Perch Energy: Community Solar Explained

Ecofrugality is about two things: saving money and helping the environment. In my book, doing either one of those things is good, but doing both at once is even better. And community solar, the subject of my latest piece for the Perch Energy blog, fits that category perfectly. 

When most people think about solar power, they think about individual homes with solar panels on their roofs. But rooftop solar isn't an option if you rent, or live in a condo, or have a roof that doesn't get enough sun — or, as we discovered, if your household energy usage is too low. If you live in a state with electricity deregulation, you can purchase electricity from a green power supplier instead, but you have to pay extra for it. Which seems unfair, since solar power is actually cheaper to produce than electricity from fossil fuels and most other sources, and it seems only right for those savings to go to the consumer.

Well, with community solar, they can. Basically, you buy shares in a big solar farm that's being built in your area and get your electricity from them. You can either buy an ownership share (which is like having our own solar array, except it's not on your own house) or a subscription share (which is like buying electricity from a green power supplier, except at a lower cost). So you get clean power and lower energy bills, all without the big up-front cost of installing a solar setup.

The only downside, as far as I can see, is that it's not available to everyone. There has to be a solar farm in your area that's accepting new subscribers, and you have to meet the operators' criteria (such as credit rating or total power use). But if there is a solar farm near you, it seems like a no-brainer to at least submit an application and see what happens. 

And in the course of writing this piece, I discovered that this is in fact the case for me. There's one community solar project near us with 615 kW of power still available. So I submitted an application, and according to the contract, they can sell us solar energy for up to 90% of our total power use at a 15% discount over PSE&G's prices. (For the remaining 10%, I guess we'll continue paying a slightly higher rate to North American Power. But we'll come out ahead overall.)

Want to learn more about how it works and how to get the same perks yourself? Check out the article.

Community Solar Explained: Ultimate Guide to How Community Solar Works

Money Crashers: 5 Different Types of Taxes

Not every article that I write for Money Crashers goes up here. I try to post only the ones that have at least a tangential connection to ecofrugality (which is why you're not seeing a link here to a recent post that provides, I swear, a definition of a bank. Writing this was not my idea.)

Thus, I had some doubts about whether to include this one, 5 Different Types of Taxes and How to Minimize Them. It's only loosely connected to frugality and has no obvious connection to the environment at all. 

But upon consideration, I concluded that if you want to spend your money in ways that help the environment, paying taxes isn't necessarily the best way to do that. Yes, some of your income tax dollars go toward environmental protection, but it's less than a third of a cent out of each dollar. You could do far more good by reducing your taxes and putting all the money you save, or even half of it, into carbon offsets, or donating it to Project Drawdown.

So if you'd like to spend less on taxes and more on the environment, check out the article. It covers strategies for paying less on five kinds of taxes: income tax, excise tax, sales tax, property tax, and estate tax. Chances are, you won't have to pay all five of these this year, or maybe ever. But you're sure to pay at least some of them.

Passover Recipe of the Month: Cauliflower Gnocchi

A couple of weeks ago, Brian and I were going through our annual ritual of figuring out what to cook during the eight days of Passover. This is always tricky, because our normal diet is so heavily grain-based. Eliminating bread, pasta, rice, and all other grains and grain products rules out nearly all our usual recipes. And I'm reluctant to make up too much of the difference with matzo, because that has unfortunate digestive effects. I find I'm okay if I limit myself to one square of matzo or the equivalent per day, but a steady diet of matzo brei, matzo pizzas, matzo ball soup, matzagna, and matzo brickle — no matter how tasty — just won't do.

This year, however, we had an ace up our sleeve. Stashed in the freezer were a bag of cauliflower rice and a bag of cauliflower gnocchi, both picked up on a whim at Trader Joe's and never used. In fact, Brian suggested it would probably be wise to take the opportunity to use them up, since they had been in there several months and presumably weren't getting any better. We weren't entirely sure if the gnocchi would work, since regular gnocchi contain flour as well as potatoes (and when we've tried to substitute matzo meal or tapioca starch in homemade gnocchi, it didn't go well at all). But they turned out to contain only Passover-friendly ingredients: cauliflower, cassava flour, potato starch, extra virgin olive oil, and sea salt. And since there was no egg in them either, they were perfectly suitable for a Vegan Recipe of the Month.

