Water Heat and Energy

For what it’s worth I thought I would share some energy ideas I messed around with and or read about. There’s a lot of people on the ‘edge’ of financial freedom or ruin.

First do you know you energy tariff? Do you know when to run your appliances? That alone can make an electricity bill better. Do you know when to charge your computers and phones more efficiently. For us at 7pm the energy tariff drops until the next morning at 7pm. Running laundry at 6 am makes a difference, or running the dishwasher at 7pm. These are conversations to have with kids. Why? It seems like a new world and keeping their hard earned money might be an important skill set.

My bucket fridge

When I was living in Paris before going to law school, I wanted to keep yogurt, cream for coffee, cheese, cold cuts for baguette. I didn’t have a fridge. I bought a rope and bucket and suspended my items out my window. At first my roommate teased me for this, but quickly she joined me and placed her own items in the bucket fridge. She was a good deal taller so this ended up helping as the window was so high up. We had to gingerly not tip the bucket and rain cheese on the courtyard below.

In the morning my roommate or I would stand on the counter to reach the window and delicately haul in our bucket. It was very rudimentary and people thought us silly at first, but would nevertheless come for the cream or milk for their tea or coffee. We would hoist up and get pate and crackers and serve our guests. Hilarious!

I don’t know all your circumstances but if energy becomes prohibitive for your budget and you want to adjust for it a bin on your balcony in certain temperatures might work.

Keeping the fridge cool.

Make sure it is full. If it is not, fill with water bottles. Water holds its temperature easier then air. Having your fridge full of water jugs will help maintain temperatures. Same with the freezer. Fill it with freezer packs (empty water bottles do well).

In the Winter put ice packs outside and rotate them through the fridge. 3 in the morning and 3 at night. Your fridge will barely need to run. I experimented with this last year. In the hotter months take an ice pack from the freezer to the fridge and rotate. You open the fridge more and the melting of the ice in the fridge maintains temperature. I know there are people quite comfortable and will think this effort silly. But you can also experiment with it because expensive energy is a new form of taxing the people and removing their spending power. If you are well off take the difference and spend it on local businesses. The economy needs us. The utilities and taxes not so much.

The Dryer.

You can hang your clothes to dry on a rack or on hangers. We have a large family. Our kids hang the laundry right out of the washing machine to the racks in their room, or onto hangers depending on the item. We sort then. We saw a savings of $200-350 a month off the bill. So it’s an expensive appliance for a larger family. It is our routine. If you think it is silly that is ok. I grew up where we hung our clothes on the clothes line. We started this years ago and it works for us. At the very least pay attention to the time of use tariff for this appliance. I find it efficient to sort when I'm removing the clothes from the washing machine.

There is a hate of colonialism. But there is much to learn from their ability to make things work with their efforts. Did you read the Little House on the Prairie series? You should. It’s a bit soothing. They hung their clothes out in winter and brought them in stiff to warm up. Moisture evaporates in that dry winter air. The clothes dry well in 3 seasons outside and dry quickly inside during those dry winter months.

FREE HEAT, COULD BE A MICRO BUSINESS idea to make these

Washing Machine

If you are already all over this great. But maybe others could benefit. The older washing machines had a standard 20 minute cycle. New cycle is an hour plus. Put it on a speed wash and then up the soil amount until you get 18-22 minutes. That gets my clothes clean and is a third the energy (approximately). I adjust the water temperature to tap temperature, so then the heat is not your cost. This is just years of thinking this way. You can do less laundry by hanging up when things are clean rather then knee jerk throw it in the wash or spot wash stains and hang them back up. I am not sure this is necessary for everyone, but might help those on a limited budget.

Cooking

Did you know you cook cook more on one burner by stacking. Boiling pasta or potatoes? Stack a corn or broccoli on the same burner. I do this all the time. It is not that I am next to poverty, I think this way. My father said to me, always put a lid on when you are heating up. I remember I was a small child. He said use the burner that is the right size for the pot. Never use the big burner for the little pot. Do we give these little instructions to our kids now a days?

Heating

There’s actually a lot of ideas I’ve researched and read up on. When I saw the writing on the wall in Europe last winter, it sparked an interest for me.

Many people live in the US drafty houses and have difficulty maintaining temperatures through the house in the winter. From reading comments on Youtube videos I discovered the following ideas.

1. poster beds can be used with coverings to create a micro-climate that is warmer for sleeping;

2. heating a heat sink and placing it under the bed to release heat during the night. this can be slate or cast iron. do not place direct on floor but on a cookie sheet for protection;

3. wearing a night cap. The colonials did this and a lot of people don’t realize how much heat is lost through the head;

4. using a mattress topper.

   

Now I discovered some interesting ideas of using water. For the same reason radiators used to be a heating source, you can adopt something in your home or apartment that is similar. One lady discovered through her fish hobby of her youth that she could maintain the temperature of her room through her aquarium. Remembering that, and being on the edge of her income she started heating her apartment in a novel way. She got two large aquariums and fitted them with the immersion water heaters. They are extremely cheap to run and for her satisfied her heating.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Now while it is not pretty, it is pretty ingenious. Using black thermal masses in a south facing porch he heats his home. He also has a subsequent water heater he made. You have to be pretty smart to reduce your costs through your own effort. If things get tight in costs these ideas might spark something for you.

I do not like forced air, I find it so dry and had difficulty with the dry air in the winter. We rely on our in floor heat that is placed in the tiles and heated through a gas boiler. Our bedroom though has none. Rather than turn on the forced air heater I made my own Radiator.

I use 1 or 2 crock pots on timer in the winter to heat the room in the night. It works. It is unbelievable really. I decided to make my own ‘radiator’. It was the observation that cooking in the kitchen through the crock pot heated the space. In the summer I plug it in outside. In the winter I turned it into a radiator. You can add clove or essential oils and make the room quite nice. In the morning I have nice hot water for washing. Very colonial, but avoided in Canada the furnace all winter. It is more efficient then the electric space heater and once hot you can turn it off for a few hours. Our house is not drafty so that helps. If we leave the house for visiting or vacation, we use MORE energy then when we are at home! It is incredible our gas bill goes up. We put the furnace on a low temperature (10-15 degrees Celsius) and the forced air furnace uses more gas then our boiler and slow cooker combo. There you have it homemade radiator. You could up the efficiency by using a timer to cycle your crock pot. You need a manual crock pot for the timer to work.

Make sure to turn your temperature down when leaving for work.

But you can upscale your heating effort with passive heat sources.

Homemade solar cooking window. She builds a cube box and cooks with her homemade solar oven or uses it as a heat source for the house.

I know this is quite off topic from typical posts, but some worry has been mounting in me for those on the edge of poverty. Maybe these ideas resound with you, or you want to experiment this year with reducing the spend on energy. If the price of oil and gas sky rockets because of the conflict in the Middle East (the Globalists will have their energy poverty result they are looking for- still another reason the Globalists want this war.)

And we will have more inflation and more costs to contend with. That in and of itself may assist their goals of ‘just transition’. Well for what it is worth, I’m curious how you will winterize your home or whether you will try some new heating ideas.

I’ve been reading articles about Raphael Lemkin who defined genocide after WW2. Hunger he believed was a form of genocide. Where some are on the edge, diverting costs from energy to food will be a big help. If you don’t need to do it, think of the savings as money to spend on local businesses to help out your community.

Share your own ideas.