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Energy Efficient Living

Operating as a person using less water, less fuel, less food, less electricity, buying fewer things & keeping your things longer. Not being wasteful or ignorant in any way. Frugality Intelligent! Spend less money & save even more on your bills! Save time too! 

Meg & I want to share some of our Home Operating concepts! Less can be more savings. Lower operating costs can save you tens of thousands of dollars & hundred of hours of time. 

Eat left overs, save what you didn't eat at dinner & have some for lunch the next day. Store the saved food in a plastic container or glass container in the fridge. Don't be a food snob. If it was ok for dinner the previous day you can eat a little bit with your lunch the next day. 

Skip breakfast, have a low carb coffee you make at home. 

Cappuccino DIY only $1.30 *even with organic half&half* :) 

I actually tell people that ask me "drinking 2 glasses of water upon waking the best thing for your body since the body becomes dehydrated while sleeping for 5-9 hours". 

I like to brew 12-22 grams of finely ground dark roasted coffee beans in the 51mm wood & stainless steel aftermarket basket for the GIVI espresso machine. I activate the steam button to overheat the water till the analog gauge needle points horizontal to the right, then turn off the lower steam button & turn on the upper brew button. This forces higher pressure hotter water through the basket & fine ground espresso producing a deeper flavor profile that melds nicely with the 2 fl oz of half & half that I add :) I also shortly thereafter drink 1 liter of water once I have warmed up a bit. 

We turn off the thermostat at night time so it's cooler in the morning now. I usually wake up feeling fairly chilly & current have a cold virus that's making that worse, but generally wake naturally between 3 and 5 am without an alarm & that works great with my early AM lark shift as a School Bus driver :) I recently calculated that my espresso with half & half made this way costs about $1.30 USD 2023 / way cheaper than driving to a Starbucks store & paying over $5 for the same thing. Multiply $3 savings daily for 365 days & that's more than $1000 per year saved making cappuccino (my breakfast) at home DIY in the kitchen in the very early AM as part of my wake up before work routine! 

We thought a lot about how to reduce our monthly bills & how to streamline & downsize to make moving easier & are in middle of doing this again since our lease ends at the end of July and we are not renewing.

Cook from scratch at home. You get to control the ingredients which influences your health. I make a small boule's of bread daily (just enough for Meg & I for 1 day) using 3/4 cup flour, 2.5 g salt, 54 g water, 3 g yeast, 5 g honey, 5 molasses, 15 g sugar, 15 g olive oil, sometimes 30 g nuts & 20 g seeds, & there are lots of options here & its a fun hobby. You can even make a good gluten free bread using instructions from a YouTube video from DC Eric Berg & his wife https://youtu.be/zsl5ENgZnr0 / 

Inspired by a YouTube Business Insider video about Juniors Cheesecake Company in NY I whipped up a DIY pair of cheesecake cups without a crust using 7 oz of an 8oz package of cream cheese we had in the fridge, 1/4 cup of sugar, 1 tsp real vanilla extract, 1 large egg, 2 tbsp half & half,  beaten in a glass bowl with an corded electric hand mixer to a smooth battery then baked in a water bath at 350 F for 20 minutes then allowed to stand for cooling to setup since they are a little jiggly at first. 

Start your laundry machine & then go do something else while it's working for you! Same with your dishwasher. 

Reduce E-Waste by using your electronics until they are dead.

Grow edible plants in pots indoors instead of only regular house plants. 

Paperless Billing, Pay on your phone or computer via web portals or apps. 

No News Paper, Read Online on Your Phone or Tablet or Computer 

Reuse food containers like plastic yogurt container in your sink to soak utensils so you use less hot water for cleaning them. 

No New CD, DVD or Blu-ray Discs, Stream Content, YouTube Premium for example. I got a converter Component to HDMI to use our 20 year old DVD player with our newer 4K TV, since we already have a library of DVD discs & other Blu-ray Discs. We mostly use the smart TV by itself with the internal computer YouTube app. 

Just Internet, No Cable and No Home Phone, Use Smartphones on a Cheap MVNO like Mint Mobile. 

