High Efficiency Washing Machines Save $$$ Every Month

Did you know that the many washing machines being made nowadays cost only a small percentage to run when compared to the last generation of washers?  A new machine can help you save a good deal of money on both your power and water bills.

New washing machines use scales and sensors in order to determine how much water is needed.  In most cases, the user no longer sets the water level.  This allows the machine to efficiently use only what it needs.  While this will help lower your water bill, chances are it is the electric bill you are more concerned about.

Everyone has seen those yellow tags and stickers that appear on appliances.  These are energy consumption ratings from the United States government.  Many modern washing machines use under 130 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.  That’s an annual operating cost of only $13, including hot water!  Modern non-high efficiency washing machines use about four times as much power.

Unfortunately, the federal government is a little behind in their estimation of electric prices.  Their numbers are based on electric costs of about $.10 a kilowatt hour.  I pay almost $.25 a kilowatt-hour.  Come to think of it, I have probably been paying a lot to run my washing machine.  Given its age and condition, I bet it is about half as efficient as even the low efficiency models being made now.   It could be costing me around $150 a year to run.  At that price, a new machine would pay for itself in just over three years.

Modern washing machines also incorporate features that the old fashioned ones did not.  For one thing, they have become more sleeker and stylized in appearance.  Electronic controls are now more common than the mechanical dials of the past. 

Companies like Maytag offer features that include a self-cleaning mode.  As high-efficiency washers have a reputation to get a little funky, that is a great option.  Many Whirlpool washers offer a self-balancing feature.  This could cut down on having to run down to the basement when the machine is trying to shake itself apart.

One important thing to remember is that the high-efficiency washing machines need a special detergent.  Make sure you only use the high-efficiency detergent.  It may seem like it costs more, but you use so much less that it costs about the same.  Normal detergent is mostly water.  This is the same stuff, minus the extra water.

It may seem like shelling out the money for new appliances is expensive.  But if you can afford to do it, they will save so much power that they will literally pay for themselves.  And while these machines pay for themselves, you’ll enjoy the conveniences that come from using newer appliances.

World Water Day is March 22

Water may be the biggest thing that we take for granted in the Western world. It’s scarce in many developing countries, and it’s becoming so in urban areas, as now nearly 1 out of 2 people on Earth live in cities. Because of this, the theme for World Water Day 2011, which is on March 22, is “Urban Water Usage.” In order to help manage our urban water—as well as water resources everywhere—click here to get in on World Water Day next week.

Here are some ideas to use when celebrating and taking part in World Water Day.

-Reduce your water usage. Try to go the whole day without water and see if you can do it. What was it like? Or fill a single bucket, knowing that many families have to walk for miles to obtain just this, and try to make it last for the whole day.

-Don’t dump out that glass of water on your bedside table; instead, use it on the plants, or give it to the dog.

-Stop drinking bottled water; instead, install a water filtration system.

-When you take a shower, do it European-style. Shut the water off as you soap up, then turn it back on just to rinse off. See if you can make this an actual daily practice.

-Better yet, go a day without a shower. We shower way too much in the West. If you don’t stink and your hair isn’t too oily, you can definitely go a day without showing. Try using your clothes for an extra day, too, if they’re not soiled—save some laundry water while you’re at it.

-Use grey water. Use your dishwater and bath water to water flowers outside—or get a rain barrel to collect rain to use on your garden during dry weeks. Remember, these things will also save you money!

-Teach your children not to waste water when they brush their teeth, wash their hands, etc.

-Try not flushing when there’s just urine in the toilet. Some people get grossed out by this but it’s really wasteful to spend that much water on one little pee!

-Install water-friendly devices in your home, such as low-flow shower heads and toilets. If you’re really brave, try a composting toilet!

-Repair leaky roofs, faucets, and other broken household items. Set out buckets to catch water from gutters and other outdoor structures and reuse it.

Groupon: Donate to Earthquake Emergency Relief Efforts - $5 (or more)

Good Karma is always a good deal.

Groupon is making it easy to donate money for the victims of the tragic 8.9 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan recently. This is a great opportunity to Donate $5, $10, or $25 to Support International Medical Corps' Emergency Relief Efforts in Japan and Other Affected Areas

This special Groupon will continue through the next 3 days, so make sure to pass it around!

"But There's Nothing I Can Cut From My Budget!"