So, this Thursday, we gave them a try. We cooked them according to the "pan saute" method on the package: dump them still frozen into a pan with a quarter-cup of water, cover, cook on medium until the water evaporates, and then add oil and saute them until they're browned. We also added some mushrooms and onions to the pan for the frying stage, the way we do when making regular gnocchi. However, we did not add any of our fake mozzarella cheese, since it contains both tofu and nutritional yeast. (You could stretch a point and say the tofu is still okay for Passover, but no way actual yeast gets a pass.) We had purchased a pound of real mozzarella as well, an indulgence we allow ourselves during Passover, but we left that out so that it would remain vegan.

As it turns out, these cauliflower gnocchi are quite tasty. They have a chewier texture than regular gnocchi, but their flavor is pretty neutral, making a good background for the sauteed mushrooms and onions. Although they're made primarily of cauliflower, I didn't find the cauliflower flavor noticeable, at least not with all those other ingredients added. They're even quicker to fix than regular gnocchi, about 15 minutes from start to finish. And they're healthier too, with less starch and more fiber.

In fact, we both liked them so much that on our next trip to Trader Joe's, we picked up another bag and tucked it in the freezer where the old one had been. It will make a perfect emergency meal for those nights when there's not a lot of time for dinner.

Unfortunately, we didn't actually get around to using the cauliflower rice during Passover. So we'll have to come up with something to do with those in the weeks to come. Perhaps they can be the foundation of our Recipe of the Month for May.

Caging the blooms

For some years now, Brian and I have been trying to put together a nice-looking flowerbed in our front yard. Our first attempt, using a wildflower seed mix, started out looking great but turned into a big mess as the tallest flowers, the bachelor's buttons, flopped over in a storm. Then we tried a mix of perennials only, but that yielded even more disappointing results. Finally we decided to give up on seeds and fill the space with an arrangement of a few larger plants, carefully chosen to provide three-season blooms: hellebore, coreopsis, echinacea, yarrow, and sedum.

Unfortunately, this just opened up a whole new can of worms. First the flowers got munched by groundhogs, requiring us to resort to chemical warfare in the form of homemade pepper spray on the plants. Then deer went after them, leading us to install an invisible deer fence to keep them out (even though it also made it quite a bit harder for us to get in when we needed to weed or cut flowers). And after that, we discovered that the taller flowers, such as the echinacea, were having the same problem as the bachelor's buttons: once they got to a certain height, they wouldn't stand up straight.

We knew from past experience that a grid of stakes and string was unlikely to fix this problem, so we figured we'd need sturdier cages around the problem plants. On the other hand, we didn't want to make them so big and clunky that they'd draw the eye away from the flowers. So, as a compromise, we picked up $17 roll of chicken wire from Home Depot that we could form into cylinders around each plant. 

Using wire shears, Brian cut lengths of this mesh to the size needed for each cage. For the echinacea and coreopsis flowers, he used three-foot lengths to make narrow cylinders that we hope will hold the flowers more or less erect. He also cut some longer four-foot lengths to make wider cages for the big sedum plants, hoping that they would discourage the groundhogs from munching on them so he wouldn't have to spray them every week. To make the cages sturdier, he doubled the thickness by bending each sheet of mesh in half lengthwise, using a line of wire conveniently strung along the length of the mesh as a guide. Then he bent each length into a circle and folded the snipped ends of the wires over to hold it in place. 

We set these circles around the plants and pinned them down with landscaping staples, which we happened to have some of left over after tacking down the ground cloth on the slope where we planted our honeyberries. We didn't have quite enough, but Brian rummaged through the mulch on that slope until he found an extra staple he could pull out and reuse.

And here they are: five little cages for two sedum, two echinacea, and one coreopsis plant. There's one other echinacea that's still protected under a full-cover cage after being munched nearly to the ground by deer last year, and there are two more coreopsis plants that got completely obliterated and will need to be replaced. These plants will eventually need cages of their own once they get big enough, but we have plenty of wire left for that.

Visually, I think these cages work pretty well. You can make them out in the photo, but that's mainly because the plants inside haven't grown very big yet; once there's plenty of foliage in there, I think they'll more or less disappear into the background. But it remains to be seen how well they will protect the taller flowers from flopping and the shorter ones from the teeth of hungry critters. Watch this space for updates.

