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 have two containers. One holds pennies and dimes and one holds nickels, quarters, and the occasional piece of paper money that comes my way. Because I no longer carry cash (I use a credit card to make all transactions electronic), I no longer accumulate much loose change. But back in the day when I did use analog money, I would keep the amount of change I had to haul around to a minimum by depositing all but a few pieces in the change collection a couple times a week. Then every few months, while I was sitting in front of the television in the evening I would organize them into those paper rolls you get for free at the bank or credit union. At my convenience, I would carry them to the bank to convert to paper money or simply deposit them in savings.