Fix a Leak Week, March 16-20

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your wrenches …

The EPA has announced “Fix a Leak Week” in mid-March. It’s the perfect time to save water by fixing those household leaks. You’ll also prevent home damage, avoid cleaning those nasty hard-water stains, and feel good about the environment — and maybe save a few pennies.

The EPA site says:

Did you know that an American home can waste, on average, 11,000 gallons of water every year due to running toilets, dripping faucets, and other household leaks? Nationwide, more than 1 trillion gallons of water leak from U.S. homes each year.

Does it matter?

Yes!

When I wrote about hiring a plumber to fix a leak a couple of years ago, I noted that one leak in my laundry sink dripped out 8 gallons of water a day.

Since that time, I’ve fixed a j-bend pipe under a bathroom sink (would have been easy as pie except that it was a pedestal sink whose pedestal was in the way) and fixed a leaky toilet. Then I replaced my other bathroom sink myself. All in all, I figure I’ve saved $700 in labor — and countless drip, drip, drips.

My “fix a leak” projects

I don’t feel too bad about my current leaks, because they are fixable manually. That is to say, I hear the “drip, drip” and run in and tighten the faucets or wiggle the valve to make it stop. But the projects I’ve been postponing include:

• Replacing a washer in the hot-water faucet in the upstairs shower.
• Replacing a washer in the hot-water faucet in the downstairs shower.
• Replacing the ballcock assembly in the downstairs toilet.

These should be a snap, because I’ve even already bought the parts (now if I can find them …). Famous last words.

Do you have a leak you can fix?

Re-using household items

In the process of trying to reduce our garbage, I’ve come across several items that I needed and wanted to not buy — and conversely, several items I hated to throw away but couldn’t easily recycle. By reusing these items, necessity meets utility.

Quite some time ago, when I started cleaning everything with baking soda instead of scouring powder, I wanted a convenient container – like the one scouring powder comes in. I found an old plastic peanut butter jar in my laundry room, used a nail to punch a bunch of holes in the lid, and voila – my baking soda shaker makes cleaning the bathroom a tiny bit easier.

In the kitchen, we have liquid dishwashing soap for washing dishes, but I prefer to wash my hands with something else. We usually use bar soap that has been sitting on a saucer, but Mr. Cheap complained a lot about the soap’s soggy bottom.

The solution? Inspired by this number on Green as a Thistle’s blog, I saved up chopsticks from a couple of sushi outings (I know, I know, we could take our own, but I didn’t think of it), sawed them in half and tied them together with jute twine. It could be fancier. Then again, we could have soggy-bottom soap.

In my bathroom, I have spent the past several years using up a giant jug of hand soap I bought at Costco (literally several — I bought it before we moved into this house three years ago). In between, I’ve gotten some “soft soap” type liquid soap at the store when it was free with a coupon. Even though I haven’t bought that soap in at least a year, we’ve been using the containers on the sink. Finally, I finished the heinous, stinky bottle of Dove hand soap recently. As I was debating refilling it, I remembered a lotion bottle I had emptied recently that was much more attractive. The label soaked right off, and now I have Dr. Bronner’s organic, fair trade lavender hand soap — in a much nicer container.

Finally, on a recent outing to my sister’s cabin, I was preparing the food to take along and bemoaning our lack of tiny, tiny storage containers — small enough to take along some salt or the cinnamon for French toast. With excellent synchronicity, it came time to change my contact lens container.

I can only tolerate contacts easily by using Clear Care, a bubbling peroxide concoction that requires storage in little hard plastic containers with lens-holder inserts. I hate to throw them out – it’s a lot of hard plastic. But by breaking off the lens-holder portion I can save the bottle for teensy-weensy storage (as a bonus, it’s even a watertight container!). The picture below shows before (left) and after (right).

Now to think of something to do with the broken-off lens portion … it looks like a Barbie-sized version of those crazy devices to hold your bra’s shape in the washing machine. If only our Barbies weren’t braless, brazen hussies.

90% reduction update

Organic Needle reminded me to do an update on our performance during the Riot for Austerity, which I started 10 months ago. This is the 90 percent challenge that I’ve mentioned on this blog — with the goal of cutting consumption by 90 percent from U.S. average consumption.

Here’s the update on what I did and how it turned out:

1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.

Our use: With our family of three, we would be allowed 150 gallons per year or 12.5 gallons per month. HA! We live in a city where it would be very difficult to do things like see our families (who live about 15+ miles away) without using cars. They have complex calculations for using public transportation, and no mention of how to figure things like air travel (which, I’m sure, must simply be disallowed). Our average usage was 53 gallons per month in 2007 and 44 gallons per month so far in 2008 (although in May, we have used just 19 gallons so far). Composite average: 49.78 gallons per month or 40 percent of average.

