Is there an app for ecofrugality?

There are all kinds of useful tools to support an ecofrugal lifestyle. In some of my Thrift Week series, for instance, I've discussed my favorite ecofrugal books, websites, and recipes. Now that I've finally entered the 21st century and acquired a smartphone, I've realized I should add apps to the list as well. 

Over the past year, I've tested out several apps that looked like they could be handy for ecofrugal folks. As it turned out, most of them weren't all that useful for me, but that doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't be for you. It all depends on where you live and what you want your ecofrugal life to look like—something that, as I've noted before, will vary from person to person.

Ecofrugal App #1: Buy Nothing

For over 15 years, Brian and I have been avid users of Freecycle. We use it mostly to get rid of stuff we no longer need, but we've also acquired a variety of useful items through the site, from a bicycle to, literally, the kitchen sink. So when I started hearing about another giveaway network called the Buy Nothing Project, I figured it would be worthwhile to check it out. 

When I first learned about the Buy Nothing Project, around 2021, it existed mostly on Facebook. There were thousands of local Buy Nothing groups across the country and around the world where people could offer or request items from each other, just as they do on Freecycle. However, the organization had recently developed its own app and was encouraging people to migrate their groups onto that platform. So when I decided to give Buy Nothing a shot, I downloaded the app and signed up for the nearest group in my area. 

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit of a wasteland. Practically no one ever posted anything on the site, and only a few people seemed to be using it at all. Eventually, I figured out that most people in my area were ignoring the app and continuing to post on the local Facebook group. So I joined the group, which I now check whenever I happen to be on Facebook, and deleted the app. 

Verdict: For me, the Buy Nothing app was not at all useful. The Facebook group is somewhat more so; it gets a lot more traffic, and I occasionally see an offer for something that I might be able to use or a request for something I might be able to provide. But so far, I have never actually obtained or donated anything via the group. The local Freecycle group, which is considerably larger and busier, remains my go-to site for disposing of excess stuff. But your mileage, naturally, may vary. It's quite possible that your area has a bustling Buy Nothing community, either on Facebook or on the app, and nobody at all on Freecycle. So check out both to decide whether either one, or both, is worth your time.

Ecofrugal App #2: Faircado

I can't remember exactly where I first heard about the Faircado app and browser extension. I may have seen it mentioned in a newsletter or just happened to run across a mention of it online. In any case, the idea behind it struck me as a sound one: make it easier for people to find secondhand clothing by popping up listings for used versions of items they shop for online. Since I do most of my online shopping on my computer rather than my phone, I installed the Firefox browser extension rather than the app.

Over the next few months, the add-on appeared to be working as designed. That is, whenever I visited a clothing store online, it would dutifully pop up a list of suggestions for secondhand alternatives to whatever I was looking at. Unfortunately, these suggestions were generally not useful for me, and for a very specific reason: the company that runs Faircado is based in Germany. Consequently, most of the secondhand garments it found for me were listed on European sites. Shipping them to the U.S. would have more than doubled their price (not to mention their carbon footprint). The extension did pop up a few items from U.S. sellers, but there was no way to filter the list to see only those items. Eventually, I got frustrated and removed the browser extension.

Verdict: This app was not useful for me, and I don't think it would be for other U.S. shoppers. I'll keep an eye on the Faircado website to see if it ever rolls out a "search by location" feature, and if it does, perhaps I'll consider reinstalling it.

Ecofrugal App #3: Too Good to Go

I learned about the Too Good to Go app from the Washington Post's Climate Coach column. Its purpose is to help grocery stores and eateries dispose of perishable food they have left at the end of the day, rather than sending it to the landfill to produce methane. You can use the app to purchase a "surprise bag" of leftovers from a nearby establishment. The prices are fairly low—in my area, they typically range from $4 to $6—but you never know exactly what you're going to get for that amount. Consequently, it's hard to evaluate whether you're getting a good deal or not. Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances.

