Financial freedom is having options, not just having money to spend
I remember times when I didn’t have enough money to buy the stuff I wanted. Still plugged into the world of consumerism and advertising to some extent, the stuff I couldn’t afford bugged me.
What I discovered was not that it bothered me because I really needed the stuff and it would give me lasting improvement of quality of life. What bugged me was that I didn’t have the option of having it. I couldn’t afford it, and because I wasn’t brought up to buy consumer goods on credit I couldn’t have it.
It took a bad experience at work to show me that there was something a lot worse than not being able to afford consumer tat. It was not having options to walk away from bad situations.
Our American friends, with their delicious lack of irony, can get away with saying things that would just sound hokey and ridiculous from me. In this old newspaper clipping, which is a 1963 ad for a savings and loan company.
The Pleasure of Walking Tall (cringe)
It highlights the advantages of financial freedom -
A man without savings is always running. He must.… He must take the first job offered, or nearly so. He sits nervously on chairs because any small emergency throws him into the hands of others.
Two-and-a-half years ago I sat in an annual appraisement, when The Firm had had a general annus horribilis due to incentivising the salesforce to sell products without evaluating whether they were profitable first. And I listened as a little twerp of a line manager told me he was going to slaughter my appraisement because the project I had been on had been cancelled and my skills didn’t fit in his area. He did it because he needed to score a decent number of negative hits. I was in a weak position, had had some upheaval in my personal life, and had no options. I didn’t have savings, so I had to sit nervously on the chair. Nowadays I would read him the riot act and launch a grievance (you aren’t actually meant to drop someone down three grades without giving them some warning in the preceding quarter, so I could have nailed him for not giving me a heads up first).
He can take a level stare from the eyes of any man.…..friend, stranger or enemy. It shapes his personality and his character.
The ermine is a noble and proud creature, and chose to take action so that this would never happen again. That means independence of working for a living. Getting another job is not the answer. There’ll be another jumped up twat who has just had a child, has no savings, and is desperate to achieve his objectives at my expense so he can continue to afford to pay interest on the debt buying his nice middle-class lifestyle.
Having savings, and therefore options, makes it easier to resist the blandishments of consumerism. Now, I can walk into a store and look at the stuff they have, all gaudily pushed for the weak of will. I can look at it, and think to myself “yes, that would be nice. I can easily afford it. But I’ll pass, because I don’t have a need for this stuff, and I know the want leads only to fleeting satisfaction for a few days”. After a certain point, it is the people in your life that matter, and what you do with them, not what is in your life.
Somehow, having to option of buying the stuff, without particularly breaking a sweat, makes it easier to say no. You can ignore all the 10% off, SALE, everything must GO signs. I’m old enough to have seen it all before, and rich enough and ornery enough to be perfectly happy to pass up on the offer if it means I can take the time to consider the purchase at my leisure. If the damn thing costs 50% more, so what? I don’t buy consumer goods often enough and they are such a small part of my budget that I can afford the luxury of consideration. And many of these offers are cyclical.
I don’t understand the fuss made on Martin Lewis’s moneysavingexpert site about topcashback and quidco etc. Obviously if you are going to spend a shedload of cash on some consumer goods then for sure, try and spend less using these sites. However, the truly radical money saving tip is don’t buy the stuff in the first place, guys.
Ivan Illich, seemed prophetic in the 1970s when he wrote in Tools for Conviviality
Elite professional groups . . . have come to exert a ‘radical monopoly’ on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a ‘war on subsistence’ that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty,’ dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts.” Illich proposed that we should “invert the present deep structure of tools” in order to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.”
Look at so many of the products people will buy for Christmas, they are a lock-in to a complex system of more payments. For example, an Xbox, a mobile phone, Sky TV, a gym subscription, a motor car, a twin-blade razor, contact lenses. So many ways to engineer extra costs into your life, and you tend to do that once you have sunk some costs into it. It was such a relief when I sold my Sky Plus PVR to a friend at work – it had suckered me into an extra £10 a month!
There are also deliberate attempts to change time-honoured ways of doing things into things that require continuous locked-in purchases of overpriced consumables. Take a Nespresso machine, for example. What a daft way to overpay for coffee. Any product that has a club on the website should ring out ripoff alert in big letters. With a bog-standard filter coffee machine I can get my coffee from anywhere, in any quantity I want. From Tesco to some hideously overpriced London coffee emporium selling me Java Blue Mountain air-freighted fresh that morning, no doubt.
