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.

Re-roll out the barrel

For most of this gardening season, our rain barrel has been out of commission. When we first hauled it out of the shed in the spring, Brian found a problem with the spigot, so we couldn't use it until we acquired a new one. Then, while he was installing that, he discovered a bigger problem: the barrel itself had a big crack right down the bottom. He tried repairing this with polyurethane aquatic sealant, but that was completely useless; it fell out as soon as it dried. Then he tried a plastic repair epoxy putty from J.B. Weld, which molded nicely into the crack but didn't stick to the body of the barrel. Finally, he tried the regular J.B. Weld epoxy, applying it to both the inside and the outside of the barrel. That worked better than the other options, but it didn't hold for long. Once the rain barrel filled up, the crack partially reopened, draining off all the water above roughly the one-quarter mark.

So, having exhausted the "repair" option, it was time to move on to "replace." And that presented us with a new problem: what was the most ecofrugal choice for a new rain barrel?

I didn't really know how much it was reasonable to pay for a rain barrel, since we'd gotten ours for free from a friend who had an extra. I checked out the selection at The Home Depot and found that for the size we wanted—about 55 gallons—prices ranged from around $40 for collapsible models made of soft plastic to over $200 for fancy wood-look models with multiple spigots. The top-rated choice was a hefty industrial drum that cost $180, but based on the picture, we couldn't figure out how we'd hook it up to our downspout. And the top seller, a utilitarian plastic bin priced at $117, made me a little wary because it looked so similar to our old one, which had cracked after 9 years of use, even though we had diligently drained it and stowed it away every winter. I was hoping for something sturdier that would serve us for decades to come.

But after scrolling a little further, I hit on something that looked ideal: a 55-gallon model upcycled from an old food storage barrel. Priced at $100 and available in three colors, it was made from a sturdy HDPE plastic that, according to the listing, "can be left outdoors even in the winter months so there is no need to modify your downspouts in the Spring and Fall." That would save us time, free up storage space in the shed, and eliminate the step of wrestling the barrel onto and off of the cinder-block pad we built for it, which is what Brian suspected had damaged the bottom of our current one. It had all the features we needed: a mosquito screen on top, a hose hookup on the bottom, and an overflow valve near the top. And the fact that it's a repurposed food container is decidedly ecofrugal.

When I consulted the reviews, I saw nothing to discourage me even in the negative ones. The most common complaint was that the spigot leaked or fell off, but that was nothing we couldn't handle, especially since we already had a whole new spigot we'd bought for our current barrel. (There was also one amusing one-star review from someone complaining that the product was "not only used but used for transporting food items"—a fact that's stated right in the product description and that, in my view, was a feature rather than a bug.)

A quick $100 PayPal payment later, our new rain barrel is on its way. We didn't even have to have it shipped to a nearby Home Depot store for pickup; having it sent directly to our home was free and actually slightly faster. 

As for the old, cracked rain barrel, Brian has a plan to put that to a new use: growing potatoes. We didn't have much success the first time we tried this using 5-gallon buckets, but Brian thinks it might work better if we plant the potatoes in a nice big barrel with plenty of room. The crack in the bottom won't be a problem, since it needs drainage holes anyway. And we won't need to worry about protecting the plants from groundhogs, since the tall, smooth-sided barrel will be too hard for them to climb. Deer may still be a problem, but Brian thinks he can deter those with a little fence of chicken wire around the top. We just need to figure out where in the yard to put the barrel for maximum potato potential.

Earthships: the ultimate ecofrugal home that I don't want

Last week my mom sent me an email with the subject line, "homes off-grid, climate resilient, and built from trash." Inside was a link to a Washington Post article about Earthships: earth-sheltered homes out in the New Mexico desert built largely from a combination of used tires, dirt, and other waste and designed to be largely self-sustaining. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't read the piece because it was behind a paywall, but fortuitously, a condensed version of it turned up in this week's Star-Ledger Extra, a freebie we get with our weekly supermarket fliers. Between that and the official website for Earthship Global, I was able to glean several interesting facts about how Earthships work and why people build them.

First, Earthship construction minimizes the use of limited resources, like wood, while making use of materials that would otherwise go to waste. They homes are built chiefly from used tires packed with dirt, turning a major waste product (we currently have 2.5 billion old tires in the U.S., with another 2.5 million discarded each year) into a wall that's strong but not brittle, heavily insulated, and naturally fire-resistant. It's also a large thermal mass that absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night. In short, it's about as ecofrugal a building material as you could ask for. Many Earthships also incorporate other waste materials, such as cans and bottles, often as decorative elements.

Also, Earthships are built to be "autonomous." They're self-powering, using solar panels for electricity and passive solar design to keep them at a comfortable temperature year-round. They have indoor gardens that can supply 25% to 50% of their residents' food needs. Their plumbing systems use the same water multiple times: first for drinking and bathing, then for watering the garden, then for flushing toilets, and finally out into a septic tank where it helps fertilize outdoor plants. 

All this makes them appealing to what the Post article calls "climate doomers." Many Earthship owners aren't just trying to live lightly on the planet and help stave off the climate apocalypse; they're planning to survive it. An Earthship builder quoted in the article says many clients see the house as their "panic room." The article says many young people see Earthships as offering "a clean break from a world that feels like it's on the verge of breaking itself."

Now, I can certainly see the appeal of living in an Earthship. They're not exactly cheap to build — in fact, they cost a bit more than other homes of similar size, though you can reduce costs by doing the work yourself with a bit of training. But they're eco-friendly and self-sustaining, and they can offer a haven from disasters that knock society to its knees either temporarily (weather emergencies, the coronavirus pandemic) or permanently (climate catastrophe). And yet, as I read the article, I didn't feel even the slightest temptation to go west and build one of my own.

Because the fact is, I don't want to live in a fortress of solitude in the New Mexico desert.  An Earthship of my own could potentially meet my needs for shelter, water, energy, and even food, but not for human companionship and community. Maybe if I could build an Earthship right here in Highland Park, from which I could still visit the library and attend outdoor movie nights and go for walks in the park and run errands in town, I might be at least slightly tempted. But retreating into the desert to live in my own little earth-sheltered hermitage, cut off from the world and its problems, has no appeal for me. I want to be a part of the world, a part of my own community, and a part of the solution.

What I'd really like is if, instead of paying $2,500 to spend a week at the Earthship Academy learning how to build a complete Earthship from scratch, I could pay some more modest sum to learn how to incorporate elements of sustainable Earthship construction into an existing home. How to add passive solar elements to my home to reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. How to recycle water while staying connected to the town sewer system. How to grow more food at home, indoors and out, without having to build a new house from scratch around the garden.

Making my current home more Earthship-like wouldn't just benefit me. The changes to my home could serve as a model for others in the neighborhood as well. I could find ways to share the knowledge I'd gained with my neighbors (lectures at the library? materials distributed online?) and help them make their homes more sustainable too. And we could work together to make not just individual homes, but our whole town better able to weather disasters, with resources like community gardens and community solar that would benefit everyone.