Columnist Michael Coren says he "fed [his] family for days" using food salvaged from the trash with the help of this and a similar app called Flashfood. The business model for Flashfood sounded a bit more useful to me: Coren called it "a discount grocery shelf" from which you can select fresh produce and other perishables at up to 50 percent off the original price. But unfortunately, when I consulted the Flashfood website, it said it didn't have any participating stores in my area. So I decided to give To Good to Go a try instead. 

I downloaded the free app and found that there were several local establishments signed up on it, but they were mostly bakeries and pizza places. That didn't look too useful for us, since Brian makes all our pizza and baked goods from scratch—probably for less than it would cost to buy from the app. There was only one nearby grocery store signed up on the app: the George Street Co-Op in New Brunswick, which offers up bags of its worse-for-wear organic produce for $4 at the end of each day. The problem is that you have to order your bag after 5pm and come to pick it up between 7pm and 8pm. That's not a very convenient hour for us to head out for a walk of around 45 minutes each way, particularly in the wintertime. So to take advantage of these produce deals, we'd have to make a special trip by car to pick them up—not exactly an eco-friendly way to acquire groceries.

Still, I felt like I shouldn't give up on the To Good to Go app without trying it at least once. So one Monday evening, when we were planning to go play board games at a local bar called Pino's, I ordered a surprise bag from Salonika, a Greek deli and grocery just a short distance from our house. We'd be passing right by it on our way to Pino's, just at the designated hour for pickups, and we could share whatever goodies the bag contained with our gaming buddies, thus reducing the hazard to our own waistlines of coming home with a whole bag crammed with rich pastries.

As it turned out, our surprise bag wasn't quite so naughty as all that. For $6, I got just two pieces of savory pastry: one largish portion of spanakopita (spinach pie) and another of cheese pie. These proved a bit awkward to share with our fellow gamers; since we had just two large pieces rather than several small ones, I had to get out my little pocketknife so people could hack pieces off. But folks seemed to enjoy the cheese pie, and Brian and I enjoyed the spanakopita later at home. Still, I didn't feel like I'd gotten that much of a bargain for my $6, and I didn't feel all that inclined to repeat the experience.

Verdict: For us, this app isn't very useful. We'd probably use it more if we lived close enough to the  George Street Co-op to take advantage of its cheap produce deals, but in our location, there's just not enough of anything we can reasonably use. I haven't deleted the app yet, but I probably won't keep it much longer.

Ecofrugal App #4: Gem.app

I learned about Gem.app just within the past couple of weeks. My phone or my computer popped up some story about secondhand clothing, and along with all the references to specific secondhand marketplaces I was already familiar with (Poshmark, eBay, Mercari), it mentioned Gem.app as a tool for searching all those marketplaces. Unlike Faircado, Gem doesn't automatically pop up search results whenever you're shopping; you have to physically go to the app or the website and do a search. But with that one search, you can find clothes from all the secondhand sites at once, rather than laboriously searching one at a time.

As I mentioned, I tend to shop with my computer more than my phone, so I haven't installed the actual Gem app. But I have used the Gem.app website several times, and I must say, it makes shopping secondhand much, much easier. Not only can I find items from many stores at once, Gem's search algorithm gives me much more useful results than those on most individual sites. If I do a search on eBay or Etsy for "women's colorful sweater," I'll find some things that fit that description, but many more that aren't sweaters, aren't colorful, and/or aren't for women. On Gem.app, all the results are, in fact, colorful women's sweaters, and I can narrow those results based on size, price, brand, and other criteria.

Verdict: This one's a keeper. I've haven't actually found anything I want yet through the Gem app, but I now waste much less time scrolling through pictures of things I don't want. Instead of hunting fruitlessly through page after page on eBay and Mercari, I can do a quick search on Gem and, if I don't see anything I like, plan to try again another day. And I imagine anyone else of an ecofrugal bent would find it equally useful.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Butternut Squash Curry

After slipping October's Recipe of the Month in just under the wire, Brian decided to get started early hunting down one for November. He did a general search for "hearty fall recipes" and came across a list that included an intriguing-looking recipe for butternut squash curry—a serendipitous find, since we happened to have all that butternut squash from our fall harvest. But we didn't have all the other ingredients required for that particular dish, so Brian did a second, more targeted search for similar recipes that we could make using only what we had on hand. And that's how he came across the Roasted Butternut Squash and Chickpea Curry at Cupful of Kale. The only thing it called for that we didn't already have was curry powder, and he could easily whip that up using another recipe he found on the site Feasting at Home. (It calls for 14 different spices and seasonings, but our well-stocked spice cabinet has all of them.)

