will be in on Thursday!!!!), and trot back across 89 and just catch the bus back. Total travel time: 45 min. This is about what it would take to go by car!

The bad: trying to get down Harrison and across 89 from the bus stop. There are no sidewalks. There are no crosswalks. It’s one of those places where the car reigns supreme.

The good: we have an Ed-Pass! We paid for it one way or another through the University (or maybe our students did---thanks students! or maybe our provost did---thanks Mike!), and it lets us travel on UTA for free!

The even better: It was totally painless and easy and as fast as taking the car.

Tomorrow. I have to be at the barn for a lesson by 9 am. The farrier is also coming tomorrow. So I have a new plan. I’m taking the 603 to the transit station, where I’ll pick up the 604. This will drop me almost at the light where I fell down yesterday. So I’ll ride my bike the last two (almost perfectly level!) miles to the barn. I’ll hold horses for the farrier, take my lesson, and then ride back to the bus stop, and take the 604 to the 603 to my house. It’ll be an adventure... I’ll write about it tomorrow!

The Car-Free Challenge: Monday

2008-07-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

This was an easy, cheater day, mostly.

John and I live within a block of where we work. So toddling off to work in the morning, it’s trivial to be car-free. Once in a while, we run into a colleague at the break in the fence, and get to complain about the ‘traffic’. And M,W,F are generally car-free days for us anyway, since we go to see the horses on T,Th, Sat, Sun.

BUT. John is getting ready for this big balloon launch (he and the students are building a high-altitude balloon that will ferry student projects to SPACE (100,000 feet)). And they need some zip ties, and a tarp, and some batteries, and an 8-Gig camera memory card, and a bunch of other stuff. So, he goes to the Lowe’s and Best Buy. On his bike! Fortunately, these stores share a parking lot (with no bike rack). Unfortunately, it’s on box-store-row, hereabouts known as Riverdale Road. But there’s a sneaky back way, if you go behind the mall and past the liquor store. It took him about 1.75 hrs, total, to go there, shop and come back again, about 6 miles round trip. This is maybe half an hour longer than if he drove. Maybe. Because you never know what’s going to happen once you get on Riverdale Road!

Coming back up the hill, there was drama, because we haven’t ridden our bikes in a while, and he was missing his lowest gears. But he came panting in the door long before I expected him... and then he fixed his gears himself, which was one of those ‘A-ha!’ moments when you realize that if it can be done, it can be done by you...

A good day in the car-free challenge. An unexpected trip goes off without a hitch!

Car-Free Challenge: Sunday

2008-07-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

It seems to be our nature to push it... so as an experiment this week, we are trying to live car-free. This being Tuesday, we’ve already got some news to report!

The car-free challenge started Sunday at noon. (We had to take my sister to the airport in the morning, and it didn’t seem fair to include her in our wackiness!) In the afternoon, I needed to make an emergency trip to the grocery store for those feminine hygiene products (I know, I know, there are other options. I’m not ready for that yet!) So I hopped on ‘old blue’, and rode on over there. The closest grocery store is the Smith’s on Harrison, about 1.5 miles away. Generally, we hate this store, because all the employees are rude. But maybe it’s time to get over that, and instead of avoiding them, try to work with them on their social issues. ; )

They have no bike racks at the Smith’s, so I locked my bike to the cart corral, and went inside.

Since I was there anyway, I got the following:
2 lemons
2 limes
dog biscuits
feminine hygiene product (quit giggling!)
trash bags (still on the hunt for the perfect kitchen can liner---we don’t get enough grocery store bags or paper bags! Any other options, anybody? I haven’t thought hard about this yet...)
OH! And Bicycling Magazine, which has a column about Ogden in the August issue. I couldn’t pass up that little impulse buy---note to magazines: write about my town and I’ll buy the issue. Promise!

Anyway, there I am at the checkout, and I ask the woman to put it in my little backpack, since I’m biking it. She is not a very good packer, and is quite put out that I won’t let her just put each item into it’s own plastic bag, and hand it to me. I have to repack when I get out of the store. But it all fits in my little backpack, and I hop on ‘old blue’, and come home. Up the hill from the Smith’s, across the University, hop off to get through the unpaved break in the fenceline. Ta-da! Easy-peasy. John said, ‘Already?’ when I walked in the door! Faster than driving, I bet. John and I should race one of these days.

I’ll put Monday’s adventures in the next entry...

After a time away...

2008-07-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

So, it was the end of term, and we went to the Amazon, and my sister came to visit (she’s 16 and such a good kid!), and we were generally busy, so I haven’t posted in a while. Coming up... we have three new chickens! and our struggle with my sabbatical in Socorro (TWO residences?! Oh no!), and the big bike challenge... is it possible for us to leave our car in the garage for one week every month? And, oh yes, the Amazon. I wanted to see it before it was gone, but I think I was too late...

But here’s a piece of an email containing good links from N, to help us all find some new things to try.

Homemade Green Cleaning Methods (I have tried most of them, and they do work):
http://www.metrokc.gov/health/asthma/facts/greencleaning.htm

Seventh Generation (awesome, awesome, awesome--there isn't a product of them that I have not used yet, I think--dishwashing liquids and detergents, toilet cleaner, nonchlorine bleach, fabric softener, feminine care and paper products); the founder has some great blogs:
http://www.seventhgeneration.com/

The BEST liquid castile soap (a little wackiness on the labels, but I give the founder a break--he lost his family in the Holocaust and wished the world to become All One in Love)--the best body wash/face wash/shaving lotion/delicate and regular laundry soap/etc. I ditched my expensive Dove body wash, Cetaphil facial cleanser and shaving foam!
http://www.drbronner.com/DBMS/LS.htm.

Natracare (feminine care products--100% organic and biodegradable):
http://www.natracare.com/index2.htm

The Prius

2008-04-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
In 2001, we bought one of the first Prius’ we could find. It wasn’t the cheapest car around, and, at the time, was barely calculated to break even on gas costs. It was a stretch for us to afford it, but we thought that it was REALLY, REALLY important for us to support this ‘revolution’ by Toyota. Yes, we would have bought an electric car, (especially since we lived in Seattle, home of the absurdly inexpensive, non-CO2 producing hydroelectric electricity supply) but there wasn’t one.
It’s now 2008, and we couldn’t be happier with our car. We had one problem with the control computer, where it completely froze up on us, and wouldn’t turn on the gasoline engine. Fortunately, that happened here in Utah, and the Toyota dealer is downhill from here! I was able to coast into the dealership with practically empty batteries, and get it fixed. The mechanic replaced (!) the computer, and it’s been fine ever since. Other than that, it’s been a perfectly reliable car.
In winter, when the car actually has to run the gasoline engine to get enough surplus heat to heat the passenger compartment, we average about 47 mpg. In summer, we do somewhat better, at about 54 mpg. It also depends on who is driving. Poor John has the definite disadvantage of testosterone. He was born with it, and it messes up his ability to make slow accelerations and decelerations at stop signs and lights. Me? I don’t care if people get annoyed, I’m going to coast to a stop, and preserve every possible drop of gasoline. No wonder he hates it when I drive!

How much does it cost?
Toyota, of course, ran the numbers, and in the usual way of environmental products, in 2001, the Prius came out even with less expensive cars, if you calculated out the savings in gasoline. HOWEVER, today’s gas prices are more than three times what they were in 2001. I suspect they are going to keep going up, until gas is expensive enough that we stop wasting it. (I get so annoyed at the students who sit in the parking lot with their engines idling for an hour before class. ARG. Clearly, gas is not expensive enough yet!)
I know several people (at least ten) who own the nerdy Prius, since I run in a nerdy crowd. One person had trouble with the computer within a month or two of buying the car, and exchanged it for another one. Other than that, I haven’t heard any complaints.
The Prius is now starting, according to the Toyota website, at $21,000. This will be an important point at the bottom of this blog.

What’s the big picture?
A gallon of gasoline weighs about 6 pounds. (6.3, actually, but that kind of precision is not necessary here!) About 90% of that is carbon, and 10% is hydrogen (hence, hydro-carbon). When it burns, the carbon in the gasoline combines with oxygen to produce CO2. O and C are really close together on the periodic table (there’s only one element between them), so CO2 is approximately 3 times as heavy as C. So for every gallon of gasoline, you get a bit more than 18 pounds of CO2.
Let’s do another Fermi problem. Optimistic, but common numbers for mpg range between 10 and 15 mpg. Americans commonly drive about 15,000 miles per year. Divide the second number by the first (let’s be optimistic about the mpg, because it makes the numbers nice!) to get 1,000 gallons per year. Each of those gallons puts 18 pounds of CO2 into the air. That’s 18,000 lbs of CO2 annually. There are 250 million cars in the US (I had to look that up!), so personal transportation accounts for 45 TRILLION pounds of CO2. Trillions. D’oh. That’s a number typically associated with... well... it’s way more than the number of stars in the galaxy... oh, wait. I know! It’s comparable to the number of dollars in the national debt, which increases at the rate of about $1.71 billion dollars per day. Isn’t THAT scary?!
So let’s talk dollars. Gas is projected to hit $4/gallon this summer, and pretty much nobody thinks it’s ever going to drop much below that ever again. So the typical American spends $4000 on gasoline alone. That’s $333/month.
Ok. So what good does it do to drive a Prius? Well, it gets approximately triple the gas mileage, so if everyone drove one, we’d drop our total CO2 output to 15 trillion pounds of CO2. And if we all were sensible about our driving, and combined trips and so on, we might be able to reduce it by another factor of two to 8 trillion pounds of CO2. But those numbers are so big, that frankly, they make it hard to see how you matter. So you could compare 6,000 lbs of CO2 (with the Prius) to 18,000 lbs of CO2 (with an SUV). But that’s still pretty abstract. So let’s think about personal savings. If a typical American drove a Prius (or equivalent!), they’d spend $1300/year on gasoline. That’s barely over $100/month. What could you do with an extra $200/month?!

Suppose that you also drop your number of miles by two, by always carpooling. And that you drop it by a further factor of two by walking to work, or driving only four days/week, or commuting by bike, or carpooling. In our case, we walk to work, and have moved our other activities closer to the house. Per capita, (to compare with the above numbers) we drive about 6500 miles per year. Divided by the average fuel economy of our car (say 50, so the math is easy), so we use 130 gallons of gas per year. So instead of $4000 on gas this year, we can budget for $520, saving $3500. EACH. EVERY YEAR. What would you and your spouse do with an ‘extra’ $7000/year? Well, you could buy a Prius... These days, they start at $21,000. This year alone, we’ll save enough on gas to buy 1/3 of a brand-new Prius. Think about that. The car pays for itself. (No. I don’t work for Toyota!)

Note: Full disclosure: We also own a 1989 F250 that we use to a) haul mulch from the city mulching facility, and b) haul the horse trailer. It gets about 8 miles/gallon, and we’ve put fewer than 25,000 miles on it in 10 years (i.e. we drive it less than 300 miles/year). We also loan it out to all of our friends and neighbors for similar purposes, so they don’t have to buy their own...

Mostly Meatless

2008-03-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
When at home, we are mostly vegetarian. We have meat rarely, and usually as a seasoning. We started out with meatless mondays, and then went to meatless tuesdays, and then just sort of figured it out. Deborah Madison’s cookbook ‘Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone’ has been absolutely essential to this transition. But I have a very strong sense of the sacred rules of hospitality. There is just no way that I’m going to go to someone else’s house, and not eat what’s put in front of me! This is my end of the hospitality bargain, according to my mother. It was beaten into me as a child, and it’s the right thing to do.

