Small Counterpuncher Sloop vs. Lumbering Brawler Frigate? Take the Sloop!

Maritime history holds numerous lessons for families navigating the treacherous waters of a modern economy.  The story of warfare at sea is the story of a conflict between those who attempt to package the most power on a single platform and those who take a more precise approach, attempting to deliver a discrete amount of power on a smaller, more maneuverable platform.

Basically, frigates vs. sloops.

There are other examples, of course, besides these storied sailing vessels, but the frigate and the sloop are the best exemplars.  And the story we are slowly plodding towards is the story of the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.

The Spanish, of course, had the ships-of-the-line, the galleons, huge ships with hundreds of large guns.  The English had a lot of little ships – sloops – with far fewer and far lighter weapons, but with a tremendous advantage in being able to tack into the wind and to change direction far more quickly.

Thanks to tricky weather, the sloops had almost insurmountable advantages in that battle, in spite of the conventional wisdom which held that the Armada was nigh invincible.  Conventional Wisdom, much like Common Sense, is wrong far more often than it is right.  Like Horatio Hornblower, the intrepid fictional adventurer of another age of British sea power, proves time and again, a simple calculation of facts and angles is far more reliable than is the related “wisdom” of what “everyone knows”.

So it is at Myrtle’s place.  We strive to be more of a sloop and less of a frigate.  This will prove more important as time goes by; economic uncertainty coupled with a changing climate mean our family will have to adapt in ways that quite simply cannot be predicted.  So, we need to lighten the gun decks and increase our sail-to-beam cross-functionality.

One of the first ways in which we are attempting to accomplish this goal is to completely re-evaluate how we consume energy.  According to the Energy Star website the average home spends about $2,200 on energy bills every year.  This makes energy consumption a low-hanging fruit in terms of where we can save money and streamline our family operation.  How can we cut this number and make our family more adaptable?

First and foremost, we had to evaluate what, exactly, goes into our consumption habits:

• Air Conditioning and Heating
• Water Heating
• Clothes Washing and Drying
• Food Storage
• Food Preparation
• Dishwashing
• Computer
• Entertainment (television, radio)
• Lighting

Some of these areas are more readily downsized than others, but each provides ample opportunities for sloopification.

Air Conditioning and Heating:  Really, given that this is Texas, heating is not a concern.  We don’t even turn on the central heat each winter; we do sometimes put a space heater on in the chicken coop.  We have not yet thought of a more energy efficient way to heat the birds when temperatures go sub-freezing, but since that only happens a few times each winter, this is not a high priority item.

A/C, on the other hand, is a major concern.  When a “cool” week is one in which we don’t get over 95° more than twice, we obviously need to keep the air conditioner running more often than not.  How to keep it from bankrupting us in less than a month is, therefore, a major concern.

There are several steps we have taken to reduce cooling expenses.  First and foremost, of course, we bought a smaller house (900 square feet) on the theory that the less house there is to cool, the less expensive it will be.  Next, we have a relatively new unit – less than five years old.

Then there are the not-so-easy steps.  We blew insulation into our attic a few weeks ago; for the money, this is one of the easiest investments most people can make.  Very few homes have so much insulation already that they would not benefit from more.  While we went with the blow-in cellulose, there are numerous innovations in the insulation market which it would be well worth your time to investigate.

Our roof, thankfully, is galvanized aluminum, which has reflective properties far superior to those of practically any tile materials available today.  However, as an older roof, it had begun to wear and rust; the solution to extending the lifetime of the aluminum, it turns out, also aids our quest for lower utility bills – there are a variety of products on the market which make claims to “heat reflective” properties, and anecdotally we can confirm that some of these claims actually have merit. 

Perhaps the most important “heat reflective” property, of course, is color.  White paint does not absorb heat, it reflects it.  Once again, consult your elementary school science text book.  Well, maybe not if you live in Texas… In any event, where we had not yet painted, we have the heat blisters to prove what happens when skin comes in contact with galvanized aluminum exposed to the sun.  Once the paint was applied, we were able to sit comfortably on the white metal roof while painting other sections.  The difference between the untreated and the treated metal is somewhere on the order of 50° cooler temperatures, which, obviously, makes cooling the house much, much easier.

Add tinted windows, additional weatherstripping for our doorways (if you live in the Brazos Valley, your foundation has shifted, is shifting, or will shift soon), and paint on the interior and exterior walls with a ceramic micro-tile additive, and we’ve done everything we can to minimize the expense of surviving the interminable Texas summer.

Water Heating/Clothes Washing and Drying:  Water heating expense is inextricably entertwined with clothes cleaning.  Given how hot it is in Texas, hot baths are not really a huge expense for us – there are times, of course, when this luxury is necessary, but warm is plenty hot enough, usually.

Clothes, on the other hand, don’t really require hot water at all.  Again from the Energy Star web site, “Hot water heating accounts for about 90 percent of the energy your machine uses to wash clothes - only 10 percent goes to electricity used by the washer motor.”  Given that most of the cleaning done in a washing machine is done via solvent qualities of soap and friction from clothes rubbing against each other, coupled with scrubbing agents like baking soda, most wash can be done in entirely cold water.  “Switching to cold water can save the average household more than $40 annually (with an electric water heater) and more than $30 annually (with a gas water heater).”  Sounds like free money to us.  If it weren’t so blasted humid here most of the time, we would also take advantage of Passive Solar Textile Dehydration technology more often, too.  (That’d be a “clothesline” for you pre-21st century thinkers.)

