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.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Coupon Site Face-Off: CouponMom vs. Krazy Coupon Lady
Couponing is one frugal-living skill I've never really mastered. As I wrote recently in a Dollar Stretcher forum thread on the topic:
For the past couple of years, I have been relying on CouponMom.com to make this part of the process easier. Before a shopping trip, I check the list of "Extreme Deals" for my state, and it shows me which store sales in my area can be stacked with coupons to maximize savings. Unfortunately, as I've noted before, the deals this site lists aren't always accurate. Sometimes, for instance, it will tell me I can stack a sale with a coupon for a specific product, but when I read the fine print in the flier, it turns out that particular product isn't included in the sale. Also, it occasionally tells me I can find coupons for specific items in the SmartSource or Red Plum coupon insert for a specific date, but when I check, the coupons aren't there. Still, I've figured, the site does have the advantage of being free, unlike many similar sites (such as The Grocery Game), so I shouldn't look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. If I have to do a little double-checking to make sure the CouponMom deals are accurate, that's still less work than hunting them down myself.
Today, however, that thread at the Dollar Stretcher inspired me to do a little searching, and I came across another free coupon site called "The Krazy Coupon Lady." I'd visited her site before, but only for general couponing tips. This time, I decided to check out some of the actual deals on the site and see how they compared to the ones I usually find at CouponMom.
The Krazy Coupon Lady site (I'll call it KCL for short) is organized a bit differently from CouponMom: instead of searching for deals by state, you have to click on the name of a specific store, and the site will pull up a list of all the deals in that store's flier. (CouponMom can be searched this way too, but it also gives you the option of looking at "extreme deals" available across all stores in your state.) At first, this seemed a lot less convenient, since I couldn't compare deals for all my area stores at a glance. After looking at the deals for my local Stop & Shop, however, I had to admit that there was one advantage to KCL's format: it's a lot easier to read. CouponMom compresses everything into one long list, so each specific deal gets only one or two lines devoted to it. To achieve this, the site sums up the details in a shorthand form that's often hard to follow. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, goes through each deal in detail, listing the sale price for each item and all the coupons that can be combined with it, along with their sources. If they're online coupons, a link is provided; if a coupon expires, the site strikes it out to show that it's no longer applicable. At the bottom, the site lists the best possible price you can get through stacking. Thanks to this easy-to-follow format, I was able to quickly spot two useful deals and link directly to the appropriate coupons at Coupons.com.
Another advantage of the KCL site is that it includes a lot more than just grocery deals. CouponMom covers some drugstores, warehouse clubs and other big-box stores, but the specific items it lists for these stores are basically the same ones you'd find at supermarkets. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, can help you find special prices on websites, coupons for restaurants, and even freebies available both online and in stores.
However, KCL does have one distinct downside compared to CouponMom: it doesn't allow you to select the deals you want and print out a shopping list to take to the store. Each deal listed for a particular store has a check box next to it, but ticking them doesn't seem to do anything; if you select "print," it just prints out the entire page, with all the deals you didn't want as well as the ones you did. And since KCL lists those deals in long format, you'll end up printing out a whole lot of pages you don't need.
As for accuracy, the two sites seem to be about on a par with each other. When I compared the listings for Stop & Shop across both sites, both sites steered me to a sale on Fiber One 90-calorie bars, and both of them claimed that one of the coupons you could stack with this sale was in the SmartSource insert for September 28. However, when I checked that insert, the coupon wasn't there, and I clearly hadn't clipped it already; there was no place it could have been. Perhaps the problem is that the version of the SmartSource flier these sites use is different from the one I get with my grocery store fliers, but whatever the reason for the discrepancy, it's clearly the same across both sites. So no matter which one I use, I'll have to be prepared for the occasional bum deal.
So which site is better overall? Well, I'd have to say both sites are useful, but for different things. For a quick overview of available deals and where to find them, CouponMom is definitely better. It's the one I'd use if I wanted to figure out which stores were worth shopping at in a given week. However, if I already knew that I wanted to visit one particular store, I'd turn to The Krazy Coupon Lady to help me spot the best buys there and find the necessary coupons. The lack of a shopping list feature is a slight disadvantage, but it's not too big a hassle to just write one out by hand. Or, I suppose, I could just identify the deals I want at KCL, then pop over to CouponMom to find those same deals and make a printable list.
The thing about extreme couponing is that when it works, it's like magic. I have found some rare, amazing deals in which a sale price stacks perfectly with my available coupons, such as a 4-for-$6 sale on cereal, plus two 75-cent coupons and two 50-cent coupons, all of which double, so that I end up walking out with four boxes of cereal that would normally cost over $4 each for only $1 total. It's an incredible thrill.Considering how rarely these "stacked" deals work out for me, I've never really found it worthwhile to put in the time and effort that true extreme couponers devote to collecting coupons and scouting out the best deals. Instead, I coupon the lazy way. First I check the weekly sale fliers to look for good deals; only when I find one do I check to see whether there's any way I could make it still better with a coupon.
