108 handkerchiefs

My in-laws are moving. Their new, one-level house will be a lot easier for them to get around in, and it's conveniently close to Brian's brother, so he can visit them regularly and give them a hand with household tasks. However, it also has a lot less space, which means a lot of the stuff in their current house needs to go somewhere else. One item his mom unearthed recently was a whole bag full of dainty handkerchiefs that had belonged to his grandmother and great-grandmother. They were all quite old and mostly quite fancy—embroidered, patterned, lace-trimmed, all sorts—but they hadn't been used in decades and she had no idea what to do with them. So, hating to see them go to waste, I offered to take them off her hands.

This weekend, the hankies arrived, care of Brian's sister and her family, who were stopping by for a visit as part of a trip to New York. (Obligatory brag: they're going to see their daughter perform with her college orchestra at Carnegie Hall.) There were a lot more of them than I'd expected, and they'd all acquired a musty smell from their long years in storage. It was clear they'd all need to be washed before I could put them to use. 

Since our washer is a front-loader, which is gentler on clothes than the old agitator models, I wasn't worried about running these old and delicate pieces through it. (We needed to do a load of sheets anyway, so it didn't even use any extra water.) However, I hesitated to entrust them to the tumble dryer, and today's weather was too wet for outdoor drying. We filled every inch of both our indoor drying racks, along with the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, and still that wasn't enough room for all of them. Brian had to string a couple of clotheslines from the laundry room ceiling to accommodate the rest. 

As we hung them, we counted them out. We initially thought there were 105, but that total got amended to 108 after we discovered that three of them had hitched rides on our bedsheets and gone through the dryer after all. (Fortunately, they appeared to have suffered no damage.) Which led to a new question: where were we going to put them all? Our current collection of roughly a dozen plain cotton handkerchiefs lives in Brian's underwear drawer, but there was never going to be room in there for this lot.

Then a thought occurred to me. Brian and I almost exclusively use handkerchiefs ourselves, but we do have one box of disposable tissues in the house for guests. Since it's seldom used, we store it on top of the fridge under a whimsical trompe-l'oeil cover. What if we replaced the tissues in that box with a stack of these fancy hankies instead? Then, whenever guests asked for a tissue, we could offer them a nice, reusable alternative. We'd just need a separate container, like a basket, to collect the used ones for later laundering. Being able to discard the hanky immediately after use, just like a disposable tissue, might be enough to overcome any tendency to see the reusable nose rags as gross or unsanitary. We'd also need to arrange the handkerchiefs in the box so that every time one was pulled, a new one would pop up in its place, just like with tissues. Or, alternatively, we could use an open-topped container for the clean hankies and the box with the narrow aperture for storing the used ones, as shown in this Instructable.

When I put this idea to Brian, he suggested taking it a step further: offer the hankies to guests and let them keep them if they liked. Of course, doing this would whittle down our collection over time, but considering that we've been working on the same box of disposable tissues for somewhere between two and six years, those 108 handkerchiefs should last a pretty long time. And we might even make a few converts to the culture of reuse along the way.

How weird are we?

I originally intended for this week's post to be about some more possible climate solutions that I've heard about in the past few weeks. (No doubt I'll cover these eventually, but just as a teaser, they include artificial trees that absorb carbon, small-scale nuclear reactors, carbon-negative concrete, advances in solar panel and wind turbine blade recycling, new battery technologies, and ultrawhite paint that makes surfaces absorb much less heat.) But yesterday morning, as I was hanging out the laundry, it occurred to me that there was another topic I'd rather discuss: Just how weird are we?

I don't know if ours is the only house on our block that has a clothesline in the back yard, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, we're the only people who actually use one. So for over ten years, our neighbors have been watching me hang our laundry on the line and have, quite possibly, been wondering why these weirdos take the time to hang their clothes when they could, duh, use this amazing modern device called a dryer that can get them dry in a fraction of the time, with much less work. And on top of that, if they're observant, they may have been wondering as well about some of the specific items in our wash that can be observed fluttering from the line. Handkerchiefs? Who in the world still uses cloth handkerchiefs when we have disposable tissues now? And rags? Bits of old socks and T-shirts that are clearly no longer wearable garments, yet these weirdos for some reason not only hang on to them, but apparently take the trouble to keep washing them over and over? What's up with that?

Thoughts like these have run through my mind on laundry day before, but this time they particularly resonated because of an article I'd been reading just before going out to hang the wash. It was a piece in the New York Times about how Uruguay is managing, practically alone among the nations of the world, to combine prosperity with sustainability. (Their population is overwhelmingly urban, and their electricity is 98 percent renewable.) It's an interesting read, but one thing that really stuck with me is the way the author opened the piece. As a contrast to what life is like in Uruguay, he outlines the lifestyle of a "typical American household," which according to him includes:

• A house of around 2,200 square feet
• Yearly energy use of 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• Six or seven plane flights every year
• Two cars, at least one of them an SUV
• At least one child
  
• A total of 25,000 miles of driving each year ("most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny")
• A couple of trips to Target each month for "six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress"
• A carbon footprint of 25 tons per person
  

As I read those paragraphs, my jaw was, if not literally hanging open, certainly feeling a bit wobbly. I knew our ecofrugal household was a bit atypical, but are we really that far out of the mainstream of American life?

Our house is, in theory, a three-bedroom measuring just 936 square feet, although the finished basement expands the usable living space to more like 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Our yearly energy use is 2,113 kilowatt-hours of electricity (all from renewable sources) and about 404 therms of natural gas. (That apparently works out to 40,390 cubic feet, so we're actually a little above average there.) The last time I went anywhere on a plane was for my grandmother's funeral 11 years ago. We have one car, which we drive about 11,000 miles per year (and we've never listened to either Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny, ever). We do go to Target occasionally, but more like a few times a year than a couple of times a month. And while estimates of our household carbon footprint vary widely, they're all between 4.5 and 12 tons per person per year — nowhere close to 25.

So, if the Times article is right about what a "typical" American lifestyle looks like, then we are indeed pretty far out of the mainstream. But is it? The author doesn't cite any sources for any of the statistics in his opening paragraphs, so can we be sure they're right?

Digging around on my own, I found that the true picture is a little more complicated than the author's figures suggest. Take housing, for instance. The article says says a typical American family has a 2,200-square-foot house in a "middle-class suburb." And Census data confirms that the average new, single-family house built in 2021 measured 2,273 square feet. But there's a problem with this statistic — two problems, in fact. First of all, not all homes are single-family houses, and second, not all homes are newly built. And anyone who lives in an apartment, or a townhome, or an older house like ours, almost certainly has less than 2,273 square feet of space.

For more accurate figures, I went to the 2021 American Housing Survey and ran a search based on square footage. And after a few minutes with a calculator, I worked out that the average reported home size (at least among households that did report it) was around 1,440 square feet. Pretty close, in fact, to the size of ours with the basement included. So as far as housing goes, we're not actually out of the mainstream at all.

