Sustainable living – Page 43

Toward more frugal homes

My new washer

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One of the nice things about new construction is that, largely because of tighter and smarter regulations, new homes and new appliances are more efficient and more frugal. My windows, with a U-factor of .31, are pretty darn snug, though no window is as efficient as a well-insulated wall. Local builders complain that Stokes County’s requirement for ceiling insulation is R-38, the same as in much of Canada, even though surrounding counties require only R-30. My Trane heat pump is far more efficient than heat pumps from the 1980s. Refrigerators have gotten much more efficient. Even my big iMac consumes far less energy than the computer it replaced.

For the month of July, with my cooling system running as needed all day and all night all month with thermostats set to 77 or 78, I used 604 kilowatt hours at a cost of $71.80. For September, with no heating and cooling needed, I’m expecting an electric bill of $35 to $40. My house is not a MacMansion. It’s 1250 square feet. [My electric company, Energy United, which is a rural electric cooperative, charges .0802 cents per kilowatt hour during the summer, meaning that my per-kilowatt charges were $48.44 for July. The rest of the bill is from taxes, fees, and fixed monthly charges.]

It has been fascinating to watch my new LG front-loading washing machine, which is Energy Star compliant. It’s astonishing how little water it uses. It’s very quiet. It spins at a very high speed to reduce dryer costs. Its behavior is very complex, controlled by a computer. Older washers with mechanical controllers were much more limited in how their wash cycles were set up.

The New York Times has a piece today on the patterns of energy consumption in the home and how they are changing.

Cooking for the cat

I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually try making some homemade cat food to see if my cat, Lily, likes it. With some minor adjustments, I used this recipe from veterinarian Michael W. Fox. It’s a thick stew that sets up when it cools. It’s all meat (don’t ask) except for some mashed chickpeas and mashed yellow squash.

I put the cat food into Pyrex dishes that come with tight-fitting covers. I’ll freeze it. Dr. Fox recommends feeding it to the cat three times a week in addition to the cat’s regular rations.

If Lily doesn’t like it, I guess I’ll take it somewhere far from the house and dump it so that the varmints can have a feast.

A new model of climate change

100 years from now: Model predicts redder areas will warm the most.

100 years from now: Model predicts bluer areas will get more precipitation.

First of all, I think it’s good to maintain a healthy skepticism about computer models of climate change far into the future. With a model of a system as complex as the earth’s climate, many assumptions have to be made and calibrated, and there is never enough data. Also, I can’t let go of the personal opinion that current models give too little weight to solar variance.

On the other hand, global warming is impossible to deny. Before I made the decision to leave California and move back to North Carolina, I spent a good bit of time looking for climate predictions at the state-by-state level. I never found any. The only thing that seemed clear was that climate scientists expected storms off the oceans to become more severe.

The Nature Conservancy and the University of Washington have put their model, Climate Wizard, on line. Good news for North Carolina: It’s ranked near the bottom (46th) on the getting-hotter scale state by state. The prediction for North Carolina also is for more, rather than less, rain as the climate changes.

But there is bad news for all of us who are fond of eating. The Midwest and California, on which we rely for so much of our food, are predicted by this model to get hotter and drier.

Homegrown tomatoes on the honor system

While exploring a bit this morning on the other side of Madison, I came across this unattended self-service tomato stand — weigh them yourself and leave the money in the box. I came away with three pounds of tomatoes and some photos. I wish there were places like this closer to me.

Has U.S. life expectancy peaked?

Life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high. But like the stock market, it’s starting to look a little toppy. Life expectancy has started to decline in some parts of the United States, particularly rural areas and parts of the South.

According to LifeScience:

“Though the United States has by far the highest level of health care spending per capita in the world, we have one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations — lower than Italy, Spain and Cuba and just a smidgeon ahead of Chile, Costa Rica and Slovenia, according to the United Nations. China does almost as well as we do. Japan tops the list at 83 years.”

This online medical journal has charts showing how life expectancy is changing area by area. (It’s uncanny how a county-by-county chart of life expectancy looks like a voting-patterns chart.)

This is all very sad, because life expectancy would continue to rise if people took advantage of what we now know about diseases caused by diet and lifestyle.

Egg report

I got a second egg this morning, so I fried them both for lunch today.

The shells were much thicker and harder than any grocery store egg I’ve ever had. The yolks stood up so nicely that it makes one realize that commercial eggs are never truly fresh. The yolks were that dark gold color that I’ve only ever seen in homemade eggs. I was afraid the yolks would not be properly dark, because the dry summer weather hasn’t left me much fresh grass and clover to feed the chickens. As far as I know, it’s primarily chlorophyll that makes the yolks so rich. But my chickens do get a varied diet that includes a lot of fruit and vegetable scraps, so maybe chlorophyll is not as essential as I thought.

I’ve rounded up some sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and wheat berries to mix with their laying mash. They seem to crave protein and go for protein foods first when I take them treats.

The quality of the eggs, and my hens’ happy dispositions, makes me feel even more sorry for the hens that produce commercial eggs. Obviously commercial hens aren’t fed well.

First egg!

One of my hens laid the first egg today. The hens are five months old. It’s a smallish egg, not the extra-large I expect from these hens, so I guess the hens aren’t as mature as I thought.

I had promised the hens that when they laid the first egg, I’d clean their house and put fresh straw in their nesting boxes. And so I did. Clearly they understood what the nesting boxes are for, because that’s where I found the first egg — in the middle box of the three nesting boxes.

Chicken treats

A plate of chicken treats

If one eats well of the summer produce, then one’s backyard chickens can eat well too. Their favorites are corn and watermelon. They like squash well enough after they’ve eaten all the corn and watermelon. They go crazy over nice, ripe tomatoes. They can put away a ton of peach peels. To try to keep the fruit flies down, I keep raw fruit and vegetable scraps in a bowl in the refrigerator until I take them to the chickens.

My favorite produce stand at Germanton has been saving produce for me that’s too rough to sell but good enough for chickens.

Honoring the tomato sandwich

Few things make better eatin’ than a tomato sandwich. And you only get them a couple of months a year, when tomatoes are in high season. Last summer, after 17 years in California, I was so starved for a tomato sandwich that I went out and bought some Bunny bread, which, in my opinion, is the best of the country-style white breads available around here.

This year, though, I’ve focused on lower carb alternatives to white-bread tomato sandwiches. Chapati bread, which I wrote about last week, serves very well. Just smear mayonnaise on a piece of the chapati bread and have some tomato, with a fork.

One of the things I’ve taken for granted since childhood is that, in July and August, there should be a row of tomatoes in the window above the kitchen sink, ripening in the sun. Does everyone do this? Or is it just something that ran in my family?

Living to be 100

The Island of the Ancients

The Huffington Post has an article today on the growing number of people living to be 100 years old. One of the reasons cited for this is “improved diet.”

I think it would have been more accurate to say “the possibility of improved diet.” The diet of the average American has decidedly not improved. The July 20 issue of the New Yorker trumps the Time magazine piece on why Southerners are so fat with a piece on why Americans are so fat. The position of the New Yorker piece seems to be that the obesity epidemic of the past few decades has primarily been caused by corporate influences — food engineering, corporate agriculture, corporate research on food’s addictive qualities, pushing larger portions, marketing, etc.

We can take advantage of brilliant new research on diet and health, we can take advantage of the availability of healthier foods, and we can cook the right stuff for ourselves at home. Or we can eat what television commercials tell us to eat and make certain corporations richer. That’s what it really boils down to.