Do I really need a bidet?

From time to time on this blog, I've talked about the idea of getting a bidet to reduce or eliminate our toilet paper use. Every time, I've concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. We spend so little on toilet paper that it couldn't possibly save us that much money, and since we use the recycled stuff, it wouldn't save trees either. So I decided the benefits of a bidet wouldn't outweigh the costs, and that was the end of it.

Except the Internet doesn't want to let that be the end of it. Since the start of the pandemic and the ensuing TP shortages, I keep seeing articles everywhere—from the Washington Post's Climate Coach, from the New York Times' Wirecutter, from Consumer Reports—singing the praises of bidets. And it seems like virtually every thread on Reddit about either sustainability or frugality (or, really, almost anything) eventually gets hijacked by bidet fanatics going on and on about how this little device has changed their lives and implying that mine will never be complete without one. It's like some kind of weird plumbing cult.

So I decided I needed to look into this issue in more depth. Am I truly missing out, and/or harming the planet, by stubbornly sticking to my Trader Joe's TP? Or is it the pro-bidet claims that don't, so to speak, hold water?

The pro-bidet crowd makes four main arguments in their favor, which I'll tackle one by one:

1. The financial argument

Many bidet fanciers claim that a bidet will pay for itself in months or even weeks because of all the money it saves you on toilet paper. To back up this assertion, they offer a wide range of statistics about the "average" American's toilet paper use, ranging from 3 rolls per week to 2 rolls per day. (How is that even possible?) The figure I'm most inclined to trust comes from Statista: 141 rolls per person per year. (This is based on a weight of 90 grams per roll; I just weighed one of ours and it's actually a bit smaller, at 80 grams.)

While this may indeed be accurate as an average, it's certainly not true for us. Last time I tracked our toilet paper use, I found that our family of two goes through roughly 68.5 rolls per year, just over 34 per person. Admittedly, I did this experiment at a time when Brian was working at the office five days a week rather than one or two. But according to Brian, even then, nearly all of his toilet paper use occurred at home. So even if he used, say, a dozen sheets per week at work, that only works out to around two and a half rolls per year. That means our TP usage now comes out to roughly 71 rolls per year.

The toilet paper we buy at Trader Joe's has also gone up a bit in price since the time of my experiment, from $4.50 per dozen to $4.99. But at 71 rolls per year, that still puts our annual TP cost at only around $29.50. According to Consumer Reports, the cheapest available bidet attachments cost around $30, so there's literally no way one could pay for itself in less than a year. And Wirecutter's top-rated bidet seat, the $400 Toto Washlet, would take over 13 years to pay for itself—assuming it lasted that long.

That's also assuming that a bidet would eliminate our use of toilet paper entirely. However, it's by no means clear that it would. There's widespread disagreement online about whether a bidet is a replacement for paper or merely a supplement to it. Some folks say they use the bidet first to wash, followed by toilet paper to dry off; others say they wipe first, then use the bidet to get fully clean. Several bidet users interviewed by Consumer Reports said they used less toilet paper since getting it; one said it had cut their family's TP use by about half, while others said they use "up to 80 percent less." If our experience was the same, a bidet would only save us between $15 and $24 per year and would take 1.3 to two years, minimum, to pay for itself.

Except there's one more problem: A bidet would add to our household's annual water use. Each use consumes about two cups of water. If we both used it every time we sat on the toilet, that would be, according to my rough calculations, about 24 cups (1.5 gallons) of water per day. (I'm estimating that we each use it twice a day for a bowel movement and I use it an additional eight times a day to urinate. If we used the bidet for bowel movements only, it would consume only about half a gallon of water per day, but it would also eliminate no more than one-third of our toilet paper use.) 

We don't pay for our household water by the gallon; our town uses a tiered system, and our quarterly water usage is generally low enough to put us into the lowest tier, up to 799 cubic feet. But not by much. Particularly in the summertime, we often get up into the 700s and occasionally even top the 800 mark, bumping us up to the next tier and costing us an extra $23.44. If we were using a bidet regularly, that extra 1.5 gallons per day would make it that much trickier to stay in the bottom tier. If it bumped us up into a higher tier even once per year, that would erase all or most of our TP savings.

In the absolute best-case scenario—we acquire a bidet for no more than $30, it saves us $24 a year on toilet paper, and it never bumps our water bill—it would pay for itself in 15 months. But it hardly seems like it would be worth the hassle for such a small savings. Which brings us to...

2. The environmental argument

The main reason "you need a bidet," according to the Climate Coach, is "to reduce clear-cutting mature forests." Millions of trees, the article claims, go to satisfy American's gluttonous need for toilet paper and our pigheaded refusal to switch to bidets. But once again, this doesn't really apply to us, since our TJ's TP is made from 100 percent recycled paper, with a minimum of 80 percent post-consumer recycled content. (N.b: that means it's made from other kinds of paper, not toilet paper that's been recycled post-flush.) 

Now, tree pulp isn't the only resource that goes into making toilet paper. Treehugger argues that the best reason to use a bidet is because, ironically, they save water. "Paper making is incredibly water-intensive," the article claims, and the wastewater from the process creates "a flood of organic waste and chemical residue which must be processed or, worse yet absorbed, after being treated and dumped into some unlucky river or ocean."

But here, again, it's not clear that the math works out in favor of bidets. According to the Climate Coach, each roll of toilet paper requires about 6 gallons of water to produce. We take about 5 days to go through a roll of toilet paper, so that's 1.2 gallons per day. And according to my off-the-cuff calculations, switching to a bidet instead would use up 1.5 gallons per day—0.3 gallons more than just using paper.

In fact, it's probably even worse than that. When I clicked through to the Climate Coach's source for the 6-gallons-per-roll figure, an episode of the Possibly podcast, it said that "A roll made from 100% recycled materials uses half as much water." Thus, cleaning our butts with recycled TP uses only 0.6 gallons of water per day—less than half as much a bidet. In short, if the main purpose of using a bidet is to save water and trees, it looks like our recycled-fiber TP actually does significantly better.

[UPDATE, 2/15/24: I've since found some more reliable numbers on water use. A little further digging led me to the Environmental Paper Network's Paper Calculator, which you can use to calculate the environmental impact of various kinds of paper use. I punched in the weight of a 12-pack of our Trader Joe's TP (about 2.1 pounds) and selected "tissue" for the grade. It said this amount of paper would use 42.8 gallons of water—3.56 gallons per roll—if it contained no recycled paper content whatsoever (either pre- or post-consumer). If made with 100% recycled paper content, it would use only 22.5 gallons, or 1.875 gallons per roll. Thus, the amount of TP we go through in one day uses only 0.375 gallons to produce—one-quarter of the amount we'd use with a bidet. Thanks to the Handy Finch blog for helping me find this source.

Obligatory citation: Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Paper Network Paper Calculator Version 4.0. For more information visit www.papercalculator.org.]

3. The hygiene argument

A lot of bidet users argue that it's simply not possible to clean your bum adequately with toilet paper alone. One analogy they're fond of using is, "If you got poop on your hand, would you just wipe it off with paper? No, of course not! You'd wash it off with water!"

My inclination is to respond to this with a snarky, "Well, that's because I pick things up with my hands, and I almost never pick anything up with my butt." But in the interests of fairness, I thought it was only right to look into this argument as well. Is a bidet really superior for cleaning?

Amazingly enough, it appears there are few to no scientific studies addressing this question. But as a colorectal surgeon interviewed by Smithsonian magazine points out, "It kind of doesn’t matter." Failing to get every last particle of poop off your bum will not in any way harm your health. There's some evidence that switching to a bidet may offer some relief for people who suffer from pruritus ani (itchy butthole) caused by over-wiping, but there's also evidence that "excessive" bidet use may cause this problem. Another expert interviewed by Smithsonian says a bidet may be helpful for people with specific disorders, such as Crohn's disease or physical disabilities that make wiping difficult, but those problems don't apply to us. In fact, for me, at least, a bidet would more likely do harm than good. Regularly using the "feminine wash" setting on a bidet to clean the lady parts can spread fecal bacteria to the vagina, which definitely isn't desirable. 

[UPDATE, 1/31/24: In the interest of fairness, I should add that a recent "Ask a Doctor" column in the Washington Post cited a 2022 study showing that bidet use doesn't just clean your butt better; it also greatly reduces the amount of bacteria on your hands after you wipe. A small sample group, 32 nursing students, wore clean gloves while using the toilet, and afterward the gloves were tested for microbe contamination. Result: the gloves of the TP users had nearly 10 times as many microbial colonies as the gloves of the bidet users. But here's the catch: as far as I can tell from the abstract, the volunteers did not wash their hands after wiping and before handing over the gloves to be tested. And in the real world, based on my observations in public restrooms, the overwhelming majority of people do wash their hands afterward, even if they don't always do it for the recommended 20 seconds. So I don't think this study provides much useful information about how clean the hands of TP users and bidet users are in real life.]