Now, not all the statistics were this far off base. For instance, the Energy Information Administration says average household electricity consumption in 2020 was 10,715 kWh, close enough to 11,000 for government work. The average number of cars per U.S. household, according to Statista, is 1.88, which rounds off to two. And SUVs and other trucks do indeed account for most new car sales.

But some of the other figures were pretty farfetched. Gallup says that in 2021, 62% of Americans did not travel by air at all, and 23% made only one or two trips. (These numbers were a little lower than they had been before the pandemic, but even when Gallup asked the same question in 2015, only 10% of Americans said they had flown five or more times in the past year.) A majority of US households have no children living at home. And the average U.S. driver put 12,724 miles on their car in 2020 (down from 14,263 in 2019, but that's still far less than 25,000). So on balance, it seems like our ecofrugal lifestyle is actually closer to the norm than the "typical" American lifestyle described in the Times article.

As for line-drying laundry, it was hard to find statistics on that. The best bit of data I could find was from a 2009 Pew poll, which found that roughly two-thirds of Americans consider a clothes dryer a necessity. That puts us line-dryers in the minority, certainly, but not such a small minority as all that. Using handkerchiefs appears to be a bit farther out of the mainstream; based on this Reddit thread, the general consensus seems to be that they're gross and unhygienic (though based on my prior research, paper tissues aren't really any better). But hankies do still have their staunch defenders. And as for the use of cloth rags in place of paper towels, an informal survey by Family Handyman found that respondents actually prefer cloth dish towels by nearly two to one.

The bottom line? Being ecofrugal may be a little bit weird in 21st-century USA, but it's not that weird. And if Forbes and the Good News Network are to be believed, it's getting more normal all the time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of those socks I just washed yesterday need darning.

Craigslist for the win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money Crashers: Top 5 Things That Are the Biggest Waste of Money

The point of frugality, I've often noted, isn't to avoid spending money; it's to avoid wasting money. Some expenses, even if they're not strictly necessities, are still worth the money. I'm not at all embarrassed about indulging in the occasional Frappuccino, for instance - especially since I use survey credits to reload my Starbucks card. Nor will I apologize for indulging in hot showers and having a large—perhaps even mildly excessive—collection of books. These are luxuries that, for me, provide enough pleasure to justify their rather modest price tags.

The expenses that really bug me are the ones that eat up money and natural resources, and provide nothing of value in return. Expenses like bottled water, for instance, which in many cases is literally nothing but filtered tap water—which you could easily filter yourself at home for much less.

So my latest Money Crashers article is more or less a rant about five of these utterly unnecessary expenses and why people should stop wasting their money on them. In addition to bottled water, I cover K-Cups, microwave popcorn, dryer sheets, and cable TV —explaining why they're unnecessary, what the cheaper alternative is, and how much money you could save by switching.

Read about it at Top 5 Things That Are the Biggest Waste of Money, and feel free to join the ranting in the comments section.

Money Crashers: Cloth Diapers vs. Disposable

When I gave my sister a set of cloth diapers as a Hanukkah gift three years ago, I was intrigued to see just how far cloth diapers have come since my childhood. The flat, white rectangles we wore as babies, with all their attendant apparatus of safety pins and plastic pants, have given way to elaborate - and expensive - "diaper systems" in a breathtaking array of styles and colors. This led me to wonder: are disposable diapers still more convenient than cloth, or have these fancy new diapers closed the gap? And are cloth diapers still cheaper, or do these pricey diaper systems end up costing just as much?

Eventually, my job with Money Crashers gave me the chance to research all those questions in painstaking detail. I learned about the many different types of cloth diapers now on the market and how much they cost to use, as well as the advances in disposable diaper technology and how to evaluate "green" claims. I then compared home-laundered cloth diapers, disposable diapers, and diaper services to see how they measure up in four areas:

• Cost
• Convenience
• Environment
• Health

Based on my research, I think I can safely conclude that the most ecofrugal choice for new parents—the one that offers the best overall savings in cash, natural resources, and time—is a hybrid diaper, laundered at home. Let's break it down quickly:

If you're an eco-conscious parent, then you presumably won't consider any disposable diaper unless you're confident that it's free of any kind of toxins that could harm your baby. A detailed study at Baby Gear Lab, which I relied on heavily for this article, shows that the best value in a "green" diaper is a brand called Earth's Best Tender Care, which costs 36 cents per diaper, or about $2,160 for three years' worth. Add in the cost of a large diaper pail ($125) and disposable wipes ($360), and your total cost for diapering one baby for three years comes to $2,645.

By contrast, the best buy in a cloth diaper is the Flip Hybrid, which costs just $300 for three years of use. Since you'll already be laundering the diapers, you can also use reusable cloth wipes (about $45 for a three-year supply) and a smaller diaper pail with a pair of cloth liners ($100). You also need to spend $70 on a diaper sprayer and shield to prep the diapers for cleaning, and about $200 for additional laundry costs. That comes to $715 total, less than one-third the cost of disposables—and all the diapers and accessories can be reused for a second baby, reducing your cost still more.

Of course, the cloth diapers are also more work. In addition to a couple of extra loads of laundry per week, you have to spend a minute or so dumping and spraying the diaper before dumping it in the pail —though the editors at Baby Gear Lab point out that, in theory, you should do that with a disposable diaper too, as it's illegal in most states to put human feces into a landfill. So if you're a truly eco-conscious parent, the disposable diapers might not actually be any more convenient in that regard. But there's also another way to eliminate this part of the job: use a removable, flushable diaper liner that you can simply lift out and deposit in the toilet. That adds another $420 to the three-year cost of the cloth diapers, but your total is still only $1,065, less than half the cost of disposables. And you can also compromise by using a diaper sprayer at home and liners when you're on the road, for a cost somewhere in between.

How about environmental costs? Well, according to my research, as far as global warming is concerned, it's kind of a wash. According to a British study from 2008, cloth diapers have a lower carbon footprint if you wash them in cold water, dry them on a line, and reuse them for a second child—but if you wash in extra-hot water and tumble dry, the cloth diapers actually have a significantly larger carbon footprint than the disposables. Of course, greenhouse gases aren't the only consideration; you also have to consider the amount of water used for laundering and the amount of landfill space used by disposables—both of which may or may not be a concern, depending on where you live. And there's also the resources involved in the actual manufacture of the disposables, which studies show significantly outweighs the resource use for cloth—though all these studies are at least 10 years old, so the numbers may not apply anymore. But when you factor in the whole "poop in a landfill" problem, it becomes pretty clear that cloth diapers are definitely greener overall, making them a win on both counts.

If you want more details (lots more), you can read the entire article at Cloth Diapers vs. Disposable – Cost, Types & How to Choose for Your Baby. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know about choosing a diaper, and probably a lot more.

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.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #15: More stuff green people like

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for January 3, 2014.

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

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.

Should you go soap nuts?