This week is a particularly good one to talk about the ‘mostly meatless’ lifestyle. Work has been absolutely insane the last two weeks, and everyone’s exhausted. Last week, we had program review, when a committee of our peers comes to evaluate us and what we do. The idea is to improve the entire program and department, by getting an external point of view. This is extremely valuable, but also exhausting. We ate out Thursday and Friday nights.

This week, we had undergraduate research symposium, two people in interviewing for a job in our department, annual faculty reports were due; all piled on top of already full workloads, due to two of our faculty members being out (one on sabbatical, and one on maternity leave). This leads to a lot of eating out. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we ate dinner out. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, we ate lunch out.

But most places that we ate, I was able to find something meatless on the menu. When it comes to lunch (in the Union Building), this typically means eating only ‘sides’, although they seem to be beginning to include more vegetarian choices. The Greek restaurant that we went to with the review committee had only appetizers that were meatless, so I went with the flow, and chose the halibut steak.

But the big exception to the rule was the tacos. Our end-of-week interviewee was from Mexico, and he now lives on the East Coast, where he says he can’t get authentic tacos. The majors had gotten tacos from Rita’s on Wednesday, and our visitor was very jealous! So we offered to order in more tacos on Thursday, if he wanted, and he just about jumped for joy. They were truly delicious, and very authentic, and I was so glad to be able to share his authentic cultural experience with him, and have the kind of free-flowing conversation that happens around food that is meaningful to people.

This is the kind of balance that I’m trying to express in this blog. It made our visitor so happy to share his culture and his history with us. I would not have wanted to miss it. Food is such a vital part of a person’s sense of themselves and where they come from. Cooking is a profound expression of culture, and an activity filled with tremendous creativity and imagination. I’m always so happy to learn about other people, and where they come from, and what they eat there, and learn their stories. I would hate to miss all of that, even to lighten my footprint!

What does it cost?
While cheap meat is very inexpensive, and organic vegetables can be very expensive indeed, I suspect that in the long run, I’m going to come out ahead. Initially, we had a difficult time figuring out what to eat, if meat wasn’t at the center of the meal. But by starting with one day of meatless meals per week, we were able to experiment, and start to build up a repertoire of foods that we could cook that just happened to be meatless. We gradually phased out prepared foods as well, just because they didn’t taste very good anymore. In the winter, of course, we eat fewer fresh vegetables, and more grains, root vegetables and beans. In the summer, we eat lots and lots and lots of leafy greens, eggplant, summer squash, tomatoes... mmmm, is it summer yet? As I mentioned in the previous entry, our food budget has ‘excess capacity’, and we could easily eat for less. But I think this would be a false economy, for three reasons:

1) My dad has terrible, terrible health problems, ranging from outrageously high cholesterol (so bad he had ‘lipid lumps’ all over) to life-threatening diabetes. Many of the conditions from which he suffers are diet-related. It seems to me to be a wise investment to learn to eat healthily and well now, so that I don’t need to be on dialysis later. All my life, I have watched him make poor diet choices, regardless of his health, and I’m determined not to do that to the people who love me.

2) Meat is expensive on so many levels, from the fossil fuel investment to grow the grain to the pollution from the run-off from feed lots to the unnerving set of disease contaminants that seem to be entering the food supply these days. While this is not reflected directly in the cost of meat at the grocery store, it shows up in my taxes. You and I have to pay to clean up this mess. I’d just as soon limit my contribution to the overall problem.

3) While it does take a little time for your body to adjust to a mostly meatless diet, once we adjusted, we felt LOTS healthier. We both lost some extra weight we were carrying around, and generally have a lot more energy. Note that we are not vegan, or even vegetarian. The funny thing about (properly cooked!) vegetables is that they have a lot of flavor, take a long time to eat, and it’s very hard to eat too many of them. You’ll get full long before you get fat. (But I absolutely have to warn you not to switch entirely, wholly, and abruptly to a mostly meatless diet, especially if you are planning to include a lot of whole grains. It will make your belly very miserable in the short term, and you will have a hard time sticking with it!) Nowadays, if we are obliged to go a day without large servings of whole grains, fruit or vegetables, we feel completely ‘blah’.

What’s the big picture?
The health benefits of fruits, vegetables and whole grains are well-documented. This is where our ancestors got all those essential vitamins and minerals that we are all missing in our diets these days (modern America has apparently invented a new kind of person---simultaneously overweight and undernourished). In addition, the enormous cost of conventional meats to both our bodies and the environment are similarly well-documented (see, for example, this article from New Scientist, which explains that a kilo of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gases than a 3-hour car ride, or this mild counter-argument, about mostly meatless).

Michael Pollan has been doing a very nice job of reporting on all of the difficulties in our current food system, and has some great advice about diet that we are finding easy to follow: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. If you are not sure what ‘food’ is, think of a Twinkie---not food. Think of a carrot---food. Power bar? Not food. Dried fruit and nuts? Food. For more on this, pick up either ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ or ‘In Defense of Food’ at the library. You’ll be entertained, at the very least! He is thorough and critical without being alarmist.

Learn to Cook

2008-03-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
Here’s the thing. Eating out uses a lot of packaging. Go to Mickey-D’s. Go on, I’ll wait. Bring back the packaging. I want to take a look at it!

(time passes)

Ok. Let’s see. We have 1 paper bag, 2 waxed paper sleeves for hamburgers, one cardboard fry carton, one (extremely large!) waxed paper cup, one plastic lid, one plastic straw, 4 ketchup packets, (didn’t use ‘em didya? No, because you ate the fries in the car!), an entire handful of napkins---12, to be exact! All that, used for about 15 minutes. Wasted.

And that’s not the half of it. We haven’t even touched the impact of raising the beef that went into the burger. Try a web search on that, or read Fast Food Nation, or any other number of other recent books on the subject. Most of us go off beef for days after such an exposure. Then we drift back into our old habits.

Eating at sit-down restaurants, on the other hand, is more or less impractical for every meal. Especially if you consider the costs involved! And restaurants are under a special obligation to make everything really pretty. Which means a lot of food goes to waste. Anything slightly over-cooked, under-cooked, or just sloppy, goes in the garbage.

So what’s with learning to cook? Well, the funny thing is that when you start cooking at home, even if you start small, you start to find out that it’s pretty interesting. And fun. And tasty. And the next thing you know, you are eating all kinds of things you never thought of. This was the single biggest lifestyle change we’ve undertaken, and we’ve gotten so good at it that we actually PREFER to eat at home almost all the time. And it’s less work than driving out to the restaurant, actually, most of the time!

There are two cookbooks we absolutely could not have learned to cook without: a) How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman, and b) Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison. The first was a revelation. Did you even know you could make pancakes without a mix? No, we didn’t either. And the second built on that. Knowing that you have that cookbook at home means that when you are at the farmer’s market, and there’s some strange-looking vegetable on the table there, you can just buy it! Once you get it home, you can look it up and figure out what to do with it, and pretty much everything in Deborah’s book is absolutely wonderful.

And before you know it, you start to find mushrooms as satisfying as beef (no, really! Well, that’s what happened to us, anyway...). And a day without green vegetables starts to seem really strange. And you start actually LOOKing for strange new foods to try, because you get confident that no matter what, you’ll think of something tasty to make! And then the next thing you know, you wake up one day, and realize that it’s been a week since you’ve eaten any meat. And then a while later, you realize it’s been a month. It’s such a pain to cook meat---it sticks to the pan, and is impossible to clean.

And then one day, you wake up and think, I wonder how you make granola? And you make it for the first time yourself, and find out it’s WAY BETTER than what you can buy at the store.

And then one day, you wake up and think, I wonder how you make yogurt? And you’ve turned into a ‘hippy-dippy’, and didn’t even notice until this very minute. Huh.

What does it cost?
Here’s how it shakes down for us:

$35/ week for Winder dairy. This is the local delivery dairy (more about it in a future post). Our milkman brings us milk, cheese, eggs, bread, tortilla chips, completely delicious, decadent and unnecessary chocolates, and coffee.

$150/ week at the grocery store from mid-October to mid-June (when the CSA is not open). This includes olives for martinis, as well as organic produce, and a whole lot of upscale items, like the really good canned tomatoes, fancy italian cured meats, and organic vegetable broth. If we skimp, or seek out the cheaper alternatives, we can do this for about half the cost. But back when we were poor, long-suffering graduate students, we made a rule that ‘anything goes at the grocery store’, figuring we needed a little luxury in life, and how much trouble could we get into in a place where the impulse items run a couple of dollars? (A lot, as it turns out, but those days are long gone!)

$50/week at the grocery store from mid-June to mid-October. These are the CSA months, when we are spending $10/week on the CSA. Totals grocery bill at this time of year is ~$60/week.

That’s for two people. We typically have lunch with colleagues once per week at the Union on campus ($16), and often eat out one evening meal on the way home from the horses (~$25).

So, figure $225/week, in the winter, mostly eating at home. Rounding up, that’s $113 each per week. For 21 meals, plus several snacks. Let’s leave out the snacks for a moment, to find that we are spending $5.38 on each meal, each. Is that a lot? Well, it’s about what we would spend if we ate fast food at every meal. And it’s far from the minimum.

In the summer, we spend $136/week, mostly eating at home. That’s $68 each, or $3.24 for each meal. ‘course we could eat for less. But that’s not the point, is it?

Remember that the idea is that we want to reduce our impact, but at the same time preserve the things that are so great about life. We have learned to cook. That means that our weekly menu typically includes a huge variety of foods. A sampling of foods this week included:

Homemade baked oatmeal
Homemade granola
Homemade yogurt
Homemade Indian Chickpea Tikka Masala
Homemade Nepali Dal Bhaat
Homemade Chinese stir-fry with snow peas and tofu
Homemade Italian risotto

Yeah. For $5.38 a plate. We should open a restaurant. ; )

What’s the big picture?
Do a web search on the environmental (or health!!!) impact of fast food. Or the environmental impact of beef. Or just keep track for a week or two of your very own household budget. What you will almost certainly find is that you spend a lot more money eating out than you think you do. And if you were keeping track of how much you actually enjoyed those meals, you’d find it didn’t even begin to compare to the satisfaction of learning to make your own Indian food (even if it means you sometimes set off the smoke detector---as John just did!)

CSA

2008-03-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture. The basic idea is that you get a bunch of people in your area together, and they help a farmer pay his or her costs for the year. In return, you get a magical produce box, filled with goodness, once per week, all summer long.

Our CSA is East Farms, which grows organic produce for the CSA boxes, and also supplies produce to the local farmer’s markets from the rest of their farm. This will be our second year with a CSA, and we are already getting excited!

Last year, on Tuesday, we would stop by down at Cochran’s produce (about a mile from the house, and on the way to the barn), and pick up our box. It was like having Christmas every week. We never knew WHAT we were going to get! In spring, we got a lot of greens, like kale and escarole, and beet greens. Lots of these were completely unfamiliar to us, which gave us an opportunity to try out a bunch of new recipes.

Later in the season, we got cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, lots of great winter squash (we still have one turban squash left!), all kinds of things. It’s fun, and we had to buy no vegetables most weeks. In fact, except for rice, we ate dinners almost entirely out of the box for most of the summer!

What does it cost?
We were on top of things this year, so we got the early season discount. A half share (at this particular CSA---the cost varies quite a lot from place to place) is $195. This is plenty for two people---it’s about 1/2 bushel by volume or weight (depending on the produce!). Our CSA runs from June through October, with deliveries coming weekly. So that’s approximately 20 weeks of produce, which means we are paying about $10/week. For a half-bushel of fresh-picked organic produce delivered practically to our door. It’s a bargain!