4. The hedonistic argument

In short, there's no sound reason for using a bidet to promote better health. But for most users, having a squeaky-clean bum isn't mainly about health; it's about happiness. Over and over, I see bidet lovers using phrases like "Once you've tried it, you'll never be able to go back to just paper" or "once you have one you feel like an animal not having it." (That latter one, by the way, was a response to a complaint about how annoying bidet evangelists are.) Some even say they can no longer stand to take a dump anywhere except at home.

Since I've never experienced this myself, it's not an argument I can refute. Maybe a sparkling clean butthole really is one of life's greatest pleasures, and I can't possibly say it isn't worth it without having tried it. But the same could be said about heroin, and I've never found that a compelling reason for trying it. Because the worst-case scenario wouldn't be that I didn't like it; it would be that I liked it so much I couldn't live without it.

This, for me, is the best argument against getting a bidet. I don't want to be a person who can't use a public restroom (or who needs to carry a portable bidet everywhere she goes) because she can't bear to clean up with paper. And even more than that, I don't want to become a person who is so enthralled with her bidet that she can't stop talking about it. I don't want to drive my friends, my family, and complete strangers on Reddit up the wall by telling them constantly why they need a bidet, and they may think they don't, but that's just because they haven't tried it, and once they do they won't know how they lived without it, and anyway it will pay for itself in a month and save the forests, and there's no way to get truly clean with just paper, and how can they stand to walk around with a dirty anus?

If I had found that a bidet truly had significant benefits for my health, my wallet, or the environment, I suppose I would have to bite the bullet and get one, even at risk of turning into an annoying bidet snob. But fortunately for me, none of these things appears to be the case. I'm not telling anyone who has a bidet and loves it that they should stop using it; I'm just saying I see no good reason to get one for myself, and I'd appreciate it if we could talk about something else.

Money Crashers: Latte Factor

My latest Money Crashers article takes on one of the great myths of personal finance: the Latte Factor. This phrase, coined by financial guru David Bach, signifies the idea that the key to financial independence is to cut out small, unnecessary expenses and steer that money into investments instead. And you must admit, as a sound bite, it's sheer genius. It's easy to grasp, and it's such a comforting idea — that the only thing standing between you and retiring rich is something so trivial as a latte. All you have to do is cut out coffee, and you've got it made! What could be easier?

In fact, there's only one thing wrong with the Latte Factor: it is, to borrow a phrase from "The Good Place," bullshirt.

In the article, I explain exactly why Bach's calculations don't work, and why they trivialize the problems that are really holding people's finances back — much more complex problems like overpriced real estate, skyrocketing health care costs, and punishing student loan debt. Then I go on to outline some approaches that actually can help you solve these problems, such as rethinking housing, refinancing debt, maximizing your income, and boosting your investment returns.

Spoiler alert: These fixes are nowhere near as simple as giving up a daily latte. But they're a lot more likely to work.

Latte Factor – Giving Up Lattes Won’t Make You Rich But Here’s What Will

Actual savings: The public library

A while ago, I read an article online—I forget exactly where—about the many benefits of visiting your local public library and all the things it has to offer besides books. (It wasn't this Money Crashers article, but it was along the same lines.) I was entirely in agreement with this, since next to our Twitch subscription (through which we watch our beloved Critical Role), our local library is our primary source of entertainment. We check out books, borrow movies and TV shows on DVD, and attend the occasional free event there. It's probably the nearest thing either of us has to a "third place."

But some readers, it turns out, don't share this view. In the comments at the bottom of the article, one sourpuss groused that the library isn't really "free" entertainment; you have to pay for it with your tax dollars, whether you want to use it or not. Apparently, he did not consider this a good value.

Now, it seems to me that if you have to support your public library whether you use it or not, it makes sense to use it as much as possible and get your money's worth. But perhaps this fellow's beef was that he doesn't think the services the library provides will ever be worth what he spends on it in taxes. Is he right? Just how much does a public library really cost, and how much value does it provide?

For our local library, the first question is easy to answer. A copy of Highland Park's municipal budget, available on the town's website, reveals that 0.97% of our property taxes go to support the library. The budget says this works out to $114 per year for the average resident, but our house must be a little smaller than average; we paid about $7,110 in property taxes over the last fiscal year, which means we only spent about $70 to fund the library.

Here's what we get for that:

• Borrowed books. First, and most obviously, we take out books—actual printed books—from the library. My account on the library's website doesn't include a record of what I've borrowed recently, so I'm just going to assume conservatively that Brian and I take out an average of one book per month. If we bought these same books new, in paperback form, they'd probably cost an average of $12 each. So, for borrowed books alone, that's a $144 value.
• Discounted books. In addition to borrowing books, we regularly buy them at the library's annual sale, at which donated books are sold at rock-bottom prices to raise money. Here's our haul from this year's sale: six small paperbacks (which would cost about $10 apiece retail), four larger ones (about $14 retail), and four hardcovers (maybe $20 retail). So this whole stack would have cost us $196 at a bookstore, and we paid only $22 for it—a savings of $174.
• E-books. In addition to physical books, we regularly use our library card to take out e-books from the eLibrary. Here, again, I don't know the exact number we've borrowed between us in the past year, but I'll guess it was at least half a dozen. Kindle books typically cost between from $3 and $10, so figure an average of $6.50. On top of that, our library temporarily gave us a subscription this year to Hoopla Digital, with an allotment of four borrows per month. We didn't get too much use out of it before the library canceled the program, but Brian took out eight graphic novels that would probably have cost him $12 each to buy in a store. So that's another $135 worth of reads.
• DVDs. Our town no longer boasts a video rental place, but we've hardly missed it thanks to the large and eclectic collection at the library. Matter of fact, its selections are probably of more interest to us than what we could have found at Blockbuster back when it was still operating in our area. It has everything from superhero movies to indie and foreign films, plus complete runs of all sorts of interesting TV series—some current, some canceled, and some BBC productions you can't easily get in the USA. We take out at least a couple of selections a month, usually TV series, thereby eliminating the need for a Netflix or Hulu subscription that would cost us $8 a month. So there's another $96 a year saved.
• Live events. Lastly, we attend live events at the library from time to time, such as film screenings and poetry readings. For the most part, these aren't events we'd pay to attend if they weren't available for free, but they make a nice change of pace from staying in and watching TV or playing board games. Most recently, I took an afternoon class that taught how to use a sewing machine, complete with the materials needed to construct a small zippered pouch. Mine didn't quite come out beautifully (I forgot to put the foot down at one point after re-threading), but it's still sturdy enough to hold pens or dice. I checked online to see what a comparable class would cost, and I found a two-hour session at a place in Brooklyn called Make Workshop for $80. So that's another $80 to add to the year's tally.

All told, in the past year our library card has saved us approximately $629 for a mere $70 in taxes. That's such a good deal that we actually feel a bit guilty about it, so we voluntarily pony up an extra $100 each year as a donation and consider it money well spent. If it enables the library to continue providing the kind of value we get from it now, it's an excellent investment.

In fact, if you look at it in terms of cost per hour of entertainment, the library is just about the best deal around. Since I not only read books but also read them aloud to Brian, a single novel can provide anywhere from 2 to 20 hours of entertainment; if you figure 6 hours on average, the 40 books we got from the library this year (borrowed, bought, and downloaded) provided us with about 240 hours' worth. Our DVD borrows, since they're mostly TV series with multiple episodes, add at least another 150 hours or so, and the events we attend add maybe 10 more hours per year. So that's a good 400 hours of entertainment, and even with our additional donation, it costs us only $170—less than 43 cents per hour. That's cheaper than a Redbox rental ($1 for 2 hours), cheaper than a Netflix subscription ($8 a month for about 10 hours), cheaper than most secondhand books (about $4 for maybe 6 hours)—cheaper, in fact, than almost anything you can do for fun.

Now, I realize our public library is probably better than most, especially for a town this small. But then, others that are cheaper probably cost even less in taxes, so the locals are getting what they pay for. In short, I'd say anyone who thinks a public library isn't a worthwhile investment either hasn't done the math or just doesn't know how to have fun.

I'm a Money Crasher

Just a quick note here to apologize for not updating the blog as frequently the past couple of weeks. I've been busy getting started as a writer for Money Crashers, a website all about personal finance. My first article there, on cutting the cost of laundry, has just gone live, and you'll probably recognize some of the topics it covers from my laundry-related posts on this blog—such as the value of clotheslines and the dubious benefits of homemade laundry detergent.

I have several more Money Crashers articles in the pipeline, all on topics I've previously touched on here, from warehouse clubs to organic shopping. I'll continue to keep you posted as they appear on the site.

Rethinking solar

It's been a little over a year since I last crunched the numbers on the possibility of installing solar panels at our house. What I found at that time was a pleasant surprise: based on my back-of-the-digital-envelope calculations, it looked like a solar array on our roof would, in fact, pay for itself eventually. However, it'd cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to install, and it would take anywhere from 9 to 13 years for us to make that money back in energy savings. Given that we're already powering our house with renewable energy through New Jersey's Clean Power Choice Program, it didn't seem worth the hassle of getting set up for solar if the payback time was going to be that long—especially with the prices of solar panels still dropping. It made more sense to wait until we needed to replace our roof, and then look at what it would cost to add solar panels at the same time.