This week's Dollar Stretcher newsletter included an article on "A Natural and Frugal Laundry Alternative." The words "natural and frugal" caught my attention, so I read on and found that the product being discussed was something called "soap nuts," also called soap berries or wash nuts. According to the distributor, NaturOli, these are the dried hulls of the soapberry fruit, which contain natural saponins, foaming compounds that work just like soap. To wash your clothes with soap nuts, you just put a handful (four or five "nuts") into a little mesh bag and throw it into a hot-water wash. The same nuts can be reused four or five times, and when they start to turn grey or mushy, you can just throw them on the compost pile.

On the face of it, these sound like the most ecofrugal laundry product you can imagine. They're natural and biodegradable, and the article claims they contain "no harmful chemicals or perfumes." They also produce no packaging waste; the muslin bag is reusable, and the nuts themselves can be composted. But what about their cost? The article says that a pound of soap nuts costs $19 at Amazon, but it doesn't say how many nuts are in a pound, so it's impossible to figure out the actual cost per load. The article provides lots of detail about how well the soap nuts clean clothes and how easy they are to use, but the only mention of their cost-effectiveness is an offhand remark about how the soap nuts "could potentially save me money, too!" Considering that the Dollar Stretcher is supposed to be all about "living better for less," this seemed like a pretty big oversight.

So I started digging around to see if I could find any hard numbers on how cost-effective these soap nuts are compared with regular laundry detergents. I checked the comments on Amazon.com and found one enthusiastic review from an owner who carefully tracked her usage to see how long the nuts lasted. She concluded that they used 5.8 ounces of nuts to wash 68 loads of laundry; at $49.95 for a 4-pound package, she found, this "works out to a cost of $.07 per load!" That exclamation point suggests that she considers this a fantastic price, but my own calculations show that our Purex detergent (bought on sale, with coupons, and used much more sparingly than the bottle recommends) actually costs us between 2 and 3 cents per load. That makes 7-cents-a-load soap nuts look a lot less impressive by comparison.

Of course, it's entirely possible that my $1.25 bottle of Purex isn't getting our clothes nearly as clean as the soap nuts would. The Dollar Stretcher reviewer praises the soap nuts' cleaning performance to the skies, saying they removed mud and food stains with ease and left the clothes smelling "clean but not fake, perfume-y clean." She concedes that they weren't quite up to the task of removing a tea stain from a towel, so pre-treatment might still be necessary for "some types of really icky stains." The majority of users on Amazon.com heap praise on the soap nuts as well, saying they do a great job with everything from cloth diapers to grungy work clothes (even those worn for really messy jobs like painting or auto repair). Most users report their clothes come out fresh-smelling and soft, with no need for a separate fabric softener. Only a few reviewers complain that the nuts can't handle tough stains or odors.

Soap nuts also offer some health and environmental benefits over plain old laundry detergent. Various reviewers on Amazon note that soap nuts are compostable, cruelty-free, and hypoallergenic. One user who is allergic to coconut says these are the only decent laundry product she's ever found that contains no coconut derivatives; others say it has cleared up skin problems like eczema that are exacerbated by most detergents. Users also like the fact that these are a natural product, free of the synthetic chemicals in traditional detergent (which one user blames for "cancer, respiratory and skin irritation, and central nervous system damage").

However, these benefits come with an environmental downside: the berries have to be imported from the "pristine Himalayans of India" [sic], so transporting them must require a fair amount of fuel and produce a fair amount of greenhouse gas. On top of that, this natural product isn't generally sold in stores, so buying it probably means ordering online and having it shipped from the processing plant here in the U.S. Of course, as this Worldwatch Institute article on "food miles" points out, simply calculating miles to market isn't a very good way to measure a product's environmental impact, and the fact that these soap nuts have been shipped thousands of miles doesn't necessarily negate their green claims. But it does take at least a bit of the shine off them.

Another problem with the soap nuts, in terms of sustainability, is that they work best when used in hot water. According to the Dollar Stretcher article, using them this way is incredibly simple: just put a handful of nuts in the mesh bag and toss it in with the clothes. However, if you wash most of your clothes in cold water—as recommended by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and most environmental sites—then soap nuts take a bit of extra work. You have to soak the bag of nuts in a cup of very hot water for a few minutes before tossing them into the wash. Some users at Amazon recommend going still further and soaking the nuts for 15 minutes to an hour before washing with them. Obviously, this makes the soap nuts a lot less convenient to use for energy-conscious cold-water washers. (However, to be fair, a couple of users say they don't bother with the pre-soaking step at all and their clothes still come out clean, even in cold.)

So, taking everything into account, how do soap nuts compare to standard laundry detergent? In terms of cleaning power, they seem to be at least equal, and possibly better. They also appear to have the edge in terms of sustainability, with their biodegradability and lack of toxic chemicals outweighing their miles to market. On the other hand, they're less convenient to use in cold water, and switching to hot water for all your washes would probably cancel out all the soap nuts' eco-benefits. But their real fatal flaw is their high cost. At 7 cents per load (a price you can only get by buying in bulk), they may appear to be cheaper than most name-brand detergents, but that's only true if you're paying full price for your detergent and using the full amount. If you habitually use coupon stacking to buy your detergent and then skimp on the amount you use, as we do, you'll pay less than half as much per load as you would with the soap nuts.

Of course, if you have a coconut allergy, or extra-sensitive skin, or your top priority in life is to tread as lightly as possible on the earth, you might consider that money well spent. But if your goal is to save resources of every kind, including your time and your hard-earned cash, then sale-priced detergent is probably a better bet.

Live the Wage Challenge: wrap-up

DAY 7 (Thursday):
Rite Aid: $2.94
Total spent: $2.94
Total remaining: $21.49

So, as you can see, I made it through the Live the Wage challenge with money to spare. My only expense was the bottle of vitamins I decided to go ahead and buy at the Rite Aid after initially hesitating over the purchase on Tuesday. And as it turned out, they cost me only $3 rather than $5, because I had a two-dollar reward that I'd forgotten about ready-loaded onto my Wellness Plus card (the Rite Aid store loyalty card). So in the end, I had nearly one-seventh of my $154 budget for the week left over, and I didn't refrain from buying a single thing that I would have bought under normal circumstances.

Our experience on the Live the Wage challenge was clearly not typical. Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois says she "didn't quite make it" through the week when she tried the challenge, and she concluded that it was "impossible" to survive on $7.25 an hour. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio ran out of money on day 5 with the purchase of a bag of trail mix. And former Ohio governor Ted Strickland ran out on Thursday evening, despite having made such sacrifices as walking to a meeting a mile from his home and eating from the McDonald's dollar menu.