Money Crashers: 10 Real Estate Scams and Fake Home Buying Frauds to Watch Out For

A quick post about a Money Crashers article at least tangentially related to frugality, because it's about helping you keep more of your money in your own pocket and not in the hands of scammers. This one's about real estate scams: fake home buyers, fake home inspectors, fake rental deals, fake refinancing offers, fake movers. At every state of a real estate transaction, the con artists are circling, waiting to attack. Be prepared!

10 Real Estate Scams and Fake Home Buying Frauds to Watch Out For

  

 

Just Egg-speriments

As I observed during my 2020 vegan Thrift Week, there are three types of vegan dishes. Some, like  mujadara with eggplant, are inherently vegan. Some are simple adaptations of nonvegan dishes; you just leave out the meat in a stir-fry or the cheese in a burrito. And the third, the most complicated type, are the ones that try to mimic the flavors and textures of a nonvegan dish with a taste-alike substitute, like the not-zarella we now regularly use on pizza and pasta.

Unfortunately, these vegan substitutes have a few shortcomings. First, they usually aren't quite as good in taste and texture as the real thing. Also, if you make them yourself, they're anywhere from a little bit more work (like whipping up a batch of faux mozzarella) to a whole lot more work (like the veggie sausages we attempted that turned out to be not at all worth the effort). And while you can eliminate that problem by buying store-bought versions (such as almond milk or plant butter), they're generally more expensive than the animal products they replace — sometimes quite a bit more.

So when Just Egg, a plant-based egg substitute, first appeared in stores, Brian and I weren't in any hurry to try it. The price at our local supermarket was around $5 for a 12-ounce bottle equivalent to eight eggs, which works out to over 60 cents per "egg" — more than three times what we pay for Certified Humane eggs at Lidl. And given that real eggs have a pretty low carbon footprint as animal products go, we didn't have a real incentive to switch.

But when we came across a bottle of Just Egg at a nearby store for just $1.80 on sale, equivalent to 22.5 cents per egg, our curiosity got the better of us. We still didn't expect these plant-based eggs to become a regular addition to our diet, but we figured it was worth a couple of bucks to learn just how good a stand-in they were for actual chicken eggs.

For our first experiment, we tried them in a potato kugel. And as far as we could tell, they worked okay. The kugel stuck to the pan a bit, but it sometimes does that with real eggs too, so we couldn't necessarily blame the Just Eggs. And it was a little flatter than usual, but that could just have been because the potatoes were on the small side. The main thing the Just Eggs needed to do was hold the kugel together, and for that, they seemed to work just like the real thing.

So, emboldened by this qualified success, we decided to try the Just Eggs in a recipe that's a little more egg-forward: a sausage and apple omelet. We got this recipe from Olwen Woodier's Apple Cookbook, but it's extremely simple: just brown some sausage in a pan, add a few sliced scallions and a peeled, chopped apple, cook until tender, and serve in an omelet. We've tried it with real sausage from the Amish market, commercial veggie sausage from Gimme Lean, and Brian's Soy Curl sausage, but we never imagined it could be made without the egg. Would Just Egg be up to this challenge?

As it turns out, not quite. When Brian poured the Just Egg into a thin layer in the pan, it just stayed liquid and refused to set into an omelet-like sheet. Eventually, he had to stir it up because he was afraid it would burn on the bottom. So what we ended up with was more of a sausage and apple scramble than an omelet.

On the plus side, the Just Egg did make a very good substitute for scrambled eggs. The texture and the flavor were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. And the nutrition profile is pretty close, too: 5 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat per serving(but unsaturated fat, so it's even healthier than real eggs). It's negligible in terms of vitamins and minerals, but otherwise pretty healthful, as well as tasty and satisfying.

But given how much these non-eggs cost when they're not on sale, I hardly think the benefits are enough to justify purchasing them regularly. They can't do omelets, and if what we want is a scramble, we can make a pretty good one with plain old tofu. For baking, we do just fine with our other egg substitutes, such as soy flour and water or flaxseed. And for applications that call for a real egg — such as our chocolate pudding, which requires the egg to be separated — Lidl's free-range eggs are reasonably humane, reasonably low-carbon, and reasonably affordable.

Money Crashers: Shrinkflation Defined

OK, folks, I know a lot of my articles at Money Crashers lately have been a bit off-topic for this blog (alternatives to debt settlement, saving at the emergency room). There are some I haven't even been posting about here because they have so little connection to ecofrugality, like "What Is a Cashier’s Check and What Is It Used For?" (Yeah, fascinating topic.) But this one is genuinely useful and, I think, enjoyable to read about. The topic is shrinkflation.

