consuming to invest 11

CONSUMING TO INVEST 11

Passive Solar

I went to some lengths in describing passive solar projects in the book “Frugal Living”, so I’ll try to focus mostly on the economic aspects here ( although I’m sure the material grossly overlaps ).  You have a clothes line, right?  What else could be a better poster child of solar?  We only dried on the line in Florida, and that lacked direct sun ( trees out the wazoo there, great for negating the need for AC ), didn’t have any wind and it rained every day.  Yet still we always got the clothes dried just fine.  When it was “outlawed” by the landlord, I put up a line below the level of the fence.  When we got our own mobile home the carport ( again, not owning a car comes in handy ) was the laundry line area.  I got lazy here in the desert, seeing little reason to arrive home after dark and hang clothes up in fifteen degrees.  But now that I get home early afternoon, I’ve taken to drying by line again ( they go from wet to damp in the worse weather, I drape them up inside and continue the next day-which is why Friday is a good laundry day ).  I didn’t as much mind the $1 a week for the dryer as the extra hour of intense boredom it cost.  I only spent half what a new dryer would cost from the years drying at the Laundromat so I don’t feel too bad about my lapse.  Worse case, an indoor laundry line in the garage will suffice. 

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I noticed an electronic food dryer on sale while surfing online.  Almost $200.  Good gravy!  Really?  If you dry in the oven in the winter, your heater bill goes down and cancels out any operating costs, and in the summer just dry by solar.  You can make a slanting trough with black metal bottom covered with glass to collect the heat, which rises to an attached square tower full of trays with a vent at the top ( and an intake vent at the bottom of the trough ).  Or, if you are lazy, just make square lumber frames with a bottom screen ( check the drying books- I think you want nylon rather than metal ) and the tops covered with cheese clothe.  In both cases, bring the trays in at night and repeat the next day.  Using electric to dry is embarrassing and retarded when other cost free ways are available.

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Most people think a water heater is an expensive add on to pre-heat water for the gas fired heater.  Or, even if the solar alone does the trick, it is still a mess of pumps and pipes and wires and nicely perforates your roof for near future add on maintenance costs.  I don’t know how they do it in China, because the unit there cost under $100 and over half of all homes have them, but I’m sure it is a much simpler design than what we came up with over here.  Perhaps if Americans didn’t use hundreds of gallons of water to bathe they wouldn’t need to spend thousands of dollars for sun fired water.  Just sink an insulated box into the ground at a south facing angle, cover with glass, and have some canning jars inside the flat black painted structure.  A few hours later, a gallon of hot water-which is a wastefully large amount for a whores bath. 

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A solar food cooker is the same as above but you need reflectors on the outside to double the interior temperatures.  Just look online at any picture of a commercial solar cooker to get the idea of the shape.  Solar cookers and water heaters are to be had for the cost of scrap wood and a marked down piece of recycled glass ( you might want to consider a completely above ground unit that can be stored inside safe from theft-just add extra insulation ) with a few bucks in rigid board insulation ( cover that from solar rays-in a few years they become brittle and almost melt and shrink and I’m sure lose effectiveness ) and some shiny metal sheeting.  Even if it cost you $100 in material, that is one third the cost of commercial units and you start saving money right away in saved fuel costs.  There are plenty of other solar projects, and once you get a taste for one of two you will embrace others enthusiastically.  Because you are producing luxuries at zero operating costs.  And, yet MORE money saved on both utilities and from appliances you need not buy.

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