Are We Serious?

This winter many people will be faced with the challenge of keeping up with their mortgage payments. To make matters worse we are all faced with exorbitant oil prices. I use the term exorbitant because of what we are accustom to paying NOT because I think the price of oil is outrageous. To put things into perspective I will compare the cost of oil to the cost of bottled water.

FastCompany.com reports that Americans move 1 billion bottles of water each week - that is the equivalent 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. We drink more bottled water than coffee, beer and milk combined. Furthermore the US is the largest consumer of bottled water in the world and yet we are the only country of the top four - Brazil, China and New Mexico - that has universally reliable tap water.

How does all of this relate to oil prices. Well take the price of a bottle of water...last weekend I paid $5.00 a bottle at a professional baseball game...however for the purpose of this example I will use the conservative price of $1.00 per 16 oz. bottle. Converted into gallons there are 128 oz. in a gallon dived by the average size bottle of water (16 oz) and we pay $8 a gallon for something we can get from the tap for FREE.

I won't even discuss the other additional costs/wastes related to the packaging and transporting of this non-essential item or the fact that 1.5 tons of plastic is used annually to package this ridiculous product. So here we are wasting money on bottles of liquid we could get for FREE while we complain about the cost of a non-renewable resource like oil.

The increase has made me a more educated consumer. I have been wasting for years. One of things we are doing in our home is putting in a fire place insert. We have fires almost every day during the winter but we have allowed the heat to go up the chimney. Not only were we wasting oil by not taking advantage of our fireplace but we were wasting wood by burning it and not using it to heat our home. Shame on us.

The other thing we are going to try this winter is an outside thermometer for our boiler. I learned that boilers are designed to heat your home during the coldest days of the year. (For us in the Northeast that's about 4 weeks a year.) This means that for the remainder of the year the call for energy from the boiler is the same even though the call for heat is less. An outside thermometer tells your boiler to use less energy and therefore less oil. I can't imagine how much oil I have wasted. It's embarrassing.

It took this increase price in oil for me to research other ways to heat my home. It took the fall of sub-prime lenders for buyer's to learn that they need to live within their means. Now the foreclosure market is bringing seller's to their senses about the true value of their homes. The good news is that there is no need for alarm. We will get past high oil prices, we will get through the mortgage issue and in due time the price of homes will rise. Until then (and hopefully after) it is time we work together to be better consumers.