Last weekend, however, I suddenly found myself bombarded on all sides by promotions for solar energy. Saturday brought an e-mail from Green America, urging me to get quotes on the cost of a solar installation. Then InboxDollars, one of my survey sites, sent me an e-mail on Sunday morning, offering a free quote on a solar system from SolarJoy. And then on Sunday afternoon, my Morris dance team performed at an Earth Day fair, and a friend of mine was there, staffing a table for a company called Solar City, which leases solar panels to homeowners. With the message "Go Solar!" coming at me from every direction, I started wondering whether maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. So I figured, well, maybe it couldn't hurt to look into the question one more time and just find out how the numbers looked for us at this point.

I clicked on over to the Green America site, which offered the option of an "instant estimate" to see how much I could save with solar. I figured it made most sense to do that before getting actual quotes, since there was no point in going through the process if it didn't look like a solar system would be cost-effective. And, unlike most other solar cost estimators I've tried, with this one the "instant" claim was pretty accurate. I only had to answer two questions. First, it asked for my address and pulled up a map so I could pinpoint the location of my roof. Second, it asked me how much I spend on electricity "in an average month." My electric usage actually fluctuates quite a bit from month to month, but since I keep track of it in a handy little Excel spreadsheet, it was quite easy to average together the numbers from the last twelve months. (The total I gave it, $42, includes the few bucks a month I pay as a surcharge for green energy from the Clean Power Choice Program. I knew that might make my electric use look a little higher than it really is, but I figured that's what I pay for green power right now, so I might as well try to get an apples-to-apples comparison.)

The site crunched the numbers for a minute and came back with some intriguing and surprising results:

1. Our house has 180 square feet of sunny roof space. That's enough room for a 2.6-kilowatt system, which would be enough to meet 100 percent of our energy needs (on average). This estimate is roughly in line with the one I got from Affordable Solar last year.
2. We could buy such a system outright for a net cost of only $5,400. That's after rebates and tax credits, which the site says could cover 30 percent or more of the cost. Presumably the up-front cost would be around $7,700, and we'd be able to get about $2,300 back.
3. The site claims this system would pay for itself in only 5.8 years. However, I'm not clear on how they came up with this number, since when I divide a net cost of $5,400 by our $507 per year in energy bills, I get a payback time of nearly 11 years (10 years and 8 months, to be exact.) Maybe the site is assuming that the price of energy will be rising every year, while my solar panels, once paid for, will stay paid for. Given how volatile energy prices are, though, that assumption seems a little iffy to me.
4. The site claims that, over 20 years (presumably the lifetime of the solar array), this system would net us about $13,000 in total savings. Once again, I'm not sure where these numbers come from. According to my calculations, over the course of the next 20 years, we should expect to spend about $10,100 in electricity bills; deduct the net cost of the solar system, and that cuts our savings down to $4,740. Even if you assume that our electric bills will gradually double over that 20-year period, our total savings still wouldn't hit $10,000.
5. According to the site, buying the system outright is actually the most cost-effective option. Buying the solar panels with a loan at 0 percent down would only save us $9,900 over 20 years, because the interest payments would eat into our savings. And renting the system, though it would cost us nothing up front, would yield only $4,200 in savings over 20 years—about a third of what we'd save by buying.

If these numbers can be trusted, it looks like buying a solar system is definitely our best option, and the up-front cost isn't actually that bad at all. However, given that the site's numbers are way out of line with mine, I'm still skeptical.

So perhaps the best way to do a reality check on these figures is to go ahead and get some real quotes. It'll be a lot more work, since I may need to spend a lot of time on the phone with the different companies giving them all the same details about our property, or possibly even having installers out to look at the site in person. But in the end, I should have a more accurate idea of just how much we could actually save with solar panels, and over what time period. And, even if it doesn't turn out to be cost-effective at this time, it seems like an appropriate way to commemorate Earth Day.

Of course, there's also the possibility that we'll sign up to get quotes and won't actually receive any, because our energy needs are so low that no company would want to bother with the piddly little system we'd require. But hey, that's useful information too.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #14: So why do I hang my laundry?

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for October 26, 2012.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

TP tracking results

The results are in! My toilet-paper tracking experiment, which I started back in mid-October, has come to its conclusion. We used up the last of the dozen rolls today, which means it took us exactly 64 days to go through them—an average of 5 1/3 days per roll. Admittedly, that 64-day period included one weekend when we were away from home, but it also included one day over Thanksgiving weekend when we unexpectedly found ourselves hosting four guests in our home, so I'm guessing that the two balance each other out.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this piece of data? Well, first of all, it means that over the course of a year, we go through 68.5 rolls of toilet paper, or 5.7 twelve-packs. As I noticed in my first post, we usually buy the store brand from Trader Joe's (100 percent recycled, with 80 percent post-consumer fibers) for $4.50 per dozen. That means our current annual spending on toilet paper is $25.66. Actually, it may be a little lower, since once in a while we manage to get a sale-plus-coupon deal on Marcal Small Steps, another recycled brand, for slightly less. But that doesn't happen often, so we'll just round it off and say we're spending $25 a year.

As far as I can tell, this figure is pretty much as low as it can go. I just stopped by our local Stop & Shop to compare TP prices, and I couldn't find a single brand there that cost less per roll than TJ's. Priced by the foot, the el cheapo one-ply store brand was a bit cheaper, at 8 cents per square foot rather than 13 cents, but I'm not convinced the one-ply rolls would actually last any longer; in my experience, thinner paper simply means it takes more sheets to get the job done. But even if we could manage to make do with the same number of one-ply sheets, we're only looking at a potential savings of maybe $10 a year. For paper that's both inferior in quality and not as green, it's certainly not worth it.

Now if, by contrast, we wanted the most luxurious tush-wiping experience money could buy, we could switch to the Quilted Northern Ultra Plush, which costs $9.69 per dozen rolls. If we used it at the same rate we use the TJ's paper, this stuff would cost us about $55 a year, more than twice what we're paying now. However, it's possible that, just as one-ply works only half as well as two-ply, this cushy three-ply might work 50 percent better, requiring us to buy only 46 rolls per year for $36.82. That extra $12 a year might be worth paying if the plush paper were recycled like the stuff we use now, but if we have to sacrifice trees to gain that goose-down softness, I'll pass.

Now, there are a few brands out there that promise to deliver both softness and sustainability, but most of them charge a hefty premium for it. The cheapest one I could find was Caboo, made from a mixture of bamboo and sugarcane bagasse, the fibers left over after the cane juice is pressed out. You can hardly get much greener than upcycling a waste product, but at $10.99 per dozen, this paper doesn't exactly qualify as ecofrugal. True, the rolls are a bit bigger than TJ's—300 sheets each instead of 250—but it still costs roughly twice as much per sheet. And that doesn't even count the $4.99 shipping charge for orders under $49. Even if we got free shipping by ordering 5 packs at a time (and somehow managed to find storage space for all those extra rolls), buying this paper would raise our annual TP cost from $25 to $50, all for the fairly dubious benefit of a little added softness (and avoiding exposure to a minuscule amount of BPA). Once again, this doesn't look like a good value.

A final option to consider is ditching the toilet paper altogether in favor of a more ecofrugal alternative. Switching to "family cloth," or reusable wipes, could, in theory, save us the entire $25 a year we currently spend on TP. In practice, though, it would mean doing at least one extra load of laundry per week, in hot water—which would increase our use of water, electricity, and natural gas. We'd also have to run the cloths through the dryer (since line-drying would leave them far too stiff to use) and probably wash them with bleach to make sure they came out sanitized—an expense we don't have now, and a chemical that isn't considered exactly earth-friendly. Altogether, it seems there are way too many variables here to do a simple calculation and say whether family cloth is, or is not, a more ecofrugal choice than paper. However, one thing we know for a fact is that switching could not possibly save us more than $25 a year—and for the convenience of something you can just flush and be done with, I'd say that's a small price to pay.

A final alternative to toilet paper that I'd planned to weigh here is a bidet attachment, such as this $60 model that gets consistently positive reviews at Lowes.com. However, when I consulted Wikipedia for a bit more information on how bidets are used, it said that a bidet is "not meant to replace toilet paper," but is instead used after paper "to achieve full cleanliness." On the other hand, this other article at wikiHow, "How to Use a Bidet," notes that some people consider the bidet "a hygienic substitute for toilet paper" and don't bother to wipe before spraying. However, they still need TP to dry off with afterwards, so it comes to much the same thing: a bidet can reduce TP use, but wouldn't eliminate it entirely. So rather than saving us $25 a year, this $60 tool could only save us, at a guess, half of that, which means it would take nearly 5 years to pay for itself. That's hardly a good enough return to make it worth the up-front cost on top of the added hassle.

