Solar Saturdays

I’ve recently been on a mission to rearrange my home cooking and energy utilisation around days of concentrated sunlight, so as to maximise the utilisation of free and available energy from our solar panels and minimise our energy expense. To date, every time that this has happened has been on a Saturday.

This is massively lucky. Saturday is my one real day off. I’ve been planning my menu ahead but it is frustrating when you look ahead and all your available cooking days have cloudy or rainy weather. On this occasion, we had a disappointing forecast of rain for the whole week, but it somehow managed to reverse, giving an impromptu day of sunshine.

Basically what this means is that I batch all my cooking into one sunny day, and simply have some form of energy consuming appliance running from morning until sundown. I bag leftovers from meals and freeze them for microwaving later, for use during cloudy periods where there’s not much free energy going.

I did the sums and realised that this process would save me between $500-$600 per annum, removing from the grid a drain of around 2200 kWh of power annually. That’s about a whole month of winter power.

It also has the effect of improving the return on investment of my 1.5 kW solar power system, without the need for battery storage. I’ve been fairly disappointed with the actual performance of my panels, which have once all the real world adjustments have been made, resulted in an annual ROI of between 4 and 5% (not amazing on a system that gradually degrades over time and may only have a 30 year lifespan). This change of use has the effect of pushing ROI up as high as 15%. Now all of a sudden solar panels can be worthwhile.

Not to mention the effect of retail energy price inflation. My sums have this at 3.11% annually, but during periods of peak inflation such as currently, it could be much higher.

The carbon emissions saving is much of a muchness, but given our reported current reliance on coal burning, it could be considerable.

Basically just really excited at my little innovation and wanted to share my nerd little achievement with the world.

Rethinking the relationship between solar panels and seasonal cooking

I’ve recently been thinking about solar panels in a different way. Instead of dealing with capital cost and return on investment, which has chiefly been the focus of many of the other blog articles that I have written on this site, I’ve been instead thinking about managing solar panels from the standpoint of considering the diurnalilty of the sun and how we can tailor our food production approach to what’s abundant and currently available. This has led my thinking down a number of different roads, such as a general revised approach to seasonal cooking with regards to solar panels, and even looking at weather forecast applications to tailor my cooking regime and menu to the available daylight hours that can be found on a coming day.

Any New Zealand solar panel user has dealt with the frustration of seeing even small 1.5 kW solar panel systems such as ours massively overproduce in summer and massively underproduce in winter, relative to the household’s requirements. That’s the reality of living at a far point in the southern hemisphere. And many in the same position will have asked the same question – now that I’ve got them, how do I get the most out of them?

An example – the winter soup

Soups are most often associated with winter – nothing seems as warming as the thought of a freshly made winter soup in a warm oven during the colder months. Yet from an electricity consumption standpoint, if your oven is powered by electricity, then it is most likely that cooking things low and slow at a high heat intensity will result in your household overdrawing from the grid, resulting in higher winter costs and carbon emissions from dirty imported coal.

Far, far easier is it to have the soups pre-made, and simply resting in your freezer, to be reheated in the microwave when needed and in so doing to minimize the impact on your household when your solar panels are least able to support your consumption. From experience I can tell you that the flavour, if not the feel, of a reheated soup is no worse than when freshly prepared.

Solar panels are about facilities management. And there’s perhaps no greater conceptual leap in the facilities management of solar power than factoring in the integration of weather forecasts into home cooking plans. Each week I sit down at the local café and write my menu for the week. The step I have failed to consider, and which would be easy to implement, is to also look at the weather forecast for the next 7 days.

Anybody with a smartphone device is able to get relatively accurate weather forecasts through Google. At a glimpse, even in winter, one can see the relative levels of sunlight availability across each of the seven days to come (and even click into that day if you want more granular information).

By far, the least energy intensive process for heating food is microwave cooking for two or three minutes on a pre-made meal. Therefore, it stands to reason that on overcast or rainy days, we should rely on the microwave more heavily.

The most intensive is the stovetop and the electric oven. Therefore, it makes sense to have the oven running when the sun (and hence solar power generation capacity) is at its peak.

This leads on to other questions, such as:

–          How can space in the oven be maximized so as to produce multiple meals at once?

–          How can we manage the maximum storage life of freezers so as to ensure efficient recycling and minimum wastage of resources?

–          What do we have to mindful of in this process that may result in health risks?

The simple overall goal of this exercise is to minimize the kWh consumed on a basic task such as food preparation, ideally so that it can fit within the band of solar overproduction during peak periods. But I can see how following this process may lead to considerable time savings as well.

