November 20, 2008 at 10:13 am (Changing habits, Energy, green living)
Tags: fireplace
We’ve been using the fireplace a lot so far this fall. I’d guess we’ve used it as our primary heat source every weekend day we’ve been home, and 50-75% of the weeknights we’re home for more than 2-3 hours. We let the furnace come on during the night and first thing in the morning.
So how’s it going? First of all, we are keeping the thermostat about 4 degrees cooler than we’ve ever done before and it doesn’t feel any colder in the house. I attribute this change to the insert’s design: it seals the chimney flue completely, whether there’s a fire going or not. We’re simply not losing as much heat up the chimney. So now we keep our “at home and awake” temp at 63 or 64 degrees and we feel as warm as last year’s 66-67 degree setting. Overnight temp is 57 degrees instead of 61; morning temp is 59 degrees instead of 62-63 (and we might actually take that down a notch).
It’s taking some adjustment to the way wood heats: unevenly. (Read on…) Read the rest of this entry »
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November 14, 2008 at 4:01 pm (Cooking, Energy, green living)
Tags: energy savings
I took the Sierra Club’s quiz on “green cooking” the other day and was rather confused by the results regarding the efficiency of gas vs. electric stoves vs. microwaves for heating water. I actually think they had mis-keyed the quiz the first time I saw it; either that or it somehow magically makes more sense today.
So the question: Which is the most energy-efficient way to cook food? The answer is rather long, and the whole thing may be derailed by remembering that cooking accounts for only about 4% of the average fuel usage in a home. It might not be worth the effort to quibble about the small differences in efficiency – especially if your windows are drafty, your attic uninsulated, and your fireplace sucking heat right out of your living room.
But for those who want the long answer, read on… Read the rest of this entry »
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November 8, 2008 at 8:09 pm (Energy, Food preservation, Musings)
Tags: freezer, pork
*sigh* I wrangled long and hard over my decision not to purchase a freezer earlier this year. My main reasons were that I wanted to save energy and to force myself to preserve food in other ways, like root cellaring.
Then the folks I slaughtered chickens with asked if I’d like to split a hog with them – pasture-raised and apple-fed by a neighbor and due to be processed within the week. The price seemed astoundingly cheap: about $2/lb, I calculated, after processing and smoking. For pasture-raised happy pig. Shoot – we pay $5/lb for the cheap happy sausage and $8/lb for bacon. I scrambled to figure out approximately how much meat is in a pig, and how much of what cuts.
And I realized suddenly, you can’t root cellar a pig. Oh, you can smoke and cure some of it – but what we really love is sausage, and I just don’t have the skills or desire to dry-cure and eat half a pig’s worth of pepperoni. So all my calculations before were really just taking veggies into account and not the fact that I could never get half a hog, a lamb, or a deer without a standalone freezer. Suddenly, it seemed perfectly logical to buy. Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
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October 8, 2008 at 2:34 pm (Cooking, Energy, Food preservation)
Tags: dehydrator, dried fruit
So I read about Alton Brown’s box fan food dehydrator and decided to try it with some apples I’d gleaned from local parking lots. I actually like it better than my food dehydrator!
I peeled, cored, and sliced the apples with one of these, then spread them out on furnace filters. I actually put the box fan on its back, blowing upward, on top of a wooden crate so plenty of air could get underneath. Stacked the filters on top of the fan, turned the fan on medium, and 12 hours later – perfect dried apple slices!
They tasted much more like the apple slices I get from the co-op than ones I’ve dried with heat. Anything I’ve dried in the typical hot-blowing-air kind of dehydrator came out with some too raw and some crispy. They always had a weird taste that might have been related to the heat, or might have been from previous exposure to Grandad’s Secret Jerky Marinade.
I’m still experimenting with how dry they need to be…are these going to get moldy? They feel like the ones from the store, so I’m hoping they’ll be good. It’s sure easier than the other one, quieter, uses less electricity, and with better results, so I’m sold!
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October 3, 2008 at 6:47 pm (Changing habits, Energy, carbon budget)
Wow, we are just not doing that well on this. I never would have guessed that we’d drive an average of 3000 miles every month! And most of that is not stuff we’re willing to give up…too many friends live out-of-state. However, my husband’s taken his last regularly scheduled quarterly trip out of state (or is there one more?), so that will save about 1300 miles every 3 months.