2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods – you get 4 times as many.

Our use: We pay a supplement to use all wind-powered electricity, so we get 360 kwh per month for our household with the challenge. Since the challenge began, we’ve averaged 486 kwh per month, or 54 percent of average. I don’t know how they account for working at home, which in my case requires that our household use include two computers, a laser printer, fax, etc., as well as someone working in my office all day.

3. Heating and Cooking Energy – this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. [We use natural gas.] US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR, or 8.3 therms per month.

Our use: Since the challenge started, we used 77.3 therms per month or 773 total for 10 months. We are close to average on this. We have a gas hot water heater, a gas furnace, a gas stove, and we live in Colorado. Again, I work at home so I am here all day. I also tend to be cold, so much so that my fingers turn blue even when the thermostat is set to 68 (which means the actual house temperature is 62 to 64 degrees), as it was this winter. I don’t see a lot we can do here, although we turn the furnace way down at night, and I have tried to divert cooking from the gas stove to electric appliances. 93 percent of average.

4. Garbage – the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. For our family of three, we are allowed 1.35 lbs per day.

Our use: We have generated about 455 lbs of garbage in the last 10 months, or around 1.5 lbs per day. This doesn’t include recycling (I’m not sure of the weight, but we’ve filled our big cart 16.5 times during the past 10 months; if a full cart averages 30 lbs, that’s 495 lbs) or things we’ve donated, given away or sold (another 582 lbs). 11 percent of average (or 23 percent of average including recycling). (Note: I saw a comment on that post suggested 2.5 lbs per person per day is average excluding recycling/compost — I have not measured our compost weight. But we’d be at 20 percent of average for garbage using that figure.)

5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY. For our family of three, that’s 30 gallons a day.

Our use: We used 62,000 gallons during the past 10 months. That’s about 206 gallons a day. We use a high-efficiency washing machine, an EnergyStar dishwasher that we run on the lightest cycle every time, I save water in the shower to re-use, and we avoid unnecessary toilet flushing. We water our lawn sparingly, but we do water it; we are converting part of our yard to xeriscape. The catch with this one? We grow a bunch of our own food, and that takes water. Imperfect science. 69 percent of average.

6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn’t perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well. The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc… Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we’re mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, toiletries, paper goods, etc… A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR

Our use: Suffice it to say that I spent $3,500 in the past year in the “household” category of my budget alone, which includes some new furnishings, painting our house, and investments in things like CFL bulbs and water-saving aerators, as well as garden supplies, cleaning products, etc. There’s simply no way. And I must admit, I don’t have a very big interest in not spending money to this extent. But I do work to buy used items a lot, and I am making a conscious effort to try to purchase things made locally or fairly as much as possible (my Target budget is nothing like it was a couple of years ago).

7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here’s the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories. … #1 is food you grow, or which is produced *LOCALLY AND ORGANICALLY* (or mostly – it doesn’t have to be certified, but should be low input, because chemical fertilizers produce nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse contributor). Local means within 100 miles to me. … #2 is is *DRY, BULK* goods, transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. … This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases. # 3 is Wet goods – conventionally grown meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc… transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc… And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of everyone’s diet.

I didn’t even go there. All this tracking takes up tons of time. Maybe some day …

How did I do?

Not that great. But it’s really hard. One thing I’ve taken from this type of challenge is that these changes take an enormous time investment. To do them to perfection, one would have to return to off the grid, do it yourself. Like the pioneers. Only the pioneers were not holding down a full-time job, going to graduate school and transporting children to school and activities. We are, and I know from my two months of processing fruits and vegetables in most of my spare time last fall, there’s only so much we can fit into a day.

Some argue that we should give up, for instance, soccer if soccer uses so many resources (gas to drive, uniform, ball, snack, game fees). But I have a hard time with depriving my kid or myself of normal life experiences when we are working hard in many ways to reduce our footprint. Likewise, our household suffers from high aesthetic standards. So I’m willing to make it myself, buy used, etc., but I don’t want to be completely out of style or not maintain a certain level of comfort and attractiveness in my home, where I spend nearly all my time.

And some categories — like using more organics or growing our own food — reflect badly on other categories — like spending money or using water.

What can I do?