I have the choice of how strong and how much I want, by varying the grind and the ratio of water to coffee. If I am lazy, I can use a coffee machine – this is in fact how an Ermine rouses himself, by loading a coffee machine in the evening, and using a wireless remote control to start this in the kitchen from the bedroom 
If I am not lazy I can use a filter cone, a French Press or a stove top espresso maker. With the exception of the filter cone, zero waste bar the bag of coffee beans, and even in the case of the cone, the waste is compostable paper.
With a Nespresso machine, my choice of coffees and choice of suppliers is narrowed massively, to the 16 of the Nespresso range and to one supplier. I’d waste an aluminium capsule each go, so wasteful that Nestle have to come up with a whole greenwash site to assuage the eco-consciences of their customers.
It’s absolutely and staggeringly bizarre. Nestle have designed a complex system to wastefully lock-in their customers by replacing a perfectly serviceable and simple range of historic methods of extracting coffee from ground coffee, purely so they could make more money. And people will willingly buy this. Illich would despair of us.
Savings. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for them. Most people save in order to buy something. That’s good, particularly is the alternative is to use credit. Though the most common reason for saving, it isn’t the only one.
I save to buy power and freedom – the freedom to walk tall in the 1963 ad. The ad looks really odd to 21st century eyes – modern ads for savings accounts emphasise saving up for something like a house, or the advantageous interest rate. I have never seen a modern ad advocating saving to buy yourself independence of thought and action. Wage slavery is too ingrained in our culture, and we have surrendered to Illich’s modernized poverty.
How much do Mr and Mrs Ermine need to live on?
Commenter TNT was intrigued to know what The Number is – how much do Mr and Mrs Ermine need to run their Nest.
We’re anomalous in many ways, so you can’t extrapolate from this a general ‘what does it cost to live in an average paid off three bed semi in Suffolk’. There is a wider and more consensual summary in the post What is your Number. For instance we don’t have any children. That is obviously a big difference from most folks, and from a financial POV it is probably to our advantage. We also, unusually for Westerners, have control of some of the means of production of our everyday needs, in the form of The Oak Tree Low-Carbon Farm. This massively distorts our food bill, most people buy their veg from Tesco, we get most of ours from the ground.
Chris with the squash harvest. There are no Clubcard points on this lot...
We also get firewood, both directly from the farm, from wood that is given us which we have enough land to air dry, and in a year or so from some biomass willow planted nearby. This distorts our heating bill, though not so much as yet. The plan is to nuke that gas usage in winter.
So here it is – the running costs for our household. Two things of note are excluded – I’ve only shown my car. Mrs Ermine’s car is a lot younger than mine so the servicing costs are probably less, and her mileage is probably about the same as mine. Depreciation (original capital cost/years of ownership) is higher. There again we save up for our cars and pay cash, so I could take the line we eat the depreciation upfront in one hit.
The second is some sort of sinking fund for depreciation/house repair, which is somewhere between £500 and £1000 p.a. for an average semi. I have a general emergency fund allocation to that, for instance there’s a flat roof that is past its service life and I have a fund allocated to replace it. Since DIY repairs every couple of years seem to work well I leave well be, knowing that I could replace it at any time should the need arise.
So, given all those caveats and hedges, what gives? What does it cost to run the basics for an Ermine’s nest?
Doom and Depression Death Spiral Deliberations
It’s all going down. The Euro is going to explode and Crash Mk2 is on its way. It’s hurricane season on the stock markets.
This is the sort of thing that could really change things for me. I haven’t got enough capital to become particularly rich, but I have cleared all my debts and cut my costs.
I have tried investing in a bull market – the late 1990s. Everybody wants to invest in a bull market like that – until it ends and they lose their shirts. I’ve also tried index investing into the post-dotcom crash over the 2000s. Though the circumstances were unfortunate, I had to liquidate in 2007, before the crash. Like SG, I was lucky and dodged a bullet…
After waiting a year, I am lucky enough to have started again into the teeth of this recession, and I expect it to turn to Depression over then next few years. I believe there is some possibility this is the denouement of Western industrial civilisation, in which case the stock market will never recover, because the assumptions that underpin industrial civilisation are beginning to unravel. In particular the myth of unending growth in a finite world is beginning to fail in the face of natural limits.
The Germans have a fine saying that “The good Lord sees to it that the trees do not grow into the sky”. Tragically, we have built this requirement for continual growth into the foundations of capitalism. Without growth we will see an erosion of jobs and will never be able to pay off debts.
However, I feel that this is not that time yet. Which is why I want to invest into this blue funk, because paradoxically it could change things significantly for me. If the market turns, and the assumptions of capitalism still hold, then the 5% or so of my working life earnings will be magnified by buying when stocks are on sale.