Shrinkflation, if you're not familiar with the term, is inflation’s stealthier cousin. It's what you see all the time at the grocery store: the cereal box gets a few ounces lighter, the toilet paper loses half an inch from the side of each sheet, or, as in one notorious case, the Toblerone bar suddenly has a huge gap between the chunks of chocolate, but the price remains the same. 

My piece explores the causes behind shrinkflation and the sneaky tricks manufacturers use to disguise it (tweaking the shape of the package is a popular one). And I also explore the strategies that can help you detect shrinkflation and defend yourself against it, such as checking unit price, keeping a price book, and switching to other brands (including store brands). 

These techniques can't always help you sidestep higher prices. When prices are rising across the board, as they are now, sometimes there's no way to avoid paying more. But at least you'll know you're paying more, rather than just wondering why you seem to run out of cereal so much faster than before.

Shrinkflation Defined – Are Companies Tricking You Into Paying More?

One new Money Crashers article, plus a podcast mention

Just a quick post here regarding my latest Money Crashers article on emergency room costs. I've already covered the benefits of going to urgent care instead of the ER when that's an option, but when it's not, there are various ways to minimize the expense. Some are things you can do before an emergency occurs, like figuring out ahead of time which local hospitals charge least for different procedures. Some can be done during your visit, like refusing unnecessary drugs and equipment. And some are for afterward, like getting an itemized bill and checking it carefully for errors. Check them all out here: 13 Ways to Save Money at the Emergency Room (ER)

Also, the Faithful on the Clock podcast is making mention of one of my earlier articles, 7 Important Financial Tips from the Bible. Check it out if that's your jam.

Craigslist for the win

When Brian and I bought our house back in 2007, the washer and dryer were not included as part of the deal. However, the previous owner offered to sell them to us for $200. This was a decent but not outrageously good price, since they were both old Maytags that looked like they might conceivably have been with the house since it was built in the 1970s. But it was still much cheaper than buying a new set, and it saved us the hassle of shopping for and installing replacements. And, being of an ecofrugal bent, we figured it made sense to keep them as long as they were still running. 

Although these old workhorses have served us faithfully over the 15 years since, I've grown increasingly dissatisfied with their performance. The dryer, for instance, has never worked reliably on the auto-drying cycle; sometimes it shuts off when the clothes are dry, but sometimes it just keeps running until someone shuts it off. So we've had to rely on the timed cycles, which aren't always easy to gauge. The washer doesn't make this easier, since it doesn't do a great job removing all the water in the spin cycle, so the clothes usually go in still dripping. Years ago, we started routinely running a second spin cycle to remove extra moisture, which also helped the clothes dry faster when we hung them on the clothesline. But even then, they were often too wet to dry completely even in a full day on the line.

So for several years now, I've had a hankering to replace these old clunkers with newer ones. I particularly liked the idea of replacing the washer with a front-loading machine. These newer models get clothes cleaner in professional tests, are gentler on clothing, and use less water and energy (even compared with new high-efficiency top-loaders). And most of all, they spin so fast that the clothing comes out nearly dry, so we would surely have no more difficulties with line-drying. But I just couldn't justify the expense of upgrading to a new washer and dryer while the old ones were still working — and despite their annoying quirks, both machines stubbornly refused to die.

Over the course of the past few weeks, though, the quirks turned into legitimate problems. The dryer started it by suddenly starting to shake violently whenever it was fully loaded. We got around this problem by drying only half a load at a time, but we knew we'd eventually need to repair or replace it. And before I got around to calling repair people for quotes, we started having trouble with the washer too — or rather, one of its long-standing problems became more problematic. 

We'd noticed for a long time that any time we washed anything large, like sheets, they tended to come out of the washer dirtier than they went in. This problem arose because they would cover up all the drainage holes on the tub and filter the dirty water as it drained out. Usually, this wasn't too big a problem, since the lint would come during the drying cycle and end up in the dryer's lint trap. (Even line-dried laundry would always get a quick spin in the dryer on the air cycle to remove dust and pollen.) But the last load we did, the sheets looked so bad afterwards that Brian decided to run them though an entire second wash cycle by themselves, and they were still dirty. 

