This is the first of a series of Frugal Posts. Four of these posts have been funded. There are more. Today we discuss cheap sources of light.
1. Sunshine
In a well designed house, for most of the day you can read, sew, wash dishes, even tinker with small motors, without adding any light. Just peel away all the decorations from the windows and let the sun shine in. "Sunbleached" is a classic, preppy color scheme for rugs and upholstery anyway. On gloomy days, mirrors make the most of the natural light available.
2. Candles
Candles are a nuisance for serious use, but they work. Set them in a metal container, NOT glass or plastic, large enough to catch any dripping wax, which you will re-melt and reuse. (If you use candles for lighting you are going to be making a fair number of your own, from leftover purchased ones or from blocks of plain wax you can probably buy cheaper than purchased candles.) Try to do everything that calls for good steady lighting--reading, sewing, machine repair--by daylight. If you do need good steady lighting, give up on trying to trim one wick to provide it; light another candle. Blow out extra candles after use.
Making your own candles is an art form. Don't get carried away, because color actually reduces the efficiency of candles. Note how professional candle makers usually dip a core of plain wax in a thin coat of bright color.
I save all candle scraps and drips, scented wax "tarts," etc., and melt them down together for reuse. White cotton string is the traditional wick material. It will hang straighter, and form a nice straight wick down the center of the candle instead of floating off to the side where it won't burn evenly, if stiffened in a bath of borax dissolved in water, but this step is not absolutely necessary. If you want short candles you can burn under a saucepan for cheap cooking, two wooden matchsticks of similar length, propped up in the center of a cleaned cat food tin, work pretty well. The foil molds in which chafing dish candles come are flimsy and hard to reuse, but they are an ideal size for using just enough wax and wicking to heat up enough canned, "instant," or microwaveable food for one or two people.
For lighting, cheap molds of the ideal size are found inside rolls of paper towels and toilet tissue. Set them on a metal base, hang a string down the middle, and pour in wax. When they are cool and solid, slip off the cardboard mold. For gifts or special occasions, dress these new candles with coats of colored wax and/or herbal oil. If you want to get fancy you can stick on layers of wax to form fancy shapes, flowers, trees, whatever, but fancifulness actually reduces candles' efficiency as lights.
I don't usually scent candles, although I sometimes buy scented ones at charity stores and sometimes buy citronella-scented ones. Chemical scents are probably all more or less harmful; herbal fragrances can have medical effects that someone who'll be exposed to them does not want. The most noticeable effect of herbal scents in the mint family (all mints, catnip, basil, pennyroyal, thyme, oregano, lavender) is to discourage flies and mosquitoes. Other effects, especially of pennyroyal and some kinds of basil, can include starting the birth process if anyone exposed happens to be expecting a baby. If you like scented candles, use them with caution.
Candles can be dangerous if handled carelessly. Babies and animals have to be kept away from them, clothes and draperies have to be controlled so they can't be blown into the flame, and someone has to stay awake in the room where a candle is burning. Some chemicals should be kept out of rooms where candles and matches are burning, too. I believe we need a federal law requiring all fire insurance policies to be written on the understanding that people use candles, and fireplaces--but use yours in such a way that you don't need to buy into the insurance gamble.
Because so many people use candles only on special occasions, almost any visit to almost any charity store is likely to yield a nice collection of candles, some used, some not. Unless someone in your family is extremely sensitive to scents, all candles are safe to use and recycle. If they come in silly shapes or in glass containers, melt them down, gradually if necessary, into your own molds and holders.
Candle wicks were one of the basic household supplies our ancestors hoarded but there are several alternatives, if you have not saved enough real cotton string. Cheap yarns don't work as wicks--synthetic materials like nylon and acrylic melt too quickly. Grass burns too fast, but dried-out slivers of wood or sturdier plant stems can make good wicks. Annie Dillard famously described a moth flying into a candle and, since nobody picked the moth out, becoming a wick. It's true: most dead insects can be used as emergency wicks, though some release nasty odors and some contain gases that pop or spark. A thin trimming off a cotton rag is another emergency wicking option. All of these alternatives will remind you to buy some cotton string, but they'll generate enough light for everyone to see where the furniture is.
3. Oil Lamps
Oil lamps are traditional, decorative, and collectible. I'm not a big fan of oil lamps or heaters. The fumes are too sooty. I don't like scrubbing soot off walls, much less coughing it up out of me!
However, oil is relatively cheap, can be considered sustainable in the sense that most people won't use it if they have alternatives, and will justify a collection of antique lamps if you have one. Oil generates lots of heat as well as light, which can make it a good choice for winter emergencies.
4. Those Adorable Little Solar Lights
Who can resist those little solar lights that are in the hardware and farm supply stores these days? Some of them are no bigger than an electric light's switch plate. Some of them are shaped like an electric light's switch plate. They contain tiny batteries that charge when exposed to sunlight and discharge, in the form of giving off a little light, when brought indoors.
It takes a lot of tiny solar lights to do more than make it easier to find stairs, but they are a cheap, easy, sustainable source of light. If you need an incentive to move, stretch, and bend, buy a lot of solar lights to carry in and out.
5. Fireplaces
If you have an open fireplace you can read by the flickering firelight, as Abraham Lincoln did, and by the age of forty you can have impressively sombre-looking wrinkles like his, too. Not recommended as a primary alternative to electric lights, a fireplace will provide a lovely romantic atmosphere for one evening, anyway. Be sure the chimney is kept clean so the fire doesn't fill the room with smoke or set fire to the wall.
