Awhile back I wrote about making your own soaps, and how much fun that can be even though it’s a lot of work. Besides, who are we dedicated homesteaders if we’re not people who actually enjoy working around our homesteads and doing for ourselves? It’s officially late October now, which means I’ve got a different soap job to do at my homestead.

I do this soap job every spring and fall, mostly just because I can. Besides, it saves my hard-strapped household of four adult-sized humans about $120 every six months on a single necessary household item, even after the not too high costs of ingredients and processing. Since some of the ingredients are also used to make bathroom and kitchen scouring powders, good ant and mouse repellants, and insect sting/burn/rash treatment, I figure the savings to the homestead overall for a year is pretty close to $300.00. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even though my labor is donated free!

This soap job is all about getting our clothes clean. Yes, I do way too much laundry – I still think my daughter and grandson pull clothes out of the drawers or off the shelves and toss them into the dirty clothes hamper if it’s not what they want to wear today instead of refolding and putting them back where they belong. They were gone out of state all of August and September and I didn’t wash more than three loads a week for just hubby and I. But I can’t seem to catch them at it, so I just do the washing (and the drying, and the folding, and the putting away…). It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!

I don’t make laundry soap from scratch – we use way too much of it and let’s face it… do our tee shirts, socks and underwear really need the same kind of delicate cleansing as our faces? Instead, I use pre-made soaps. Keep a bowl down in the bathroom for the dregs of bar soaps that get too small to use, for this specific purpose. I also have family and friends who travel for their jobs quite a bit, and who pick up those little motel soaps for me. I keep them in a basket in the bathroom closet, they come in faster than I can finish off with a project like this.

What I do is turn all these soap bars and leftovers into liquid soap. That means putting a big soup pot on ‘low’ on the stove (or on top of the wood stove if it’s cold enough to be heating the house), and breaking or carving the bars and leavings into small pieces to dissolve in the hot water. I have found that the smaller the pieces (flakes and shavings are best), the faster they fully dissolve. Keep stirring and adding more until I’ve got a good gallon of thick liquid. All in all, it ends up being maybe 20 little bars and the bathroom dregs.

At this point I pour the hot liquid soap into my container, which is a clean 5-gallon plastic bucket (with lid), and add another 3 gallons of hot water while stirring to thin it down a bit. To this I add 2 cups of regular baking soda and 4 cups of dry borax powder. While the soap is still warm, slowly and while stirring well. I buy the soda and borax – cheap generic brands – in the biggest boxes I can get at the grocery, once a year. Mixed in equal parts these make a handy scouring powder for sinks, toilets, tubs, counters, etc. all year long.

The mixture will cool into a gel. I use a plastic soup ladle to dip it out, about a cup for a standard washer load. My washing machine (a heavy-duty basic 1-size floor model I got a great deal on when our last one died) only takes a ‘medium’ load. I start the fill, get the soap and add it while the water’s filling before putting the clothes in. Then load in the clothes and let ‘er wash! I leave the top up if I’m doing whites so the main wash water won’t drain, then turn it back to start for a second agitation (with the same soapy water) when I add bleach.

The clothes come out as clean as any expensive laundry soap I’ve ever used (and I’ve probably tried them all). They come out smelling great from the various scent ingredients in the commercial soap bars, and they’re also very soft without using any fabric softener at all in the wash or sheets in the dryer due to the various lotions also included in those commercial soap bars. The soda and borax enhances the de-greasing and basic cleaning ability of the soap.

Now, people don’t think about making their own anything anymore, but this way of recycling bar soaps is environmentally sound as well as very satisfying personally. As the grocery bill goes up and up and up every week, it’s really nice not to have to pay $5 or more on a regular basis for laundry soap. If you’re going to be a committed homesteader (I always say), you should at least learn how to do as many things for yourself as you can. So I do.

Having posted with pride about our new honest-to-hillbilly deck, I thought this might be a good time to talk a bit more about the many tools a homesteader needs in order to keep the place in order, do the gardening and landscaping, renovate and repair home and outbuildings. I can do this because during the deck project we had a total of 4 hammers on hand, and two of them ended up without handles before we were done. Frustrating.

