Micro Cabins

In the many cycles of boom and bust, the boom that started around the year 2000 was a doozy!  So it makes perfect sense that the bust which followed was also a doozy!  It appears as if housing prices in the United States peaked some time in the 2006-2007 timeframe, and by 2008 they were in a freefall.  The crash was so severe that it brought down the financial markets of countries around the world.  It was a truly epic crash!

I am writing this in early 2011 and things seem to have bottomed out, but the patient is in a coma.  Foreclosure sales are still at a record pace, although new foreclosure filings seem to have leveled off.  Prices haven’t moved much, and new home building hasn’t been this low in decades.

I think this makes it a good time for people to re-evaluate the entire concept of home ownership.  But if you have your heart set on a home, perhaps you should reconsider tying up all of your net worth with a box in the suburbs, surrounded by millions of other boxes.  Maybe this would be a good time for you to look into micro cabins!

Now the wife and I just got out of our albatross of a house and are getting ready to hit the road for some traveling.  But if and when we decide to finally settle down I really do love the whole concept of owning a small cabin out in the woods somewhere!  Micro cabins are small (as you may be able to tell by the word ‘micro’ in the name) but are designed so efficiently that you might never notice.  Claustrophobia is offset with spacious lofts and windows and roomy porches.  But all this comes with a price — a CHEAP price!  I just saw a set of plans to build a 16×20 cabin for $4000!   Good grief, my last home builder charged me twice that much just to add room for an extra car in the garage.

If you want to find out more about these wonderful little homes here are a few places you can do some more research:

* Tumbleweed Tiny House Company – This company can do it all for you.  They have a book, they have workshops, and they have lots and lots of tiny house plans.

* Tiny House Designs – This is a leading source for all things tiny – they may not use the term ‘micro cabins’ specifically, but they have everything under the sun when it comes to living in small, inexpensive spaces. I especially like their Solar SaltBox Plans!

* Penny Pincher Barns – These folks sell all-inclusive kits for every kind of small living structure you can imagine.  They call their cabins ‘mini’ but I think we’re in the ballpark…

And here are the two extremes in this particular category:

* House In Montana -  These people are pushing the limit of the word Micro with these behemoth cabins.  1024 Square Feet!  Hardly anything micro about that!  They also come with one acre of land and cost $189,000.

* Nine Tiny Feet – Yes, you read that right – nine square feet!  Several different design ideas here, including one on wheels and an actual by-god MICRO cabin!

Ask me how I know.

If you want to avoid the usual, if you want to avoid spending almost $700 on a set of tires for a little sub-compact, then you need to be prepared and you need to give yourself time.  I love to use Discount Tire because it is convenient and they really do have good service.  I have had many flats fixed or repaired over the years, and air pressure, rotation and balancing are all included when you buy your tires from them.  And they usually give a decent discount when you bring in a set of tires that may have worn down ahead of their normal warranty numbers.  And yet I really did spend nearly $700 for my last set of tires, which will have maybe 500 miles on them when I sell the car this month.  No, I didn’t do my research, did I?

Your first problem here is the vast amount of tires that are available.  Dozens of manufacturers and brand names are out there, and each one of these has a bewildering array of sizes and types and tread patterns.  The easiest choice is whether to buy a passenger car or truck tire.  Once you are past that, you need to think about the weather where you live.  Dry weather and wet weather have different needs, but all tires need to be able to handle water on the road.  The farther north you live, the more you need to consider all-weather or winter tires.  And if this vehicle regularly goes off of the pavement, that’s another entire category of tires.  After that, most of the choices are marketing hype and prices and mileage warranties.

A good place to start is Consumer Reports.  They do unbiased testing on tires.  You will have to pay, but you can purchase an online subscription and keep it for 30 days for under $10, well worth it to help you narrow down your choice for cheap tires.  As recently as October of 2010 Consumer Reports showed that even a good ultrahigh performance tire could be found for around $100. They also noted that prices differed from outlet to outlet and, seemingly, week to week.