We do have a few more goals in mind to help with our consumption:

• Gas: I want to look into carpooling my daughter to school next year. It is only 2.5 miles away, but the drive adds up. Carpooling might cut it in half. Mr. Cheap plans to take public transportation to his job, too.
• Water: We want to install rain barrels — which, as I understand it, are on their way to legality in Denver.
• Food: Last year, I was not that impressed with our local farmers markets, but I did work hard to buy locally produced food or organic food at our grocery store. I will try the farmers markets again this year, or maybe join a CSA (I think I just found another local option that still has openings!). And we want to add more to our home food production, hopefully including chickens when we have a chance to get it together.

What do you think about these challenges? Are you determined to reduce in any particular area? Or do the challenges discourage you by showing just how hard it is?

Move your water around

Spring is coming, which means most of us will have more uses for extraneous water. Here are some ideas of how to make the most of your water:

• Save the pasta water. Many Italian recipes have you blanch veggies in boiling water, then cook the pasta in the same water. Then, this same water can go to moisturize your compost pile or water a garden — within reason. If you’re a pastaholic, you might produce enough starch to choke your plants, so take it easy.
• Put a bucket in the shower. Catch the flow while you’re waiting for the water to heat up. Use it to flush the toilet (dump it in the tank or right into the bowl). If it’s clean, use it the same day to get a head start on your kid’s or pet’s bath (don’t let soapy or grey water sit for re-use — it’s too germy). Wash the bucket once in a while, too.
• Keep a clean pan in your sink. Catch water while you’re waiting for it to get hot there, too. Save energy with your dishwasher by running sink water until it’s hot (so your dishwasher gets things cleaner, and you don’t have to rinse dishes). But catch the water in your pan and re-use it for something else — like cooking pasta (“for every [water] there is a season, turn, turn, turn …”).
• Get a rain barrel, if it’s legal or you’re a scofflaw.
• Hand wash dishes over a pot or bowl. Put just a little soapy water in the bowl. Rinse things above the bowl. The bowl will get fuller as you go — no need to start full and let it overflow.
• If you like to soak dirty dishes, start the day’s soak with just a little water. Before you know it, you will have rinsed a few things, and the soaking pot will fill up.
• Turn the tap on just a little — not full blast.

What else do you do?

Weekly Wrap-Up: Water waste to Gen-Y Fi(nance)

First, for those of you outraged at us Coloradans’ not being allowed to harvest our roof water, the Colorado Senate is working on it:

The Senate Agriculture, Natural Resources & Energy Committee approved a plan to allow homeowners to collect water that drains off of roofs up to 3,000 square feet so ranchers and farmers could use it to water livestock and metro residents could use it to water their lawns and gardens.

The measure (Senate Bill 119) passed unanimously and goes to the Senate for debate.

 

 

There’s a new social networking site called Greenopolis (http://greenopolis.com/beta/). I joined and took the survey for my “green badge” — although I’m not sure how they score it. (One question was “Cutting one minute off your shower for a month will save how much water?” Well, the right answer is “it depends,” isn’t it? Hard to choose among their categories’ set amounts. For me, the answer would be about 37.5 gallons, because I use a low-flow showerhead and don’t shower every day. That put me in the lowest category. Do I get extra points for knowing the answer?) It will be interesting to see how the site evolves.

 

Local dairies are growing (on the coasts, at least), according to this New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/dining/20dairy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=dining

 

Here’s a nice personal finance blog that will probably be especially appealing to the younger adults among us — but we can all learn something, I’m sure: http://shauna26.wordpress.com/

Fix your leaky toilet!

If any of you lie down each night for a restful sleep and doze off to the guilt-inducing sound of a leaking toilet, take my word for it: FIX IT! And fix it now.

Instructions always say you can tell a toilet is leaking by putting food coloring in the tank, waiting 15 minutes and seeing if any of the color has infiltrated the bowl.

At my house, I could tell the toilet was leaking by the dripping or almost running sound in the toilet, which went louder or softer depending on the hour. From our leaky laundry sink episode, I remembered that that faucet’s slow-but-steady drip was wasting around 8 gallons per day. Heaven only knows what the toilet’s been doing.
I peeked inside the tank and saw the water level was too high. The easy fix for that is to bend down the arm supporting the float ball, so the tank knows it’s done filling. When I tried that, the water started running nonstop in the toilet. Quickly, I re-bent the arm up until the running stopped, and then I high-tailed it to Home Depot (well, when I was in the area, so as not to waste gas, too).

The fix-your-toilet aisle had a mind-numbing array of options, and I realized I didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the toilet. From the float ball situation, I guessed it might have to do with that area, and from the running, I guessed the flapper might not be working well.  I thought about buying entirely new contents for the tank for $20, but I decided to gamble on the “fixes the two most common causes of leaky toilets” kit for $10.

So, Saturday evening (I do know how to have fun, don’t I?) I drained the tank and replaced its intestines.

