Three Gallon Drought Dish Washing

Drought Dish Washing at the Debi Cates Home

I enjoy washing dishes. Good thing, too, since I don't have a dishwasher. The machine, non-me kind anyway.

My little house was built probably in the late 40s or early 50s. There are lots of challenges for modern living in an older home, especially one just 800 square feet. I have a heck of a time finding furniture that's sized moderately enough not to look like a gorilla stuffed in a shoebox. And don't get me started on the stingy number of electrical outlets. Thank heaven for power strips because otherwise I'd be writing this blog on a manual typewriter. Then there's the time I tried to install a clothes washing machine in the back add-on room with its badly done peer and beam floor, a funny story for the scrapbook...

Where was I? Oh yes, hand dish washing. You won't find it surprising then that my house does not have a dishwasher installed. Here are five steps I've been perfecting to conserve both water and the energy to heat it, yet to get dishes as clean as humanly (this human) possible.

1. Fill each side of the sink with one gallon of hot water. You read right, just one drought-thrifty gallon per side. And I only do dishes once per day  depending on how much I cook but never more than once a day. The third gallon is to pre-rinse while waiting to wash (see hints below). Until this method becomes second nature to me -- it's not yet -- I've been using a pitcher to measure the water.

2. Do not put dish washing soap in the water. Instead I directly squirt my dish scrubber, the round green one in the photo. My daughter crochets these scrubbies out of tulle. They're my favorite, soft enough not to scratch cutlery and strong enough to scrub pots. Not putting a big squirt into the water, I'm using a lot less dish soap. A penny saved is a penny earned.

3. Wash the items that touch your mouth first.  I learned this rule from my mother, at the tender dish-washing age of six. That would be your glasses and silverware, the dishes you'd like the most clean, washed while the water is hottest and cleanest.

4. Scrub out of the water. By washing each dish in my hand, not in the sink, I can give it a dunk in the wash side which isn't made wildly soapy by directly washing there. Then ready for the crystal clear rinse in the left side. Doing this also reduces even further the amount of soap I use since my sudsed-up scrubber never goes in the water.

5. Continue washing from cleanest to dirtiest. Common sense, I know. The wash water will get inevitably dirty as you go along, but here are a few things that might help:

• Scrape: I use a rubber spatula to scrape plates and bowls, which to my delight gets them as clean as pre-wash possible. For pots and pans, Pampered Chef sells three nylon pan scrapers for $3. They work wonders and will outlast you. I've used the same one for over 15 years and it looks new. Also good for scraping off mooshed-in gunk on floors.
• Soak: Between washing, I keep a one gallon mixing bowl by the sink full of water. I pre-rinse dishes in it, or soak things I know will set hard as rock, like eggs and breakfast cereal. On days I'm not lazy, I will even pour that dirty water outside onto the compost bin which in my desert clime, always needs watering.
• Grease or Oil: I have a septic tank so am especially aware the bad effect grease has on drains and sewage systems. I haven't yet devised a good method for responsibly disposing of cooking oil since it is one of the things I don't compost. I try to use as little as possible, throwing away used oil in the trash. In any case, not having excess oil or grease on the dishes is helpful.
• Pink Cup: I have this one small pink plastic cup, an odd man out. Since I'm not using much water, and when the sink is full of dishes, it's sometimes hard to fully rinse. I use that cup to scoop and pour rinse water when there's not enough room to dunk. 

After years of washing dishes with a full, sudsy sink and after years of always rinsing under running hot water, it's a big step for me to perfect washing with less water, less expense, and hopefully less effort to boot.

What hand dish washing hints do you recommend? For those with dishwashers (the non-human kind), feel free to share your best green hints as well.

My first reusable produce bag

Here is my first reusable produce bag, sewn from materials on hand. The bag is made from nylon wedding tulle, and the drawstring from one ply teased out of a three-ply nylon cord. It is extremely lightweight and is washable. Another plus is it will be convenient for the grocery clerk to see the sticker code for keying it into the register. That's the good news.

The bad news is nylon is plastic. :(

But, like I've been saying over and over again to myself, one must start somewhere and every little bit helps. By using materials I had on hand, no gasoline was burned by shopping. I predict this bag will last a long time, preventing the use and disposal of a hundred of those thin plastic bags from the grocery store.