The very best thing you can do, of course, is to purchase the absolute, best quality, longest-lasting tools – any tool – you can possibly afford. Yet in today’s economy, getting the best quality tools is often beyond the means of those of us trying hard just to make things work. Here at my homestead we’ve got a shed chock full of old chain saws, string trimmers, handle-less shovels, pitchforks, axes, mauls, sledgehammers, pruners, etc., not to mention a whole collection of broken hammers, screwdrivers, various saws and power tools bought cheap over the years and which didn’t last long enough to get to the second job.

Worse, I’ve an energetic daughter and some grandchildren who work hard on occasion, but can’t ever manage to put the tools back where they belong. Which means I find rusted things all over the place, often with wooden handles that long since rotted into compost. It’s extremely frustrating, and having to replace the tools every time you start a project is a regular pain in the ass. Not to mention expensive.

My friend and local homesteading hero told us many years ago to “Buy The Best” because that way you don’t have to keep on buying over and over again. Great advice, but not very practical if you’ve got to have an axe (the last one has only half a handle) and you’ve got just $20 to spend right now. And my hugest complaint about ALL homestead tools with handles – when the heck do the handles get to the modern composite resin/graphite world, just like golf clubs?

Luckily for all us non-wealthy homesteaders, There Is A Way. Why, we can purchase ‘best’ quality tools secondhand! There are a number of ways to do this, and you won’t be sorry. Often you can acquire the super guaranteed-for-life item at or below on-sale cheap stuff at Walmart if you just spend some time looking around. There are estate and farm auctions, there are whole secondhand warehouses, and there are a good many sites on the internet where even with shipping costs the ‘best’ tool comes in cheaper than the Walmart Special.

You could go local to the auctions and auction houses that will let you inspect the items and brands pre-auction, you could go to Craig’s List or Freecyclers and hope for the best, or you could check out some of the links below and surf some of their cross-links too. The ‘best’ of our tools is a Craftsman tiller my father-in-law bought for me when we first moved here. It’s still in the shop right now for its 5-year tune-up, but that thing’s a true workhorse that may never really die. We went ahead and put out the bucks for a Stihl chain saw about 7 years ago, and it’s still going strong on its 4th chain. Which is better than the several cheap ones under the shed that didn’t last 2 seasons.

What’s your most elderly tool, and are you glad you bought the ‘best’?

Links:

Used Tools
How to Buy Good Used Garden Tools
Used Snap-On Tools

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University have developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Note that this isn’t solar panels on the roof, but the enameled coating on the siding itself. Meaning that metal buildings – including garages, barns, equipment sheds, airport hangars, outlying megachurches and community buildings could all be generating electricity (some from the infrared spectrum current solar cells cannot capture) while they’re just sitting there enclosing space. Put a few regular panels on the roof too and it could be generating more than it uses on a regular basis.

But when I went looking at just how innovative this development is in the overall scheme of things keeping affordable alternative energy options safely insulated from regular people who might just put them to work, I found that the idea isn’t all that new, and isn’t anywhere close to being marketed to consumers of things like metal buildings (commercial or residential). Why do you suppose that is, given the sheer amount of money being funneled into research and development, as well as into actual production?

For instance, National Geographic reported in January of 2005 (more than 3 years ago) that Spray-On Solar-Power Cells are True Breakthrough. Just like in the ‘new’ news, nanotechnology able to harness infrared as well as visible light was formulated into a plastic to be sprayed like paint onto stuff (including clothing and cars) to produce “portable power.”

Have you bought any solar powered clothing or cars lately capable of charging your cell phone or car battery? …I thought not. In January of 2007 (just over a year ago), researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology reported that they had developed a buckeyball-based solar cell that could be sprayed like paint onto flexible plastic sheets. Inhabitat cited one of the researchers as predicting…

“Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

Have you printed out any usable solar cells on the ol’ Epson yet? Not to worry, says Konarka Technologies, which has actually developed the inkjet solar cell printing process for big production facilities (but no reports on whether any big production facilities are actually buying it).