Did I mention “Do it NOW!”? The entire project took me less than half an hour, and that included getting up and leaving the room twice in search of two supplies (scissors and a sponge) that I didn’t get in the first place, even though the instructions said that they, a bucket and a wrench would be all I’d need.  The instructions were very thorough. It was easy, even with zero toilet-fixing experience. Oh wait, I did adjust the flush chain on our old home’s toilet once, so make that extremely minimal toilet-fixing experience.

Now we have a fancy-schmancy ballcock flusher, a somewhat more powerful flush, and the beautiful sound of silence. Perhaps that’s why I slept like a log last night ….

Weekly Wrap-Up: An Onion-y farm bill, groceries, toilet water and government checks

• Grocery costs have had the highest year-over-year increase since 1990 – here’s an article that looks a little bit at why. I know I’ve noticed this trend (especially on cheese, which used to go on sale for $2.50 to $3 per pound, and now seldom drops below $3.50) — have you?
• What will you do with your economic stimulus check from the government?
• And in what seems to be a weekly toilet trend on this blog, Slate this week published “It’s time to drink toilet water,” a sobering look at water usage.
• Finally, we need some humor around here! I am generally quiet about my burgeoning fiber and spinning addiction (an addiction, it must be said, that inexplicably causes grown people to drool, sometimes literally, when touching wool), but this article is a perfect connection – at last, the government is looking into REAL sustainability (and soft, soft wool). 

 

Weekly Wrap-Up: Green film, green poo, Greenpa

Think Green, Live Green challenge: I’m no filmmaker, but if you’re handy with the videocam, here’s a chance to put your green life in action: http://verdavivo.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/think-green-live-green-challenge-2/

 

And you thought not using toilet paper was radical! Ha ha ha ha ha … Check out Greenpa’s “poopsicle” post for a really green bathroom routine: http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2008/01/sigh-mel-brooks-found-out-too.html

Add it up: What living green saved us in 2007

Putting effort into conserving makes a BIG difference. Here’s how things added up for our family of three from our biggest ways of living green in 2007:

1. Hung laundry out to dry, spring through fall (October/November). In seven months, about 140 loads of laundry (conservatively) saved $69 and 630,000 watts of electricity.
2. Composted all vegetable waste. Two to three half-gallon(ish) bins move out of our kitchen every week, turning about 130 pounds of stink-producing waste into fertilizer.
3. Brought my own shopping bags to all the stores where I shopped. At a per-month average savings of 43.6 plastic bags, I refused approximately 523 bags in one year.
4. Switched just about all our light bulbs to CFLs — 23 light bulbs. If we save an average of 46 watts per hour (replacing a 60-watt bulb with a 14-watt bulb), and use the average bulb just 1 hour per day, we’ll save 386,170 watts and $41 in a year.
5. Lowered the thermostat at night (to 55 degrees, then a compromise at 58 degrees). Our gas company claims lowering the thermostat by one degree saves 1% on your bill, which would come to 2% off our bill (our new “low” is 2 degrees lower than previously), or $2.40 a month. I don’t know if that’s correct, but our last 2007 gas bill was 8% lower than our last 2006 gas bill.
6. Donated 26 bags of goods (375 pounds) to charity for re-use, Freecycled 184 pounds and sold 150 pounds (last half of 2007 only) — 709 pounds of items that might go into the landfill from some homes.
7. Recycled our paper, plastic, glass and cardboard in city bins — a total of about 21 large carts full, or at least 315 pounds (15 pounds per full cart).
8. Switched to natural cleaning products – especially baking soda.
9. Saved water by flushing less and catching “warm-up” water to re-use for watering plants, cooking pasta, the dog’s bowl, etc.
10. Recycled plastic bags we do receive.
11. Recycled shipping materials (packing peanuts, etc.) by taking them to our local shipping store for re-use (two huge garbage bags full).

You don’t have to get all obsessive with a spreadsheet like I do. But this week, take a look at your own house and think about how the little things add up.

Water chart & water-saving wish list

OK! Are You Going to Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You? not only likes to conserve water, too, she also is more talented than I and converted my water use chart into a jpeg for me.

Voila, the illustration of our water use the last few years! (We are billed bimonthly, thus six bills per year.)

Note that the spike corresponds with Denver Water’s suggested outdoor watering schedule, posted in 2006.

And my husband pointed out that rain barrels (as well as using grey water … but not unused water) are illegal in Denver.

In the kitchen this morning, I wished for another invention — a “tiny tap” that would open a tap just a smidge, if you need a few drops of water or if you need to rinse some little tiny thing, when you don’t need the faucet at full force.

What water-savers would you invent, given your druthers?