So why was this challenge so easy for us when it's so hard for most people? I think one major reason is quite obvious: we're a married couple with no kids. That meant we had $77 for each person in the household, which gave us a lot more wiggle room in our budget than Strickland (who had only $77 for himself) or Ryan (who had to support a family of five on a $154 budget). As I've observed before, it may not be true that two can live as cheaply as one, but it's certainly the case that two people together, sharing the cost of housing, food, and all sorts of incidentals, can live a lot more cheaply than two people apart. Yet having kids can easily eat up all that extra income and then some; Ryan's biggest budget-busters during the challenge were $25 worth of "vitamin D drops and other incidentals" for his newborn child and "summer camp for his 10-year-old daughter."

Clearly, though, being a childless couple wasn't our only advantage. Schakowsky was in exactly the same situation, with $154 to support herself and her husband, and she still exceeded her budget for the week by $4.47. CBS also quotes her as saying that on a budget this strict, "There’s no way that you can stop into a Starbucks"—even though Brian and I did exactly that on Sunday. So what did we do that Schakowsky didn't?

Her account of her experience gives a couple of clues. First of all, she notes that one of her biggest expenses was "Driving 140 miles round trip to my granddaughter’s birthday party," even though she counted only the cost of gas and tolls and not car maintenance or insurance. Brian and I, by contrast, drove our car only once during the whole week, when we made our big grocery-shopping trip on Friday. The rest of the week, the car sat in the driveway as Brian took his bike to work. Admittedly, this is an unusually small amount of driving even for us. Our usual Thursday-night dance practice was canceled due to low attendance, so we didn't have to make a trip down to Princeton for that. We also didn't drive up to Morristown for the Minstrel concert on Friday night, which we typically do at least once or twice a month, and we were fortunate enough to have a whole week of sunny weather, so Brian didn't have to drive to work even once. But even if we'd done our usual amount of driving, it's unlikely we would have had to buy any gas, since we'd just filled up the tank on the 20th, and a full tank usually keeps us going for around two weeks. And even if by some chance we'd started the challenge with a nearly empty tank, we could still have gotten by with only a few gallons—about $13 worth—to get us through the week. That wouldn't have broken our budget.

Schakowsky also observes in her account that "pets are luxury," saying "Our family dog Lucky is disabled and his needs quite expensive." Well, we also have a pet, but we didn't need to purchase anything for her during the week. A big bag of her favorite dry food costs only $25 from the PetSmart and lasts her for months; a bag of her new cat litter (which I'll tell you about sometime) is around $20 and is also good for several months. If we had to take her to the vet for some reason, that would be a significant expense that would almost certainly put us over our $77-per-person budget, but typically, all she needs is a yearly checkup, which is an expense we can plan for. Adding up all the costs of caring for our cat over the course of a year, I find they come to around $1,086, which works out to $20.88 per week. So if the Live the Wage challenge were spread across a whole year rather than compressed into one week, the cost of pet care would definitely be manageable. Of course, our pet isn't disabled like Schakowsky's, so it's not surprising that her needs are less expensive, but I think an equally big factor is that she's a cat, and as these figures from the ASPCA show, cats are cheaper to own than dogs in general.

Finally, Schakowsky notes that on the Live the Wage challenge, "We didn’t have enough money to pick up our dry cleaning, nor could we do our laundry in the coin operated washer and dryer in our D.C. apartment building." We, by contrast, did two loads of laundry in our very own washer and hung them on the line (though one of them ended up getting caught in an unexpected shower and had to go in the dryer after all). The cost of both loads, factoring in detergent, water, electricity, and gas, was almost certainly under a dollar, and most of that is covered under utilities anyway, which aren't part of the $77 budget. As for dry cleaning, in general, we just don't do it. I think the only garment we actually own right now that requires dry cleaning is Brian's good suit, which hasn't been worn in over a year.

So, to sum up, here are my rules for making it through the Live the Wage Challenge, along with some ideas for how they could be applied to real people trying to survive long-term on the real minimum wage:

• Challenge Rule #1: If at all possible, do the challenge as part of a couple. That way, you can split the costs not just of housing (which isn't counted in the budget) but also food, Internet service, medicines, household goods, and to some extent, transportation (since you only need to make one trip to the grocery store rather than two separate trips). What this means in real life is that, if you're a single person living on minimum wage, your ideal living situation is to either live with family or have a roommate and share your living expenses as much as possible. (This piece in the New York Times tells the stories of minimum-wage workers who live with their parents, share a home with a significant other, or rent a room in a friend's house to save money.)
• Challenge Rule #2: If you drive, have an efficient car that's cheap to maintain—and then don't drive it that much. It's best to avoid making a 140-mile round trip if possible, but if you have to, you're definitely better off making it in a car that will take 3.5 gallons of gas to go that distance than one that will take 7. Biking to work, as Brian does, will help if you're in an area that allows it; so will carpooling, if you can find someone to ride with. And in real life, if you live in an area with a good mass transit system, you might be better off not owning a car at all (though as I noted in this post, if you already have a car, you won't save much, if anything, by using transit instead).
• Challenge Rule #3: If you have pets, stick to smaller ones. Obviously, if you already have a dog (or several), you're not going to get rid of it for the sake of a one-week challenge. You probably won't even want to get rid of it if you're suddenly forced to live on minimum wage in real life (though you may be forced to eventually). But if you're only thinking about getting a pet, it's worth giving some thought to how much it will cost, not just to buy but to care for on a year-round basis. Cats are cheaper than dogs, and smaller pets, like a mouse, bird, or fish, are cheaper still. If you're trying to get by on a low wage, this is definitely a big consideration.
• Challenge Rule #4: Wear low-maintenance clothes. Avoid anything that requires dry cleaning; you'll be doing the environment a favor, as well as your wallet. If you work at a job that requires you to wear a suit every day, then you're almost certainly doing this challenge for one week only, and not as a way of life; you can probably manage to get by for the space of one week wearing the same jacket every day, or going with a more business-casual look. And if you're a real-life low-wage worker, then wash-and-wear clothes are probably the most practical for you anyway. Of course, if you're an apartment dweller, then even washable clothes can be a bit costly to care for; according to my records, when we were living in an apartment, we used to spend between $6 and $23 at the laundry every month. But this is another area in which sharing with others will help keep your costs down. Two people do not produce twice as many loads of laundry as one; more likely, they'll just do two large loads per week rather than two small loads (whites and colors). At a laundromat, where smaller loads may cost just as much as larger ones, sharing your laundry could cut the cost in half.

And finally, here's one rule that doesn't work for a one-week challenge, but does work in real life: plan ahead. The politicians who took the Live the Wage challenge talk about being derailed by "unexpected" expenses, such as health care. When you only have $77 to get through the week, having a big lump of that go for a doctor visit or medicines can break your budget. But in real life, you know that you're bound to get hit by this kind of expense at some point, so you can plan for it. You can budget a certain amount each week for health care, knowing that most weeks you won't use it, but when you do, you'll go through several weeks' worth at once. If you set the money aside as you go, it'll be there when you need it. This is a strategy that nearly every budgeting expert recommends, yet it's one that you can't reasonably follow during a one-week challenge, when it's largely a matter of luck whether you get hit with an unexpected expense or not.