Oh yes, this is the biggest lie we tell ourselves. I tell myself this lie on a regular basis! Then I sigh, and stop, and think, and you know what? There is ALWAYS something you can cut from your budget. Any person anywhere has about 30% of their budget going to something that can be cut. I don't care how rich or poor you are - there is always room to cut. The tricky part is admitting it!

But how do you find it? The first thing you have to do is take an honest accounting of your expenditures. Don't judge, don't try to change - just spend a month writing down everything that you spend, and what category it belongs to.

This can be a shocking experience. I would venture to say that most people don't REALLY know where every penny goes. We think we do, but if you actually track every cost for a month, I can guarantee you'll be surprised by the results!

Now here is a funny thing. We all find it incredibly easy to tell someone else what they should stop buying. Right? You can just look at one of your friends and name five ways they should stop wasting their money. It's so easy to see these things from the outside.

So here is what you do, once you have finished your Month Of Writing Everything Down: pretend like it's someone else's budget. Pretend as if your best friend has written down all her expenditures, and she wants you to help pick what items she should start cutting back.

I like to go a step farther, and pretend that my life is a struggling business that I have recently been put in charge of. I don't doubt that if you were put in charge of your workplace and told to rein in the budget, you would have some pretty good ideas on how to make changes.

We all indulge in "If I was the boss" fantasies. But when it comes to your finances, you ARE the boss. You are the one in charge of allocating funds and making purchasing decisions. You are also the one responsible for saying "no," and for making sure that the budget stays balanced.

These are tough times, and even if life is good for you right now, it might not be in a few months. If you were laid off today, what would you stop buying, so that you could sock that money away for an unknown period of unemployment?

Would you bring your own French press to work, instead of buying a latte every afternoon? Would you bring your dinner leftovers to eat for lunch, instead of buying lunch every day? Would you drop the $20/month data plan from your cell phone bill? Would you call the cable company and switch from digital to basic cable?

You already know what you can cut from your budget. You just don't want to. And believe me, I've been there! But getting past that layer of denial is the best thing you can do for yourself - and for your bank account!

Photo credit: Flickr/RambergMediaImages

Care About Your Indoor Air Month

Honestly, caring about your indoor air should be something we all do year-round—particularly during the winter time, when we have all of our windows shut and no fresh air entering our homes. Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do to remedy poor air quality, with options ranging from free to inexpensive to pricey. Here’s a list of things we can do to help improve the quality of our indoor air.

Open windows. Even if it’s super cold out, just opening them for a few moments a day can help increase the fresh air of your home.

Get rid of harmful chemicals. Use low voc paints when you can, hire a professional to replace harmful insulation with greener alternatives, and get rid of anything else in your home that you know of that releases harmful chemicals into the air.

Don’t let people smoke in your house. This has increased the air quality of our home tremendously! If you do smoke, do it outdoors, or confine it to one room at the very least—especially if you live with children.

Purchase plants that help absorb harmful chemicals. Any plants will usually help improve the air quality of a home, but some specific plants are known to help eliminate targeted toxins, like formaldehyde or benzene. Even carbon monoxide can be removed from the air, to some extent, with the help of our floral friends. Some of the best plants to use for this include the peace lily, gerbera daisies, mums, English ivy, and bamboo palm. Many more plants can be found listed here.

Set up a good air filtration system in your home. You can get a small air purifier for around forty bucks, which will take care of one room. If you do this, you’ll probably want to put it in your bedroom(s). Larger purifiers, which can range from eighty to hundreds of dollars, may be a better investment for larger spaces, particularly if you’d like to purify the air across the board in your home. You can also have whole-house purifiers installed, which cost a pretty penny but do filer all of the air in your home.

Take off your shoes when you get in the door. Any toxic crud on your soles shouldn’t be tracked throughout the rest of your house. And if you work with chemicals every day, you may want to even keep a separate set of shoes, coats, and clothing in general to keep in your trunk to change into once you get to work each day to prevent as many chemicals as possible from being spread in your home.

An End To Environmentalist Finger-Pointing

Becksta's recent article touches on an issue I've been thinking about for a while. There are two trends in the environmental movement which are going to have to stop if we want them to succeed. And we do want the environmental movement to succeed, right? Save the planet? We're all on board with this.