I publish this blog posting on one of our laptops, usually the M2 MacBook Pro lately, as it's the most energy efficient & fastest machine! It's also the video editing rig for my YouTube channel. I know the internet has a huge energy footprint, but less than sending paper copies of all the content published to billions of people. Besides internet creates a lot of jobs worldwide that create shared wealth & prosperity & new kinds of jobs that never existed historically like being a Blogger or YouTuber! 

Use a Kindle vs Printed Books for Reading

Use a ceramic coffee mug over & over thousands of times, not foam or paper cups

Use ceramic plates not paper plates, no plastic single use plates

Replacing wasteful heat loss incandescent light bulbs with dimmable color option LED's

Bundle errands so one car trip can achieve many goals in sequence. 

Go to bed earlier & wake up earlier

Drink black coffee without sugar, you can add milk alternatives, I like half & half, Meg likes soy milk 

Stop drinking alcohol, its ok sparingly here & there, but stop drinking daily

Close your window shades at night to trap heat inside better 

Eat more veggies & less meat

More fiber & less sugar

Save grey water in a jug at home to water house plants

Lower your thermostat setting to 68 F in winter

Increase your thermostat setting in the summer to reduce AC use

Buy things you need when they are On Sale, never pay full price for anything

Fix or repair or customized or upgrade your stuff instead buying new things

Reused paper & plastic grocery bags for DIY projects or to go shopping again or for recycling paper, plastic, metal, & plastic at home; for sorting your recycling. 

Compost food scraps to make soil for your pots & planting beds, instead of buying plastics bags of compost. Think veggie scraps, cuttings of carrots, peppers, tomatoes, banana peals, limited citrus, no meat, just bad fruits, rotting veggies. If you put too much citrus it kills the bugs that make the compost form the food waste, namely worms. Turn the compost regularly & ket it moist & make sure the stuff is chopped up enough to break down easily. 

Stop throwing away furniture & donate it or give it a face lift & repaint it to your favorite color so you enjoy keeping it longer, so you're not spending money on something new. 

Stop trying trying to imitate other wasteful people & focus on being happy with what you already have

Realize that all forms of media are designed to make your feel like you need more, when you are only tying to fill a hole that God & faith in God can fill, that your worth and value in God will make it so that you want less & so that you will never need anti-depressant drugs, that you will actually learn to not chase after things of this world. There is an organizational expert named Maria Kondo who teaches people to reduce clutter at home.

Take better care of the things you have & they will last longer. Don't spill on your clothes for example and you will not have to waste chemicals & time cleaning them extra. Focus on not spilling your coffee or dropping your smartphone. Be more thoughtful & conscientious & slow down & focus on being more precise & intelligent & operating smarter & less wastefully. You will not be wasting your time getting your phone repaired. Don't beat yourself up because of a small blip or mistake, everyone spills the milk sometimes, but you can spill less if your focus on spilling less. 

If your home has a wood stove, you can take paper waste, Amazon boxes, mail catalogs, snail mail, paper packaging materials, and since they are made from tree' fiber they can be burned like wood. 

An organized home wastes less of your time since you will not be looking for things if everything has a home & you instantly know where to find everything. 

The inside of your home & how you configure it actually reflect the state of your mind. You have not be given a spirit of fear, but of power & love & of a sound, well balanced & self controlled mind. In this way you can improve the state of your home. 

You can line dry clothes at home instead of always using the electric dryer. Meg & I even did this in our 375 Ft studio apartment, we strung up a plastic coated metal tether, electrical cable, and anchored it with J hooks to different points on the wall & built a clothes dryer hanging setup in our living room & bedroom area. In our larger apartment now we use a collapsible folding clothes dryer made of wood & paper fiber rods to fold our damp clothes over the rods for slow air drying. Air drying clothes saves electricity and makes your clothes last longer. 

Air source heat pumps are the most efficient way to heat & cool indoor spaces. 

A reusable 40 oz stainless steel powder coated water bottle that you clean & reuse thousands of time daily for years on end to stay well hydrated. 

Going further on the same battery capacity of your Nissan Leaf SV by hyper-mileing. Getting better fuel economy in your gas powered car by driving cool calm & collected with smoother safer driving techniques. 

Take shorter showers inspired by submarine operators, where you warm rinse, then turn the water off & soap up & then turn the water on & rinse off. 

