funny

Since I can’t save at the gas pump ($51 yesterday for a Costco fill-up that recently cost $38!), maybe I can retrieve a few bucks from the swimming pool pump.

The Feds say you can save as much as 60% on your pool’s electric bill simply by cutting back the number of hours you run the pump. Well, I’ll believe that when I see the statement (and don’t see sheets of algae growing on the walls)…but I’m willing to give it a try. It sez here:

Pool pumps often run much longer than necessary. Circulating your pool’s water keeps the chemicals mixed and removes debris. However, as long the water circulates while chemicals are added, they should remain mixed. It’s not necessary to recirculate the water everyday to remove debris, and most debris can be removed using a skimmer or vacuum. Furthermore, longer circulation doesn’t necessarily reduce the growth of algae. Instead, using chemicals in the water and scrubbing the walls are the best methods.

Reduce your filtration time to 6 hours per day. If the water doesn’t appear clean, increase the time in half-hour increments until it does. In the Florida study, most people who reduced pumping to less than 3 hours per day were still happy with the water’s quality. On average, this saved them 60% of their electricity bill for pumping.

Hmm. I’ve always gone by the advice that six hours a day is the least you can run a pool pump without getting green water, and you need to run it longer in 100-degree heat, when the pool water turns bathtub-warm. It’s hard to believe that you could get away with three hours in Florida—though maybe so, in the winter.

I do cut back the hours to six in the wintertime, to no ill effect. Right now it’s set to run about seven hours. Let’s try shifting it back down to six for a week; then try five. It may mean you’d have to keep the chlorine level too high to swim safely, which is no trade-off. But if the system will stay stable with normal chemical levels and fewer pumping hours, bully!

Comments from iWeb site:

2 Comments

Mrs. Micah

Good luck with that. My dad co-owned a house with a pool before he got married and he told us it was just too expensive to consider.

Saturday, April 26, 2008 – 12:26 PM

vh

Thanks to my rabid neighbor, costs of running the pool have been well within reason. Because he destroyed the entire system, my homeowner’s insurance paid to replaster the pool and install a new filter and pool cleaner, saving me about $10,000. It will be many years before any of that work has to be redone.

Meanwhile, I do the routine maintenance myself–it’s really easy. Costs of pool chemicals are modest, especially if you buy in bulk, and a comparison of power bills between this house and my last house, which was the same size but didn’t have a pool, suggests the cost of running the pump is about $15 a month. I’ve never paid more than $150 for a pool technician’s visit; most of the time a service call is $80.

None of this (so far) has been unaffordable. And I enjoy the pool so much, the costs to date have been worth it.

Sunday, April 27, 2008 – 08:08 AM

One element in the Month of (not-so)Extreme Frugality involves the experiment of navigating the house after dark by candlelight.

This requires me to dig up some candles and to figure out how to use them to best effect.

I have a number of pillar candles. Some are scented. Personally, I dislike the odor of scented candles. However: the late Walt the Greyhound had, as most greyhounds do, a bit of a flatulence problem. The methane could get pretty thick in the house, especially when the air-conditioning was going and I couldn’t open doors and windows. One way I coped with that was by burning off the gas with flares-that is, candles. Perfumed candles stank less than Walt, and so I would pick up pillars on sale at places like Cost Plus and Pier One for use in the living room and bedroom.

The problem is, pillars don’t put out much light. In terms of candle-power, they’re not much better than a plug-in night light. They’ll do to keep you from stubbing your toe on the coffee table, but you can’t read by them.

Tapers, however, do work quite well for the purpose. In the candle drawer, I have eight tapers, plus the two stubs in the outdoor candle-holders that have resided on the back porch all winter. These aren’t gunna last a month. How to buy candles without spending more than the CFLs would run up on the electric bill?

There’s an Ikea down the freeway from the university, halfway to Tucson. They have candles, very cheap. I’ll drive over there some time in the next couple of weeks and buy a box or two. A round trip to Tempe costs $7; add another dollar or so for driving almost to Chandler. In yard sales, candles can be had for pennies, but that also requires you to spend gas driving around town. I could make them with beeswax, an easy project that produces candles free of ingredients from the chemistry lab.

Burning Gas to Burn Wax?

In green terms, I’m now beginning to have doubts about this candle scheme. While it may or may not be frugal for an individual—depending on how high the Salt River Project racks up our electric rates and how cheaply you can get your hands on candles—burning wax and string release carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. If everybody is burning candles every night, will this not consume more energy and release more greenhouse gasses than generating electricity at a central plant, where smokestack washers or hydroelectric power control the per-capita release of gasses?

What’s the carbon footprint of a candle? It takes heat to melt wax and power to run assembly lines and make dyes and perfumes, plus the raw materials have to be hauled to factories and the finished products delivered to market-probably from overseas. Even so-called “beeswax” sold in craft stores probably is not: how do you think they get those colors in beeswax sheets? It doesn’t come out of the hive colored pale blue. The stuff must simply be factory-made wax melted, colored, and poured into molds to produce hexagonally patterned sheets.