This just brings me back, full-circle, to my biggest gripe about the Live the Wage challenge: doing it for one week simply isn't realistic. In one way, it's too easy, because you know it'll only be a week, so you can just put off large, expected expenses like the cable bill (or pay for them ahead of time). Yet in another way, it's too hard, because you can also get hit by large, unexpected expenses, and you don't have any time to plan ahead for them. As a test of your ability to live on the minimum wage, I think the simulator at NYTimes.com is actually much more useful.

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.

Murphy strikes again

This morning, the weather report was predicting a beautiful, sunny spring day, with highs around 60. A bit windy, perhaps, but still perfect weather for hanging laundry. And since the forecast for the rest of the week was much chillier (highs in the 40s), I hastened to get a load of colored laundry up on the line as early as possible. I got that all hung up and found that it used less than half of my available clothesline space, so I figured I'd just go ahead and throw in a small load of whites, as well, and hang those on the second clothesline. I had to hang the handkerchiefs up by one corner to make it all fit, but I squeezed it in.

So, of course, this afternoon it started to rain. And, of course, it happened while I was out taking my walk, a mile from home, so I couldn't rush out and take down the laundry.

Fortunately, it didn't rain very hard, so by the time I managed to get everything off the line, it was only a bit damp—still drier than it had been when I first hung it up, so my line-drying efforts weren't totally fruitless. But I sure would have saved more energy by hanging up the second load in tomorrow's colder weather, instead of trying to do them both today to take advantage of the nice warm sunshine.

Still more annoying is the fact that the little sprinkle of rain we got was just enough to wet my freshly dried laundry, but not enough to save us from having to water our newly planted trees. Although I can only assume that if I do water them, it will then proceed to rain really hard tomorrow.

The small stuff

Today, before putting in a load of laundry, I wrote the date on the detergent bottle.

Why, you may ask, would I do a thing like that? Do I think the detergent's going to go bad, or something? Well, no, it's more to settle a bet with myself. Several of my cronies on the Dollar Stretcher forums have posted from time to time about homemade laundry detergent as a way to save money. I was skeptical about this, because it doesn't seem to me like laundry detergent is actually all that expensive. We can usually find it on sale at about $2 for a 50-ounce bottle, which is usually labeled as a sufficient quantity to wash 32 loads of laundry. At $2 to wash 32 loads, we'd be paying 6.25 cents per load—so if we do, on average, 1.5 loads per week, we're spending about $4.88 a year on detergent.

Even this figure, though, is probably too high, because when we wash a load of clothes, we generally don't use nearly as much detergent as the manufacturer recommends. (At 32 loads per 50-ounce bottle, the amount indicated by the "fill line" on the cap is presumably around 1.6 fluid ounces, or a little over 3 tablespoons, per load.) I started cutting way back on detergent use after I read about a 1997 experiment conducted by the staff of "The Straight Dope" to see whether those high-priced "laundry balls" actually work. In a controlled test, it turned out that pre-stained clothes got almost as clean when washed with plain water as they did with either Tide or laundry balls. Contributors speculated that this might be because of the detergent residue lingering in the clothes from previous washings, but even so, that's only the merest trace of detergent—so it seems likely that you don't need anywhere near the 1.6 ounces the manufacturer wants you to use. I generally put in one-third to one-half that amount, depending on load size and dirtiness. So logically, a 32-load bottle should actually clean anywhere from  64 to 96 loads, and should last us anywhere from 43 to 64 weeks. That's only $1.63 to $2.41 per year.

But of course, logic has its limits. In practice, I might be underestimating the amount of detergent I use per load or the number of loads I do per week—or the manufacturer might be exaggerating when it claims that its bottle will wash 32 loads. The only way to know for sure, I reasoned, was to take a brand-new bottle and keep track of just how many weeks it took me to use up. So that explains (finally) why I wrote the date on the new bottle of detergent before using it for the first time. What it doesn't explain is, why do I care?

Partly, of course, the answer is that I am an obsessive bean-counter, and I always want to track every detail of my life, from my mortgage balance to my home energy use. But there is some method in my madness. As Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) wrote back in her first Tightwad Gazette book, if you're trying to live on a budget, it really does make sense to "sweat the small stuff." There are a lot more small strategies for saving money than there are big strategies, and a lot more opportunities to use them in your daily life. Knowing how to negotiate with a car dealer might save you a few hundred or even as much as a thousand bucks at one shot, but only once every, say, ten years. Knowing how to pay less for laundry soap, on the other hand, might save you only a few cents on each load—but you do a lot of loads in a lifetime. And if you put this strategy together with all the other small-stuff strategies that save you just a few pennies a day, after a while, those pennies start turning into dollars.

Moreover, she points out, it usually doesn't take that much effort to net a small savings. True, writing down the date on my laundry bottle can't possibly save me more than a few bucks per year—but on the other hand, it only took me a few seconds to do, and spending a few seconds to save a few dollars is a pretty good return on the time invested. And even if it doesn't end up saving me a penny—even if all I learn is that I'll spend the least by doing what I'm doing already—it's still worth the effort to find that out, because it's "good training." It helps me keep in the habit of thinking about what I spend, which is, as I noted back in 2010, the single most important habit for saving money over the long term.

And finally, it's fun—at least, if you're an obsessive bean-counter like me and the Frugal Zealot. I honestly think that even if I won a 500-gajillion-dollar lottery and never had to think about money again as long as I lived, I would still continue to count my pennies, because I genuinely like doing it. Knowing that I'm using only what I need, and no more, makes me feel smart (and considerate, since it makes me a better steward of the earth and its limited resources). Some people might find it silly to keep track of how much laundry soap you use when you could buy every bottle of laundry soap in the world and never miss the money, but personally, I would feel silly using more laundry soap than I need just because the manufacturer told me to fill the cup up to the line. After all, why let them take advantage of me just because I'm rich? Sure, maybe I don't need the money, but don't I have as good a right to it as they do?

Blessings large and small

It's once again that time of year when we reflect, in between bites of turkey and cranberries, on all the things we have to be thankful for. This year, I obviously have one really big cause for gratitude in the fact that Brian and I got off so lightly from "Superstorm" Sandy. More than 100 Americans died as a result of this storm; hundreds of homes were destroyed; here in our own town, many residents were without power for a week in the middle of a cold snap. Here, we were without power for less than 48 hours; our only losses were a pint of milk (which might actually have been still drinkable, but we didn't risk it) and a crotchety old inkjet printer that was on its last legs anyway. No question, we got off cheap.

Yet it occurred to me, as I was taking a shower the other day, that there are a powerful lot of much smaller blessings that it's easy to overlook because we're so used to them. I can take a hot shower every single day if I want to, and dry off with the biggest, fluffiest towel IKEA has to offer. That's a luxury that even the richest of the rich couldn't have imagined just a few hundred years ago, and that would be beyond the dreams of millions of the world's people even today. Yet most days, I don't even pause to think about how lucky I am to be able to enjoy it.