Then I wouldn't just be the captain of my own Earthship; I'd be part of the crew of a town-wide Earthship sailing toward sustainability. Together, we could all help fend off the climate apocalypse or, if worse came to worst, survive it as a community. Which, to me, seems much better than surviving all by myself.

Perch Energy articles

I recently wrote two articles for a new client: Perch Energy, a company that helps you choose a new power provider based on price and renewable energy content. (The service isn't available yet in NJ, which is a pity, since I sure could have used it when looking for a replacement for Green Mountain.) These pieces on their blog don't carry my byline, so I'm not adding them to my official work portfolio, but I figured it would be okay to share them privately with my small band of ecofrugal fans.

The first one, Complete Guide to Saving Energy At Home, is just what it sounds like: a primer on energy savings. It covers the benefits of conservation and the easiest ways to save, such as turning down the thermostat, eliminating phantom power, replacing old light bulbs...basically, all the stuff you probably know already, but conveniently gathered in one place. And the second, Water Saving Tips At Home, does much the same thing for water use.

Not sure how long-term this writing gig will be yet, but for now, it's nice to have a chance to write about something that's more consistently in tune with my ecofrugal interests than the work I've been doing for Money Crashers.

The curse of the auto flush toilet

Last week, Brian and I took our first honest-to-goodness overnight trip in over a year. The vaccines arrived too late to allow us to make our usual trip to Indiana for Christmas last year, so to make up for it, he took a week off and we drove out to visit his folks for a few days. It's a twelve-hour trip by car, so we naturally have to make several stops along the way — usually just one for a meal, but quite a few to use restrooms. And so I had my first reminder in over a year of one of the biggest problems with public restrooms: the capriciousness of auto flush toilets.

I'm not the only one who finds these thing annoying. Search "why are auto flush toilets so bad," and you'll find multiple threads on Reddit complaining about them (usually in very bad language, so you've been warned). The problem is, to know when to flush, they rely on an infrared sensor that is, in theory, blocked when someone is seated. So every time the light hits that sensor, it assumes that someone has just gotten up and flushes. But in reality, it's almost impossible to enter a stall, sit down, do your business, get up, and exit without uncovering the sensor multiple times, resulting in multiple flushes. In some restrooms I've visited, the toilet regularly flushes at least once before I even sit down.

Now, there are several reasons to be annoyed by this. Maybe you don't like loud, unexpected noises, particularly when you're in a public place and partially disrobed. Maybe you don't like having your bum sprayed with water. Maybe you're a parent whose small child gets freaked out (not unreasonably) at having the potty suddenly threaten to suck them in while they're sitting on it. But for me, the most frustrating thing about these "phantom flushes" is that each one of them wastes water — according to the EPA, at least 1.6 gallons (the current federal standard) and, in the case of some older models, more than four times that amount.

How much waste does this add up to in total? There don't seem to be any recent studies on this point, but according to Grist, a 2010 study (no longer available online) found that water use in one office building increased by 54 percent after it installed auto flush toilets. Multiply that by all the 27 million toilets in the U.S. that use these infernal inventions, and you're talking about a lot of wasted water. Think about what you could do with all that extra water in a place like California, which lives in a perpetual state of drought. According to a 2015 Los Angeles Times op-ed, eliminating auto flush toilets just in the state's two biggest airports, LAX and SFO, could save 80 million gallons per year. Replacing all the auto flush toilets in the state with manual ones would save billions of gallons.

And yet the EPA, which has a mandate to prevent water waste, does not propose this solution. Instead, it suggests that these 27 million toilets should all be replaced with WaterSense models, which use less water per flush. And admittedly, wasting 1 gallon of water on each phantom flush is better than wasting 1.6 gallons. But it would do nothing at all to eliminate the phantom flushing problem. A manual flush toilet that uses 1.6 gallons of water for one flush per use is still a lot more efficient than a so-called WaterSense toilet that uses 1 gallon each for three or four.

A real solution would be to make better sensors that don't go off until the user is actually done with the toilet. My first thought on this point was that maybe instead of an infrared sensor, the toilet should have a sensor under the seat that detects a person's weight, so it would only flush after the person has actually finished and stood up. But I quickly realized there were two problems with this. First, apparently some people prefer to stand up to wipe, which means they might not be done before the flush occurred. But more seriously, apparently many people never sit down in public restrooms at all. Again, I couldn't find a recent study, but a 1991 study in Britain found that fully 85 percent of women — 85 percent! — prefer to "crouch" over the seat to avoid contact. (Another 12 percent routinely covered the seat with paper, leaving only 2 percent who dared to allow their bare butts to make contact with the seat.)

So here's my new idea: don't put the sensor on the toilet at all. If you want to have an automatic flush toilet, have it be triggered by the opening, or perhaps the unlocking, of the stall door. That would absolutely guarantee that the toilet won't flush until the person is done using it. You might still get a few phantom flushes from people who only went into a stall to change clothes or something, but it would be far less than the number we're getting now.

Unfortunately, I don't have the engineering know-how to make this work, nor the connections to get such an invention distributed. But anyone who does is more than welcome to steal the idea. I'm happy to forfeit any financial gains from it in exchange for the benefits of less wasted water all over the country, and less annoyance to me and millions of others every time we use a public restroom.

In the meantime, I guess I'll have to make do with the low-tech solution outlined in the Grist article: covering up the sensor with toilet paper or a Post-It as soon as I enter the stall, and removing it when I leave. So, essentially, turning the auto flush toilet into an overly complicated version of a manual flush toilet. This won't always work, because as I noted above, there are some toilets with sensors so oversensitive that they flush reflexively pretty much the second you walk into the stall. But at least it will reduce the flush rate to two per visit — only twice as many as necessary — instead of three or four.

Ecofrugality in the time of COVID, part 2

Today, my weekly "The Goods" newsletter from Vox contained this headline: "Do you really have to wash your mask after every use? Short answer: Yes." This puzzled me, because as far as I know, there's really no evidence to support this particular piece of advice. Think about it for a minute: If you're outside, maintaining a six-foot distance from other people, then there should be no way for their germs to get onto your mask — even onto the outside surface of it — in any detectable amount. Even if you're in a store and coming within six feet of other people, as long as they're all wearing masks too — which, by law, they have to be here in New Jersey — then their germs shouldn't be getting onto your mask.

Even if there's still a tiny, theoretical risk that germs could somehow get onto your mask just from briefly passing someone else on the street, that risk is no greater for your mask than for the rest of your clothes. Yet no one is suggesting that you have to immediately take off and wash all your clothes after coming inside and then wash your hands and change into clean clothes, lest the germs from your clothes somehow get onto your hands and from there into your body. This kind of precaution makes sense if you're a doctor who's been in contact with sick people all day, but I haven't heard anyone advocating it for ordinary people just going out for a walk or a trip to the store. So why is it necessary for masks?

