Last Week's Frugal Accomplishments

Last week was an interesting week for us.  It was brutally cold (minus 3 one morning), and there was no school for the week due to snow and the extreme cold temperatures.  But it did mean that Benny could get out to go to work, and he was able to pick up some extra hours at work.  And, since I stayed home all week, we were able to save on gas since I wasn't driving to work each day.

Here are some other ways we saved:

• Ran gas logs for extra heat to keep from running the HVAC (gas is cheaper than electric here)
• Ate entirely from the pantry and freezer including vegetarian chili, loaded baked potatoes, homemade french bread, homemade pesto pizza with veggies, corn bread, winter squash pancakes from frozen winter squash puree, beans and rice, baked oatmeal, lemon poppy seed muffins, and leftover winter white pesto lasagna (no meals out)  
• Read library books and listened to one free Audible book, Inkheart
• Prepared grocery list using Southern Savers and coupons
• Washed clothing in cold water
• Showered every other day to save hot water and keep my skin from drying out
• Used family cloth and cloth diapers
• Worked more on "pre"-potty training with little man
• Taught little man a few more signs (berry, cat, and potty) (this at least saves our sanity because it means he can tell us more of what he wants)
• Left oven door open after use to heat up the house (when little man was elsewhere occupied, of course)
• Recaulked two living room windows for better insulation
• Closed curtains to insulate windows better
• Cleaned exhaust fan filters in kitchen hood and bathroom to improve efficiency
• Changed out all incandescent bulbs to CFLs (we are working on saving for LEDs to save us more money)
• Benny redemed a coupon for a free sandwich at Chick-Fil-A before it expired and brought it home
• Used Christmas gift of windshield screen during really snowy/icy days so we didn't have to run the car as long to warm up and defrost the windshield (and minimize scraping)
• Composted anything we could (toilet paper tubes, food scraps, paper towels, tea bags, etc.)
• Researched online and found recipes for citrus vinegar cleaner, homemade body butter, and homemade liquid dish washing soap
• Hung all clothes and diapers to dry after washing
• Finalized our lease for the apt and got it signed
• Installed a draft dodger in the basement and at our door to the basement stairs

How did you live and save green last week?  I'd love to hear from you!

Green Energy on a Shoestring Budget

So, snow day number seven (in a row) begins... Before getting the real post for the morning, I had to share this with you all. One of my former students produced it and it's highlighted on booneweather.com today. It absolutely fits how we're all feeling right now! If "Groundhog Day" Was Set in Boone Now, on to this morning's post...

As I said before, we have the vision of having solar panels on our roof one day, but that simply doesn't fit into our budget right now. We did try to plan the home with that end goal in mind, choosing electric kitchen appliances and electric tankless hot water heaters. Of course, the southern orientation of the house will mean that we'll get the most out of our solar panels when we finally get them.

In order to save energy now, we had higher R-value insulation put into the walls and attic space, so that the home would heat and cool more efficiently. (And also insulated the slab in the basement--see below for more details.) We chose double paned windows (which have pretty much become standard) that will help retain the internal temperature of the house. Our heating system is zoned and sized for the basement as well, so we can control each level independently. Some of the most common sense things we did were to install ceiling fans in almost every room (again, thanks to my uncle, a family friend, and Benny). When we have the windows open in the spring and summer with the fans on, we don't need AC. (In fact, I think we ran it about a week last year. Yes, we're blessed to live in the mountains with wonderful breezes most days.) And, as I mentioned in the laundry post, we don't use the dryer that much.

We did a few more things to increase the energy efficiency of the home:

1) We installed insulation behind every outlet and light switch. (These are readily available at most home improvement stores.) All you do is screw the cover off, put the foam sheet in place, and screw the cover back on. It's amazing how much cold air you can feel flowing through those spaces once you remove the cover!

2) We stuffed insulation (or spray foam insulation) into every other possible leak, especially behind the dryer and around the holes where the cable and HVAC system come into the home.

3) We installed CFLs in every possible fixture in our house. (We did leave out the chandelier because you can't dim CFLs, but we most often eat by candlelight or have an oil lamp, so we don't use that light that much.) And, of course, we only use the lights when it's dark so that we can make as much use of the natural light as possible. (This means that in the spring and summer, when it's light outside when I'm getting ready, I don't turn the light on in the bathroom until I put on makeup. We have a sheer shower curtain, so it diffuses the natural light nicely into the shower.)