To make matters worse, shortly after this astounding purchase we decided to pull the trigger on a long-anticipated purchase of a truck for our eventual RV plans.  We got it very used and very cheap, but it at least had decent tread on the used tires.  However, I will probably replace them by the time we start hauling our trailer around just to start off with the best tread possible.  But this time I am going to find cheap tires!  No, not cheap in quality, cheap in price, especially since this is a large 4×4 truck.  Have you ever priced truck tires?  Good grief!

So far I have found at least one good source of cheap tires online, and that is TreadWright.com – they sell retreads!  I can replace my big fat off-road tires for about $100 apiece.  No, I’m not kidding.  No, wait, before you start spewing all of the tired cliches you’ve ever heard about retreads, keep in mind that they probably aren’t true.  Yes, big rigs use retreads, almost exclusively.  No, all those blown-out pieces of tire tread you see all over the nation’s highways aren’t from those retreads.  They are mostly likely due to under-pressured tires.  Besides, if retreads were so bad, why would Goodyear and Michelin make or authorize them and sell them with a warranty?

So there ya go.  Cheap tires.  Safe tires.  Not mutually exclusive!

I won’t fault you if you want to save money, but what about saving money while having a tire that has the same exact tread depth as a new tire?  That is where retreads come in.

Retreads start with a used tire that is probably something you would consider buying yourself.  But then they take that tire and inspect it.  If approved, they buff a very thin layer off of the outside edge of the rubber and a computerized machine wraps a continuous ribbon of brand new truck rubber on it.  The tire is then computer balanced, cured and given a new tread design.  Once it cools off it is inspected and tested, taped up and shipped to the customer.

Of course, retreads have their own critics, but much of this criticism is either based on old technology or bad information.  The January 2009 issue of Petersen’s 4Wheel & OffRoad magazine did a test on some retreads from Tread Wright, and in August JP Magazine had some really good things to say about them as well.

So maybe we should do a little real-world comparison, eh?  Here is my completely unscientific, average Joe research into tire prices.  And since I just bought a very used F350 I’ll use the tire size my beast came with, 285/75/R16.

For brand new prices, I’ll go with Discount Tire.  I’ve been using them for years, and if I was in a pinch I’d go with them so this is a good test of what I would pay if someone held a gun to my head and said “Buy some new tires online right now or you die!” (ok, that’s a silly scenario, but hey – work with me here) LOL

Discount Tire has some Falken Ziex S/TZ-04 with a 50,000 mile warranty for $155 each. (they advertise a $50 rebate but the fine print reveals that it requires using their credit card)  That is a road tire with a price of $620 for 4 (not counting extras that Discount Tire always charges).  Their shopping cart tells me $741.98 including balancing, install, tire disposal fee and state sales tax.

Searching for used tires online proved to be very problematic.  I couldn’t find any site with my size except for a couple of individual tires on eBay.  $50 to $100 plus shipping.  I will try to go buy a local shop that I see a lot for better pricing.

For retreads I found a nice tread for $99.40 each, or $124 including shipping.  Not a total mud tire, but looks great for off-roading.  No tax.  I believe Discount Tire will give these a balance and install for around $15 a tire, maybe $25 max?  Still, that comes to around $600 total.  That difference is enough to get my attention!

I will write another article on this as soon as I get some more detailed pricing info.

Voltaire is well known for his various clashes with the French social order, and it’s an irony that perhaps the only person ever to pose a real foil for Voltaire on an intellectual level was a female aristocrat. Du Chatelet was unique in terms of her mental attributes, and was a virtual outcast in the brainless circles of French aristocracy for that reason. She eventually married the Marquis du Chatelet, and settled uncomfortably into the environment of vacuous entertainments of her class. Meeting Voltaire, however, changed all that, permanently.

The meeting of these two minds resulted in an affair lasting over a decade. Affairs were common, and as long as no embarrassment was suffered by the nobles concerned, all was well. Voltaire and Emilie moved into the dilapidated Chateau de Cirey in Champagne and completely refurbished it. Emilie’s exposure to Voltaire soon gave her the confidence to reassert her original mental character. With some of the inevitable bumps of any relationship, Voltaire discovered that he’d met an extraordinary woman, certainly the most important woman in his life.