As usual, Brian made a couple of minor modifications to the basic curry recipe. Following a tip at the bottom of the recipe, he added six ounces of frozen spinach to the dish to boost its veggie content. He also substituted home-cooked chick peas for the canned ones and changed the unspecified "salt and pepper" in the recipe to a teaspoon and a half of salt and no pepper. Also, since I'm a spice wimp, he replaced the quarter-teaspoon of "hot chilli powder" with a dash of our not-that-hot cayenne pepper. And, midway through the cooking process, he decided to omit the 200 ml of vegetable stock the recipe called for because the sauce seemed quite liquid enough without it.

The result was a mild but flavorsome curry that both of us enjoyed. Roasting the squash, rather than just cooking it on the stove, definitely seemed to add more depth and complexity to the flavor. Of course, it also added time to the cooking process. The squash had to roast for about 40 minutes to get tender enough to go into the dish, and while you spend part of that time preparing the rest of the sauce, it's still not exactly a quick weeknight dinner. So we probably won't make this as often as other squash favorites like our roasted vegetable medley (diced squash roasted with Brussels sprouts and potatoes, with scrambled egg added for protein) or butternuts squash souffle. But it can join our beloved butternut squash lasagna as a dish we trot out for relaxed weekend dinners.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: (Belated) Late Harvest

This week's post is not going to be about the election. All I'm going to say about that right now is that it's not game over for the climate, because the clean energy transition is too far along for any one man to stop. Instead, this post is going to be the one I should have written last week instead of letting myself get distracted by heat pump shenanigans: my late-fall Gardener's Holiday. 

At this point, nearly all of our 2024 crops have been gathered in. We still have a few green tomatoes on the vines that we're hoping will start to blush before the frost hits; any that are still green at that point will go into a box to ripen indoors. (Our success rate with this is only about 50 percent, but it costs nothing to try.) Also, we missed our window for harvesting the Climbing French green beans before the seeds turned starchy, so all the remaining pods are staying on the vine to dry so we can save the seeds. There's a little square of lettuce that will remain in the garden to overwinter. And as always, the rhubarb can be expected to soldier bravely on until the first freeze. But for the most part, whatever we're going to pick this year has been picked already.

The biggest winner in this fall's garden is the butternut squash. After several years of getting disappointing harvests from a mix of Waltham plants and smaller varieties like Little Dipper and Honeynut, this year we decided to plant only the larger Walthams—and that strategy paid off big time. We harvested a total of 13 squash, totaling a whopping 42 pounds. It's probably our best butternut crop of all time—even better than the year a rogue vine took over our side yard and produced 11 totally unplanned squash.

One of the smallest squash went into last month's Recipe of the Month, a medley of roasted stuff that we've dubbed, appropriately enough, Roasted Stuff. And most of a second one went into a curry that will feature as this month's Recipe of the Month, which you'll hear more about next week. But we still have 11 large squash left to see us through the winter, which means we'll have plenty of chances to enjoy old favorites like butternut squash lasagna, butternut pizza with sage, butternut squash souffle, and butternut squash pasta with vegan brown butter. We might even be able to spare one to take the place of pumpkin in our Thanksgiving pie, so that both our pies (pumpkin and rhubarb) will feature home-grown produce.

But the squash is not the only crop from our garden featuring in this week's meals. Last night's dinner was fish tacos with cabbage-and-tomato slaw that included some of the last dregs of our tomato harvest. Tonight's is a mushroom tourtière made from store-bought mushrooms and onions, but enhanced with sage and thyme from our herb bed. And earlier in the week, we partook of a Pad Thai that used up the last of our home-grown green onions. So, even as fall winds down toward winter, we can continue to enjoy what remains of last summer's bounty. (And that's not even counting the dozen jars of jam that Brian put up from last summer's plums and raspberries.)