4) The thermostat stays at 62 in the winter for us. I know this sounds extreme to some people, but we've really gotten used to it. With our insulation being higher than most homes, the heat stays in well and the cold stays out. I've learned in the evenings to put on a sweater or sweatshirt, and we sleep better with the cooler air. If you can't make an adjustment like this all at once, try it one degree at a time. (It's more energy efficient to run your heat that way anyway, than bumping it up and down several degrees at once.)

5) We kept all of the trees on the property that we logically could. This means that in the winter, the evergreens on the north side act as a windbreak and keep the house a little more protected. In the summer, the deciduous trees (those that lose their leaves in the fall) help to nicely shade the house. It does still get a little warm on the southern side of the house in the summer, but we installed curtains to help control that.

6) We insulated BEFORE they poured the cement slab in the basement. After we laid the vapor barrier (which is easy and will save you on labor costs if you're looking at building), we laid down blue board (the hard, Styrofoam type insulation). Although this was not the most earth friendly product, it did mean that we'd get a lifetime of savings out of the insulation factor. It also means that we have to worry less about condensation in the basement because the insulation acts as a thermal break between the interior temperature and the temperature of the ground underneath the house.

7) Our current project is to install new weather stripping around the exterior doors. Since the doors have settled a bit and shifted when they were moved with the house, the weather stripping that was originally installed now has gaps. This is an easy project, just do your research first so you know what type of weather stripping would work best for your application. I've also made a draft dodger from some dried beans, dryer lint, and scrap cotton fabric for the basement entry. Since I used these materials, it means that if (or when) the beans start to get a little funky, I can compost the entire thing.

8) We bought the most energy efficient appliances our budget could afford for the kitchen. This meant a fridge with the freezer on the bottom (warm air rises, remember, so this model makes tons of sense), a range with double ovens (the top one is smaller than the other, so it heats quickly and uses less energy... the bottom one uses convection, which runs about 25 degrees cooler and makes fantastic cookies), and the most energy efficient dishwasher we could buy (you don't have to rinse and it recirculates the water, sensing the cleanliness of the water with an electronic beam... oh, and we have a Lavender prewash cycle!). (Yes, that's a horrible run-on sentence for an English teacher.) We did take the hand-me-down washer and dryer from Benny's sister, which are not terribly energy efficient, but we know that when we have to replace them, we'll purchase the most energy efficient models our budget can afford.

9) I started landscaping last year, which included bushes as foundation plantings. Although foundation plantings provide a nice visual, their primary purpose here was to provide an additional wind block and temperature break between the yard and the house. Once the bushes grow up well, they will shelter the house from the winter winds and snow, meaning that heating the basement (one day, when we finish it) will take less energy.

10) We installed curtains in every window we could to act as another thermal break. We have a few odd shaped windows upstairs that will need something custom, so we're still working out the details there. When we do have something on those windows, it will probably be something that I make because that is generally cheaper than store bought materials.

Now, I know many of you may be thinking... with all those electric appliances, hot water heaters, two floors, tons of windows, you can't possibly have an economical electric bill! Not so fast... in the spring and fall, when we don't run the AC or fans, our bill is around $30 a month. In the winter, it might get up to $90, maybe $100 if it's really cold outside. So, when you average that out, that means we spend about $40-50 a month on electricity.

Certainly, we could make that greener by opting into the program offered through Blue Ridge Electric, where we can purchase green power from TVA for an additional cost. Right now, that's not in the budget for us, but maybe in a few years we'll have our own solar panels!

So, I hope you've found something useful here that will help you make your home a little more energy efficient. Also, if you haven't seen the documentary Kilowatt Ours, you should. It's amazing in what it reveals about the American energy industry and what individuals can do to make a difference. It's probably available at your local library, and if it's not, they usually welcome requests from patrons about new material to add to the collection.

Reflections on a Home

After numerous snow days, I've had quite a bit of time to think and reflect on our life as a family and decisions we've made, and continue to make. One of the things I am most grateful for is our home, which we tried to design with our planet and wallet in mind. While there are many things that we wanted to incorporate into our home, our initial building budget just couldn't handle them all. Here's a run-down of what we did thus far, and where we'd like to go in the next few years.