Voltaire was probably secretly as amused as aghast to find that his beloved Emilie was a prodigy in mathematics. It’s a testimony to Emilie’s effect on Voltaire that at one point they were competing with each other for a science prize. Voltaire, who could and occasionally did breeze through life with a few quips, and was evasive enough when it suited him, was actually challenged intellectually. They came in neck and neck in the prize awards. Voltaire had spared no expense, Emilie had used her mind and an upstairs room with a lens.

The relationship with Voltaire eventually ended, but Emilie was still working on her mathematics, despite a turbulent personal life and pregnancy. The study of Newton was the work of the true scientists of the day, and it was ultimately Emilie who discovered that Newton’s formula for gravity was flawed, and correlated the results of a range of experiments into a formula. She was the one who put the “squared” into the modern equation. That formula was the original basis of E=mc2.

Her findings were published in a booklet printing under the title Principes Mathematiques de la Philosophie Naturelle. Interestingly, while Emilie’s name faded from memory, her mathematics became (and still are) the accepted formula. The book was completed literally days before her death from childbirth.

Passionate Minds is one of those rare books which should not be put down at all. The relationship, conducted in the midst of Voltaire’s own extraordinary life, makes a mockery of fiction.  Bodanis, whose works include the history of E=mc2, is an appropriate person to write this long overdue vindication of one of history’s most brilliant women. Voltaire grieved for her for the rest of his life.

And then I had to replace the tires on my little Kia Rio hatchback and walked away with four nice Yokohama tires with a 60,000 mile warranty and paid over $600.  Ouch!  OK, so maybe I should check out this whole used tires thing again…

As it turns out, there are actually quite a few places you can find on the internet where you can order used tires.  At first this seemed to me like it would kill all of your cost savings, mainly from the shipping charges.  But if you find someone in your area, or if you are ordering the tires for a fleet or for something besides using them on a vehicle it probably starts to make more financial sense.  And then I started thinking about the used tires business itself.  How could anyone make money at a business like that?  I just assumed that used tires were something you bought at some small mom and pop type of business.  Maybe you are in college and are broke, maybe you run a landscaping business and drive all over town mowing lawns and don’t really care about shiny new tires.  Those customers are going to look for a local business.  But several businesses are selling used tires online, so I decided to dig into this issue a little closer, just out of curiosity.

Of course some of the top results when you search in Google are obviously creating their web site just to get clicks on their Google Ads.  There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but many sites like this are referred to as ‘MFA’ (Made For Adsense).  The problem with them is that they contain articles which are outsourced to some ‘third world’ country and they end up providing a lot of words without really providing much information.  UsedTiresDealers.com is one of those kinds of sites.  I even found a site which purports to sell used tires, but I’ll be damned if you can actually get to their product page or order form.  And they don’t even have ads!  But then there are the sites actually selling tires, and I really like Howard Levy’s site.

UsedTires.com – pretty much the best website name for the product.  Looks like he’s been in the business for almost thirty years, and online since 1997.  Now this guy is an early adopter!    And it also appears that he sells most of his used tires wholesale.  This makes sense to me.  And it seems that a lot of these tires are purchased for something called ‘Tire Derived Fuel’ which I don’t understand but it seems to have something to do with recycling and gives me something else to look up and maybe write about!

I’ve been using this stainless steel reusable filtered bottle for about a month now.  The bottom line is that it holds a good amount of water and is easy to use.  I tested it with tap water and it generally removed any unpleasant taste.  I had originally intended to keep it with me all day for general drinking purposes but I think it would be best for traveling or hiking.  I intend to test some other bottles for daily use, and there is really just one reason for that:  ease of use.

