Fossil Fuels Suck!

My brother-in-law in Kansas was without power for three days, and apparently, there are still people in Oklahoma and Kansas who don't have power. And unless you have a generator, without power, you don't have heat. Which makes it pretty cold, even inside the house, right? Since we've moved out in the middle of nowhere and now heat our house with propane, we've become much more aware of our energy consumption. Our tank is now depleted down to 20% - and it's not even January yet! Which means we're going to have to buy more propane soon. Again. In bulk. Which means another $500 we're going to have to pull out of thin air. (I wish!)

So Michael got the idea... why don't we just turn off the propane? Let's see how cold it really gets? I mean, nevermind the blizzard we just had and all. Really. Because our bedroom and the upstairs are SUPER warm when the heat's on. Sometimes we'll even crack a window at night. We have steam heat, and man, does it rise! Maybe we don't even need heat, we reasoned... I mean, the people in Oklahoma have gone ten days now... how cold can it get?

Let me tell you. Really fricking cold. Finger-numbing cold. I can barely feel mine as I'm typing, actually. Standard framed houses were built for fossil fuel heating on the grid, period. Cold seems to seep in from everywhere. So, no luck on the "Let's do winter without any heat" idea.

The thing is, when Michael turned it off, the pilot went out. And since we haven't had this kind of setup before, he's not sure how to get it back on. So he's going to call today and find out. In the meantime, I'm freezing. Two sweaters, two pairs of socks, a down comforter, and my nose and toes and fingers are still frigid.

So I decided to start a fire. I've started fires before. How hard can it be?

You see where this is going, don't ya?

No, I didn't blow up the house. Thank god. But my fire sucked. It sucked so bad I called Michael at work, my teeth chattering, to complain about my fire-building skills. He said, "Let me call you back in ten minutes."

Instead, he came home. Nice, that he works only six miles away still. He came home and built me a big, warm, toasty fire that is still burning two hours later. All I have to do is keep putting logs on it.

Don't I have the sweetest husband ever?

And thankfully, I'm not blue-faced and chattering like Alvin and the Chipmunks anymore. Now I just have to cough up the dough for more propane. *sigh* I'm seriously considering Michael's talk of moving off the grid and building solar!

Renewable Energy Coming to Michigan!

I was so excited to read that there may be a mandate requiring 10% of Michigan's electric power to come from renewable energy by 2015, and 30% by 2030. Yay us! There are twenty-three other states who have already set renewable energy standards (yay them!)

Michael and I have talked about buying land and building a solar home, something off the grid. Ultimately, I believe we will, at some point. But it's always so frustrating to have the willingness, but not the means, to accomplish something that I know will be so beneficial for us, our children, and our children's children.

It's heartening to know our state is catching up and jumping on the green bandwagon. There's some opposition, I guess, about wind power. Windmills and turbines might "blight" the Michigan landscape. Feh!



I think they're rather beautiful. Certainly no worse than fences or telephone poles. And what they signify--renewable energy--is definitely worth whatever aesthetic minuses there might be!

Water Woes

When we lived in the city, we paid for our water. And when I say, we paid for it, I mean we REALLY paid for it. We lived in a suburb of Detroit, actually pretty close to the border of the city (about a mile or so away) and because Detroit is poor, they upped the water usage charge to the suburbs to pay for their own water use. Twisted? Yeah. But true.

So we would pay $300 every three months for water, for the same amount of usage (actually--less!) as, for example, my mother-in-law in a different county, for which she would pay $100. It was maddening, but since it the rate was dictated by the city, there wasn't much we could do about it.

Out here, we don't have to pay for our water, because it comes from a well. So the water we bathe in, wash clothes in, wash our dishes in, is free. What a concept! Now, granted, we don't have any water pressure, but that's not a problem in general with living in the country, it's a specific problem with our well, which will (knock on wood) ultimately be fixed.

However, drinking well water is not my idea of fun. I'll cook with it (like, boil pasta in it) and bathe in it--but drink it? *shudder* I've never liked the mineral taste of well water. So instead, we buy our water from the store. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, because our local Meijers has a Culligan water system, which provides filtered water in gallon jugs for $0.59. If you bring your own jug, you only have to pay $0.29 a gallon. Of course, you have to fill your own, which is part of why it's cheaper than just grabbing a jug of water off the shelf, but it doesn't take that long, really, to fill a bunch of them. And fifty gallons of water is only a little less that $15.00. Wish I could have gotten those prices when we lived in the city!

However, at our Meijers (which just opened up, by the way, less than a month ago) the Culligan water system has been out of order for a few weeks. Very annoying. Michael went there with all the jugs in the back of the minivan last time, but it was still out of order. So, instead of putting the jugs back into the van and going all the way there, I decided to call Meijers to make sure the water system was working again.

