Energy Saving Tips for Home & Church

Submitted by Susan Angell

This year we all face the challenge of higher energy costs than we could ever imagined of in our wildest dreams. Ordinary homeowners and small and big businesses are going to engage in a struggle to get through this coming winter financially intact. I just read the US Government energy saving pamphlet and I know almost all the stuff in it BUT what can I do for myself and my church based on living in the Northeast all these years and personal or in my case, historical experience. After all we live in the state of Maine and the home of LL Bean who is the expert in cold weather gear. You know, common sense stuff.

Electricity: Common sense will tell you that a whole house/church does not need to be lighted when only a few rooms are in use. The habit of turning on all the lights in Ellis Hall or our homes, is a habit we have to kick. I thought my Mom and Dad were unreasonable and very irritating people when they were constantly reminding me to shut off lights when I was no longer in a room. Nag, nag, nag. Well, in retrospect, I now know that they did not have a lot of money and my family responsibility was to join in that saving a nickel/dime/dollar here and there, period. Energy saving light bulbs are now available to purchase. Also, one of the things I learned from the government pamphlet is that leaving my computer on when I am not using it, I do it all the time, is very expensive. One is never too old to learn new things!

Heating Fuel & Thermostat settings: Heating people will tell you that thermostats should not be set any lower than 55 degrees. I totally agree. What they don’t actually say is how high it should be to warm a house/church because of a million variables. Our church has new windows and doors have been tightened up and have new sweeps and that is good. The church has zoned heat and that is good. We are converting from oil to gas and that is good. Thermostats are programmed and that is good. Church thermostats can be over ridden and that is NOT good. Turning up the temperature setting for a meeting or an event that will last only an hour and forgetting to turn it back down is NOT good. Some years back this omission would only cost a few bucks. Heating an empty sanctuary, Ellis Hall or the vestry for 24 hours in this day and age can cost hundreds. If somehow we manage to disrupt the programming and it does not revert to the proper setting in a certain number of hours, we are talking BIG bucks. Our homes are the same story. If everyone is out and going to school or working, heating an empty house is throwing away money. There are now reasonably priced thermostats that you can program and are another tool available to the common man.

My children still talk about this situation that occurred in the 80’s when they were youngsters and our family was short of cash to buy oil. We needed to conserve by lower thermostat settings. We sat in the living room at night watching TV wearing hats and bundled up in quilts. We dressed warmly at all times. I also vividly remember the 70’s when the US had short oil supplies and we could only get 100 gallons delivered every two weeks. While I remember these times as being filled with anxiety and fear, my children recall them as an adventure and just love to retell greatly exaggerated stories to one and all about their childhood deprivation.

Winter Clothing: Put away the shorts, flip flops, short sleeves and delightfully light clothing for this season. The practice of walking around barefoot in our homes needs to cease.
Nice warm socks and slippers should be the in thing. Sweats and thermal clothing has come a long way from the union suit era and can be very chic for both children and adults. Layering clothing can be a key to comfort. What about outside the house at work or church? If you are a “chilly” person, dress for the worst case in those layers. Ladies put aside the light hosiery and shoes and adopt those stylish warm tights and very attractive heavier shoes that are now available. When you are older your internal thermostat changes and you sometimes feel cold while all around you younger people are just fine. These past years I have recognized that I am a “chilly” person and instead of expecting the thermostat to be put up to suit my needs I have adopted a survival mode. I discretely wear silk long underwear in winter and thermal socks, attractive layered sweats and turtle neck tops for at home and wool pants, blouses, vests, brocade jackets, etc for church all the time. This works for me.

FOOD: As energy costs go up, food goes up. Some people will have the hard choice of managing to purchase both food and fuel. It has been a long time since these two things have occurred and many younger persons really have no idea how to feed their families and be warm too.

Many cost saving tips have never been heard of. Buy in season. What the heck does that mean? It means never buy the fruits and vegetables that are not in the US growing season at the time. Buy apples in the fall and winter, buy tomatoes or corn on the cob in summer, etc. Another: Plan meals for the whole week and make your grocery list accordingly. WOW! Not complex but big savings are involved here. No more running to the store every other day to buy meal ingredients and also picking up just a little of this and a little of that and looks so tasty on that day. I work hard and don’t have time for that is a common reply but this is a method of survival in hard times. Just try it, you can treat it as a challenge and you can boast about your savings to anyone that will listen to you and be proud. Using product savings coupons for family shopping can be worthwhile too. Getting the family involved in spotting those coupons for stuff they like that come with the Sunday paper, in daily newspapers and magazines, can be fun. Some of the young people that do this have told me they can save as much as $20-$30 per week. I find that hard to believe but why would they not tell the truth?

Instead of providing a piece of meat for every person, cook a roast or buy one large piece that can be divided and add rice or potato and 2 other vegetables and bread to the meal. For the working family the slow cooker used to be the best tool to provide tasty tender meals cooking delicious food while we were at our jobs. The dietary rule used to be: meat, a starch of potato or rice and one yellow and one green vegetable for the main meal. Another old rule was never to throw away food. I was a German girl living with two German parents and was served German food which I despised. I especially detested spatzel and it did one no good to eat only a little of this spooned flour and egg dumpling because if there were leftovers my Mom would take them and toss them into a frying pan with a scrambled egg and serve them again the next meal. Mom, Dad and my brothers loved this stuff. Ugh! My Mom excelled at creating good meals disguised as something else….casseroles of odd leftover items and hash was a favorite of our men folk.