The Ech2O bottle is lightweight and easy to carry, but once you flip the straw and start sucking it takes awhile to get the water to come up through the filter.  It takes a bit of practice to find just the right amount of suction so that you get almost all water instead of all air.  Slow and steady wins the race here.  Of course this really should be expected.  There is a strong filter in here after all.  But it’s just annoying enough that I wouldn’t want to deal with it unless I was in the wilderness.  But that’s when they shine.  Scoop up any water you find and drink with peace of mind from a lightweight sturdy container.  That is very valuable on the trail.

I recommend picking up some of these bottles from Nubius Organics, a very eco-friendly company.

First, a word about safety.  Using a regular plastic sports bottle is just starting out on the wrong foot.  Odds are that it will be floating somewhere on the ocean 700 years from now.  Plastic just never goes away, and a huge chunk of all manufactured plastic goes into drink bottles.  On top of that, it tends to leach things that get into your body like BPA.  Sure, one drink won’t hurt, but a lifetime of constant exposure can’t be good.  Do you really want to be the guinea pig for the plastics industry?  But the good news is that there are many affordable and perfectly safe, environmentally friendly ‘green’ alternatives available to you.

For example, Kor makes the OneBottle, composed of Eastman Tritan, which is free of bisphenol-A (BPA), a leaching toxin found in polycarbonate bottles.  It has a stunning elliptical design and a hinged opening and holds 750ml of water.  The handle makes it extra easy to carry, and the wide mouth makes it easy to clean or add ice cubes.

Eastman Kodak sponsored a short interview/promo video discussing this bottle and the various causes that each color represents.  Kor is a member of 1% for the Planet.

Another great option is the Pure bottle from Nathan.  It has a unique flip straw made of silicone so you can drink without having to open or tilt the bottle, which is also made from Eastman Tritan.  They make a 1 liter size, but there are also 750ml and 500ml sizes which fit in car cup holders or bike cages.  All their bottles are wide-mouth and come in a variety of colors.

Of course many other drink bottle options are available, including nalgene, aluminum and stainless steel choices.  And for those of you looking for custom imprints or fund-raising options, check out Green Benefits – they have both stainless steel and plastic bottles.  Oh, and not just any kind of plastic bottles, plastic that will biodegrade in the landfill!  That’s a win-win!

Almost all species on earth require regular intake of fresh water, especially us mammals. For man in particular, as we began our nomadic ways, travel and migration was dictated in large part by water availability. Primarily we followed rivers and creeks. Eventually we noted the location of spring-fed ponds and lakes. This reliance dictated our movements for eons.

At some point we figured out how to transport water in clay jars and animal skins/bladders and began trekking across drier climates. This carried on to modern times with the ubiquitous canteen. And some time in the 7th century B.C. the Assyrians built an aqueduct to deliver water across many miles to the city of Nineveh, probably the first municipal water system.

But most of today’s population is just as removed from the sourcing of water as they are their food. We don’t raise our own crops or animals, and we don’t have to pump our own water. And then some time around twenty years ago we started seeing bottled water show up on the grocery store shelves, right next to the soft drinks.

And thus the trend began. More and more of us, especially here in America, have stopped drinking water from the faucet.  Our tap water is provided by a local entity, usually the city or county, or a rural water district.  We pay for it with our taxes and other fees, and yet we increasingly reject it for drinking and instead pay yet more money to drink water from our grocery store shelf.

Enter the Bottle

Water at the grocery store comes from many sources.  Most of the bottled water comes from either municipal sources or springs.  In addition most grocery stores have a water filtration system where you can fill your own water bottle.  The filtration is typically some form of charcoal and/or reverse osmosis, but the source is the same tap water in your kitchen.

Oddly enough, tap water is more likely to be filtered and is tested for chemicals and contaminants *much* more frequently than bottled water. Oversight for municipal water systems is handled by the EPA, while the FDA oversees bottled water.
Bottled water’s popularity is due in part to problems people perceived with the taste or chemical composition of tap water. But while tap water might have once suffered in comparison, bottled water has the added burden of being very expensive and wasteful of resources.  The amount of plastic water bottles in our local landfills is staggering.  And the worst part is that once plastic has been created it almost never goes away.  When all of the wood and metal and other man-made material in our landfills has long biodegraded the mountains of plastic will still persist.