I thought, perhaps, (since we're in the country and all) I'd actually get a real person on the other end of the phone, but alas, it was a recording. And not just any recording, but one of those "smart" recordings, the kind that attempt to identify what you say in order to transfer you to the correct department. I hate those.

This time, right when the recording asked, "How can I help you?"-- I sneezed. I've had a cold, and all of a sudden, ACHOO! The recording replied: "I'm sorry, I didn't get that..." Which just cracked me up. I started laughing, and the recording replied, "I'm sorry, in order not to waste any more of your time, I'll transfer you..."

Perfect! I got to bypass fighting with the recording without even trying. Mental note to self: whenever recordings come on, just sneeze to get to the head of the line! :)

The good news is, the woman I did get tranferred to said the Culligan water machine is working again. Yay! Time to go get me some cheap water!

Let There Be Light!

I just replaced every single one of these in my new house:

With one of these:

Why?

Because I'm a mizer, that's why. These bulbs last much, much longer than regular, incandescent bulbs. They don't break when you drop them, either, Ms. Klutz discovered (bonus!) and they are supposedly environmentally friendly.

According to Wikipedia (the lazy woman's research guide *grin*)": a CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) can save over $30 in electricity costs over the lamp’s lifetime compared to an incandescent lamp and save 2000 times their own weight in greenhouse gasses.

But can it cut an aluminum can in half, that's what I want to know!

I buy them at Sam's Club, so my savings is pretty significant. Still not as cheap as incandescent bulbs, but when you consider they last 8-15 times as long!? I've had one in the lamp next to my bed for two years, and it's never burned out. Two YEARS! Woot!

As for the environmentally friendly part, well... there is a concern about mercury, I guess. (Can't have everything--where would you put it, right?) They use 1 mg of mercury in them when they make the bulbs. Of course, 1 mg of mercury isn't all that much... there's 1 mg of mercury per cubic meter of sea water, right? So they say... but still, put a million of them in a landfill, and you've got a math meets mercury disaster leaking into our water supply, right? Of course, burning coal to make the electricity that goes into incandescent lightbulbs actually produces mercury, too. Can't win for losing...

So I guess I have to do the right thing and recycle the new bulbs when they finally burn out! I did find some place local from this site: Earth911.

Now I'm just waiting for them to come out with affordable LED bulbs. Right now they're cost prohibitive (like $50 a bulb! Eek!) but I have a feeling they'll replace the CFL. Kind of like cassette and video tapes getting replaced by CDs and DVDs.

Why?

A 1.4 Watt LED bulb replaces the standard 60 Watt incandescent. The CFL bulb uses 13 Watts. You do the math!

I can't wait!

Propane Pain

How many of you knew that you have to buy propane in bulk? Go ahead, don't be shy, raise your hand if you knew.

Uh-huh.

To those of you who have your hands raised...

WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME!?!?!?

*sigh*

Like I have a spare $400 in my budget to purchase propane all at once?? Which, by the way, only fills half that torpedo at the side of my house. HALF.

What brainiac came up with this whole fossil fuels as energy idea in the first place, thinking, "Hey, here's a good idea, let's take this non-renewable energy source and sell it, and we'll make a mint--until it all runs out at some unforseeable point in the future that we don't care about because we'll be dead..."

Feh!

Makes me crazy to know that there ARE renewable energy sources out there (solar, wind, etc) and ways to build houses that would maximize those to make them viable options... but are they available to the general public? Nope.

So I'm stuck robbing Peter to pay Paul in order to heat my water and, when it gets cold enough, the house. (Which is, technically, still heating water--it's steam heat.) I do find it kind of interesting to have an actual gauge outside, though, telling how much energy we've used. It certainly makes you more conscious, and I like that part. We now have 5% left. When we called to ask how long the propane company thought that might last, they replied, "For some people, it could be a month, for others, about three days."

Of course, we had to err on the side of caution and order propane now--just in case we're propane hogs and don't know it. But it will be interesting to see how much energy we use, and how much we can conserve. A rather fun experiment.

If I'd only known we had to pay it all at once, I would have planned for it, ya know? *sigh* I guess we'll know for next year, and start planning accordingly.

I just wish we didn't have to use non-renewable energy sources at all. But it really is interesting, how living out here forces you to think about things you take for granted in the suburbs or the city. Out here, rubbish pickup is direct. Propane tanks sit at the side of houses like huge torpedos. Your personal consumption and waste is definitely more in-your-face, which makes it much, much more conscious. Not necessarily a bad thing.

People out here still try to disguise it, though. As if that big thing shaped like a bomb at the side of your house doesn't actually contain enough explosive material to blow up half the county. I've seen people plant lots of flowers around their tank to hide it, or even paint it:

I'm tempted to paint mine too, believe me.

But I definitely wouldn't be painting flowers on the side. Oh, no. Mine would be more... graphic...

Well, I'll just leave it to your imagination...