What’s the big picture?
The family farm is rapidly being driven out of business by Big Agriculture. This is not entirely bad. From the same amount of land, more people are getting more calories than ever before. (Wait, did I say that was NOT bad? ha!) Certainly, feeding people is a good thing.

But I also think that some people really love the family farm. They want to grow lots of different things, and see what happens. And some people want to eat lots of things, and see how they taste! I got to spend a lot of time on a family farm when I was a kid, and I remember how wonderful it was to have all the animals and vegetables and things. Certainly, I romanticize this. Of course I do. I was a kid. But it’s so clear to me that some people love this job. And in the nature of thinking everyone should get to do the job they love, I want to help ‘em do it!

It’s also true that I’m concerned about how our food supply has become so narrow, and Big Ag just doesn’t have the same values I do. They want tomatoes that ship well, and hold up to refrigeration. I want tomatoes that taste like sunshine, and explode when you eat them. We just have different priorities!

In addition, our CSA is 12 miles from our house. TWELVE. That means that food that comes from the CSA has traveled 12 miles to get to us. The average distance that produce in the grocery store has traveled? 1500 miles. No joke. That means that the produce in the grocery store is far from fresh, was probably picked before it was ripe, and often has been chemically ripened to make it palatable. Anyone who’s ever had a tomato fresh from the garden can identify the difference. If you’ve never had one, beg, borrow or steal one. It’s a revelation about how amazing food can be.

I won’t even talk about social justice here, except to say that if you’ve never watched people picking 1,000-acre fields of the same crop (lettuce, say, or onions), then you should hie yourself to Southern California, and stand and watch it for a day or two. After ten minutes, you will have a whole new way of thinking about food.

For more on this type of subject, Michael Pollan is the person everyone is reading. His Omnivore’s Dilemma is famous, as is his latest book, In Defense of Food. Granted, he’s ‘just’ a journalist, but he’s wandered around and studied our food supply pretty hard, and talked to a lot of different people about it. His advice about food can be summed up in seven words, which sound like something my grandpa would say: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ As you will find if you pick up one of the above books, the definition of ‘food’ hides a lot of ideas. Twinkies are not food. Neither is GoGurt. Or a PowerBar. Lots of interesting ideas in those books... and I think most people will have at least one ‘oh yeah, I knew that!’ moment.

The Radius Toothbrush

2008-03-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
In the quest to cut the amount of plastic we use, sometimes we come across something that’s a little, infinitesimally small change, and we think, ‘Is it worth it?’, and then we try it! Because you could sit around and calculate all day, but you won’t really know until you give it a try. I came across the Radius toothbrush company one day while I was trying to figure out what to do about all the ‘products’ that we all use. That’d be shampoo, toothpaste, etc. And I thought they were spiffy, so I ordered some of the ‘Source’ toothbrushes.

If you take a look at it, above, you’ll see the brown part of the handle, and a clear plastic part. That clear plastic part is the part you throw away---it’s pretty much all of the toothbrush that actually fits inside your face. The rest of the handle gets used again and again, as you put new replacement heads in.

These toothbrushes are great. I’m not a connoisseur of toothbrushes, by any stretch of the imagination, but these seem to do the job just fine.

What does it cost?
At the time of writing, the toothbrush is $6.95. Replacement heads are 3 for $6.95, or ~$2.32 each. Comparing grocery store prices gives anywhere from $2-$4 for a typical toothbrush. Depending on the toothbrush you ordinarily buy, the Radius could cost a little more, or it could save you more than $1. But this is not a big deal, right? Even if you were super-duper toothbrush immaculate, and changed your toothbrush every single month, you’d only save $12/year, at MOST. It does cost a little bit of time to go to the website and order them, but after we tried them the first time, I just ordered a slew of replacement heads, to keep in the drawer in the bathroom.

What’s the big picture?
Saving money is not the only benefit. In general, if you have an eco-friendlier choice, and an eco-not-friendlier choice, and they cost about the same, you should always opt to be lighter on the environment---there’s no reason not to! These toothbrushes save about 80% of the plastic that goes in a typical toothbrush, save on packaging (the replacement head packaging is significantly less than the packaging for three complete toothbrushes), and we get to support a company we feel good about! It’s a small thing. But all the small things add up.

Which leads to another Fermi problem: What if everyone in America switched their toothbrushes? So there are 350 million people in the country, more or less. Each of them will use four toothbrushes per year, on average, if they are listening to their dentist. That’s 1.4 billion toothbrushes. Every year. Suppose that a toothbrush has a mass of, say, 40 grams (I just went and weighed one on the kitchen scale). That’s 56 million kg of plastic, just in toothbrushes! Now suppose that everyone switches to Radius, so they save 80% on the mass. That’s a savings of 44.8 million kg of plastic! Annually! And I haven’t even counted the packaging.

The Grocery Bag

2008-03-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
In the previous post, I had a nice little rant about plastics. I feel better now. I want to point out that I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to eliminate plastics entirely from your life, and I’m not even going to attempt it. Just sitting here, if I pick up my eyes, I see seven instances of plastic--from the covers on the library books to the pulls on the window shades, plastic is really, really useful! But sometimes it’s unnecessary, and sometimes these uses get out of hand. As has happened in the case of the plastic grocery bag. See the previous rant for numbers on this particular infestation, but suffice it to say, they are everywhere, and there are more of them all the time, and any one of them is going to outlive YOU. So what do you do?

Take your own bags to the store, fill ‘em up, and bring ‘em home again. If this embarrasses you, try shopping at one of those ‘liberal, hippie stores’, like Whole Foods or Good Earth Natural Foods a couple of times. Most people who shop there bring their own containers. You’ll fit right in! Alternatively, visit the local ethnic groceries. We have fantastic ethnic groceries in Ogden---Carlo’s vegetable stand is one of our favorites, as is ‘Joe’s’, also known as the Asian Market. Oh, and farmer’s markets almost never have stuff all bagged up for you. You have to bring your own bags there too. After a while, you just get used to it, and even taking your own bags to the regular grocery store seems less embarrassing. I carry my reusable bags around in my larger bag all the time. That means I’ve always got ‘em with me.

What does it cost?
Anywhere from nothing, to a lot, depending. I mostly use those off-white canvas tote bags that you collect from conferences, workshops or who-even-knows-where. I have about seven of these that have just collected over the years. Some of them say where they came from: I have one from Springer-Verlag, (a scientific book publisher) that I picked up at a conference---it’s part of the way they advertise to mostly spaced-out nerds. But some are just plain, buff-colored canvas, and I have no idea where they came from. I also have a hand-knit flax ‘string’ bag that cost me $36 just for the yarn (I knit it myself). The thing about knitting is that it doesn’t save you any money. You could almost always buy things cheaper from someplace. But that’s not the point, really. I had hours of entertainment from knitting that bag. Anyway, clearly, this could run into the hundreds of dollars pretty quickly, if I hand-knit all my bags out of specialty yarn! But mostly, the cost of the bags was hidden inside conference fees and the like, and there are lots of places you can acquire them for a couple of dollars per bag.

I carry four bags with me all the time, tucked inside a larger, hand-knit bag that I use as my carry-all purse-like structure. That pretty much does it for us, even at the grocery store. You’ll be SHOCKED at how much more stuff you can fit in a sturdy bag than in a flimsy plastic one.

There is a slight downside. We have a dog. And as you may know, most places want you to bag up your dog’s poo, and throw it in the garbage, to go in the anaerobic landfill, there to be preserved, in perfect poo-ness for a thousand years. (I feel another rant coming on!) We used to use our old grocery bags for this, but now we don’t have any! What to do? Should we BUY plastic bags? That seems ridiculous. So far, we’ve been able to get by with other plastic bags---tortillas come in a plastic bag. Bread comes in a plastic bag. But sometimes we are obliged to beg plastic bags from friends and co-workers. At least they are getting used one more time before they go in the landfill! Other solutions exist. I just came across a statement that ‘the thoughtful dog owner trains his dog to poo before he leaves the yard for his walk.’ I thought, ‘Wait. You can do that?’ Of course you can. We’ll get right on it!

What’s the big picture?
Well, take a look again at the previous post. Or visit National Geographic’s News Post on plastic bags. Or take a look around your neighborhood. Most of the litter you see is plastic. And much of it is bits of those annoying ‘urban tumbleweeds’. This is one of those rare occasions where a change makes an impact that is visible immediately, even if only to you, even if only when you look under the kitchen sink, and notice that the annoying jumble of plastic that was always falling out on the floor is gone, gone, gone.

old comment, transfered from prior site:

N.H.

We bought sturdy reusable bags at the commissary, and we have used these to do our biweekly grocery shopping. Once in a while, we might not have enough bags for all the goods; reluctantly, we ask for plastic bags because we then reuse them for kitty litter duty. However, we were proud that the last grocery trip did not require extra bags!

There is also the Chico Bag; I always carry one in my purse and get to use it whenever I do light shopping. (Sunday, June 22, 2008 - 06:55 pm)

Plastics, oy

2008-03-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Today, a nice little rant about plastics. The thing about plastics is that they last a really, really, really long time. Consider the average grocery store bag (Americans use ~380 million of these every year!). You use it for, what, 30 minutes, while you drag your stuff home from the grocery store. About 0.6% of these are recycled. Most sit in a landfill for hundreds, or even thousands of years, depending on the landfill conditions. Even worse, approximately 100 million don’t get thrown away. Instead, they escape from captivity and roam the urban landscape like tumbleweeds, clogging up sewers, gutters, and animals; tangling themselves around plants, trees and powerlines, and generally making a mess. The ones that wash out to see cause even worse problems, gradually breaking down into tiny pieces, getting eaten by small marine creatures, and working their way into the food chain. (Of particular interest is the North Pacific Trash Gyre, which is a current area of research for Marine biologists. I first heard of this from Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us. Google searches on North Pacific Gyre will be plenty of information to get you all worked up. But it’s still under study, and scientists are working to figure out the extent, composition and impact of this fundamentally ugly contribution of humanity to the planet. Sigh.)

So, but the thing is this. Even if you don’t care about marine biotes, and even if you don’t care about the environment, and even if you think that the hype about pthalates is just that... hype, you should still care about reducing plastic usage. Americans throw away more than 75 million tons of packaging and containers every year. That’s 532 pounds for every man, woman and child in the country. For most of us, that means we are throwing away something like four times our body weight in packaging each an every year. Oy.

While plastics numbers 1-7 are theoretically recyclable, we all know the painful truth. Most towns recycle only numbers 1-3, and most people aren’t very good about making sure that even those plastics go in the recycle bin.

So, let’s say you don’t care about landfill space. It just doesn’t bother you that we have these huge pits where we throw all of our trash ‘away’. (For a great book about where ‘away’ actually is, check out Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte). And it further doesn’t bother you that nobody’s actually done the study to see what happens when you put all those various chemicals together in such close proximity, except to note that sometimes, the liners leak, and all sorts of heavy metals seep into the watershed. (Right. Well, we’re doing the study now. In the larger environment. Nobody can say how it will turn out.)

It should still matter to you! Because plastics today are almost entirely a petroleum-based product, making us even more dependent on foreign oil. And let’s face it, if you have a dwindling resource, and you have to choose between grocery bags and surgical tubing for hospitals, wouldn’t you rather save it for the hospitals? No? You don’t care about those sick people? If they’d lived righteous lives, they wouldn’t BE in the hospital? Well then, how about this argument:

Using fewer plastics saves you money. That’s right, money that you have right there in your pocket! How’s that, you say? Have you ever visited the bulk foods aisle at your grocery store? Have you noticed that you can get those bulk foods for far less than the foods you’ll buy elsewhere in the store? The entire reason for that is packaging. The bulk raisins are not any different than the regular raisins, and the bulk rice is the same as the rice that comes wrapped in plastic. But you don’t have to pay for the packaging! You also don’t have to pay to transport the packaging! Hooray! More money for you, so that you can put in some insulation, and save even more money! (If sometimes it looks like I’m really just a tightwad, that’s probably close to the truth! As they say, a penny saved is 1.3 pennies earned, if you figure for taxes!)

