We all have power meters attached to the buildings in which we live, and the little needle keeps spinning around and around, ad nauseum, at least until solar panels become affordable. I recently read a story of a family who managed to install solar panels, and while that would normally have cost over $20,000, with various national and state rebate programs, they only spent $8,000.
Wow. Imagine having $8,000 to spend.
We’re customers of Green Mountain Energy here in Dallas, so our bill payments go toward producing more renewable energy (see the big bathtub analogy for more on how this works). But the hardware is operated by a company called Oncor, which has decided it’s time to upgrade our power meters to be smarter. Oncor worked through some calculations (Surcharge Analysis PDF) and figured that the best way to install them would be to charge the average customer $2.12. Every month. For eleven years.
That’s $291.72 for a new power meter.
Within the last month, a hundred grants were given out to companies making improvements to power meters. The company in our area was not one of them. So residents of DFW are likely stuck with the fee.
On their FAQ about the Advanced Meters, Oncor made this suggestion for dealing with the extra $2.12 per month:
How can you offset this fee? Just replace a 100W light bulb with an Energy Star CFL light bulb and you could save more than $2.30 a month.
That’s cute, and likely true, but I don’t believe we’re still using any of the old style bulbs at our house.
This entire scenario of being charged over an eleven-year period for something that won’t be available to everyone until 2012 would be supremely depressing, were it not for the fact that I’m a big data nerd. I love efficiency, and you can’t improve efficiency unless you know exactly what is being wasted. A smart meter will do that for me.
But what’s depressing again is that I could have this right now, for only $200. The Energy Detective (TED) Series 5000 is a device that attaches to the power control panel on the inside of your house, rather than the outside. Other than that, it does all the same stuff: analyze your power usage in real-time, and over regular intervals, then adjust your behavior accordingly.
I’d be excited to get a TED set up in my house, then walk around unplugging one thing at a time, finding the major offenders, maybe put some devices on a schedule; or find out exactly how much we’d save by keeping the house, say, 2 degrees warmer. Those are just a couple of examples. For all I know, more energy is being wasted when two particular devices are running together for one hour than by running both separately for one hour each. Like I said, I’m a big data nerd.
I’d be very interested to hear your story of using a smart meter. Has anybody had the pleasure, yet?
The staff of cockeyed.com (it might just be this one guy named Rob, and sometimes his friends), has a series called “How Much is Inside?” which attempts to figure out how much mundane items should cost. Recently, they tackled the sandwich.
He weighed and measured and inspected every ingredient in your average turkey & cheese, grilled cheese, and peanut butter & jelly. And after some very funny and intelligent writing, he found this:
- Processed turkey sandwich: 93¢
- Grilled cheese sandwich: 48½¢
- Peanut butter and jelly: 64¢
But that’s not all. Rob went all out and created the Sandwich Price Calculator, where you can assemble your own sandwich and see how much it should cost.
Read How Much is Inside a Sandwich?
But seriously
You should also check out Rob’s experiment to see if he could apply for a credit card using a torn-up application.
This is a cliché, but I need my coffee in the mornings. I prefer it iced, except in the very brief winters we have here in Texas, and for a long time, I was a loyal customer of the Starbucks Iced Coffee in a Can.
I’d have one every morning at least four times a week, at a cost of about $2.00 each. They cost more in the convenience stores, but at my former employer they’d have them stocked in the cafeteria downstairs. It was the perfect amount of caffeine, deliciously flavored, to help me self-medicate my A.D.D. And in terms of the Expensive Coffee-Related Drink factor, two dollars is on the low end of the scale.
And then Starbucks stopped selling them. Like Pudding Pops and the Bar None candy bar, my favorite treat was yanked out of my grasp with no alternative presented. Since then, I’ve gone back and forth to iced tea, water, some truly awful “energy+coffee” replacement that Starbucks is now doing, the bottled Frapuccino, and my more normal “iced venti vanilla latté, please.”
None of them have really satisfied in the same way. I just want roughly 8-10 oz. of iced coffee, and I want it to be easy. Well, I found a way (thanks to my wife) to make it easy, and cheap, through this cold-brewed iced coffee recipe at the New York Times.
The recipe makes a measly two drinks, so I just tripled the recipe to make a full week’s worth (give or take a day for the vanilla latté, which is something I like to do for myself on Fridays, anyway). I tried it out for the first time this morning, and it was an instant success. All I had to do was put some ice in a glass, pour in the coffee and go.