So this year, my Thanksgiving list is going to focus on the little things—the small blessings it's all too easy to take for granted. By focusing my attention on them for this one day, maybe I can help myself be more aware of them on every other day. So....

I'm thankful that simply by flipping a switch, we can have more than enough light to read, cook, play, and (if necessary) work long past sundown.

I'm thankful that, no matter how much I complain about being cold in my office even with four layers of clothing on, I do actually have the option of turning up the heat if I really need to.

I'm thankful that we not only have plenty of food to eat, but plenty of delicious food to eat every day of the week. (Recent meals include pasta a la Caprese, made with the last of our tomato crop, and homemade chicken pot pie, made with humanely raised chicken.)

I'm thankful that Brian's job provides us with good health insurance at an affordable cost.

I'm thankful that we have the biggest library in history—which is also the world's biggest shopping mall, movie theater, road atlas, news source, and a veritable gold mine of bizarre facts and other diversions—at our fingertips.

I'm thankful that we have enough money to feel no guilt about discarding a pint of so-called chocolate-peppermint coffee creamer, a "seasonal item" that I was initially thrilled to find for a buck fifty at the Aldi, only to discover upon tasting it that I could discern no trace of either chocolate or peppermint in the flavor and the mouthfeel was a bit like melted Crisco. (And I'm positively gleeful that I was able to replace it, today, with a pint of Bailey's coffee creamer—normally $2.59 at the Stop & Shop, on sale this week for $1.50, a mere 50 cents with my dollar-off coupon, and 45 cents after deducting a nickel for our reusable shopping bag.)

I'm thankful that, with Thanksgiving still four days away, we already have most of our holiday shopping done, and thus will have no need to go anywhere near a mall on Black Friday.

I'm thankful that it's still warm enough out this weekend to hang one more (possibly last) load of laundry on the line—and that when it's no longer warm enough, or when it just isn't convenient, I can simply toss it all in the dryer instead.

And I'm thankful that, with so many things to be thankful for, there are probably hundreds more that I just can't think of right now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Actual Savings: So why do I hang my laundry?

For some time now, I've been meaning to write a blog entry—or several—about the book All the Money in the World, by Laura Vanderkam, which my mom loaned to me a couple of months ago. Subtitled "What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending," it's an analysis of the ways in which having and using money does, and doesn't, make us happier. I've recently started rereading it, aloud, to Brian, and the chapter we went through this morning was "The Chicken Mystique," which discusses the trend toward urban homesteading and self-sufficiency, as epitomized by backyard chickens. Vanderkam says that as a childhood fan of The Boxcar Children and Little House on the Prairie, she can understand the appeal of this kind of lifestyle—but ultimately, she questions whether it's really worth it for most people. As she points out, raising your own food and making your own clothes aren't the only way to live a meaningful, sustainable life. For someone like herself, it makes more sense to devote her limited time to her "core competencies," which include writing and caring for her family, and then use the money she earns from her writing to buy food and clothing produced by others (for whom growing food and making clothes are their true life's work). She backs this claim up by crunching the numbers on home-raised eggs:

A small batch of chickens might lay you two dozen eggs a week. Organic free-range eggs cost about $4 a dozen in the store...The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. If you could clear $6 an hour, then your chicken work would have to take you less than 1.33 hours per week to be economical...and that doesn't include the start-up costs, which are highly variable.

Well, okay, fair point. I do think that she's overlooking one of the key benefits of home-grown food, which is that having our country's food production more widely distributed is an inherent good. When we depend for our food on a few big growers, than anything that hurts one of those growers can potentially threaten our entire food supply. When food comes from many sources, by contrast, losing one of them is less of a disaster. But then, the producers of organic free-range eggs tend to be small growers anyway—so I can buy Sauder's Farm eggs at the store and still support local growers rather than huge agribusinesses.

However, her strict dollar-cost analysis came back into my mind later, as I was hanging out my laundry on the clothesline. I'd made a point of doing the wash today because the weather forecast was calling for a mostly sunny day with highs around 70—the kind of perfect laundry day we probably won't have many more of before winter sets in. Yet as I sorted through the wet clothes and pinned T-shirts up on the line, I found myself wondering, "Why do I do this? Is it really a good use of my time?"

Asking this question at all felt a bit shocking—in fact, almost blasphemous, from an ecofrugal standpoint. After all, line-drying clothes just seems like such an ecofrugal no-brainer: why on earth would you use fossil fuels, for which you have to pay money, to dry your clothes when the sun will do the job for nothing? But I recalled Vanderkamp's observations about how chicken farming, and many other money-saving activities, have large costs in terms of time—which, unlike money, is an inherently limited resource. Most of us could find some way to make more money if we had to, but no one can increase the number of hours in a week. Throwing my wet clothes directly into the dryer would take me two minutes; hanging them on the line takes ten to twenty minutes (plus another five or so to take them down at the end of the day). Why, exactly, do I consider this time well spent?

Well, for starters, it does save me some money. But it's not that much money, really. Michael Bluejay, who calls himself "Mr. Electricity," claims on his website that clothes dryers make up "a whopping 12% of electricity use in a typical household"—but our household clearly isn't typical. For one thing, we do only one or two loads of laundry per week; for another, our dryer runs on gas rather than electricity (though the tumbling does use some). Bluejay estimates the cost of a single tumble-dried load of laundry at 49 cents for an electric dryer, 24 cents for a gas dryer (based on the energy rates we pay here in central Jersey). So by hanging my laundry, I'm taking at least 10 minutes to save at most 24 cents. That means that my hourly wage for this activity is, at best, a paltry $1.44—less than a quarter of the federal minimum wage, even after taxes.

Okay, but hanging my laundry to reduce energy use doesn't just save me money—it also helps shrink my carbon footprint, right? Right—but again, not by that much. According to Bluejay's calculations, drying a single load of clothes in my gas dryer uses about a quarter of a therm of gas. One therm of gas, according to the EPA, produces roughly 0.005 metric tons of CO2. Our household's carbon footprint for the past year, according to Carbon Footprint, is 8.73 metric tons (well below the average for the US, but still above the worldwide average, and much higher than the level of 2 metric tons per person that they cite as a reasonable target for mitigating global warming). So each time I hang a load of laundry, I'm shrinking our household's carbon footprint by less than one-thousandth of one percent. Every little bit helps, no doubt, but it's pretty clear that hanging all our laundry isn't going to get our footprint down to the target level.