The problem is, deals like that are few and far between...Most of the time, the coupon inserts I get delivered with my local grocery store fliers have only one or two coupons each that are even worth clipping--and most of the ones I clip end up going unused because they expire before a sale comes along to stack with them.
For the past couple of years, I have been relying on CouponMom.com to make this part of the process easier. Before a shopping trip, I check the list of "Extreme Deals" for my state, and it shows me which store sales in my area can be stacked with coupons to maximize savings. Unfortunately, as I've noted before, the deals this site lists aren't always accurate. Sometimes, for instance, it will tell me I can stack a sale with a coupon for a specific product, but when I read the fine print in the flier, it turns out that particular product isn't included in the sale. Also, it occasionally tells me I can find coupons for specific items in the SmartSource or Red Plum coupon insert for a specific date, but when I check, the coupons aren't there. Still, I've figured, the site does have the advantage of being free, unlike many similar sites (such as The Grocery Game), so I shouldn't look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. If I have to do a little double-checking to make sure the CouponMom deals are accurate, that's still less work than hunting them down myself.
Today, however, that thread at the Dollar Stretcher inspired me to do a little searching, and I came across another free coupon site called "The Krazy Coupon Lady." I'd visited her site before, but only for general couponing tips. This time, I decided to check out some of the actual deals on the site and see how they compared to the ones I usually find at CouponMom.
The Krazy Coupon Lady site (I'll call it KCL for short) is organized a bit differently from CouponMom: instead of searching for deals by state, you have to click on the name of a specific store, and the site will pull up a list of all the deals in that store's flier. (CouponMom can be searched this way too, but it also gives you the option of looking at "extreme deals" available across all stores in your state.) At first, this seemed a lot less convenient, since I couldn't compare deals for all my area stores at a glance. After looking at the deals for my local Stop & Shop, however, I had to admit that there was one advantage to KCL's format: it's a lot easier to read. CouponMom compresses everything into one long list, so each specific deal gets only one or two lines devoted to it. To achieve this, the site sums up the details in a shorthand form that's often hard to follow. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, goes through each deal in detail, listing the sale price for each item and all the coupons that can be combined with it, along with their sources. If they're online coupons, a link is provided; if a coupon expires, the site strikes it out to show that it's no longer applicable. At the bottom, the site lists the best possible price you can get through stacking. Thanks to this easy-to-follow format, I was able to quickly spot two useful deals and link directly to the appropriate coupons at Coupons.com.
Another advantage of the KCL site is that it includes a lot more than just grocery deals. CouponMom covers some drugstores, warehouse clubs and other big-box stores, but the specific items it lists for these stores are basically the same ones you'd find at supermarkets. The Krazy Coupon Lady, by contrast, can help you find special prices on websites, coupons for restaurants, and even freebies available both online and in stores.
However, KCL does have one distinct downside compared to CouponMom: it doesn't allow you to select the deals you want and print out a shopping list to take to the store. Each deal listed for a particular store has a check box next to it, but ticking them doesn't seem to do anything; if you select "print," it just prints out the entire page, with all the deals you didn't want as well as the ones you did. And since KCL lists those deals in long format, you'll end up printing out a whole lot of pages you don't need.
As for accuracy, the two sites seem to be about on a par with each other. When I compared the listings for Stop & Shop across both sites, both sites steered me to a sale on Fiber One 90-calorie bars, and both of them claimed that one of the coupons you could stack with this sale was in the SmartSource insert for September 28. However, when I checked that insert, the coupon wasn't there, and I clearly hadn't clipped it already; there was no place it could have been. Perhaps the problem is that the version of the SmartSource flier these sites use is different from the one I get with my grocery store fliers, but whatever the reason for the discrepancy, it's clearly the same across both sites. So no matter which one I use, I'll have to be prepared for the occasional bum deal.
So which site is better overall? Well, I'd have to say both sites are useful, but for different things. For a quick overview of available deals and where to find them, CouponMom is definitely better. It's the one I'd use if I wanted to figure out which stores were worth shopping at in a given week. However, if I already knew that I wanted to visit one particular store, I'd turn to The Krazy Coupon Lady to help me spot the best buys there and find the necessary coupons. The lack of a shopping list feature is a slight disadvantage, but it's not too big a hassle to just write one out by hand. Or, I suppose, I could just identify the deals I want at KCL, then pop over to CouponMom to find those same deals and make a printable list.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
The Quest for an Organized Freezer
Ever since Brian and I first moved into this house, I've hated the fridge. I don't have any complaints about its actual performance; it does a perfectly decent job of keeping our fresh food cold and our ice cream frozen. It's a little smaller than average, at 18 cubic feet, but that's a reasonable size for the two of us. The motor is a bit on the loud side, but not so loud as to be disruptive. And its energy use, for a machine its age, is actually quite impressive. We tested it with our Kill a Watt meter over two separate 24-hour periods, one in the winter and one in the summer, and we calculated that it probably uses about 500 kilowatt-hours over the course of a year, which is better than many modern-day fridges. (Sadly, this means that according to the EPA's Refrigerator Retirement Savings Calculator, we can't possibly justify replacing it on the basis of energy savings alone.)