Now, in theory, I suppose the bidet could be combined with the "family cloth" idea, with the cloths used only for drying. It would still mean more laundry, but the cloths could probably be washed in cold with the rest of our clothes. But that would involve even more hassle and expense than just the bidet itself, and the potential savings still can't possibly exceed $25 a year. All in all, I think I'm best off sticking with my trusty old TJ's TP. (However, next time we shop there, I just might consider trying the "super soft" version. It's still 100 percent recycled, and it's not nearly as pricey as the Quilted Northern—so considering that it's such a tiny item in our overall budget, springing for the slightly plusher stuff might turn out to be a little luxury that's worth the cost.)

Toilet paper trail

Remember how, last year, I wrote down the date on a newly opened bottle of laundry detergent so I could track how long it took us to use? Well, I'm at it again—this time with toilet paper.

Naturally, this tracking experiment will have to be a bit different from the first one. A single roll of toilet paper takes much less time to go through than a bottle of laundry detergent, and there can be quite a bit of variation in how long it takes us to use a roll. So instead of just marking the date when we start a roll and the date when we use it up, I plan to keep track of the start and end dates for the next dozen rolls we go through. With this information, I can calculate all sorts of interesting facts, such as:

• How much we currently spend on toilet paper each year. We buy the store brand from Trader Joe's, which is 100 percent recycled, 80 percent post-consumer content, and $4.50 a dozen. (That's practically the lowest price it's possible to find on any brand, and certainly the lowest for any brand with recycled paper, barring the occasional sale-plus-coupon deal.) Once we know how long it takes us to use up one of those 12-packs, we can easily figure out how many we go through in a year, and at what overall cost.
• How much we could save per year by switching to the cheapest non-recycled brand. I'm hoping and expecting to find that the answer is "very little," so we can point to toilet paper use as yet another green choice that has little to no cost.
• How much more it would cost us per year to switch to the ultra-plushy paper. That will help us figure out whether the luxury of wiping with something that feels like a hotel bath towel would be worth the extra cost, in both dollars and virgin tree pulp.
• How much it would cost us per year to switch to a tree-free toilet paper made from bamboo and/or sugarcane bagasse (the pulp left over from sugar production). The blogger at Eco Mum says she switched to a bamboo paper after learning that recycled toilet paper is often contaminated with endocrine-disrupting BPA and BPS. For what it's worth, both the Eco Etiquette column in the Huffington Post and the Ask Umbra column in Grist say that the amount of BPA found in recycled TP is so minuscule that it really isn't worth panicking about, and certainly isn't worth the environmental cost of switching back to virgin pulp—but for those who are worried, the Eco Etiquette advisor says bagasse-based paper is a reasonable alternative.
• How much we could potentially save by switching to "family cloth," which is a euphemism for reusable, cloth toilet wipes. This is another alternative to recycled TP that pops up in many sources, such as Sustainable Baby Steps. In theory, this seems like an ideal ecofrugal choice, since a key principle of the ecofrual life is that reusable products are almost always better for both the earth and your wallet than disposable ones. Yet family cloth, even aside from the "ick factor," obviously has some costs that toilet paper doesn't. First, you need to find room in your bathroom for a sealed container (like a diaper pail) to store the cloths; for some of us, finding that extra space would mean remodeling the whole room at significant cost. Second, you'll obviously need to do laundry a lot more often—and since these cloths both start out filthy and need to come out sanitized, you'll need to use hot water and probably bleach. All those extra loads of laundry will cost money, time, and natural resources. So on the whole, it's by no means obvious that family cloth is a more ecofrugal choice than TP. To do a real side-by-side comparison, you need hard numbers on both cost and environmental impact—and this TP tracking experiment will give me at least one of those.
• How long the payback time would be on a bidet, which is another alternative to TP suggested in many of the sources cited above. These devices, which clean the tush with water, are common in Europe and some other parts of the world, but rare in the US. Adding a completely separate fixture, like those found in luxurious French bathrooms, would obviously be impractical, but an attachment that adapts an existing toilet to double as a bidet can cost as little as 60 bucks. Knowing how much we spend on TP per year will help us figure out whether such an option would be cost effective. (Even if it definitely is a money-saver, however, I'd be reluctant to install one without trying it out first to make sure we'd actually find it convenient and comfortable to use.)

Of course, like laundry detergent, toilet paper is only a very small expense. It's quite unlikely that any of the strategies in this list would have all that big an impact on our budget, positive or negative. But as I noted when I first started my laundry tracking experiment, even little expenses are still worth keeping an eye on, because there are so many more ways to save small change than big money on a day-to-day basis. None of these strategies may make a big difference by itself, but none of them takes that much effort, either, and when you put enough of them together, they really do add up. Or, as the Brits have it, "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves."

The rewards credit card shuffle

Last week, I came across an article at Money Talks News with the somewhat cumbersome title, "No Rewards Credit Card in Your Wallet? You're Likely Missing Out Big Time." I clicked on it mostly out of idle curiosity, not expecting to learn anything from it that I didn't already know. After all, I currently have two rewards credit cards in my wallet—one Citi Dividends and one Chase Freedom—both of which pay me 1 percent cash back on all my purchases, plus an additional 4 percent on specific categories that change quarterly. To make sure I get the most out of my rewards, I jot down these categories on a crib sheet in my wallet, so I can always use the card that pays the highest bonus at any given location. And, of course, I always pay off the balance on all my cards in full, so the 5 percent cash back is really 5 percent and not just a discount on an interest rate of 15 percent. So all in all, I thought I was doing a pretty good job gaming the system.

However, my confidence started to falter when I got to this sentence: "The real trick here is to find a rewards credit card that pays a bonus in categories in which you spend the most money each month." This, I had to admit, was a weak point of both my rewards cards. Because the categories that pay bonus points keep changing, we don't consistently earn the best rewards on our biggest-ticket categories. Some quarters, to be sure, one of the cards will pay a bonus on gas or groceries (two categories in which we're guaranteed to spend at least some money every month). At other times, one will pay a bonus in areas where we spend money at least fairly often, such as restaurants or home improvement stores. But there are also times when the bonus categories are all but useless to us. Right now, for instance, my Citi card is paying bonus rewards on hotels, car rentals, movies, and theme parks—four categories in which we haven't spent a single penny in years.

I did some rough calculations and found that over the past three months, we've earned 1.2 and 1.4 percent respectively with our Citi and Chase cards. That was a bit of a disappointment, because I knew for a fact that we could do better than that. I've recently seen several ads on Hulu featuring Samuel L. Jackson touting the Capital One Quicksilver Cash Rewards card, which pays 1.5 percent cash back on everything—no limitations, no exceptions. However, the Money Talks News article mentioned another card that might be still better for us: the Blue Cash Everyday Card from American Express, which pays 3 percent at supermarkets, 2 percent at gas stations, and 1 percent on everything else. Both of these cards are free of annual fees, which is a bottom-line requirement for me, and their interest rates are comparable to those on our current cards—though that doesn't really matter, since we never carry a balance anyway.

It looked like either of these two cards would be better than the two we have now. To really maximize our benefits, of course, the best thing to do would be to get both of them, and then use the Blue Cash Everyday card exclusively for supermarkets and gas stations (which would be easy to remember without the need for a crib sheet) and the Capital One Quicksilver card for everything else. However, I was reluctant to apply for both cards at once, since having too many inquiries on your credit report is likely to ding your credit score, which could reduce our chances of actually getting either card. (Also, both cards offer a bonus of $100 if you spend a certain amount in the first three months, which is easier to do if you can concentrate your spending on one card at a time.) So which of the two would be more useful to get into my wallet first?

To find the answer, I figured, I'd need to go back and look at our credit card statements for the past 12 months. For each card, I could add up the amounts that we spent each month on groceries, gas, and other stuff and get a total for each category for the year. Then I'd multiply each category by its appropriate percentage—3, 2, and 1 respectively for the Blue card, 1.5 across the board for the Quicksilver card—and see which gave me a higher total. I assumed the easiest way to do this would be to set up a little spreadsheet on Excel. However, as I was perusing the details of the two credit card offers at Credit Karma, I noticed that the site was providing an "estimated savings" figure for each card, with a note saying that I could get a more accurate estimate by logging into my account. Credit Karma, for those not familiar with the site, is a website that will, with your permission, pull up your credit report and show you your credit score for free (though, as this article points out, the score they show you isn't identical to the FICO score used by most lenders). The way they can afford to do this for free is that once they know your financial situation, they can start trying to sell you financial products you might have a need for, like insurance or bank accounts. Of course, you can just ignore these offers, and most of the time, I do. However, in this case, they were offering me information about a product I actually did have a use for: a better rewards card. Why not let them do the math and tell me which card would be the best deal for me?

So I logged into my account, and bam, up popped a total of my monthly credit card spending, neatly sorted into categories. Based on these numbers, I could search their database of credit card offers to see which one had the best payoff for me. I had to do a little fiddling with the search feature to find the most useful offers, weeding out the cards with travel rewards (which are about as useful for me as a set of matched luggage for a tortoise) and the ones that charge an annual fee. Once I'd narrowed down the list, I could sort it based on criteria such as average user rating, average percentage cash back, or total payout over one, two, or three years. The Capital One Quicksilver card turned out to be the best deal over the long term: Credit Karma estimated it would pay me $308 a year, plus a one-time bonus of $100 if I spent $500 on it in the first three months, which would add up to $1,025 over three years. The Blue Cash Everyday card came in second, at $837 over three years, and my existing Chase Freedom card was a close third at $828.