More in the next post about my quest to see how low we can go with using plastics. I just hate throwing stuff ‘away’. Grumble, grumble, grumble. But it’s hard. Really, really hard, to cut down on plastics. The stuff is everywhere.

Rain Barrels

2008-03-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
(That’s not MY yard in the picture! It’s just a random xeric yard. I’ll get genuine pictures posted some day...I got a new laptop and lost all my old photos!) We added our first rain barrels last year, to see how they worked out for us, and they were great! We didn’t need to use any other water on the front yard all year. We’ll add to the system this year, and try to cover the back yard too.

We acquired two 80-gallon repurposed olive barrels from C-A-L Ranch Stores. They look like the red ones at the top of the page on this site. These came with brass ‘faucets’ installed at the bottom, to which we could attach a hose. We drilled a couple of holes, and connected them together with clear plastic tubing, and some silicone caulk. Then we cut a larger hole in the top of one barrel, and hooked it up to the downspout at the front of the house. We didn’t bother with any kind of diverter, because the bottom four inches or so of water falls below the faucet, and never gets used. Most of the nastiness that washes off the roof will sink to the bottom, and won’t get put on the landscaping. We have all xeric plants (nearly all from High Country Gardens) in the front of the house---it’s absolutely stunning, and uses hardly any water anyway!

How much does it cost?
Each barrel cost $50. Can’t complain, really. We have secondary water here, so there’s no documentable cost savings, but it’s a huge water savings to be able to use the water that falls on the roof.

What’s the big picture?
In the US, more than 50% of residential water is applied to landscapes and lawns. If we could eat grass, that would be one thing! But it seems absurd to a) plant Kentucky bluegrass in Utah, and b) use our precious water for lawns! Anyone who thinks we’ll be able to continue using water in the West the way we always have, should probably think about that a little harder! Xeriscape Colorado has calculated that xeriscaping can save 60% of water and maintenance costs. Water barrels are a huge component of this. Historically, (well, maybe I mean pre-historically!) people who lived in this area were hyper-aware of the water cycle, and dug cisterns, hoarded water, or lived nomadic lifestyles to try to cope with the plain fact that they lived in a desert. Imagine if everyone put in xeric landscaping and rainbarrels. We would save HALF the water we use now! HALF! Oy. Also, I should mention that we spend a few hours in the front yard in the spring, and a few hours in the fall. And then we sit on the deck, and raise a beer to salute the poor neighbors who are fertilizing, watering, and mowing, and pretty much being slaves to Kentucky bluegrass. Frankly, I just don’t like lawns enough to put that much work into ‘em!

Water usage graph

2008-03-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

We are down from 278 gallons/day, in 2003, to just over 90 gallons/day in the 12 months preceding February, 2008. Thats for two people, so our per capita usage is now 45 gallons/day. That’s a HUGE improvement over 139 gallons/day, from when we started, but it still seems really large. I have a pretty good visceral sense for how much a gallon is (picture a milk jug), and I definitely wouldn’t want to have to carry 45 of them to the house every day!

So where does it go? Actual water consumption (for drinking and cooking) is probably no more than 2 gallons each. Typically, I’ll drink at least three liters of water/day, but most of one of those is at work. The dog consumes another two liters, so say one liter each for the dog. Then there’s coffee in the morning---one more liter. And various washing veggies and cooking pasta. Probably not more than a gallon each per day. So 2 gallons each for drinking and cooking is probably a fair estimate.

Ok. Next most obvious thing to consider is the toilet. Say 2 gallons/flush (I don’t want to talk about new toilets at this time. No really. I don’t. You wouldn’t either if you already knew your plumber on a first name basis! Chad is great. He’s our plumber. At least he was, until he went off to make his fortune in industrial plumbing. I’m not sure I trust this new kid...). Figure, maybe five flushes per day, here at home? So 10 gallons per day is a nice round number.

That leaves 33 gallons unaccounted for. We typically do 3 loads of laundry/week, at 25 gallons/load. That’s another 10 gallons per day. But that’s for both of us, so 5 gallons each.

Similarly, we run the dishwasher about 3 times/week, at 25 gallons/load. So another 5 gallons each.

That still leaves HALF the water we use. If that water goes into showers, we are looking for 23X7 gallons per week, which is 161 gallons. Divided by 4 is ~40 gallons/shower. Does that seem like a lot to anybody else? I mean, probably we are leaving out things like washing hands, and brushing teeth, but those are maybe another couple of gallons. At best, we are talking 35 gallons EVERY TIME WE SHOWER! Oy. I have to go think about that now.

Electricity Usage Graph

2008-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

Electricity, as it turns out, is even more interesting than natural gas (read: makes us feel way more awesome about ourselves!).

We have driven our per capita electricity usage down by nearly 20% to 1700 kWh/year. This even includes the addition of an air conditioner last summer! What does it mean? Well, we could think of it this way: it’s 142 kWh/month, or an average of 4.7 kWh/day. If we assume we get sunshine for eight hours/day, we find we’d need to generate ~590 Watts every hour during the daytime. That’s per capita, though. So we’d need solar panels designed to deliver 1200 Watts to supply our average electricity usage! Of course, we don’t need even that much, for many months of the year. From March-July, and September-November, we use 90 kWh/month. So for those eight months, we’d only need a system that could deliver 400 Watts! (More about calculating the size of the panels, etc. in a future post...)

But we could also think of it this way, just to be snotty, just this one time: The average per capita usage in California is the smallest in the nation, probably mostly because they have a climate designed for gods. What is that usage? 6732 kWh/year. More than four times as much as we use at our house! WY is highest, using 26,407 kWh/year. Average in Utah: 10,031. At first, I thought this was either a) a misprint, or b) the total electricity usage, not just the residential usage. But then I started talking to people about electric bills. If ours hits $30/month, it’s a lot. More typically, it’s about $20. Most people we talked to have electricity bills in the multiple hundreds of dollars! One couple we talked to was paying $800/month for electricity! (Their house was more than 4 times larger than ours, and they had (are you ready) BOTH cathedral ceilings AND electric baseboard heat. As Homer would say, ‘D’oh!’)

Nice, isn’t it, what just a little paying attention will do? It’s just habit now. It really is. We don’t even notice that we are doing anything at all out of the ordinary, and our electric bills are an order of magnitude less than the average person’s. Huh.

Update: I just got the February bill, so I ran the numbers for the last 12 months. Since that leaves out January and February of last year, it made a significant difference! We have used just under 1600 kWh of electricity in the last 12 months. That’s 100 kWh lower than the year of 2007, in spite of the fact that the two periods mostly overlap! Keep checking in to see how low we can go!

Water saving washing machine

2008-02-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
Horizontal axis washing machines tumble your clothes, instead of swirl them. This action is more like the action of the dryer. It uses far less energy and water than a conventional, top-loading machine. A top loading machine typically fills up with water to wash your clothes---typically, this means you use 40 gallons to wash every single load. In contrast, a front loading machine will use about 25 gallons, a savings of almost 40%. They use about half as much energy, because they don’t use nearly as much hot water. In addition, they remove much more water from the clothes in the spin cycle. This means that your dryer doesn’t have to work as hard! Oh, and they use less detergent, and are not as punishing to the fibers of your clothes, so that your favorite sweats will last longer!

What does it cost?
These washers are typically more expensive than top-loading washers, and will run between $600 and $1000. (Top loading washing machines start at about $400, and run up to a bit over $1000.)Energy savings for a family of four might be as much as $100/year, so comparing base-level appliances, the machine will pay for the difference in only two years. That does not include the savings from your municipal water supply! Or the savings in detergent, electricity to run the dryer or in clothing!

What’s the big picture?
So, this is a nice series of little Fermi problems.

How much water do we ‘save’ every year using our more efficient washer? We do 3 loads/week during a typical week. Times 52 weeks, is of order 150 loads per year. That’s probably a little low, given spring cleaning, and the occasional times when we have to do double laundry, because we were doing home improvement, and got extra dirty, or whatever. So let’s say 175 loads/year. If we save 15 gallons in every load, we save 2,600 gallons of water every year!

How much water gets used to do household laundry in the United States each year? John and I do about three loads/week on average, but we are probably not normal in this respect, since we have a tendency to wear our clothes multiple times, and many people don’t. But, little kids have little clothes. But, they tend to get them dirtier. So, for the sake of argument, let’s just make a nice round number of 2 loads per person per week. There are 350 million people in the United States. So that’s 700 million loads of laundry. Times 40 gallons per load is 28 BILLION gallons of water. If everyone switched to a more efficient front-loading washer, we are talking about real numbers---a little over 10 billion gallons of water saved.

Which doesn’t even begin to consider the energy savings...

Natural gas usage graph!

2008-02-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to stop messing around with the cross-correlations to temperature, and just show a graph. This graph represents our natural gas usage since we first moved into the house, in 2002. The dates are a little funny, at the moment, and run from March to February, because I wanted to get the very latest data in! But you see what’s happening at our house. In 2003, we put in the new furnace. In 2007, we insulated the attic. Annual natural gas usage is down to 50 decatherms from 122, the year we moved in! We’ve driven our natural gas usage down almost 60%. Wait, what’s that I hear? What? Applause? Yep, keep applauding. It’s pretty much the prettiest graph I ever made.

The Fireplace Barrier

2008-02-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
So this is how it happens. At some point, as you are looking around your house, you notice this big hole. About 3 feet wide, by 2.5 feet high, it sits there, a big black opening, gaping at you. You stick your head in there, and crane your neck around to look up, and notice that the opening is blocked, on the inside, by a piece of metal. Removing your head from the chimney, you stare at the fireplace for a minute, and think, ‘This is stupid. But I really like it.’ It’s nice to have a fire sometimes. It adds warmth and light to your life. You don’t want to give it up all together.

The whole point of a chimney is to draw air out of the firebox. The idea is that air moves across the top of the chimney (outside, air is moving pretty much all the time!). This creates a pressure difference, with low pressure at the top of the chimney, and high pressure at the bottom, where the firebox is. The air moves from high pressure, at the bottom, to low pressure, at the top. This is good. Seriously. If it didn’t work this way, your house would fill with smoke every time you had a fire. It’s the draft of the air moving from high to low pressure that keeps the smoke going up the chimney, and also brings more oxygen into the firebox so that the wood will keep burning. But even when you do not actually have a fire in the actual fireplace, this drafting business is still happening. The air is flowing from the inside of your house up the chimney, to the outside air.

The next time it snows, watch the area around the chimney. The snow will almost certainly melt faster near the chimney than elsewhere on the roof (if it doesn’t, you may have bigger problems!). This is because heat is leaving the house through the chimney, warming the chimney and the space around it.

Most chimneys have a damper in them---a piece of metal that opens and closes like a door. When the damper is closed, it slows the transfer of heat out of the chimney. When the damper is open, it allows the draft to flow freely from high to low pressure, carrying with it the heat from your house. But, as you know, metal is a good conductor of heat, and in any event, is not known for creating a very good seal! So, while a damper is good, and certainly you don’t want to be putting cellulose insulation or anything equally ridiculous in your chimney (think fire hazard!), you might want to do better than a piece of sheet metal.

So then you think, ‘Well, if I could just keep the air from going out when I don’t want it to, and then let it out when I want a fire, that would really be the best thing.’