But what if the only way to save the planet was to stop shaking your finger at people who are doing the "wrong" thing? I don't half suspect that a lot of people would quietly drift out of the movement if we suddenly banned "feeling morally superior."

I talk to a lot of different kinds of people in the course of a day. And here's the thing we all have in common: we're all trying hard to do the right thing. Could we try harder? Sure. There is always room for improvement. And that's an issue that we should address with ourselves before we start pointing the finger at others.

For example, someone recently chastised Becksta for flushing a Kleenex instead of throwing it away in the trash. Well, first of all, it's not immediately apparent that sending it to the landfill - where it won't decompose - is actually a better choice than flushing it. Issues are never as clear cut as we like to make them out sometimes. Perhaps the best option would be to drop the Kleenex in the toilet and then leave it there to be flushed with the next, shall we say, "deposit."

Personally, I compost my Kleenex. But that's a luxury that's available to me as someone living in a rural area with access to a compost pile. It certainly doesn't mean that I'm a better person for it. I'll be honest with you: sometimes I don't recycle stuff. I live miles away from the nearest curb-side pickup, so I have to store all my recyclables and haul them to the dump and sort them and walk up and down the ladder beside the huge bins myself.

So sometimes, if I just have one oddball recyclable item? I throw it away.

We all have room for improvement.

The other related trend that's disturbingly popular is what I've heard dubbed "hair shirt environmentalism." Meaning that the more you suffer, the better it is for the environment. A rational environmentalist will suggest you turn your AC down five degrees to save energy. A hair shirt environmentalist will suggest you turn it off altogether. The message is "I suffer more, because I care more."

For one thing, that's not going to lure people to our cause. No one wants to hear they have to suffer. Given the choice between suffering and wasting resources, most people (clearly) will choose to waste resources. Hair shirt environmentalism is just snobbery by a different name, and it actively repels people while distracting efforts to make real change.

Solar panels, for example, often get lost in the discussion about adjusting your thermostat. Why not just install solar panels? Then you can crank your AC as high as you like, for free! Everybody wins!

So the next time you feel yourself about to pass judgment on someone else's actions, do us all a favor, and check yourself.

Photo credit: Flickr/a2gemma

Tell the EPA: No More Triclosan!

When I buy soap, toothpaste, and other personal care products, I always carefully check the label. I was into Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, and other natural and organic brands back in college, but not nearly as much as I am these days. These days, after all, I have a family to worry about and a child to protect.

The thing is, I should not have to stress over the products I need to buy for my family, and neither should you. No one should, for that matter. We should have protections in place to keep us from slathering our bodies with harmful substances (much like people in other countries do), and we shouldn’t have to spend hours of our time analyzing product ingredients before buying them.

That’s what the EPA is for.

The antibacterial agent triclosan is one such ingredient that none of us should have to worry about, let alone look for. It’s attached to a string of bad news: hormonal disruption, reduced fertility, early onset puberty (something that we’re all baffled by these days), and even cancer. It can also harm one’s immune system, as well as cause birth defects. The evidence against this chemical is so strong that recommendations for a ban are already being issued by scientists—yet it’s still in our products. Here are some products that you can find this potentially deadly in; check to see if you have these in your bathroom.

  • Deoderants: Old Spice, Right Guard, several other brands
  • Clothing: Dickies, Fruit of the Loom, more
  • Liquid Soap: Dial, Softsoap, Tea Tree Therapy, CVS, others
  • Cosmetics: Jason Naturals, Revlon, Paul Mitchell, many more
  • Toothpastes, such as Colgate

For many more products, including kitchenware, Playskool toys, and computer products, click here.

To ask the EPA to put a ban on these chemicals as soon as possible, please click here. Comments are due by February 7, but the good news is that the reason this issue is up for a hearing at all is because last year concerned citizens stood together and demanded the ban. Please help keep up the momentum by submitting your passionate, yet respectful comments today. Let the EPA know that we won’t stand for poison in our personal care products—let alone our children’s toys!—and that we want them to ban this chemical once and for all to help keep us all safe.

Kleenex - "Nice" (Video)

That's a nasty sounding rhythm section for a band that looks like Kleenex does. But cobbled together from the likes of other top ranking grrl/rawk groups from the seventies, nothing resulting from the collaboration should be surprising. It's just good.