On top of that, based on what we now know about the virus, it seems that COVID isn't likely to spread through contact with objects at all. The CDC website now says, "The primary and most important mode of transmission for COVID-19 is through close contact from person-to-person," and while it adds that "it may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes," I'm not aware of any evidence that the virus actually does spread this way.

In fact, according to one idea floated last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, one benefit of masks could actually be that they don't block out every single virus. The authors speculated that wearing masks that screen out some, but not all, viral particles could allow people to become inoculated against the virus through low-dose exposure, increasing the chances that their immune system will learn to recognize it without their actually needing to be exposed to enough of it to make them sick. Granted, this hypothesis hasn't been and probably can't be tested, but if it's right, it would mean that being hyper-sensitive about washing masks after every use is not only unnecessary but counterproductive.

Even the Vox article itself conceded that, since surface transmission isn't common, "The recommendation to wash your mask comes out of an abundance of caution." And yet the headline sends exactly the opposite message: You must, yes MUST, wash your mask EVERY SINGLE TIME you use it. And you must not touch it at all while wearing it. And when removing it, you must touch only the ear loops, not the surface. And you must immediately wash your hands afterwards. And you mustn't wear that mask again until it's been washed — and oh, by the way, a mask will only remain effective for about 50 washings, or 100 if it's air-dried. After that, you have to buy a new one.

Reading this article really pissed me off, and at first I wasn't sure why. I mean, sure, what they're recommending may be unnecessary, but is it really harmful? How can "an abundance of caution" be a bad thing?

Thinking it over, I discovered the main thing that bothers me about this: It's anti-ecofrugal.

Consider: if you have to wear a fresh mask every time you go out (not to mention putting on a fresh one if yours gets wet from rain, sweat, or exhaled moisture), then you have two choices. First, you can wear disposable masks, which use up more resources and create more waste than cloth ones. Or, second, you can have a large enough supply of reusable masks to wear a fresh one (or two) every day between loads of laundry. This, in turn, means you either have to buy your masks by the dozen or wash your clothes every couple of days, doing smaller loads if necessary, to ensure you always have a clean one. And even if you have a different mask for every day of the week, you'll still need to invest in new ones after a year, since they're no good after 50 washings. No matter what you choose, you have to spend more money and use more resources than if you simply had two or three masks and wore the same one until it got dirty.

And here's the thing: I would still be willing to do all this, even though it goes against my environmental instincts, if there were clear evidence that, by doing so, I would be helping to contain the virus. In that case, I would see it as a worthwhile sacrifice, much like not seeing my friends in person for months and not touching anyone outside my family and crossing the street every time I come near another person on the sidewalk. But in fact, there is no clear evidence that this abundantly cautious behavior makes a difference. Wearing masks absolutely makes a difference. But there's no evidence that requiring fresh masks every time makes more of a difference than reusing the same mask.

And this is just one way out of many that ecofrugal behaviors are being actively discouraged, if not outright banned, during this pandemic for little or no benefit. I still can't take my reusable cup to Starbucks (though I could if I lived in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East); I have to take a single-use cup that can never be recycled. I still can't take a reusable bag to Trader Joe's; every time I shop there, I have to take one or more of their paper bags, which are even worse for the environment than single-use plastic ones. Despite the increasing evidence that COVID does not spread through contact with objects, businesses are continuing to require practices that are bad for the environment and unlikely to have any effect on health — focusing even more on them than on practices that do actually help, like limiting the number of customers in the store at a time.

Moreover, the cost to the environment isn't the only problem these strict policies create. For example, much as I dislike the added cost of buying more masks and doing more laundry, I can at least afford it. But there are many people, even in this wealthy nation, who can't easily afford it, especially with unemployment as high as it is now. For these people, these strict guidelines are a serious hardship — one that could make them less willing to wear masks at all. After all, if the only right way to wear a mask is to wear a clean one every time you leave the house, and to keep it on continuously until you return home, and to avoid touching it at all, and to change it (while somehow not touching it) any time it gets wet, and to take it off as soon as you get home and then wash your hands immediately, then if there's any single one of those rules you can't comply with, you're liable to think, "Well, wearing a mask is just impossible for me." By trying to get Americans to adhere to the strictest possible guidelines "out of an abundance of caution," these doctors may actually be making us all less safe by reducing compliance.

Let me be absolutely clear about this: I am not taking an extreme libertarian stance against all steps people, businesses, and governments are taking to contain the virus. I am absolutely for any measures to do so that truly are supported by the science, such as wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, and contact tracing. What I can't get behind is imposing rules that have no science behind them, that reduce the chances people will comply with the rules that do have science behind them, and that waste money and natural resources in the process.

Earth Week Challenge 2020: Water Wednesday

Day 3 of the Earth Week Challenge is "Water Wednesday." Today's challenge is to "Become mindful about your relationship with water. Learn about local water issues and how you can protect your access to clean water."

Well, I could just argue that I've already done that, dust off my hands, and move on. But the email I received goes on to suggest several more specific and concrete tasks to complete:

1. Find at least three ways to conserve water in your home or daily habits.
If they're asking me to name three ways I already conserve water in my home or daily habits, I could do that without breaking a sweat (which would also save water). I've already written 25 posts here about my water-use habits, including one Money Crashers article specifically on ways to reduce water use at home. But if they're asking for three new ways to save water that I haven't adopted already, I'm not sure I could manage that. At this point, I've already harvested all the low-hanging fruit: washing full loads of laundry, using a water-saving shower head, using drought-tolerant plants in my yard, and so on. The only things left are either prohibitively difficult or expensive (like installing a greywater tank) or simply unacceptable to me, like holding my showers to a three-minute limit. I don't have many extravagant habits, but I like to take my time washing my hair and shaving my legs.

2. COVID-19 water challenge: Save water while washing your hands, turning the faucet off while you lather your hands for 20 seconds.​
I'd already tried this, and as far as I can tell, it did no good. After taking 20 seconds to lather up my hands without the water running, I just had to spend another 20 seconds rinsing off all that soap. The process ended up taking twice as long and using just as much water.

3. Meditate on how you are thankful for having clean water. 
I've done this before, not in any really focused way, but every time a news story happens across my path about places that are struggling with water shortages or pollution. I can take a few seconds now to express my gratitude, once again, that I can drink water straight out of my tap and don't have to shell out ludicrous amounts of money (and consume ludicrous amounts of packaging) for bottled water, but it doesn't make me any more aware of the problem than I was yesterday.

There was also a "bonus task" created by Audubon Florida, which involves writing a story about the Everglades for a specific audience, but this was a lot more time-consuming than the others, and I couldn't see how it would directly help anyone. So I've set that one aside to revisit when I have a little more time to spare.

So, all in all, I didn't do much of anything differently for Water Wednesday than I would on any other Wednesday. I did wash one very full load of laundry, but that was because we hadn't done it for over a week and I was nearly out of socks; I did take a shower, because I had skipped it yesterday; and I washed my hands the same way I've been doing ever since the COVID outbreak started. The only specific action I took in honor of the challenge was to try to mimic Brian's low-water washing method when cleaning up the lunch dishes. But I probably didn't manage to keep my water use quite as low as he did.