So what is it that bugs me so much about this fridge? In a word, organization—or more accurately, the near-total lack thereof. Here are the major problems with it:
Worst of all, though, is the freezer compartment. It has no shelves at all, just a big open box in which everything gets stuffed willy-nilly and won't stay put. When we first got the fridge, I tried to order a freezer shelf from Hotpoint, since they claimed to offer one; however, this turned out to be false, since the part they sent me was actually an extra shelf for the fresh food compartment. So instead, we've done our best to try and arrange the space with a hodge-podge of makeshift partitions: a wire cabinet organizer that goes only partway across, a couple of mismatched plastic bins, a Rubbermaid breadbox for storing meats, and an assortment of pint-size deli containers. Yet even with these crude organizers in place, we still invariably end up with a variety of bags and boxes stuffed precariously in sideways or upside down, constantly at risk of falling out when the door is opened. It's like Fibber McGee's closet in there.
For years now, I've had ambitions to replace this frustrating fridge. When I wrote the latest report on refrigerators for ConsumerSearch, I thought it would be a good opportunity to figure out which model would be the best choice for a replacement. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that top-freezer fridges—the most efficient, most reliable, and least expensive type—don't tend to get very good reviews. Even my Best-Reviewed choice, a Maytag that did well in professional tests, had a lot of complaints in user reviews about its uneven temperature control; owners said it was impossible to keep the freezer cold enough without freezing everything in the fridge. (It also comes with a built-in ice maker, which is worse than useless to us, since it requires extra plumbing work to install and takes up much-needed freezer space to boot.) My runner-up pick, a Haier, looked ideal except for one problem: the nearest store that carried it was an hour away in Langhorne, PA. I might actually have considered it worth making the trip, but I figured I'd wait for a sale first, and while I was waiting, the fridge disappeared from their inventory altogether, leaving us with no good alternatives at all. Given that the fridge we have now still works, there's no point in spending $850 on a replacement unless it's actually a major improvement.
So while we wait to see whether next year's models offer any better options, I'm looking for ways to make better use of the space in our current fridge, especially the freezer. A series of Google searches on this topic turned up lots of articles featuring pictures of beautifully organized freezers, such as this one at The Kitchn. However, all the homeowners in this article started out with freezers that actually had some kind of interior organization (bins, shelves or both) to start with, rather than what we have, which is basically just a box with a door. If we could simply find some way to add a full-width shelf, that would be a good start, but when I Googled "add shelf to freezer," all I found was an article on Lifehacker that suggests using a wire cabinet organizer—which is what we have now. I have searched and searched for a better one that would cover the full width and depth of the compartment, but to no avail.
Normally, when we have a storage problem to deal with, Brian just builds a custom-fitted piece out of wood to maximize the space (like the dividers for my sock drawer and the tilt-out drawer for our kitchen sink). Unfortunately, in this case, that approach won't really work, since a thick piece of wood would take up too much space and a thin one wouldn't stand up well to freezing. So last night, we went on a hunting trip at Target, looking for some sort of kitchen or home organizers that might help tame this beast of a freezer. Nearly everything we found, however, was unsuitable in one way or another: too big, too small, or not square enough to make good use of the space. In the end, all we came home with was a little $4 ice bin, which fits under the makeshift wire shelf and helps a bit with corralling the loose bags. We also weeded out some unnecessary items like excess ice cubes, and I tried a trick for cutting down the ice cream bucket as shown in this Lifehacker video. (They recommend it to keep the ice cream fresher, but for me, the bigger advantage is the space it saves. Also, we can see how much ice cream we have left without looking inside.)
This "after" picture, however, is only marginally better than the "before," so I'm still looking for better ways to organize. And I think I may actually have hit on a possible solution, if a rather unconventional one. While browsing the Container Store (a site that one of my fellow Word Nerds would call a "panagora" of all things storage-related), I came across these drop-front shoe boxes. The larger ones are exactly the depth, and just under half the width, of our freezer compartment, so two could sit abreast on the bottom and create a complete second level that completely spans the space. We could store meats in one, veggies in the other, and the drop-fronts would give us access the to contents without disrupting the rest of the freezer. And once we'd used those to make a solid base, we might actually be able to fit in some more traditional freezer organizers on top.
Am I crazy, or could this actually work? And is it worth $20 plus shipping to find out?
So what is it that bugs me so much about this fridge? In a word, organization—or more accurately, the near-total lack thereof. Here are the major problems with it:
- The shelves are made of wire. If anything spills in the fridge, it drips right through onto the contents of the shelves below.
- Although the shelves are theoretically movable, the only place it's possible to create a space that can accommodate tall bottles is on the top shelf—which means that the refrigerator light is smack in the middle of it, so bottles are all forced to one side or the other. It also means there's no way to keep milk on the bottom shelf the way Tip Hero says you should to keep it fresh; there isn't enough vertical space.
- It has only a single produce drawer. In addition to being very big, heavy, and hard to open and close, it also causes all our veggies to rot faster as a result of being stored along with fruits.