In the end it boils down to if I believe in the stock market as a way to get a return on money, then if I’m not prepared to buy into a bear market, then when else? Doing otherwise is illogical and being untrue to my values. I am aware that I may be throwing this last year’s salary into oblivion, but I feel the likelihood is a lot less than 50%.
So bring on that stock market death spiral. If I am right, my 5% of my working life will punch above it’s weight. I want to invest in a bear market, and I want to be still investing while I am still working, through the low-water-mark when all seems lost. And if the assumptions of capitalism hold, there will be a turning point.
If they don’t, well, so what? That year’s worth of income won’t buy me early retirement in the desperate times to follow, but some of the community and alternative non-financial investments may help soften the blow as living standards in the UK decline, and we focus once again on the needs of life rather than the wants.
Money isn’t everything. You need a certain amount of it in an industrial civilisation. Most of the wins are to be had in not being suckered into consumerism, to know when enough is enough, and what is necessary, what is nice to have, and what shouldn’t be bought even if you have the money.
Not buying crap and empty dreams is most of the personal finance battle, along with gaining an appreciation of the economic cycles. It’s one of the benefits of gaining experience as you get older. I was a child in the 1970s crises, though I observed the upside of it when my Dad bought his house outright in his late forties. I thought I would never find a job in Thatcher’s first recession of the early 1980s, but it did happen after six months.
I survived the negative equity and 14% mortgage rates of Thatcher’s second recession in the early 1990s, when it looked like house prices would never recover to the long-term norm of 3-4* salary (I know that sounds like a sick joke now, but reversion to the mean is a strong force, both from the upside and the downside. The problem is it tends to work over the 10 year period, which is a long time to put life on hold). What I lost of the first house I gained on this one.
So in financial crises it always looks like the world is going to end, it goes with the territory. And the bear argument always makes a better story. This crisis is probably different from others, inasmuch as it is the cumulative denouement of several recessions that were put off by inflating asset prices in 2001 and the mid 2000s, so we probably have got three recessions-worth of pain to go through anyway as all the stuff that was put off comes home to roost. Capitalism seems to need recessions to flush out irrational exuberances.
Added to that are the structural changes in the global economy, the barmy shenanigans un Euroland, increasing energy prices and the like. None of this is looking good, but it’s not clear to me that it amounts to a terminal death spiral. In the West we have been living above our means on borrowed money, so not only will living standards fall to something that matches the wealth we create, they will fall below that with the suckout from paying down debt. In the end you don’t borrow money from someone else, you borrow it from your future self. We are now that future self and it’s pay back time.
My aim is to do okay out of the Depression, for in such times what matters is to be truly debt-free, because money will be tight.
This guy needed $100 more than he needed a car in the 1930s. We will see things approaching this, I don’t know if we will see Hoovervilles in the years to come.
The way to tackle a Depression is basically to try and decouple as much as possible from the economic system. That means
- Eliminate debt – of any sort. The reason is that money becomes incredibly hard to come by, so servicing non-negotiable debts like mortgages becomes extremely onerous if your income falls or disappears. Where you can’t do this then prioritise mortgage debt over all else.
- Don’t rely on benefits of any sort. I am not sure that this will fall to 1930s era harshness, but it’s likely to be a lot less liberal than we’ve been used to
- Reduce costs wherever you can, particularly recurring costs (gym memberships, Sky or other pay TV, long mobile phone and internet contracts.
- Insource – do as much as possible for yourself – whether it’s home repair, prepare and grow your own food or bringing up your own kids.
My policy is to avoid debt of any kind unless it’s underwritten by cash assets, and to minimise dependency on others, particularly the government and any benefits. The latter will come as a shock to a lot of people who have built the assumption of continuing benefits into their economic lives. Many of these will probably be scaled down or shed in the coming years because the government doesn’t have the income it used to have. We already see the straws in the wind with the clampdown on incapacity benefits and the steady increases to the state pension age.
There are other things to be done to improve resilience in the harsh times ahead.
One of those is to live healthier – in addition to the usual culprits of eating and drinking less and taking more exercise this is at odds with my financial goals. Financially, it would make sense to work a little bit longer, but I have seen all too often that as people get older their tolerance for the day to day low levels of stress in the modern workplace can break out in physical form. I am lucky enough to enjoy good health at the moment, but I have seen too many colleagues fall by the wayside in the last ten years of their working life.
In the hard times to come health spending will be less. Although we don’t have the health insurance fears in Europe that Americans suffer from, the quality and availability of health care will fall. It is also something that one should do anyway, but the stress of working life mitigates against living healthily in many ways.