First, we knew that we could only build within a certain footprint because of the building site, so we only looked at plans that fit these requirements. Since we wanted to make the most of our space and our money, we decided to go with a modular home and basement system. This meant that our home was built in a factory, largely, and not subjected to the elements, it meant that we didn't have to worry about moisture issues in the framing. It also meant that the house went up quicker, meaning fewer days we had to pay crews to work on the site and fewer months of interest on the construction loan. We chose a two story Cape Cod style house on a basement foundation to make the most of the vertical space, meaning that we had to remove less topsoil than if we had chosen a ranch or other sprawing design. Our floorplan has the master bedroom on the main level, so this means that until we have kids, we don't have to heat or cool the upstairs, saving us money on energy bills and saving the planet by using less energy from coal fired plants.

In choosing a modular home, we had maximum flexibility with where we wanted windows, the fireplace, decks, and other features. We chose to have the house face south to take full advantage of the passive solar lighting and heating. In the years to come, we plan to add solar panels to the roof, which will be ideal with our southern facing roof. We added windows on the east and west sides of the house to allow for as much daylighting as possible, meaning that we had to run our CFL lighting as little as possible. We also tried to make the windows on the north side of the house as small as possible, so that this colder side of the house would lose less heat during the winter. Earlier this winter, we added curtain panels that are lined to allow the daylight in, but we can easily close them at night to keep the heat in. During the summer, these will allow us to block the glaring sun during the afternoon, keeping the house naturally cooler.

For flooring, we chose an eco-friendly bamboo for the main level, even though the modular kit came with carpeting. We had the carpeting installed upstairs for now, although one day, we would like to add bamboo upstairs as well. The bamboo flooring is eco-friendly because it is a grass, growing rapidly and sometimes invasively. (When purchasing bamboo, it is key to make sure you purchase from a reputable agency. Unfortunately, because of the rising popularity of bamboo, sometimes entire forests are cut down and replaced with bamboo--hardly an eco-friendly move.) Our bamboo flooring is the natural finish with the vertical grain, looking more like a standard hardwood floor. In order to save money here, we purchased our flooring from a friend through his hardware store, meaning that we got his wholesale price for almost 1000 square feet of flooring. Then, my husband and father-in-law installed the flooring over the Thanksgiving holidays, saving us several thousand dollars in installation fees.

Because of our budget, we did choose standard insulation and sheetrock, although we may do things differently when we decide to finish out the basement. To save a little more, my handy husband and father-in-law, as well as several friends, helped to hang most of the drywall upstairs (that part of the home was not finished in the factory).

We got a deal on paint, since Benny (my husband) works for a local Benjamin Moore retailer. In keeping with our earth conscious mindset, we opted for the Aura paint, a low VOC (volatile organic compounds) paint in an eggshell finish. Even if you don't get the family discount, I would highly recommend going with a low VOC paint, as it means that the overall air quality in your home will be better because those nasty compounds won't be in the air you and your family are breathing. If you're painting new sheetrock, Aura is a great product because it is self-priming on new drywall, meaning that we only had to paint the rooms once, not two or three times. (I think we did have to paint the burnt orange in the office twice, due to the deep color.)

My uncle worked for a building supply company at the time and had several materials he could give us, as they were slightly damaged and could not be sold through the company. This meant that we acquired 7-inch baseboard for the upstairs rooms, as well as his help in applying the beautiful wood edging on our laminate countertops. He also took some of the scrap wood from the lumber yard and built some wonderful benches for us to use on the deck. The design is very simple, yet functional. It's great to know that we kept these materials from ending up in a landfill somewhere.

As far as plumbing and fixtures goes, there wasn't a lot that we could negotiate with the factory, other than style for the main level. However, upstairs we were able to install a low-flow toilet, which uses less than half the water required by conventional models. To retrofit our downstairs toilets, we've added plastic containers filled with water to displace the water in the tank, meaning that we use less water per flush. We've also made sure that each sink in the house has an aerator, meaning that it uses less water, and we've installed low-flow shower heads.

I'll post more later, along with some pictures. I hope you find some useful tid-bits here and come back for future postings.