- It has no meat and cheese drawer. Our supply of block and grated cheese all has to be piled up toward the back of the bottom shelf, where the stacks tend to fall over and individual blocks can get lost. And if I buy a bag of string cheese snacks, there's no good place to keep it where it will be accessible and not get buried.
- Although it doesn't have one of those idiotic built-in egg compartments in the door, which are in the wrong place for storing eggs and completely useless for storing anything else, it does have an oversized dairy compartment that's too big for our butter dish and too small to accommodate anything else along with it.
Worst of all, though, is the freezer compartment. It has no shelves at all, just a big open box in which everything gets stuffed willy-nilly and won't stay put. When we first got the fridge, I tried to order a freezer shelf from Hotpoint, since they claimed to offer one; however, this turned out to be false, since the part they sent me was actually an extra shelf for the fresh food compartment. So instead, we've done our best to try and arrange the space with a hodge-podge of makeshift partitions: a wire cabinet organizer that goes only partway across, a couple of mismatched plastic bins, a Rubbermaid breadbox for storing meats, and an assortment of pint-size deli containers. Yet even with these crude organizers in place, we still invariably end up with a variety of bags and boxes stuffed precariously in sideways or upside down, constantly at risk of falling out when the door is opened. It's like Fibber McGee's closet in there.For years now, I've had ambitions to replace this frustrating fridge. When I wrote the latest report on refrigerators for ConsumerSearch, I thought it would be a good opportunity to figure out which model would be the best choice for a replacement. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that top-freezer fridges—the most efficient, most reliable, and least expensive type—don't tend to get very good reviews. Even my Best-Reviewed choice, a Maytag that did well in professional tests, had a lot of complaints in user reviews about its uneven temperature control; owners said it was impossible to keep the freezer cold enough without freezing everything in the fridge. (It also comes with a built-in ice maker, which is worse than useless to us, since it requires extra plumbing work to install and takes up much-needed freezer space to boot.) My runner-up pick, a Haier, looked ideal except for one problem: the nearest store that carried it was an hour away in Langhorne, PA. I might actually have considered it worth making the trip, but I figured I'd wait for a sale first, and while I was waiting, the fridge disappeared from their inventory altogether, leaving us with no good alternatives at all. Given that the fridge we have now still works, there's no point in spending $850 on a replacement unless it's actually a major improvement.
So while we wait to see whether next year's models offer any better options, I'm looking for ways to make better use of the space in our current fridge, especially the freezer. A series of Google searches on this topic turned up lots of articles featuring pictures of beautifully organized freezers, such as this one at The Kitchn. However, all the homeowners in this article started out with freezers that actually had some kind of interior organization (bins, shelves or both) to start with, rather than what we have, which is basically just a box with a door. If we could simply find some way to add a full-width shelf, that would be a good start, but when I Googled "add shelf to freezer," all I found was an article on Lifehacker that suggests using a wire cabinet organizer—which is what we have now. I have searched and searched for a better one that would cover the full width and depth of the compartment, but to no avail.
Normally, when we have a storage problem to deal with, Brian just builds a custom-fitted piece out of wood to maximize the space (like the dividers for my sock drawer and the tilt-out drawer for our kitchen sink). Unfortunately, in this case, that approach won't really work, since a thick piece of wood would take up too much space and a thin one wouldn't stand up well to freezing. So last night, we went on a hunting trip at Target, looking for some sort of kitchen or home organizers that might help tame this beast of a freezer. Nearly everything we found, however, was unsuitable in one way or another: too big, too small, or not square enough to make good use of the space. In the end, all we came home with was a little $4 ice bin, which fits under the makeshift wire shelf and helps a bit with corralling the loose bags. We also weeded out some unnecessary items like excess ice cubes, and I tried a trick for cutting down the ice cream bucket as shown in this Lifehacker video. (They recommend it to keep the ice cream fresher, but for me, the bigger advantage is the space it saves. Also, we can see how much ice cream we have left without looking inside.)This "after" picture, however, is only marginally better than the "before," so I'm still looking for better ways to organize. And I think I may actually have hit on a possible solution, if a rather unconventional one. While browsing the Container Store (a site that one of my fellow Word Nerds would call a "panagora" of all things storage-related), I came across these drop-front shoe boxes. The larger ones are exactly the depth, and just under half the width, of our freezer compartment, so two could sit abreast on the bottom and create a complete second level that completely spans the space. We could store meats in one, veggies in the other, and the drop-fronts would give us access the to contents without disrupting the rest of the freezer. And once we'd used those to make a solid base, we might actually be able to fit in some more traditional freezer organizers on top.
Am I crazy, or could this actually work? And is it worth $20 plus shipping to find out?
Monday, October 6, 2014
DIY sitting/standing desk, version 2
After using his improvised Lack sitting/standing desk for about two months, Brian noticed a few flaws in his original design. First, the surface area of the standing desk was slightly too small to accommodate his keyboard, mouse, and monitor easily all at the same time. Second, the table was just a bit too high for him to use comfortably. The adjustable monitor, in its raised position, sat right where it should at eye level, but the surface of the desk was too high for the keyboard; he had to bend his arms at an uncomfortable angle to use it.