A couple of days later, you are wandering around the basement (probably looking for something that you never find), and you notice this enormous piece of styrofoam (about 4’ square) that came in a packing box when your grandmother sent you some framed pictures from her house when she moved. A little flag goes up in your head, and you see that piece of styrofoam, cut to fit the opening upstairs. But that would be pretty ugly, so you continue on your way.

A couple of days after THAT, you are poking around in your arts and crafts and sewing box, and you notice a big piece of fabric that you bought as a remnant for a couple of dollars because you liked it, and sometimes you do that. You never know when you’ll need a piece of fabric. Right next to it is the glue gun.

Before you know it, you’ve got a fabric-covered insulating panel that fits snugly against the opening of the fireplace! The area next to the fireplace is distinctly warmer and less drafty, and when the wind blows hard across the top of the chimney, you can hear the styrofoam flex a little as it get pushed harder against the opening by the higher pressure inside the house. It’s so SATISFYING. And so totally free. And so competent. Your granddad would be proud.

What does it cost?
Well, nothing, if your grandmother sends you things with big pieces of styrofoam attached! ; ) Say $10, if you have to actually go buy a piece of styrofoam and a length of remnant cloth. This is all a part of the same weather-stripping and insulating job that I’ve discussed in several posts. The effect of any individual improvement in the sealing up of cracks and leaks is difficult to distinguish. But overall, keeping the heat you already paid for in is a lot more sensible than adding more heat!

What’s the big picture?
See the post on weather stripping! I suspect that most people don’t pay any attention to the fireplace hole, except when they want to put a fire in it! But as we are going around an trying to reduce our heating energy usage by 15% or more, it’s an obvious hole to plug! There are lots of other options, besides the one that I used. You can install a fireplace damper at the TOP of the chimney (aka a chimney cap damper). You can add glass doors, which have the added advantage of being fire-proof. And, back in the day, when glass was expensive (I mean WAY back in the day!), they used to create these wooden panels that were precision tooled to fit the front of the fireplace. I remember seeing them in places like Plymouth Rock and Colonial Williamsburg. Nothing like good, old Yankee know-how! In all these cases, the purpose is the same---to keep the draft from running up the chimney, and carrying your heat with it!

Warning! Always make sure the fire is totally out, and the fireplace and ashes are cool before you put the barrier in. Duh.

Insulating the attic

2008-02-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
In the winter, you are never, ever, ever going to be able to keep all the heat in. You can not win against the forces of entropy, which want to spread that heat all around to the colder places until all the places are indistinguishable from one another, because they are all at the same temperature. But what you CAN do, is slow the process of heat transfer down enough that the inside stays warm as toast long enough for the sun to come back up and do it’s job by heating up the joint. Or so that you get more benefit out of the air that you’ve worked so hard to warm up.

Alternatively, in the summer, you want to keep the heat OUT of your cool house for as long as possible. Preferably until the sun goes down, and the air cools off, and you can open some windows to let the cooler air in.

The magic of insulation is that it slows heat transport in EITHER direction---in or out of the house! How does it know? It doesn’t! It just slows down the heat. Properly thick insulation doesn’t care if the heat is trying to go out or in... it slows it down in either direction. How does it do that? Well, by creating ‘shade’ and also trapping air pockets, so that the faster processes (radiation and convection) are no longer working. The heat can’t radiate through the insulation (‘shade’), nor can it convect through, because there are no air currents that penetrate all the way through the insulation. So the heat can only transfer by conduction, which is the slowest of the three processes. Make no mistake. The heat will eventually transfer to the cold side (think of your thermos, in which the soup eventually cools, even if you never open it. But if you slow the process WAY down, you can be more comfortable longer without your furnace or air conditioner doing any work.

There are lots of options out there. We chose to go with a recycled cellulose product. We were looking for maximum ‘puffiness’ with minimal chemistry.

What does it cost?
This is pretty much the sweetest thing ever. So I call the people to get an estimate. And they tell me that it’s going to cost $0.75 per square foot to insulate our attic. I estimated the attic at 1200 sq. ft. So the total bill is $900. We’d budgeted $1000 for this job, so I said ‘Great!’, thinking I’ve just saved $100! But then! The woman on the phone says, “Do you have a gas furnace?” I tell her that I do, wondering why she wants to know. She explains that Questar gas is offering a $0.35 per square foot rebate, for attic insulation. ‘Hooray!’ I say. That cuts my costs by $420, down to $580! She asks me if I have central air. ‘Why, yes, I say, we just put it in this summer!’ ‘Great!’ she says, ‘because Rocky Mountain Power is ALSO offering a $0.35 rebate!’ ‘Are you serious?!’ I asked. ‘Yep.’ she says. I calculate quickly in my head. This brings my cost per square foot down to $0.05. That means my total cost will be... $60?!?!?! Wow. So of course I tell them to come out and do it right away.

The guys show up with a big truck and a hose. They make noise for two hours, and then clean up and go away, and I know have R-39 insulation in the attic!

But wait, there’s more! So about 5 months later, we’re doing our taxes, and find that the Feds are also giving tax breaks!

In the end, someone (whoever you prefer to think of) paid us to put insulation in our attic. It reminds me of the good old days, right after AT&T broke up, when you could switch phone companies and get a $50 check. There were times in graduate school when this was the only way I had food to get through the month!

There is not enough data yet to be sure that I can tease out the effect of this. But preliminary data makes me suspect it’s going to be big (for two winter months, at equivalent temperature to last year, we are using 1/3 less natural gas!)

What’s the big picture?
This type of passive energy efficiency often gives the most bang for the buck. Putting in insulation is cheap (even at $900), and if you pay someone to do it, it’s not even annoying. And then it just sits there, year after year, keeping the hot summer weather out, and the warm winter heating in. You don’t have ongoing costs the way you do for higher-efficiency furnaces or energy star appliances, so the total cost of the upgrade is easy to calculate, and that makes it easy to calculate the payback time. But we are not concerned, really, about how long it takes to pay back the upgrade, since we will be living in this house for the foreseeable future. In terms of pure energy savings, this was probably the best thing we’ve done.

High-efficiency furnace

2008-02-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
About 4 years ago, we needed to buy a new furnace, so we got the most efficient one we could find. You might wonder what it even means to have a high-efficiency furnace. After all, electric baseboard heaters are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, so that should be good, right? Wrong, since the line losses between the power plant and your house, combined with the inefficiency of the power plant (typical numbers are in the tens of percent), means that heating by electricity is actually very inefficient, hence costly.

Efficiency is generally calculated as the benefit you get out divided by the effort you put in. So you see that this number will always be less than one. If you ever got more work out than you put in, then you should go off and patent yourself, and be rich! Since the amount of energy put into the electric baseboard heaters becomes entirely heat, the process is 100% efficient (has efficiency equal one). But if you look instead at the entire chain of energy production, from coal to useful heating of your home, the process is more like 10% efficient. (Of order 30% of the coal turns into electricity, of order 30% of that thirty percent actually makes it to your house.)

So what are they actually measuring, when they talk about the efficiency of a furnace? They are talking about the fraction of your fuel dollar that actually winds up heating the house. There will be losses to exhaust (which is good---you WANT the carbon monoxide to leave your home!), and to heating , for example, the actual body of the furnace, which is generally not useful. A standard furnace has one heat exchanger, which extracts the heat from the gas burner. This gives you an efficiency of about 80-85%. This heat is added to air, which is then forced through your ducts, to heat your home. The rest of the heat (between 15 and 20%) is carried away by water vapor through the flue. A high-efficiency furnace adds a secondary heat exchanger to the basic system. This exchanger takes heat out of the water vapor, further condensing it. This heat is added to the air, and is used to heat your home. These furnaces can be as much as 98-99% efficient! That is, 98-99% of the energy available as heat actually goes into the ductwork, instead of being vented directly to the outdoors!

Our furnace was well over 20 years old, probably more like 30, possibly as many as 40. It definitely needed to be replaced! While it had been kept in shockingly good condition, even 20-year-old furnaces have typical efficiencies of only 60%.

What’s the cost?
Well, this was a while ago now. But as I recall, it was a few thousand dollars for the new furnace. It has almost certainly paid for itself in the meantime. At that time, we were too ignorant to look around and see if there were rebates from Questar Gas, or the federal government (there probably were!). In any event, these rebates are available now, so poke around, and see if you can get your new furnace subsidized by your own tax dollars!

What’s the big picture?
As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, heating and cooling the house is the majority of the typical American’s energy usage. Changing from an 80% efficient to a 98% efficient furnace will save ~20% of your fuel usage. Changing from an older, 60% efficient furnace will save ~40% of your fuel usage! It seems reasonable to assume that the number of people running very old furnaces is probably offset by the number of people running new, relatively efficient ones. So that on average, we are all using 20-year old furnaces. This is probably ball-park. If everyone replacing a furnace ANYWAY, replaced it with a high-efficiency furnace, the country would save 1/4 of it’s natural gas reserves. That would make them last four times longer. Huh.

Now if people replaced their electric baseboard heat with natural gas, high-efficiency furnaces, the gains would be enormous. So enormous that these people would probably be shocked by the drop in energy bills. However, the typical application of electric baseboard heat is in rental homes (it is cheap to install, but expensive to run. Landlords love it!). So it is unlikely that the average tenant is in a situation to make this change, so it’s probably best not to think about it!

Adjusting the thermostat

2008-02-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
I was reading Dickens the other day, and thinking about this whole ‘heating up your house’ thing. It suddenly occurred to me what it really meant that all of his characters (notably Scrooge) go to bed in a bed with heavy curtains, wearing a nightcap. It means it was FREEZING COLD in their houses! Now, we don’t want to go back to that: people didn’t live very long. But maybe we could try being just a little uncomfortable, and see how it goes...

Over the last five years, we have gradually dropped the winter thermostat significantly, and now keep the house at 60 degrees while we are home, and at 55 at night and while we are at work (a programmable thermostat makes it so we don’t even have to remember, and also have less temptation to ‘cheat’!) In the summer, the air conditioner does not come on until the house hits 80 (90 while we are at work). By being clever about the way we open and close windows over the course of the day, we can usually keep the house cool all the way into August. But eventually, the ground is warm enough that the basement isn’t cool anymore. Then the whole house starts to heat up. Remember those big, beautiful plate glass windows I was telling you about? They make it very hard to replace the hot indoor air with cool outside air when the sun goes down. We are still working hard on this summertime heat problem...

The ‘extra-cold’ temperatures don’t bother us anymore. Incremental changes, over a long period of time, add up to a big change, with almost no effort. And it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice! It just feels like what you are doing. Eventually, you have enough blankies and hats and scarves and sweaters that it’s just as comfortable at 60 as it was at 70 or 75.

It’s especially odd when people have their air conditioners set lower than their furnace. In the summer, when it’s hot, they have the house at 68. And in winter, when it’s cold, they have the house at 72. Just reverse those, and you’ve made a big change, at temperatures that are obviously comfortable. (BTW, I’ve heard stories of people who don’t have a combined thermostat, and have their air conditioner and furnace thermostats set this way all year. And so the air comes on, and cools the house to 68, so the heat comes on, to try to get it back up to 72. So the air comes on, to try to cool it down. And the heat comes on, to try to warm it up. And so on. Can you imagine?!)

What’s the cost?
Well, nothing in installation or monthly fuel bills. This is pure savings! Isn’t that nice?

See that, I just lied. Turns out that there IS an increase in monthly fuel bills, at least at first, and at least in your own personal fuel! We eat A LOT more when the house is only 60 degrees. A LOT more. And we still lose weight in the winter. It’s pretty much the thing everyone’s always praying for---you can eat whatever you want, all the time! You just have to stop keeping your house at the ‘ideal’ temperature! Your body burns a lot of calories when you are cold, heating you up again!

