What are your frugal and sustainable tips and tricks?

[Sally PB]

For those of you who drink well water, do you ever have concern about pesticides and herbicides leeching into your water supply?

Our house, and therefore our well, are between acres of farm field and a river. We had the well tested when we bought the house, 30 years ago, but not since. I don't know that there are herbicides/pesticides in our water, but it would not surprise me if there were. Another reason to have the RO filter.

Of course, we're cooking and bathing in it too.

 

[gtaus]

Using Multiple Discounts To Save Money

This is the time of year that you might be able to purchase store Gift Cards at a discount. For example, my local Fleet store is offering 10% off Gift Cards purchased this week. I picked up enough Gift Cards for my estimated purchases for the next year. On top of that, I used my rewards credit card and will get another 1.5% for the purchase of those Gift Cards. Yesterday, I bought some open "Oops" 50# bags of feed at 25% off, normal price $13.49. So, what is my real savings on this purchase and/or what is the actual discount percentage I got after all my discounts?

Fortunately, we have computer tools that can figure that out quickly. I entered my info into Microsoft Copilot AI and this is what I learned....

*********************************
Let's break down the calculations step by step.

### Initial Price and Discounts

1. **Item Price**: $13.49
2. **25% Discount on the Item**:
\[
\text{Discounted Price} = 13.49 \times (1 - \frac{25}{100}) = 13.49 \times 0.75 = \$10.1175
\]

3. **10% Discount on the Gift Card**:
\[
\text{Gift Card Price} = 10.1175 \times (1 - \frac{10}{100}) = 10.1175 \times 0.90 = \$9.10575
\]

4. **Additional 1.5% Discount on the Gift Card**:
\[
\text{Final Price} = 9.10575 \times (1 - \frac{1.5}{100}) = 9.10575 \times 0.985 = \$8.96726
\]

### Total Discounted Price
The final price after all discounts is **\$8.96726**.

### Actual Discount Percentage
To find the total discount percentage, we compare the final price to the original price.

1. **Total Savings**:
\[
\text{Total Savings} = 13.49 - 8.96726 = \$4.52274
\]

2. **Actual Discount Percentage**:
\[
\text{Discount \%} = \left( \frac{4.52274}{13.49} \right) \times 100 \approx 33.53\%
\]

So, your total discounted price is **$8.97** (rounded to two decimal places), and the actual discount percentage is approximately **33.53%**.

********************************

Sometimes I like to look at the numbers to see if my system is actually saving me money. It is. I got a couple bags of feed for less than $9.00 each when you consider all those discounts. That's a pretty good deal for me.

 

[gtaus]

Feeding Chickens late in the Day to Save Money?

I recently watched a YouTube video on chicken run composting. I converted my chicken run into a composting system about 3 years ago and I believe it's the best decision I ever made. My chickens will be outside all day scratching and pecking in the compost litter finding good things to eat. In the non-snow months, my commercial feed expense is about half of my winter cost.

I have always fed my chickens early in the morning when I also open up the pop door to let the chickens out into the chicken run. I never thought much about it. However, in that one video, the guy says that he lets his chickens out into the composting chicken run and has them scratch and peck for food all day. Then, later in the afternoon, he will put feed into his feeders. He claims that he saves a lot of money with that system, as the chickens have already spent most of the day eating "free" food from the compost litter.

I am just wondering if anyone else has tried that system? I think if you are lucky enough to get waste food from restaurants and such, that later feeding system would really work.

 

[TooCheep]

I haven't gone that far with my hens, but I do let them free range during the day. Also, I give them some food scraps and some are light enough to fly into and dig around in my contained compost pile.

The girls can get more food that way during the warm months than in winter and I've seen a noticeable decrease in feed consumption during those months. I haven't explicitly measured it, but I'm happy with the reduced costs, increased variety and more natural life this offers my chickens.

 

[gtaus]

I haven't gone that far with my hens, but I do let them free range during the day. Also, I give them some food scraps...

Right. I toss our kitchen scraps out into the run every morning before I open the pop door. When I open the pop door, the chickens all rush outside and spend most of the day outside in the chicken run scratching and pecking in the compost litter for bugs and worms.

I fill up the feeder in the coop in the morning, but almost all the chickens are outside the coop. So, I don't know if it would make any difference if I withheld the feed until later in the afternoon. I do know that I only go through about half the feed in the non-snow months, assuming that they find lots of things to eat in the compost litter.

Someone also mentioned that my winter feed consumption is probably higher due to the cold temps and the chickens requiring more food to burn calories to keep warm. That makes sense, too.

In any case, I thought the idea of feeding the chickens later in the day made sense and might be a way to save some money on commercial feed costs.

 

[BDutch]

Still Losing The Battle...


Rant over. Thanks for any comments if you made it this far. Would love to hear other thoughts, for or against, on this subject of bottled water that affects us both in the frugal sense and sustainable life style.

We have good tap water, so I use that to drink plain water. But with my evening meal I like to drink soda water. This comes in bottles.

And on vacations when the water tastes bad (chloride) we buy bottled water too.

In my country we have deposit money on most plastic bottles, glass beer bottles and cans and they don’t go into landfills.

PS the good health office says it is healthier to drink tap water than the water that comes in bottles. You only need to wash up, if you drink from the bottle, because if you don’t the water can easily get contaminated after a weeks use with warm temperatures.

Many organisations in NL give a reusable waterbottle (often aluminium or durable recycled plastic) to new personnel as a welcome present.
i have 3 water bottles from my last 3 jobs.

 

[BDutch]

I really like using these new tools like the Artificial Intelligence program ChatGPT.com

Do you know how much it costs to give a prompt to ChatGTP or any other AI model?
It seems free for you to use it, but it costs an enormous amount of energy and water to let these systems do their work.
Don’t think I’m a saint, I am tempted to use it too.

A good article on AI and environmental costs in Dutch. I hope you can use auto translation:
https://www.kennisnet.nl/artificial-intelligence/dit-zijn-de-onzichtbare-kosten-van-ai/

 

[BDutch]

A tip for people who cant free range their chickens (daily). Whose world isn’t covered with snow, and don’t live in a desert.

Grass clippings are a healthy and free treat I gather from my lawn (grass field) or from the municipalities green strip behind our garden.
My chickens love it and it’s full of vitamins.

I use a simple household scissor to cut the grass in small pieces and make sure they have access to grit (grinding crop stones) to avoid crop problems.

 

[saysfaa]

In my country we have deposit money on most plastic bottles, glass beer bottles and cans and they don’t go into landfills.

Some of the states also have deposit money on bottles and cans. The bottles then go into landfills. I think most of the aluminum of the cans that are returned is reused.

 

[gtaus]

Do you know how much it costs to give a prompt to ChatGTP or any other AI model?

Well, it's free to me. So, I really don't think about it.

It seems free for you to use it, but it costs an enormous amount of energy and water to let these systems do their work.

I can only imagine any large server warehouse is going to takes lots of energy to run. So, I asked MS Copilot how much more energy it takes for AI to run a single query in AI compared to a Google search. A Google search takes about 0.3 Wh of energy compared to AI which is about 2.9 Wh, almost 10X more energy! So how much is the energy cost for a single AI query? 2.9Wh/1000Wh ~$0.0003 with my rate of $0.12 KWh.

It's hard for me to grasp the cost of three hundredths of a penny. For as much as I use AI, it would take me months to use up one penny's worth of electricity/energy on my queries. In the meantime, I have discovered a number of ways to save real money from suggestions I got from my AI queries.