6. Motor Vehicle Lights
Only in a few kinds of emergencies can this be considered frugal, but your car or truck's motor is good for a few hours of light or heat. Some new gas-burning vehicles are designed to be used as emergency gas-powered generators.
7. Alcohol and Other Chemical Burners
"Are they safe?" We do not live in a safe world. The only way to be safe is to be dead and buried--then this world has no more harm to do to you. Next question! Some chemical burners have been around long enough that people who are familiar with them consider them safe, relative to this mortal world, and frugal, relative to the gas and electric companies. I, personally, don't know enough about them to recommend any of them. If you have inherited one you should consult someone who's been using one like it.
8. Traditional Battery-Powered Lights
The ones that run on two D-cell batteries, are good for six or eight hours, and give about as much light as a candle only it's steadier light, are good if you're not going to use up the batteries all at once. They are, for example, easier to carry around the house or hold up to the breaker box than a candle is.
Smaller flashlights never were very useful. I wouldn't buy one.
Bigger flashlights, with batteries big as canning jars, will light up a room for a whole night if necessary and are worth buying batteries for, but using them to replace electric lights is certainly not frugal.
9. Newer, More Efficient Battery-Powered Lights
I have a little rechargeable flashlight, about half the size of the traditional two-D-cell kind, good for about twice as much light. Never having used it for more than a quick flash of light--to look for dropped objects in corners, to make sure nobody else has set up camp in my shoes when I put them on at night, to find the matches and light a candle, that sort of thing--I'm considering, this summer, when to recharge its itsy-bitsy battery for the fifth time. In nine years. Some new battery-powered lights really do represent dramatic progress in battery technology; others are just overhyped. I'd tell you where to buy a flashlight like mine if I knew, but I don't. I think--I could be mistaken--that it was one of the "rewards" my natural sister used to get, approximately every time she turned around, for selling Avon. (I recommend Avon as a job for all beauty queens.)
One thing those big, slick slabs of plastic that are currently being sold as "phones" really are good for is emergency lighting. They really will light up a room all night and, after a few hours on a charger plugged into conventional electric power, they'll be as good as new and ready to do it again the next night. If you have one of those things, you might as well get some use out of it. They don't exactly work like phones, and who still uses a phone, anyway, except a few businesses that still have the wall-mounted kind.
If your goal is just to stick it to the power company, lighting your house with new battery-powered devices has potential. But it's not frugal. Even new batteries will run down and have to be replaced if they're used every day. You'll still be hauling a lot of money to the store and a lot of batteries back, and they can still corrode and leak toxic chemicals into your pockets. A good new battery-powered light is worth keeping for a flash of light, but will not replace sunlight, firelight, candlelight, or even Edison's clunky old light bulbs.
The computer on which you're reading this has significant room-lighting potential, too. You couldn't stand to look at it if it generated enough light to do things like illuminating a printed page from which you wanted to copy something to post on your web site. Nevertheless, it does put out enough light that you could see it if something unexpected happened to be where you always set your bare foot if you happen to go to the door at night.
10. Serious Solar Power
Good old Brother Sun pours down enough energy to meet all of our needs, most of the time, if we were only collecting it.
This web site has been saying for some time that, if the electric power companies want to survive, they need to forget about those exciting (to some) new sources of energy like "fracturing" or "fracking" shale, building nuclear power plants, or drilling for oil in new locations, and start working with what's already here. Every shed and garage is a solar power plant waiting to be built. If Appco, Pepco, Dominion, et al., install those solar energy collectors wherever property owners agree to pay them off in electricity, the companies will not have to worry about becoming irrelevant when people install the collectors at their own expense, and also the three corners of Virginia can eliminate one longstanding source of acrimony as the Point will, at last, be supplying something that everybody in the Hump and Swamp admits they need.
The companies will currently balk and whine, saying that of course they caaan't install solar collectors on sheds, and that the only safe way to install one at your own expense is to have it wired into the grid in such a way that you're still dependent on the company and your solar power can be cut off if you don't pay your monthly bill. Wrong, boys. It may involve pay cuts for high-level company employees, but it's quite feasible to restructure the electrical grid in such a way that the companies will be paying property owners monthly checks. The companies need to be planning for this. They must not be allowed to fantasize about building any more power plants, of any kind, unless and until they have invested in more equitable relationships with home and business owners. They need to be thinking of every property owner as a resource on whom they will depend as they continue to meet the energy needs of the cities.
The possibilities are endless, and delectable. Should parking lots have shelters from the rain, as an incentive to park at the far corner of the lot and walk, to get your exercise in? Of course they should, and why should those shelters not be collecting solar energy? "Clean" public transportation in the cities has been called a boondoggle because it consumes electricity. Could commuter bus stops and train stations generate even part of the energy the buses and trains consume? Electric vehicles aren't feasible if they have to be powered by the existing grid. What if they could be powered by their own garages?
Yes, batteries can corrode and release toxic minerals over years of exposure to wind and rain. Yes, some sort of filtration system needs to be installed along with the batteries. And what about storage of collected energy? Charged batteries can be stored long enough to get households through as many days without sunshine as most of the United States have, but where? Plans for safe storage of batteries--battery sheds?--need to be made, too, before households start trying to become solar farms.
But there's no real reason why frugal people need to be making payments to keep lights turned on. Brother Sun can take care of that. We just have to pay attention to new technological developments, exercise good judgment, and not let the companies jerk us around. We need laws that steer the companies in the right direction--either moving with property owners to harvest energy from sheds and garages, or just dying now and clearing themselves out of our way.
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