What’s the big picture?
The vast majority of an American’s household energy usage is in heating and cooling the home (our esteemed gub’ment estimates it at 56%). Estimates vary, of course, but if you plot up your data, and see distinct seasonal variations, chances are that this is true for you as well! Keeping your house cooler in winter, and warmer in summer is one way to beat down that energy usage.
Estimates of the energy you might save are calculated in lots of vastly different ways, and vastly different units. Here are a few ways to think about the impact of this change:

In summer, for every degree above 72 F, 120 pounds of CO2 are not emitted (presumably annually). from NPR

Turn down your thermostat to 68 degrees. For every degree you lower your heat in the 60-degree to 70-degree range, you'll save up to 5 percent on heating costs. Wear warm clothing like a sweater and set your thermostat to 68 degrees or lower during the day and evening, health permitting. Set the thermostat back to 55 degrees or off at night or when leaving home for an extended time, saving 5-20 percent of your heating costs (heat pumps should only be set back 2 degrees to prevent unneeded use of backup strip heating). California’s Consumer Energy Center

‘Try turning down the thermostat 5 to 10 degrees at night, and then turn it up again in the morning when the coffee is brewing. If you can get used to that, you'll save 5 to 10 percent of your heating bill.’ green living

Weather Stripping

2008-02-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
Heat can travel in three ways: by radiation, convection or conduction. Radiation is the way that ‘heat’ (in the form of electro-magnetic radiation) travels to us from the sun. It’s that lovely feeling you get when you raise your face to the sun in the spring, and for the first time in too many months, it feels warm. You’ve seen convection in a pot of boiling water, especially if you have an electric stove. If you watch the pot, it does eventually boil, but just before it does, you’ll see rings of bubbles rising through the water above the coils. And then, the bubbles disappear, but you still see raised spots on the water above the coils. This is the hot, lower density water rising from the bottom, reaching the surface and cooling, and dropping back down in the gaps between the coils. This mixes the heat through all the water in the pot. Conduction is the way heat passes through a solid. Your windows clearly don’t convect! Instead, the heat at the inner edge makes the molecules move faster (heats them up). Then those molecules bump into molecules deeper in the material, making THEM move faster, and so on, until heat has passed through the solid. This is by far the slowest method of heat transmission.

The idea of weather stripping is that you want to find all the places where heat is traveling out of your house by convection---by moving hotter air to cooler locations, and block them so that the heat has to travel by conduction instead. You will never win entirely. You can’t keep the heat in forever. But you CAN slow it down. Significantly!

One common path for heat to leave your house is around the doors. If the doors are not sealed very well, the air can flow around them, carrying heat swiftly from your house. How can you tell if this is happening? Burn some incense, and hold it near the places that you think you might have leakage. If the smoke moves sideways towards the door or window, that’s where the air is going.

We added weather stripping around some of our doors. Others fit too tight for this. But that’s not a problem, if you think about it. If they fit tightly, they are doing a good job of keeping air from flowing through the doorway!

What’s the cost?
Sometimes people claim that the cost is nominal, but what they mean is that THEY didn’t notice it. But in this case, the cost really IS nominal. A huge roll of weather stripping costs a few dollars, and takes a few minutes to install. You could do it in commercial breaks! Seriously. just stick the stuff in all the openings where you notice a draft. This is technology to the rescue, with a cheap, easy, effective method for cutting your energy usage.

What’s the big picture?
Home energy audits reveal that energy loss by air movement can account for 1/3 to 1/2 of the heat loss from your home! This means that simply by sealing up those leaks, you can save 1/3 to 1/2 of the energy you use to heat or cool your home. Suppose that half of those leaks can’t be plugged, for various reasons. Still, you can save 15% on your heating and cooling energy usage just by plugging the gaps around movable things like windows and doors. While on the one hand, some people argue that a too-tight house is unhealthy, because the air trapped inside becomes ‘stale’, for those of us living in 50-year-old brick houses, this is probably not an actual problem! There are far too many holes and cracks and leaks for us ever to capture them all. But we CAN plug the big ones. Imagine saving 15% of your heating and cooling energy. Just by installing a couple of dollars worth of foam in two or three spots in your house! During the commercial breaks of Battlestar Galactica. It just doesn’t get any better than that...

New Windows

2008-02-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
Newfangled windows come in all sorts of varieties, with a large number of energy-saving features. Probably the biggest single advance was the double-pane glass. This traps air (or some other gas) between the panes, so that conduction of heat through the window is dramatically slowed. A still gas is not a very good conductor of heat. The principle is the same as for clothes, or down comforters, or jackets. In those cases, you want to trap air and hold it still next to your body, so that your body heat can warm it, and it will remain close to you. If you think about it, this means that you are not heating up the environment as quickly, because you are trapping the warm air close to you. So flip it around. Trap the warm air between the panes of glass, and away from the cool air inside the house. Yep. You get it.

Other advances include low-E coatings, which block much of the non-visible wavelengths of sunlight. You won’t miss ‘em when you look out the window, because you can’t see ‘em. But keeping that energy out of the house is the key to keeping it cool! These are fun. If you open the window, when the sun is shining on it, you can literally feel the difference between the sunlight coming through the open part and the sunlight coming through the window. It’s a great innovation that makes a huge difference in overall heating and cooling.

By the way, in winter, all of these innovations work the other way---keeping your house warmer than the outdoors! It’s like that old joke about the thermos---how does it know?!

In our house, all the ‘normal’ windows (i.e. all but three enormous plate glass ones) have been replaced with double-pane, low-E windows.

What’s the cost?
These days, it’s pretty hard to find windows that DON’T have energy efficiency built in! I can’t even give a cost estimate in a reasonable way, partly because it’s incremental above the cost of replacement windows, partly because there are so many variables (number of windows, sizes, labor costs, oy!)

Nor can I really give an estimate of how much energy is saved, yet. We haven’t had them for a full year, and are doing so many things that it’s hard to tease them apart. I may come back to this when we’ve got a better estimate on all the other things. If we can account for all of those, whatever remains has to be because of the windows!

What’s the big picture?
Windows are expensive. They can run thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, depending on how fancy, many or large they are. But windows are one of the big players in energy loss from the typical home. You can tell, if you look at an infrared picture of a home, as above (which is not our house, by the way, but a random infrared picture). We had to replace several of our windows anyway, and it made a lot of sense for us to get very energy-efficient ones.

Window Shades

2008-02-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
In the summer, when the sun is high in the sky, and above the horizon for more hours, windows can be a huge source of heat entering the home. Glass is nearly transparent to visible wavelengths (of course! That’s sort of the point of glass!), and that visible light then gets absorbed by the floors, furniture, carpets, etc., and heats them up. They hold the heat, and radiate it back into the house even after the sun goes down. (You can use this phenomenon to your advantage in the winter, but in the summer, it’s a distinct disadvantage.) Window shades help by literally shading the window, and reflecting much of the sunlight back to the great outdoors. It’s far more effective to have these on the outside of the house, because they keep the heat outdoors. Indoor drapes or shades can help by shading furniture and floors, so that they don’t absorb as much heat during the day, but the drapes themselves and the air between the drapes and the window absorb heat, and release it back into the house.

For us, this problem is particularly exacerbated by 3 enormous plate glass windows. Two of these windows face west, and one of them faces east. Over the largest of these, which faces west, we have installed a roll down shade, that slides in channels on either side of the window. We keep it rolled up all winter, where it is not at all noticeable above the window, and roll it down during the afternoons in the summer. The material is a loose-weave plastic fiber, and when it’s rolled down over the window, you can see through it to the bright side. (From inside to outside during the day.) We installed this several years ago, and it cut down on the daily temperature rise inside the house by several degrees. And that’s with just one shade!

There are other benefits as well. Our furniture and floors are not fading as fast as you would expect in our mountain sunshine, and while the rooms are bright and sunny, they are not TOO bright and sunny!

We plan to install shades over the other two windows this summer.

What’s the cost?
For the large window, which measures approximately 6’ tall by 10’ wide, the shade cost $1100. There were no rebates or other savings, so the entire cost was ours. There are no ongoing costs, and after four years, there is no sign of any wear or tear.

What’s the big picture?
Again, it comes down to how hard the air conditioner has to work. Keeping the house temperature down to 85 instead of 90 by using the window shade means that the air conditioner needs to do 5 degrees less cooling.

Down-scaled Computers

2008-02-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
When it was time, we replaced our old desktops with laptops (oops, sorry, notebooks!). The energy savings here can be very large. Because notebook computers a) use LCD screens (although most desktops come with LCD monitors these days) and b) are not plugged in all the time and c) are optimized to use energy at the slowest possible rate so that the battery lasts the longest possible time, they use far less energy than the typical desktop machine.

What’s the cost?
Given that we were going to buy a computer anyway, it cost no more to acquire a laptop than a desktop.

As for ongoing costs, several people have run the numbers on desktops vs. laptops. One of the most detailed sets of numbers comes from Mr. Electricity: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html According to this site, a desktop computer uses between 60 and 250 Watts. On sleep/standby, it uses between 1 and 6 watts. Our old desktops were almost certainly at the high end of this range, given our gadget-hound nature. A typical laptop uses between 15 and 45 Watts. Suppose that our laptops are at the high end of the range, and that we don’t use them any more or less than the desktops. We have reduced energy usage by our computers by 80%.

In other news, Apple has developed an extremely effective recycling program: http://www.apple.com/environment/ and has made enormous strides all over the place, environmentally speaking. One of the things I love most about this company is that they don’t tell you what they are going to do. They only tell you what they’ve done. It’s such a refreshing change from all the hype that so often doesn’t materialize.

What’s the big picture?
The amount of energy used by a computer in a typical home is a tiny fraction of the total amount of energy used. If you are going to put a lot of effort anywhere in particular, this is probably not the place to do it! But if you’ve already picked a whole lot of the ‘low-hanging fruit’, and are planning to replace your computer anyway, why not get a laptop instead of a desktop?!

Wind Power Electricity

2008-02-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
Rocky Mountain Power has the Blue Sky Initiative, where for $1.95, we can buy 100 kWh from wind. This is so easy, it almost feels like cheating! Rocky Mountain Power uses this money to buy wind power and invest in wind farms. This program won the ‘Green Power Program of the Year’ for 2007 from the EPA and DoE. We were solicited to join a few years ago, by a flier in our electric bill. It’s also possible to sign up through the website.

What’s the cost?
We’ve subscribed for enough of these to offset our entire electricity usage, as well as some of our neighbors’. Our maximum electricity usage comes in the wintertime, when we run the electric dryer, and averages 10 kWh/day, or 300 kWh/month. Three credits ($5.85!) would offset this entire usage. We get a couple of extra ones, because we can, and it makes us happy. No, of course we don’t know if our specific Amps come from wind. But that’s not the point, really.

What’s the big picture?
According to their website, in 2006, Blue Sky purchases accounted for 336 million kWh of electricity. That’s kept 672 million lbs of CO2 (equivalencies: 57,523 cars off the road, or 67.2 million trees planted).

Blue Sky now (Feb, 2008) has 58,000 customers.

Our whole town has enrolled in the Blue Sky Energy Challenge, which is one of the reasons I really love living in Ogden. Go Sustainable Ogden committee!

Our University has also enrolled to get 5% of our energy from the Blue Sky Initiative. Go Weber State!

