Saving Money on the Homestead part 1

Looking for ways to make our household into a self-sustaining homestead is always interesting. Having a real functioning Homestead is not something most people think about in this day and age, but surprisingly enough, more and more people are beginning to take a serious 2nd look at the idea. With the economy behaving as unstable as it has been and job certainty a thing of the past, we are looking at numerous ways to get our home to evolve into a producing homestead and cut down the amount of actual dollars paid out to maintain and run it. We’ve been working on it slowly for the past number of years already, beginning while we still lived in the city.

Power & Gas Consumption: The first thing we did was to replace all our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. Since then we’ve been looking at numerous options to move into LED lighting but haven’t been able to decide on what bulbs to move to yet due to either priceyness or lack of quality in the bulbs we looked at. To further reduce our utility bills, we installed a digital programmable thermostat on our furnace, and wrapped our hot water tanks and pipes with insulation. We also insulated outdoor power outlets, water taps, re-caulked windows and doors and checked for siding gaps. More insulation in the attic always helps, especially if in snowy climates you notice the snowpack melting off your roof in mid-winter. Then you know you are losing all your heat out the roof!

We’ve never had air conditioning in any place we’ve lived in, and we don’t plan to get it either. Instead we are looking at what ancient cultures did to cool their houses and using their techniques wherever possible. The easiest thing to do is look at where the windows in the house are placed and open one on a top floor and one on a bottom floor to encourage the convection movement of air through the house. Sometimes on the hottest days of the year, it needs a bit of a push so we strategically place a fan to get the air consistently moving through. To cut costs on air conditioning that way, install solar powered fans, and make sure your home is well insulated to begin with. Currently our house is a single level, so we open a window on the side of the prevailing winds that is shaded, and one at the opposite end of the house, then use a fan to push air around corners through hallways and rooms.

The flip side of air conditioning is keeping things snug & warm in the winter. Depending on the type of windows you have, you may want to seal them off with plastic on the inside to add an extra layer of insulating air. We are building acrylic/plexi winter covers for both inside and outside our windows to double up on the insulation effect, weatherstripped around the edges and screwed to the walls. This should mean less wood burned over the winter and more stable temperatures indoors.

Appliances: The next thing we did inside the house was to evaluate everything that uses power, actively and with shadow draws. Everything that has a shadow draw we put onto power bars and keep turned off when not in use. This includes phone/small electronics chargers. It should include your microwave as well. The only things we allow to draw power all the time are the fridge and freezer. Do keep any extra space in your freezer full either of food or bottles of frozen water. Use drying racks instead of your clothes dryer! Once we go solar with our power, we may indeed switch to propane fridge and freezer. Our house has traditionally had alot of computers. In the beginning, they were all desktop pc’s and were left on all the time. The monitors were all crt’s too and also left on but usually in standby. Now there is a single failing desktop left and we have fully migrated to laptops, tablet pc’s, and netbooks with flat panel lcd monitors only where needed. None of the systems are left on anymore when not in use, partly for saving power and partly to protect our investment during the frequent lightning storms and grid power outages we see so frequently here.

Water charges: For those of you on public water where you get charged for your usage, put some rocks into a pop bottle and seal it and drop one into each of your toilet tanks to lessen the amount of water drawn into the tank. Depending on your model, you might have to experiment with the bottle size to find the balance of exactly how much water you really need to flush. This saves on both the charges for cubic meter usage as well as disposal fees if you have those too.

For those of you on a private septic system, you have a few options. If you are on a tank, it will be far cheaper for you to conserve water very diligiently in your house as anything going down your drains is going into your tank to be pumped out by the pump truck which costs $$$. I’d seriously consider installing a separate grey water system to capture all of your used water except sewage. The smaller amount that goes into the tank, the less often you have to pay to have it pumped out. The reserved grey water can then be used on your gardens or trees, this goes for city dwellers too. Useful note: if your system includes a septic pump -ALWAYS- have a spare new pump on hand. We learned this the hard way when a pump died and the tank overflowed. It was really gross to fix that problem.

Our house has a tank and leach field combination so we only need to get the solids pumped out of our tank once a year or so. Our plan is to build a separate composting toilet and begin using that as it will greatly reduce our intermittent pumping costs as well.

