Riot for Austerity update

It's the first of the month already! Phew, January went by quickly. Time to read my meters again.


Food: This month is the first time I've made a concerted effort to track how our food consumption fits with the Riot guidelines. It was a pretty slack month for me: we bought heaps of items I would normally make including crackers, ice cream, dips and so forth, and this really showed in our figures. Essentially we should be aiming for a diet consisting of 70% homegrown or local and organic foods: 25% bulk dry items: and 5% processed or conventionally produced (or non-local organic) items. Our figures however, looked more like 35%: 11%: 54%. Oops.

At least I can see where we can improve, and the exercise shows quite markedly what happens when I stop cooking basic items from scratch (less bulk dry goods, more processed goods). I am also beginning to compile a list of local food producers (as much as I can with limited time and resources anyway), to look into the possibility of occasional bulk buys from them directly. Or at the very least, so that I will be able to recognise the names of local producers at markets and so forth (as not all the producers at my nearest Farmer's Market are what I would term 'local').


Consumer Spending: This is also the first month we have been conscientiously tracking our consumer spending, and we've already spent a third of our yearly target, although to be fair I was expecting this. With school going back (and girls needing new school shoes), plus big-budget expenditure like the ceiling fans and washing machine, it was always going a big month. This next month should be more "normal".


Water: Our goal use is 120 L/day. Our actual use was 871 L/day. Eeek! This month was really hot and dry, plus our rainwater tank was empty, so we had to water our fruit trees and vegies not only (almost) every day, but using mains water too :-( We had been averaging about 380L/day up until this month and I was hoping to do better with the new front-loading washing machine. Ah well, this will serve to make me try harder to conserve water elsewhere, that's for sure.


Electricity: Our goal use is 5.7 kWh/day. Our actual use was 23 kWh/day! Double eek! We averaged about 10 kWh per day last year, so you can clearly see the difference using an air conditioner made this month with it's high temperatures. We tried to limit it's use unless we really needed it, but I'm sure the air con also worked harder than usual when it was on because the outside temps were so high (around 40'C/ 104'F), and when it wasn't on we had the fans going on high in several rooms. Meh. I can only hope we can make up the numbers during the rest of the year.


Natural Gas: Goal use: 19 MJ/day. Actual: 29.1 MJ/day. As usual, I think it will be difficult for us to get down to our goal until we have solar hot water heating installed. Since we have a gas hot water service (not electricity), we don't qualify for any of the government rebates for SHW systems and we just can't afford to have one installed otherwise, particularly since gas-boosted SHW systems (which is what we would have to install) are the most expensive on the market. I understand that the government are focusing on replacing the inefficient electricity HW systems, but some sort of a rebate for the rest of us would be nice... At least all the hot weather is perfect for solar cooking.


Fuel: Despite having next to no public transport where we live and almost nothing within walking distance (except the girls' school), our goal is to only use 94 L of petrol for the month. However we blew that out of the water with having to drive DH to work because he is recovering from pneumonia (although he did manage cadge lifts with a co-worker who kindly drove out of her way), and lots of school holiday travel. We used 181.5 L (travelling a whopping 1648 km).

However, this is also the first month we have kept a log book in the car of where and when we travelled, so fortunately I can see that 86.47L of our petrol use was for work and work-related travel, which means that had DH been riding his bicycle to work as per usual, we would have only used 95.03L for the month! Phew.

It was really interesting to see where the extra travel was going, plus of course, I can now work out how much the average trip to Bunnings or the grocery store costs in fuel! Added incentive to really ensure that I am combining trips and planning travel, that's for sure.


Garbage: Our goal is to discard less than 2.3 kg of rubbish per week, and 0.75 kg of recycling. We actually discarded 2.0 kg of rubbish (up on last month unfortunately; that's all the food I bought instead of made) and 2.65 kg of recycling per week. Our recycling weight was up because we had a couple of BBQ's with friends (and there were lots of empty beer bottles left over)! This has given me the necessary kick in the butt to get out the beer brewing kit I bought on eBay last year, and I'll be brewing my first batch today.


So, on the whole I'm sorta-kinda happy with our progress this year, but it goes to show what happens when you get a bit complacent, and that will certainly be reflected in our next lot of bills. Meh. No point in dwelling on it though; onwards and upwards and all that ;-) Hopefully next month I can report better results!

Updated: This post outlines the figures I used to calculate our goals. Riot rules state that where figures are for a "household", you should apply them to your household regardless of the number of people you have living in it, so by rejigging my figures for a household of five, I am not strictly adhering to the Riot. Meh. I recalculate them because a) the average Aussie figures are lower than the US figures they work off anyway, and b) we'd be too discouraged otherwise!