Port Potager

Now that it's cold and the furnace is on for the season, we've decided to take another look at the thermostat settings. It turns out that we can comfortably Turn down the thermostat by another 2 degrees while we're at home. As you may recall, turning down the thermostat to save some money on our heating bills was our very first Trim the Fat Tuesday exercise. Since then, though, we've insulated the house , and that has made an enormous difference in our comfort level. This house used to be a drafty wreck , but now it's consistently comfortable. No longer are the upstairs bedrooms a full 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and our November heating oil top-off was under 25 gallons, which is far less than what it's been in the past. All this plus an oil price of just $2.89 per gallon (for now, anyway) bodes well for this winter. I should note that the insulation did right by us in the summer, too. We never even bothered to put in the window A/...

Week One of our New Year's resolution is here! The first step taken to save some cash in this project is pretty painless (I didn't even tell anyone I was doing it, and it's actually been this way for a month without anyone even noticing): Lower the thermostat by 1 degree. We already have a programmable thermostat , which we use to set the heat back by 8 degrees while we are gone during the day and 5 degrees while we are sleeping at night. I'm sure that also saves us money, but I have no idea how much, because we've always done that. So that doesn't count — we're looking for new savings that I can actually count up and add to my mortgage payment. A fairly quick internet search shows that the rule-of-thumb is that you can expect about 3% savings for every degree you turn down your thermostat. This is obviously affected by all kind of factors (house size, outside temperature, R-factor of your insulation, blah blah boring you can check out some charts...

This is something we've been meaning to do for years — ever since we moved here, in fact. We have a gigantic, ancient water heater in the basement, and I'm quite certain that it is responsible for most of our electric bill. So we finally got off our asses to Turn down the water heater to 120 degrees. Our tank is a beast: 80 gallons, which is way more than we need. It's electric, which is the least efficient thing ever. It's also 15 years old, so we're on borrowed time. We need to replace it soon, but in the meantime, this little change should save us some cash. There's going to be a lot of rough math here, because the thermostat on the water heater looks like a child's toy: As near as we can tell, this decal is fake, as there is no knob to turn. Instead, Kirk had to take a screwdriver and move a tiny screw inside that hole to change the temperature. The choices were 150, 125, and 90. It had been set at 125 according to the (surely inacc...

Behold the pitiful state of our okra seedlings: It looks like just about all of these germinated, but then all but one (maybe two...we'll see) failed to take root. This could have something to do with the extra-cool temps in our house while we were on vacation. We adjusted our thermostat way down while we were gone, and okra likes it hot. But I'm thinking a more likely culprit is the new seed starter cups we used. In general, these are pretty cool. They are little discs of coir wrapped in biodegradable paper that plump up when you add water. Each one has a little indentation in the top to place a seed, and once in a watering tray, they just soak up water and stay good and damp. These worked really well for our tomatoes and peppers, especially since you can just plant them, mini-pot and all into a bigger pot when they get too big. Those nightshade plants will grow extra roots up their stems, and they'll poke through the paper with no trouble. But for okr...

Now that our long autumn nightmare is over and we have heat again, we were curious about the financial upshot of sticking with oil. Not that we had a choice .  The new furnace works much better and is much  more efficient than the old one, thanks in no small part to fully insulated ductwork that is now installed properly – that is, the heat registers are under the windows instead of in the center of the house, where they did little good to anyone.  The only thing that’s not entirely up to snuff is the ductwork to the second floor. These are quite small, and there are only two ducts to the whole upstairs: One in our room, and one that’s split between the kids’ rooms. It’s a good 5 degrees colder upstairs at any given time of day – and that’s actually an improvement. But could we do better if we hung on to some of those electric space heaters we were using all through the fall? My thinking was that if programmed the thermostat to dial the nighttime t...

Remember how we had a home energy assessment back in April? Well, in addition to all the free lightbulbs , they also offer some serious discounts on another way to save money by lowering energy costs. We took advantage of the offers to Air-seal and insulate the house to lower our home heating costs. Part of the energy assessment involves the representative from MassSave  inspecting your home for insulation — they run the furnace and measure heat loss, scout out the drafty spots, etc. Turns out our century-old house has no insulation at all. This explains why we're so miserable (even inside ) when the wind blows, and why we pay through the nose for our heating, despite our willingness to keep our programmable thermostat set pretty low during the winter. Because Massachusetts is a totally awesome place to live, they offer a nice subsidy to encourage homeowners to insulate their homes. It’s good for the environment, good for homeowners' wallets, and good for local contr...

Q: Why would our chickens' water fount be in the kitchen sink? A: Because it's frozen.  December came in with a touch of snow, which made for a fun trek to the Christmas tree farm yesterday: It was pretty, but it was cold . When we got home with the tree, we realized the temperature for the day hadn't climbed out of the 20s. When Kirk looked in on the chickens, he realized that their water had frozen over, so we had to bring it in the house to chip out the ice and refill it. Time to winterize the coop. About a month ago we picked up a warmer for the water: For a quick fix last night, we ran an extension cord from the garage to the coop, but today Kirk worked up some permanent wiring: He dug a trench (lucky me – I got to fill it back in!) and ran a wire underground from the workshop to the run: From the run the wire goes up through the eave, along the ceiling of the run, and on into the henhouse. Kirk set up an outlet on the wal...