Tag Archives: frugal

Save Water – Shower With A Bucket!

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Shortly after moving into our new-to-us 1954 single family Cape we of course started discovering issues. One was that the water pipes inside the house were all only half-inch diameter – smaller than more modern houses.The result is that in order to get sufficiently warm water for my 6am 2nd floor shower I must run the shower for up to a minute or more before I dare to step in.

One feature I like is the older 3.5 gallon size toilet – even though modern low-flow toilets use only 1.5 gallons per flush I found myself needing to snake through clogs in the ones we installed in our old house at least once a month.

But after a full 3-month water billing cycle showed we were using the maximum amount in the lowest price tier (up to 15 CCF per cycle – “CCF” = Cento Cubic Feet = 748 gallons per CCF) I decided to work on offsetting the inefficient toilet and shower routines.

By implementing a few small changes to my bathroom routine, in the first week I cut my net water use in half, saving nearly 100 gallons! Here’s how:

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Check What Amazon Is Selling You

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[I previously posted this information on my Facebook Page – it was quite popular so adding it to my blog during holiday shopping season seems relevant.]

I keep some items in my Amazon account’s “saved for later” queue when I don’t need them immediately but know I will want later. This was the case for the best-priced listing of 24-count box of Duracell Procell AA batteries.

battery

When I next decided I needed more batteries I logged into my Amazon account, went to the “saved for later” area, and in the batteries listing clicked “move to cart.” Fortunately before I clicked “buy” I looked at the item in the cart and realized it was NOT the box from a non-Amazon vendor for $11.44+free shipping, but instead was an Amazon Prime vendor for $1 more!

I do have Amazon Prime, but the Prime-eligible items are not always the best deal even with its free 2-day shipping. And as far as I know there is no editable setting which instructs Amazon to alter non-Prime choices to Prime. In fact, when looking at an item’s description they will sometimes tell me there is a non-Prime seller with a better price or quicker delivery.

I deleted the item from my cart and tried the move a couple more times – the same thing happened: the item as it appeared in “saved for later” was not what was in my cart once I clicked “move to cart.”

The solution I found was to leave the unwanted, more expensive choice in my cart – THEN I was able to go to the less expensive item’s listing, add it to my cart, and after that delete the unwanted one from the cart and purchase the wanted version.

So always double-check that the item in your cart is from the seller with the price that you chose!

Raw Vegetable and Fruit Juicing At Home – Part 1

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“Juicing” (raw vegetables and fruit, not athletes on steroids!) has been a health tactic-verging-into-diet-fad for some years, and lately has gotten a lot of press. Many supermarkets now carry commercial brands of juices and smoothies, plus juice bars and shops sell everything from just-pressed juice to entire regimens of delivered juices and fasting support.

Personally I’m not big on “fasting” or “cleansing” to extremes – but I’m not great about eating enough vegetables. I also wasn’t interested in paying up to $10 for 16 ounces of juice!

About 7 years ago I bought a cheap juicer, but it was such a pain to use and clean that I put it on a shelf and eventually gave it away. Recently a Facebook friend posted about using her old but reliable Omega juicer, which got me interested in researching what machines were available and easier to use regularly. I was willing to spend more to get a better performing juicer after calculating the the cost savings if I were to have two 16-oz servings of juice per day:

2/day = 14/week – at a local juice business’ prices the cost is $133-140 per week.

vs

A $250 juicer plus $30/week in organic vegetables/fruit from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s brings me out ahead of store-bought in just 3 weeks!

Yes, I could buy much cheaper juice products at the local grocery, but when you read the labels of those you will find they lean heavily on fruit juices and can have total sugar content the same as or higher than a can of Coke!

In this post I’ll describe the various types of juicers – a future post will cover how I’m using mine.

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Friday Faves 01-25-13

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Some fun items:

For my donation to the Indiegogo campaign for Lunar Labyrinth (still 6 days to go!) I got one of two available custom flasks. That reward point is now closed – BUT if you would like to have a nicely hand-painted steel flask, great for water or any 8 oz of liquid you might want to stash in your hip pocket (great for places that want to sell you a bottle of water for $5!)  check out John King’s site:

 

If you are wondering about what evidence, if any, exists for using a particular supplement for a specific medical use, check out this chart visualizing study results for various supplements.

 

If you don’t use a lot of data/text/voice time on your phone, or it varies so much that paying $100/month for a large amount of minutes that don’t roll over, check out Ting, who offers a plan that automatically charges you for whatever tier of service you actually use in a particular monthly period, even if you signed up for a higher tier.

 

If you like classic movies shown in old moviehouses, consider supporting Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre so that they can update their projectors (since the film distributors are going all-digital, even for old films) and their heating/cooling system: