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Frugality

When DIY doesn’t save much

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In theory, my pool needs to be drained and refilled. Over time, hard-water particulates and chemicals build up in pool water, especially in Arizona low desert, where hard, salty water is now piped in from the Central Arizona Project.

I’ve resisted this for a year, since I’m always skeptical when someone comes up with an extra way to take my money away from me. However, it’s pretty clear they’re right: a band of white hard-water scale keeps building up on the tiles. Though it will wash off with in a hard spray from the hose, that job is a hassle under the best of circumstances and mighty unpleasant in the winter, when the air is cold.

Cost of the job is generally estimated at $200. An alternative to draining and refilling is to have a company come around with a gigantic filter in a truck and spend the day filtering the entire 18,000 gallons. That also costs $200. One way or the other, I figure I’d better get this done before my monthly income drops to half of its current munificent flow.

So. This morning I call Leslie’s. Their CSR quotes a price of $95.

Izzat so? say I.

Well…yes, but: the $95 is just to have a guy come over here with a pump, drop it in, and turn it on. I could do that myself, and I’ll bet the rental would be a darn sight less than ninety-five bucks. No chemicals, no start-up, no nothin’ else is included. I ask how much the chemicals would be. He doesn’t know: you have to go to your local Leslie’s store to find that one out.

I call Swimming Pool Service and Repair, the outfit that rebuilt my pool after it was vandalized. Alyssa, their longtime despatcher, says it’s $185 to drain, refill, and restart the pool. That includes the chlorine, stabilizer, and acid, and yes, they do the entire job for you.

Back on the phone, this time to the local Leslie’s outlet. How much for the chemicals to restart 18,000 gallons of pool water?

Well. It’s $36 a gallon for the “conditioner” (which I take to mean stabilizer but am not sure), and you need two gallons. Then you need the shock treatment, for which he did not quote an amount but which I know to cost a little over $8, plus the usual 8.3% sales tax. So now we’re up to $86.64, and we haven’t paid for acid, which I happen to have on hand and which he doesn’t think will be needed anyway but which we know will be needed because CAP water tends to the basic. So for a mostly DIY project, I’d pay at least $182, compared to $185 to have someone who knows what he’s doing come and do the whole job for you.

Factor into the equation that if you dork with the chemicals yourself and mess it up, it’s your problem; if a pool company applies the chemicals and something goes awry, they’ll come and fix it.

Interesting play on consumer psychology. Leslie’s strategy of having you buy and pour in the chemicals leads you to assume that you’ll save money by doing part of the job—probably the most difficult part, we might add, given that these caustic compounds need to be applied carefully and in the right order. Consider the advantages to Leslie’s:

• Leslie’s collects $95 for about a half-hour of an employee’s time and the wear & tear on one submersible pump.

• Leslie’s sells you the chemicals at the retail price instead of including them, at wholesale, as part of the job.

• Because the consumer does most of the work, Leslie’s doesn’t have to pay an employee to do the entire job and do it right.

• Leslie’s escapes any liability for incorrect application of chemicals—the company doesn’t have to stand behind the quality of work done when it does no work.

• The consumer, after paying the full retail price for the chemicals, assumes all responsibility and liability for their use.

By the time taxes are paid on the Swimming Pool Service and Repair bid, their fee comes to about $195. In the best-case scenario (which experience suggests is never the likeliest scenario), Leslie’s underbids Swimming Pool Service and Repair by about $13, but I end up doing all the work, and I get no warranty or service support whatsoever.

Makes that extra thirteen bucks sound like a bargain, doesn’t it?

Rent-a-solar-panel

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In this month’s Scientific American, writer Christopher Mims reports that a few enterprising businessmen have figured out a way around the daunting cost of installing solar panels on private homes: don’t buy the things—rent them.

It’s a brilliant idea. Here in Arizona, where a cloudy day is so rare as to elicit excited news reports from local television stations, the one thing that keeps people from covering their rooftops with silicon is the breathtaking expense. My electrician, who solarized his own home, said it would cost $30,000 to switch my house to solar power. It nets out to around $17,000 after various government rebates. But still…

That’s a lot of $300 summer power bills, and, as much as I’d dearly love to get off the grid, it’s way more than I can afford pay for a principle.

One of these outfits, SolarCity, proposes to install the panels on your home for nothing and lease you the equipment. The combination of a reduced power bill and the monthly lease payment represents a significant savings on your power company’s bill (or so it is claimed). And SolarCity points out that on average power companies have been jacking up the cost of electricity about 5 percent every year, so if you lock in your rate with a several-year-long lease agreement, your effective savings increase at 5 percent a year.

In a slightly different spin on this idea, SunRun, a company based in San Francisco and serving Northern California, charges around $1,000 up front and then sells you the power. Power costs, we are told, should be less than or about the same as your power company’s, but one way or the other, you get that comforting self-righteous feeling of powering your home with “clean” solar energy. It would be good to know what’s involved in the large-scale manufacture of solar panels and their ancillary equipment, but for the nonce we won’t look too hard at that issue.

Apparently a number of cities and states are also experimenting with ways to make retrofitting your home affordable, and many will provide rebates for residents who install various kinds of energy-efficient devices. Mims reports that Berkeley and Boulder will lend homeowners enough to pay for solar panels and installation, allowing them to repay the loan over 20 years as part of their property tax bill. There’s no sign of these programs at either city’s site, and so it’s impossible to tell whether such programs, if they exist at all, would save you anything month to month.

At this time, the cost of rooftop solar still exceeds the cost of buying power from a local utility. For me, that’s the bottom line: my summer bills are already way more than I can afford, and they never will go down. I don’t like leasing, which resonates of debt payment. And I’m certainly not going to lock myself into another $30,000 worth of debt slavery to install my own system. But I might put those compunctions aside for a no-money-down arrangement that would guarantee lower power bills than what I pay now.

Unclear what happens if you sell your house while you’re in the middle of a lease with an outfit like SolarCity. It would not be good if you had to pay the whole cost of the solar array out of the proceeds of the sale.To recover it, you’d have to jack up the sale price about 30 grand—good luck with that, anytime in the foreseeable future! Since yours would be the name on the lease, transferring the monthly payments to the buyers would be problematic: if they default, you could end up having to pay for their power until the lease expires.

What’s your take on this? Would you lease a solar power system from a private company?

Living within your means is good for the economy

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This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine ran a letter to the editor by Economics Professor John Lunn and Accountancy Assistant Professor Martha LaBarge, both of Hope College, Michigan. The letter comments on Paul Krugman’s article in the September 6, 2009 edition, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”

In their letter, they note that historically, some “bubbles” never led to recessions, and they add this interesting remark:

The market system works well most of the time. Perhaps a key factor affecting whether a shock to the system or even “irrational exuberance” leads to a serious recession is the level of buffer stocks held by households and firms. When savings exist and debt levels are not inordinately high, the economy adjusts to a shock. But when debt levels are high and savings low, the bursting of bubbles in houses and equities can turn into a severe recession. (My emphasis)

How much more dead on target can you get?

This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say for lo! these many months: living within your means, refraining from purchasing objects and services that you don’t really need, and staying out of debt not only do not harm the economy, as steady long-term habits they actually benefit the economy.

A major contributing factor to the late (we hope), great deprecession was that far too many Americans took on far more debt than they could repay. Innocent of the potential consequences of the many questionable loans that were offered, people were led to pay more than properties were worth through loans whose ballooning payments they couldn’t hope to cover even if they had not lost their jobs. Not only that, but they were up to their schnozzes in credit-card debt and car loans.

Had the average man and woman on the street taken a more realistic view of their lifestyles, had they been spending no more than they earned, had they restricted borrowing to instruments whose terms and balances they could reasonably handle and to lenders that do not charge usurious rates, had they been setting aside adequate funds in savings, even the run-up and collapse in housing prices might not have pushed the economy into a recession as profound as the one we’ve been experiencing.

This brings me back to my basic thesis: Frugal living is not just the responsible thing to do. Frugal living is patriotic.

Image: Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Penny-wise and pound-foolish!

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SwimmingPool

Leslie’s Pools had an in-store special offer of 50 percent off any pool service, including the routine filter cleaning. Naturally, I couldn’t resist that one, and so this morning Bob the Wonderful Leslie’s Guy showed up to do the job.

You may recall that last April, I got peeved at Leslie’s because they’d jacked up their price on DE filter service and tacked on a “trip charge,” a gratuitous insult when gasoline prices were lower than they’d been in the past two years. So I called on Adam, a neighbor who advertises that he’s in the pool servicing business, to come over and clean out the diatomaceous-earth filter. He did the job for Leslie’s pre-hike price, and since he could walk to my house there was no absurd trip charge. Not only that, but he used his own DE instead of dumping mine in there.

Ohhhkayyyy….  That looked, on the surface, like a positive development.

A few weeks later I had to have the pressure gauge replaced. Adam had jammed it back onto the pump cattywampus, and with the action of opening and closing the relief valve during the almost daily debris-cleaning activities, it had cracked. That cost $133.31.

Dumb tax!

And that’s not all. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has been sluggish to the point of torpor. He barely crawls around the bottom; normally he zips around like some sort of berserk ferret in there, and often climbs up the walls and tries to get out. The swimming-through-molasses act has been going on for a very long time (like…since last April, maybe?), and no amount of backwashing and trips to the Leslie’s pool-cleaner vet have helped.

Well, so Bob the WLG, having already complained that it wasn’t very long ago that I had the thing cleaned out so he didn’t see why it should need to be cleaned again, hauls the filter innards out to the alley and takes the thing apart.

It was totally clogged. Bob speculated that Adam hadn’t bothered to disassemble and clean the parts individually, but had simply set the whole lash-up in the alley and sprayed it off with the hose. Since it didn’t take Adam long to do the job, that’s probably a fair guess.

Dumb tax surcharge? Hours of physical work for the Happy Homeowner. I’ve been out there for a good hour almost every morning through this godforsaken record-breaking hot summer, just trying to keep the pool from turning green. I’ve had to clean up dust and debris manually, day in and 115-degree day out, because Harvey was effectively nonfunctional.

So that’s what happens when you get cheap and hire an unknown quantity instead of a provider with a known track record, just to save five or ten bucks.

one of these

=

a bunch of these

£££££

Image: Proof-quality Lincoln penny, public domain, Wikipedia Commons

What IS frugality?

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Every now and again, a blogger agonizes over whether frugal habits lead to cheapness—or worse, will be perceived by friends and relatives as miserliness. Beyond Paycheck to Paycheck ruminates, to entertaining effect, on the wacky ideas people have about personal finance and frugality. True frugality, IMHO, does not mean asceticism, tightness, or pathological self-deprivation. So, what really is a healthy, productive frugality?

Frugality is. . .

• Independence

The frugalist knows better than to jump off a cliff just because all the other sheep do it.

• Freedom

Not until you’ve paid off your last penny of debt are you truly free to work where you please, to choose an occupation that remunerates you in something more meaningful than cash, or not to work at all.

• Common sense

True frugality recognizes the difference between penny-wise and pound-foolish.

• Charity

What goes around comes around. Over at Gather Little by Little, GLBL has been trying to explain the importance of giving for a while.

• Living light on the land

Frugality by its nature is “green.” Frugalists neither waste nor want…nor do they accumulate junk. So frugal habits tend to preserve resources of all kinds.

• Goal-setting

Pinching pennies for no other purpose than to pile up pennies is a miser’s habit. Frugal people save money for specific reasons: to get out of debt and stay out of it; to send the kids to college; to take a dream vacation; to buy a house; to accrue an emergency fund; to finance a secure retirement.

• Self-discipline

The frugal person stays on track toward the goal.

• Organization

Frugal people keep track of their finances and other aspects of their lives.

• Ambition

Frugality is self-motivation to do better in life as well as in personal finances.

• Minimalism

Frugal people furnish their lives with only what they need or truly appreciate.

• Love

Frugalists work to build a better life for those they care about: born or unborn, found or yet to be found.

• Faith

. . . in a better future.

Jamaica Sunrise, Adam L. Clevenger, Wikipedia Commons

Funny knocks off Paul’s geeky air-conditioner

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If you haven’t seen Seattle’s best answer to a heat wave, check out Paul’s guide to how to make your own air conditioner, complete with detailed photos, over at Fiscal Geek.

It being hotter than a three-dollar cookstove here in lovely uptown Arizona just now, I decided the damped-down central HVAC $y$tem needed a little boost along these lines. Copper tubing is beyond my girlie handyperson skills, though…also beyond my level of industry, in 115-degree heat.

But a fan: I have a fan. It’s parked on my desk, where it blows directly on me, especially during the afternoon, when 82 degrees at the hall thermostat translates to about 90 degrees in the back bedroom that is my office.  And down on the bottom of the deep freezer I happen to have an old gallon orange-juice bottle, filled with frozen water. That’s ice, for the nonengineers among us.

Not only that, but I have Arizona folkways. The old buzzards used to say (long before I was an old buzzard myself) that before the advent of refrigeration, the few hardy Phoenicians brave enough (or poor enough) to spend the summer in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun would stay cool by hanging wet towels over the cages of electric fans. This always sounded a little apocryphal to me…how did they survive electrocution, in the era of ungrounded plugs? But who am I to question my elders, eh?

So, I decided to try a couple of adaptations to Paul’s schema. These would rely on only one electrical device—the fan—rather than a fan and an aquarium pump, and would not require any manly tools to construct.

First, we have the Old Frontier version of swamp air conditioning.

This thing, in case you don’t recognize it right off the bat, is the rack that comes with a clothes dryer, on which you’re supposed to lay out flat stuff and tennis shoes to be dried, tumble-free. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve finally found a use for it.

And this? A wet rag. Actually, it’s a wet flour-sacking type kitchen towel.

The clothes dryer rack is clunky enough that it almost stands on edge by itself. Conveniently, though, our abbreviated five-foot shelf of reference works resides atop the desk, right next to the fan’s summertime abode.

This allowed me to prop the rack against a couple of the books, a maneuver that stood the rack up steadily enough to tolerate the wet rag without falling over and keeps the wet rag from contacting the electric fan. Just in case, though, I laid a section of the New York Times on the desktop, underneath the rack and its damp covering.

Then it was just a matter of…yes! turning on the fan!

Thar she blows!
Thar she blows!

This invention works best when the fan is set to full blast. At lower speeds, the wet towel, even though its fabric is pretty lightweight, blocks the air flow enough to leave you wondering what happened to the breeze.

The effect is…well…a bit swampy. Gives you some insight into why our City Grandparents decamped to the high country every summer.

Moving on… The first attempt with a plastic-encased block of ice looked like this:

Knowing the frozen bottle would sweat in the heat and suspecting its lid would leak, I put a cookie sheet (girlie tool) underneath it. Further concerned that the cold and possible condensation under the aluminum sheet could damage the fine surface of my superb cut-rate on-sale desk, I set a trivet under the bottle. This, I figured, would allow air to flow under the cold object, as well as around and over it.

In a later version, I put the trivet beneath the cookie sheet. This provided better balance. The slippery bottle, unevenly inflated as the water inside expanded while freezing, wanted to skid off the trivet; this arrangement proved a lot more stable. The aesthetic is tidier, too:

And how do these schemes work? Well, I’d say the ice block strategy is marginally more efficient than a wet towel on a fan. Interestingly, the ice block scheme cools better as the water inside melts and the plastic jug’s exterior sweats a layer of water. Probably the cooling effect comes from the water’s evaporation. In either lash-up, the fan has to be set on high to create any noticeable cooling effect.

IMHO, the effect is much enhanced by the application of ice to bourbon and water.