Now let us consider the dollar costs for the individual. Beeswax to make your own candles is pretty expensive, even when ordered on the Web. One outfit sells wick at 10 cents a yard or $50 for a spool, and sheet beeswax at $1.75 a sheet, or $35 for 20 sheets. One sheet makes two candles, so DIY beeswax candles would cost you about a buck apiece ($1.75/2 + 5 cents = 97 cents, not counting gas to drive to the craft store or shipping for an online order).

I estimate my use of electricity to run lights at not more than $20 a month. The power bill was $80 last month, when all that drew power was the pool pump, the refrigerator, the lights, the toaster, an occasional use of the oven, once-a-week use of the bread mixer and the washer and dryer. The pool pump costs about $20 to $40 a month to run. The refrigerator allegedly runs around $13 a month. I can’t find figures for the clothes washer that don’t figure in the cost of heating water; I use cold water and I rarely wash more than two loads a week. The cost must be around five or ten bucks a month, max. Assuming the pump costs $40 a month (on the high side, I believe) and the electric cost of the laundry is $10, the cost of lights and small appliances would be $17 a month. Let’s say the oven, toaster, and breadmaker cost about $10 a month; that would leave $7 for the lights.

If a typical beeswax candle cost a dollar, you’d burn through seven bucks with seven candles, far from enough to last a month. Twelve economy tapers cost $11.50, plus $6.50 shipping, or a $1.53 apiece. Here, too, if you use tapers for lighting and not just for atmosphere, you’ll burn though those fairly fast. Even if the pool cost $30 a month and the lights are running $17, the cost of candles to light your house for 31 evenings could easily add up to around $30, significantly more than the cost of electricity.

So, unless you go to bed at dusk, chances are you’d spend significantly more on candles than you would on CFLs, which are said to cost $12 for 10,000 hours, including the cost of the bulb. That’s around a penny an hour. While it’s true that CFLs contain mercury and require fuel to make and transport, just what kind of chemicals are in a candle?

It looks to me like an individual would do a lot better to simply turn off the lights in all rooms that are unoccupied and use a single CFL bulb to navigate each room that is occupied.

I just cleaned 1,860 square feet of flooring without using more than a microtherm of natural gas to heat a pail of water…in one hour flat! Not only that, but laydeez and gents, that floor is CLEAN!

One idea for the Month of (not-so-)Extreme Frugality was to sweep the floors—which are tile throughout the house—with a broom, not with the big Panasonic vacuum cleaner or the little Eureka vac-broom. Then to carry through with the remaining two routine steps of floor-cleansing: dust-mopping and wet-mopping.

Dog hair, for those of you who have never had the privilege of living with a dog that thinks it’s a sheep, gathers on hard floors in balls and piles up in dunes. Unlike sand, though, dog dunes drift on the breeze, especially the breeze from a vacuum cleaner motor. So, absent a very practiced technique, vacuuming the hair-strewn floor usually causes the dog dunes to go airborne, floating up the walls and drifting in disintegrating clouds across the room, to settle behind doors and sofas at some later time.

Not so with a straw broom.

Brushing up the wads of dog hair and the small stones, leaves, and skiffs of dirt the dog and the humans tracked in proved to be very easy and very fast. And less back-breaking than usual: though I did have to bend down to sweep mounds into the dust pan, I didn’t have to yank out and re-plug a stubborn electrical cord in every room, hold the cord off the floor and dodge around it, or struggle with attachments. So there actually was less bending and wrestling than with a vacuum cleaner, and because the broom refrained from blowing dog hair into the air, it worked more efficiently. Plus a broom weighs far less than a vacuum cleaner or even an electric broom.

Normally it takes 45 minutes or so to vacuum the whole house, and by the time that’s done, I’m tired. Brooming the floor took a fraction of that time. By the time I finished dust-mopping (which has to be done after vacuuming, too, because the vacuum doesn’t lift the fine pieces of dirt, and the dog hair resettles onto the floor), I had hardly broken a sweat! Wet-mopping an entire houseful of tile is never fun, but it’s a lot less miserable when you don’t start the job already pooped out.

I started around 3:30, spent some time chatting on the phone with the pool dude, and finished at 4:30 sharp, still feeling reasonably fresh despite the warmth of the season’s first summerish day.

This seconds my opinion of installing hard floors as one of my most cost-effective renovations. Not only are they easier to clean than carpets and way cheaper in the long run (because they never have to be professionally cleaned or replaced), in day-to-day use they’re cheaper, too: you can clean the entire house without ever using any electric power!

If Anna H. Banana were not having a little stench issue in her old age, I wouldn’t have had to use hot water for mopping, either. So, those of us who can restrain ourselves from taking in pets could, in theory, keep a house floored entirely in tile, concrete, or wood clean and sanitary without ever expending a watt, an ohm, or a therm.