My Dad always claimed that my Mom could feed an army with a few pounds of ground beef and when he was out of work, she proved that she could feed a family with it 3 times a week!

Hot soup from leftover chicken and turkey and vegetables with rice, barley or pasta was another addition to a meal as a filler. Adding one casserole a week is another way to trim costs. Make them as delicious as possible and the children will tell the tale of these good things to their spouses for the rest of their married lives, ad-nausea. A recent survey indicated that the average family throws away $5-$10 worth of food a week per person! That seems unbelievable and is a lot of money.

I know that Moms and Dads are both working at jobs out of the home now BUT takeout food will wreck the food budget faster than anything. It is tempting, easy and often really good tasting. If you do take out once a week or more, a good plan is to make it an event once a month. KFC chicken, Italian sandwiches, pizza and the like on the 2nd or 3rd Saturday of every month makes it an event that everyone looks forward to rather than same old, same old. Frozen dinners are a budget killer too and since such food containers are skimpy and the stuff in them is not really that tasty or nutritious, eliminate them from your food budget for awhile.
Sandwich Meats: If you really cannot do without the expensive sandwich meats and cheese from the deli instead of prepackaged meats and cheese, you can adopt my Mom’s “rule”. No one, and that included Dad, can open the refrigerator and take a piece of cheese or a several slices of meat and pop them into their mouths. You had to make a sandwich. It was a killer but we weren’t exactly sure of what the penalty was to do this and didn’t want to find out.

Cereal: I am very fond of sugary, unhealthy cereals. However, buying unsweetened nutrient packed healthy cereal is so much cheaper and buying this is a favor for your family and is great as snacks for ravenous children too. I’m hungry, they whine. Have a bowl of cereal will not endear you to them BUT you might end up with lean, mean children instead of chubby sugar eater couch potatoes. No guarantee here but an interesting possibility. In the olden days when Tupperware was first introduced, buying cereal in bulk and packing them in air tight containers was a cost cutting way for trimming the food bill.
Bulk Buying: While paper products, household cleaners, laundry detergents, trash bags, personal toiletries, etc. are not food, they are part of your weekly buying at the grocery store. People with families and have the storage room, now can save big time in buying these products at the big box stores. While this is just not worth the effort for me as a senior person, when I was young I would have jumped at the chance to save lots of money. When I first came to Maine, it was a popular thing to buy part of or a whole steer for meat and pop them into the freezer for good eating. I admired people that froze fresh produce things too. I was told once, and I have no idea if it is true, that purchasing a large freezer unit just to save money was not wise if the freezer wasn’t kept full and to remember to add the cost of electricity to run said freezer to the price of what was into it. In this day and age you can purchase tasty frozen vegetables during off season at very reasonable prices and buying meat in family packages on sale in a careful way and freezing them in your refrigerator compartment is today’s way of cost cutting.

Desserts and snack Foods: We all know and don’t really give a darn, about cookies and pies and snacks are not being in the “good food” category. We like them, we want them and we get them. Hard times require hard decisions. This could be handled the same way as take out. Instead of being a daily thing, dessert could be part of a special Saturday or Sunday meal once a week. Instead of answering, I’m hungry, with, have a bowl of cereal, the plan could be cookies and ice cream once a week. Not only will you have lean, mean, children, you will have adults falling into the same category. Hot fresh pop corn is an inexpensive treat to eat and can also be bagged in little baggies for school snacks and lunches. Innovative thinking can generate good ideas. Rice cereal and marshmallow bars are yummy. Here’s another idea. Limit the number of items meted out: one bowl of ice cream, three or four cookies, one rice bar, etc. In my world, treats were limited and it made them more prized than you could imagine. I think my Mom liked to torture us kids. She always made one more dessert than persons at the table. Mom’s “rule” was that the extra dessert belonged to Dad for “later”. We created our own “rule” and it was that if the king of the house didn’t eat it later than that night, it belonged to whichever child got to it first on the next day! It was a war but we loved it. How sweet it was eating the extra in front of your siblings.

Beverages: Here is another battleground. We really like our sodas a lot. They are not good for you but taste so good. As a young mother I purchased weekly one 6 pack of cola and it was my treat. I drank one every evening until it was gone. The children got powdered packaged drinks made up with water. It was understood that severe repercussions would ensue for any that dared to touch my treat. Carbonated drinks were too expensive to purchase for little people. That’s the way it was and they remember it bitterly. The new idea that children are entitled persons is a concept created by those bitter children who are now parents and they will pay for this excess dearly not only with having obese children. Some day their children will deny their little people sweets and sodas, saying that they were not going follow in their parent’s footsteps of giving unhealthy food to their precious children.

So, all said and done, we US citizens are noted for a can do attitude. We are creative and have always managed throughout tough times. Our attitude sometimes irks other countries and they view us as spoiled, consuming people. We can be. We also have the freedom that allows us to believe that we “can do” no matter what. We can get through these hard times too and if we need ideas, we can ask our Grand Mothers and Fathers and our parents what they did during hard times and modify them to suit us.