The best way to make coffee

One of my birthday presents this year was a new AeroPress coffee maker. I had put this item on my gift wish list because I was intrigued by its versatility. You can use it to make either regular-strength or espresso-strength coffee, and you can make either one, two, or three cups' worth at a time. And since I can't remember the last time I needed to make coffee for more people than that at once, I thought the AeroPress could potentially take the place of all the coffee-making apparatus in my cabinet: my big 10-cup drip machine, my single-cup pour-over cone, the filters for both, and the little moka pot I use for espresso. And on top of that, it was reputed to make a pretty darn good cup of joe.

Having tried it several times now, I can report that the AeroPress does everything it claims. It does indeed brew up a very good cup of coffee: rich, not too bitter, and free from sediment. (And I haven't even tried using it in cold brew mode yet, which could potentially be even better.) It's also very easy to use and very easy to clean. But what struck me most about it, after a week of use, is that it's probably the most ecofrugal way to brew coffee.

The method I've been relying on most for my everyday coffee was my little pour-over cone. It's quite simple to use, with minimal equipment, but it does require the use of disposable filters. True, they go into the compost bin (used grounds and all) rather than to the landfill, but they still require resources to produce. And of course, they're not free to buy either. The last box I bought was from Trader Joe's and cost $2.00 for 100 unbleached filters (size 2), so that's 2 cents apiece — not a lot, but it adds marginally to the cost of each cup of coffee. And the filters take up additional space in the cabinet.

I could, of course, eliminate the cost and the waste of paper filters by using a reusable filter made of cloth or metal. I even tried it for a while, but I quickly gave up on it because it was such a hassle to clean the grounds out of the filter. Even after I'd dumped the contents out into the compost bin, there was still quite a large volume of wet coffee grounds clinging to the cloth filter, and I had to run water through it for at least 30 seconds to get the thing clean. So whatever resources I saved by not using the paper filters were offset, maybe completely, by the amount of water it took to wash it. Not to mention all the grounds that ended up going down the drain, which probably weren't the best thing for the plumbing.

Other methods of brewing coffee have similar problems. A French press uses no paper filters, but requires just as much water (and work) to clean. An automatic drip machine uses even bigger paper filters and requires a significant amount of water (and work) to clean all the parts of the pot itself and the drip apparatus. They also waste the coffee itself if you brew a whole potful and only three people take any. And of course, the increasingly popular single-cup brewers, most notably the Keurig, produce a ludicrous amount of waste. According to the Story of Stuff project, the number of single-use K-cups trashed to date could circle the globe more than 10 times.

The AeroPress isn't zero-waste, but it's pretty close. It does have a filter, but only a tiny one, a flat disk just 2.5 inches in diameter. These "micro-filters" cost $5 for a package of 350 — only 1.4 cents each — and the amount of space they take up in the cabinet is negligible. And best of all, they make it incredibly easy to clean the press. When I finish brewing a cup of coffee, I just remove the filter cap, position the chamber over my little bathroom compost bin, and ram the plunger home. This ejects filter and grounds together into the bin, and all I have to do is rinse off any grounds clinging to the plunger. Then the whole gadget can go into the dish drainer to dry, and it's ready for its next use.

All in all, this coffee maker seems make the best possible use of limited resources compared to other methods. It saves paper by using such tiny filters. It saves both water and time by reducing the need for cleaning. It also saves time by brewing up a cup of good coffee faster than any other method I've tried. It saves cabinet space by replacing three different coffee gadgets with one. It saves energy by brewing coffee with water below the boiling temperature (ideally around 175°F, though to be honest, I usually just guesstimate it), so I don't have to bring the kettle to a full boil. And all of this, of course, saves money.

Please note, I am not trying to shill for AeroPress here. I was not paid anything to write this post (like they'd waste the money on a blog as tiny as this one, anyway), and I'm not trying to convince anyone who already has a coffee brewing method they like to switch. Indeed, I'd be delighted if you'd share your experience in the comments and tell me why you think your favorite method is superior. I don't promise to be convinced, however, because I'm pretty darn pleased with my new coffee maker — and with all the extra space I have now in my cabinet.

Thrift Week 2019: The Reusable Edition

One of the cornerstones of the ecofrugal life is replacing single-use items with reusable ones. For folks who care about both the environment and their bank balance, this is generally a no-brainer. After all, what kind of sense does it make to keep spending money on things you're just going to discard? And why flood the waste stream with disposable napkins, tissues, whatever, when you could just buy one thing and use it over and over again?

Some time last year, I got the idea to write a post about all the different ways we've put this principle into practice in our own lives. I started making a list of disposable things we've replaced with reusable ones, and when I got to seven items, I thought, hey, wait a minute—why not give each one of these its own post for Thrift Week?

Thus, I'm dubbing Thrift Week 2019 the Reusable Edition. Each day this week, I'll be focusing on  a specific disposable item we no longer use (or never did use) and what reusable item we've replaced it with. And since we're starting off Thrift Week on a Thursday, which is Morris dance practice night for me and Brian, I thought I'd make my first post about an item that always accompanies me to my dance practices and gigs: my reusable water bottle.

As I've said many times, both here and on Money Crashers, I think the whole concept of bottled water is about as far from ecofrugal as it's possible to get. I mean, think about it for a minute: you're taking something that anyone can get out of a faucet for practically nothing, and instead putting it into single-use plastic bottles and charging a buck or two apiece for them. How on earth did this idea ever catch on? I can see why you might be forced to buy your water in bottles if you live in one of the few places in this country that doesn't have a safe drinking water supply, but how did it ever become the standard across the entire country, to the point that drinking from the tap never even occurs to people?

Now, I realize there are some people who regularly drink tap water at home but buy bottles to take with them on the go, since you can't exactly tote the kitchen sink along with you. Well, it's true, if you want water ready to hand when you're out and about, you need to bring your own bottle—but there's no earthly reason why that bottle needs to be disposable. The kit bag I tote along to every Morris practice contains a stainless-steel water bottle I acquired on Freecycle, which holds—I just checked—a good 28 ounces. It has a twist-on top with a pop-up drinking valve, and an additional guard that fits over that valve to catch any leaks. In the few years I've had it, it's developed a few scratches and dings, but it holds water just a securely as ever. Most of the time, I don't even bother to clean it, and I've never noticed any kind of crud growing in it—but if I did, a good rinsing and air drying would leave it as good as new.