When can the average homeowner expect to be able to purchase house, slab and deck paint that generates electricity at Home Depot for a comparable price to regular exterior paints? When can we expect to buy roofing tiles or sheets at Lowe’s that have inkjet printed plastic coatings that not only generate electricity, but add to the life of the roofing material?

The technology is out there. The government is pouring money into development. So far, none of it’s found on the shelves at Home Depot or Lowe’s. Why is that?

If we COULD buy it for a reasonable price when it’s time to paint or re-roof, We the People surely would. I’d sure hate to think that this might actually be the reason we can’t buy it. They’ve had time to incorporate and patent, they’ve had public money for R&D, they’ve reported for years that it’s easily done and the technology is easy. They can make more money off us if they wanted, I’d sure buy the stuff and so would millions of others. What’s the holdup… really?

There are more reasons to be energy independent than just to save money or avoid the hassles of what happens when the electricity goes out. The American Energy Independence organization lists some of them on their web page, that every homesteader should read for no other reason than to spur them into immediate planning and action.

As I write this post on the second day of 2008, oil has hit $100 a barrel on the NYMEX [New York Mercantile Exchange] exchange, sparked by concerns about violence in Nigeria. We’ve lost more than 3,000 of our brave young soldiers in Iraq, a war of aggression launched almost entirely over control of the world’s second largest petroleum reserves. Combined with news last week of a looming world-wide food shortage being pinned mostly on the eagerness of bare subsistence farmers to produce more lucrative energy crops (like corn and soy for ethanol and biodiesel), the more that we can do for ourselves, the better we’ll weather the coming storms of necessary change. We can lead instead of follow.

From the Energy Efficient Homes resources page I found a list of the top 10 energy efficiency tips that all of us can put to good use in steadily lowering our energy demands even as we plan for the future of providing our own home-grown energy sources. Those tips are aimed at businesses, but are just as wise for homesteaders. Here are some great hints we can all put into use…

• Turn your computers, printers and other office equipment OFF when they’re not being used. That means at night and all day any days you aren’t actually using them. A household can shave nearly $45 a year off the electric bill just by getting into this habit, and when you’re planning for your kilowatt needs in the future, these not-used kilowatts will count significantly.

• Install an “occupancy sensor” in hallways, bathrooms and other areas of your home where lights don’t need to be on all the time. These sensors can be purchased for about $20, and can save the homeowner $40 or more per year on their electric bill, per sensor! Since it’s notoriously difficult to get children (and others) to be as aware as we’d like them to be of turning out the lights when they’ve left a room, this expense will also factor significantly in kilowatt planning for the future.

• Lower the thermostat on the water heater. Is your water hot enough to scald? Then the thermostat’s set too high. Every 10º lower saves you energy usage and money. If your best temperature for hot baths and dishwashing is, say, 110º, that’s where the thermostat should be set. That way nobody ever gets accidentally scalded, and you can just use the hot water faucet when you’re washing up. You simply don’t need water hotter than that out of the tap.

• Turn off your water heater at night and whenever you’re away from home or the house is empty. If your heater is behind a wall (like mine is), this can easily be accomplished by flipping off the breaker. This should also be done for water pumps on your well or spring. You could install an automatic timer, but that can be rather inconvenient if you need hot water at night or on Sunday. But just by doing these two things a homesteader could shave lots of kilowatts off the usage profile and save more than $100 a year on the bill.

• Set the heating system thermostat low at night and when you’re away. Your house really doesn’t need to be warmer than about 68º even when everyone’s home, since it’s not that difficult to figure out why they make sweatshirts, flannels and sweaters. At night you can turn it down to somewhere around 55º and still sleep quite comfortably – that’s why they make blankets, comforters and quilts! Your pipes won’t freeze and you could save $1500 or more every winter on your electric bill!