So, given that the financial and environmental benefits are so tiny, why do I willingly, even cheerfully, spend 20 minutes on this chore, once or twice a week? Why not just spend that time on something else productive and pay a little more to Carbonfund each year for my carbon offsets? If I'm being totally honest about it, I think I have to admit that I hang laundry because I enjoy it. I enjoy it partly because of the admittedly illusory sense that I'm doing something to lower our energy bills, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and stave off global warming apocalypse. But if that were the only reason, I could just admit that it's a silly reason and put my time to better use. No, I think there must be more to it than that. I like hanging laundry, quite frankly, because it gives me an excuse to spend 20 minutes outdoors on a nice, sunny day. It gets me out of the house and doing something active, even if 20 minutes of pinning clothes on the line doesn't qualify as much of a workout. It gives me a sense of connection with the natural environment—even if it's only the environment of my own back yard. It helps me feel in tune with the cycle of the seasons; it makes me pay attention to how the amount of daylight changes from month to month, and how the temperature gradually drops throughout the fall. It makes me more aware of winter when I have to stop hanging my clothes out on the line because it's below freezing even in the daytime—and it makes me more aware of spring when I can celebrate the arrival of the first warm day by ceremonially hanging out the first laundry load of the year. And I think those benefits, frankly, are more than enough to justify the use of 10 or 20 minutes of my time. Sure, I could have spent that time working and (at least in theory) earned a few bucks that I could spend on something that would increase my happiness down the road—but being out in the open air, feeling the sun on my back and the wind in my hair and the wooden clothespins between my fingers, makes me happy right now.

Raising chickens to save a nickel per egg, on the other hand, I can live without.

Weather permitting

It occurred to me yesterday, as it has before, just how much of the ecofrugal life is contingent on the phrase, "weather permitting." For example:

Yesterday Brian rode his bike to work (having just finished installing the new rear wheel and brake line). He usually bikes to work during the warmer months, unless he needs to get in particularly early or to stay particularly late. But he can't do it during the winter, because it's too cold and, more to the point, too dark. And he has to skip it on those summer days when the temperature is over 100 or there's the threat of a thunderstorm. So although biking to work is an undeniable win-win-win in ecofrugal terms—a way to save money, help the environment and get some exercise all at once—it's also a habit that depends on the weather and climate.

I did a load of laundry yesterday and hung it up on the line. I generally use the clothesline during the summer, even if it means having to put off doing the laundry until the forecast calls for sunshine. But I can't do it in the winter, because the clothes would just freeze solid. (I've heard of people who do it anyway and claim that they're "mostly dry" once they thaw. But I have my limits.) So once again, even though drying clothes for free with sunlight, rather than paying to do it with fossil fuels, is an ecofrugal no-brainer, it's still a practice that only works when the weather allows it.

I also took a walk in the afternoon, as I do on all but the very hottest or coldest days. It was a particularly ecofrugal walk, as I stopped in at the local farmer's market and, after that, at the nearby thrift shop. Locally grown peaches for $2 a pound and pants in good condition for $2 a pair—a definite ecofrugal triumph. But it's a trip I wouldn't have been able to make in the winter or the spring, because our local farmers' market is only open from July through November. (It's also only open on Fridays until 4pm, which means it's really only available to those of us who don't work bankers' hours, which has always struck me as a bit annoying. But I guess they can't really do it over the weekend, because there are other markets to set up in neighboring towns on Saturday and Sunday.) So this particular ecofrugal habit is one that's only available at certain times of year. (The thrift shop is open year-round, but only for a very few hours a week; I'm much less likely to pass by there at a time when it happens to be open if I'm not on my way to the farmers' market.)

Finally, in the evening, we went to a free concert at the park in Hopewell. This happened to be Broadside Electric, a band we particularly know and love, but we've gone to other outdoor concerts like this in our area without knowing the band, simply because they're fun and free of charge. But this ecofrugal form of entertainment is—once again—only available in the summertime. Even if it weren't too cold for outdoor entertainment in the winter, the light wouldn't last late enough to make it practical.

Basically, what it comes down to is that it's a lot easier to be ecofrugal in the summertime than it is in the winter. And that's true not just of a few special events, but of our whole lifestyle. We generally manage to get through the summer without using air conditioning more than two or three times, but we'd never get through the winter without heat.

Perhaps if I want to take my ecofrugal lifestyle to the next level, I should be concentrating on ways to save money and natural resources during the colder months. So far, all I can think of is canning and freezing garden surplus (which would be a great idea if we ever had any surplus) and wearing layers to stay warm (which I already do, and I still can't seen to tolerate any temperature below 68 degrees). So maybe, like a squirrel storing up nuts, I should really make a start now on gathering nuggets of ecofrugal wisdom to get me through the winter. Does anyone out there have any nuggets to contribute?

Happy First Washday

It seems to be a natural human instinct to create holidays to celebrate the turning of the seasons. The modern pagan calendar marks not only the quarter-days (solstices and equinoxes) but also the cross-quarter days that fall in between, making one holiday to mark the start of every season and another to mark its midpoint. The Christian calendar includes its great winter and spring festivals, and the Jewish calendar ushers in fall with the High Holy Days. Even allegedly secular holidays get roped into the act. The official "summer" season, defined as "the period when it's okay to wear white shoes," is bounded by Memorial Day on one end and Labor Day on the other, even though neither holiday technically has anything to do with the time of year. And the change from fall to winter is unofficially pegged to Thanksgiving weekend, even though that weekend's weather—at least here in the Mid-Atlantic states—is sometimes as balmy as June.

But there doesn't seem to be any holiday that marks the official start of spring. Sure, we have the religious festivals of Easter and Passover, but they move around the calendar so much that it's hard to pin the season to either one. We even start looking for signs of spring in February with Groundhog Day, even though there may still be a foot of snow on the ground. But it doesn't matter what we do; spring just comes when it comes. It's marked by events that don't appear on any calendar: the melting of snow, the appearance of snowdrops and crocuses, the first day it's warm enough to go out without a coat. We can't predict to a day when these events will happen—but they are holidays, all the same. They are festivals, days to celebrate, whenever they arrive.

So I hereby declare today, February 18, 2011, to be First Washday—the first day it's been warm enough to hang a load of laundry up on the line. There was a vague threat of possible showers in the weather report, but I wouldn't let that deter me. Today is First Washday, and I intend to give the event all the honor it deserves. It may be back below freezing by tomorrow night; it may even snow again on Monday or Tuesday; but none of that can change the fact that First Washday has come at last, and a joyous occasion it is.

The Resource Equation

A recent post on one of the Dollar Stretcher blogs profiled a couple with different approaches to frugality: a compulsively tidy wife who is always trying to get rid of clutter, and a packrat husband who holds on to all kinds of things "just in case." The wife was forced to admit that her husband's approach had its benefits after one of her new car tires was pierced by a large chunk of gravel, damaging it beyond repair, and he produced the old tire from the garage as a replacement. This led her to wonder:

who is more frugal? Is it the person who doesn't have to buy things twice as they know where they have put it, who doesn't waste time searching for things, who doesn't need more room to store more stuff? Or is it the person who can nip into the garage and find a whatsit that will perfectly fix the whatchamacallit instead of the proper part, which costs megabucks?