I chose this large, sturdy bottle for my Morris bag because it sees a lot of heavy use, and I wanted something that would both hold a good supply of water and stand up to being hauled around and buffeted in my kit bag. However, we also have a couple of others that see regular use. We regularly keep two glass bottles in our car cup holders that originally held juice; I believe one was originally a Snapple and one was a Nantucket Nectar. Spending two bucks on a bottle of juice may not seem very ecofrugal, but if you look at it as a reusable water bottle that comes with a free serving of juice as a bonus, it's actually a great price. All we had to do was drink the juice, take the bottles home and give them a quick wash with a bottle brush (originally bought for our reusable milk bottles, back when we were regularly drinking powdered milk), and refill them with water. In the wintertime, we make a point of never filling them more than about two-thirds full, lest they freeze and crack the glass, but in the summer we can fill them right to the top. We take them inside for rinsing and airing every now and then, but otherwise they need no care.

Even when we want bubbles in our water, we no longer buy it in disposable containers. My Primo Flavorstation, which I received as a gift four years ago, is still working fine and can supply all our fizzy-water needs. When I first got this, it came with a warning that the plastic bottle supplied with it shouldn't be used for more than two years, because the PETE plastic in it would slowly degrade until it could no longer handle high pressure, resulting in a dramatic explosion. So I bought a second bottle for it just in case, but I've been tempting fate by continuing to use the original bottle for the past two years, and so far it's still holding up. (I did start turning the machine to face away from me before hitting the carbonator button, just so that in case it does suddenly go off with a bang, I'll have the machine between my body and any flying plastic fragments.)

So, basically, for the last four years, we have had no need to buy any form of water in a disposable bottle, and we hope not to need any for the foreseeable future. I suppose some day both the bottles for my Primo will give up the ghost and I'll have to find some other solution, but maybe by that time someone will have come up with a creative solution that will allow me to use the machine with some other type of bottle. (Maybe something along the lines of this 3D-printed adapter someone made for the SodaStream.) Or maybe I'll have to trade in the Primo for a SodaStream with an adapter that allows it to be used with a standard, refillable CO2 tank.

Our plumbing comedy of errors

Last October, I mentioned that we'd been without water at home for a couple of days, and promised to tell you later about how it came about. So, as promised, here's the whole long, strange story. I referred to it in my earlier post as a "bizarre string of circumstances," but the phrase my husband used in relating the story to his parents was "cascading clusterfuck"—and after hearing the story, his mom, though normally disapproving of such language, had to admit it was an apt description. However, as you'll see at the end, even this perfect storm proved to have a silver lining.

First, a little background: Earlier this year, one of my survey panels invited me to take part in a home product test. The item to be tested was a little device called a Leakbot, which is already in use in Europe and is now being tested for the U.S. market. You clip this gadget onto your home's main water intake pipe, directly above the main shutoff valve, and it can supposedly tell—presumably by detecting changes in water flow through the pipe—when you've got an undetected leak somewhere in your home's plumbing system. It then alerts you through an app and helps you set up an appointment with a plumber.

Anyway, the company offered me a $100 gift card if I would install one of these devices in my home, download the app, and use it for a full year. I figured there was no real downside to this; it wouldn't cost anything, and there was always the chance it might save us some money by catching a leak early on. What did we have to lose?

All went fine for the first month. Then, on a Monday in October, I got a call from Leakbot saying the device had detected a leak in my home. I thought this was odd, since not only had I seen nothing, I hadn't received any alert through the Leakbot app. Just to make sure, I checked the app, and it said our system seemed to be working normally. The phone rep seemed puzzled, but suggested sending out a plumber to check it out just in case. Since I work from home, this was no problem for me, so I agreed to meet with a plumber on Wednesday.

The first thing that went wrong was that the plumber ended up having to reschedule the appointment for Friday—a delay that, for reasons you'll soon see, proved to be significant. So on Friday morning, shortly after Brian (who had taken the day off from work) and I had finished breakfast, two guys showed up on our doorstep and headed down to the utility room to check the system. To do this, the first thing they had to do was shut off the main water valve to the house. And within five minutes, they were back upstairs saying, "We've got some bad news."

The shutoff valve for our plumbing was an old-school compression valve, a type that's particularly likely to break when it gets old—and ours apparently had never been replaced since the house was built in 1971. Knowing this, the plumber did his best to turn it as slowly and gently as possible, but to no avail; it had broken, and the valve was now stuck in the closed position. In short, we no longer had water to the house.

The plumber immediately admitted that, no matter how old and crappy the valve was, fixing it was his responsibility, since he was the last person to touch it. But there was one problem: Since it was the main shutoff valve for the whole house, in order to replace it, he'd need to shut off the water supply to the house at the curb box, which taps into the town water main. And while plumbers normally carry "keys" with them to turn these curb boxes off and on, the curb box used in our town was an unusual type that he didn't have a key for. So we'd have to call the water department to come and shut it off before he could do the repair.

It took a little bit of research to find the number for the water department, and once I managed to get through, they informed me that all their crews were currently out and they'd have to get back to me. I asked if they thought someone would be able to come shut off the water before the office closed at 3pm, since otherwise we'd be without water for the whole weekend, and they could only say, "Well, I hope so." So the plumbers, who had just been sitting around up to this point, decided to take off and attend to another job, while Brian and I had to sit around the house waiting for a call.

Eventually, someone showed up, armed with the appropriate key to turn off the water—but when he tried to put the key into the box, he found he couldn't reach the valve. Due to some sort of settling or shifting, the curb box had actually changed position, leaving the shaft between the shutoff valve and the opening bent and filled with dirt. So there was no way the "key"—basically a long, straight metal pole with a connector on one end—could reach the valve. The guy from the water department informed us we'd have to have the entire box dug out and a new access put in, a job that would probably cost between $2,000 and $3,000—which we'd have to pay out of our own pockets, since the curb box was technically on our property and didn't belong to the borough. So now we were facing a whole weekend without water, plus a repair that would cost between two and three grand. All on account of a leak that, I will stress once again, we had no evidence actually existed.

Well, the plumbers, who had returned from their other job by this point, said their company could take care of the repair for us, but they'd have to send out a separate crew with the right equipment for the job. So we brought up some bottles of water from the basement and settled in for a weekend without running water. Fortunately, the company called us up that evening and said Leakbot had offered to pick up the cost of our new curb box—probably because they realized it would be really bad P.R. if we went around complaining that our Leakbot had cost us $3,000 for repairs because it sent out a plumber to fix a leak that wasn't there. So the good news was, we now knew we weren't on the hook for the expensive repair; the bad news was, we still had no water until it got done. (Leakbot actually offered to pay for the cost of putting us up in a hotel until we could get the curb box replaced, but we declined, figuring we'd be more comfortable at home with no running water than in a hotel with it.)

The repair crew showed up the next day. They didn't bother with any such niceties as ringing the bell or talking to us, so we had only the vaguest idea what was going on out there, but by the afternoon, they'd gone away and left behind a five-by-four-foot patch of gravel where part of our sidewalk had once been. By this, we assumed that we now had a usable curb box. Unfortunately, this got us no closer to having running water in the house, because we still had to wait until Monday for the plumber to come back.