Connection with the community is another aspect of life that may pay dividends in future. Rich societies become atomised because everybody can afford to buy in services and every house can have their own washing machine and lawn mower. However, getting to know other people gets you a wider range of skills and a deeper understanding of the way things work in your house, if these are your responsibility. I repaired my central heating system which failed for want of a zone valve with a replacement motor for less than £15, whereas I am sure getting in a heating engineer would probably cost more. Repairing things rather than replacing will probably become more widespread. Knowing other people and helping them out and being helped out by them makes a lot of things that are expensive or are a grunt a lot eaiser. We would have really struggled to raise a polytunnel between two of us, whereas many hands do make this easier and a lot more fun.
The next few years are going to be a rough ride. I could get slaughtered financially in it, and I’m aware of the risk. However, I also believe fortune favours those who are prepared to take a calculated risk, and this is mine. I’m not one of the pussies that when asked what is your attitude to losing money is “No, never, under no circumstances” and shovels all their money into cash. I’m prepared to take the hit if I screw up, on the grounds that the UK economy is going to be so shattered if I am wiped out that there’s precious little that would preserve wealth. Sometimes you have to do the best you can with whatever you have to hand.
simple living Suffolk: Aldeburgh Covehithe Dunwich frugal holiday Minsmere Southwold
by ermine
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A tranquil Suffolk weekend away
This post is about something which is about as unfrugal as you can get, gratuitous travelling. Maybe it’s the mad dogs and Englishmen sort of thing and summer is breaking out…
The county of Suffolk is charming and pretty, and DGF and I though we might try going away at home so to speak. A long time ago she had stayed in a B&B in Southwold and was surprised at the number of weekenders from London who were up there, and also how well they seemed to know the county. We were trying to work out why, and came to the conclusion Suffolk is is quite a rural and tranquil county reasonably close to London and easy to get to from there. The relative isolation in the bulge of East Anglia such that nobody goes through it to get anywhere else, there are no motorways in the county for instance.
We haven’t been away for a fair old time, but the weather looked good and there’s no point in living in a beautiful county if you don’t make use of it every once in a while So I thought I’d share some of the local treats.
We started off near Aldeburgh on Friday night with some fish and chips from Aldeburgh Fish and Chips. This place has a seriously good rep, because the fish is fresh.
Aldeburgh fish & chips, unfortunately eaten before I'd though to take a picture
You do have to put up with a fair old queue, this next photo was taken on a chilly December day and there was still a long line.
Aldeburgh Fish & Chips still has a queue on a cold December's day!
Then if was off to find a suitable spot to eat next to the long shingle beach with the roar of the sea as a background. The beach at Aldeburgh is very long, and though of course at the town itself there will be enough other people, but it was easy enough to find seclusion here. We went a little way along the coast road north of the town towards Thorpeness, past the Maggi Hambling shell sculpture to more isolated parts of the beach.
Our fish was very fine indeed. If you’re into self-catering instead and want really fresh fish then Aldeburgh beach is a good place to get it at one of the local fish stalls selling fresh fish just in
Fresh fish stall selling locally landed fish at Aldeburgh
Aldeburgh Beach
This area is a nature reserve and as the dawn broke there was birdsong against the crashing of the waves, including this flock of linnets that appeared in the gorse bushes on the landward side of the road.
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Dawn breaking over the Aldeburgh coastline
simple living: advertising consumerism David Bailey photography
by ermine
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A Close Shave with Consumerism and a Canon G12
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that applies to freedom from consumerism too. I came close to being had by the old serpent of gadgetitis lately, and it was the good old 30-day rule for new purchases that saved me from an unthinking purchase suckered by marketing. I might even make the purchase after 30 days, but I’ll make it for my own reasons.
I was looking at Everyday Minimalist’s pictures from China which are quite striking. I’ve never been to China so of course it will be striking because it’s new to me, but I was struck by gadgetitis was when she said
I took each and every shot with my amazing Canon G12 camera.
I will go as far as to say it is the best camera for a tourist because of it relatively light body compared to its packed features, the easy exposure dial on the left to adjust each shot, the amazing flip screen and overall awesomeness.
BF was cursing his heavy “professional” camera the entire 5 weeks, although he loved his wide lens option. He wished he had brought his Canon G11 as well, for quick (amazing) shots like mine.
I know how he feels – I have a couple of SLRs and if you’re going to shoot pictures that will be used in print or of anything that moves then it’s the only way to go – the larger sensor and the fact that the picture gets taken when you press the shutter button rather than some random but noticeable period of time afterwards means a digital SLR is the only way to go – for A4 size and up you need the quality, which is different from pixel resolution, and to capture the decisive moment you need the speed.
