Doing More with Less

I do not like to watch the news lately.  Everytime I turn it on, there is more news about how the economy is getting worse and worse.  It’s depressing I tell you!  It’s a good thing we don’t have to buy so many of those pricey cleaners.  Yep, that’s right.  Remember that the greenest method of cleaning your home isn’t with an expensive natural formulated cleaner that you would buy at the store.  If you really want to be green (in your home and in your wallet), make your own cleaners.  I have gone over this before but was so excited to find some new “recipes” and facts to spur my little MEEPs onward and upward.

Here’s my next challenge for MEEPs and anybody else who wants to try.  Do not purchase any of the new “green cleaning” products from the store.  Make your own using some simple ingredients.  You will not be contributing to the energy costs and wastes created throught the processing of store bought cleaners.  You will not be supporting the production and use of yet another plastic container.  You can reuse one that you already have. 

More importantly to most of you, you will save on your grocery/home budget in a HUGE way!  For example:  A typical bathroom cleaner would cost $3.19 and the homemade version costs $.15.  That’s a 95% savings.  Window cleaner costs about the save.  That would be another 95% savings.  How’s that for a start?  You can use the savings that you get from making your own cleaners to buy increasingly costly food and gas.

A “Less Streaky” Window Cleaner:  1/3 Cup White Vinegar, 1/4 Cup Rubbing Alcohol (aids in evaporation to prevent streaking), 3 1/2 Cups Water, 1 Clean Plastic Spray Bottle (reuse an empty one).  Mix all ingredients in the spray bottle.  Shake well.  Spray on glass surface.  Wipe with a crumpled already read newspaper. (when done, throw the damp newspaper out in the recycle bin to dry) 

Citrus Disinfectant:  Comparable to those commercial orange cleaners.  Peel from 1 orange, lemon, grapefruit, or lime.  3 cups White Vinegar.  1 clean quart jar with lid (such as a ball canning jar).  1 clean 32oz spray bottle (reuse an empty one).  Combine the citrus peel and vinegar in the quart jar.  Place lid on jar and store in a cupboard for 2 weeks (yes, you will need to plan in advance.  Convenience really does cost a little in some situations)  Shake occasionally.  Remove the peel from the jar and strain the vinegar.  Put the vinegar back into the jar.  To use as a spray cleaner, put 1 cup of vinegar into spray bottle and add water to fill.  To clean linoleum floors:  add 1 cup of the vinegar mixture to 2 gallons of water.

Fresh Smelling Multipurpose Cleaner:  Nice clean smell and inexpensive.  3 1/2 cups water.  1/2 cup white or apple cider vinegar.  1 teaspoon Borax (in supermarket detergent section).  1 teaspoon washing soda (in supermarket detergent section).  1 teaspoon liquid castile soap (at health food stores).  1 clean 32 oz spray bottle (reuse an empty one).  Fill spray bottle with hot water.  Then add the other ingredients.  Shake well.  Spray on countertops, appliances or fixtures, and tile or painted surfaces.  Wipe with a clean cloth (I like to use old burp cloths) or a damp sponge.

 

 

 

Essential Nonessentials

As some of you may know from this post.  I have been trying to find out some better ways to use essential oils.  I love essential oils.  Essential oils (EOs) are concentrated oils from various flowers, herbs, fruits, and plants.  Since ancient times, they have been used for their medicinal and aromatherapy properties.  There seems to be an endless number of scents and combinations you can use for various purposes.   The best part…they are known for their antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and antimicrobial properties.  A great, cheap and natural alternative to synthetic chemicals. 

However, I have been scared to venture too far into this because of cautionary tales of what to mix and what not to mix.  If you mix the wrong combination, you can end up with some not so enjoyable results (various toxicities, skin rashes, horn growth, etc).  So it has made me a little nervous to be messing around with these concentrated little gems when I have been either pregnant, nursing, or in the immediate vacinity of children and pets.  Basically, the past 5 years have been a wash with EOs at my house except for use in a couple cleanin sprays.

But now, I shall no longer be chained to my fears!  I will embark on this experiment.  Let’s hope it goes better than my experimentation with concentrated HCL in the lab years ago.  For those of you who haven’t heard this story, my sense of smell has been moderately altered from respiratory passages being burnt out from that experiment.  There are certain scents I have trouble detecting and my smell thresholds are off.  (Pair that with my mild color blindness and I am a multisensory mess!). Oooh, I was so young and naive.  Lesson learned:  If you are told to only use a chemical under a fume hood, don’t think that you can save time by just trying to hold your breath by the lab bench instead.  On a positive note, it taught me that chemicals can be very bad for your body.  Bad, bad chemicals!

