Home Removal Services Blog

We have all heard that the recession is technically over. Well, employers are still not hiring and you may have been lucky enough to keep your job, but with a reduction in salary (or no salary increase in the last couple of years) you need to watch your food budget. How can you do this?

You can do it the traditional way and look into your pantry and refrigerator for what food you already have in your kitchen. Then, go to your cookbooks and see what you can make with what you already have in the kitchen. Write down the ingredients you need to buy and head to the grocery store with your shopping list. That’s a good method, but that’s how things were done in the 1950s. Nowadays, you can utilize the internet to keep your family on a food budget.

Why would you find recipes the old fashion way, which will take an hour? You can utilize the internet and get the job done much much faster. Simply search “recipes by ingredients” and select from the list of recipe websites.

Now that you’ve found a website to find recipes based on the ingredients you already have, it’s time to jump onto the site and give it a whirl. When on the recipe website, type in the ingredients or groceries you already have at home and search for what recipes you can make with those ingredients. It’s that easy!

Typically, I do this each Sunday for the entire week. Basically, I add in all the ingredients I already have at home and then select 5 recipes for the week. This will generate a list of groceries I need to buy for these 5 recipes. I print this list out and head to the grocery store.

I usually spend around $50 for 2 people (my wife and I) for the entire week (Monday through Friday). This means we spend around $200 per month and this saves us probably around $100 each month or $1,200 per year in savings. Most of these recipe websites are free, so give them a shot!

A solar shed differs from a common or garden shed in much the same way that power walking to a power lunch wearing a power suit differs from walking to lunch dressed in regular suit. The operative word is power; solar power to be precise.

A major problem with the average garden shed though is that little prefix: garden. Sheds are usually situated, well, in the garden and nowhere close to an existing power supply. So, getting power to a shed conventionally means running a power supply cable.

Of course, this then means digging up great swathes of your garden in order to bury and safely shield the supply cable from whoever might next decide to stick a spade in the ground. Any anyway, once you get the cable to the shed you then have a huge potential fire risk on your hands (wooden buildings burn really well).

Then there’s question of what exactly are you planning on doing in your shed that actually needs 220 volts (or a more wimpy 110v for US residents)? Of course, the number of different answers you might get to this question is proportional to the number of people you might ask.

Some folk simply want a basic workshop or a place to pot up plants and store tender specimens in cold weather. Others seek a peaceful respite from the world where they may shelter from whatever the weather brings and quietly enjoy a book or the newspaper. Then there are those who can spot an opportunity to easily and cheaply kit out a serviceable study or office in which to work.

Regardless of the purpose though, if you want to use your shed for various activities and not simply as an outdoor storeroom then you are going to need certain things. The first of which is light; no can see, no can do – its as simple as that. Then you might want to install various devices and tools. Lastly, depending on your climate and time of year, you may also want some form of heating or ventilation.

That’s where you’re going to need some power. But luckily all sheds share a useful characteristic, which is a large amount of otherwise wasted surface area (namely the roof) which is ideal as a platform for a solar panel or several.

Modern solar panels are remarkably effective and will relentlessly convert sunlight into electricity day after day, even when it’s not especially sunny. All that is required is to rig up some means of storing all this free electricity, and for that you may offer your thanks to Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta who thoughtfully invented the voltaic pile, otherwise known as the battery.

Now, a fortuitous feature of solar panels is that for the most part they generate electricity at 12 volts (its that man again) DC which just so happens to also exactly match what almost all low-voltage appliances (including lights) and power packs require. This means that all your equipment can be kept permanently fully charged during the day and any surplus routed to a deep cycle storage battery that can take over at night.

Of course this pattern of collecting, storing and using solar generated electricity repeats more or less endlessly without ever costing anything to maintain or harming the environment. So whether you harbour ambitions to kit out a home office, pen a best seller, or simply have a den to lounge about in peace and comfort, a solar shed could be just the thing.