But they’re a bear to cart around, and don’t go in your pocket. Plus for some types of photography like street photography you change the action with a big SLR so you need something smaller, like EM’s Canon G12. Or in my case, my Canon Ixus 950
Canon Ixus 950, somewhat worn
Pocket digicams don’t last forever with me, whereas my SLRs are still going, even my film ones, ‘cos they are in a bag when not actively used. I don’t know how people manage to keep their digicams in the sort of condition where they can sell them, perhaps they don’t take them out with them. I can see how girls have a chance keeping them in a handbag, but as a guy I stick the damn thing in a pocket. The trouble is that if you stick a pocket camera in you pocket, it gets to look like this. After a while, dust works its way into the lens mechanism and you get the dreaded E18 lens error. I’ve already had to dismantle this, taking out a bazillion tiny screws to get dust out of the lens mechanism. The only way I could do this was with compressed air, after which some of the dust lodged in the sensor cell so I get dark spots in the sky on bright days.
I use this one if I expect low light and the aperture wide open, and a secondhand Nikon coolpix 4500 for daytime digicam shots. And in general, the photos I took with those a couple of years ago, or their predecessors five years ago, are better than what I shoot now.
It’s not the camera that takes the picture, it’s you
I’ve read a fair few photography magazines in my time, and the spiel is always the same in both editorial and the ads, if you want to take great pictures, get a better camera. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? This advertising was imbibed over many years, all B.F. (before frugality). It still lies there in a corner of my mind, and rises like a snake-charmer’s cobra when I think of wanting to take better pictures.
It’s utter bollocks. The message is always something like:
Psst – wanna take pictures like David Bailey? Use the same camera as he does and you’re away!
For most consumer products, it’s true, because they are consumed passively – if you want to get the same features on your phone as David Bailey then use the same phone as him. If you want to look like Kate Middleton then wearing the same dress as her gets you some of the way there if you’re young enough and of her general physique. Unfortunately if you want to take the same sort of pictures as David Bailey then you really do need to be him. You need to go where he goes, have his contacts, and his vision. Even if I use the very same Olympus Trip as he did, his photos will be better than mine.
At least there is something noble about aspiring to be like a well-known photographer if you want to take pictures, even if it isn’t your camera that will make your pictures great. I detect the strong whiff of decadence in Nikon’s adoption of a well-known generic celebrity to market their current camera line. I had to look him up, because my first reaction was who the heck is Ashton Kutcher, I’d never heard of him? As soon as I saw a picture of him I knew he wasn’t a photographer. Real photographers usually look grizzled and weatherbeaten, rather than some Hollywood pretty boy. Let’s just say that when you Google Ashton Kutcher photography you get a load of pictures of him rather than by him.
I’ve got nothing against the guy, and good luck to him for earning a few more dollars. It’s more the social science of it. Either the ad company was lazy, and generalized the usual ‘if you want to get her look, wear her dress’ ad campaign. I hope so, because otherwise we’re all getting simple, and merely aspire to be minor celebrities by using the same Stuff.
So why are my pictures getting worse then?
It’s not that my camera is knackered. It’s what’s behind the viewfinder that is at fault. I am jaded, I am not living my values. Saving money means I haven’t been anywhere different on vacation for a while, apart from the odd work trip. What you put in front of your camera is half the work of making decent photographs, however, I live in a beautiful county of England and occasionally travel to London for work.
Most cities ramp building height to downtown gradually, but London and LA have planning regs that give this toytown juxtaposition of the old and the gargantuan new. My work mobile did a serviceable job here
Let’s face it, tourists from other countries come to the UK for its sights and history, so it would be rude to use that as an excuse. And I’ve taken enough magazine features even in the last couple of years, so 40 years of experience is still working for me, I can get the light right and depth of field and all that jazz, and basic composition.
So I thought I’d go out into the pleasant Suffolk countryside and shoot some pictures with my old Nikon Coolpix (it was bright enough the Ixus will have spots in the sky from the dust).
Five spot burnet day flying moth
I ran into this red-spotted moth, it’s a workmanlike record shot of what is probably a five-spot burnet. Or maybe a six. Something bored me about this so I figured I could try a bit better, the bugger’s trying to get out of the frame so it was time to see if I could nail him in context.
Moth with some of the Suffolk countryside t keep it company
It’s better. It’s not a great picture, but it’s a step in the right direction, the moth should be pointing up a bit and shame about the moth antenna in line with the thistle spike. I wasn’t able to see subtleties like that on the screen in daylight.
