Cutting Your Electricity Costs
/ 0
- Details
- Category: Off-Grid Living
- Published on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 04:07
- Written by seedspreader
- Hits: 524
This was written by Katlupe.
For anyone who is trying to cut energy costs, here are some ideas to get you started.
You can apply some of the same principles an off the grid home uses, but use it to drastically cut your electrical power usage. Of course, the main energy suckers are the ones that use heat, such as electric heat, electric hot water, electric stove and oven and the electric clothes dryer. Air conditioning, as well. These appliances use huge amounts of your electric power, eating up your watts as soon as they are turned on. Switching to propane or natural gas for water heating, home heat, cooking and clothes drying, along with more efficient refrigerators and freezers will offer much savings. For an air conditioning alternative, there is evaporative cooling systems. Changing to these appliances will instantly cut off more than three quarters of what you usually pay for electricity.
Living off the grid, I have many people contact me to ask how they can cut the cost of their electric bill, without changing over to alternative energy sources. So the very first thing I tell them to do, is to change all their light bulbs to the newer compact fluoroscents. Screw in light bulbs should be mostly compact fluorescent lights, using about one quarter the power of regular bulbs while giving the same brightness and color. I plan on stocking up on those when I find them on sale. Timers are great for children's rooms and rooms that the lights get left on.
And especially for anyone who is thinking of replacing a computer. Replace your big desk top computers with laptops. They use much less power. We run 2 laptops over 12 hours a day on very little power. A desk top (actually it is the monitors) uses as much in a few hours, as our's do in a week. The monitors are what you have to watch. I am sure there must be some new energy efficient ones out there now. Since I started using a laptop, I would never go back to those overgrown dinosaurs!
Build An Attached Greenhouse. (Part III - Finishing)
/ 0
- Details
- Category: Off-Grid Living
- Published on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 04:02
- Written by seedspreader
- Hits: 632
I forgot to post the outside picture of the greenhouse with the all the exterior walls on it. So here it is. We've not made a lot of progress on planting in the greenhouse, but we expect that to be corrected this week. We've got some onions we are going to transplant into single 4x4 containers. We've been amazed at how much warmer the greenhouse is than outside and Amy actually has been drinking morning coffee out there. I think she really enjoys it so far. 
I made a set of growing shelves for the greenhouse today. We pulled our closet doors out (we prefer to use curtains, although right now they are just open) and they made perfect shelves. I used more of those 2x2 ballisters that we had left over out of the back shed.
Read more: Build An Attached Greenhouse. (Part III - Finishing)
Build An Attached Greenhouse. (Part II - The Frame)
/ 0
- Details
- Category: Off-Grid Living
- Published on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 04:00
- Written by seedspreader
- Hits: 736
Read more: Build An Attached Greenhouse. (Part II - The Frame)
Cooking with a Wood Cookstove.
/ 0
- Details
- Category: Off-Grid Living
- Published on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 03:24
- Written by seedspreader
- Hits: 464
Katlupe added this fine piece on cooking with woodstoves, make sure to check it out! 
Read the rest below.
* Picture from this post on Lehman's Country Living Blog. Good people at Lehmans, check them out.