These findings should have been conclusive, but something about them gave me pause. I noticed that the listing for the Chase card showed its "average rewards rate" as only 1.2 percent, and I had already determined that over the past three months it had been closer to 1.4 percent. Looking more carefully at the spending breakdown the site was using, it appeared that it was based solely on my most recent bill for each card, rather than on an average over the entire year. So it was likely that their estimates of the rewards we'd earn with each card were skewed by what we'd happened to buy in the last month.

To double-check their figures I went ahead and punched in the numbers into Excel just as I'd originally planned. Once I did this, I discovered that the savings estimates were actually significantly lower than the ones I'd gotten from Credit Karma. The Quicksilver card was still ahead, but it would only have earned us about $175 over the past year—and that's if we'd shelved all our other cards and made all our purchases on the Quicksilver card exclusively. Even with the $100 bonus, our three-year savings would be only $624. The Blue Cash card, under the same terms, would give us $157 a year, or $571 in three years with the bonus. Our current Citi Dividends and Chase Freedom cards, by contrast, are earning us a total of $144 a year. So switching the bulk of our purchases to a new card could put a little more money in our pockets each year, but not that much: only $13 for Blue or $31 for Quicksilver. It's still probably worth applying for the Quicksilver card, but it's certainly not going to be a game-changer.

It's a little disappointing that we won't be able to get that big a reward from a new rewards card, but I guess it's not that surprising. After all, the rewards you earn are based on what you spend, so the only way to rack up really huge bonuses is to spend a whole lot of money—which doesn't leave you ahead in the long run. It's the same sort of problem I've noted before with articles about saving money or cutting your energy use: you can't eliminate very much waste if your life wasn't that wasteful to start with. So I guess I should find it comforting that we can't earn really massive rewards with a credit card; it just goes to show that our credit card bills themselves are nice and lean.

Actual Savings: Soda Machines (Or, Getting my Fizz Fix)

I'm a big consumer of seltzer, especially during the summer months. My usual afternoon snack is a bowl of my microwave-popped popcorn accompanied by an egg cream (that's milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer, for those of you from the Midwest and other foreign parts). I also enjoy ice cream sodas for a summertime dessert; they use a lot less ice cream than eating it straight, so I can satisfy my sweet tooth with fewer calories and also stretch a half-gallon of sale-priced Blue Bunny further.

As an indulgence, seltzer isn't that expensive; I can usually find it on sale for 50 cents a liter or less. (The two-liter bottles are cheaper still, but when I buy them the seltzer invariably goes flat before I use it all up.) However, I do feel a tiny bit guilty about all the packaging waste my seltzer habit produces. I've never bought any other kind of bottled water, and I've written repeatedly about what a silly waste of money and resources it is, but here I am, still tossing a plastic bottle into the recycling bin every few days (or an aluminum can every day). But unlike plain water, the fizzy stuff isn't available on tap, so what's the alternative?

It might seem like the obvious ecofrugal choice would be to buy one of those newfangled home-carbonation machines, like the SodaStream. Unfortunately, my research indicates that these devices, while they may reduce waste, don't necessarily save money. The most basic SodaStream machine, the Fountain Jet, costs $80 and comes with one 60-liter carbonator. Replacement carbonators cost $15 each. Assuming I now pay 40 cents a liter for seltzer on average, I'd have to consume 420 liters of the stuff to reach the point at which my homemade fizz was as cheap as the store-bought variety. If I go through 3 liters of soda per week, or 78 liters over the course of a summer, it would take over 5 years for my soda machine to pay for itself—assuming it didn't break before then.

The main reason the SodaStream is not particularly cost-effective isn't the initial cost of the machine; it's the high cost of the CO2 refills. There are lots of places to have CO2 tanks refilled: one reviewer of the Fountain Jet on Amazon.com notes that "most paintball shops and some grocery stores" provide this service, and so do many sporting goods stores. The problem is that SodaStream's machines use a proprietary cartridge that won't work with the refilling equipment. A SodaStream competitor called the Primo Flavorstation could take a standard-sized CO2 canister, but it's no longer on the market. There are a few other soda makers on the market, but they all appear to use proprietary CO2 cartridges as well. Cuisinart machines use tiny 3-ounce cartridges that cost $20 a pop and carbonate only 16 liters of water; the Hamilton Beach Fizzini takes single-use CO2 chargers that cost 70 cents each and are good for only one liter. It can also take the standard-sized chargers used in an old-fashioned seltzer bottle, which can be bought in bulk, but even these come to 43 cents each with shipping. In every case, the cost per liter is actually higher than that of the store-bought seltzer, which means there's no way the machine will ever pay for itself.

I'm not the first person to notice this problem, of course, and various companies sell products designed to circumvent it. A company called CO2 Doctor sells a $35 adapter ($40 with shipping) that will let you fit a standard 12-ounce paintball tank into your SodaStream; another company sells a similar adapter called the SodaMod for $60. A 12-ounce CO2 canister can be refilled for about $3 and, extrapolating from the size of the SodaStream canister, should be able to carbonate about 50 liters of water. However, once you factor in the cost of the adapter, plus the cost of the machine itself, you'll still have to drink 360 liters of seltzer before it becomes cheaper than buying it from the store.

So it looks like there's no good way to make a home soda machine truly cost-effective. However, there are other ways to carbonate water at home with less equipment. The My Pop Soda Shoppe system, for instance, skips the CO2 canister altogether and produces its own fizz the old-fashioned way, through fermentation. You just put a cup of sugar and two teaspoons of yeast into one bottle, and as it ferments, it will produce 10 liters of CO2 that are stored in a separate reservoir. From there, you transfer it as needed into a bottle of cold water. Unlike other home soda machines, this one can also carbonate other types of liquid, such as fruit juice or wine. The system costs $75, and the seller claims that the materials needed cost only 2.4 cents per liter. However, if you use organic sugar, as we do, the cost for materials shoots up to 95 cents per batch, or 9.5 cents per liter. That's still a much lower cost per liter than the SodaStream; it would take only about 250 liters, or a little over 3 years, for this system to pay for itself. But during that whole time, we'd go through sugar awfully fast, which would mean making more frequent trips to Trader Joe's. Moreover, this system requires quite a bit more work than most home soda makers (filling, cleaning, and so on).

Another alternative is to put together your own "home carbonation system," as outlined in this Instructables article. The author provides a condensed explanation of how it works right at the start of the article:

Take a 20lb CO2 Tank and regulator, attach a tube, and stick a 99 cent locking ball air chuck (tire inflator) on the end of the tube. Pop a cheap snap-in tire valve (schrader valve) into a plastic soda bottle cap and you're ready to carbonate any liquid in about 30 seconds. Colder liquids absorb more CO2 carbonation.

He estimates that you can get all the parts you need for "around $100, plus the deposit on a CO2 tank," which is another $100 or so. By his reckoning, a 20-pound CO2 tank can carbonate over 1,000 liters of water, which he says works out to less than 2 cents per liter (which presumably means that it costs around $20 to refill the tank). Unfortunately, because of the high initial cost of all the parts, the system wouldn't break even until it was halfway through its first tank of gas. At the rate I drink seltzer, that would take over 6 years—longer than the SodaStream. (This site has testimonials from several users who were able to put together home systems for less, but the cheapest system was $95 total, which means it would still take just over 3 years to pay for itself.)

What I'd really like is a machine like the old FlavorStation, which could work with a standard 20-ounce paintball tank. That way I'd be able to get the tanks refilled at any local sporting goods store, and the whole thing would take up less room (and be less work) than a big 20-pound tank. And the thing is, it's still possible to buy the original FlavorStation from various vendors for around $32.50. If the 20-ounce tank it comes with is good for 85 liters (once again extrapolating from the size of the SodaStream cartridge), then this machine would actually pay for itself on its first tank of gas, or just into its second year of use. And even if my local sporting goods stores refused to refill the Primo CO2 canisters (a problem mentioned by some users on amazon), I could just buy a paintball tank for an extra $20 and still be ahead of the game.

The only reason I hesitate is because, with the product being discontinued, I know I can't expect to get service or parts for it if it breaks. So is it worth a $32.50 gamble on a product that, if it lasts, could only save me around $100 in its first five years of use—as well as keeping around 400 plastic bottles out of the recycling stream? Or does it make more sense to just assuage my guilt by buying my seltzer in aluminum cans, which are more cost-effective to recycle?

Actual savings: Solar power

Just a little while ago, I was filling out a survey on how likely I would be to consider solar power for my home. In order to give an informed answer to the question, I did a quick search on "solar payback time," and I found this article from a site called Clean Technica, which claims to be "the #1 cleantech-focused website in the world." It leads off with the claim that "there are people who apparently know nothing about it but decide it’s their duty to tell people the energy payback of solar panels is a decade or more (which it is not!)." It then goes on to display a bunch of charts showing that the payback period for rooftop solar systems is "between 1/2 a year and 1 1/2 years in Southern Europe and under 3 years in the rest of Europe (which has approximately the solar irradiance levels of Alaska)."

