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Saturday, February 16, 2008

Intro to us

I am Sue mom of 5 boys. My boys are Alex 14 Tim 12 Zach 8 Nik 3 and Quentin 9 months. my dear husband is Dave.

This is my feable attempt to document our plans to save energy and money.

It all started because ..well we are broke. Also my 8 year old son is a bit of a curious science loving child. He saw an ad on TV one of those doom and gloom shows on discovery channel about how if we dont change our ways the world will end and really SOON.
This scared him

that is an understatment this sent him into a fit of tears and screaming histerics that made me question his sanity.

Once I got him calmed down I explained a few things to him.

First off there are many theories out there about what COULD happen this is not saying that all theories are right or wrong but there are a LOT out there.

one thing all of the theories agree on though is that if everyone made some small changes in thier lives that they could have an impact on the world.

His big brown eyes lit up and he grinned one of those heart melting smiles of his.

and that is how this began we started talking about the things we already do around the house to help out. recycling, is the big one , paying attention to the time of use savings on our electric bill, and Turning off the lights when not in the room.

He blushed you see turning off lights when not in a room is NOT something my kids are very good at it.

So I deputized him

he is now Light Cop it is his job to make sure we use as few lights as nessisary

We have other plans as well

First we will work on our electric usage. WE will document 2 typical days a weekend day when everyone is home and a weekday when the 3 oldest go off to school and Dave goes to work.

Then we will document our usuage again after putting into effect some changes

Putting up as many compact florescent light bulbs as we can stand.
being more diligent about turning off things we are not using
and unplugging all non essencial appliances

Then we will take the readings again to see how much of an impact our efforts had.

WE have some bigger plans for summer including

Building a solar hot water out of junk we find around our goal is to not spend very much money and make it out of salvaged parts and make it look nice.

Planting our own vegetable garden. we have done this before but not in the scale that we are planning this time.

We are also going to start a small worm farm

Oh and one of my pie in the sky ideas is to build a temporary greenhouse out of used Milk Jugs mostly this will be used to extend our rather short growing season and help harden off the seedlings we start inside the house.

and finally we are planning on looking into Wind power

3 comments:

Laura said...

where did you find patterns for the diapers? We are also trying to go as green as possible and I will be documenting as much as I can on my blog, but am really, really interested in what others have to say!

Ryan said...

another thought for the old working lightbulbs. they make heat... use them in your greenhouse to extend your season?

It is very cool to see you guys doing this.

Sue said...

Thank you Ryan I do use lightbulbs for heat for my chickens in the winter we also use red heat lamps but mostly the white bulbs bcause they serve two purposes heat as well as giving them more light so they lay more eggs if chickens do not have enough light they stop laying