So, first thing Monday morning, I called back the plumbing company to ask when I should expect them. The secretary seemed surprised by the question and said, "You're all done." I had to explain to her that, no, the part of the job that involved heavy digging equipment was done, but we still needed to get the valve replaced before we'd have any water. So she checked the schedules and said, okay,  she'd send someone out on Tuesday. This, in case you're counting, meant a total of four days without water.

Tuesday the plumber showed up. I once again had to call the borough to get them to turn off the water at the curb, which involved making several rounds of back-and-forth calls to them and the plumber to determine that no, they really didn't have the key for the curb box. But eventually we got the water turned off and the plumber installed a new valve. In fact, just for good measure, he installed two—one above the water meter and one below it, which is the setup most homes have. (He explained that most likely, this was the reason our Leakbot had given us a false positive in the first place: the instructions said to clip it to the main water pipe "right above the valve," but in most houses that would mean the valve above the water meter, and I'd installed it below the water meter, since that was the location of the only valve we had. Which means, of course, that if the instructions had simply told me to put it above the water meter, we could have avoided this whole mess.)

Anyway, once the new valve was in place, I had to call the water department yet again to get the water turned back on. The guy from the water department grumbled about the fact that when they'd replaced the box, they hadn't also eliminated the upright piece of pipe that the valve was mounted on, thereby making it unstable. Apparently he'd tried to explain to Brian, the first time he came out, why this was a problem, but between his limited English, Brian's limited plumbing knowledge, and our general frazzled state, it hadn't sunk in, so we didn't think to go out and give the plumbing crew any instructions about it. In any case, it was too late now.

Fortunately, he managed to get the water turned back on without incident, and when I turned on the taps in the house—hallelujah!—water actually came out of them. Admittedly, it came out in a rather spurty fashion due to all the trapped air that had settled in the pipes, but it was a lot better than the barely discernible trickle we'd had before.

When Brian came home, I told him that the problem was now resolved. He went downstairs to take a look at the new valve the plumber had installed, purely out of curiosity, and then came back up saying, "You're not going to like this." Apparently, the new valve—the brand-new valve that we'd gone through all this hassle to get—had a slow leak. It was barely noticeable, just a drop every couple of minutes, but it was definitely there. So after spending the past four days with no water over a leak we didn't actually have, we now had one.

So, the next day, the plumber—who was surely sick of the sight of us by now—came back to install another new valve. This time, just to make absolutely sure there would be no problems, he installed a different type of valve, one he swore couldn't possibly leak. After one more round of calls to the water department to get the water turned off and back on, we finally had a system that was working as it should.

Unfortunately, we also had a torn-up sidewalk that needed to be repaired. It took only a few minutes of research to determine that this wasn't a job we could reasonably do ourselves, so I had to spend much of the next week trying to reach cement companies to get quotes on a repair, and they were all a lot higher than I expected. We eventually ended up paying $350 out of our own pockets to fix the sidewalk...which we'd had to tear up to replace the curb box...which we'd had to replace because of the broken plumbing valve...which broke because a plumber came out to fix a leak that, I will note yet again, didn't exist. (There was also an expense of about $15 to replace the float valve in our upstairs toilet, which had given up the ghost after four days of having buckets of water dumped on top of it every time we needed to flush. But it was old and touchy anyway, so that expense didn't bother me.)

So, even though the problem is now resolved, it sounds like we have a good reason to be ticked off about the whole situation, wouldn't you say? Except, as it turns out, though, there's a coda to this story that shows how the whole disaster was kind of a blessing in disguise.

You see, the weekend after this whole plumbing debacle, Brian was working at the utility sink in our basement, and when he tried to shut it off, he couldn't. There was a slow but persistent drip that stayed no matter how much he tightened the tap.

Well, that's a simple enough problem to fix, right? All you need to do is shut off the water under the sink, take apart the faucet, and replace the washer. Except when Brian checked below the sink, he found there was no shutoff; the hot and cold water lines were both plumbed directly into the wall. This sent him into a panic, because working on it would require him to shut off the water to the whole house, and he was afraid of setting off yet another chain of catastrophes. He was so freaked out that he declared he didn't want to touch the job; I should just hire a plumber.

However, I wasn't prepared to do this without at least looking into the problem first to see how hard it was likely to be to fix it ourselves. A quick search online suggested that, as I'd thought, it was a very simple job; I told Brian I saw no reason I couldn't handle it myself, with no plumbing experience whatsoever, and he certainly should be able to. If he was really that worried about it, I was willing to call a plumber just to set his mind at ease, but only if he really thought it was necessary.

After hearing this, Brian decided he'd be willing to at least give the job a try. He popped by the Home Depot and picked up an assortment of washers and other small parts, figuring that if one of them proved to be the right size, that would save us the trouble of making a hardware run in the middle of the job (and if none of them was, we could always return the set). As it turned out, one of them was a perfect fit, and the whole repair took us probably 15 minutes, from the time we turned off our spanking new main water shutoff valve to the time we turned it back on.

But here's the beautiful irony: If Brian had discovered this leak two weeks earlier and tried to fix it then, we would have been the ones to break the main water shutoff valve. We would still have gone through the entire series of problems with the valve and the curb box and the four days without water, but with one crucial difference: We would have had to pay for the new valve, as well as the new curb box, out of our own pockets, to the tune of around three grand. But as it was, we got both jobs done for free and only needed to pay $350 for the sidewalk repair. So ironically, by giving us a false alarm and setting off a whole chain of unnecessary repairs, Leakbot actually ended up saving us quite a lot of money.

Of course, when the repair crew came to fix the sidewalk, they also pointed out some previously unnoticed, but definitely significant, problems with our roof. So it looks like our home-repair troubles are not over yet. But replacing the roof is an unrelated problem, one that I'll no doubt cover in a future post.

The ultimate low-water dishwashing method

Due to a bizarre string of circumstances which, in the words of Michael Flanders, I'll tell you all about some other time, we currently have no water at our house. For the past 46 hours or so, we have been unable to bathe, do laundry, or do anything else that requires a large amount of water, and we'll probably be in the same position for at least 24 hours more.

In the absence of running water, we've had to get a bit creative. My enterprising husband has taken to hauling up buckets of water from our rain barrel to flush the toilet with, and for brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and cleaning dishes, we've been relying on our emergency stores of water from the basement. I brought up two 2-liter bottles yesterday as soon as it became apparent we were going to be without water for a while, and I used up part of one right away for washing my hands. I assumed I'd have to go down and get at least one more after dinner, so Brian would have enough to wash the dishes with.

Instead, to my astonishment, I looked up from my book to discover that he'd already done them all—and not only was the second bottle of water still full, there was still some left in the first. He'd actually washed the entire dinner's worth in less than a liter of water. And all this without even having a dishpan to soak them in.

I was so impressed by this that I insisted on watching him clean the breakfast dishes this morning so I could observe and document his low-water technique. As you can see here, he started out with a good sinkful of dishes: one big plate, one cereal bowl, the two cat dishes from the previous night, a cocoa cup, a juice glass, the filter cone I use for coffee, and a baking pan we'd used to bake a cake for the Minstrel concert the night before.

