Utilities

We are learning to be very conservative here. It is very unlike us. Sarah kept at least one light on in the basement ALL of the time in Saint Louis. St. Louis City charges a flat rate for water usage based on the number of water fixtures. That meant that the kids took lots of baths and played in water a lot. Not here. In St. Louis, we had a nice, gas, over-sized water heater. Not so here. It is about half the size of a typical water heater. Since electricity is insanely expensive here, we have a plan that splits costs. We have really expensive electricity during the day and from 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM it is cheap. That means that the water heater heats during that time. If you run out of hot water during the day so are screwed. Or you pay premium rates to heat that dude up. It is enough that I actually think about what I am doing when I turn water on in the bathroom to make sure that I'm not drawing water out of the water heater that isn't actually making it to the faucet. I take showers with as little water as possible. We plan our showers and the kids' baths with our house cleaning schedule as well. It is a lot of planning.

The same is true with our heat. We have these radiator type things. But they are electric. They are filled with ceramic bricks and either brine or oil. They are heated based on the same schedule as the water heater. How hot they heat is based on a setting for the size of the room and the actual thermostat setting. The tricky part here is planning how cold it is going to get during the day. The radiator is basically just a heat battery. There is a fan under them that circulates the warm air when the room temperature drops. If you turn up the thermostat during the day (or you simply have it set too high), you are likely to use it up so that they are cold. So there is a lot of planning there. Fortunately, we also have a wood stove that is lined with thick bricks, so if you work it out ok, you can get a fire going in the morning and then just keep it running low so that the bricks stay warm all day to supplement the heaters. If you really get it going, you can set up a fan in the foyer to feed that extra heat up to the bedrooms and Sarah's stained glass workshop.

So we are really learning how to manage ourselves so that we don't use utilities. We have to separate our trash into recyclables, food waste and normal trash. Since we have little trash cans, we really work on that. The nice thing about having a wood stove is being able to thin our the paper waste by using it as kindling. That is good, because we generate a lot of paper/cardboard waste. Definitely not as much as we used to.

This is a good experience for us. It is nice to feel like we are actually impacting the environment less as the family grows.