Ceiling Fan

2008-02-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
The whole point of sweat is that it is supposed to evaporate off of your body, and cool you by absorbing the energy it takes to turn water from a liquid to a vapor. Ideally, the vapor moves away from you, so that the air around you doesn’t get saturated. If it does, it keeps the sweat from evaporating. If you’ve ever been in the deep south, you know that when the air is already full of water (i.e humid), you feel stiflingly hot, and the sweat just sits on you and makes you feel sticky and even more uncomfortable. Here in Utah, the climate is dry, and so evaporative cooling by sweat is a good adaptation, if the air moves at all.

We have the great fortune/misfortune to have three enormous plate glass windows. (2 are 5’x6’ and the third is 10’x5’). The views are spectacular. But the entire west side of the house (which is in direct sunlight from 3-9 during high summer as we wait for some trees to get a little taller, wider, and fuller) has no open-able windows, so air flow is hard to come by.

We installed an energy-star ceiling fan (energy star because of the attached fluorescent light, and also because of the shape of the fan blades) in the bedroom. The ceiling fan moves the air around in the bedroom, making a huge difference in our ability to evaporatively cool ourselves. And, of course, this comes at a much lower energy cost than running the air conditioning.

We really only need the air conditioner when the temperature gets over 100 degrees for most of the day. It’s hot here in Utah in the summer, but it’s also arid, so the temperature drops like a rock when the sun goes down. The fan does a great job for most of the summer months, but August can be unbearable.

What’s the cost?
$140 for the fan, minus a $20 rebate for energy star appliance from Rocky Mountain Power. We put it in ourselves, so there was no installation fee. Fortunately for us weenie afraid-of-our-wiring homeowners, it came with a remote that we hung on the wall where the light switch used to be. While on the one hand, that means that the fan is drawing vampire current all the time, so that it ‘listens’ for the remote; on the other hand, we didn’t have to figure out how to run another switch down through the lath and plaster walls. We felt that was a fair trade-off. We’re even more afraid of our lath and plaster walls than we are of the wiring! So many things to learn how to do...

What’s the big picture?
I don’t have really good numbers on the energy usage of our air conditioner, because we just bought it this year. (This was a complicated decision. IF we were going to get an air conditioner, of course we’d want one that was compatible with our awesome four-year-old 98% efficient furnace, otherwise we would have to replace that too. This was the last year that they were going to make them, and in August, it was over 100 degrees for too many days in a row. So we went ahead and did it. We used it for a couple of days in August, and a couple of days in September. Yes, these months are part of our 96th percentile calculation from the energy star web page. I’ll have to think about that for a while.)

But, when there’s no data, you can always make stuff up until you get some. Suppose you run your 5000 BTU/hr air conditioner for 8 hours per day for 90 days during high summer. You’ll get 3,600,000 BTUs of cooling that summer. If your air conditioner had a SEER (a measure of the efficiency, higher is better) of 13, which is typical, then you will have used about 277,000 Wh of electricity, or 277 kWh.

Each day that you use an energy star fan (~31 Watts) instead of the air conditioner, you use 248 Wh of electricity. By using our fan, we can cut down on the air conditioning to only the very hottest ~4 weeks of the year. So we use the fan instead of the AC for 60 days. This is 14880 Wh, or about 15 kWh. How does this compare to 60 days worth of air conditioning? That’s 185 kWh. So take 185-15, and we save 170 kWh of electricity annually with this modification. That’s about 61%! As it turns out, if you run the fan and the air conditioner at the same time, you can keep the air conditioner cranked up to a higher temperature, and save even more energy, whilst still being able to sleep at night. We’ll run the experiment this summer, and see how it turns out!

Solar-powered Attic Fan

2008-02-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

How does it work?
So, this is totally amazing. What you want is something that turns on when it’s hot, so that it evacuates all the REALLY hot air from your attic. And then, you want it NOT to go on when it’s cold, so that your attic is a nice, still air buffer against the raging wind. AND, you want to never have to think about it.

So you cut a hole in your roof, (gasp! Yeah, I got nervous about that part too...) and you drop a fan in. Nail a solar panel to the roof. Hook up the one thing to the other thing, and the fan turns on. It’s like magic! I’m even a physicist, and every time I do this, I think WOW! That’s the sun! Making my fan go around! Wow! I could go on all day about band-gaps and silicon and semi-conductors, but my initial reaction is always ‘WOW!’. Don’t forget, after you’ve stared goggle-eyed for a long time, to finish following the instructions, and apply caulk liberally to all the nail holes and cuts you’ve just made!

So the sun comes, and heats up the attic, and turns on the fan AT THE SAME TIME. Isn’t that brilliant! I love it. As you probably can tell. But wait, you say, what about winter? You don’t want to be sucking cold air into the attic in the winter! Well, where we live, about the time that things start to cool off, the sun is so low in the sky that the fan never goes on! (If you’ve never noticed this about the sun, that sometimes it’s high in the sky, and sometimes it’s low, go outside, plant a stick in your yard, and measure the shadow, (write it down!) every Sunday at noon, for a year. It will change your life. No joke. All the sudden, the Universe will make a lot more sense to you.) It’s magical, and wonderful, and a joy to behold. On top of that, you don’t have to run any wiring to a switch anywhere, which is really intimidating, if you live in a 50-year-old house with original wiring. And, if you live farther south, or your house is oriented to the west so that the fan might go on in the evening, just unplug it when you are up cleaning your gutters in the fall. I just love it when technology and nature work together to make my life easier!

Oh, yeah, and ventilating the attic is a good idea anyway, because of mold considerations!

What’s the cost?
$300 for the fan, including the solar panel. We got one where the panel was separate, so we could orient it the way we wanted. In the end, we laid it flat on the roof. This seems to work fine. We installed it ourselves, so there was no cost there. $0 in ongoing energy costs, of course. The fan is about $200 more expensive than a standard conventional fan, but as I’ve already mentioned, we are weenies about running new wiring and trying to attach it to our 50-year-old wiring. I would be surprised if we could have gotten an electrician to run the wiring for the fan and a thermostat. Some estimates I’ve read are that a conventional attic fan costs between $10 and $20/month to run. That seems high to me, but the point remains that the solar fan has no on-going costs. Besides, solar panels are totally sweet.

What’s the big picture?
I can’t seem to find any pre-existing calculations about how much it helps keep cooling bills down if you have an attic fan (this being the argument everyone makes, which is conceptually sound). I’ll have to ponder this for a couple of days, while I figure out the best way to at least make an estimate of heat transfer back and forth to the attic.

Line-dry clothes

2008-02-01T14:13:00.000-08:00

This is sometimes called the ‘solar clothes dryer’! As you know, we live in Utah, where the air is dry, dry, dry, and it’s sunny about 90% of the time. As long as the temperature is above freezing, and we can get to the clothesline, we dry clothes outside. This year, we’ve had many, many feet of snow, and so we are using the clothes dryer this winter.

How does it work?
About 75% of the year, we do nearly all of our clothes drying outside. From late November through the end of January, we typically use an electric dryer. Occasionally, in spring or fall, our work schedules jam up so that all of the sudden, it’s Sunday, and we have no clothes and its raining.
At first, this was a real pain. We had to get used to carting wet clothes up the steps out of the basement into the backyard, up the stone wall, around the tree to the clothesline. We invested in some deep laundry baskets, and some better clothespins. And then, after a while, it was kind of pleasant. It was a really great excuse to spend a few minutes outside in the sunshine, bending and stretching. And then I started to be aware of the birds, and the sun on my face, and the terrific SNAP that pillowcases make when you shake them out really hard. I love the smell of clothes (especially sheets) dried outside in the sun. And I find that the laundry actually goes MUCH MUCH faster when we are hanging it out, since the cycle on the washer is so much shorter than the cycle on the dryer. I’ve also noticed that clothes last a lot longer, and fit better, because they don’t shrink up in the hot dryer. We typically do 3-4 loads of laundry per week. It’s not uncommon, in the summer, that I’ll hang out all the loads, and immediately after I hang the last load, I can start taking down the first 2 or 3. By the time I’ve taken them down and folded them, the last load is dry. It’s a fun game, really, to see if you can get this to work out---you have to put the towels and other heavy laundry in the first load! I know. I’m a nerd.

What’s the cost?
Er... nominal. A big laundry line was in the back yard when we moved in, so we had to buy clothespins. $10, maximum. We’ve had them for six years. Sometimes we step on one it breaks, and we have to throw it away, or repurpose it into a chip clip. It’ll be, probably, 20 years before we need new clothespins, so say $0.50 per year. (Ack! I just noticed, for the very first time, that my keyboard doesn’t have a ‘cents’ symbol! Didn’t there used to be a ‘cents’ symbol? Or am I imagining it?)

Now, you could say that it costs in TIME, for us to hang out laundry instead of just throw it in the dryer. But I like to hang out my laundry. I think the bending and stretching and time in the sun is good for me. So it doesn’t feel like a ‘cost’ to ‘spend’ my time in this way.

What’s the big picture?
There’s a particularly awesome article about this in the Journal of Consumer Studies and Home Economics, where they actually compared the metabolic energy costs (how much food you have to eat) to the electricity costs. That just makes me smile to know that people are calculating that out! Fun!

But the long and the short of it is that the amount of energy saved is strongly dependent on the number of loads of laundry you do! Historically, using the dryer was the main difference between our summer (8 kWh/day) and winter (12 kWh/day) energy usage (averaging data from 2005 and 2006). In our case, we can estimate: 4 kWh/day*90 days of winter=360 kWh. So you could estimate that if we used the dryer all year, we’d use about 1,440 kWh of electricity in a year. That’s probably an overestimate, given that winter clothes are heavier than summer ones. So this effort saves approximately 1,000 kWh per year. Depending on where you live, this is ~$10/month in cost savings.

Apparently, some places have ordinances against line-drying your clothes. That’s the kind of thing that really frosts my socks. Who’s in charge of your government?! It should be you. Go and present them with an argument with data, charts and graphs! Dazzle them with science! You might not accomplish anything, but then again, you might! And maybe, if you went and talked to your neighbors about it, you could change your little corner of the world. No for an answer, you’ve already got...

Energy Star Appliances

2008-02-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

Our house was built, variously in 1941, 1950, and 1955. When we moved in, there were several appliances that might have been hanging around that long. I haven’t checked to be sure, but our electric stove could easily have been a 1950’s model! It certainly looked like one, and the coils on the stove top were literally worn away.

How does it work?
Every time we replace an appliance, which we’ve now replaced every appliance that came with the house, we look for the energy star label. Energy star is a government program that began in 1992, and is run jointly by the EPA and the DoE. The purpose of the program is to help consumers identify energy efficient appliances and consumer electronics. When you are going to spend hundreds of dollars on an appliance, such as a refrigerator, that you will use every single day, potentially for decades, it doesn’t seem like a burden to consider the energy efficiency into the mix! Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me...

We live in Utah where water, in the words of Mark Twain, ‘is for fighting over’, so we have to balance energy considerations with water considerations occasionally. Our dishwasher, for example, uses more power but less water.

What’s the cost?
Well, this is one of those funny calculations, that I think has already been done, by corporations, about each and every appliance. Consider. Companies are going to charge you as much as you’ll pay. That’s a given. If they make a more efficient ‘fridge, they will increase the cost by the estimated energy savings that you could get down the road. Because then they can convince you that you still come out ahead. So I set the cost of energy star appliances at zero, because the company has already figured out how much they can charge based on this complicated calculation. As energy costs rise, I automatically come out ahead. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

What’s the big picture?
According to the Energy Star website, “Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2006 alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 25 million cars — all while saving $14 billion on their utility bills.”

Death to Vampires!

2008-02-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

It surprised me, the first time I realized that most of the items with plugs in my house have a standby mode that draws power, all the time, 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. This is true for the phone charger, the laptop charger, the microwave, the TV, the VCR, practically everything! And, of course, it’s so inconvenient to unplug them every time, because all the plugs are down near the floor, and hidden behind the sofa or the bookcase.