And here's the amount of water he poured out for himself to start with: about ten ounces. That's it! He ended up needing just a little bit more to finish rinsing that last pan, but as you'll see, it wasn't very much.

As he worked, he explained to me the basic premises of his low-water washing technique. The most important rule, he said, is to make every bit of water you use do as many jobs as possible. So, when you rinse off a dish, don't just let the rinse water run down the drain; make sure it runs off into another dish, where it can start the process of soaking. It's kind of like the way the family in Little House on the Prairie used to bathe on Saturday nights, letting the children bathe first, then Ma, and finally Pa (the largest member of the family, and thus presumably the one with the most dirt on him), all in the same tub of water, because hauling and heating up a fresh tubful for each of them would have been five times as much work. The point is to avoid wasting any amount of water that could still be useful, no matter how small.

He demonstrated this by taking the little bit of water he'd left in the cats' dishes overnight to soak them and using that to moisten the plates. Then he gave each of them a quick once-over with the dish scrubber wand, using the little bit of water he'd just added to work up a lather. If they had any residue clinging to them that the dish wand couldn't easily remove, he used the green scouring pad for a slightly rougher treatment. Up to this point, he'd actually used no additional water beyond the tiny bit that was in the cat dishes.

Once he had everything soaped up, he began using the water in the measuring cup to rinse the dishes. He started with the smallest dishes and worked his way up to the biggest ones, and as he worked, he let the rinse water from each dish run off into a larger one. Here, for instance, he's rinsing one of the cat dishes and emptying the rinse water into his cereal bowl.

And here's a three-fer: he's emptying the water from the juice glass, pouring it out over my cocoa spoon to rinse that, and letting it empty into the baking pan.

When he got to the biggest dish of the lot, the baking pan, he found he didn't have quite enough water left to rinse it. So he poured out just a little bit more from the bottle into the measuring cup—not more than two ounces—to finish the job.

Counting this and the little bit of water that was left over in the cat dishes, he didn't use more than a pint altogether to clean the whole sinkful of dishes.

As Brian pointed out, doing dishes this way does involve a trade-off: while it uses a lot less water, it also takes more time. So it's not necessarily something he would want to do when water is plentiful. But after demonstrating the technique for me, he started to think that maybe, with a bit of practice, he could work some of these water-saving strategies into his normal daily dish-washing without taking too much extra time. So even when our household water is flowing again, we might be able to use less of it. If that helps us stay in the bottom tier of usage on our quarterly water bill, saving us $18 a pop, then I'm all for it.

Settling in for winter

Although there are still plenty of leaves left on the trees, the weather for the last few days has been decidedly wintry. Yesterday, when heading out to the farmers' market for some local apples and cranberries (because it's just silly to make Thanksgiving cranberry sauce from Wisconsin-grown cranberries when the plant is native to New Jersey), I actually set aside my lightweight fall coat in favor of the bulky winter one—and all the parts of me it didn't cover were still freezing. And even though we've already fired up the heating system for the winter, I also had to haul out my wearable blanket a couple of days last week to stay warm while working.

This change in the weather signaled that it was time for us to take care of a few seasonal chores. We'd already taken care of stashing away the window air conditioner and changing our sheets from their summer percale to warmer flannel, signaling that the warm weather was definitively over for the year; now it was time for those tasks that mark the transition from fall into winter. First, Brian went out into the garden and harvested all the remaining tomatoes and peppers: several more of the big Pineapples, a few Black Princes (which are actually Green Princes at the moment), a smattering of little Sun Golds, and about four green Jimmy Nardello frying peppers. All the ones that have started to "blush," even slightly, got set out on the kitchen counter, where they are now ripening up nicely; the completely green ones got stowed in a newspaper-lined box in the basement, together with an apple to accelerate the ripening process. This hasn't always worked so well in the past, but there's not much we can do with the green tomatoes otherwise (and it won't hurt the apple), so we have nothing to lose by trying.

Then, today, Brian went out to deal with the job of stowing away our rain barrel for the winter. Yesterday morning, he'd opened up the spigot at the bottom to let the water empty out, which it did, but very slowly; when he got home from work, there was still water dripping from the spout. But by morning, the drip had stopped, and he just had to open it up to get out the remaining water near the bottom. In fact, as soon as he moved the barrel, it became apparent that he wasn't going to get the remaining water out without opening it up, because some of it had turned into a block of ice that we could hear clanking around in there.

So he undid the screws at the top and removed the lid, revealing a few chunks of ice, a bit of liquid water...and a layer of dark green algae smeared all over the inside of the barrel. Fortunately, it turned out that this stuff peeled off pretty easily, so Brian was able to remove most of it with his hands. He discarded it, and the ice, in a little bed to one side of the yard where we've planted this year's crop of garlic and shallots; with any luck, it will serve as fertilizer. Then he reassembled the barrel and stowed it in the shed. He did happen to notice one problem when he reattached the lid; the black rubber pipe attached to the back, which drains the overflow from the barrel away from the house, was starting to split in places. Trying to remove it from the spout just exacerbated the problem, so he left it in place for now. When we return the barrel to service next spring, we'll see if the damage proves severe enough to cause a leak and replace the part if necessary.

Then all that remained was to return the downspout to its wintertime configuration. He took off the piece that routes water from the downspout into the barrel and replaced it with a longer piece that extends the pipe down to the ground and directs it outward, across the barrel's concrete resting pad, and away from the house. That should keep the foundation safe from water damage, whether winter brings us rain or snow.

As for installing the storm windows in our screen doors, that turned out not to be necessary, since he'd never actually removed them to replace them with screens this spring. We don't tend to leave the doors open for ventilation anyway, since we have plenty of windows, so it wouldn't really have made much difference. We still have plenty of ice melt left over from last year, and our snow shovels remain in good condition, along with the car's tires and windshield wipers. And we've both had our flu shots already.

So now the only task left on our winter checklist is to buy a big bag of birdseed and set up our backyard buffet for the local cardinals and sparrows. (Not the squirrels, though. They may have managed to plunder our plum tree and pilfer our eggplants, but so far they absolutely cannot figure out how to hack our bird feeder. It's this kind, so if you're looking for a feeder that can truly thwart the furry menaces, I can recommend it.)

As soon as that's done, we can count ourselves ready for winter—which will leave us free to enjoy the last few lingering, golden days of fall.

Thrift Week 2017, Day 6: Keep a Green Home Day

In the original Thrift Week schedule, Day 6 was Own Your Home Day. I can see why the founders of Thrift Week chose to devote a day to this topic, because owning a home can be a great financial move. Once you own your house free and clear, you're free of monthly rent payments for the rest of your life—and the money that frees up in your budget can help propel you toward other financial goals, like paying for college or retiring early. In fact, as I noted in my article on Financial Independence (FI), cutting your expenses is a double whammy, because it both boosts your monthly savings and reduces the total amount you need to save (since you don't need as much money to live on). And since the monthly rent or mortgage payment is the single biggest expense in most people's budgets, eliminating it is probably the best single move you can make to fast-track yourself toward FI at one swell foop.