Food Storage:  Of the numerous advantages of eating fresh produce, one of the easiest to overlook is the energy saving possibilities.  The supersized refrigerator is an essentially American phenomenon.  It is, sadly, starting to become more popular throughout the world, but we are hoping that this trend desists, particularly as fresh foods make a comeback.

When you visit European households, one of the first differences you notice between the American way of doing things and the European style of living is that mealtime is much more deliberate.  There are no huge refrigerators full of weeks and weeks worth of food.  You make a trip to the market – and markets are smaller and closer for this very reason – and pick up fresh produce for the specific meal you are about to prepare and then eat.

There are several ramifications to this way of doing things.  For one thing, portion sizes are much more reasonable.  You don’t buy three times as much as you need.  Also, there is much less waste.  You eat what you have prepared; it doesn’t sit in the refrigerator where you will then a week later say “I meant to eat this before now, but since it’s moldy, I’ll just throw it away.”

And the refrigerator in which it is not sitting getting moldy?  It’s a much smaller fridge.  It typically looks more like what American families buy for their kids’ college dormitory rooms.

We at Myrtle’s place have such a fridge.  A miniature fridge, by most people’s way of thinking.  It goes where our dishwasher used to be.  It consumes much less electricity on an annual basis than the typical refrigerator, and it makes us much more deliberate in our food choices – we don’t do “leftovers” very often.  If “leftover” food does not fit in our tiffins for lunch at work or school the next day, then it is fed to the chickens.  The refrigerator is for storing dairy, butter, and condiments.  “Leftover” is a four-letter word.

Food Preparation:  We probably have some room for improvement on this score.  We use an electric stove/oven, which is in and of itself less efficient than would be a gas cooking station, but we just plain prefer not to have gas lines in our home.  Maybe we’re just superstitious.  However, there are several tips on the Energy Star web site for reducing energy usage in food preparation.

1. Use the right sized pot on stove burners. A 6" pot on an 8" burner wastes over 40 percent of the burner's heat.  Using the right sized pot on stove burners can save about $36 annually for an electric range, or $18 for gas.
2. Covering pots and pans also helps you cook more efficiently and keeps your kitchen cooler.
3. Have a gas range? Keep the burners clean to ensure maximum efficiency. Blue flames mean good combustion; yellow flames mean service may be needed to ensure the gas is burning efficiently.

We don’t use a microwave, nor do we use a lot of other countertop gadgets.  In fact, something we do purely for taste has the added advantage of costing us less, too -- we use a french press for our coffee instead of using an electric drip coffee maker.  We boil water on the stove, and then pour that water over the coffee grounds in our french press, and let it steep.  This makes for the best tasting coffee in the world, at a fraction of the energy costs associated with the typical countertop coffee machines.


Dishwashing:  It’s easy to understand why dishwashers became popular, particularly when listening to our daughter complaining that washing dishes is “the single most disgusting thing anyone has ever been asked to do, anywhere”.  However, this is an expense we simply cannot abide, particularly given that dishwashers are among the worst culprits at outgassing in the home.  Formaldehyde and chlorine droplets in the air are telltale giveaways that the dishwasher has been in use.  This, more than anything else, is why one of the first things we did when we bought our house was to tear out the dishwasher and replace it with a mini-fridge. 

It’s a better use of space, and it doesn’t cost us anything in additional electricity.  The water was going to get heated anyway, as it is when we wash by hand.

Computer/Entertainment:  We are extremely fortunate to be a family of bookworms.  We spend too much time on the computer, no doubt, but at least our usage of other forms of electronic brain composting are extremely limited.  This, no doubt, helps with our energy expenditures.

Lighting:  Rheostat, rheostat, rheostat!  It’s on the to-do list, we promise!  In addition to turning off lights in rooms where you are not using them, going with fluorescent wherever possible, using solar powered lights for all exterior fixtures, etc., using dimmer switches for all overhead lighting fixtures is one of the best possible ways to trim energy use.  A rheostat allows you to only access as much energy for a given lighting job as is actually required in order to give you only the light you need, no more.  Installing a dimmer is a relatively painless task; just make sure you turn of the proper breaker before messing with the wall switch.

We are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the crème de la crème of conservationists on the home energy front yet.  We have a very, very long way to go before we are satisfied on this score.

But to return to the sailing metaphor, if you picture going from the supersized frigate mentality which has driven American lifestyles for more than half a century to a leaner, meaner, sleeker sloop mentality, there are two elements to consider.  First is forming a reduced size hull capable of handling both shallow and deep water without getting swamped; next comes fitting that base with rigging – sails capable of maximizing speed and agility to allow for lightning maneuverability regardless of weather.

Getting off the grid by going to solar energy and home small-turbine wind are examples of setting up powerful rigging.  Getting rid of energy consumption hogs like an oversized refrigerator or a dishwasher, those are examples of downsizing the hull.  We’re halfway there.  Myrtle’s place is doing everything we can to get ship-shape; we hope you join us in this quest.

Happy sailing!