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Vinegar and Baking Soda

Household chemicals. Probably some of the most dangerous things we have around. Have you ever really looked at the labels on some of that stuff? My wife and I have a rule (seems like we have lots of rules, huh?) that relates to food and is making its way into many aspects of our lives. And that rule is we look at the ingredients in our food or in our cleaning supplies or household items such as toothpaste and if we can’t spell it or pronounce it, we try to avoid it.
This especially can apply to cleaning supplies. From window and countertop cleaners to scrubbing cleansers, we typically use products containing things such as ethylene glycol mono butyl ether (I think that’s just one ingredient with five words) and, here’s a good one: n-Alkyl dimethyl Benzyl ammonium chlorides. And, to top it all off, there are warning labels to seek medical attention if you get this in your eyes or on your skin.
And we’re cleaning our kitchen countertops with this stuff? The same countertop we prepare our food on? Does any of this seem even a little bit weird to you?
For several years, we have been using what I call “natural” cleaning supplies. And, no, we don’t buy the latest “green” cleaning product (although some are very good). For 99% of our cleaning, we have been using white vinegar in a 50-50 mix with water and baking soda.
We have cotton cleaning towels and we have an old spray bottle we’ve reused and filled with our vinegar solution. This works on bathroom and kitchen sinks, countertops, mirrors, pretty much everything. For scrubbing and more difficult areas (like our stainless steel sinks), we use baking soda and a little water, make a paste, get an old toothbrush and we’re set.
There have been few areas of our house that we haven’t been able to clean with these products. And the big advantages are they are cheap (A gallon of white vinegar costs just under $3 around here and a large box of baking soda is about the same), and we don’t worry using them around the kitchen counters and our food. In fact, there are some pretty good recipes using vinegar and others using baking soda. Hmmm…
But probably one of the best compliments we’ve had, though, is when my mom called me the other day and asked what we used to clean our house, because “it always looks so nice”. Oh yeah.

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The Lawrence Street House – Beginnings

I know it’s been a while since my last blog, so I’ll bring those of you who are new to thesimpleHOUSE up to date. Our kids are grown. We raised them in a 2,750 sq ft house that worked really well as they passed through their teen years and into adulthood. But now our daughter is married (they had their second anniversary in August) and our son just graduated from college and will be moving out soon. So we’re very close to being two people in what is now seeming to be a very large house. So last summer, after much searching, we found a wonderful urban infill lot in downtown Eugene, Oregon (our home town). We have the 2,750 sq ft house on the market for sale (let me know if you’re interested; it’s nice and doesn’t quite qualify as a McMansion) and are starting the design process. We recently did a LEED Platinum house (theSAGE in previous posts) that pulled out all the stops on sustainability. And you know, it wasn’t really that hard to do. So armed with a desire to be in something around 1,600 square feet, within walking distance of most amenities and that “itch” that I, as an architect, get about every decade, we’re designing another home. Stay tuned.
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CFLs and LEDs

In addition to the thirty second rule, we went through our house and replaced quite a few of our light bulbs with CFLs (compact fluorescents) ad some LED (light emitting diodes). We started with the exterior porch lights. This was because we leave our porch lights on all night for security. And, since we live in a house that sits on a corner, with three bollard lights, two porch lights and four “over the door” lights, we had some serious wattage going on.
Originally, we had 60 watt bulbs in our three bollards, 100 watt bulbs in our two porch lights and 50 watt bulbs in our over the door lights. That was a total of 580 watts going all night!
Well, we changed out the 60s and 100s for 11 watt CFLs and the 50s for 3.7 watt LEDS. That dropped our wattage from 580 to just under 70 watts. Not only do they last longer, but they put out almost as much light (except for the LEDs — they’re quite a bit dimmer and they’re expen$ive!).
But they all work fine for security. And, based on this success, I’m going through the rest of the house and replacing bulbs where I can (we have a lot of recessed can incandescents on dimmers, so it’s slow going). I’ve started with closets and am working my way through the house.
Consider CFLs or LEDs where you can.
  

