I’m afraid I’ve done only part of the work here — below is a report on my activities of the last two months, but I haven’t finished calculating things and coming up with percentages.
Electricity. The most positive event in this department is the arrival and successful use of my Storm Kettle — a little chimney-shaped double-skinned kettle that sits over a small burn chamber and allows me to easily bring more than a quart of water to a near-boil with three strips of balled-up newspaper and a fistful of dry twigs. This has enabled me to stop using electricity to heat water.
On the other hand, since I’m raising chicks now, I’ve had to use electricity to keep them warm, and so have been burning a couple of incandescent bulbs 24/7 for a few weeks. Surely there is a better way. (Hmm. There would be the way the chickens do it. But that requires a rooster, or the services of one. Do people hire roosters out to stud? I’m not allowed to have a rooster in the city.)
And it being full-blown summertime, anytime I’m in the loft, I’m running a fan.
I’ve also had to install a bug trap in the bio-digester, which takes electricity, though not too much. I’ve described in earlier posts my CFL/flypaper device for catching fruit flies and other small flying bugs that multiply in worm bins, and I’ve had that going pretty consistently for a week or two.
So even though I’ve met one of my goals by replacing electricity with biomass for heating water, I haven’t really reduced my usage.
I’m averaging 2.61 kwh a day from late April to late June, but it was roughly 2 a day or less at the beginning and it’s between 4 and 5 a day now. There has also been some usage in the other parts of the building, but not too much. Some lights, some power tools.
My refrigeration has settled into a pattern. I use my small chest cooler to make ice and transfer it to the Coleman cooler every day or two. When the weather stays in the mid-80s, it’s a piece of cake. When it goes into the 90s I have to pay more attention. I don’t honestly know whether this is better than a reasonably efficient small refrigerator/freezer. I ought to get a kill-a-watt meter and figure it out.
My usage has never included all of the electricity I used for laundry. When I was in PA I went to a laundromat once in a while, and since I got here I’ve used Mary Ann’s washer and dryer a couple of times. But now I’m regularly washing clothes by hand and not using any electricity at all.
I still rely on electricity to run my oven, but hope to change that soon. I haven’t been using it much, but I have just done some work toward getting my kitchen more functional, and that will probably change.
Butane. I’m still using my little buffet range for most of my cooking, and my usage has gone up a little. I usually go through an 8-oz. canister a month and this last time it was 28 days or something close to that.
Garbage. This really hasn’t changed much over time, though I definitely filled a dumpster when I moved. All non-toxic organic waste goes either into a worm bin or a compost pile. A few bottles and cans are recycled. And the bits of plastic and coated cardboard trash that need to be picked up by the city fills a medium-size bag every six or eight weeks.
Water. I’ve made some progress here in terms of household water usage, which is quite low. Since I’m using composting toilet facilities, there’s no water for flushing. My bathwater amounts to about 3 or 4 quarts most days. Sometimes dirty clothes then go into the bathwater. I don’t use much for washing dishes when I’m a good girl and clean them up right away. (One spray bottle with soap and baking soda, one with water and a little vinegar, dry with a clean cloth. It only takes a couple of mouthfuls to brush my teeth. It’s safe to say that for household use I’m at about 2.5 gallons a day or less most of the time.
But I’m drinking a lot of water from the tap when I’m in the garden and I’m using city water in one of my gardens on a pretty regular basis. We’re meaning to come up with a way to capture rainwater for that instead. (The other garden I think will be fine with Mary Ann’s cistern.) None of that is being measured.
Consumer goods. I’ve made several purchases of new items: a nice range hood with exhaust fan and lights; my Storm Kettle; and a brand new copy of the second edition of Barbara Damrosch’s Garden Primer. The first edition is one of my favorite books, and I was interested in seeing what she had to say these days. I have also bought several of those clip-on work lights, some large plastic (vinyl?) bins, a great big cooler, a package of white dishrags. Not sure what else, will add things as I remember them. ( Checked: the lights, bins, misc. hardware and household adds up to about $138.50 since I moved here. Plus a little for two spray bottles. Call it $150 for misc., $125 for the Storm Kettle, $187 for the fancy range hood. All of it is new household-related, thus reduction-oriented.) I am mostly scrounging for stuff that nobody needs anymore here on the Hill, but also shopping at the Habitat second-hand building supply store on a pretty regular basis. My kitchen has been constructed so far out of a $2 set of shelves, $10 worth of sawhorses, a $10 door panel, and a $5 piece of formica. I painted the sawhorses and the shelves a nice shade of gray-lavender with a can of surplus paint that cost Jeff $2 some time back in the past. I’ve been taken out to eat a few times.
Transportation (gasoline). I rarely take the bus, because I rarely have to go anywhere. However, I will ride it over to Grandin Road tomorrow to get my hair cut. I’ve taken one long cross-country trip by bus, and one trip in a rented car. That took about $27 in gas, which means — about 7 gallons. I have also carpooled to several things, most significantly a 75 mile trip this week in a Ford Focus with two other people — so put another gallon on my tab. The garden work has involved the use of a gasoline generator on several occasions and the regular use of a riding mower to pay our “rent” to the business that lets us use the land. I suppose this should be divided by the six people on the Hill, but it’s also part of the footprint of the vegetables that Rachel and I will be providing to others. Two different pieces of large equipment that run on gas or diesel were also used for a few hours each when we were breaking ground and building beds. When I work for Nancy, that involves riding in a car. Yesterday we took an 80-mile round trip, so that became part of the food miles of the food we served the 50 people we fed lunch to. But this will hopefully be balanced out by the fact that my gardening will enable her to do less traveling to shop for local produce.
Food and household consumables. Hmm. I don’t spend much money in the supermarket anymore. Most bulk, dairy, and processed things now come once a month on a truck: soap, ginger beer, feta cheese, powdered milk (for making yogurt), miso, almond butter, dried fruit, nuts. Lots of food I get in the form of surplus from Rachel’s garden or Nancy’s catering, which is probably about 70% local. I buy fruit mostly at the farmer’s market, though I did fall for organic and conventional grapefruit pretty regularly until the local cherries came in. And of course we’re all about local food here, that’s our business. How completely I manage to switch to local eating depends on how my “subsistence mix” crops — grains, oil seeds, dry beans, storage vegetables — perform and how well they store. I’m eating meat now (chicken, mostly) because we can get it locally and also because other people on the Hill eat it and offer it to me socially. I don’t plan to buy any more salmon after the cans my sister brought me from Costco. I just don’t feel right about it any more. Anchovies I’ll probably continue to buy when I can find them at a good price. She also brought me baking soda in bulk, sunblock, fair-trade coffee, maple syrup, and light bulbs. After a while I guess our chickens will provide a lot of food. I’d like to feed them as much as possible from foraging but we haven’t figured anything out yet about that.
