Composter: so far, so good - no funky smells, either from the kitchen scrap bucket (my biggest worry) or from the big composter itself. I haven't brought myself to look inside since we started adding kitchen scraps though. Yikes.
Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: We've replaced all of our eight kitchen spotlights and our 14 basement can lights (at 65 watts each) with 16-watt, dimmable CF bulbs. They take a little getting used to - although they're warm-ish, soft white, they are still just slightly cooler in color than the incandescents. Also, they take a minute or so to warm up, so when you first turn on the lights they are very dim and uninviting, but within 60 seconds or so they reach full luminescence and are really quite an acceptable substitute. At $15 a pop they were quite an investment, but supposedly they last for five years or so. We'll see. We have about a zillion other recessed lights in the house so we'll be making it a project to eventually replace all or most of them. Incidnentally, if you're in the market for these (dimmable CF are a little tough to find) we bought the NEPTUN-R30-16W-Dimmable reflector bulbs from www.1000bulbs.com
Box mansions
11 years ago
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1 comment:
Love the blog!
Several years ago Kathryn and I took a shot at worm composting. You buy special green plastic bins and fill one of them with a fibrous starter material and, of course, worms. You periodically add stuff like veggie scraps and drier lint and the worms turn it into worm poop and also excrete a liquid known as "worm tea" that can be used as a fertilizer. Eventually the worms turn the entire bin into compost and you switch them to the other bin.
Anyway, that is the theory. We had it working for about a month as I recall, but then I think I put too much stuff in the bin and the worms couldn't get to it fast enough to prevent major rotting and they ended up in worm heaven.
It was really great while it worked. When you would open the bin to add stuff the worms would run like hell from the light and burrow underground. It would be really great with kids.
We'll show the bins to the BoulderBerks when they are up here, but sans worms. We may give it another try some time, but we aren't ready yet.
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