How does it work?
Most consumer electronics have a standby mode (TV, VCR, power chargers, etc.). Consider the television. The standby mode has an actual purpose---if the TV is genuinely off, it doesn’t ‘listen’ for the signal from the remote control. You have to turn it on with a physical switch. Most TVs ‘remember’ things for you, for example, which cable channels have actual content. If the power goes out, you have to reprogram the TV.

Power chargers, on the other hand (sometimes called wall warts), don’t have this functionality. They just burn up current and make heat all the time for no purpose at all!

In our house, nearly everything with a standby mode has been put on powerstrips. It was especially clever, we think, to install a power strip inside of a cabinet, into which we have plugged all of the chargers---laptop, phone, iPod, battery, etc. Now all that stuff, and all those cords, and all those chargers we were always tripping over are compactly hidden, and get turned off with a switch. It’s a nice combination of environmental friendliness and aesthetics, I think! Most of the time, we remember to turn off the power strip when we grab our portable devices and go. Most of the time...

We don’t watch a lot of TV, and when we do, it’s typically from iTunes (We don’t even have cable! We just couldn’t stand the commercials yelling at us all the time!), or from a season DVD. So it hasn’t been a hardship to put the TV, VCR, Wii, DVD player all on a power strip that only gets turned on for a couple of hours/week. But if you watch a lot of TV, or have TiVO, or similar, you aren’t going to be happy with a power strip attached to the television!

There’s a new item on the market, called the ‘Smart Strip’, which turns off all the attached appliances when the main one is turned off. I’ve ordered one to see if this will be helpful to us, but I’m not entirely certain that it will be. If it doesn’t work out for here at home, I know I can use it at work, so that when I power down my computer, the printer, etc. power down too. Sometimes you just have to try stuff!

The exceptions that make us annoyed? Our stove has a clock that we don’t need, but we don’t want to tear open the panel to turn it off. Our microwave has a clock that we don’t need, but we don’t want to tear open the panel to turn it off. We don’t put a time in, which saves a little bit of power, and sometimes we just forget to hit the power strip when we grab the phone on the way out the door.

What’s the cost?
About $20 for a quality power-strip, up to $30 for a smart strip.

What’s the big picture?
Wikipedia has a nice article on vampire power, where they quote Alan Meier, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He did a study in 1998, which showed that 5% of residential energy consumption went to vampire power. By 2000, this rose to 10%. Some estimates are even higher (as you can imagine, this is hard to figure out precisely!). This may not sound like very much, but when you go ahead and multiply by the number of households in the U.S., you get numbers in the millions of Megawatt-hours. Heavens. Can we have some nicer units please? Oh yes. How about $3 billion? Billions are big, and hard to understand. How about 18 power stations? That’s a nice round number. Think about that for a minute. 18 coal-fired power plants, with all the attendant costs to your wallet, the environment, and your children’s health. All just dumping heat into your house at all hours of the day and night. Drat. It really adds up, whenever you figure the numbers for all of us...

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

2008-02-01T14:08:00.000-08:00

I know! You’ve heard it all before! So have I. Claims are that you can save 75% of your lighting costs by switching over to compact fluorescent bulbs. How can such a simple switch make such a big difference? It’s not hard to put in a different light bulb, after all!

We have switched over to CFLs in the whole house, as our old light bulbs burned out. In some cases, we had to replace light fixtures to do this, but most of our old light fixtures were outdated anyway (and in some cases dangerous---bare wires! yikes!).

How does it work?
Incandescent bulbs (the old-fashioned kind) work by running a current through a filament. This heats the filament, so that it glows. If a small current is used, the filament glows almost entirely in the infrared which you can not see with your eyes, but can feel as heat with your skin. As the current increases, the temperature of the filament increases, and it emits more light at ALL wavelengths (including the infrared). At the same time, the brightest part of the light shifts to higher energies---into the visible part of the spectrum. An incandescent bulb emits most of it’s light as heat, not as visible light! In the wintertime, this heat is not wasted, since your light bulbs will help heat your house, but most of us don’t live in climates where we want to heat our house in the summer. And, of course, heating your house by the direct transformation of electric energy into heat is probably the most expensive way to do it. Anyone who’s had electric baseboard heat will tell you that!

Fluorescent bulbs work by a completely different principle. Instead of using a current to heat a filament, which emits across a broad range of light energies, fluorescent bulbs use a current to excite particular atoms, which emit in narrow bands of light. Combining atoms that emit in red, yellow and blue wavelengths makes a bulb that is nearly white. In the past, fluorescent lights were nearly always too blue, which is much less pleasant than white light. Producing a bulb that makes a ‘true white’, or even ‘incandescent yellow’ light is tricky business, and researchers are working to improve the colors of fluorescent bulbs, even as you read this!

What about the mercury?
You’ve almost certainly heard that fluorescent bulbs need to be disposed of properly, because they contain small amounts of mercury. This is true for many bulbs, but not all. Mercury is one of the elements used to balance the colors in the bulb, and give that ‘true white’ glow that we all favor. As long as the mercury is inside the bulb, there is zero danger to you. And some bulbs do not contain any mercury! You need to make a decision about which matters more to you: the color or figuring out where to return them when you are done!

What about the cost?
Dozens of websites work out the cost difference for fluorescent vs. incandescent bulbs. In a nutshell, the fluorescent bulbs last a lot longer, and save you energy costs, and so, over the lifetime of the bulb, the cost is about the same. Of course it is. It would be silly for companies to charge less, since this is clearly what you are willing to pay for lighting your home!

What’s the big picture?
This from the energy star website, showing a big return for such a small investment, or maybe just showing how many people there are:

“If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.”

Things I’d like to do, maybe

2007-11-22T14:07:00.001-08:00

Some things require a lot of courage... and some just require thinking about... and some require convincing other people that they are a good idea!

Composting toilet. It seems ridiculous to me that we take clean water, put poop in it, send it down the hill, take the poop out, and send it back up the hill as clean water again (or send it on into the Great Salt Lake, depending). It’s stupid.

Cistern: In addition to rain barrels. We live on a slope, so it would make a lot of sense to put a cistern at the top of the hill.

Hot water: tankless? Solar? The old water heater will go before too much longer.

Work less: it takes time away from arranging my life so that I wouldn’t have to work so much, if you see what I mean.

Still to do...

2007-11-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

Heavy drapes for the big windows
Xeriscape back yard
Awnings for kitchen and library windows
Solar panels and/or solar hot water
Solar-powered outdoor shower
Gray water reuse
More rain barrels
Garden

Reluctant changes...

2007-11-22T14:06:00.000-08:00

Some things I just don’t want to do, but think I probably ‘should’

Replace Kleenex with handkerchiefs
Increase number of car-free days

Things I’m not sure about...

2007-11-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

Insulate ducts
Seal ducts
Insulate hot water heater

But we could probably never...

2007-11-22T14:04:00.001-08:00

There are lots of things that we can’t really imagine being self-sufficient in. These are just a few, to remind us how many people it takes to support our lifestyle!

Olive oil
Baking soda
Salt
Pepper
Coffee/tea
Soaps and cleansers
Vinegar
Wine and beer making supplies
Grains
Some spices
Sugar
Baking powder
Olives
Butter
Nuts
Wood
Dog food
Dog chips
Medicines
Probably most hygiene products

With major changes...

2007-11-22T14:04:00.000-08:00

And if we changed our lifestyle all together, so that we lived here all the time, and didn’t work, or, if we made some major investments, we could be self-sufficient in

Eggs
Goat’s milk
Goat’s milk cheese
Honey
Electricity
Water

Self-sufficient with changes

2007-11-22T14:03:00.000-08:00

Our jobs often take us out of town in early summer. That makes starting and maintaining a garden a little tricky. But if we find some people to take care, and rearrange our schedules a little bit, we could almost certainly be self-sufficient in:

Potatoes
Eggplant
Zucchini
Onions
Spring salads
Peppers
Chiles and jalapenos
Fresh corn

Potential Self-sufficiencies

2007-11-22T14:02:00.000-08:00

So that got me thinkin’. What else could we be self-sufficient in, if we planned a little better? We have several fruit trees on the property, for example, but we don’t really take advantage of them...
Just by thinking ahead a little more, we could easily be self-sufficient in:

Rosemary
Basil
Thyme
Tomatoes
Apples
Plums
Parsley
Cherries
Rhubarb
Pears

Self-sufficiencies

2007-11-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

This is going to sound funny, and trivial, but it was quite a revelation this year to realize that without even trying, we’ve become completely self-sufficient in culinary sage. It’s such an infinitesimally small step. But to realize that, potentially, we may never, EVER have to buy this particular item again, was astonishing. We had so much of the stuff, in fact, that I made big sage ropes for some friends as hostess gifts. They won’t need to buy any this year either! So then I started to think about ways in which we are already self-sufficient...

Sage
Grapes
Grapevines (for decorating, construction, etc.)
Socks (not in the wool, but in the labor)
Sweaters
Hats
Mittens
Slippers
Dried flowers, grasses, etc. for decorating
Compost
Afghans for cuddling up in our chilly house

Works in Progress

2007-11-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

We work at eating ‘in season’, although we are still mostly clueless, and this can be mysterious at the grocery store. On the one hand, food that’s in season is often less expensive. On the other hand, sometimes it’s just old and they are trying to get rid of it!

Phasing down things like sugar, that are heavy and travel a long way to get to us. Where we can, we make a local substitution.

Baking homemade bread and other goodies. This comes in waves. We’ll do well for a while, then get overwhelmed for a while.

Phasing down the use of plastics. We think twice now, everytime we pick up a plastic bottle. How DID people wash their hair before shampoo and conditioner came in plastic bottles?! Looking for replacements for cleaning products, etc as well.

Buying grains, etc. in bulk at the health food store. (it’s not on the way to anywhere we usually go, and I haven’t calculated out the costs/benefits.

Using bikes and feet more for around-town travel

The Point...

2007-11-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

We bought our house in Ogden, Utah in 2002, without thinking very hard about it. We knew we wanted to live within walking distance of work. Oh, and living near the trail system would be nice. It was all about the location, and we didn’t think very hard about the house itself. But then we began to be overwhelmed by what’s happening in the larger environment. So, as is natural to physicists, we started taking the problem apart into manageable pieces, starting with our own small environment, and working on one thing at a time. We want to see how low we can go, footprint-wise!

It’s definitely long past the time to begin making changes in the way we do things, but I also think that there needs to be a little forgiveness in the debate. We all live the way we do in the U.S. because it is comfortable, and we know how to do it. Most of us are warm and dry, and well fed. We have lots of fun distractions, and don’t have to think very hard to figure out how to get a sandwich on any given day. These are all really great things, and we don’t want to lose them. The question we are asking is... given a couple of high-powered physicist University professors, with the busy lives that entails, what changes are easy to make? Which ones are hard? Which ones are hard, but worth it, and which ones are we going to have to be driven to at the end of a stick? Which ones are sustainable, which ones are glorious, and which ones make us feel deprived?

It’s an experiment. To see what we can do, one step at a time, one little piece after another. For most of us, this is the way to make lasting change: one step at a time, with a little time for it to sink in and become part of everyday life.

A note about priorities. Because we’ve got a good, organic, local CSA, the priority is on changing our water and energy picture, not the food supply. Once we get the rain barrel system worked out, we will look more closely at the food supply issue. In the end, it makes more sense to grow our own than to truck water back to Utah from California in the form of tomatoes. But here in the middle of the experiment, a huge garden doesn’t make sense yet, even though we’ve got space for it, because we don’t know what we are doing!