Now, that sounded a bit odd to me, because I definitely remembered talking to a solar installer a few years back about whether a solar system would be a good deal for us, and they concluded that, based on our site and our relatively low energy use, solar panels on our house would not be able to pay for themselves. I don't mean that they would have a long payback time—I mean they would not produce enough power over their entire lifetime to pay for the cost of installing them. Yet here were these folks at Clean Technica insisting that the payback period was no longer than three years. Was this big discrepancy simply due to the much heavier subsidies for home solar systems in Europe? Or did it mean that the cost of solar power had dropped so much in the past few years that a solar system, formerly a bad deal for us, was now a good one?

Finding the answer to this question turned out to be more work than I expected. Searches on "calculate home solar power potential," "is solar a good investment for me," and "how much solar power can my house produce" all led to dead ends. Some of the links were sites that wanted my contact information in order to give me a quote on a solar system; others provided general information about how to figure out what size your solar system should be; but none could actually give me concrete information on how much a solar system would cost me and how much it would save me. Finally, I managed to find this "solar estimator" from a company called Brightergy, which finds your actual house on a map and lets you outline the exact spot where you want to put solar panels. It took a bit of fiddling to get the tool to work, but eventually I managed to sketch out a roughly appropriate area for a 2-kW system. The site crunched the numbers and told me this would cost about $7,300 to install, of which we would get back 30 percent in tax credits, giving us a net cost of about $5,110. The energy it produced would reduce our power bills by 84 percent, or $463 per year. Thus, the system would pay for itself in...11 years, which last time I checked was in fact "a decade or more."

To double-check my figures, I used this "system sizing estimator" on the site of a different solar power company, Affordable Solar. It has one very handy feature that the other site lacks: a map showing how many "sun hours" different parts of the country get in an average day. The northernmost parts of the country get around 3 hours of sunlight; the Southwestern desert gets 6 hours or more. Here in New Jersey, we get around 3.5 hours, which means that to meet 100 percent of our home electricity needs, we'd have to install a 2.55-kW system. Affordable Solar claims that such a system would add more than $10,000 to the value of our home, but they don't say how much it would actually cost to install. However, Michael Bluejay's solar energy calculator indicates that a typical cost is around $4 per watt, making the total cost $10,200, or $7,140 after the tax credit. Divide that by an annual power bill of $540, and the payback time is just over 13 years. (According to Bluejay, this figure isn't quite right, because I need to adjust my electric bill for inflation over time. He recommends multiplying it by 1.5 to compensate. If his calculations are correct, then my payback time is actually just under 9 years. However, in reality, energy prices don't just rise at a steady rate with inflation; they're extremely volatile and hard to predict. So all we can really say is that my payback time is somewhere between 9 and 13 years—probably.)

Bluejay notes that for most people, "The calculator probably won't show a huge savings from solar." However, he maintains that it's still a good investment, since "for about the same amount of money or a bit less, you can get your energy from a clean source." Which is a perfectly valid point. So really, there's no need for the folks at Clean Technica to get so huffy about people claiming that solar panels will take a decade to pay for themselves; even if it's true (and for me, at least, it is), that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

Actual savings: biking to work

The latest print edition of my Dollar Stretcher newsletter contains an article called "Reduce the Cost of Your Commute." (It isn't up yet on their website as I write this, but it might be by the time you read this.) It poses the question, "with the cost of gas hovering near $4 per gallon...how can you reduce the cost of commuting or make the time spent more profitable?" The article then lists a number of suggestions, such as changing your work schedule, carpooling, working from home, and the one that Brian favors, biking to work. Naturally I was pleased, not to say smug, to see part of our lifestyle endorsed in this way. But I couldn't help asking myself: does it really save all that much money? Over a year ago, I crunched the numbers on line-drying laundry—another money-saving measure that's widely touted in publications like The Dollar Stretcher—and found that the savings were actually pretty trivial. Last summer, I did a similar calculation for homemade laundry detergent and found that depending on how cheaply you can buy detergent, making your own may not in fact save you any money at all. Might biking to work be the same kind of thing—a feel-good activity that doesn't have much of a financial payoff?

Calculating the answer is pretty simple. I know that the distance Brian commutes to work is about four miles each way, and I know that our little Honda Fit gets about 40 miles to the gallon in typical mixed driving. (The EPA claims this car only gets 29 mpg in mixed driving, but I don't know what kind of idiot they've got driving it, because our mileage has never been anywhere near that low.) However, short trips, like Brian's daily commute, get lower gas mileage than most of the driving we do, so to be fair, let's assume that Brian only gets a measly 32 mpg out of the car while driving to work. That means that for every 8-mile round trip he makes, he uses a quarter of a gallon of gas. The receipt from our last gas fill-up shows that we paid $3.40 per gallon, which means that every day Brian rides his bike to work instead of driving, he saves 85 cents. So if he commutes by bike an average of three times a week, April through November (35 weeks), his pedal power saves us $89.25 per year. That's a lot better than the $14 or so I save hanging laundry, but it's not exactly a slam dunk.

Now, how do those savings work out on an hourly basis? Well, Brian's relatively short commute takes him about 25 minutes on the bike, while driving in rush hour traffic takes roughly 15 minutes. (On the bike, he can go by way of the park and skip a lot of the traffic.) So, for a round trip to and from work, he spends an extra 20 minutes to save that 85 cents, for an hourly rate of $2.55. That's only 30 percent of New Jersey's minimum wage, which doesn't look that impressive.

However, biking to work has additional benefits beyond saving money. The Dollar Stretcher article points out two of them: "you'll save dollars and get a workout at the same time," and "Peddling [sic] past cars stuck in rush hour traffic will make the ride so much more pleasant!" Both of these have definitely been the case for Brian. Since he started biking to work on a regular basis, he's dropped a size in pants, and his blood pressure is much improved. And while on a typical day, biking to work takes longer than driving, there are also the occasional atypical days—usually days when a football game at Rutgers has brought traffic to a near-standstill—that he's able to get home on his bike much, much faster than he could have in the car.

Then there are the environmental benefits. If Brian bikes to work 105 times each year, then over the course of the year, he saves 26.25 gallons of gas. According to this formula from the EPA, the carbon output of that amount of gas is 0.23 metric tons, or about 2.5 percent of our total carbon footprint. Not a huge environmental benefit, perhaps, but certainly a measurable one. (Actually, when you do the math over the course of a whole year, even my line-drying efforts start to add up; drying 60 loads of laundry every year saves us about 0.3 metric tons of CO2, which isn't bad at all.)

Now, your mileage, as they say, may vary—and so may the length of your commute and the amount you pay for gas. If your car is a lot more efficient than ours, or your commute is a lot shorter, than biking to work may save you less than it does us; on the other hand, if your car is a lot less efficient, or the price of gas in your state is much higher, then you might save a lot more than we do. It's pretty easy to crunch the numbers for yourself and figure it out: just take the number of miles in your daily commute, divide by your car's mpg, and multiply by the cost of a gallon of gas. But even if the number you get as a result seems low, that doesn't necessarily mean that biking to work isn't worth your while. Like hanging laundry, it may turn out to be worth it for the exercise and fresh air alone.

An Earth Day dilemma

Last fall, when we had our boiler tuned up for winter, the repairman confirmed what we had long know was coming: our ancient boiler, probably installed when the house was built over 40 years ago, was slowly rusting to pieces. Rather than try to replace it in a hurry before the weather got too cold, we resolved to nurse the old one through one last winter and replace it at our leisure in the spring. So now that the weather has finally (finally) warmed up, I've lined up a series of appointments to get quotes on a new unit. In fact, the first contractor, who showed up today, gave us quotes on two: their standard gas boiler and their super-efficient condensing model. And, no surprise, there's a big difference in cost between the two. If we go with the plain old 83 percent efficient boiler, it costs us $3600; for the super-duper 93 percent efficient boiler, it's a whopping $7600. (We can get back $300 of that as a rebate from the state's Clean Energy Program, but unlike some other utilities, PSE&G doesn't give us anything extra on top of that, the cheapskates.)

Now, the contractor thought the more efficient boiler would pay for itself if we intended to be in this house long-term, which we do. However, based on my calculations, we're talking really long-term. I punched in the numbers on the manufacturer's energy calculator (which I had to use in Firefox, because it doesn't work in Chrome), and it thinks that the more efficient boiler would cost about $208 a year to run, while the moderately efficient one would cost $231 a year. So, if we're saving $23 a year, it would take about 160 years to pay for the $3700 difference between the two. Moreover, even these numbers may be highballing it, since their calculator shows us using 370 therms of gas each winter with our current boiler. Based on my back-of-the-Excel-spreadsheet calculations from our utility bills, our actual energy use is somewhere between 227 and 349 therms per winter.

So the bottom line is that, based solely on dollar considerations, we can't justify buying the more expensive boiler. Which brings me to the dilemma: is it worth spending an extra $4000 (well, $3700 after rebate) just for the sake of doing everything we can to curb global warming?