To fix these problems, he had two options: raise himself up higher by standing on a stool, or make the desktop lower by shortening the legs of the Lack. Unfortunately, both of these options would just create a new problem: while his keyboard would now be at the right height, his monitor would be well below eye level. He could have just set it atop the wooden stand that he made for using it on his regular, seated-level desk, but when he considered the idea of piling the monitor stand on top of the Lack table on top of the desk, it started to sound a bit too much like a game of Jenga. So he realized that, to make a stable stand that worked at both hand level and eye level, he'd need to add on a built-in monitor stand to the top of the Lack.
So, one rainy day when he wasn't biking to work, he brough the Lack table home with him in the car and hustled it back into his workshop, where he spent the next couple of hours producing assorted whirring and banging noises. His first task was to shorten the legs of the Lack. This involved a bit more work than simply sawing off the ends, since the legs of the Lack are hollow except for the very bottom bit, and he needed some way to stabilize them. So after removing the bottom 2.5 inches from each leg, he cut four 1.75-inch square blocks out of two-by-four, pressed them into the ends of the legs, and glued them in place.
Once this was done, he assembled a little "pagoda" out of scrap wood to sit on top of the Lack. The stand itself was simple enough to build: he just cut one large piece and two smaller upright pieces and attached them together with wood screws and glue. However, attaching this new piece to the top of the Lack proved a bit trickier. He couldn't simply run wood screws up through the underside of the tabletop, because the tabletop, like the legs, is hollow and can't hold a screw in place. He could have simply screwed them up through the thin veneer of the top and into the solid wood of the stand legs, but he feared this wouldn't be stable enough.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself in the form of the leftover hardware from last month's futon misadventure. Since we ended up using only one of the three cross-dowel nuts from the hardware that White Lotus sent us, we still had two left, and these looked like the perfect tool for securing the bolt in place. Brian started by drilling a horizontal hole through each vertical support of the monitor stand. Then he drilled two long vertical holes up through the hollow top of the table and into the wood of the supports, intersecting with the holes he'd already drilled across in the other direction. Once all the holes were in place, he fed a cross-dowel nut into each horizontal hole and screwed a long bolt into the vertical hole and through the cross-dowel nut. Then all he had to do was tighten up those cross-dowel nuts to make everything rock solid. (That explanation was probably incredibly confusing, but if you look at this little cutaway diagram that Brian drew, it should make more sense.)
Here's the newly remodeled piece in Brian's workspace. The monitor and keyboard are now at the correct heights respective to each other, but the surface is still a bit small to accommodate the keyboard and mouse. For now, he's compensated for that by setting the Lack atop his desk at a slight angle, so he can lay the keyboard and the mouse pad diagonally across the top of the Lack desk. However, if this doesn't work out in the long run, you may be seeing yet another post sometime in the future about the Lack sitting/standing desk, version 3.0.
Oh, and incidentally, the cut-off ends of the Lack table legs did not go to waste. I was able to put these four little square bins to use holding paper clips and various gewgaws on my desk—a rather tidier solution than the assortment of small bins and origami boxes I'd been using before. Waste not, want not, that's the ecofrugal way.
To fix these problems, he had two options: raise himself up higher by standing on a stool, or make the desktop lower by shortening the legs of the Lack. Unfortunately, both of these options would just create a new problem: while his keyboard would now be at the right height, his monitor would be well below eye level. He could have just set it atop the wooden stand that he made for using it on his regular, seated-level desk, but when he considered the idea of piling the monitor stand on top of the Lack table on top of the desk, it started to sound a bit too much like a game of Jenga. So he realized that, to make a stable stand that worked at both hand level and eye level, he'd need to add on a built-in monitor stand to the top of the Lack.
So, one rainy day when he wasn't biking to work, he brough the Lack table home with him in the car and hustled it back into his workshop, where he spent the next couple of hours producing assorted whirring and banging noises. His first task was to shorten the legs of the Lack. This involved a bit more work than simply sawing off the ends, since the legs of the Lack are hollow except for the very bottom bit, and he needed some way to stabilize them. So after removing the bottom 2.5 inches from each leg, he cut four 1.75-inch square blocks out of two-by-four, pressed them into the ends of the legs, and glued them in place.