This reminded me of a similar situation described by Amy Dacyczyn, the "Frugal Zealot," in her Tightwad Gazette newsletter (no longer published, but archived in book form as The Complete Tightwad Gazette). In an article called "The Frugal Balance," she noted that many people consider some aspects of the frugal lifestyle to be "too extreme" for them. A typical comment, she said, might be:

"Yeah, my sister Thelma is really frugal. You can't move in her house because of all the bread bags, Styrofoam meat trays, rubber bands, and toilet-paper tubes. But I just can't live that way. I guess I'm not the tightwad type."

Amy's response was that this isn't a case of being "too frugal": rather, it's frugality out of balance. Thelma is concentrating on saving just one resource–money–by keeping this huge stash. But because she is not using other resources effectively, such as the space in her home, she ends up wasting time, energy, and money because she can't find things when she needs them. A truly frugal person, by contrast, will try to make the best possible use of all resources, balancing the amount of stuff stashed with the amount of space available. A tightwad who lives in a big house with lots of storage space can afford to keep more things "just in case," while one who lives in a tiny apartment must take extra care to conserve space and save only the things that are most likely to be useful. "Because we all have different amounts of money, time, space, and personal energy and different ideas about what constitutes quality of life," she writes, "we must each find our own frugal balance."

For me, striking this frugal balance means taking the environment into consideration as well. In fact, when I have a decision to make involving money, I sometimes think in terms of a "resource equation": money plus time plus effort plus natural resources. Rather than just making the choice with the lowest dollar cost, I try to consider all these variables and come up with the choice that will give me the lowest total cost. Sometimes, a single option is obviously the best choice because it lowers several variables at once: for instance, switching out my incandescent bulbs for CFLs saves both money and natural resources. In other cases, a choice raises some variables while lowering others: for instance, hanging out laundry to dry saves money and natural resources, but takes extra time and effort. I have to reckon in my mind how much that extra time and effort is worth to me to decide whether hanging out the laundry is the best choice overall. (For me, the answer is generally yes in summer and no in winter.) And occasionally, I'll decide that a choice that costs me more money is worth it because of the other resources it saves, such as paying a bit extra for renewable electricity through the state's "CleanPower Choice Program." (Combining this with conservation measures means that I only pay a few extra dollars a month, and when the thermometer hits 100, as it did yesterday, I can switch on the AC without guilt.)

So basically, my whole idea of ecofrugality is pretty much the same as Amy Dacycyzn's concept of the "frugal balance." The key point is that true frugality isn't just about money: it's about using all resources as wisely as possible. Interestingly, I stumbled across a quotation recently on my favorite cryptogram website that expresses much the same idea. In the words of that most venerable of all tightwads, Benjamin Franklin:

Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do, and with them everything.

Happy Earth Day, if the weather holds

Today's weather report calls for "sunshine and clouds mixed," with "a stray shower or thunderstorm," which is singularly unhelpful when it comes to planning your day. Do you ride your bike to work, or do you risk being caught in that "stray shower or thunderstorm"? Should you hang the wash out on the line, or will that "stray thunderstorm" leave it more drenched than it was when it came out of the washer? In other words, how many of the "green" things you do most of the time will the weather ironically force you to skip on Earth Day?

This got me thinking about how the weather and climate affect the "greenness" of my behavior in general. For example, I'm sure I'm generally a deeper shade of green in the summer than I am in the winter. I can't line-dry my clothes in the winter, because they'd freeze solid (apparently there are some people who do this and bring them in, still frozen, to dry, but I'm not quite that dedicated); Brian can't ride his bike to work in the snow; and while I can go most of the summer without air-conditioning (I switch it on only when the temperature in the house hits 90 degrees, which may not happen more than twice in a summer), I certainly can't manage for most of the winter without heat. During the winter months, my garden lies neglected, and even eating local food is impractical, because nothing grows in New Jersey from November through March. (Barbara Kingsolver's local eating experiment in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I wrote about on my old blog, was only practical because the family moved across the country from hot, dry Tuscon to warm, fertile Virginia.) Even buying secondhand goods is harder in the winter, because there are no yard sales. In fact, according to Wikipedia, one of the reasons for choosing this date for Earth Day in the first place, forty years ago, was that it was "late enough in spring to have decent weather."

This is a troubling trend, because it suggests that we may be trapped in a vicious circle. Probably the biggest environmental problem the world faces right now is climate change—a better term than "global warming," because the earth isn't simply going to grow gradually and uniformly warmer across its entire surface; instead, weather patterns will shift dramatically, and one of the likely effects will be more and bigger storms. In other words, the weather is going to keep getting worse, and the worse it gets, the harder it will be for people to do the things that are needed (like driving less, or using less power) to mitigate the problem.

But on the other hand, some of our problems may turn out to be self-correcting. For instance, the burning of fossil fuels is a problem not just because of the greenhouse gases and other pollution they produce, but also because they're a limited, nonrenewable resource. But that may be a good thing, because as the supply of these fuels starts to run low, the prices will go up, giving a boost to conservation efforts and to the renewable-power industry. I'm not trying to say that the problem will take care of itself, and we don't need to do anything—merely that there are at least a few good reasons to hope that the efforts we do make won't be futile.

Personally, I've never been much of a believer in hand-wringing. Yes, we need to understand the scope of the problems we're facing, but only so that we can figure out what's needed to solve them. I prefer to focus on ways to succeed, rather than on the disastrous consequences of failure. So rather than joining the chorus of doomsayers, I'm going to come up—right now—with a list of ten simple things that I am doing to help the earth this Earth Day, come rain or come shine:

1. I got in and out of the shower in three minutes.
2. Afterward, I dried my hair with a microfiber towel rather than a blow-dryer (which is terrible for my dry hair anyway).
3. I have dressed in my secondhand best (every garment except the underwear).
4. I'm now brewing up a cup of organic, Fair-Trade coffee. (I'm also using Amy Dacyczyn's trick of adding half the original amount of ground coffee to the once-used grounds in the filter, to get a second cup from half as much coffee.)
5. I will submit at least one new green-themed article to Associated Content. (Side note: I've had three new articles published there since my last post. Two of them are reworkings of topics already discussed on this blog: a piece on the virtues of popcorn and the best way to take advantage of them, and an editorial on how the recession is making Americans greener. The other is a review of the new solar garden lights I picked up at the Aldi last week. I've added a handy link at the right that will take you directly to my Associated Content page.)
6. I will darn one of Brian's socks that has developed a hole in the toe (though this may actually be counterproductive, since we probably need new rags in our kitchen more than he needs new socks).
7. Speaking of which, I will use reusable rags to mop up all our kitchen spills, of which I'm sure there will be some.
8. I will take a walk (with an umbrella, if necessary) to renew my appreciation of nature.
9. Tonight's dinner will be meatless (potato-apple skillet, from the delectable Small Potato Cookbook).
10. And I went ahead and hung the laundry out on the line. Call it a leap of faith.