Prius miles this month: 3275 (+1550)
Truck miles: 145 (+5)
Gas this month: 74 gallons (+32)
Air miles this month: 0 (0)
Elec (household): 283kwh (+85)
Elec (hot water):163kwh (+170)
Propane this month: 143 (+143)
Wood this month: 0 (+0)
Total carbon to date: 8336lb
Goal for June ‘08-May ‘09: 18500lb
So…1/3 of the year is gone, but we’ve used almost 1/2 of our carbon budget…and we haven’t used the heater at all yet. |
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Note: Wood and propane are listed as quantities bought, not quantities used. I don’t have a good way of knowing how many gallons of propane we’ve used, so I’m just listing it as a lump sum. All I can think of for the electricity spike this month is canning.
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October 1, 2008 at 9:28 am (Energy, Musings, green living)
See http://onestraw.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/community-supported-enegy/
In short:
- Use wood chip gasifier to make electricity and heat.
- Use heat and electricity to make biodiesel. (Pay farmer to grow 80 acres of canola for this.)
- Use canola mash to make ethanol.
- Use remaining mash to feed tilapia in a greenhouse.
- Use greenhouse to grow food, and cattails to clean the water. (Eat and/or gasify the cattails.)
- Sell CSA shares of energy + tilapia.
Rob has a gasifier and a biodiesel setup, a friend with a commercial oil press, and access to farmers with land.
Huh…
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September 19, 2008 at 1:49 am (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, green living)
Tags: solar cooking, solar oven
I ordered a Sport Solar Oven in June. They’ve been swamped with orders lately, so I just received it a week ago (first week of September). The shadows are across the entire front of the house when I get home this time of year, but I had a day where I got home at 4:30 and could toss some potatoes into it to give it a trial run.
They came out great. I used garden-fresh Russian Banana fingerling potatoes sliced about 1/4″ thick, tossed with a little olive oil, salt, and fresh rosemary. Put them in an 8″x8″ pan, covered with another one, and threw it in the oven with the reflectors on. Two hours later, they were done. I probably could have even taken them out sooner, but I was cooking the rest of the meal indoors.
I’m really impressed with this kit. It includes everything: the oven, reflectors, 2 pots (sadly, they don’t fit when the oven is on the side for catching low-angle sun rays), a water purification indicator…even an oven thermometer. My oven was about 275 degrees during this trial run – very respectable. I couldn’t get my homemade box oven to break 150.
I want to use it more, but it will take planning ahead. There are only certain things I’m willing to leave in it all day – vegetables, mostly – and I just realized that my best sun is in the front of the house in view of the road. I don’t think people would steal it, but I’m not quite willing to take the risk. We have a pretty high-traffic street.
Peak Oil Hausfrau has a nice running list of things she’s cooked in her solar oven (different model from mine – hers gets a bit hotter). It’s very inspirational, and great to see some real-life uses of this low-impact tool. I don’t know if I can bake in mine, but it’s got me thinking how many of the things I cook that could be done in the oven if I plan it right.
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August 6, 2008 at 7:57 pm (Changing habits, Energy)
Tags: carbon diet
July had a few surprises. First, we drove more than we did in June (a total of about 3600 miles) and we used way more electricity (526 kwh up from 283). A lot of this was unavoidable – or at least, not things we were willing to avoid. Over 1500 miles on the Prius and 100+ miles on the Explorer were due to a quarterly trip my husband takes. He carpooled most of that distance, though, so two other people didn’t rack up any miles for that trip. And, since he was gone, I had to drive the Explorer – though I worked from home 2 days, which saved about 4 gallons of gas.
The electricity was from two things: a/c (it got humid enough to warrant it several nights) and canning. And our hot water usage was back up to 157 kwh. Not sure why that is…I’ve been sticking to the shorter showers.
On the other hand, we didn’t fly at all this month, so that helped our overall carbon balance a lot.