• Close your drapes or blinds when it’s either hot or cold outside. If you have no window treatments (I don’t, I’m not that concerned about bears seeing me naked…), think about installing some that offer a measure of control and insulation value. I get a lot of heat energy gain during the winter because I have big windows on the south side of the house and dark wood siding. In summer the sun is high enough overhead not to shine directly in, so this works out fine. If I did have a heat gain problem in the summer it would be worth my while to install a retractable awning for those south-facing windows, or simply roof over the deck on that side of the house.

• Install energy-efficient light bulbs – fluorescent or LED – everywhere they can be used. These do not work outside or on dimmers very well, but efficient light bulbs that do are currently in development. They’re expensive at first, but last much longer than your standard incandescent bulb while producing more light per watt. The investment is well worth it – use the money you’ve saved from some other area of conservation!

• Mind your weatherstripping around doors and windows. Reduce drafts and your home will feel warmer at 68º than it might at 75º when the wind’s blowing through. You’ll also avoid cold spots that make you want to turn up the heat or plug in a space heater.

• Think hard about installing sky lights in outbuildings as well as over your primary living space. This will lead to less use of electricity to light these areas during the day, and can pay for themselves by that savings alone. Sky lights don’t have to be fancy, expensive things that inevitably get installed by someone who insists you’ve got to purchase a whole new roof first. Any handy homesteader should be able to cut a hole in the roof of the shed, barn or bailey with a saws-all and install a safety glass or plexy panel with enough caulking and flashing to keep it from leaking.

When we lived in Florida I discovered a US Navy jet airplane graveyard off the Naval Air Station where you could purchase old canopes for $100 or less. These things are cool to the nth degree! We got one and installed it on the roof of an old city transit bus we’d turned into a motor home, and it impressed people wherever we went in it! I’m quite sure at least one rock band whose members we knew went right out to get one for their tour bus, though I don’t keep up with celebrity gossip enough to know if their bus is famous for it.

Below are some very useful links to information, products and services you may find helpful for your own planning. Get busy, homesteaders!

Links:

Energy Efficient Homes

BHM: Home Energy Information and Resources

EnvironmentalLights: LED, CFL Lighting

Full Spectrum Lighting

Good Shepherd Wool Insulation

We have all heard the litany… global warming, unsustainable consumption habits, the real human costs of petroleum dependency and the ever-rising cost of all forms of energy. When it’s difficult for regular middle class city and suburban dwellers to maintain their few hours of home down-time due to rising costs, the burden on rural homesteaders can easily be impossible to bear.

The smartest thing that anyone committed to sustainable and self-sufficient living should have already begun planning their off-grid strategies. Even though it may take years to accomplish the dream, the sooner you start moving in that direction the sooner you can hope to get there.

There are many things to consider before taking your homestead off-grid, and this series will take a look at some of those things as well as offer some resources so the homesteader can begin his or her own research. In this post we’ll examine the current and projected future costs of different on-site energy sources, energy storage vs. backwards metering, and best alternatives for your particular homestead.

One of the first things a homeowner needs to become aware of are the various federal and state incentive programs available to them if they choose to meet some or all of their own energy needs with ‘green’ sources. These incentives have been steadily increasing at the same time the per-watt price of the technology has been steadily falling. In some places the cost trade-off – where the cost to install is paid for by the incentives and further energy is basically free-for-upkeep – is down to 3-5 years. Which is a point when someone planning to live the whole rest of their lives on their homestead has no really good excuse not to go off-grid! The Database of State Incentives offers a clickable map with details for all 50 states and is updated as incentives are tweaked or changed.

Once you have a good idea of how much you can offset your costs with incentives and tax rebates, you’ll need to have a good idea of exactly how much electricity you use. Gather at least 6 months’ worth of electric bills – including the hottest and coldest months – and write down your actual kilowatt usage. If your bill includes a breakdown of peak usage include that in another column. Some utility companies don’t include that information on monthly bills, but will supply it if you ask them nicely. It is important for you to know your peak usage so you will be able to supply enough energy to cover that.

If your overall kilowatt usage over the months falls within a fairly small range of variation but your peak usage looks really high, you’ll need to figure out what is using the most energy of all your activities and appliances. There are significant ways to lower a homestead’s energy demands, both overall and peak, but that requires knowing what you use and a willingness to pare your usage wherever you can.