There are about three cups’ (the measuring kind) of ground coffee in a one pound bag, which is enough to make the modified recipe three times. That’s eighteen mornings’ worth of iced coffee for $10, presuming you’re buying the expensive ground coffee at Starbucks. Which I will probably continue to do. Nobody’s perfect.
I am a typical American consumer. I buy books, music, and movies for my own entertainment, and the objects spend more time on my shelves than they do in their respective playback devices. I make an exception for music as everything I buy is almost immediately transcoded digitally and transfered to a portable media device. The entertainment industry is thankful for people like me. I don’t even maximize my Netflix subscription, which I seem to have kept despite considering quitting the program over two years ago.
The library should be a money-saving option for people who like reading, watching movies, and otherwise consuming media. I found a calculator that will put into numbers how much money you could save by utilizing a library’s services rather than opting to buy everything you consume. The calculator is designed for library patrons who already use the free services and would like to see how much they are currently saving, but a slight modification in the terminology would focus the calculator on how much you could save by getting to know your friendly neighborhood librarian.
A quick run of the calculation shows that I could save $100 per month in books, movies, and CDs alone. How much could you save by visiting the library rather than the store?
Personal Library Savings Calculator, Winter Haven (Florida) Public Library
According to Alan Greenspan, this is of the first types of spending that consumers give up when a recession is felt personally. When men come to the point at which they need to save more money than usual and decide to cut bank their spending, underwear is at the top of the list of possible reductions. Because underwear is invisible to the public, man apparently have no shame in letting the fabric deteriorate more than they would when a flush bank account would allow them to replace tattered undergarments when necessary.
Furthermore, an increase in underwear purchases could signal the beginning of a recovery. If this is true, it’s bad news for the economy in the next few years. Underwear industry experts are predicting no growth in sales until 2013.
I have not noticed any decline in my own undergarment purchases. My overall spending on clothing has remained strong as I have been replacing some of the clothing I’ve owned for ten years or more, some of which no longer fits anyway. My underwear doesn’t necessarily last as long before I replace the old clothing with something new.
Purchases of women’s underwear does not correlate to the recession. Any time is a good time for buying lingerie.
Have you reduced your clothing purchases, particularly underwear, to save money this past year?
If you can’t answer this question because you don’t know how much you spend on clothing, consider tracking your expenses for a period of time. You might find you have some opportunities to save money across your entire budget.
How your undies track the recession, Michael Brush, MSN Money, May 27, 2009
Photo credit: williamnyk
There’s a toll-free number on the back of my driver’s license labeled “Roadside Assistance”. I’d never noticed it before today, when a co-worker was telling me how she used the number to get her tire changed on the dangerously-busy Tollway.
“For free?” I asked. “Of course,” she said.
So I started to wonder if I’d been paying AAA for services that I could be getting for free. I did some Googling and found this:
The toll-free line has been operated by DPS since 1989 for motorists to use when reporting non-life-threatening situations … If a tow truck is ultimately dispatched, the motorist is responsible for any costs incurred. Some cities and agencies do have courtesy patrols and roadside trucks to provide non-towing services and they may be dispatched by the local agencies when appropriate.
Examples of when a motorist should call the Roadside Assistance Hotline include: stranded with car problems, hazardous road conditions, debris in the roadway, suspicious activity at a rest area, and obviously intoxicated or dangerous drivers.
So, to summarize: we want you to call us if you’re having trouble or see something dangerous. We might send help, and it might be free.
My state isn’t the only one with a free (?) State-run roadside assistance program. If part of the recession means not renewing whatever service you use for emergency roadside assistance, check online to see what’s available for free.
During previous economic downturns, publications have often done stories about saving money by borrowing books, music and movies from the library. This is true not only in recessions, but every time you want to save some money. Libraries aren’t just for research; they have plenty of entertaining material as well.
But of course, they suffered from a problem that many bookstores didn’t: if a book was popular, you’d have a hard time finding a copy. It’s the 21st century now, most things have been digitized, so a perfect copy of anything shouldn’t be hard to find.
Well, with actual books printed on paper, you might still have to wait to get a copy of a popular title, but we recently found that our local library system is partnered with a service that enables it to offer digital downloads to anybody with a library card.
What’s more, it looks like this service, called “Overdrive”, has partnered with many many libraries throughout the world. Search their site to see if your library is offering this sort of thing. And if necessary, pick up a library card. They’re not expensive, I promise.
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