Hot Water: This is a silent big cost if you have the traditional style of hot water tank. Many people don’t know that the tank is burning gas or power all the time to keep that water hot 24/7. Consider that when you use hot water it’s usually not for terribly long periods of time at once. You can adjust the temperature of your tank down and keep it just warm enough, or install a hot water on demand system like we are doing to balance cost vs. convenience. As mentioned earlier, insulate that tank! We have learned exactly how much hot water we really need since our gas has been off, and have been heating only what we need on the stove as needed, then measuring exactly what our usage has been. It’s a very eye opening experience!

Well Water: We learned some very important lessons on this one:

1. If there is no power, the well pump doesn’t work.
2. The pump house, well head, pipes, and air tank are prone to freezing. If this happens , things will at best not work and at worst things will crack & flood, and still not work.
3. If the well pump doesn’t work, the house has no water to the taps or toilets. This causes you to go get water from elsewhere which is a huge amount of work and hassle if you have as many animals as we do. We need upwards of 80 gallons on a hot day.
4. It is expensive to not have a spare well pump on hand, and even more expensive to get someone to replace your broken one for you, especially on a sunday night on a winter holiday weekend in -40C.

To solve and prevent these issues from occurring again to us, we did and are doing the following:

• Put thermostatic heater in the pumphouse set to 6C – done!
• Plugged the heater into a thermostatic plug set to turn on at 7C – done!
• buying a backup dual or tri-fuel generator for the pumphouse, to power heater and pump. – looking for one now.
• Insulating the pumphouse even more – deciding the best materials to use.

Debt Payment Snowball: The next hugest thing in the beginning we did was Budgeting. We took a very hard look at our debts and expenses since we needed to really understand where our paychecks every month were evaporating to. It was a little mortifying to see that I had spent $150 in a single week at the cafeteria at my work at that time, as well as how much was spent buying coffee out and going out for dinner. Then there was the insane consumerism we were doing, buying things we really didn’t need just because we thought we could use them sometime or they were luxury items. We started to drastically cut that sport of spending, and now it’s non-existent. This freed up a goodly amount of cash-flow that we funnelled right back into debt repayment. Once the debt repayment is complete (excepting the mortgage), I think we’ll throw a party since it will be a huge accomplishment. Then we’ll take all that $ we were using to pay the debts down and knock out the mortgage.

I challenge you to make 2 budgets to compare, one that is how you are currently living with all debts, and the other one after those debts are paid off. I bet you’ll see a big difference in the amount of $ left over at the end of the month between the two.

The next step once you have your budget in mind, see where you can cut your costs. What costs are under your control directly or even indirectly? For us, a huge cost was food. I had to rein it in immediately. I came up with solution of producing at least some of our own food. This took me down the path of growing a garden, and learning to preserve our excess food using methods that would stand up under situations of no power. (Canning and dehydrating, before freezing)

Producing your own food – Gardening: The first year we were renting so didn’t have any land of our own to garden on. We did a few containers of tomatoes in the front yard, and then rented a community garden plot near our house and grew things there. We also lucked out in that a relative had space in their backyard for a garden so let us cultivate veggie there. We invested about $1000 in equipment and supplies for both gardens and tools to work them, and the value of the produce we grew was roughly around $3000 market value that year. We ended up about 2K ahead in savings. We really noticed that ‘extra’ cash in the budget that winter, so the idea paid off.

We began looking at other parts of our grocery bill to cut down. I learned how to make all our own convenience foods which took care of a big chunk of the bill, then we started roasting our own coffee and saving even more. The last things I looked at were our dairy, eggs, and meat. I subscribed to a milkman service for awhile which was ok, and started buying things in bulk at places like Costco and wholesale supply stores. I began to buy freezer boxes of meat from butchers.

Now, we have our own goats, chickens, and rabbits and soon a milk cow to further take care of those needs. It is far cheaper to feed an animal or tend your own crops than to goto the store and see your money sucked into the big food distribution systems only to get crappy value food in return. We will add hunting & fishing to our list of methods to procure our food. The other big thing cut off the grocery list are baked goods, we now do all our own. We have very little need to goto the stores to buy food now. We only go for toilet paper, soaps and cleaning supplies, and things like soy sauce which we can’t make at home.

Well that’s enough for part 1 of our saving money series. Stay tuned for part 2!