What this approach may point to is a more total shift in the thinking of how we move energy consumption from one time period (or even one season) to another. What do we need that produces energy? Then – how can we time our usage of energy to give us what we need in a way that’s least expensive and produces the least environmental impact?

8 tips for reducing carbon emissions in 2020

Butcher Facebook feeds
Approximate investment: $0
Payoff period: from the day you start shopping
Emissions reduction: 952.6 kg co2 equivalent per year

Signing up to butcher Facebook feeds is a great way to save money and reduce your emissions.

Butchers often run specials on Facebook that allow you to plan your shopping ahead. I found that using multiple butchers’ feeds allowed me to cut down my meat expense from $44 per week to around $18 per week, a saving of 59%.

Buying meat on special means there is less waste. It also means you gravitate towards the cheaper meats that the butcher can afford to discount. Often these are meats such as pork and chicken, which have a lower carbon footprint.

Let’s assume a two person household consumes 121 kg of meat per year. This equates to around 330g per day. Switching from a diet spread equally across lamb, beef, pork and chicken to one more concentrated on pork and chicken would save 952.6 kg co2 equivalent emissions per year.

To do this, all you have to do is like 3 or 4 local butchers’ Facebook feeds and pin them to the top of your feed, so you can see when specials are announced.

Thermal underwear
Approximate investment: $80
Payoff period: Less than 1 winter month
Emissions reduction: 1,037 kg co2 equivalent across 4 winter months

After four weeks of using butcher Facebook specials, you should be able to afford some thermal underpants for your family for winter.

When Australian journalist Greg Foyster pointed this out, I did a double-take. We spend too much energy concentrating on heating spaces, when we could be insulating our bodies directly for a fraction of the price.

This led to an experiment where providing my family with thermals contributed to cutting down on winter energy consumption by 487 kWh in a single month.

Making stock from meat bones and leftover vegetables
Approximate investment: $0
Payoff period: from the day you start cooking
Emissions reduction: difficult to estimate, around 260 kg co2 equivalent per year

Making home made stock is a great way to stretch your household shopping budget even further and create more meals for less input. It also ties in neatly with winter.

The EAT Lancet diet has been recommended by scientists and involves dramatically cutting down on each individual’s consumption of meat, treating meat as a garnish rather than the centre of a meal. One way to achieve this easily is to use the bones from meat to provide additional nourishment during the week.

The bones from a 1.2kg chicken carcass can easily provide 2kg of stock. This could cover 8 additional servings per week at almost no extra cost.

Build a home compost system
Approximate investment: $50
Payoff period: 6 months (depending on council rates)
Emissions reduction: difficult to estimate

By the end of winter, you should now have over $1000 extra in your back pocket. It’s time to invest some of that in some eco-initiatives that will set you up for further long term savings.

Let’s start with the cheap ones. Setting up a composting system, in our case a worm farm, is an easy way to cut down on waste collection costs.

In Kapiti, waste collection isn’t cheap. A council rubbish bag can cost $4.60 and tends to go up over time.

Home composting allows you to strip your rubbish bag of all compostible matter. A study undertaken by the Feilding Council revealed that around 40% of the contents of rubbish bags were unnecessarily going to landfill.

By cutting down on the annual number of rubbish bags required, a home compost should save you an extra $95.68 per year, assuming you started with going through one rubbish bag per week.

Prices of waste collection will vary depending on the collection costs of your council.

Build a square foot garden
Approximate investment: $130
Payoff period: one growing season
Emissions reduction: difficult to estimate

Once you’ve built up enough home made compost, you can start planning how you are going to use it. One good way is to build a square foot garden.

Square foot gardens are raised beds designed for maximum productivity with little maintenance. Two gardens should be enough to provide vegetables for one adult each day of the growing season.

Finance an ebike
Approximate investment: $3500 cash, but can currently be purchased on 0% interest finance
Payoff period: 1-6 years
Emissions reduction: 643 kg co2 equivalent to 2145 kg co2 equivalent per year

The return on investment you get from an ebike will depend on how often you use it, how far you travel, and whether you can save on parking costs if you work at a city centre.

The most important thing is to choose an ebike that is fit for purpose, and that has quality components that don’t break down or cause functional problems over time. I have found my current Shimano Etoro to be very reliable and I have travelled over 7000 kilometres on it.

If you can save on inner city parking costs using an ebike, it is likely you will pay for the bike in less than a year. The upper end of 6 years’ return is based on travelling 100 km per week for shorter trips. Results will vary depending on how you use it.

