Going Green
By Jim Bona
(Hamilton, NY- Dec. 2014) The home heating season has been upon us a few months. Most of us have had our furnaces checked, filters cleaned, chimneys scrubbed; all the good stuff, safe stuff.
We had a wonderful run of unseasonably warm weather, which just helped to postpone the inevitable. At some point though, the house gets so cold that you have to turn the heat on. It is an expensive proposition and one that constantly reminds us of how efficient – or inefficient – our systems are. There are ways to squeeze out every little bit out of our heating bill and we have heard them repeated often.
Lower the thermostat – even one degree.
Wear a sweater.
Make sure your windows and doors are sealed well, with no drafts.
Here is one that has been staring me in the face for years without realizing it. It isn’t really about home heating, but it involves it. Put a pot of water to heat up on your wood stove rather than using the kitchen stove. Simple, yet effective…and cheap. How could I have not realized it all these years that I have been heating with wood? Since there is already a heat source going full blast, it doesn’t figure to light a burner on the stove to heat water when I can just as easily (and cheaply) put it on the one already going. It is super fast too. If your woodstove is burning a flu temperature of 500, your pot of water will be boiling in no time flat.
Some people put a teapot to boil water on their woodstove to add some humidity in the house, since it is a very dry heat.
If you wanted to get really serious, you could boil water for rinsing the dishes instead of using the hot water from the faucet, or even adding a pot into your load of laundry. That would be a substantial savings in your energy costs. A little less convenient and a bit more work.
I don’t know if I would be brave enough to try to cook food on a woodstove though, but for boiling water, it is pretty easy. Pretty hard to burn water.
Jim Bona is recently retired and a resident of the village of Hamilton for more than 30 years. He is passionate about all things green…and a few other things too. He can be reached at: madnews@m3pmedia.com.