Anyway, back to EOs.  First of all, remember this about EOs:  A little bit goes a very, very long way.  One drop is usually about equal to one ounce or more of the actual plant.  A small bottle may cost you a few buckeroos but it lasts a really, really long time.  Secondly, remember that as with any substance, at a certain amount EOs are toxic.  Do your research and follow any necessary precautions.  Better yet, if you are doing something really fancy with them, please contact a professional aromatherapist.

I will first address one household use for EOs…Air fresheners.  Some may argue that air fresheners are not essential.  I beg to differ.  Try living with the funky 5 over here at my house.  And no, I am not talking about our dance moves.  I am talking about our own essential aromas.  Mmmm…somedays I thank the good Lord that my sense of smell was altered before entering motherhood.

To create a room scent, you can diffuse it using an electric diffuser for aromatherapy and for air freshening purposes.  You can easily create room sprays for the same thing.  All you need is a small plastic spray bottle, water and your oils.  For example, citrus, cinnamon, or peppermint will help to eliminate food and cooking odors in the kitchen.  My personal new favorite use…put a few drops in your vacuum bag (I put it on my filter since I have a bagless) to freshen while you vac. That’s a ”2-fer-1″ deal for ya.

 

A recipe for a kitchen freshener is on this page 

Some air freshener recipes are here. and here.

Some blogs addressing EOs:  here, here, and here…..oh, sorry!  I just spent 2 hours reading random blogs and ended up here.  I love it!  I have no idea what the path was but if you know me, you know why I was so interested in this blog.  It’s like my past life and conversations as a biologist in industry came back to haunt me in a very amusing way.

 

The Water Goes Down and Your Bills Go Up!

 In speaking about saving money with a friend (Cleaver Mama, I am talking about you), we were discussing our water bills.  They keep going up, up, up!  It could be because both of our family numbers keep going up, up, up as well.  Increases in family size, means more baths/showers, more laundry, more dishes, more of everything!  We just send a lot of water and money straight down the drain.  We definitely need to “Green” up our houses on this topic!  Not only can we save a TON of change, we can create little changes that mean a whole lot to the World’s water supply.  It doesn’t get better than this!

“If many little people in many little places do many little deeds, they can change the face of the Earth”  ~African Proverb

Greening the blue in the kitchen:

Keep a jug of water in the refrigerator to keep it cold.  That way you don’t have to run the tap to get cold water. 

Try not to use/waste ice.  Making it takes water (duh!) and often we just let them melt at the bottom of an empty glass and throw it out.  Some countries don’t even serve ice in restaurant drinks because of fresh water worries. 

Only run full loads of dishes in the dishwasher.  This will save water and energy.  Each washing cycle uses about 25 gallons of water.  A river will literally be running through your kitchen if you run it all the time for small loads.  My hubby prides himself on his dishwasher loading abilities.  It’s like he’s a dishwasher engineer.  He will go to great lengths to squeeze one more cup in there.  So I think our house is pretty good on this one!

Also, don’t “wash” your dishes in the sink before putting them in the dishwasher.  I thought that’s what we got these machines for…to save washing time, so don’t prerinse!

If you do wash dishes in the sink, don’t let the faucet run.  Fill the sink with soapy water and fill the other side of the sink (or a wash tub) with water to rinse.  OOH!  This will save me the big bucks for sure.  I tend to run my rinse water from the tap.

Also, soak caked on, stuck on food by placing some water in the pan.  Let it sit.  Then scrub.  Don’t turn on the hot water and let it keep running on the pan while you try to chip away the crusty food.  That’s a lot of water going down the drain!

Use biodegradable dish soap when you wash your dishes in the sink.  When you are finished, you can pour the “gray water” on your indoor or outdoor plants to save watering costs. 

Use boiled water that has cooled from boiling eggs to water plants.  Great nutrients for plants.

Use the boiled water from cooking veggies to make a soup instead of dumping it in the drain.

Don’t use your garbage disposal!!!  It takes a lot of water to grind up left over food stuff. (Not to mention the electricity.)  Composting is the best way to go.  On multiple “Green” levels.

Greening the Blue in the Bathroom:

Stop the flushing!  If it’s yellow, let it mellow.  If it’s brown, flush it down.  Don’t be too grossed out!  If you flush your toilet only one less time per day, you could save 4.5 gallons of water each time.  That is as much water as the average person in Africa uses all day (including cooking, bathing, and drinking).  (The Green Book, 2007)

If you love to consistently flush (as I do) put a plastic bottle full of water in the toilet tank to decrease the amount of water used.  We have one toilet that was not affected by this but the other has a little bit of a hard time getting the “big jobs” flushed.  We just had to become a little more selective when considering which throne we wanted to sit upon at certain times.

If you are replacing a toilet, get a dual flush toilet.  A light little flush for liquids, and forceful flush for non liquid waste.