Read the rest of this entry »
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July 26, 2008 at 6:57 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, Food origins, Food preservation)
Man, it’s nuts how good I feel when I Get Stuff Done. Highlights from the last couple days:
- Strawberry and blueberry preserves (I wanted to crawl face first into the pint of strawberry)
- Chopped holes in clay and planted 5 tomatillos, 4 tomatoes, and 1 pepper plant that I got for free Friday at an end-of-season sale
- Good yard sale find: down/feather “mattress” or super-thick comforter
- Cut and burned all the Canada thistle that was going to seed in the back (witness the ten thousand minute puncture wounds on my forearms)
- Good-bye and good riddance to the hot tub, my most expensive mistake to date
- Great conversations toward some very interesting consulting work
- Started playing with the Kill-A-Watt and discovered that toasting my breakfast uses more power than leaving the fan running 18 hours straight
- Made sag daal for dinner…oh so tasty! And just for fun, figured out that it costs about 50 cents a serving, including rice. I think I paid $7 last time I had it at a restaurant.
In other news, he doesn’t know it yet, as he’s been out all afternoon, but my sweetie’s first batch of homemade yogurt came out really well. I bent the no-sugar rule to sample one spoonful topped with the cherry preserves I made last week. His assessment of “almost obscenely good” is pretty spot-on.
I did the math, and a quart of homemade yogurt comes to about $2.25 plus the price of homemade preserves. Enough to flavor a quart runs from 35 cents (blueberry) to 85 cents (organic strawberry). A quart of his old favorite yogurt – available only in 6-oz cups – would be $5.50; the price of my favorite just jumped to $6/quart. With the quantities of yogurt we eat in this house, we’ll easily save $20-25/month.
The homemade yogurt and preserves aren’t organic, but they are local (including the sugar) and made with essentially no waste. The milk even comes in glass bottles. The real impetus for doing this was to quit throwing out all those little plastic cups. In addition, his fave is trucked in from California and mine from Pennsylvania. By switching to homegrown, we’ve cut about 3000 food miles per quart.
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July 15, 2008 at 7:26 pm (Changing habits, Energy)
Back in January, I set out a list of things I planned to do this year. Six months in, I’m well on my way:
| Bake a good loaf of bread (or biscuits?) from local flour, preferably sourdough. |
Yes! It wasn’t sourdough; I decided sourdough is more of a “pet” than I’m willing to take care of just now. I’ve now done a crusty bread and a sandwich bread that are both worth repeating. And a pumpkin bread, but that’s just for a treat. |
| Build pergola to shade the front windows, tidy landscaping underneath, and grow edible plants up the side. |
Yes! This was finished last weekend. |
| Learn what I’d have to grow to feed ourselves for a year. |
Yes. The short version is I can grow 1.8 million calories of diverse foods (enough for 2 people for a year) on 1/4 acre (a little under 12,000 sf). My garden last year was 150 sf. This year it’s 250 sf and next year it’ll be between 1450 and 2400 sf, so still a ways to go. I have horrendously complex spreadsheets, if anyone is interested. |
| Find out how deep our well is; investigate hand pumps. |
Urgh. Yes. Turns out we need a new well soon. It’ll probably be 80-100 feet deep, and the county probably won’t allow us to have a hand pump, for fear of contaminating the water table. |
| First pass at rehabilitating soil in the back yard: manure, radishes, and field peas. |
The “rehab” area looks like a jungle of reed canary grass. *sigh* I did till up a new patch, though, and am starting to build the soil there. |
| Kill an animal for food, clean and butcher it. |
Not yet, but still plan to. |
| Grow, process, and eat homegrown quinoa. |
No, and it won’t happen this year; I can’t seem to get quinoa to grow. |
| Donate 500 lbs of produce (home grown or gleaned) to Food Gatherers and still have all the garden veg we want. |
Haven’t donated any yet. It’ll be mostly potatoes and squash, which haven’t come in yet. I will have to bring my goal down a bit since half of this was supposed to be gleaned apples, which won’t work due to bug infestation. Though perhaps I’ll pick some at an orchard and donate them, anyway. |
| Can tomatoes (and maybe peaches); freeze corn, broccoli, and green beans. |
Not yet – waiting for the harvest! |
I’m also adding all my Carbon Reduction goals to this list and have learned that I can, in fact, ride my bike to the nearest store (11 miles round trip) without dying or injuring myself.
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