When I ran a search on "clothes come out of washer with lint," the Internet told me the problem was that the washer's lint trap needed cleaning. In fact, The Spruce said we should be cleaning it regularly throughout the year to keep lint at bay. Well, as far as I could recall, not only had we never once cleaned it in all the years we'd owned the machine, but I didn't think I'd ever so much as seen it. And when I checked all the places the sources said it might be — the top rim of the tub, the middle of the agitator, the end of the drainage hose — I found nothing. Brian, figuring it had to be somewhere, pried off the machine's front panel and felt around, but he still couldn't find anything. And then he couldn't figure out how to put it back on again. He finally managed it after about twenty minutes of wrestling with the thing, but by that point it was too late: I'd decided these old machines had become more trouble than they were worth. Even if they were both technically still working, they weren't working well enough for our needs.

Since ConsumerSearch no longer does in-depth product reports, I checked a few other sites, like Good Housekeeping and U.S. News, to find suitable replacements. (I focused on the washing machine, since these vary more in performance and energy use than dryers.) And here I ran into some serious sticker shock: nearly all the recommended models were over $1,000. Even the "best value" model at Good Housekeeping, an old-school top-loader, was $900. And a matching gas dryer would probably add another $1,000. (Electric ones typically cost about $100 less, but switching from gas to electric would require us to install a new 220-volt outlet — and since our circuit board is pretty full already, that might in turn require us to rewire the entire panel, which would cost more than the washer and dryer together.)

So I decided to take a quick look on Craigslist just to see if there was anything suitable there. And luck was with me: a post had gone up that very day for a front-loading washer and a matching gas dryer for a mere $300. The post said they were 7 or 8 years old and still working "great," but were being replaced because their kids had bought them a new set for Christmas. Of course, we'd have to rent a truck to pick them up and haul them home, but even with that extra expense, they'd still cost much, much less than a new set.

I knew that at that price, we'd need to move fast to get our hands on these appliances before someone else snapped them up. Unfortunately, we couldn't pick them up that very day, as we already had a commitment to be somewhere else in the afternoon. So I replied to the post asking if they were still available and offering to come get them on Sunday afternoon. At first, the poster hedged, saying he was tired of dealing with scam calls and lowball offers, so "The first person who puts cash in my hand gets them." In other words, we were welcome to rent a truck and drive over, but he couldn't promise the machines would still be there when we arrived. I made a counteroffer: If he would let us drive down tomorrow and confirm they were suitable, we would pay him on the spot, provided he would then hold the machines for us to come pick up later in the week. I added that we would also require a written contract saying that he had sold the machines to us and would not sell them to someone else later. At that point, he agreed to "go out on a limb" and hold the machines for us until today.

Getting the new washer and dryer here was, admittedly, a bit of an undertaking. First, Brian got the old washer and dryer disconnected and pulled out of the way to make room for the new ones. Then we rented a truck and an appliance dolly from the U-Haul just outside of town. Then we drove down to Hamilton and checked the machines to make sure they worked. Then, with the previous owner helping, we loaded first the dryer and then the washer onto the dolly, hauled them up the steps and out the milk doors leading out of the basement, hefted them onto the truck, and strapped them down. Then, after driving home, we had to repeat the process in reverse, now with just me and Brian: maneuvering the giant boxes off the truck, onto the dolly, down the steps into the back yard (with the aid of the ramp Brian built for our patio project), and into the laundry room, where we manhandled (and womanhandled) them into place. And since we had the dolly, we took advantage of it to haul the old washer and dryer out of the basement and up to the driveway, close enough to the curb to be pushed out there on the next trash day. (Fortunately, these old monsters contain no electronic components, so they don't need to be treated as hazardous e-waste.)

So, all in all, the process of deciding to buy, finding, buying, and transporting our new washer and dryer took up most of this weekend, and we still need to get them hooked up. But it also cost us a mere $429 total: $300 for the machines, $109 for the truck rental, and $20 worth of gas. That's less than one-quarter of what we'd have paid for new ones, and a more eco-friendly purchase to boot. (A new washer and dryer might have been a little bit more efficient than these 7-year-old models, but surely not so much more as to offset the environmental costs of manufacturing them.)

In short, we have confirmed yet again that Craigslist is the best place to shop for our home needs. The price is right, and shopping secondhand is the right choice for the planet. And if it requires more physical labor, well, we could probably use the exercise anyway.