For me and Brian, buying this house and paying it off early was definitely a wise move, one that has opened up the new goal of FI a real possibility for us. But all the same, I'm not prepared to declare flatly that everyone should own a home. As this Money Crashers article (not one of mine) shows, there are significant downsides to being a homeowner. For one thing, in some parts of the country, it's really expensive to break into the housing market, making homeownership impractical for young people and anyone with a low income. Buying a house you can't really afford is certainly worse than renting.

Plus, homeownership carries extra responsibilities. When something breaks, you have to fix it yourself (or hire someone to do it) instead of just calling the super. And owning a home ties you down to one location, which can be a real problem if you have the kind of job that might require you to pack up and relocate to a new city at a moment's notice. Moving is hard under the best of circumstances, but it's much harder when you have to sell your old house and find a new place to live at the same time. And if you can't find a buyer right away, you could be stuck with double payments—one on the old house you haven't sold yet, and one on the new one—for months at a time.

So while owning your home can be an ecofrugal choice, it's not necessarily the best choice for everyone. I think it's much more useful to focus on making the home you have as green and efficient as possible. Boosting your home's energy efficiency, lowering water use, and adding edible landscaping are money-saving moves that can work well for both buyers and renters—and help keep the planet healthy at the same time.

Making your home greener is a topic I've covered quite often on this blog in the past, from lots of different angles. Here are just a few of the ideas I've explored:

• Energy-efficient lighting. I was an early adopter of compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, because even back when they cost $25 a pop, they were so much more efficient and long-lived than old-school incandescent bulbs that they were a better deal in the long run. However, when the current generation of LED light bulbs came on the market, I was skeptical about their benefits, pointing out that their lifelong costs were nearly identical to my existing CFLs and there was probably no point in switching right away. I was betting that the new technology would get both cheaper and better over time, and sure enough, it has—so much that last year, I was finally prepared to take the plunge on my first new LED bulb. Over time, I'm sure, these will gradually take over my entire house. For anyone who's still using antiquated incandescent bulbs, I think upgrading directly to new LEDs is definitely the way to go and will net you significant energy savings (plus cut way down on time spent changing bulbs). However, if you already have a houseful of CFLs, I wouldn't recommend throwing them all out; it probably makes more sense to eliminate them by attrition, gradually replacing them with LEDs as they burn out. Who knows—perhaps by the time the last of your old CFLs expires, there may be super-efficient incandescent bulbs will be on the shelves that offer even bigger savings. 
• Efficient appliances. If it's not worth spending $6 on an LED bulb to replace a reasonably efficient CFL, then it's even less of a bargain to throw out a working appliance to upgrade to a newer, more efficient model. That's one reason Brian and I took so long to upgrade our old refrigerator; we knew that a new one was never going to pay for itself in energy savings alone. However, once we'd made the decision to take the plunge and replace it, it definitely made sense to spend the little bit extra it would cost to choose a new one that was Energy Star certified, which would pay us back with a 9 percent savings on electric use every month for the rest of its life. So while I wouldn't recommend discarding an old appliance (unless it's a really old energy-guzzler) just for the electric savings, I would say that when the time comes to replace, paying extra for a more efficient model is a choice that will pay off.
• Clotheslines. One appliance that's unlikely ever to pay for itself in energy savings is a new dryer. Since all a dryer has to do, pretty much, is convert fuel to heat, there aren't any big differences in energy use between models. However, there's one kind of dryer that cuts power use all the way down to nothing: an outdoor solar clothes dryer, better known as a clothesline. Based on my calculations, the savings from hanging a load of laundry is pretty paltry—maybe 25 cents for 20 minutes of work, and maybe 3 pounds of CO2—but for me, at least, the time spent outdoors in the sun and wind is a reward in itself.
• Insulation. One of the first big projects we took on after buying this house was to insulate the attic. We boosted its R-value from around R-14 to R-38, which, according to this Inflation Savings Calculator, should save us about $898 over the first ten years. So the $743 worth of insulation we bought and installed ourselves has probably paid for itself already and is continuing to save us money every winter (and perhaps some in summer too). If your house is under-insulated, you can probably get a similar return adding insulation yourself, and a more leisurely payback if you hire someone else to do it.
• Solar panels. When I first looked into the costs and benefits of a solar array for our house, I found that it probably wouldn't be able to pay for itself. However, solar prices have dropped precipitously since then, and when I got some quotes on a solar electric system two years ago, it looked like it would actually yield about a 10 percent return on our investment over its 20-year lifetime. So this is something I'm thinking we might actually go for at some point—though since our roof is going to need replacement pretty soon, it makes sense to wait until we've done that first. I can't extrapolate from my experience to say whether going solar will work for you, since there are so many variables, but you can use a calculator like this one to crunch the numbers for yourself.
• Edible landscaping. In 2013, I calculated that our vegetable garden had produced about $233 worth of food from about $42 worth of seeds, plants, and compost. That same year, we expanded our edible landscape to include raspberry canes, which gave us about $50 worth of fruit in their first year alone; cherry bushes, which took a couple of years to produce but eventually gave us about two quarts of cherries; plum trees, which so far have provided only a handful of plums—but they were very tasty, and the trees are still growing. And that's not counting our asparagus patch (which unfortunately isn't all that productive), our rhubarb (which is ridiculously productive and could keep us in pies all year), and all our fresh herbs. And we're still coming up with new plants to add. Admittedly, edible landscaping on this scale is hard to do if you don't have a yard to landscape—but even apartment dwellers can grow a few herbs in pots on a windowsill, or maybe even a tomato plant on a balcony, and enjoy a little home-grown goodness at a bargain price.
• Rain barrels. Our rain barrel, a gift from a friend, saved us about 1,000 gallons of water in its first year of use. It's hard to translate that directly into dollar savings, but with a little guesstimating, I put it at about $15. So if your water situation is anything like ours, you could build a barrel yourself with $30 worth of parts, as described at Instructables, and it should pay for itself in about two years.
• Compost bins. We built our first compost bin out of shipping pallets harvested from Brian's workplace, and we proceeded to make compost in it the lazy way (more respectably known as "cold composting"): just throw everything in and wait for it to break down. It takes practically no work, cuts way down on our household garbage, and gives us enough compost each year to nourish at least half our garden. Anyone with a bit of spare yard space and a source of to shipping pallets could do the same thing and get homemade compost with very little effort. (We'll need to replace the bin this year, as pallets aren't the most weatherproof material, but seven years of use from a bin that was practically free ain't too shabby.)

And these ideas are only the tip of the iceberg! My various articles on Money Crashers offer lots more suggestions, from reducing paper use with cloth napkins and electronic newspapers to decorating your home on a budget. All these ideas will make your home greener and put more green in your wallet at the same time—a thrifty choice that can work for anyone.