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The Thirty Second Rule

I want to dedicate this blog entry to my friend Levi. In a conversation he and I had a while back, he told me they have, what he calls, a “thirty second rule.” What that means is, if they are going to leave the room for more than thirty seconds, they turn off the lights. Simple, huh?
Yet this is such an easy habit to get into and it can make a difference. While I can’t say it will cut your electric bills in half (this is “halve it all”, after all), it can make a serious dent in your energy use.
My wife and I started being more diligent in turning off lights around our house. Since we currently have gas heat, most of our electric bills are lights and appliances. In just being careful: turning off lights when we’re not in the room, not turning on lights if we don’t need them (our house has wonderful natural light in most every room), and those sorts of things, we have been able to reduce our annual electric bills every year for the last three years. That’s pretty good.
There are a few additional things we’ve done to help with this, and I’ll talk about those in future blogs. But today, in addition to employing the thirty second rule, we installed timers on our bath fans.
One of the problems faced we are faced with in the Pacific Northwest is damp air. When we shower, we need to use the exhaust fan, but it usually doesn’t pull all of the moisture out of the air before we have to go to work. So what to do? We can turn off the fan and get SOME of the moisture out, we can leave the fan on all day while we’re at work and get ALL of the moisture out, as well as a significant amount of heated air.
OR, we can install timers. I remember in our first house we had the turn-the-dial timers on our bath fans. But those don’t look very good anymore and they fell into disuse (if they even make them anymore). But Leviton makes a multitude of nice timers. The one pictured here is what we installed on our bath fans. We set the timer for 60 minutes and the fan runs while we go to work, then turns off after an hour.
Leviton also makes a 24 hour programmable timer that we used for our exterior porch lights, too. But I’ll talk about our porch lights (CFL and LED as well as the 24 hour timer) next time.

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Paper or Plastic? Neither!



I remember when I would go to the grocery store and the clerk would ask “paper or plastic?” We typically would say “paper” because it was easier to recycle. Our garbage company picks up recycles, but doesn’t do plastic bags. And we’d always forget to take our plastic bags back to the store. So they’d pile up in our recycle drawer. Paper was easier, but that bothered us, too.

So a few years ago, my wife and I decided to invest in durable, canvas bags. We bought four like the one pictured here from ECObags. They are durable, socially responsible canvas bags. About $9 each. And we love them! When we bought ours, they had a logo on the side that said “neither”. I liked that.

We’ve found it rare when four bags aren’t enough for our shopping. And we can pack them with heavy stuff and they hold up really well. The straps are sturdy and I’m amazed at the stuff we can load in them. Almost heavier than we can lift sometimes — really.

Plastic bags are convenient and cheap. But cheap isn’t always good. Worldwide, we consume and discard between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags. That’s about 1 million EVERY MINUTE! About 380 billion are in the US alone, 100 billion of those are grocery bags, costing retailers $4 billion annually.

We’ve found our bags useful for carrying all sorts of things around, not just our groceries. And even after three years, they’re still going strong.

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Going Paperless at Home

There are two technological marvels that I find incredibly helpful and amazing: pdf files and scanners.

A couple of years ago, I started trying to go paperless. There are actually a lot of easy ways to make progress in this area. First, I started with online banking. My statements are no longer mailed to me, but I access them online. I download them as pdfs.

Then I started paying bills online. And with the confirmation of the payment I used a handy little feature with my printer function called “print to pdf”. I print the receipts of my online payments to pdf files and organize them by month in file folders on my computer, not in my drawer.

But I still get those pesky receipts when I go shopping. And I’m even glad for them because they help me stay organized and keep track of budget things in Quicken. But now there’s a company called The Neat Company and they have a product called NeatDesk. It’s basically a scanner that can interface with your computer to scan documents, business cards and receipts. And it has the ability to batch feed about 10 in a bunch, so you don’t have to do them one at a time.

And it will export your receipt info to Quicken and your business card info to Address Book or Outlook. I haven’t bought one yet (although it’s on my list).

The thing I’ve found with saving stuff to pdf is how easy it is to retrieve data when I need it. It’s much easier than sifting through a stack of receipts or boxes of stuff.

So give it a try. You’ll love it!

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Tissues, Toilet Paper and Towels

This section of the blog will require a part one and a part two. There are five paper product areas I want to discuss. I’m going to talk about four of those here in part one and will cover the fifth in part two.

In the forest products industry, toilet paper is the number one part of the “tissue market”. The tissue market includes toilet paper, paper towels and napkins as well as facial tissues. In the U.S., we consume 50% more “tissue market” products than Europe and 500% more than Latin America.

Paper towels are the second most used tissue product. I couldn’t find reliable information on paper napkins and facial tissues. Much of the paper used in tissues and paper products like this is, fortunately, recycled. And, no, the “recycled” content of toilet paper isn’t recycled toilet paper. That would be gross. And think about it, used toilet paper goes down the drain and into the treatment sludge facility; recycling would be virtually impossible.