Note that by accepting an offer of low interest finance you can sometimes receive an ebike that is cost neutral. This calculation can vary heavily depending on your usage, so double and triple check your calculation before committing to a purchase and always choose reliable equipment. Also note your usage may change over time, which will affect the return from your investment.

Install an HRV system
Approximate investment: Varies, in our case came to $3400 for installation
Payoff period: 5.82 years (Will vary depending on household)
Emissions reduction: Varies, but in our case about 840 kg co2 equivalent per year

Another way to reduce your winter energy consumption is to install an HRV system. This does not need to be an HRV brand system.

HRV systems work by circulating warm air stored in the roof with cooler air stored in the lower building. The result is a more temperate environment for a lower heating or cooling cost. The system functions best at times of year when the discrepancy between roof space temperature and indoor temperature is at its greatest. This is often during the months leading up to and trailing off from winter.

HRV systems are available on finance at low rates of interest and are sometimes worth it, but due to low-ish and fluctuating returns, will not be cash neutral.

The above payoff period calculation assumes that an HRV system will save a household 4.9 kWh per average day and that retail energy prices will increase by 3.2% per annum.

Note that there is also a cost of replacing filters included in the calculation, which will vary depending on the supplier.

Invest in a vehicle with low fuel consumption per hundred kilometres
Approximate investment: $8500
Payoff period: 8.6 years
Emissions reduction: 1043 kg co2 equivalent per year

For some jobs, travel by car is unavoidable. In this situation it is essential to invest in a car that achieves the lowest consumption of fuel per hundred kilometres, relative to what you can afford for the purchase cost.

For this sort of decision, it is sometimes worth looking at the second hand hybrid market. At present, it is possible to buy a hybrid with a 4.0 litres per hundred kilometres consumption rate for less than $10000, although note that second hand cars bought by private sale may sometimes include hidden defects and should be properly inspected prior to purchase. Note also that cars bought by private sale will have to be paid in cash.

The car I own now is a Honda CR-Z that I bought for $8500. Taking into account petrol price inflation, the car will achieve an 11.64% return on investment, better than many high performing stocks on the NZX.

The idea behind all of this is that reducing carbon emissions is a straightforward process that can add thousands in retirement savings per year. Using the above steps and just moving from small and cost-effective challenges to bigger propositions and challenges I’ve increased my savings by over $5,000 per year. I’m constantly on the lookout for new ways to reduce emissions that are also good household investments. So if you know of any please hit me up in the comments section below.

Recovery plan for back injury

It’s important to follow physiotherapist instructions and to minimise stress on my back during recovery from back injury.

The goal is to be fully functional and working fit so that I can continue in my career and not be forced to limit my day to day operations.

I’ve noticed that the main problem that seems to trigger unnecessary pain and a worsening of my back condition is transitions between different postures, whether standing or sitting.

It makes sense to minimise the number of transitions I make between different postures while my back is still in recovery. Hopefully this will minimise pain and prevent worsening of the condition. This does not mean being less active. Simply planning my movements better to eliminate or reduce unnessary changes in position.

Other than that, these are the steps I can follow.

  1. Create a cleaning roster for each day of the holidays. List who is the primary cleaner and who is the backup until 7th January when my supervisor returns.
  2. Delegate all cleaning tasks. Do not do any cleaning shifts yourself. Cleaning shifts have led to injury.
  3. Continue to do stretching exercises as directed by the physio.
  4. Minimise car travel. Limit to half an hour per day and always use back rest cushion.
  5. Increase the regularity of aquajogging exercises and spa, as an alternative to riding the ebike or other exercise.
  6. Set up laptop with Microsoft Word and Excel.
  7. Find a comfortable supine position from which to do writing.
  8. Take the back injury seriously and do not stress yourself with writing tasks during recovery unless you are sure they can be completed pain and injury free.
  9. Set up the standing desk as soon as you return to work. Clean and remove old desk and replace with new standing desk.

Recession proofing planning

A recession may still be a way off, but it feels more inevitable. A lot of recent growth has been driven by growing levels of indebtedness. Low rates of interest have led to widespread accumulation of debt and also quite possibly the worsening of quality of debt. Small increases in interest rates, driven by inflation and restructures to the economy, could now have a much more
marked effect on the level of defaults and consumer spending patterns.

If and when the time comes, I want to be clear on where I want to be.

A decent personal cash reserves
Full time employed in addition to running the business
A decent reserve in the motel bank account
All debts that have the potential to be interest bearing in the next 12 months, paid off

Until this position has been reached, it’s not worth thinking about investing. When the recession comes, the opportunity will come to think about investing anyway.

Will it be enough to get us through? Possibly not. It depends on how long the recession lasts.