Never flush trash down your toilet.  Put those boogery kleenex in the trash.  Don’t feel tempted to flush it.  That’s 4.5 gallons right there!

Check to see if your toilet is leaking and wasting your hard earned cash.  Put a few drops of food coloring into your toilet tank.  If it seeps into your bowl over time (don’t flush for a while), you have a leak.  Fix it!  You could save 250 gallons of water a month by this little action.

Don’t let the water from the faucet run while you are shaving or brushing your teeth.  For rinsing your shaver, put some warm water in the stoppered sink.  Then you won’t have to keep turning it on.  If you turn off the faucet while brushing your teeth, you will save 10 quarts of water each time you brush.

Replace your shower head/faucets with low flow aerating ones, they reduce water flow by up to 50%.  We have done this in our showers and have noticed very little pressure difference.  Don’t be fooled by those that say you will have bad hair because of doing this little saver.

What’s better…taking a shower or taking a bath?  A shower!!  The average person uses 20 gallons of water for a bath and only 10 gallons for a shower.  Save those baths for special occasions.  Yipes!  I am bad at this.  I LOVE taking a bath to relax at night.  Is the fact that it’s a Wednesday a special enough occasion to take a bath??

Cut down on the shower time!  One minute of showering or running the bath water usually uses about 3-5 gallons of water.  Make it a race with the clock.  Shower for less than five minutes.  Better yet, shower with a partner for less than five minutes.  Even better, shower with a partner for less than five minutes and only turn on the water when you need to rinse.  Turn off the shower as you soap up.  Can we say Brrr….

 One more thing….leaks can really waste water over time.  To find out if you have any hidden leaks in your home, don’t use the water for 2 hours.  Record the start and finish amounts on your water meter.  If the numbers have changed over the 2 hours, you have a leak.  Find it and save.

Whew!  What a list!  Don’t think you can’t make a difference by doing these little things in your own home.  If you do all these things think how much water you will NOT be consuming and how much money you will be saving!  And we haven’t even talked about how you use water outside your home yet!

For another quick to do list go HERE or HERE.

Sources:  The Green Book, 2007.  1,001 Ways to Save the Earth, 2007.

 

Waa…Waa… Water!

Aah, delicious water!  It’s cool.  It’s refreshing.  It’s easy to serve.  With a lemon or ice, it always tastes nice. (You guessed it, we are working on rhyming over here at our house.)  As much as I love sodas, wine or juice, there is nothing that I crave more when I am really thirsty.  I just go to the sink and turn on the tap.  It is seldom that I think of how lucky I am to have the priviledge to just immediately quench this thirst for water. 

I tend to forget that more than 1 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean and safe drinking water.  How would it affect your life?  You couldn’t just turn on that tap.  You couldn’t get one of those bottles of water that you pay the big bucks for.  You have NO access to safe drinking water.  What would you do?  How would you feel?  What if where you lived lacked basic sanitation needs?  Would you worry constantly for your children’s health and safety?

 Well, there are many who live without.  More people than you might think have to worry everyday about obtaining water and basic sanitation.

How many people know that, in 2002:

■ 1.1 billion people lacked access to improved water sources (tap water in the house or yard from public distribution systems, protected wells and springs, public stand posts, rain water collection), which represented 17% of the global population.

■ 2.6 billion (42% of the world population) lacked access to basic sanitation.

■ Of the 1.1 billion without access to improved water sources, nearly two thirds live in Asia.

■ 1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases (including cholera); 90% are children under 5, mostly in developing countries.

■ 80% of the population without access to drinking-water were rural dwellers, but future population growth will be mainly urban. 

How many of us know that we are now in a “Water for Life Decade” or that March 22, 2008 is “World Water Day”?  Yes, that’s right.  The United Nations has adopted March 22 as World Water day and the decade of 2005-2015 as Water for Life Decade.   Now is your chance to raise awareness for an issue that reaches into every corner of the world. 

We are ever aware of water issues in my home.  For one, our water bill keeps going up, up, up since we keep adding to our family numbers.  Secondly, we have always lived within a short drive or walk to Lake Michigan, one of the most amazing bodies of freshwater ever.  Third, I am a biologist who has a special little spot in my heart for plants and ecology (especially wetland ecology).  Fourth, Tomas majored in Hydrogeology (ground water stuff) and sees groundwater issues everyday from his environmental consulting work.  He loves to go into schools and teach kids about pollution and the water supply.  We just love water and HATE to see it wasted or misused.  Over the next couple days, I am going to help to explain how our water supply needs attention and also how you can go green, green, green when dealing with the blue stuff.

Surfs up dude!  Let’s hang ten together on this one!

Find out more about World Water Day here:  http://www.worldwaterday.org/