And, I’m not advocating going paperless with your toilet paper; even I have a limit. But I will suggest you buy double rolls, simply because they use half the little cardboard liner roller things and about half the packaging. And, check the recycled content of the toilet paper you buy.

But, when it comes to paper towels and napkins and facial tissues, I will advocate for going cloth. We switched to cloth cleaning towels quite some time ago and haven’t bought paper towels for a couple of years. We find it works very well and we have purchased enough cloth towels that we can run them as part of our normal washing load of laundry with virtually no additional effort. Buy white ones and use them over and over.

On facial tissues, I have used a cloth handkerchief since high school. I guess I got that habit from my dad. He always used a cloth hanky. To be honest, part of why I dislike paper facial tissues is my finger seems to always poke through into the snot. Sorry to be gross, but that’s my original motivation. Cloth has worked for me for a very long time.

We’ve recently switched (almost 100%) to some simple, white cloth napkins, too. This seems to be working fine for us. We haven’t gotten sick from using cloth napkins, handkerchiefs or towels, so I guess it’s OK. And, we are making even more progress in reducing our trash.

Give it a try; you may even like it better. I know it’s cheaper!

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Recycling, Compost and Waste

One other way to “halve it all” is to reduce the amount of garbage we generate. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is more commonly known as garbage or trash. This is the stuff and junk that ends up in our landfills. Or, in some areas, it’s incinerated.

My wife and I have been working to reduce our trash. Our garbage collection company gives us three cans, a 90 gallon recycle can, a 90 gallon yard debris can and a 32 gallon trash can. For quite a while, they would pick up the recycle and yard debris on alternating weeks and the garbage every week.

So we took on a personal challenge. How could we reduce our garbage that we generate? Some of the things we did I am blogging about. More will follow. We tend to like the challenge with a goal, so we started looking at several areas of our trash generation. Little did we know these are also the suggestions at the EPA website.

First, we did what is called “source reduction.” We looked at buying less. Then, we tried to buy in bulk when we could. We look at how much packaging there is with an item and is there a way to buy it without all the surroundings? Some stuff there is more packaging than item! If not, is the packaging recyclable? Go paperless when you can (more on this later).

Second, we recycle everything we can. When we designed our kitchen, we built in large, pull-out drawers for the recycling. Sometimes our 90 gallon can is overflowing. Many items can be recycled: paper, cardboard boxes, many plastic bottles, food cans, etc.

Third, we started composting. We got a little can and have it in the kitchen for food scraps. We were running it down the garbage disposal, but now we compost it. I also put our lawn clippings in the compost to balance “the greens and the browns”. I know that didn’t really add to the landfill problem, but it certainly was wasteful. My wife loves to plant flowers and compost helps feed the soil. And our yard debris has been reduced.

So, what’s the result of us “halving it all” with our garbage? We now only have our garbage company pick up our garbage every other week. Yep, 32 gallons that are often not full, every other week. AND… we pay less for this service, so, again, we’re saving money. Do some of these things and call your garbage company: you may be able to save money while helping our environment.

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Our Coffee Addiction

If you think I’m going to slam coffee in today’s blog, you’re wrong. While I do recommend fair trade, organic shade grown coffee for what may be obvious reasons, today’s topic is actually about the disposable cups we drink our coffee from.

I hope by now everyone is death on styrofoam cups. I’m not even going there. But what I am going to talk about today is the paper cups and lids we often get from Starbucks or Full City or (insert your favorite coffee shop here).

Estimates are that we will use about 23 billion paper coffee cups in 2010. Billion. That will require cutting down 9.4 million trees, 7 trillion BTUs of energy and 5.7 billion gallons of water. This will create 363 million pounds of solid waste. We have trouble processing such large numbers, so here are some comparisons.

The energy used just to manufacture the cups that we use just for our coffee could power 77,000 homes. It’s almost a gallon of water for every human being on the planet. Just from our paper coffee cups. And the FDA has regulations on the amount of recycled paper pulp that is allowed in contact with food and beverages. So the majority of our paper cups are made with a high percentage of virgin paper.

Yet the answer is simple: Carry a reusable mug with you to the coffee shop. Many are already doing this, but if we’re going to use 23 billion paper cups next year, many are not. Most every shop I know will fill your mug with your favorite brew.

Plus, many offer discounts if you use your own mug. So the benefits are twofold: help the environment and save money.

And that’s a win-win all the way around.