The content you’re looking for is no longer here. We’re finally beginning to shut this blog down, to remove old content.
We’ve chosen to start with essays that are available elsewhere. Specifically, this article has been edited into our eBook, More Calories Than Cash: Frugality the Zeiger Homestead Way. It contains edited, improved, and expanded versions of essays that used to be available for free on this blog, and new material as well. You can learn more about it, and order it here.
If you heat 3 cups of water when you only need one there are indeed savings to be had by saving the other two cups for later use but by far a more efficient use of power would be to only heat the 1 cup of water you needed!
True, but academic. Before boiling a kettle, do you poll the family to find out how many cups each person needs, or do you simply boil a kettle? Life’s a little too short to be that careful, in our opinion. We boil about as much water as we need, and if we find we have extra, we throw it in a thermos. On the few occasions someone tries to boil exactly what they need, it’s almost guaranteed someone else will come along and pour water for some other use before the person who put the kettle on can use it!
Besides which, in our small home, one person may offer to boil water for everyone, but others may decline until they smell the hot drink the person made–boiling more than precisely what’s needed allows others a second chance. If they still decline, there’s hot water in the thermos for later.