Once this was done, he assembled a little "pagoda" out of scrap wood to sit on top of the Lack. The stand itself was simple enough to build: he just cut one large piece and two smaller upright pieces and attached them together with wood screws and glue. However, attaching this new piece to the top of the Lack proved a bit trickier. He couldn't simply run wood screws up through the underside of the tabletop, because the tabletop, like the legs, is hollow and can't hold a screw in place. He could have simply screwed them up through the thin veneer of the top and into the solid wood of the stand legs, but he feared this wouldn't be stable enough.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself in the form of the leftover hardware from last month's futon misadventure. Since we ended up using only one of the three cross-dowel nuts from the hardware that White Lotus sent us, we still had two left, and these looked like the perfect tool for securing the bolt in place. Brian started by drilling a horizontal hole through each vertical support of the monitor stand. Then he drilled two long vertical holes up through the hollow top of the table and into the wood of the supports, intersecting with the holes he'd already drilled across in the other direction. Once all the holes were in place, he fed a cross-dowel nut into each horizontal hole and screwed a long bolt into the vertical hole and through the cross-dowel nut. Then all he had to do was tighten up those cross-dowel nuts to make everything rock solid. (That explanation was probably incredibly confusing, but if you look at this little cutaway diagram that Brian drew, it should make more sense.)Here's the newly remodeled piece in Brian's workspace. The monitor and keyboard are now at the correct heights respective to each other, but the surface is still a bit small to accommodate the keyboard and mouse. For now, he's compensated for that by setting the Lack atop his desk at a slight angle, so he can lay the keyboard and the mouse pad diagonally across the top of the Lack desk. However, if this doesn't work out in the long run, you may be seeing yet another post sometime in the future about the Lack sitting/standing desk, version 3.0.Oh, and incidentally, the cut-off ends of the Lack table legs did not go to waste. I was able to put these four little square bins to use holding paper clips and various gewgaws on my desk—a rather tidier solution than the assortment of small bins and origami boxes I'd been using before. Waste not, want not, that's the ecofrugal way.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Arugula invasion
As gardeners, Brian and I have always had a complicated relationship with weeds. Some, like mugwort, are our sworn enemies; others, like purple deadnettles, we just try to coexist with. Clover, a plant that many homeowners consider a weed, we actively encourage to grow in our yard, because it competes with the truly obnoxious weeds and enriches the soil with nitrogen. But the most confusing "weeds" of all are the ones that are actually garden crops—veggies that we've cultivated on purpose—that pop up in places where we haven't planted them. Should do we treat these as weeds to be removed, or as annexes to our main garden space?
The answer depends on several factors, such as how much in the way the plants are and how good they taste. For example, I have decided to insist on removing all volunteer tomato plants that pop up in our side yard, because (a) the sprawling vines take over the entire yard, making it nearly impassible, and (b) since they're mostly the offspring of hybrid tomatoes, they don't breed true—so even particularly tasty parent varieties, like Sun Golds, end up producing unremarkable-tasting fruit. However, the large butternut squash vine that twined its way through the side yard in 2010 was allowed to stay, because it provided us with a generous crop of our favorite squash. Contrariwise, the volunteer tomato plants that have proliferated this year on the far side of our garden plot have also been tolerated, because although their fruits aren't great, there isn't really anything more important growing there.
Often, the place where volunteer plants are most of a nuisance is in the garden itself. Last year, for instance, when our Sun Golds produced so heavily that we couldn't keep up with the job of harvesting them, the tomatoes that dropped off the vines into the garden beds produced dozens of tiny seedlings that we had to yank quickly before they turned into huge, sprawling vines and choked out all our lettuce. The year before that, when one of our dill plants went to seed, dill ended up being one of the most prolific "weeds" in our garden (though one that we could usually pull up and eat, rather than just pull up and throw away).
Up until this year, however, the problem of weed-veggies in the garden had been confined to the beds. Now, for the first time, we're having vegetables pop up in the paths. Our new garden paths have, alas, not proven quite so impervious to weeds as we'd hoped they would be; the relentless mugwort has repeatedly managed to poke through the landscape cloth and the layer of stone dust over it, and other weeds have snaked their way under the edges of the landscape cloth to proliferate around the boundaries of the beds. But this week is the first time we've spotted bits of green poking their way through the weed barrier that turned out, on close inspection, to be none other than arugula.
Nor is the arugula invasion (which, by the way, would be a great name for an alternative band) confined to the garden. We've seen volunteer arugula plants in several other places around the yard as well. There's a good-sized patch of it in the side yard, right around the base of the compost bin, and some of it appears to be growing up through the cracks in the driveway. It's actually kind of ironic, because the arugula we actually planted in the garden this year didn't yield well at all, and now here it is appearing in all these places where it's never been grown before.
Our best guess as to how it happened is that after our arugula plants bolted, several of them got pulled out and mixed in with a big pile of woody weeds that we stored next to the bin, waiting for them to dry out so we could strip the branches of leaves before bundling them. It must have scattered some seeds there, resulting in the present crop of arugula, which looks far healthier than the patch we actually planted this spring ever did. Then, once the bundles of brush got moved to the driveway to wait for bulk trash pickup, the arugula continued to drop seeds, sowing a new generation of plants through the cracks in the concrete.
So, bizarrely, a veggie that we completely failed to grow a decent crop of on purpose this spring is now coming up all over the place this fall. I've already picked two big plants from the garden paths, as well as one from the bed itself, and that bunch alone has probably doubled the size of the harvest we got in the spring. Add to that what's currently left in the bed, and in the driveway, and in front of the compost bin, and arugula may end up being one of this year's most profitable garden crops, completely by chance.
Like I've said before: a gardener's life is full of surprises.