For my sewing friends, here's a tip on working with net, which is like trying to sew air. For a stabilizer, I used regular paper which I was able to tear away easily when done. Used envelopes, flattened out, would work very well for this purpose.

I used a stitch on my sewing machine that was similar to zig zag, but even more ziggy and zaggy, number 21. I'm sure that won't mean much unless you also have a Brother CS-6000i, so here's a photo (click to see larger).

Today my daughter and I are headed to the Midland Downtown Farmer's Market for the first time! I wish it wasn't 30 miles from here. Still, that's a fraction of the distance most produce must travel to get to my local grocery store, I'm sure.

Time for me to sign off now. I'll be bringing my reusuable shopping bag and this one little produce bag I've sewn so far. :)

Easy Peasy: Retractractable Laundry Line

New indoor laundry line that I installed myself :)

Another simple step that's begun working for me is this retractable laundry line I installed in my shower. I don't yet have a big outdoor wash line, but this one is keeping up with my t-shirts, dish towels, and other light laundry that I've been doing by hand.

To help speed dry, I keep the bathroom window open and the bathroom door closed. Too hot this summer to do otherwise; it's been over 100 degrees almost every day this June.

Installing was easy, but I had to build up nerve to drill screw holes in the shower wall. I did some thinking ahead and purposely put the line container part furthest from the shower head, and higher too. That way it's less likely for water to get in, or worse, inside the wall through the screw holes.

The device cost under $10 and, as the name indicates, I retract the line in the morning for my shower. After that I pull it back out, hang a few pieces of laundry, and that "load" is dry by the next morning.

I figure the few items each day equals a load each week, saving electric-usage for both the washer and dryer. Plus I've been getting some stains out that I know would have stayed otherwise. Yay!

Beauty and the Beast

What is it? It's the interior of a freshly changed "tall kitchen" trash bag, so tidy. Beautiful, even.

Um, maybe more like a beast.

Fossil fuel energy is used to make plastic like that bag. In addition, plastic itself is made of petroleum. At every stage of production and use, plastic releases toxic by-products. News stories are revealing more and more frequently the frightening health effects from those chemicals, chemicals now found in our bodies.

Not only that, the plastic from this bag will still be around in the year 2510, or maybe 3010. No one knows exactly how long because, well, it takes so long to biodegrade.

Burning plastic to be rid of it, isn't a good option either. My son-in-law is a fireman and could tell you about the noxious plumes from a home filled with a standard amount of plastic when it burns.

Come on, this is just a bag and I'm only using one a week. That's 52 bags a year for me, one person. And 52 bags per person in the U.S. would be 16,089,372,000 bags a year. Sixteen billion bags just to throw away stuff. And since it doesn't biodegrade, what about the plastic from last year? Or 1990? Or 1950?

Every bit of plastic ever produced still exists today.

What can a person -- transitioning or not -- do to move away from petroleum-based plastic?

I could keep reducing my garbage, ultimately using fewer and fewer of these bags. There is no warning on the box, so one bag can't be all that bad. Wait, there is this one label on the box, in small print: "Not recommended for food storage." Why? Because it would leach bad stuff out into your food. Not good for food, not good for the ground, not good for you.

I could buy the oxobiodegradable plastic bag. Or I could buy biodegradable bags made of tapioca. In any case, I looked for them in my local grocery store, 2 miles from home, but they carry neither. It doesn't makes sense to me to drive across town for them, nor to indirectly burn gasoline by having them shipped to my doorstep from Amazon either.

Even if I could find some locally, a bit of googling revealed that the tapioca just entices micro-organisms to eat that part of the bag, then seeds the environment with polyethylene fragments. And the oxobiodegradable has additives that make them breakdown, releasing carbon dioxide and methane far more quickly, contributing to greenhouse gasses. Besides, I don't trust the corporate guys to tell all they know. Or even to know all they should know.

In desperation, I could at least re-use the ubiquitous plastic shopping bags that I bring purchases home in. Then I wouldn't be encouraging more plastic to be made. Since I'm currently sewing cloth shopping bags, my days of having a plethora of plastic bags are numbered, though.