To make this decision intelligently, I had to ask myself just how big an impact the more efficient boiler would really have on our carbon footprint. Considering how little it saves us in dollar terms, I kind of suspected that it wouldn't be that much. So I found a greenhouse gas emissions calculator and punched in the 30 therms of natural gas that, according to the Weil-McLain site, is the amount we'd save per winter with the high-efficiency boiler. Burning that amount of gas, I found, would produce 351 pounds of atmospheric carbon. Then I calculated our household's current total carbon emissions using this other EPA calculator and found that they come to 13,575 pounds per year. So buying the more efficient boiler would reduce our footprint by an extra 2.5 percent. But given that we already buy carbon offsets every year to make up for the fossil fuels we burn, couldn't we just spend...lemme see here...an extra $1.64 per year on those to make up for that extra 30 therms of energy? I could pay that amount every year for more than two thousand years before it would add up to the extra $3,700 we'd pay for the pricier boiler.

But then, on the other hand, we'll probably have this boiler for at least 20 years. Indeed, if it lasts as long as our current dinosaur of a boiler has, we may never replace it again. And while the 93-percent-efficient boiler may be the top of the line right now, it's quite possible (likely, I would hope) that some time in the next 20 to 40 years, boilers that efficient will become the standard. So does it make sense to get the most efficient one that's available now, rather than risk ending up behind the curve in the future? Then, too, natural gas presumably isn't getting any more plentiful. People don't tend to talk about peak natural gas the way they do about peak oil, but it stands to reason we've got to hit it some time, and at that point, the price of natural gas could increase pretty steeply. So the $23 that the more efficient boiler would save us next winter might end up being more like $50 or $100 or $200 by the time this thing sees its twentieth winter.

But on the other hand (hey, where'd that extra hand come from?), using fossil fuels of any kind isn't really sustainable in the long term. This report from the unapologetically left-wing Center for American Progress concludes that "In the near term, natural gas presents opportunities to reduce carbon pollution" as a replacement for coal, but after that, "there needs to be a swift transition from natural gas to zero-carbon energy." Their definition of "near-term" is no later than 2030, well within the expected lifetime of our new boiler, whichever model we get. So does it perhaps make more sense to save those extra dollars now so that we'll have them to invest in a "zero-carbon energy" method of heating our home down the line, whenever such a method becomes available? (I'm not sure what such a future method might turn out to be—solar? geothermal?—but then, that's why they call it the future.)

I don't know yet what the answer is, and there's probably no point in jumping to conclusions until I've at least seen the quotes from the other contractors. Maybe one of them will turn out to have a high-efficiency boiler that's much less expensive, and the point will become moot. But thinking about it, I can't help feeling like we've made this same decision several times already: with our water heater, with our car, and even with our choice to continue using CFL bulbs until the price of LED bulbs drops. In every case, we ended up opting for the less efficient product because, as Brian put it, we don't want to "pay through the nose for immature technology." Why pay a huge markup for the best that's available right now, when the best that's available ten years from now is almost guaranteed to be a whole lot better—and possibly a whole lot cheaper to boot?

Actual Savings: LED vs. CFL bulbs (an update)

Ever since LED light bulbs first came on the market, there has been a lot of debate about whether they were superior to compact fluorescents. From the start, LED bulbs clearly had some advantages over the older CFLs, such as:

• Lower energy use
• Longer lifetime
• Contain no mercury, so a broken bulb isn't a hazard
• Dead bulbs can be safely disposed of at home
• Reach their full brightness immediately when lit
• Produce steady light with no flickering (actually, modern CFLs don't flicker enough for me to detect at all, but some people claim that they still notice it)

On the other hand, the early LED bulbs also had a distinct set of disadvantages, such as

• Directional light (illuminates only the spot it's pointed at, not the whole surrounding area)
• Cold, bluish light (this was also a problem with early CFLs, but "soft white" CFLs were available well before soft white LEDs)
• And the big one: high initial cost. When I first attempted to analyze the differences between CFLs and LEDs back in 2008, I couldn't find an LED bulb equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent for less than $55.

At the time, I crunched the numbers to calculate cost of both CFLs and LEDs over 50,000 hours of use and concluded that the LED was indeed cheaper, but only just. Using one LED in place of 6 CFLs would save about $13 over a period of about 16 years—and during that time period, the price of LEDs was sure to drop considerably as the technology improved. I concluded that it made most sense to continue using CFLs until LED prices came down. Two years later, I revisited the issue in this blog post and found that LEDs' edge over CFLs had actually narrowed as both bulbs came down in price: at that time, an LED would only save you about $2.50 over its lifetime. Since the initial cost of the LED was still $43, I concluded that waiting to replace your CFLs was still the smart choice.

Since then, I've kept a casual eye on the price of LED bulbs, glancing at them each time we passed the lighting aisle in Home Depot to see how much they cost. Over the past few years, they dropped pretty steadily, falling below the $20 mark and, recently, even below $10—but the bulbs available for sale were mostly equivalent in brightness to a 40-watt incandescent, while the CFLs we used at home were generally 60-watt equivalents or brighter. When one of the CFLs in our kitchen fixture burned out last summer after 6 years of service, we ended up buying another CFL to replace it because we couldn't find an LED of comparable brightness at a reasonable price. However, last week, on a trip to IKEA, I spotted some LED bulbs on sale for just $7 each, and I decided perhaps it was time to crunch the numbers again and see whether LEDs had finally pulled ahead of CFLs as a better overall investment.

To get a reasonable idea of how much different types of bulbs cost in the store, I went to HomeDepot.com and looked at the lowest-priced bulb in each category: incandescent, CFL, and LED. I also looked at two different levels of brightness: around 500 lumens, the equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent bulb, and 850 lumens, equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent. All the bulbs in my comparison are "soft white," with a color temperature of 2700 kelvin—the warm, yellowish shade of the incandescent bulbs most of us grew up with. In the 500-lumen category, we have three competitors:

1. The Philips 40-watt incandescent, priced at $1.62 for 4 bulbs, or 40.5 cents each: brightness 500 lumens, power use 40 watts, 1,000 hour lifetime.
2. The Eco-Smart 40-watt equivalent CFL, priced at $5.85 for 4 bulbs, or $1.46 each: brightness 550 lumens (10 percent brighter than the 40-watt incandescent), power use 9 watts, 10,000 hour lifetime.
3. The Cree 40-watt equivalent dimmable LED, priced at $5.97 per bulb; brightness 450 lumens (90 percent of a 40 watt incandescent), power use 6 watts, 25,000 hour lifetime.

The first thing that's apparent from these numbers is that the longevity of LED bulbs has actually dropped over the past few years. In 2008, a 60-watt-equivalent LED had a claimed lifetime of 50,000 hours; by 2010, it had dropped to 35,000; and now it's only 25,000. Perhaps manufacturers found they could make the bulbs a lot more cheaply by cutting back on durability, and their lifespan was still long enough for most customers to consider them a lifelong investment. On the other hand, maybe the initial estimates of bulb life back in 2008 were grossly exaggerated, and manufacturers have simply dialed down their claims as real-world results showed that the bulbs weren't lasting nearly that long. Whatever the reason, it's clear that the advantage LEDs have in longevity isn't nearly as great as it initially appeared. They'll last twice as long as a comparable CFL, but they won't last six times as long.

Their advantage in terms of power use also isn't nearly as great as early claims made it appear. An article about LED bulbs that appeared in the Dollar Stretcher newsletter back in 2008 said that they "consume roughly 1/4 the electricity needed to fire up a CF." My own calculations at the time found that this claim was way off: a CFL equivalent in brightness to a 60-watt incandescent used 14 watts, while an LED of comparable brightness used 8, for a savings of only 43 percent. Yet the difference between the bulbs listed above is even smaller. The 6-watt LED uses two-thirds as much power as the 9-watt CFL, and on top of that, it isn't as bright. If you calculate the efficiency of each bulb in lumens per watt, it comes to 12.5 for the incandescent bulb, 61 for the CFL, and 75 for the LED. Far from using only 25 percent as much electricity as the CFL, it's not even 25 percent more efficient.

So how do these three competitors stack up in terms of lifetime costs? Well, to keep a room lit for 25,000 hours, you'd need 25 incandescent bulbs costing a total of $10.13. They'd use a total of 1,000 kilowatt-hours (40 watts times 25,000 hours, divided by 1,000), which, at the current nationwide average of 12.31 cents per kWh, would come to $123.10. Total cost for incandescent bulbs: $133.23. Over the same period, you'd go through 2.5 CFL bulbs, at a cost of $3.65, and they'd use up 225 kWh of power, costing $27.70, so your total cost would be $31.35. Or, you could use just one LED bulb, costing $5.97, and 150 kWh of electricity, costing $18.47, for a total of $24.43. You'd save $6.92, but your room would be about 20 percent dimmer the entire time.