The Impending Environmental Crisis: Not My Fault

I am as environmental as the next person, but I am kind of tired of having the brunt of the entire impending environmental crisis being laid on my shoulders. Just today, I was told that I was really wasting water because I made the heinous error of flushing Kleenex down the toilet as opposed to putting it in the trash.

 

Fair enough, but come on. Really? Let's put things into perspective.

 

I live in an apartment, so don’t have a yard to water in the summer. I don’t golf, so am not contributing to the draining of any aquifers that may be lurking underneath the ground, and am not importing water so that my course will be forever green.

 

I work from home, so don’t really contribute all that many emissions to the air. When I do drive, it’s not all that far.

 

I don’t have an air conditioner and my place isn’t all that big, so I don’t waste that much energy heating my place (and would waste less energy if my place was better insulated, something I have NO control over.)

 

I would guess that approximately 62.4% of the things I buy are used and come from fine Boutiques such as the Good Will and Value Village (don’t forget to pronounce the latter with a French accent—it really impresses people).

 

I recycle and donate my old stuff to charities. I try to buy local produce when I can and eat home-grown lettuce in the summer.  I even compost.

 

So, stop blaming me and people like me for the degradation of the entire environment! Yes, there are things that I could do better, but my environmental/carbon footprint is not quite as large as it’s being made out to be. Just because I am not a patchouli afficianado doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the environment-- I just don’t think that I am the one who should be blamed.

 

Blame the car companies for waiting so long to make more fuel-efficient cars. Blame the city governments for allowing the residents (and golf course owners) to waste so much water. Blame the big corporations and mining companies who either ignore safety standards or pay big money to ensure that less safety standards are enacted. Blame rampant globalization and the greed of developing nations who want their rightful piece of the pie. Blame the companies who build factories in the same developing nations instead in the EU or in the US just so they can avoid strict environmental regulations.

 

Just stop blaming me.

 

 

 

 

The Paperless Professor

Today I read about a 68-year-old college professor who has been paper-free for more than a decade.  This Tennessee professor of religion pledged over 15 years ago to keep his classes paper-free, and he has stuck to that pledge. 

I wonder if he has ever calculated how many reams of paper he has saved?  How many tons of toxic chemicals from the production process he has spared?

In 1994 when Gerald Smith made his pledge, it was big news.  The graphical internet was still in its infancy, and many people had not yet heard of email.  AOL had only just released version 1.5 for Microsoft Windows 3.11.

However, colleges had always been on the leading edge of email and internet technology.  When I was attending the University of Washington in 1994, they made it a point to create an email account for every student.  We checked our email using the text-based email program PINE on terminals in the computer labs.  (Uphill, both ways, in the snow.)

Smith is deeply connected to the local ecology.  As part of his "Rural Religion" course he takes students on field trips out into the Tennessee woods to identify wild and abandoned or feral plants.  Many of his classes are conducted outdoors, or with local residents as special guests to talk about what life is like in the rural South.

As a professor of religion and a "practicing Cumberland Presbyterian," Smith also embodies a possible road out of the social deadlock we have created in the realm of ecology.  Most religious people fall onto the conservative part of the political spectrum, which automatically rejects "hippie stuff" like concern for the environment out of hand, as leftist politics. 

But as Smith's work amply demonstrates, being an environmentalist can be seen as honoring the works of God.  "Waste not, want not," Smith says, and this attitude of personal thrift and responsibility has the potential to resonate farther in our society than "normal" green mantras might. 

I had this conversation with a conservative religious right-wing friend a while ago.  He argued "Why can't we save the Earth because it's God's work, rather than getting bogged down in this whole Global Warming thing?"  And I was like, "Okay!  DO THAT."

Smith's story, his respect for the Earth, and his deeply considered belief in the power of the individual to change people, is hopefully a message that will go far.  And his joyous embrace of paper-free alternatives - like hands-on classes and online lecture notes - may help counteract what is often dismissed as "hair shirt environmentalism." 

Reading the story about Smith in the local paper, I'm struck by the fact that Smith didn't ban paper from his life.  Instead, he opened his life to other possibilities, better routes, and easier methods.  Too often we let ourselves be boxed in by two false choices: waste resources, or deprive ourselves.  The truth is that it's a big wide world out there, and better alternatives are all around us.  If we'll simply take a walk in the woods, have a good think, and look around ourselves, we can find a better way.

Photo credit: Flickr/Muffet

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