Further on the light interplayed with the water-starved grain which is a sort of greeny-yellow compared to what I think it usually looks like.
Luminous water-starved Suffolk grain. I'm sure it should be a different colour this time of year
All-in-all the trip served me well. it reminded me that it’s not my camera I need to fix, it’s me. That’s not to say I won’t get the G12, but it’ll be for the right reasons. Not because it will make my pictures better, because only I can do that. But because I’m tired of spotting the dust specks out of the sky with the Ixus in Photoshop, and because the flip out screen will enable me to shoot from lower down or higher up than the usual eye level. Perspective is another key aspect of getting better pictures, and eye level isn’t always the best vantage point for a lot of things – like the moth for instance.
Or I might wait, because the greatest weakness in my image taking system is my own inspiration, which is unlikely to be fixed for a year and a bit. I’m not David Bailey, the fire of photographic creativity doesn’t blaze from my very pores, it burns low at the moment. That’s the trouble with anything in the artistic line, it’s moody, and sometimes creativity just goes AWOL. And I learned the memes of advertising sleep for a long time just below consciousness. That is scary…
Listening to the barley bird – one of the pros of cycling to work in a beautiful county
One of the downsides of being a crabby old git on here is I don’t tip my hat often enough to some of the finer sides of life. A year ago I posted about the advantages of cycling to work with the emphasis on it saving money. However, there are other pluses to cycling to work, my route goes next to fields and then across a small patch of heathland, where I was treated to this lovely sound
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It’s the sound of the barley bird. You have to have a heart of stone if you can’t tale a few minutes to listen to a nightingale that has crossed the lonely thousands of miles from Africa. He sits deep in a bush or some scrub and calls out his signal, which he hopes is heard by a lady nightingale who follows his long journey a couple of weeks later. That’s just not the sort of thing that you hear from your car over the traffic over the Today programme. Called the barley bird in old Suffolk because nightingales arrived as the barley was sprouting, according to the wonderful nature writer Richard Mabey
Bike odometer
As for the financial advantages, well, that still holds – I pass the same petrol station and it looks like things have gone up somewhat – petrol was £1.20 a litre then. So I get to save about two pounds a day. Okay, so it isn’t earth shattering, however it adds up. In the time I’ve had this bike computer I have put about 3000 miles on it. I’m a utility cyclist not a recreational one, so most of these miles I’d have driven otherwise.
And every so often I get to hear a nightingale. What’s not to like
fixing things oak-tree low carbon farm: germination heat mat lettuce thermostat
by ermine
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temperature controlled heat mat success
The heat mat I fixed three days ago has delivered 
We’ve had lettuce seeds in a cold frame from two weeks to no joy so far, whereas a new batch with heat @ 20°C looks like a win in three days.
lettuce seedlings germinated in three days @ 20C
Now I just need to get a control on the Sankey propagator which uses four times as much power for an area about one-sixth of the size. For all that power it does raise the temperature to over 30°C which is unnecessary, and possibly slightly detrimental.
fixing things oak-tree low carbon farm: engineering germinaton heat mat horticulture propagator temperature control
by ermine
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A rare dodgy piece of German engineering in this propagator heat mat
Germany has got itself a reputation for top quality engineering, so I was somewhat surprised to come across a pretty poor example of German engineering in terms of the Bio-Green Sahara heating mat. The mat itself is fine, and continues to do sterling service. It is foil with heating wire run through it, the aim is to stick this under seeds being propagated.
It addresses the fundamental problem that the UK is too far north for most of our vegetables, which were used to the more balmy climates of lower latitudes. So the seeds don’t really get the feeling that it is time to grow until too late in the year, when the temperature reaches what they expected in the Spring, but we get in Summer.
The heat mat comes with a thermostat with a remote probe
which DGF reasonably assumed to be connected with a wire. I had noticed that this damn thing was adding a pretty outrageous extra load to our daily power usage – it is a 65W heater, so if it were on continuously, then it would draw the same amount as the fridge, namely 24×65/1000=1.5kWh.
It was time to break this out again this year, and I took a look at it. The probe reminded me of the sort of thing used on a gas valve to stop the main gas valve opening until the pilot light is lit. These are often thermopiles driving solenoids these days but in the past they were a copper tube with a volatile fluid in it which vaporised on heating to increase the pressure. A capillary tube takes this to the gas valve and opens the valve under pressure.
True enough, this appeared to be the case here, and the device was associated with a disturbing smell of chloroform, which is presumably the active ingredient.