Testing the heat pump waters

Brian and I have known for a while that we want our next home heating system to be an electric heat pump. Last time we replaced our boiler, this wasn't really an option; the heat pumps available at that time were old-fashioned models that struggled to produce heat as the temperature dropped below freezing. But in the ten years since, the situation has changed dramatically. Modern cold-climate heat pumps can run at full strength in temperatures as low as -5F, a temperature that we seldom see here in New Jersey. And, on top of that, the Inflation Reduction Act now offers a 30% tax credit to help pay for them. So we've been assuming that we'd ditch our fossil-fuel boiler whenever it reached the end of its lifespan. However, since it's only ten years old, we figured it would be at least another ten years before we got to that point.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a hint that might not be the case. We'd hired a heating contractor to do a routine tune-up on our heating system, and he informed me that the boiler had some major problems. He showed me a photo he'd taken that appeared to show a significant amount of rust on the heat exchanger, which he said "means there has to be a leak somewhere." Also, he said, the pressure gauge was reading around 20 psi, even though the system was supposed to be at between 12 and 15. To fix this, he claimed, we'd need to replace not just the pressure valve but the entire "trim kit": basically, all the valves, pipes, and other parts that connect to the boiler itself. And then he quoted me a jaw-dropping price for this repair: $3,500.

Well, given that the boiler itself had only cost us less than twice that price in the first place, I started wondering if it would be a better idea to simply replace it. So I went onto HomeAdvisor and put in a request for several contractors to give us quotes on a heat pump system. Unfortunately, I didn't get them. All four of the contractors I spoke with said that it wasn't practical to heat a home with electricity in this area, at least not without a fossil fuel backup. Some claimed that it just couldn't be done—that a heat pump would never be able to keep a house sufficiently warm. Others said it was possible, but the cost would be unreasonably high—as much as double what we were currently paying with gas.

This was baffling to me. I'd done a lot of reading about this topic in the past couple of years, and tons of reliable sources—Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Yale Climate Connections—had assured me that modern heat pumps could totally handle climates much colder than ours. I'd also crunched some numbers using the Electrification Planner at Rewiring America, and it had estimated that for a home like ours, the costs for heating with a heat pump would be pretty close to what they are with gas. It said we might pay anywhere from $170 more per year to $350 less, with the median household saving $75.

Seeking more data, I made a post in the heat pumps forum on Reddit to ask if anyone else had successfully used a heat pump in our area. I got tons of responses from people as far north as Canada assuring me that they used heat pumps with no backup, no problem. A few people said that I should expect to pay more heating with electricity as opposed to gas, but only one claimed the cost would be prohibitive.

Eventually, I did manage to get one contractor to give me a quote on a heat pump system. I'd done a little research ahead of time to figure out what a reasonable price would be and gotten back a fairly wide range of estimates, so I was prepared to hear anything from around $5,000 to $18,400. You can imagine my shock when I opened the contractor's estimate and saw that he would want over $23,000 to install a ducted system (including the cost of adding new ductwork). A mini-split system, which most sources had said was the cheapest option for homes that lack existing ductwork, was even worse: close to $29,000.

Fortunately, by the time we got this quote, we knew we wouldn't need it. Because we'd learned one other thing from the various contractors who'd come out to our house: the quote the first company gave us for repairs was way, way too high. (Several of them said the company in questions was notorious for this.) One of them, after taking a look at our system, said the only part we really needed to replace was the expansion tank, and that would cost less than $400. We eventually hired his company to fix it for a mere $355—about one-tenth of the price we were quoted for the initial repair.

So, the bad news is, we're not going to be ditching our old fossil-fuel boiler this year. The good news is, we don't have to make any decisions about replacing it under time pressure. We can afford to wait at least a few more years, and perhaps by the time we're ready, there will be more installers in New Jersey who are actually familiar with modern cold-climate heat pumps and can install one for a decent price. Or, who knows, by then there might actually be air-to-water heat pumps on the market that can work with our existing radiators, so we can simply swap one in for the old boiler with no need to alter the rest of the system.