The realisation for me is that planning for the recession starts with how I conduct myself on a day to day basis. It starts with how I change my behaviour today.

Dealing with injury recovery

I recently suffered a fairly debilitating back injury. I’m on a road to recovery thanks to a very capable physiotherapist, but the injury has wreaked havoc on my time management, cost me countless hours, and really left me feeling short-changed in terms of what I might have achieved.

The cause of this is that any position other than laying on my back can be intensely painful. But it occurs to me there are still things I can do while laying on my back.

Even as I read this I can detect a level of my own workaholic neurosis. Yes, my body needs to rest. Yes, there are things I want to do. No, I may not be able to accommodate both situations at once. But I can try.

Step 1 – Accept my limitations
Working at a desk or standing is no longer viable. Lying in bed is my basic option. I have to accept that until I’m properly recovered, things aren’t going to move at the rate I want them to.

Step 2 – List my abilities
What can I do while I’m not 100%? Lots, really. I can write on Evernote on my phone. I can read. I can use my laptop to access the internet. I can make phone calls. I can create documents and I can delegate.

Step 3 – Focus on what I really want to do
One good thing about this situation is it forces me to reevaluate. If I’m using so much of my life for work, am I doing what I really want to do? Am I doing what matters?

If I only had 5 productive hours a week, what would I spend them on? What about 10? What about 20? Limitation forces focus.

Step 4 – Identify what is practically stopping me from doing what I want to do I want to finish a novel. Is there a reason I can’t do that on my back? In a sense, yes. My document is on my desktop computer and I need to be sitting upright to access it. But it’s as simple as moving the Word document to a laptop or transportable device where I can access it while reclining.

Step 5 – Force yourself to take action
We all know how this is done. Count to 5. Then on 5, do what needs to be done to restructure your environment to make it work for you even in spite of your illness or injury.

Motel Optimisation Plan

We’ve got a pretty good business. Each night, we are filling up, even during the midweek. But I still feel there is room for the motel to do better.

Below I’ve listed some items that I aim to improve upon as a step towards continuous improvement at Otaki Motel.

Place customer service first

● Minimum expectations for management (opening hours, closure policies, what to do if closing the office, how to support guests when we are away from the office)
● Address manager burnout
● Improve responsiveness to sales enquiries
● System for checking phone messages regularly
● Train relieving managers on answering emails

Ensure staff are happy with their roles

● Contracts
● Create manager roster
● Install new whiteboard with string

Review financials

● Complete new breakeven cost analysis
● Quantify all loans and record in motel loan book

Improve systems

● Train managers to record health and safety issues
● Record needed items on whiteboard
● Empower staff to purchase needed items, on account if needed

How to leverage retail fashion brand marketing data in a buyout situation

This is just a list of Cliff Notes coming from recent dealings with large scale fashion brands. There are a number of technological and marketing advantages in this age that mean you can give yourself a big advantage in buying a business if you know what to look for.

Due diligence

Look for a large email database

● Check the terms of in-store discounts
● Check the regularity of email offers

Look at the Facebook presence

● Check the number of Likes and Subscribers for the page
● Look at what audiences and marketing systems they have in place at the moment

Look at existing Google Analytics data

● Check New vs Returning sales online
● Look at average conversion value and lifetime value

Look at any available in-store data

● Check New vs Returning sales in-store
● Check in-store conversions
● Check average sale value, and other stats

Retirement on 63k

Recently on a road trip with my dad we explored some sound old towns from his home of origin and looked at some of the old properties there.

The surprisingly low cost on some of the sections made me realise that a small, comfortable freehold retirement could be achievable for as little as 63k.

The cost of a section is around 45k. The cost of a caravan could be 5k. The cost of a connection to the grid and water mains might be achievable for around 12k. Allow 1k for second hand furnishings and you have a lifestyle.

Why aren’t more kiwis thinking like this? Freehold lands and campervans are two assets that don’t tend to go down in value.

I feel that millennial culture has become too avaricious. A part of this stems from fears of having an inadequate nest egg in retirement, and insufficient income to cope with inflation. But the key with retirement is not to over think it.

Retail is a calendar

The most successful retail entrepreneurs I know are frequently creating events for people to come into their shop.

The physical premises are less important than the reason or incentive for the customer to cross the threshold.

The same physical premises might have great or terrible stock turn – and it all depends on the ability of the entrepreneur to create reasons for the customer to enter.

On that basis retail is the same as event design.

From there it’s just a question of leverage. What advertising methods can we use to reach customers to inform them of the event and the payoff.

The market will decide for itself who is meant to be your customer.