Now, let's look at the competitors in the 850-lumen category:

1. The Philips Soft White 60-watt incandescent, priced at $1.62 for 4 bulbs, or 40.5 cents each: brightness 860 lumens, power use 60 watts, 1,000 hour lifetime.
2. The Philips Soft White 13-watt CFL, priced at $7.98 for 4 bulbs, or $1.99 each; brightness 840 lumens (just barely dimmer than an incandescent), power use 13 watts, 12,000 hour lifetime.
3. The Cree 60-watt equivalent dimmable LED, priced at $7.97 per bulb: 800 lumens (only 93 percent of the incandescent's brightness), power use 9.5 watts, 25,000 hour lifetime.

Crunching the numbers for these three bulbs, we find that over 25,000 hours of use, you'd use 25 incandescent bulbs, costing $10.13, and 1,500 kWh of power, costing $184.65, for a total of $194.78. CFLs would cost you $4.15 for 2.08 bulbs and $40.01 for 325 kwh of electricity, totaling $44.16. And a single LED would cost $7.97 for the bulb and $29.24 for 237 kWh, totaling $37.20. Once again, the LED bulb edges out the CFLs over the long haul, saving you $6.96—this time with only a slight loss of brightness in the room.

It looks like in the past few years, LEDs have increased their lead over CFLs in terms of long-term savings, but not by a huge amount. However, we're also talking about a shorter payback time than we were a few years ago. A $43 LED purchased in 2010 would take 35,000 hours of use—over 19 years for a bulb that burns 5 hours a day year-round—to yield a mere $2.50 in savings. A return of $2.50 on an initial investment of $43 over a 19-year period is...well, I'm not sure of the exact formula, but it's pretty pathetic. Buy an equivalent LED bulb today, however, and you'll spend only $7.97 up front and get back $6.96 in savings over a period of only 13.7 years. Looked at as an investment, that's still pretty unimpressive, which is the reason I'm not about to go replacing any of my existing CFLs with LEDs. But once those CFLs burn out and I need to replace them anyway, I can go ahead and spring for new LEDs with a reasonable level of confidence that they'll be worth it in the long run. And, as a bonus, I shouldn't need to replace them again for at least 13 years.

The light bulb myth lives on

I just saw an article in this week's Tip Hero newsletter that kind of got on my nerves. It's one of those ever-popular lists of ways to save on your electric bill that, as I've noted before, seldom have anything to tell me that I haven't heard many, many times before. This article was no exception to that rule, basically trotting out an assortment of chestnuts like "turn off the water when you brush your teeth" and "turn out the lights when you leave a room." The only somewhat new piece of information in it was the recommendation to switch to LED bulbs, and even that was basically an updated version of the traditional recommendation to replace incandescents with CFLs.

There was one detail, however, that particularly annoyed me. In the item on turning out lights when you leave the house or the room, the author of the article made the extravagant claim that this practice "can save you big bucks on your electric bill." Now, even back in the days of incandescent bulbs, leaving lights on was never all that big a waste of energy. If you had a 60-watt bulb, for instance, and you left it burning while you left the room for 15 minutes, then in that time it would use 15 watt-hours, or .015 kilowatt-hours. At the nationwide average electric rate of 12.5 cents per kWh, that's about one-fifth of one penny's worth of electricity. Even if you left that same light on for 15 minutes every single day, the total cost on your electric bill at the end of the month would only come to 5.6 cents. Admittedly, those pennies could add up quickly if you made a habit of leaving all your lights on all the time, and since switching them off was a lot easier to do than, say, upgrading to a more energy-efficient refrigerator, it was a reasonable piece of advice. But even back then, claiming that you could save "big bucks" this way was setting up an unreasonable expectation.

Now, suppose you've followed this author's other piece of advice and started switching over your bulbs to LEDs. A quick Google search shows that an LED bulb equivalent in brightness to a 60-watt incandescent uses 10 watts of energy. So the 5.6 cents you would have saved by switching off that 60-watt incandescent every day for a month is now cut to less than 1 cent. In fact, you could leave a 10-watt LED burning 24/7 for the entire month and it would use only 7.2 kWh of electricity, or 90 cents' worth. There is no possible stretch of the imagination by which that adds up to "big bucks" in savings.

Mind you, I'm not saying that the advice itself is bad. With the price of LEDs now down to as little as $10, this type of bulb has finally become a cost-effective alternative to CFLs, and I will certainly consider one the next time one of my current CFLs burns out. And even if their energy use is low, it still makes sense to turn them out when they're not being used (especially since doing so won't wear them out much faster, as it can with CFLs or incandescents). But promising "big bucks" in energy savings for doing this is simply dishonest.

Actual Savings: Homemade laundry detergent

Work on the patio has commenced, but due to a combination of weather delays and protesting muscles, we weren't able to complete Phase Three (Excavation) today. So I'll wait to fill you in on that job when it's done, and instead give you an update on a much longer-term project that was just completed today: tracking our laundry detergent use.

As you may recall, way back in January I made a note of the date on a newly opened bottle of detergent. This idea was inspired by the frequent posts I kept coming across on frugality websites (such as this one at The Simple Dollar) about the benefits of making your own laundry detergent. I was skeptical about this, because it didn't seem to me that laundry detergent could possibly be a big enough expense for us to make it worth the trouble of mixing up our own. But I figured I couldn't be sure exactly how much we pay for detergent in a year without tracking the amount of time it takes us to go through a bottle. And as of today, I have the answer: exactly 24 weeks.

Now, admittedly, this is actually a much shorter period than I was expecting. There are several possible reasons why I might have "misunderestimated" our detergent use, as our former president would say. Perhaps we actually do more loads of laundry per week, on average, than the 1.5 I estimated in my initial post. Or perhaps I actually use more detergent in each load than the one-third to one-half a capful I thought I was using. Or perhaps the detergent manufacturer is actually exaggerating when they claim that a 50-ounce bottle is enough to wash 32 loads, using a full capful each time. Or maybe it's a combination of all three.

However, it turns out that while my estimate of how long each bottle lasts us was low, my estimate of how much each bottle costs us was high. I said that we "usually find it on sale at about $2 for a 50-ounce bottle," and that's true—but detergent is also one of the few items for which we consistently manage to stack sales with coupons. So not only can we usually find a brand of detergent we like (basically, any brand that's unscented) for $2.00 a bottle, but we can usually combine that sale with a $1-off coupon, or a 50-cents-off coupon that doubles. So our actual cost is only $1.00 per bottle. And at that price, even if we go through a bottle every 24 weeks, our total detergent cost for the year is only $2.17.

Now let's compare this with the results achieved by Trent, the blogger at The Simple Dollar, when he tried mixing his own laundry detergent. He spent a total of $6.97 on the ingredients (factoring in water and fuel costs). He estimates that these ingredients are enough for "at least six batches," each of which will wash 52 loads of laundry, making his cost per load around 2.2 cents. Now, if my initial estimate of 1.5 loads of laundry per week is accurate for our household, then our one-dollar bottle of detergent washes 36 loads of laundry, making our cost per load about 2.8 cents. So switching from sale-priced detergent to homemade could, in theory, save us 0.6 cents per load—which works out to about 47 cents a year. That's pretty far off from Trent's estimated savings of $65.08 a year.

In reality, though, our savings is probably even less than that. As I noted above, it's likely that we are actually doing more than 1.5 loads of laundry per week, because we went through the bottle of detergent much faster than we should have if that were the case. So assuming conservatively that we actually do around two loads per week, our one-dollar bottle of detergent is actually getting us through 48 loads, at a cost of just under 2.1 cents per load. In other words, we're actually paying slightly less for our sale-priced detergent than Trent is paying for his homemade stuff.

Moreover, even if we could save a whole 47 cents a year by making homemade detergent, we'd have to go through the process of mixing up a batch every six months. Trent's recipe calls for grating up a bar of soap by hand, then stirring it bit by bit into a pot of simmering water, and pouring the whole mess into a big bucket along with three gallons of warm water, a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of Borax. This whole process couldn't possibly take less than fifteen minutes, counting the time needed to wash the pot out afterwards. So we'd be spending half an hour per year making detergent in order to save 47 cents, earning a princely wage of 94 cents an hour for our efforts. Moreover, we'd be washing our clothes with what Trent describes as "some slimy-feeling water with various sized pieces of white gelatinous stuff floating in it," which has to be dipped up by the cupful out of a five-gallon bucket (which we'd have to find room to store somewhere in our laundry room). Am I the only one who has better things to do with my time?

The moral of this story, I think, is that advice on saving money should always be taken with a healthy dose of salt. People who write articles for save-money newsletters and blogs know they aren't going to excite anyone by claiming that an idea can save you a few dollars per year, so they are liable to make the most generous estimates possible in order to maximize their claims about how much you can save. Trent, for instance, came up with his estimate that his homemade laundry detergent would save $65.08 per year based on the assumption that you are doing one load of laundry per day—and that if you weren't using his homemade mix, you'd be using Tide with Bleach to the tune of 20 cents per load. For us, both these assumptions were way off base. So whenever you see a claim like this, it's worth taking a minute to think it through, and maybe even crunch some numbers, to see whether the claim is reasonable, bogus, or somewhere in between.