The answer depends on several factors, such as how much in the way the plants are and how good they taste. For example, I have decided to insist on removing all volunteer tomato plants that pop up in our side yard, because (a) the sprawling vines take over the entire yard, making it nearly impassible, and (b) since they're mostly the offspring of hybrid tomatoes, they don't breed true—so even particularly tasty parent varieties, like Sun Golds, end up producing unremarkable-tasting fruit. However, the large butternut squash vine that twined its way through the side yard in 2010 was allowed to stay, because it provided us with a generous crop of our favorite squash. Contrariwise, the volunteer tomato plants that have proliferated this year on the far side of our garden plot have also been tolerated, because although their fruits aren't great, there isn't really anything more important growing there.
Often, the place where volunteer plants are most of a nuisance is in the garden itself. Last year, for instance, when our Sun Golds produced so heavily that we couldn't keep up with the job of harvesting them, the tomatoes that dropped off the vines into the garden beds produced dozens of tiny seedlings that we had to yank quickly before they turned into huge, sprawling vines and choked out all our lettuce. The year before that, when one of our dill plants went to seed, dill ended up being one of the most prolific "weeds" in our garden (though one that we could usually pull up and eat, rather than just pull up and throw away).
Up until this year, however, the problem of weed-veggies in the garden had been confined to the beds. Now, for the first time, we're having vegetables pop up in the paths. Our new garden paths have, alas, not proven quite so impervious to weeds as we'd hoped they would be; the relentless mugwort has repeatedly managed to poke through the landscape cloth and the layer of stone dust over it, and other weeds have snaked their way under the edges of the landscape cloth to proliferate around the boundaries of the beds. But this week is the first time we've spotted bits of green poking their way through the weed barrier that turned out, on close inspection, to be none other than arugula.Nor is the arugula invasion (which, by the way, would be a great name for an alternative band) confined to the garden. We've seen volunteer arugula plants in several other places around the yard as well. There's a good-sized patch of it in the side yard, right around the base of the compost bin, and some of it appears to be growing up through the cracks in the driveway. It's actually kind of ironic, because the arugula we actually planted in the garden this year didn't yield well at all, and now here it is appearing in all these places where it's never been grown before.Our best guess as to how it happened is that after our arugula plants bolted, several of them got pulled out and mixed in with a big pile of woody weeds that we stored next to the bin, waiting for them to dry out so we could strip the branches of leaves before bundling them. It must have scattered some seeds there, resulting in the present crop of arugula, which looks far healthier than the patch we actually planted this spring ever did. Then, once the bundles of brush got moved to the driveway to wait for bulk trash pickup, the arugula continued to drop seeds, sowing a new generation of plants through the cracks in the concrete.So, bizarrely, a veggie that we completely failed to grow a decent crop of on purpose this spring is now coming up all over the place this fall. I've already picked two big plants from the garden paths, as well as one from the bed itself, and that bunch alone has probably doubled the size of the harvest we got in the spring. Add to that what's currently left in the bed, and in the driveway, and in front of the compost bin, and arugula may end up being one of this year's most profitable garden crops, completely by chance.
Like I've said before: a gardener's life is full of surprises.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Cucumber alert
A couple of weeks ago, Brian and I harvested the last, or nearly the last, of our cucumber crop, and we thought a good way to use it up would be to make the Summer Pasta Salad he invented last August. He mixed everything together, just as he did the first time, and it looked nice and colorful, but it tasted...wrong. The flavors of basil and garlic and tomato were all still there, but there was this unpleasant, bitter undertone to everything. After cautiously trying another bite or two, I managed to pinpoint the source of the problem as the cucumbers, which were so bitter I couldn't even eat a whole piece. I thought perhaps it might be possible to just eat around them, but when Brian tried his, he declared, "I'm not eating this," and he dumped the whole bowlful straight into the compost bin. It was a bit of a wrench to my ecofrugal soul to see a cheap, healthy, home-cooked meal go to waste, but I had to admit, he was right: what we had in front of us wasn't truly food. He said the taste was so bad that it seemed like it had to be bad for us—like our bodies were trying to tell us, "Warning! Don't eat this!"
Fortunately, there happened to be a new diner in town that we'd been planning to try anyway, so we didn't go hungry that night (although we had to scrounge a bit for lunch in the absence of the leftovers we'd expected to have). But the experience still left us with a bit of a puzzle on our hands. The recipe had tasted fine the first time we made it; what had gone wrong the second time?
A quick Google search on "bitter cucumber" pointed Brian toward the answer. According to a site called Gardening Know-How, cucumber plants, along with melons and squash, naturally produce bitter compounds called cucurbitans. Most of the time, these compounds are confined to the leaves and stem of the plant (which I guess explains why our groundhogs have never touched them). However, certain conditions, such as uneven watering or fluctuations in temperature, can cause these chemicals to work their way into the fruit. Eating too much of these bitter compounds can actually cause illness, so Brian was apparently right in thinking that the salad tasted like something unsafe to eat. (The amount of cucumber in it probably wasn't enough to harm us, but considering that we wouldn't have enjoyed it either, there was no good reason to take the risk.)
