Some "greener" updates 03/26 - 04/01

Well, this has been an exciting week...first off, we ordered a new refrigerator. The house came with what I affectionately call the "ghetto fridge." It is a 20 years old, heavy, cream colored energy sucking monster. The deli drawer was stuck in the closed position and it smelled. So we did a lot of research on what features we liked, and what refrigerators were the most energy efficient, and perhaps most important - what would fit in the slot of the ghetto fridge. We decided on a GE 19.5 cu. ft. "clean steel" with freezer drawer with ice maker. Its pretty hot - or cool. Whatever. I love it! And I can fit a large pizza box into it without having to much (if any) rearranging - and that, quite frankly, is my metric of a good fridge - does it fit a large pizza box? And it is one of the most energy efficient models available. In fact, it used the least amount of energy of any unit we saw, only costing about $43/yr to run!

"Ghetto Fridge" at home in the garage...


Nate and Max with hot new fridge!

Another exciting thing we accomplished this week is the installation of rain barrels. Well, we installed one and are working on the other. We were hurrying to get at least one finished so we could test it in the rain today. I was able to get two 50 gallon plastic drums from my work - which was great because they were free. We were able to hook up some black flexible tubing to the gutter with a standard connector and then we attached a 4" to 2" PVC connector to the end of the flexible tubing. Unfortunately, the tubing wasn't as flexible as we wanted, so we will have to do some rearranging to get the tubing to hang straight down from the gutter and into the 2" hole of the barrel - but like I said, this was the dry (or should I say wet) run, just to see if it worked since we had rain today. We had the tubing running to the barrel by ~ 9:30 am this morning - I went out to check the barrel at 6:00 pm and we had 40 gallons of water! And we only had a very light off and on rain today! We will very easily be able to fill two 50 gallon barrels from the garage run off! In addition to being green and saving us money, its convenient too - we will be able to set up a soaker hose into the vegetable garden which is behind the garage - where there normally wouldn't be easy access to water (the hose outlet is up by the house, we need a LONG hose). Check out our awesome rain-water collection system!

Rain-water collection system...


Collecting Rain!