I save water at home by peeing in a plastic bottle of 64 oz capacity 3-8 times & then Meg lets the yellow mellow in the toilet so we combine the urine from the bottle will the toilet yellow and save 10-25 flushes of water per day like this. 

Reduce food waste at home any way you can imagine. Doing your dishes with less hot water faster & less soap. More meal planning & practice pre-prepping & saving up starters for different dishes in small containers in the fridge so you can rapid start a health meal quickly that's made from scratch ahead of time for future time savings. 

I am talking about washing your clothes on the cold or cool setting less often & not taking a shower every day, even using a digital watch timer to race yourself to take a faster shower. 

Use 1 square of toilet paper to wipe your butt hole after pooping. Then another. You can probably get away with radically reducing your tree killing footprint by economizing the use of toilet paper with a single square finger cover insertion into your rectum where you use more of the papers squares area to clean your anus. You can wash your hands afterwards and should for being hygienic & clean anyway. 

Sit less & move more & stay active to keep the blood flowing to reduce risks for stroke, clotting, embolism & heart disease. Skip breakfast! Skip dinner, Eat a big nutritious lunch & then fast the rest of the day, especially if you're morbidly obese and want to lose weight now. 

Stop eating sugar at once. Stop buying junk food & candy. Drink water & black coffee or Tea. Stop drinking alcohol, beer & wine. Stop putting toxins into your body regularly. 

Think of operating with a God like intelligence in all ways. Stop, sit down, turn off your cell phone & put down, stop reading, stop looking at the screens, turn the music & TV and think about how you can optimize your entire life. 

How can you improve your home by getting rid of stuff you not making good use of. 

How can you clean up your mind & thought life with the Holy Word of God from the Christian bible, especially in Ephesians & Romans and the sections about Christian Moral conduct as a person. 

Save your money, you will need radically more of it in the future because of currency inflation! 

Frugality intelligent because it automatically reduces wastefulness & ignorant spending. 

Never experience buyers remorse if you never buy something you don't actually want & can't actually afford

Those people with billions who exploited other people & nature, they will stand before God to have their soul judged & they can't take the money with them into the afterlife. I want other people to stop being radically obsessively selfish. 

Dreaming of a world with less crime, less pollution, no climate change, no natural hazards & disaster. I am talking about making a Utopia on Earth by upgrading everyones mindset with Christian Ethics & Values from the Bible as Jesus Christ taught his followers who went on to write the New Testament. 

Imagining a world with more real Men who have a can-do enabled attitude about everything. I want to live in an America populated by maverick heroes, not half baked stoned druggie weirdos like Jeffry Epstein. 

There will always be some bad mixed in with the good because no one comes with a user manual. We each make mistakes and sin, but we can encourage & edify one another to pursue more excellence in all ways. 

This means lifting up our brothers & sisters by teaching them & demonstrating to them the best ways of operating as a person inspired by more Love via the Holy Spirt. 

Being a person means your going to have impacts on nature one way or the other, but you can reduce your negative impacts by being smarter about not buying things you do not actually need & probably cannot actually afford. 

There is actually no shame in living within your means, never debt spending like imbecile governments. You can operate much smarter than the governments of the world! Operate like an efficient competitive business as a person. 

Millions of Americans are on the brink of bankruptcy, just one pay check away from financial collapse. This largely because they are foolish with the money they do make from working. Many for example choose to have children they really can't afford. A children can cost its parents in America almost $1 million over 18 years. Part of the reason that's so expensive because the currency not as powerful as it was. When I was born, the parental costs of rearing an American baby in 1983 for 18 years was estimated at $830,000. When you have 2 or more children, pass me downs & other cost saving tricks like buying in bulk at Costco can radially reduce the overhead costs per child. Think of what it costs public schools to educate children. What it costs to have a nanny since mom & dad are both working full time to pay the mortgage or the rent, property & income taxes to the MAN! 

You have to pay to play in life, the rub of being a free adult that you never had to deal with as a child. I try to gently convey this to students on my bus while telling them to appreciate their parents & to understand that there parents are giving up a lot in order to make a nice life for them as students, for their children. This of course not true for all the students on my bus routes since some of them have negligent parents, some of the parents are in jail or prison and some of them ignorant or are negligent of their children & do not provide for them adequately, mentally, emotional, socially, financially or otherwise. Clearly not everyone fit to be a good parent of children. 

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