Now in a gas cooker you don’t expect to move the sensor, so having a rigid copper capillary tube is okay. But a heating mat that is described by some retailers as
These all new aluminium encapsulated versatile heatmats easily roll up when not in use.
should not be supplied with a device that is designed to be deployed to a fixed installation. Flex that sensor tube too often and the bugger will crack, releasing the chemical into the atmosphere so that the thermostat will never turn off. The manual really ought to tell you that this is extremely delicate and should not be flexed repeatedly.
The next thing that is painfully wrong is that they tell you to whack the sensor into the soil. Stands to reason, right, that’s what you are trying to control? Not so fast – there is a problem in that the delay between the heat getting to the sensor means there is a large overshoot, as the sensor tells the heater “turn it up, turn it up, turn it UP WHOA THERE turn it DOWN you’ve gone far too much turn it DOWN”.
For the mathematically inclined this is a control system and the lag mucks about with the poles on your Bode plot. I think that’s what I recall from uni. As an engineer it was a lot easier, the mantra was always get your sensor right next to the heater. Which is counter-intuitive because you are measuring not at the point of delivery, but it gets the delay down. You will get a static error due to the thermal resistance from the heater to the soil, but that’s better than ending up with large temperature swings. Industrial control systems use proportional control and may add rate-of-change and integrating loops to go for greater accuracy but these are seeds, they just want to feel they’ve been shifted southwards about 20 degrees of latitude.
The instructions should also have included the practical stuff to make an efficient plant mat, as well as how to avoid knackering the device. The heat only needs to go upto the seeds, rather than downwards, so the heat mat should be placed on an insulating substrate, otherwise energy will be used worthlessly in heating the potting bench. Celotex is probably ideal, but I used a couple of sheets of expanded polystyrene foam covered with aluminium foil. You obviously want to consider what happens under fault conditions with the heater on permanently and dimension accordingly The heat mat then sandwiches the heating cable in two sheets of thick aluminium foil, spreading the heat better.
For those looking to do this on a budget, this can be made using standard heating cable such as used for keeping pipes frost-free, with thick aluminium foil either side. If you are doing that using mains power, you should know the difference between class I and class II insulation and how that pertains to your construction. For UK / Northern Europe you’re looking at about a maximum power input of 150W per square metre, the thermostat will kick that back as required.
The thermostat probe then needs to be placed above the foil, rather than in the soil, and the whole lot covered in a thin layer of builder’s sand, on which the plastic modular trays with the seeds are placed. Since I am using this in a conservatory and don’t want the floor covered in sand I constructed a tray from some plywood and bits of pallets to contain the sand. The disadvantage of using wood from pallets is all the pieces are different widths which makes you look a rotten carpenter if you don’t have access to power tools to trim them to size, or the patience to do it with a jack plane. You can’t argue with the price, however!
tray with heater mat and sand
I was still left with a defective thermostat, so I replaced this sucker with a Dallas DS1820 digital temperature sensor and a 16F628 PIC microcontroller to drive a triac controlling the mains powered heating mat. It ended up looking more like a piece of laboratory equipment than a cuddly Bio-Green growing device, but is a lot more accurate. That system was originally part of a project to propagate sweet potatoes but the development time was a couple of weeks too long so I missed the start time and the tubers rotted 
My device had a second sensor and serial output because those sweet potatoes are finicky, this was something that originally grew in Mexico and South America. You are seriously taking the mickey trying to persuade them to think about growing in a chilly British March…
Temperature controller. It doesn't have the friendly curves of the Bio-Green devices so it looks like a piece of lab equipment but it is far more accurate.
For a propagator I don’t need 0.5C accuracy, so if we end up needing more of this sort of thing I may just use an analogue system using thermistors. I also had a Sankey propagator base I used to use for tomatoes, this is thermally balanced and could do with temperature control to save power and get more reliable, it can easily drift up beyond 30°C, which isn’t that great and makes the contents a sod to keep watered.
To save anyone who may come across this having to look the germination temperatures up, here are the values I swiped from a Plant Propagation lecture by the Organic Growers Alliance:
28°C Cucumber
25°C Aubergine, Pepper, Tomato
15°C Celery, Celeriac, Calabrese, Early Cabbbage, Brussels Sprouts
12°C Sweet Corn
10°C All others
All a fair amount of rant from a poor piece of engineering, though it says something for German engineering in general that the odd dodgy one stands out so much. Bio Green do make the electronic version of the device I constructed for about £50.
living intentionally simple living: early retirement frugality
by ermine
4 comments
frugality – akin to living like a celibate monk in a brothel
Todd at financialmentor.com summarised the challenge of what you have to do to become financially independent in 10 years. The thrust of his argument is you need to live on a lot less than you earn, and he described how that isn’t so easy
It takes the self-discipline of a celibate monk living in a brothel to survive on 20-30% of what most people earn in our current culture.