This answer, however, led us to another question: would other cucumbers from the same plant have this same unpleasant taste? Gardening Know-How warns that once a cucumber vine has started to produce bitter fruit, it will most likely continue to do so, and it's best to discard the whole plant. Since the cukes we'd just picked were pretty much the last of the season, that wasn't a problem, but what about the ones we'd picked earlier? Would the multiple jars of pickles in our fridge have that same nasty, bitter taste? Fortunately, Brian was able to assure me that all those cucumbers had gone into the jars long before this bitter-tasting one showed up, so there was no reason to worry about them.
Nonetheless, I wanted to relate our experience as a warning to all you other gardeners out there. If you grow cucumbers, make sure you always taste them before using them in a recipe—particularly if it's late in the season, or if the weather has been unpredictable during the summer. Otherwise, you risk ruining a whole dish with one bad cucumber.
Incidentally, in the course of researching this problem I also found a few suggestions on ways to deal with it. About Home says that the bitter compounds tend to concentrate in the skin of the cucumber and toward the stem end, so if you peel the cucumbers and use the parts toward the middle, you "should be able to salvage more than enough for a salad." A video on YouTube offers a far odder solution: cut a thin slice off each end of the cucumber, then press the cut slice against the cuke and rub vigorously in a circle for a minute or so. This will cause the cuke to release a white, foamy substance, which supposedly draws out the cucurbitans with it. I personally haven't tried any of these methods, so I can't vouch for their effectiveness, but if you've picked a cucumber that's essentially inedible, I guess you have nothing to lose by trying them.
As for us, we'll do our best to raise our cucumbers right in future years to keep them from developing this problem again. We can't do much about the weather, but we can take extra care to keep the plants evenly watered. And next time we buy new cucumber seeds, we might consider switching out our highly productive Marketmore 76 or Calypso cukes for a "sweet" variety, since these are less prone to cucur-bitterness.
Fortunately, there happened to be a new diner in town that we'd been planning to try anyway, so we didn't go hungry that night (although we had to scrounge a bit for lunch in the absence of the leftovers we'd expected to have). But the experience still left us with a bit of a puzzle on our hands. The recipe had tasted fine the first time we made it; what had gone wrong the second time?
A quick Google search on "bitter cucumber" pointed Brian toward the answer. According to a site called Gardening Know-How, cucumber plants, along with melons and squash, naturally produce bitter compounds called cucurbitans. Most of the time, these compounds are confined to the leaves and stem of the plant (which I guess explains why our groundhogs have never touched them). However, certain conditions, such as uneven watering or fluctuations in temperature, can cause these chemicals to work their way into the fruit. Eating too much of these bitter compounds can actually cause illness, so Brian was apparently right in thinking that the salad tasted like something unsafe to eat. (The amount of cucumber in it probably wasn't enough to harm us, but considering that we wouldn't have enjoyed it either, there was no good reason to take the risk.)
This answer, however, led us to another question: would other cucumbers from the same plant have this same unpleasant taste? Gardening Know-How warns that once a cucumber vine has started to produce bitter fruit, it will most likely continue to do so, and it's best to discard the whole plant. Since the cukes we'd just picked were pretty much the last of the season, that wasn't a problem, but what about the ones we'd picked earlier? Would the multiple jars of pickles in our fridge have that same nasty, bitter taste? Fortunately, Brian was able to assure me that all those cucumbers had gone into the jars long before this bitter-tasting one showed up, so there was no reason to worry about them.
Nonetheless, I wanted to relate our experience as a warning to all you other gardeners out there. If you grow cucumbers, make sure you always taste them before using them in a recipe—particularly if it's late in the season, or if the weather has been unpredictable during the summer. Otherwise, you risk ruining a whole dish with one bad cucumber.
Incidentally, in the course of researching this problem I also found a few suggestions on ways to deal with it. About Home says that the bitter compounds tend to concentrate in the skin of the cucumber and toward the stem end, so if you peel the cucumbers and use the parts toward the middle, you "should be able to salvage more than enough for a salad." A video on YouTube offers a far odder solution: cut a thin slice off each end of the cucumber, then press the cut slice against the cuke and rub vigorously in a circle for a minute or so. This will cause the cuke to release a white, foamy substance, which supposedly draws out the cucurbitans with it. I personally haven't tried any of these methods, so I can't vouch for their effectiveness, but if you've picked a cucumber that's essentially inedible, I guess you have nothing to lose by trying them.
As for us, we'll do our best to raise our cucumbers right in future years to keep them from developing this problem again. We can't do much about the weather, but we can take extra care to keep the plants evenly watered. And next time we buy new cucumber seeds, we might consider switching out our highly productive Marketmore 76 or Calypso cukes for a "sweet" variety, since these are less prone to cucur-bitterness.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Ecofrugal Living Podcast, Episode 2: Solving Problems Without Money
The blog entry from September 25 has been a particularly successful one, attracting well above the average number of hits and comments, so I decided to turn it into my second episode of the Ecofrugal Living podcast. If you enjoy it, you might like to see the comments on the original post, as well as the post that inspired it at Live Like a Mensch.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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