Decisions about heating system and appliances you’ll need to replace in order to consume less electricity will also have to consider whether the homesteader plans to store energy on-site in banks of batteries, or whether the homestead chooses to use the commercial grid to its own advantage as a supplier. Batteries are expensive to install and maintain, probably best for homesteads that are remote enough to have never been on the grid in the first place, and younger homesteaders who have a lot of time and energy to spend doing things the hard, old fashioned way. Battery technology is getting better all the time, but no cheaper. In a later installment in this series we’ll be getting into actual costs of on-site storage as well as the pluses and minuses of such a system.

My homestead is currently on the grid, and our electric company is required by regulatory law to provide us with a “backwards meter” if we ever install our own electrical generating capacity. If we want it, and since I do not want to hassle with the whole battery-bank expense, we do want it. The deal is that we purchase our energy from the utility the same way we always have for running our appliances, power tools, lights and such. At the same time, the electric company must purchase all the energy our system produces. If we’re producing more than we’re using, it goes back out on the grid for other people to use.

Now, the price we pay per kilowatt from the utility is more than the utility will pay us for the kilowatts we produce. Having looked into the cost and hassle of battery banks, I am fairly convinced the price difference is reasonable so that we can avoid on-site storage. We have been slowly but surely replacing appliances over the years with more energy efficient models, and are keeping ultra low-use and pedal powered models in mind as they develop for our next computers, radio/stereo, TV/video replacements. And of course we’re buying nothing but low-watt flourescent bulbs for lighting, even while keeping a stash of mantle-type oil lamps on hand.

We heat with wood, which is handy because we live in the woods. Fuel’s in no short supply, though it takes some work. We don’t have air conditioning because we don’t need it. Though we do have to run a dehumidifier in the basement all summer to keep things from mildewing. It’s a new, energy efficient model, but we could probably do without it entirely by insulating and covering the concrete floor. One of those building projects on the list (along with new siding, windows, roof, doors…). A homestead is a long-term project, so I don’t feel too guilty that we’ve spent 15 years planning and still haven’t accomplished our dreams!

Another big energy drain comes with the washer and dryer. Not to mention the energy used to pump the water 200 feet up the mountainside. I could hang the clothes out to dry, but although that makes them smell great, it’s a lot of work I’d rather not do and I get hives from stiff clothes irritating my skin. I’m thinking I’ll want to keep these appliances, though I’ll probably replace the dryer again with an even more efficient model one of these days. The refrigerator is a big ‘tron user too, but new ones are outrageously expensive. But I figure that as the models have become ever more energy efficient, it won’t be too long before we’ll be able to upgrade ours to a newer model recycled from someone who goes us one better on a new $2,000 double door monstrosity.

The sump pump in the cistern down at the spring is a 220 powerhouse, having to pump so far uphill. We’ve long planned to fabricate a creek-powered ram jet and bypass the house to pump another 50 feet to the top of the ridge behind the house, into a newer, larger cistern that will give us gravity feed pressure to the house. Yet another of those ‘someday’ projects.

So start your homework by organizing your needs and understanding your usage, check out some of the links below to help. Stay tuned for the next installment!

Links:

The Economics of Going Off-Grid

Grid-Connected Solar or Wind Systems

Paring Down for Off-Grid Living

Solar Power at Half the Cost

Off-Grid – Life Unplugged

MSNBC: ‘off-grid’ community

Wholesale Solar

Once upon a time things like laundry soap, dishwashing soap, handwashing soap and ever-so gentle complexion soap was all nearly as cheap as potatoes, cornmeal and all-purpose flour. Nothing anybody thought about ever making for themselves, because what would be the point?

With some home-grown and home-preserved foods, a gardener/homesteader will of course do it anyway despite the fact that these things can be purchased from the grocery store from mass production companies for a lot less than it takes to grow, harvest and process at home. That’s done for taste, nutritional content and pride in self-sufficiency. But soap, a very much basic part of our general upkeep of cleanliness all around the homestead, has until recently been practically a lost art form.