Still not convinced?  Watch this short but amazingly informative video from the great folks over at the Story of Stuff.

Obviously the portability of bottled water is a big factor in its popularity. But given the high cost to the environment, it would be nice if there were clean, safe, environmentally friendly and inexpensive alternatives. I decided to research this issue and here are my results so far.  I hope you find it helpful and informative!

For the home:

- Bottled water delivery – this is available almost everywhere, and it is very convenient. It is more expensive than tap water or water filtered at home, but it is less expensive than buying individual bottles at the store. It is more environmentally friendly since the large 3-5 gallon bottles are re-used, but like bottled water at the grocery store it is delivered gas-burning trucks.

- In-home filtration – this might be the best of both worlds. The water delivery is automatic through your city’s pipes, and the cost is the same you pay right now. Your taxes already support the maintenance. If taste is an issue, or you are concerned with trace chemicals, etc., you can add a water filter. This can be as simple as something that attaches to the faucet or as fancy as a unit that filters and softens the entire house.

New Wave Enviro Premium 10 Stage Filter System

This countertop water filter system contains a patented 10-Stage contaminant removing filter cartridge. It lasts 3 times as long as the common carbon block filters (1500 gal. vs. 500 gal.).

This filter removes or greatly reduces Chlorine; cancer-causing organic/chlorine compounds called Trihalomethanes (THM); bad odors, e.g., Hydrogen Sulfide, which gives water a rotten egg smell; pesticides; herbicides; PCB’s; toxic heavy metals (i.e., Lead, Cadmium), Organic Arsenic, micro-organisms (protozoa and cysts) such as Cryptosporidium and Giardia; and dozens of other lesser known organic contaminants.

But some things are left IN the water, inert minerals such as Magnesium and Potassium; chlorides and fluorides. If you are concerned about Fluoride, New Wave makes a Reverse Osmosis System as well.

For personal use:

- Filtered bottles – these are water bottles that contain their own filter. The obvious benefit is that you don’t have to buy a filter for the house, and you can refill from any source. If you are at someone else’s home or at work, your water can taste the same.

EcoUsable 25oz Filtered Water Bottle – Metallic Green

(click here for a review of this drink bottle)

This stainless steel bottle comes with it’s own flip-top filter!  The 25 oz. bottle holds 22 oz. after you take the filter into account.  The Ionic-Adsorption Micro-Filtration system removes 99.99% of pollutants and lasts for 100 gallons, or about a year.  This filter is like having a water treatment plant in a bottle!  It gets rid of the following:

* Aesthetics: unpleasant taste, odor, clarity, chlorine, sand, sediment and Radon 222.

* Biological: Pathogens such as cryptosporidium, giardia & other cysts and spores.

* Chemicals: toxic chemicals, detergents, pesticides and other harmful industrial and agricultural wastes.

* Dissolved Solids: heavy metals such as aluminum, asbestos, copper, lead, mercury and others.

If you enjoy hiking you can literally drink from tap water, streams, rivers, lakes and pools!  Trust me, you don’t want to try this without a filter!

The bottles are 304 food grade stainless steel, non-leaching, BPA-free and taste-neutral.

- Unfiltered bottle – most non-disposable bottles are either plastic, nalgene or some form of metal, usually aluminum or stainless steel. The metal ones are more expensive up front but are 100% recyclable and thus very environmentally friendly, not to mention extremely durable.

- Klean Kanteen – On Sale! Exclusive Eco-Conscious Line of Stainless Steel Klean Kanteen Bottles

Klean Kanteen bottles are all stainless steel and their tops and spouts are made with bisphenol A-free plastic (BPA).

- Nathan Bottle – Love Bottles

Nathan has a line of stainless steel bottles with a ‘stainless’ flip straw for sip-and-go convenience. The lid has a patent-pending finger loop and QuickClip to easily attach to a belt, shoulder strap or pack strap. BPA-free. 3″ x 9″