It’s why most people fail, with the exception of odd, extremely focused individual like Jacob (ERE) who finds this all a breeze.
I’m with Todd there. I achieve a greater savings rate than 70%, but then I cheat by having a paid-off house and cycling to work a lot of the time, which takes down two big fixed costs for most people.
Not paying a mortgage isn’t hard, what is hard was paying all the instalments and overpayments over the last 20 years to get to that stage. Reducing other costs was hard. It is particularly hard for the first one or two months of going cold turkey on consumerism.
It was difficult because I had to overcome the norms of a lifetime. For most of my working life I was okay with work, and indeed even now what I do is fine and has regular moments of being interesting. It is the management environment that gets me down. So I had got used to spending a little bit less than I earned, so I was both a consumer of boys toys and of fine wines and eating and drinking out.
Losing the gadget addiction was a harsh switch but easier to hold on to, compared with losing the eating and drinking out. In the end I didn’t want to be working longer to sustain that lifestyle of having the toys, once I had come to that conclusion I could execute the decision, job done. I still have the gadgets I bought up to April 2009, there’s no point in flogging stuff like that on Ebay for the time/return point of view and most of them still work, and surprisingly enough I’m happy with their slowly ageing functionality. Stuff, therefore, was not the problem, and indeed sitting on Stuff accumulated over nearly thirty years of working life means Stuff wants have mostly been addressed anyway.
Hardly watching TV and web-surfing with the power of ad-block plus on my side means I am exposed to far fewer ads than most people, and I adopt a30-day embargo to sterilise any residual power of advertising. If I had a desire for some consumer item, stick it on a list and park it. After thirty days if it still seems like a good idea, go for it. 30 days gives enough time to reflect, and eliminates 95% of my purchases – by then I’ve usually found a way round it or it simply didn’t matter that much to me anyway.
It’s where my world intersects with other people that contrasts and difficulty lie. This is where Todd’s comment rings true for me. Before April 2009 I lived in a way that wasn’t particularly different from how my colleagues and friends lived. The biggest obvious difference is probably being child-free, though even that isn’t hugely unusual in the people I know.
Now, there is a big difference. Most of the people I know from work spend a lot more than I do, and they get nice stuff for it. One guy I know has an audio system that’s worth more than my house. Many have more than one foreign holiday a year; I haven’t used my passport for the last three years.
You have to be more internally referenced than usual to live so differently from the people around you, just like the monk holding to his own values despite the whorehouse around him reflecting contrasting ways of living. ERE observed that early retirement tends to draw personality types INTJ. I would say it is the independence of thought that is the most valuable aspect of that personality type for executing the frugality needed to achieve early retirement, where all around me things urge me to spend! spend! spend!
Trying to spend less means I sometime pass on social opportunities. So there is a cost to living differently, and I choose to pay that cost in the interest of being able to stop working a lot earlier than most people I know. Compared to the quality of life I lose by not buying Stuff, the quality of life I lose by cost-cutting in experiences and socialising is more of a downside to going for early retirement.
Although I am probably personality type INTJ, I’m not as strongly that way as say Jacob, and by going for early retirement rather than extreme early retirement the frugality challenge isn’t such a big ask. Being older than the typical extreme early retirement planner helps too, as SG observed in this comment.
Half the trouble with extreme early retirement for most people is that the first two decades of your working life contain the biggest costs – getting somewhere to live and buying the stuff to set up a household, and just when you are clear of that, most people then have children. That sets you back again because they costs some extra money but more importantly restrict the household’s capacity to earn money.
If I had time and energy on my side I would go the route of the entrepreneur, I wouldn’t choose saving as a means to financial independence. Although taking a long hard look at spending and cutting waste is worthwhile, at the moment I have reduced spending on things that would enhance my life.
So unlike ERE, and Monevator, the attractions of the Spending whorehouse are real for me. It is just that the attractions of financial freedom are greater.
Imbolc – as the light lengthens, so the cold strengthens
It’s the first of February, the ancient festival of Imbolc, the beginning of the natural world bursting into life in the UK. I got on my bike to cycle into work for the first time this year, and as I travelled along I enjoyed the sound of robins singing, sparrows chirping all around, chaffinches calling and great tits singing.
Nutters, the lot of them – February is also one of the coldest months of the year, and yet there are buds appearing on the trees and the birds are up for it. It doesn’t feel like it due to the cold, but perhaps Spring is really on her way It is halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, and the beginning of the farming year.