Now it’s coming back, in favor of specialty soaps that go for a pretty penny at natural food and product stores, but sell fast. Part of it is the ever-rising cost of mass produced soaps, some of it is the trend toward avoidance of animal products, and some of it is an increasing number of serious allergic reactions to chemical ingredients in mass produced soaps.

So I thought I’d write about home soap-making just to highlight how really not-difficult it is, and how a committed homesteader can produce a year’s worth of soap (plus some for gifts) in a single week of work and a one-time investment in ingredients and supplies. Your skin will thank you, your loved ones will smell great, and your friends will be so greedy for their special gift-soaps that they may lock their bars away in secret hiding places to keep it away from unauthorized users!

There are some things absolutely required for soap-making, only some of which you’ll have to purchase again every year along with the ingredients. Making soap requires that you handle good amounts of straight Lye. Lye is nasty stuff – it’s corrosive, gives off choking fumes until it’s dissolved, and it can seriously burn your skin on contact. This means you need some stout rubber gloves (Platex Living will work), and these will have to be replaced every session. You’ll also need plastic safety goggles, stainless steel or non-chipped enamel pots, and molds to shape your bars. If you’re handy in the woodshop, molds are easy enough to make. If you’re handy in the woodshop, you no doubt already have a good pair of safety goggles. Most of us homesteaders already have big enamel canning pots, and if the project is carried out over the propane grill on the back deck, ventilation isn’t a problem at all. The only things you’ll need to purchase every time you make soap are the lye, the oil(s), the additive ingredients and the rubber gloves.

Most of the standard and traditional soap recipes use tallow (beef fat) or lard (pig fat) as the lipid ingredient. Since it’s important to have the proper ratio of lye to lipid – and different lipids will require different ratios of lye – a basic Lye to Fat Ratio Table is handy. Bookmark this one or print it out and keep it with your soap recipes. It will prove important.

This table will allow the soap maker to substitute vegetable fats for standard animal fats. Soaps made with olive oil, palm oil, sunflower oil or coconut oil are particularly good as facial soaps, and are gentle on the skin. Yet even if you have an aversion to rendered animal fats, the lanolin that comes from scouring wool doesn’t require the death of the sheep and makes a really good whole body soap. Beeswax is another animal product that isn’t death-dealing but makes a great soap additive. This will of course be a matter of choice and taste, as well as what makes the best added ingredient combos – aloe, oatmeal, ground flax seed, pumice or clay, etc.

Then there are the scent ingredients, which are best as essential oils. A face soap can smell like rich lavender, but it might be more refreshing if it smelled strongly of peppermint. A body soap that smells like lavender will be nice for Mom and the girls, but that’s way too sweet for a guy-guy. How about a refreshing pine scent?

Almost anything can be a soap mold, so long as it’s not made of aluminum. Plastic ice trays can make nice little guest-soap bars. Those plastic segmented trays for tackle boxes or craft bead supplies make slightly larger bars. Wooden molds of 2x4s with a paneling bottom and divisions works well. Anything with a top opening no smaller than its body will work, including scallop shells!

Below I’ve linked some excellent sources for instructions and recipes, useful hints, and great ideas. If you’d like to make your own soaps these will be useful. For liquid soaps and laundry soaps, once you’ve got the basic ideas down these are quite easily produced as well (and may be the most sensible thing to do with cheap genetically engineered cooking oils you’d never want to use in real cooking). Ace hardware is always a good place to get bulk ingredients such as lye, and some of them also have molds and other soapmaking supplies – or can order them for you.

So get busy making soap, and please share any cool recipes you come up with! Don’t forget to make some nice printed wrappers or stickers (to seal tissue-wrapped soaps) that creatively announce that it’s YOUR homestead that produces these soaps. You may find your local natural foods store is eager to buy them for resale to their own customers. Why… it might be a business!

Links:

The Joys of Making Soap

Muller Lane Farm: Making Cold Process Soaps

Back to Basic Living: Soap

The Olde Cron’s Bewitching Bath Soap

Walton Feed: Lye to Fat Ratio Table