I then looked in my garbage for the solution.

Monitoring my trash these last weeks, I noticed something. I throw away plastic bags. There's the plastic bag popcorn comes in, the big plastic bag toilet paper comes in, the plastic-coated bag dog food comes in. There's a bunch of them each week and not made of the kind of plastic taken by my recycle center. How ironic is it that plastic bags fill up my trash. Why throw them away in yet another bag?

Yep, I like this idea and I've begun saving my "trash" as trash bags. It will work both toward my goal of reducing my contribution to the landfill and reducing fuel consumption. Well, at least for as long as the stuff we buy is mostly, sometimes only, available packaged in plastic.

It's not a solution against the many health dangers of plastic. It's not as tidy as the bag above. It certainly won't be beautiful. But you know what I'm thinking? Those 16 billion white, tall bags bulging with garbage couldn't possibly be tidy or beautiful either.

Links
GLAD's ^® declaration of dangerous chemicals not used in their production. What is their stuff made of? It's not answered. Probably for a reason.
CNN's article "5 toxics that are everywhere: Protect yourself."
CNN's video "One woman's mission to be plastic-free."
The animated Internet sensation, "The Story of Stuff."

Budding Greenthread

Greenthread bud, Thelesperma megapotamicum
April 14, 2010
West Odessa, Texas

I like the common name of this wildflower, greenthread. Its name and this image of it budding caught me today as a lyrical title, going well with the small green steps I've been attempting lately.

Wednesdays are garbage pick up day on my street. The volume of garbage I produce is an excellent way to gauge my consumption. I set a recent goal for myself to produce only one "tall kitchen" bag of garbage per week. I've done that for a few weeks now, and today my bag is even only 3/4 full. I'm making progress.

I couldn't have done it, though, until I started taking recycling seriously, plus continuing to compost. Without doing both of those, I would produce three to four times as much landfill-destined waste.

Like everything, I tried to make my recycle system as easy as possible. I know myself well enough to know if it's complicated, I'll get lazy. Now I have a lightweight plastic bin right by the trash can. Before I throw anything away, I first see if all or any part of it is accepted by our recycle center, and a lot more of it is than you might think. I don't sort at home. Once a week when I take the plastic bin to the center, I sort the contents there.

My compost system is also simple -- an enamel mixing bowl in the kitchen for scraps and a pile outside in the back for the actual composting. Everything except meat and dairy scraps go in it. I even dump liquids in it, like my cold coffee. Recently, I began using a rubber spatula to scrape the dirty dishes, which then helps make dish washing easier, too. I dump the bowl every day or two, covering it with a plate when not in use.

I put my compost pile at the edge of my garden, closest to the back door because in the 110 degree days of summer or the few freezing days of winter, I don't want to go trekking across the country-side. A person can do all sorts of things to make better, faster compost but again, I don't make it complicated. As they say, "compost happens." I dump it, I leave it. I don't worry about it attracting wild critters because I have two outside dogs. Ansel and Dixie, on the other hand, are free to eat what they will from it. And surprisingly, they do like certain fruit and vegetable scraps. At last, when I need compost, I shovel off the chunky, least-composted top layer to reveal the black gold beneath.

Now, back to my one bag per week landfill-destined garbage: there are some problems with it. I'll cover those tomorrow with some solutions I'm considering. Maybe you'll have some even better suggestions for me. =)

Gotta Have Jo

Seems kind of silly, but after posting yesterday I realized I wasn't entirely sure what a kWh was. I gave myself some basic schooling today.

A watt is the unit electric appliances and utility providers measure electricity usage. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts. A kilowatt hour is the same thing as a kilowatt. How are they different? Um, I don't think they are.

For my purposes, I need only understand the electric company bills me in 1000 increments, those kWh thingies.

Today I took a little tour around my house, paying special attention to items I use most often. Every appliance has their wattage listed on the back. I found one that immediately seemed like a real guzzler -- my coffee machine, listed at 900 watts. What that means is if I leave it on for an hour it will use 900 watts. Or, in the parlance of my electric bill, .9 kWh.

Holy beans, Mr. Coffee! I make coffee every day and leave the pot on for at least an hour. (Do not get between me and the coffee pot in the morning.) That means in a month I use 27 watts (.9 X 30 days) . Sure, that's only $3.30 a month, a pittance compared to Starbucking it. But here's a real kicker for me: it was 10% of my electric usage last month.

Here's another kicker that can be applied to us all: each kWh saved is almost half a kg shaved off your carbon footprint. (See "It's carbon judgment day" on Guardian.co.uk for detailed information on how to calculate your carbon footprint.)

With my mom's help (she's very smart and has done a lot to reduce), I've got a painless solution to save most of those coffee kWhs and most of the 11.61 kg of CO2 I would otherwise emit monthly. After my coffee makes tomorrow, I'm pouring it into a thermos and turning off the pot.

Which makes me think of the refrain, "How low can you go? How low can you go?"

UPDATE: Read Eeyore's comment for an engineer's calm explanation of why I might have over-demonized my coffee pot. Thanks, Larry!


Photo is your author, with my gotta-have-it jo, August 2006.

Quieting the Slurp

I'm beginning to think more and more of my energy consumption as slurping loudly at the trough of diminishing fossil fuel. You could say this photo is my straw: my electric meter.

Since I posted last month where I hinted about making changes, a terrible disaster struck. The BP oil spill is tragic and a reminder why this subject is important. The need for ever more risky oil drilling isn't something just Corporate America demands. My own wanton usage has demanded it, too.

Starting last month I began seriously monitoring my electric consumption. While I didn't do anything radical like replacing appliances with a lower energy-rated ones -- not yet -- you might say I myself become an energy-efficient model.

I spent the month doggedly turning off everything when not in use. I looked at every item with a fresh eye for reduction or reuse. But mostly I spent the spring days allowing myself to feel the experience of the season. I opened windows wide when it was cool and closed curtains tight when it was too warm. To combat the heat, ironically I also spent lots of time outdoors, like when I was a kid. Remember when even the hot days of summer never seemed too hot because you were too busy doing "stuff?" (One difference now, I apply lots of sunscreen first).

Those small things apparently worked.

April...	kWh Used
2010	267
2009	691

Holy cow! I reduced a whopping 424 kWh, down to almost a third of what I used last year. And this is the lowest usage I've had the last 30 months, going back as far as my provider keeps online records. I love the financial benefit, too. Based on my current rate of .122333 cents per kWh, I have an extra $52.30 in my pocket. Mine, all mine.

To be objective about the effectiveness of my actions, though, there is one other thing. I have to take into account the weather.

Heating and cooling are the biggest consumers of energy and in West Texas most of our annual energy goes toward cooling. This billing cycle happened to be mild, cooler, than last year's. I wondered how much of my savings was due to that cooperative weather and how much to my new diligence.

Meteorologists have devised something they call Heating Degree Days and Cooling Degree Days, HDD and CDD for short. Weirdly the calculation doesn't really report days. You can learn more about it by googling it. Basically it is a number that indicates variation in temperature, up or down, from 65F for any given day. I'm using it to put temperature into the mix.

Billing period...	HDD + CDD =
04/15/2010-05/12/2010	83+71=154
04/15/2009-05/13/2009	15+287=302

The difference is significant. With 287 CDDs last year, and only 71 this, it was much milder this year. And that makes my comparison not quite apples with apples. :(

How do I incorporate this difference to fairly compare? I know that I didn't turn on the A/C or heater this billing cycle so that tells me that the 267 kWh I used is pretty much my bottom line.

As for using the degree days data I gathered, well, I have no idea how to use them scientifically in this case!

I guess it's going to take the whole summer -- June, July, and August when my kWh consumption has historically risen, yikes, over 1,000 each month -- to get the big picture of how well I will haven taken the responsibility to reduce my fossil fuel consumption.

Let's hope it's going to be a summer to be remembered fondly. Mild would be nice. If not, I'm sure I'll be hotter than last year, but also less worried about large carbon footprints and high bills. Ask any kid, they'll know the kind of summer I'm talking about.

How about you? How are you feeling these days? Cool? Hot? Saddened, maybe angered by the 5,000 barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf daily? What cooling techniques or other reductions have you tried? What worked best? Anyone else willing to monitor their use with me during the long, hot summer of 2010?